Note: The original publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Membership and Outreach Committee of the Buddhist Churches of America and is also available at www.americanbuddhist.org

By Gordon Bermant

In 1986, when I encountered Shin Buddhism in the powerful personality of the late Reverend Kenryu Tsuji, I was taken by his comment that Shin Buddhism required voices that would make Shinran Shonin’s message available to a wide American audience. Now it is clear that such voices exist—sonorous, vibrant, and increasingly accessible to audiences that extend beyond academic and traditional Shin communities.

Three of these voices, all with perfect pitch, were heard during the 2003 IASBS symposium and are presented here in the three previous papers. Each has a distinguished history of transmitting Shin teachings to American readers. Professor Taitetsu Unno’s books, River of Fire, River of Water (1) and Shin Buddhism: Bits of Rubble Turn Into Gold (2), mark a significant crossover of Shin exposition into the mainstream trade publishing market. Professor Kenneth Tanaka’s book, Ocean: An Introduction to Shin Buddhism in America (3), presents Shin practice in a context of everyday life with which all religious seekers can identify. And among my reasons to be grateful to Professor Roger Corless is the joy that surprised me when I encountered his brilliant article “Self Power Practice with an Other Power Attitude” (4). This article and many others by Roger should be made available to larger audiences that would benefit from them.

Among other major contributors to the tradition, I emphasize first the pioneering work of Professor Alfred Bloom. Reverend Tsuji was a great admirer of Professor Bloom, holding his writing up as a model of Shin exposition in English (5). We are also indebted to Professor Hisao Inagaki, whose translations of the Pure Land Sutras and brilliant, graphical presentations of Shin thought have illuminated the teachings for all of us (6). We recognize the enormous accomplishment of the translators of Shinran’s collected writings (7) and the steadfast work of Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai in disseminating Teachings of the Buddha (8) through many channels. Among my personal favorites is the Primer of Shin Buddhism that George Gatenby and John Paraskevapolous published in Australia (9). Recent work that has reached us through translation is Hiroyuki Itsuki’s Tariki (10), which was a remarkable event: a religious autobiography by a Japanese author whose other work is not well-known to American readers. Other authors, including several ministers in the BCA, have also made significant contributions to Shin publishing in English. I have referred to some of these and other texts in an appendix at the end of the article.

In sum, the concern that Tsuji Sensei expressed for almost two decades is no longer the primary problem facing the future of American Jodo Shinshu. The wisdom and compassion of Shin Buddhism are expressed in flawless, elegant English and published in media that are accessible to all who care to find them.

And Yet…
And yet, many thoughtful members of the American Jodo Shinshu community believe that our national church—the BCA—faces a crucial choice. In simplest terms, the choice is this: Change or perish. If we wish the church to survive, we must change some of our organizational assumptions and practices, which lack the vitality and flexibility to meet the inescapable challenges that confront the church.

It is beyond argument, I believe, that despite its growing literature, Jodo Shinshu remains the invisible school of American Buddhism. It is hiding in plain sight with approximately 15,000 registered practitioners associated with about 60 temples and as many full-time fully ordained clergy, all of whom are organized under the umbrella of a national organization with an annual budget of more than $1 million, a large portion of which supports the national church’s graduate school and seminary. And yet, as late as 1997, in a major conference proclaimed as the First Buddhism in America Conference, which drew more than 800 participants, not one presentation of Shin teaching appeared in the 40 chapters, comprising more than 550 pages, of the published proceedings of the conference (11).

Viewed with a pessimistic eye, the Buddhist Churches of America comprise an aging, slowly dwindling membership and a seemingly incurable inability to attract its sons and daughters into the ministry in sufficient numbers to provide each temple with a full-time pastor. But there is more to the story than that. Healthy initiatives are now underway in BCA, of which the $30 million “Campaign BCA—The 21^st Century” is the most visible and daring. The goals of the campaign are admirable and deserve vigorous pursuit (12). However, the acquisition and principled deployment of money alone will not remove the constraints that limit the church. Something more is required to ensure the future of the church as an institution that leads, nurtures, and expands its professional and lay memberships. This paper aims to define what that “something more” might be. It is an effort to re-imagine the church of Jodo Shinshu in America.

Steps Toward Re-Imagining the Church
Re-imagining the church can proceed along a path with well-defined steps. Here I propose three steps and expand briefly on each. For these ideas I am indebted to an example of Christian mission literature, which I believe shows clearly how religious content and organization can be appropriately linked (13).

The first step in re-imagining an American Jodo Shinshu church is to emphasize a vital connection between one’s own religious experience and one’s obligation to share the benefits of the experience with others. Making this connection is crucially important for two reasons. One reason is internal to the doctrine, and the other is external to it.

The Internal Reason
An exclusive focus on Amida’s grace (tariki, Other Power), with its assurance of rebirth in the Pure Land after death, when completely incorporated by children within a Shin family, may predominate subsequent religious experience to blunt the impact of other valid teachings, in particular the Bodhisattva’s vow of return for the sake of sentient beings. Similarly, the rhetoric of “just hearing,” as in, “Just listen to the teachings of the masters,” encourages passivity among laypersons, with an attendant assumption that Shin clergy are responsible for all religious teaching and clarification.

The tendencies toward passive acceptance and dependence on others for religious work create a gap between the clergy and laypersons, which is not healthy for either group. Nor is it healthy for the future of the church.

Fortunately, recent expressions of a wholesome balance between listening and acting can serve as templates for the immediately active religious role of the Shin layperson. Here, for example, is how Taitetsu Unno concludes his splendid presentation of five stages of deep hearing:

The process of deep hearing culminates with our birth in Pure Land, but the Pure Land is not the ultimate goal. It is a mere way station from which we return into our world of samsara. Now endowed with wisdom and compassion, the welfare and salvation of all beings become the ultimate concern. The return, however, is inseparable from the going, both made possible by the centrifugal force of boundless compassion. Such is the ultimate expression and deepening of the bodhisattva ideal which breaks through conventional notions of time and space (14).

Speaking for myself, without being religiously adept but merely earnest, I nevertheless recite a version of Bodhisattva vows every week of the year. Among other things, I say that I will “try to save all life from pain and grief, and with the Dharma pave a road to Buddhahood”(15). Having recited this vow, I now face three possibilities: 1) I mean what I say and act sincerely in respect to the vow; 2) I think I mean what I say but in fact don’t act sincerely in accord with the vow and am in a state of self-deception or false consciousness; or 3) I don’t mean what I say and am a conscious hypocrite (16). Acknowledging my personal inadequacies, I can nevertheless strive to avoid hypocrisy and false consciousness. From this Mahayana perspective, it seems clear that neither indifference to others nor mere passive acceptance is an authentic response to the receipt of Amida’s great gift by those who take Bodhisattva vows. A vital, causal connection exists between my religious experience and my subsequent obligation to be active in respect to it.

This connection applies to everyone who makes the vow in good faith. No additional certification or ordination is required to set out on this path.

The External Reason
The second reason for emphasizing the connection between individual experience and collective obligation lies deep in the American grain. Americans have a strong tradition of resisting the idea that individuals on a spiritual path require the support of an organization, i.e., a church. William James illuminated this resistance a century ago in his Varieties of Religious Experience (17). James distinguished “institutional religion” from “personal religion.” As to institutional religion, he said, “Worship and sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity, theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials of religion in the institutional branch.” James rejected organizational religious forms in favor of personal, experiential religion, which he characterized as the “inner dispositions of man himself,…his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his incompleteness.” In personal religion, he continued, “…the ecclesial organization, with its priests and sacraments and other go-betweens, sinks to an altogether secondary place,” as the individual gains or forfeits “the favor of God.” Having made this distinction, James intentionally neglected institutional religion as he created his extraordinarily sensitive account of personal religion. In doing this, James tapped into a deep vein of American religious strategy, if you will, which is to trust the personal above the institutional as an indicator of validity.

One hundred years after James spoke on religious experience, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor examined James’ position in his book, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (18). Taylor criticizes James’ elevation of the personal over the institutional expression of religion:

What James can’t seem to accommodate is the phenomenon of collective religious life, which is not just the result of (individual) religious connections but in some way constitutes or is that connection. In other words, he hasn’t got a place for a collective connection through a common way of being (19).

At the normative level, Taylor faults James for overemphasizing the individual at the expense of collective religious life. He notes that the dissatisfaction with the quality of collective religious life that James expressed grew even more intense during the second half of the 20^th century. It became one symptom of the cultural tendency to insist that personal validation is the only validation that matters:

And so the new, more individualized pursuit of happiness, loosening some of the ties and common life ways of the past, the spread of expressive individualism and the culture of authenticity, the increased importance of these spaces of mutual display…all these seem to point to a new way of being together in society. This expressive individualism…seems steadily to advance (20).

Thus, Taylor dissents from James’s strong preference for the individual over the collective in religious experience, but he affirms that James’s position represents the fact of religious life among many Americans today.

What does this have to do with the vitality and growth of American Jodo Shinshu?

We must take the present as we find it. Most Americans who enter the doors of a Jodo Shinshu temple for the first time will be coming from a failed experience with one or more traditional American churches. They are not fleeing religion; they are fleeing a church structure or context that they found to be stifling, coercive, irrelevant, hypocritical, or all of the above. In all likelihood, their exposure to Buddhism has been through reading in the Zen, Tibetan, Mindfulness, or generic meditative traditions. Their discovery of the BCA temple was probably accidental. They will have responded to their reading with enough enthusiasm to encounter a group of strangers for an hour or so on a Sunday morning.

The newcomers will decide quickly whether the BCA temple is a place for them. They will not return for a second time if their initial experience is so alien that they feel unwelcome, or so familiar that it reminds them of what they have already rejected. They seek a fellowship of people who understand what it takes to trust a church again. The American Jodo Shinshu Sangha, re-imagined, is such a fellowship. This becomes our second step.

The second step in re-imagining an American Jodo Shinshu church is to discern how the church, as a national organization and in each of its temples, can support the religious development of newcomers who will be more diverse than the traditional membership.

To put it mildly, this is a very big step. But it can be graded into two smaller steps.

1) Maintain a clear distinction between religious purpose and expedient means.

The impulse to begin this task, the means for accomplishing it, and the justification for it, must all be explicitly religious. This is because of a tendency to frame the task of growth in terms common to the marketplace: advertising, marketing, strategic planning, budgeting, and so on. For example, the current campaign for BCA in the 21^st century was developed according to the same methods that work effectively in the business world. This approach is expedient, but only expedient. Expedient means must be seen or, more accurately, must be experienced to be in service of a religious purpose, not ends in themselves. We undertake this work because we are Shin Buddhists who benefit from the wisdom and compassion alive in the world and have vowed to share these benefits as a consequence of our own aroused compassion. Although this concept was implicitly understood by many within the traditional Japanese–American Shin community during the 20^th century, it must become an explicit lesson to be learned and practiced by the evolving American Shin community of the 21^st century.

2) Shift orientations from inward- to outward-looking.

Given an avowed obligation to share the teachings, the orientation of the church will be energized to shift its local and national perspectives from inward- to outward-looking. Writers in the Christian mission movement have presented with power the shift that can take place (21). Although the underlying theology is, of course, different from ours in BCA, the organizational dynamics in the first instance are identical.

Figure 1 shows the traditional local church portrayed as a set of concentric circles. At the center is the “committed core,” described by Gruder et al. as follows:

The core is generally composed of people serving as officers, on committees, in choirs, or in other groups. They seek to live out faithful lives but give most of their church time to providing services to those who only attend (22).

Those who “only attend,” called the Congregation, are described as “affiliates who expect services but have minimal ownership. It is a voluntary association of expressive individuals” (23).

This situation is recreated at the national level, as shown in the next figure.

Figure 2 portrays the current state of the national organization. The clergy and national lay leadership, as well as the seminary–graduate school at IBS, spend most of their time and energy responding to demands from congregations of individual temples who, by virtue of their financial support to the national organization, claim entitlements. This typically takes the form of complaints about lack of service from the national organization. The expected benefits are expressed by individual temples just as individual temple members claim entitlement for individual benefits from their temple’s core memberships. These dynamics focus the energy of the organization inward, toward responding to the dissatisfactions of the congregations of individual temples. Almost no time or energy are left to direct outward, toward the unchurched and the seekers.

The BCA will continue to decline unless these structures are changed, to redirect the focus of local and national organization from inward to outward.

Again borrowing gratefully from the visualization of Gruder et al., Figure 3 shows how the American Jodo Shinshu community can be structured for survival and growth.

The refocused local temple has a sense of direction. Everyone, minister, core, and congregation, experiences the temple as a vehicle for moving toward a fuller expression of wisdom and compassion in the world, which is none other than Amida Buddha. The joy of membership is the joy of sharing one’s appreciation of Amida with others both inside the church and in the surrounding context. Members of a congregation who communicate the enthusiasm of their Nembutsu faith will naturally attract and support seekers who come looking for just such enthusiasm that is unhooked from world views and ecclesial structures that the seekers have rejected. One comes to church to learn, share, and participate according to one’s abilities and other commitments. As members often discover, in such a setting, the more one gives, the more one receives (though not always as expected).

Figure 4 portrays the re-focused national Jodo Shinshu Church in America. The components interact with each other mutually in order to remain focused on the single purpose, which is to progressively realize wisdom and compassion in the world: Amida Buddha. All the components of the church are aligned in purpose. Each component views the others as resources for traveling the Bodhisattva path. Seekers in the church’s context will be moved by the coherence and dedication that are evident in the church’s structure and activities. They will be drawn to it. The growth will not result solely from one, two, or a dozen campaigns or other expedient means, but rather because of the joyous sincerity with which the membership, at every level, professes its faith.

To summarize, our second step begins by sustaining a clear focus of religious ends while using expedient means, and continues by re-focusing local and national organizations to the world around them, to become exemplary institutions that will attract religious seekers.

Turning now to the third and final step in the process, we seek a topic that moves from imagination to action as efficiently and effectively as possible. That topic is, I believe, the roles and responsibilities of ministers and laypeople.

The third step in re-imagining an American Jodo Shinshu church is to recast the roles of BCA ministers and laypersons.

In respect to ministers, limitation of ministerial service to pastoral service in existing temples is out-of-step with the re-imagined, re-energized church. Ministers should be active in a number of roles. In respect to laypersons, each is on a bodhisattva’s path; hence each has a responsibility to share the teachings with others. Distinctions between propagation and outreach, and between active and passive temple membership, are irrelevant. The responsibility of laypersons for the religious life of the temples is increased without decreasing the leadership of the professional clergy.

The problem of ministerial shortage in BCA has become so prominent that a special group within the National Board was established to clarify and perhaps solve the problem. The group produced a thorough, elegantly organized report that included a number of recommendations. It is too early to know for sure whether any of these recommendations will find fertile ground in the current BCA structure. I think it is unlikely. The current structure makes temples passive clients of the national organization. As paying clients, temples perceive entitlement to fault IBS and the Bishop’s Office for not succeeding in generating more ministers, whether domestically trained or imported from Japan. Laying the blame off, rather than recreating the temple to operate effectively without a full-time minister, makes the ministerial problem unsolvable, for two reasons. First, the entitlement-oriented environment of such temples discourages members from wanting to become ministers. Second, it chills the enthusiasm of Japanese-born ministers, who are free to choose whether to remain in the United States or return to Japan.

The culture of passivity and entitlement must change to become a culture of active life in the Nembutsu and to fulfill the obligation to act in accord with our Bodhisattva vows.

The history of BCA, explains and in some ways justifies, the assertions of those in other temples who argue that they are not getting what they deserve from the national organization. The fact remains, however, that disgruntlement will do nothing to solve the problem. The lack of a full-time minister at a temple is not an insurmountable barrier to the existence of a vital Sangha, one whose members create opportunities for traditional worship, wholesome sociality, religious education of their children, and propagation of the Shin teachings into the surrounding context. What characterizes such Sanghas is a turning away from the worry that the national organization “owes” them a minister.

In order to foster the development of active, outward-facing Sanghas, the national organization can recast the role of the minister to gain more religious and organizational leverage with the existing ministerial corps. Ministers can serve several temples equally, if appropriate funding arrangements are made and the laypersons in each temple are trained and empowered to act in the minister’s absence. Importantly, over time, the extent of ministerial roles can be broadened from that of single temple pastor to include chaplain, scholar/teacher, youth leader, and lecturer/Dharma speaker to many temples and to religious seekers from outside the church. This will make the career prospect of entering the BCA ministry more attractive to youth and to adults who seek a religious vocation later in life.

In harmony with these changes, the national organization of Kaikyoshi ministers can accelerate the development of lay training programs. The programs will prepare laypersons to share the substance of teachings and rituals and will include public acknowledgment of the importance of lay propagation of the Dharma to other temple members and to the unchurched and seekers in the Sangha’s local context.

After all, no religious “turf” exists that belongs to those who are ordained and is off-limits to those who are not—only Samsara and Sukhavati—and a Dharma that accounts for both. No one owns this Dharma, and every Mahayana Buddhist has vowed to use it for the sake of others. Shin laypersons need not wait for the minister to arrive, like Estragon waiting for Godot, “blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.” (24)

I’ll conclude as I began, by relying on Reverend Tsuji. In 1989 Tsuji Sensei published an essay entitled A Challenge for American Shin Buddhists (25). As usual, he wrote briefly and directly to his point. I can provide no better closing than to quote from this essay:

 The time is now when both ministers and lay members must join forces to extricate ourselves from the dark morass in which we find ourselves. …[W]e have a tremendous challenge. Let us remember that in the Shinshu Sangha there is no differentiation between the lay and the ordained; we must be united in our Buddha-Dharma and what it meant to Shinran Shonin.

Thank you, Tsuji Sensei, for saying in 60 words what I have struggled to say in 4,700.

2. Unno, Taitetsu. Shin Buddhism: Bits of Rubble Turn into Gold. New York, NY: Doubleday, 2002.

3. Tanaka, Kenneth K. Ocean: An Introduction to Shin Buddhism. Berkeley, CA: Wisdom Ocean Publications, 1997.

4. Corless, Roger J. “Self-Power Practice with an Other Power Attitude” in The Pure Land, 1992, v. 8–9, pp. 166–205.

5. Bloom, Alfred. Shinran’s Gospel of Pure Grace. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1965.

6. Inagaki, Hsiao. The Three Pure Land Sutras. Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Research and Publication, 1995.

7. Hirota, Denis; Inagaki, Hsaio; Tokunaga, Michio; and Uryuzu, Ryushin (Trans.). The Collected Works of Shinran (Vols. 1 and 2).Kyoto, Japan: Jodo Shinshu Hongwanji-Ha, 1997.

8. Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai. The Teaching of Buddha. Tokyo, Japan: Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai, 1966.

9. Gatenby, George and Paraskevopoulos, John. A Primer of Shin Buddhism. Neutral Bay, NSW: Hongwanji Buddhist Mission of Australia, 1995.

10. Itsuki, Hiroyuki. Tariki: Embracing Despair, Discovering Joy. Tokyo, Japan: Kodansha, 1999.

11. Rapaport, Al. Buddhism in America. Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1998. The situation was even worse than that: The glossary in the book contains a reference to Pure Land Buddhism, equating it with organizational Jodo Shu and stating that “Jodo-shu has the largest number of adherents of any school in Japan” (p. 560). It should also be noted that the conference from which the published volume arose was officially entitled the Future of Buddhist Meditative Practices in the West. This might have served as an odd rationale for the absence of a Jodo Shinshu presence in the volume, as if a tenet of American Jodo Shinshu were that Shin Buddhists should not participate in discussions of Buddhist meditation. Given the generally great interest in meditation and the growth of meditation opportunities in some BCA temples, not to mention the central position of meditation in the Contemplation Sutra, this would be a retrograde doctrinal position.

12. The BCA National Council endorsed the following four goals at the outset of the fund-raising campaign: 1) Strengthening Shin Buddhism as a major religious tradition in the United States; 2) Creating a thriving Jodo Shinshu ministry; 3) Increasing self-reliance; and 4) Enhanced service to the greater community.

13. Gruder, Darrell L. (Ed.) Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Chirch in North America. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Erdmans, 1998.

14. Unno, 2002, pp. 28–29.

15. Such is the text of one of the vows in the Ekoji Buddhist Temple Service Book. Other versions announce that same commitment.

16. Fingarette, Herbert. Self-Deception. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. The distinction between conscious hypocrisy and self-deception is a theme recurring throughout Professor Fingarette’s book.

17. James, William. Varieties of Religious Experience (originally Gifford lectures, 1901–1902). New York, NY, 1958, p. 41.

18. Taylor, Charles. Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. Cambridge, MA, 2002, p. 24.

19. Taylor, p. 24.

20. Taylor, p. 88

21. Gruder, Darrell L. (Ed.), Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998, pp. 202–213.

22. Gruder, pp. 202–203.

23. Gruder, p. 203.

24. Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York, NY: Random House, 1984. See also http://samuel-beckett.net/Waiting_for_Godot_Part1.html.

25. Tsuji, Kenryu T. A Challenge for American Shin Buddhists. San Francisco, CA: Buddhist Churches of America, Department of Buddhist Education, 1989. I am grateful to Mas Ishihara, of the Stockton Buddhist Temple, for sending me a copy of this essay in July 2003. His timing was perfect.

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Shigefuju, Shinei. Nembutsu: Nembutsu in Shinran and His Teachers. Toronto, Canada: Toronto Buddhist Church, 1978.

Southern District Dharma School Teachers League. Well, Almost Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Jodo Shinshu*
*But Were Afraid to Ask. Los Angeles, CA: Pure Land Publications, 1995 (Third Printing, Revised).

Suzuki, D.T. Buddha of Infinite Light: The Teachings of Shin Buddhism, the Japanese Way of Wisdom and Compassion. Boston, MA and London, UK: Shambala Publications, 1997.

Tsuji, Kenryu T. The Heart of the Buddha-Dharma: Following the Jodo Shinshu Path. Washington, DC: Ekoji Buddhist Temple/Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2003.

Yamaoka, Seigen. Jodoshinshu: An Introduction. Los Angeles, CA: Pure Land Publications, 1991 (Third Printing, Revised)

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The Crucial Element in Outreach: Establishing a Buddhist Education Program, by Marvin Harada

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