User:Jlharry12345/Buddhism in the United States

The page of the Buddhism in the United States includes many fields about the Buddhism but not enough explanations about how people influenced by the Buddhism.

About the spread of Tibetan Buddhism and Theravada, the Wiki page showed a quite brief history scene of the development and essential time point. However, the consequence of the society and the life change of the people are rarely reflected. How the people’s life could evolve the Buddhism spirit? How the American treat their daily life from the Buddhism concept? How the change of the Buddhism in America brings American living style different with other Buddhism countries (China, Japan, Korea, and so on?) Comparing to the living style in Japanese or Tibetan Buddhism worshipers, how American worshipers’ lives different from them. More, just like the Sikhs and the Hinduism, how Christians or the people with other religions treat the Buddhism worshipers? How the normal people’s view about the Buddhism in America? Even the temple and the places about the Buddhism could be build up and established, the meaning of them are truly same as the buildings in China or Japan? Those more micro field of the Buddhism in American are not showed in the Wiki page. However, they are the important part of the social role of the religion. Why they can exist in people’ mind and gathered worshipers from American society, that is a point which I must consider about.

The dilemma of the contemporary society which Buddhism worshipers facing were not completely shows in the Wiki page. It is not means there is no difficulties in this group, it is hard to noticed in the internet. Through the passage “We’re Not Who You Think We Are,” I can see many difficulties of the Buddhism in America. However, the Wiki page still not fully cover this field. And by the passage “White Utopias: Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals,” White supremacy dominated the “authority” of the religion in America, then how they interpret the Buddhism in their view? Wiki page showed downward sides so small that there are so many problems could not be discussed in the internet through the lack of the Wiki source. The fact is, avoiding discuss what the problems are is not the way to solve the problems but making the warm bed for more problems.

How the Buddhism related to the races and some specific groups in society are not discussed in the Wiki page, neither. Relating the races with the religions is a common way which the American society treat the different racial group people. How the Buddhism enroll in this topic? How the people with racial discriminations seen the Buddhism as the representative foreign and Asian culture which could be more representative than Hinduism and Sikh because of the number of worshipers in the Asia. Through the passages of the Sikh and the Hinduism, it faced a lot from the history until now, and how about more widely spread religion, Buddhism? The Wiki page did not mention a lot so that the necessity to add on is the main topic.

The Problems could be diverse and plenty. Including all of them could be an issue cause I cannot explain clearly for it. So that focus on specific one or two problems could be better. I will begin the next step for this after learning the Module 3 and try to create a page about the problems and then keep my works going.

Source:


 * 1) We're Not Who You Think We Are, BY CHENXING HAN|, MAY 15, 2017.
 * 2) Eck, Diana L. "American religious pluralism: Civic and theological discourse." Democracy and the new religious pluralism (2007): 243-70.
 * 3) Wei, Dao-ru, and Janet Mei-kee Cheng. "Buddhism in China and modern society: an introduction centering around the teachings of Taixu and Yinshun." The Journal of Oriental Studies 20 (2010): 171-182.
 * 4) Seager, Richard Hughes. Buddhism in America. Columbia University Press, 2012.
 * 5) Smith, Buster G. American Buddhism: A sociological perspective. Baylor University, 2009.
 * 6) Green, Ronald S. "Buddhism and American Cinema." Journal of Global Buddhism 16 (2015): 95-103.