Buddhism, American style

She did the Eastern thing.

As a 22-year-old child of the '60s, Helen Tworkov "spent a couple years bumming around Asia teaching English and working in Tibetan refugee camps."

It was her first trip. Asia was a nice place to visit. And she was interested in the dharma, the path of wisdom blazed there by the Buddha over 500 years before the birth of Jesus.

But Tworkov didn't want to live in Asia. She liked New York, where she was born, was raised in a culturally Jewish home and now edits a Buddhist magazine. She liked America. Things like democracy, critical inquiry in a free marketplace of ideas, political moxie and the belief that bad things can be changed _ the whole bag of can-do Western ideals.

"I can't speak for anyone else in the American sangha (Buddhist community), but I personally do not want to live in Tibet, in Sri Lanka," said Tworkov, interviewed in the loft offices of Tricycle magazine, a 2-year-old denominationally independent Buddhist quarterly she founded and edits. "I don't want to live in Japan. I don't want to live in any of those countries. I am very, very grateful to be an American."

It took Tworkov eight years after she came home to actually start practicing Buddhism. "I thought Buddhism was something that only Oriental people could do," Tworkov, now 50, said with a laugh. "I didn't get that Americans could actually do it."

When she did take refuge in the Buddha, she practiced a form of Tibetan Buddhism for 10 years before switching to one of the Japanese-rooted Zen schools for 10 more. In 1989, the former college anthropology teacher wrote Zen in America, profiling five American Zen masters.

The Buddha cut a new religious path through the old problem of suffering, seeing mind as both source and cure for the ache of all things passing away.

In what Buddhists call "turning the wheel of dharma," said Tworkov, the new way spread throughout Asia, taking on the flavor of different religious cultures and influencing them in return. Buddhist ideas hit New England in the mid-1800s, but Buddhism first came to America as a living religious path with the immigration of Japanese and Chinese Buddhists in the last half of that century.

In numbers, Buddhism remains a largely Asian-American affair here, fueled in great part by continuing migrations, especially from Southeast Asia.

But a century after the first non-Asian-American embraced Buddhism at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago _ where a Japanese Zen roshi and Sri Lankan Buddhist reformer were major players at what is generally hailed as the official entree of Buddhism into mainstream America _ the wheel of dharma is turning a little more red, white and blue.

And as a second World Parliament of Religions gears up for a return engagement to Chicago this month, the dharma is turning here, in part, on a nifty new set of all-American wheels: Tricycle magazine. In its first two years, the feisty, independent Buddhist quarterly has emerged as the voice of what Tworkov and editor-at-large Rick Fields say is "something called American Buddhism."

"To be living, Buddhism must be continually changing," said Fields. As he and Tworkov lay out the territory, Buddhism in America has become more lay-centered, feminine-friendly and "engaged" _ committed to social change and political involvement _ than its Asian dharma parents.

Tricycle's name is a bit of Buddhist tongue-in-cheek, Tworkov explained, turning the traditional idea of Buddhism with its one wheel and three vehicles on its head. "We have three wheels and one vehicle," she said.

Tworkov also wanted a simple American name to invite non-Buddhist readership, one that would suggest beginnings. In the long view of the dharma, Buddhism is just beginning here, and American believers are involved in a tricky balancing act.

It must be working. Tricycle sells at the rate of 35,000 copies an issue, half over the counter. It carries a cover price of $6. As a religion and culture commentary, it holds its own alongside more established efforts such as Commonweal, Tikkun and Christian Century.

Tricycle is not a propaganda forum for any one Buddhist school, said Tworkov, and focuses more on the role of Buddhism as a whole in the American scene.

The publication lays claim to being America's first denominationally independent American Buddhist magazine. "Our questions are American questions," said Helen Tworkov, founder and editor. "It's an American magazine, a magazine of contemporary American ideas through a Buddhist point of view."

It was chosen as Best New Magazine for 1992 by Utne magazine, a kind of Reader's Digest for the alternative press based in Minneapolis.

Each issue is a mix of articles, essays, history, artwork, reviews, profiles and interviews of style and substance.

There also are ongoing, sometimes not so docile, Buddhist family debates on red-flag issues such as abortion, euthanasia, the environment, AIDS and sexual acting out by big name Eastern gurus.

Buddhism has a larger presence on the American creative stage than most people know. In Tricycle's pages, American writers, thinkers and artists from pop and performance to high-brow pass through: Philip Glass, John Cage, Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia; poets Anne Waldman, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg; deadpan satirist/actor Spaulding Gray; explorer/author and Zen priest Peter Matthiesen; pioneer performance artist Laurie Anderson.

The current issue of Tricycle is representative. It leads off with a small literary coup, the first installment of '50s Beat Zen novelist Jack Kerouac's previously unpublished life of the Buddha, called Wake Up. (Kerouac, a former St. Petersburg resident, died in 1969.) It is accompanied by "Buddhism, Racism and Jazz," an intriguing essay by Zen priest Norman Fischer that draws some pertinent connections on American spiritual impulses and ends up wondering why there aren't more African-American faces in the meditation halls.

Other articles examine Buddhism's role inside the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II, one of Uncle Sam's less honorable moments in human rights leadership, and dharma and apartheid in South Africa.

The issue also takes Tworkov to the set of Little Buddha, an upcoming Bernardo Bertolucci movie about a young American boy who a Tibetan lama claims is the reincarnation of his late master.

The challenge is how to "clarify the jewel we call Buddhism and bring it to this country," Tworkov said. "How do we take it out of cultures all throughout the East _ Tibet, China, Japan, Sri Lanka _ how do we take it out of its patriarchal, male, sexist, abusive settings and bring it into a culture that cherishes equality and democratic ideals?"

"The East offers us a very, very strong contemplative tradition and the value of a contemplative mind," she said, while the big contribution of the West is the vision that human beings can create a better society. "We don't have to leave it all up to God. We can create a sense of social responsibility."

Like Tworkov, editor-at-large Fields, 51, has practiced Buddhism for more than 20 years and been mentored by Zen roshis and Tibetan lamas. Still, on the phone from his Boulder, Colo., home, Tricycle's editor-at-large called himself an "American Buddhist."

"New American Buddhism is really made up of people who have hands-on experience of different Buddhist traditions," said Fields, author of How the Swans Came to the Lake, the standard account of Buddhism's history in America.

"All the Buddhist strands which were never in contact are now coming together," Fields said, adding that he thinks non-Asian-American participation was about roughly equal in the three major vehicles. "Once again America plays the role of melting pot."

Baseball's Buddhist roots?

An excerpt from Tricycle founder Helen Tworkov's "Editor's View" column in the summer 1993 issue:

"Abner Doubleday, who died 100 years ago, was a member of the Theosophical Society (and)familiar with Buddhism through his close friendship with Madame Blavatsky. But he is best remembered for laying out baseball's diamond field in 1839 in Cooperstown, N.Y., which today is home to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Sometimes referred to as "the father of baseball," Doubleday has been claimed by some Buddhist enthusiasts as one of their own for infusing this quintessentially American game with mystical Buddhist numbers _ nine (innings, players, yanas), three (strikes, jewels, vehicles) and four (balls, bases, noble truths). Even the field has been touted as an esoteric reference to the Diamond Sutra. According to modern historians of the sport, however, Doubleday's association with baseball is more mythic than actual. Yet one great mystery remains: the 108 stitches (as in suture or "sutra') on the hardball. This is the total of 9 x 3 x 4: the same number of Buddhist prayer beads on a sacred mala as well as the number used ritually and repeatedly throughout Buddhist cultures. And even if history does disprove Doubleday's influence on baseball, Buddhist sages tell us that there are no coincidences. Play ball!"