Marketing Buddhism in the United States of America: Elite Buddhism and the Formation of Religious Pluralism
Marketing Buddhism in the United States of America: Elite Buddhism and the Formation of Religious Pluralism
Charles B. Jones
Scope of the Inquiry
am not the first person to report on the marketing of Buddhism within the United States. In a 2000 issue of the Journal of Global Buddhism, Douglas M. Padgett wrote about the manufacture and marketing of meditation cushions in the United States and ruminated on the complex relationship between Buddhism’s ostensible nonmaterialistic ideals and goals on the one hand and the nuts and bolts of money and consumption in the marketing of religious paraphernalia on the other.1 While such a study casts valuable light on the complexities and contradictions of contemporary Western Buddhist practice, I have other fish to fry here. I am concerned not with the marketing of Buddhist gear but with the marketing of Buddhism itself, its teachings and its practices. That is to say, I comment on the
kind of Buddhism that has asserted itself in the marketplace of religious ideas in the United States, particularly through the kinds of commercial venues where religious ideas themselves are the commodity. This means, above all, bookstores and magazine stands, the places where people go to shop for reading material that will inform their Buddhist thinking and practice or merely satisfy their curiosity if they do not intend to practice but simply want information.
Beyond seeing just what kind of Buddhism is up for sale in contemporary North America, I also want to take this opportunity to explore a larger phenomenon within which this marketing operates and influences people’s thinking in another area. By looking at how Buddhism is being marketed in the United States, I believe a dynamic through which people formulate ideas about the relationships between various religions can be discerned. In particular, I want to use the selling of Buddhist books and periodicals as a way to see how people arrive at their ideas about religious pluralism. As I shall show, the marketplace exerts a force that distorts (or adapts) Buddhism in such a way as to lead people to certain conclusions about religious diversity in general.
1. Douglas Padgett, “‘Americans Need Something to Sit On,’ or Zen Meditation Materials and Buddhist Diversity in North America,” Journal of Global Buddhism 1 (2000): 61–81. There is also an article in a 2001 issue of Tricycle magazine by Douglas 2 1 6 Patt that I cite in the last section.
As a major component of the research for this article, I went shopping. On 2 January 2006, I went to the Borders bookstore at the White Flint Mall in Kensington, Maryland, and spent an afternoon writing down the titles and authors of the books that were for sale under the subject heading “Buddhism.” During that time, I recorded some ninety-one separate titles for sale, which represented about two-thirds of this store’s total offerings. Before leaving, I quickly surveyed the remainder to see if the patterns I had noted to that point held and to make sure there would be nothing that would significantly alter my
conclusions. Satisfied that the notes I had represented an adequate sample, I took them to my office to analyze the findings. To do this, I looked up each title on the Internet and scanned tables of contents, publicity materials, and reviews. This allowed me to sort the materials according to sectarian affiliation and general subject matter.
2. See Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, “Of Churches, Sects, and Cults: Preliminary Concepts for a Theory of Religious Movements,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 18 (1979): 117–31. Stark uses this theory to understand the rise of Christianity in Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), chap. 2.
3. Stark and Bainbridge, “Of Churches, Sects, and Cults.” Colleagues from sociology have alerted me that this sect/cult distinction is not universally accepted. This fact, however, is not important for this article. I am not attempting to define the terms sect and cult in general; I simply find the definitions put forth by Stark and Bainbridge a useful analytical tool for purposes of this research. 4. Diana Eck, A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 182.
Before presenting those findings, let me say a word or two about methodology. There is some sociological theory that supports the use of books and magazines as an important resource for gauging the uptake of Buddhism into American culture. The sociologists Rodney Stark and William S. Bainbridge make a distinction between new religious movements that they call “sects” and those they call “cults.”2 They define the former as movements within preexisting religious groups that seek to reinforce certain aspects of that religion’s practice or reform it in some way. A sect movement does not call on its followers to learn new concepts, worldviews, languages, practices, or texts; it can build on the foundation of the things its target group already believes and does. As a result, sect movements flourish among discontented and dispossessed populations toward the lower end of the social and educational ladder.
Cults, in Stark and Bainbridge’s view, are new religions in every sense of the word, at least for the people who adopt them (an important qualification, since the subject of this study, Buddhism, is hardly a new religion). As these religious traditions enter geographical or cultural territories that have not known of them previously, those who wish to learn about them or join them must study new scriptures, master a new technical vocabulary, learn new practices rooted in an
unknown cultural matrix, and so on. This being the case, cults generally flourish among those of higher educational and cultural attainments, whose minds are more flexible and open to new ideas and new expressions. Buddhism, in this analysis, still functions among the non- Asian-descended populations of the United States as a cult rather than as a sect. Thus, it is natural to expect that these Buddhists will be, by and large, college educated and used to reading as a primary way of assimilating new information.
History would seem to bear this expectation out. As several studies of the rise of Buddhism in America have shown, interest in Buddhism first arose during the nineteenth century through the medium of literature. The New England Transcendentalists and the Theosophists mostly approached Buddhism through literature in translation; only a few hardy souls traveled abroad to study Buddhism up close in its Asian context. Diana Eck reports that when Henry Steele Olcott, one of the founders of Theosophy, died in 1907, his body lay in state surrounded by the books he had studied.4 It was not until after the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago that Americans began to encounter Asian masters and get firsthand teaching. Even then, the primary audience for these “missionaries”
consisted of educated and upper-class patrons. Buddhism made, and continues to make, little to no headway among the less-educated working classes.
A more recent study also supports this hypothesis. It is fortuitous that, just as I was preparing this article, one of my graduate students was conducting a survey in the Washington, DC, and Baltimore areas to compare people who practice Zen with others who practice “Centering Prayer.” Zen, as an import into their
religious practice, would function as a cult, while the Centering Prayer, which builds exclusively on Christian ideas and practices from the past, would be more of a sect. One of the questions asked was, “How did you first become interested in Zen/ Centering Prayer?” As Stark and Bainbridge’s theory would predict, roughly three times as many Zen practitioners as Centering Prayer participants checked the box marked “Books, school, lectures.”
5. The figures were 57.8 percent for Zen and only 18.1 percent for Centering Prayer. Christine Brickman, “Navigating Pathways: Christians Contemplate the Dharma Gates” (unpublished manuscript, May 2006), 33. 6. I have experienced this myself. On three consecutive days, I looked on Amazon.com to see how my own recent book, The View from Mars Hill, was doing. One day, it was ranked around 142,000. The next day, it came in around 200,000. On the third day, it had
fallen to around 300,000. Three days later, it had sunk to 642,000. This may merely mean that Amazon had sold a single copy on the day I first looked. Thus, a look at the marketing of books would yield more insight into the development of Buddhist beliefs in America than it might for religious phenomena of the sect type. There are, however, many books out there, so my research aim was to determine which books the American Buddhist reading public would see on an
average book-shopping trip. I chose to go to a large commercial book chain instead of going either online or to smaller, more local bookstores for the following reasons. An online book service, such as Amazon or Barnes and Noble, operates out of large warehouses with almost no practical limitations on shelf space and thus has the flexibility to carry virtually anything that is in print, and so the mere fact that it has an item for sale does not mean that it
actually sells in significant numbers. I did try doing a subject search for “Buddhism” on Amazon.com and then having the results listed by sales rank, and while the results generally confirmed what I had already found at the Borders bookstore, they also yielded a long and ungainly list unsuitable for analysis beyond the first several screens that listed the most popular titles. The sales rank numbers one finds on Amazon are notoriously volatile; the sale of a single copy of a given book can catapult a book up several thousand notches, and it can crash back downward the very next day.
Smaller neighborhood stores were also unsuitable, in my opinion, because the amount of shelf space they can devote to Buddhism is so limited that the sample of titles would be far too small to be significant as an index of an American Buddhist’s reading preferences. I also eliminated used bookstores since their on-shelf stock reflects books that other people want to get rid of, not what the store’s proprietor thinks will sell.
A large franchise such as Borders suited my purposes because it could devote enough shelf space to books on Buddhism to allow for a fairly wide variety of titles. In the past, I had shopped for books on Confucianism at a Barnes and Noble in Charlottesville, Virginia, and been pleasantly surprised to find some fairly good academic books along with the more popular titles, something I believe would not happen with more limited shelving for this one topic. However, unlike an online bookstore, this Borders did not have unlimited shelf space, and so a purchasing manager would have to pay attention to what was likely to sell
and make sure those books were stocked. In short, I thought the Borders would present a middle way between too little shelf space to make meaningful stocking decisions and unlimited shelf space that would obviate the need for any such decisions. Within this middle range, I thought it reasonable to hope that in surveying the shelves, I might find that the shopper at Borders would be presented with a mix of both popular and scholarly books, books that would reflect both his or her own culturally defined interests and the Asian tradition seen more objectively.
I was wrong. Perhaps I was more shocked than I should have been because I rarely go to such bookstores, preferring to buy books online or through the campus bookstore based on colleagues’ recommendations and catalogs that I receive in the mail from academic presses. I was quite unprepared for the mix of popular works by charismatic Buddhist leaders, biographies of contemporary Buddhist figures, meditation manuals, Buddhist solutions to problems ranging from finances to parenthood, and simple introductions to the Buddhist religion that I found there.
As shown in table 1, the number of books surveyed was ninety-one. However, the total in table 2 is higher because several books covered more than one topic and so were listed in more than one category. The highest incidence of this occurred in books that I have listed both under “meditation” and “self-help”; it seems the the head of the Gelugs-pa. Similarly, the books in the “Zen” category did not represent specifically Caodong/Soto or Linji/Rinzai, but represented a sort of pan-Zen mélange.
This, in brief, is what a shopper would have found on the shelf at Borders that January day. What does it mean?
Reading the Bookstore
At first glance, it might appear that nothing new has been learned by surveying the bookshelves, or that very little has changed since scholars first began paying attention to the patterns in American interest in Buddhism. A look at sectarian identification shows that the books with a clear affiliation tend to be Zen, Tibetan, and Theravadin, with Zen far ahead of the other two. A look at subject matter shows self-help at the head of the list, followed by doctrinal elucidation and meditation. However, as noted above, “meditation” and “self-help” were the categories most
Note : “Other” indicates other specific sectarian affiliations, such as Pure Land.
likely to overlap. Were I to separate titles into one or the other category more strictly, “meditation” would come out on top of the list. I also noted that, not far from the “Buddhism” section of this bookstore, there was a separate set of shelves marked “Meditation,” which contained Buddhist books as well.
7. Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Nar- 149, 184–200; for a detailed overview of the compo- and Study of Buddhism in America (Berkeley: Univerrative History of Buddhism in America, 3rd ed. (Bos- sition of Buddhist organizations in the United States, sity of California Press, 1999), 7–48. ton: Shambhala, 1992); Eck, A New Religious America, see Charles Prebish, Luminous Passage: The Practice
These observations only confirm what students of American Buddhism have been saying for years about trends in non-Asian Americans’ interest in Buddhism. The standard history, Rick Fields’s How the Swans Came to the Lake, makes it quite clear that Zen, Tibetan, and Theravada Buddhism have captivated the interests of the non-Asian Buddhist enthusiast, and other books by prominent scholars that present somewhat more concise histories, such as Charles Prebish’s Luminous
Passage and Diana Eck’s A New Religious America, echo these findings.7 Jan Nattier, in an article published in a 1995 issue of Tricycle magazine, calls the Buddhism found among non-Asian Americans “elite Buddhism” and also notes the predilection of this cohort for these three lineages of Buddhism. Furthermore, Nattier reports that these elite Buddhists tend to boil the essence of Buddhism down to the practice of meditation and the experience of enlightenment.
This pattern of selecting these three forms of Buddhism over the alternatives can be confirmed in other ways as well. A college textbook on Buddhism published in 1989 came under criticism in a review essay by Nattier for reporting almost exclusively on these three schools of Buddhism to the virtual exclusion of others, thus distorting the picture of Buddhism’s history.9 One of the books on the shelf that day at Borders, Joseph Goldstein’s On Dharma, was an attempt at Buddhist ecumenism aimed at bringing together the major strands of American Buddhism, which the author took to be Tibetan, Theravadin, and Zen.10 A glance at
the advertisements for books, supplies, and retreats in any issue of Tricycle reveals these preferences when a sectarian affiliation appears. Even academics are not immune from these tendencies: Galen Amstutz, in his book Interpreting Amida, states that many Western scholars of Buddhism came from the ranks of spiritual seekers, and so, not surprisingly, scholars have been much more prolific in publishing studies in these three areas than in other branches of Asian Buddhism such as Pure Land, Nichiren, or Abhidharma.
8. Jan Nattier, “Visible and Invisible: Jan Nattier on the Politics of Representation in Buddhist America,” Tricycle 5 (1995): 44. Eck, in recounting the founding of the San Francisco Zen Center in the 1960s, gives a further illustration of the difference between the Asian immigrant and the elite Buddhist in this regard. The founder, Shunryu Suzuki, came from Japan in order to minister to the Japanese community in the Bay Area, but Euro-Americans with an interest in Zen came to him as well. Suzuki found these nonAsians much more interested in meditation than his Japanese-American clients. See Eck, A New Religious America, 190.
9. Roger Corless, The Vision of Buddhism: The Space Under the Tree. New York: Paragon House, 1989); Jan Nattier, “History, Subjectivity, and the Study of Buddhism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 60 (1992): 531, 535. It should be noted that, to a large extent, Corless’s emphasis was intentional. He says, “I have, in effect, reinvented Buddhism, with a western audience in mind” (Corless, Vision, xx).
10. Joseph Goldstein, On Dharma (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003).
11. Galen Amstutz, Interpreting Amida: History and Orientalism in the Study of Pure Land Buddhism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), 65–68.
12. Jonathan Landaw and Stephan Bodian, Buddhism for Dummies (New York: Wiley, 2003); Gary Gach, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Buddhism
(Indianapolis: Alpha, 2002); Noah Levine, Dharma Punx (New York: HarperCollins, 2003); Hilda Gutierez Baldoquin, Dharma, Color, and Culture: New Voices in Western Buddhism (Berkeley, CA: Parallax, 2005).
13. Greg Holden, Karma Kids: Answering Everyday Parenting Questions with Buddhist Wisdom (Berkeley, CA: Ulysses, 2004); Susan Moon, Not Turning Away: the Practice of Engaged Buddhism (Boston: Shambhala, 2004). So has my quick survey of the shelves at Borders succeeded only in proving the indubitable once again? Should one be surprised to find few or no books on other traditions within
Buddhism, or dealing with such topics as ritual performance, monastic ordination and rules, or ethics? Should it only have been expected that the books that Borders’ purchasing agents chose as likely sellers would focus on the Tibetan, Theravadin, and Zen traditions and on the topics of self-help and meditation?
Not quite. Going back to table 1, the category that heads the list with the most books on the shelf is “nonsectarian,” a group of books with no clear sectarian affiliation at all. These included a handful of introductory texts, including Buddhism for Dummies and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Buddhism,
and books of biographical essays, such as Noah Levine’s Dharma Punx or Hilda Gutierez Baldoquin’s Dharma, Color, and Culture: New Voices in Western Buddhism.12 In these two categories, one might well expect no clearcut sectarian focus. Perhaps more significant is the appearance of self-help books based on Buddhist principles that do not rely on a particular Asian tradition of Buddhism for support, such as Greg Holden’s Karma Kids: Answering Everyday Parenting Questions with Buddhist Wisdom, or books on social action such as Susan Moon’s Not Turning Away: The Practice of Engaged Buddhism.13 The appearance of such nonsectarian books may alert one that Buddhism in America has become more inculturated and less dependent on affiliation with Asian antecedents for legitimation than was the case in the past.
With this one exception, however, my investigation so far has not broken much new ground. Scholars have long known that Americans liked Zen better than Pure Land and meditation better than ritual or the monastic life.
Can this quest go deeper?
Religious Diversity
One way of deepening the inquiry is to bracket out the fact that Americans have ignored entire segments of Buddhism and ask, of those Asian traditions that have been widely accepted by the elite Buddhists, which aspects of their traditions have been selected, and which rejected?
Since the Zen tradition seems to be the single most popular Asian tradition among the elite Buddhists in America, I begin with it. As is well known among scholars, the tradition known as Chan in China, Zen in Japan, Son in Korea, and Thien in Vietnam has roots that go back more than thirteen hundred years, and
during the intervening centuries between that time and the present numerous sects and lineages have come and gone. As noted above, most of the books on Zen found on the shelves display a lack of awareness about these sectarian ramifications. Books of translations of Zen classics tend toward eclecticism, and many books (such as Joey Green’s The Zen of Oz) betray no trace of concern with sectarian precursors, contenting themselves with a sort of generalized idea of Zen in the abstract.14 Thus, it should be no surprise that most books on the popular market, if they make reference to a lineage within Zen at all, line up with one of the two major Japanese schools that sent missionaries to America: Rinzai and Soto. One sees no trace of, for example, a specifically Obaku teaching on the shelves.
Even within the vague limits of these two traditions, one finds that the books present a highly filtered and adapted form of Zen. As a way of seeing just how filtered this Zen is, one may note the appearance in the early 1990s of Bernard Faure’s highly acclaimed and muchcited set of “cultural critiques” of East Asian Buddhism, The Rhetoric of Immediacy and Chan Insights and Oversights.15 In these books, Faure explored the concrete religious life and expression of Chan and Zen monastic institutions in China
14. Joey Green, The Zen of Oz: Ten Spiritual Lessons from over the Rainbow (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1998).
15. Bernard Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
and Japan. In addition to the “rhetoric of immediacy,” which is to say the discourse of a pure and unmediated experience of enlightenment, one could find a whole smorgasbord of other practices as well. These included thaumaturgy (rainmaking rituals, the relationship of enlightened masters with other monks known as wonder- workers, or such masters being wonder-workers themselves), a cult of relics, the veneration of images brought to “life” by the ceremony of “dotting the eyes,” rituals of sutra chanting, repentance rituals, and many other phenomena.
Faure’s intent here was to examine the East Asian Zen tradition without any necessary regard for the inculturation of Buddhism in the West. However, his work alerts one that the Zen presented in the books popular with Western audiences might well be unrecognizable to someone from the premodern East Asian tradition. They might wonder at Westerners who “practice Zen” without seeking ordination, without chanting scriptures, without dedication of merit, and so on. This is
very important: it means that if someone were to go to Borders in order to learn about Zen (having already selected that as opposed to any other Buddhist tradition), the kind of Zen he or she would find would be one already adapted to Western concerns, culture, and sensibilities. To look at the reader reviews on Amazon.com, some Western Zen practitioners did not appreciate Faure’s pointing out to them that their understanding of Zen was at variance with that of their Japanese and Chinese precursors.
But now I want to build on this observation in order to raise another concern from a different direction. Westerners who have already made a commitment to Buddhism are not the only ones who go to Borders to buy books on Buddhism. In his survey of attitudes toward the world’s religions among American Christians, the Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow identifies three broad groups marked by three basic attitudes toward other religions: the “spiritual shoppers,” the
“inclusivists,” and the “exclusivists.” The first two groups are, as their names imply, broadly tolerant of and curious about other religions, and thus likely to buy books as a way of finding out more. The distinguishing mark of the spiritual shopper is that he or she is willing not merely to accept other religions and learn about them but to “try them out” by going to Zen retreats, Sufi workshops, and buying books.
Part of what drives this openness is the conviction that we all share a common humanity, expressed in religious beliefs and practices that, while different on the surface, really all lead to the same goal. One of the surprises in Wuthnow’s findings, however, is that even these very open and earnest souls prove, when queried, to know very, very little about other religions. Constantly sampling teachings and practices from here and there, they never commit to one and follow its program through to the goal and thus enter into other religions only superficially. Survey questions designed to gauge the depth of their knowledge reveal that, by and large, the spiritual shoppers simply do not know very much about the religions into which they dip.
My survey of the shelves at Borders seems to point to one possible reason for this lack of knowledge: the very books that the stores make available convey to them an already-accommodated Buddhism stripped of its distinctively Asian features. If this is so, then one may easily imagine these spiritual shoppers hearing something about Buddhism in school or from friends and deciding to look further into it. Arriving at the bookstore, they will find primarily books on Zen, and secondarily Tibetan and Theravadin Buddhism, along with a healthy smattering of nonsectarian books with an educational or self-help focus. Having selected a few books on Zen, they will then learn it in a way that already speaks to their own native concerns and culture and does not confront them with elements of the religion that they might find truly strange, confusing, or even objectionable. Their books are already written in such a way as to reinforce much of what their own culture has taught them about being human and seeking the good.
Is it any wonder, then, that they arrive at the conclusion that all religions are ultimately the same?
Conclusion
In the past, as a young academic right out of graduate school, I might have found it very easy to be smug and cynical about the dynamic of Buddhism and the market that I have been describing in the preceding pages. For someone who has learned one or more Asian languages, spent time in Asia, and tried to understand Buddhism in the Asian setting, it is all too easy to smirk at the popular, “bastardized” Buddhism that has emerged in America or to deride as “trendy” the
Buddhism presented by these books. More mature reflection, however, quickly wipes the condescending smile off one’s face. After all, is there a “pure” Asian Buddhism that undergoes bastardization and commodification on U.S. bookshelves? One might imagine that in medieval China, during the time that the Chan (Zen) tradition was consolidating itself and coming to self-awareness and self-definition, that a character analogous to myself might have appeared on the scene. Observing Buddhism adapting itself to Chinese culture, he might have felt either smug or outraged at the bastardization of the pure Indian Buddhist tradition apparent in the emergence of Chan.
This is not only an academic conceit that one must confront and name. Some American Buddhists have expressed either resigned complacency or righteous anger at the adaptation of Buddhism to the market conditions of the West. David Patt raised these questions in an article that appeared in Tricycle magazine in 2001, where his subject was the commodification, not just of cushions and gold-plated buddha statues, but Buddhism itself, through the media. In this article, he noted: “It’s easier to sell Buddhism translated into terms that ‘suit
16. See, e.g., table 1 in Wuthnow’s study, which queried respondents on their knowledge about the specific teachings of other religions. Robert Wuthnow, America and the Challenge of Religious Diversity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 191.
the Western mind,’ but isn’t the Western mind the mind that has merged inseparably with the consumer ideal?”17
My answer is, “Yes, but why worry? Inculturation happens!” While one may lament the marketing of Buddhist books that adapt the teachings a bit too readily to the “Western mind,” one might profit by looking at the process that has unfolded whenever Buddhism has crossed any cultural boundary. The scholarly literature on the “sinification” of Buddhism in China is substantial, for instance, and shows that Buddhism cannot help but adapt itself.
I might also use this example to refine my usage of Stark and Bainbridge’s sect/cult typology. While they are surely right that cult-type religions spread mostly among the upper, more educated classes and are therefore more likely to be transmitted through books and other writings, my survey of the sorts of books they actually read shows the limits of this model. True, they are more open to and capable of absorbing new ideas, technical argots, and practices than are the people who follow a sect movement, but their openness and flexibility are not unbounded. Even the educated reading public still prefers books that take these new ideas and puts them into more familiar frameworks and idioms. Even someone willing to stretch his or her mind to embrace Zen will prefer The Zen of Oz to the more challenging academic books on Zen’s Asian manifestations.
But again, this is not a problem peculiar to the United States. Remember that the first books ever printed with moveable type were Chinese Buddhist texts. Someone must have thought there was a market for them.
17. David Patt, “Who’s Zoomin’ Who? The Commodification of Buddhism in the American Marketplace,” Tricycle 10 (2001): 91.
