Dharma and Greed

Think about America. Turn the word over in your mind. America, the land of liberty, the richest nation in the world. America, home of the brave and the brave investor. America, to the shores of which come the tired, the poor, the teeming masses yearning to be free-market capitalists. America, where greed is good, failure is bad, and everyone wants to be a millionaire.

Now consider Buddhism.

That's right. Buddhism. The dharma path. The road to enlightenment.

Turn the word Buddhism around in your mind awhile. Whether you are familiar with Buddhist philosophy or not, you probably can conjure a notion of what Buddhism seems to be about, of what kind of person a Buddhist might be. You may imagine scarlet robes and shaved heads. You might see the Buddha himself: peaceful and smiling, large and shirtless.

Got it? Good.

Hold those two ideas in your thoughts a second. Allow them to dangle there in your mind. America and Buddhism. Buddhism and America. Now squeeze the two together.

American Buddhism.

Sounds like some unlikely distant cousin of jumbo shrimp and nonalcoholic beer, as paradoxically mind-boggling as "flexible ethics," "religious tolerance," or, ahem, "compassionate conservatism."

Yet before we trip too far on some sweet oxymoronic high, we'd do well to return to our meditation on the meanings of "America" and "Buddhism." Because, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, American Buddhism -- with all its tasty paradoxes fully on view -- is clearly an oxymoron to be reckoned with.

Recent estimates put the number of American Buddhists at somewhere around 3 million, a group comprised of both Asian Buddhist immigrants and Western converts. Often connected to one of the increasing hundreds of Zen centers and other Buddhist training centers in the country, these practitioners range from traditional monastic adherents (full-time monks and nuns) to garden-variety working-class Buddhists (or "weekend meditators"), people with houses and cars and families and careers -- and a spiritual practice that, while relatively new to America, does have a few thousand years of impressive momentum behind it.

Yet this is America, a culture obsessed with a hunger for wealth and property, a populace powered by a mainstream encouragement of greed and envy and avaricious desire. Let's face it: in America, if you can't make money, you can't be taken seriously; if you don't dream of becoming rich and famous (or at least rich), you aren't properly American.

Summit Meeting

But didn't the Buddha teach (roughly paraphrasing here) that such earthly desires lead to sorrow and pain, that only by transcending greed and envy and the pursuit of material goods will we find true, enduring happiness? So how, then, does American Buddhism integrate these two apparently opposite ideals? How can you live in a culture where money is necessary, yet follow a spiritual path in which the desire for money is poison?

Let's put it another way: Can anyone be truly American and truly Buddhist?

Well, it seems the Dalai Lama has been asking the same question.

At a Northern California gathering of Buddhist teachers held in late June -- a kind of Buddhist-American summit meeting held at the famous Spirit Rock Meditation Center -- 220 influential Buddhist leaders met for five days behind closed doors to discuss the many tricky issues facing American Buddhism at the turn of the century. Though attended by such Buddhist superstars as bestselling author Jack Kornfield (also a co-founder of Spirit Rock) and Barbara Gates, co-editor of the popular, AmericanBuddhist journal Inquiring Mind, it was the Dalai Lama of Tibet -- easily the most famous, most successful promoter of popular Buddhism in the world -- whose presence created the biggest stir.

After all, in some ways the Dalai Lama is the perfect symbol of American Buddhism. As the primary ambassador for the cause of Tibet (the country from which he was exiled after the Communist Chinese invaded in 1951), the Dalai Lama must walk a tight doctrinal line between serving as a defender of Buddhism's basic principles and working as the Tibetan cause's most proficient and successful fundraiser.