American Dharma by Ann Gleig

Author:Ann Gleig [Gleig, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300215809
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

S • E • V • E • N

From the Boomers to Generation X

On the morning of June 10, 2011, at the Garrison Institute, a former Catholic monastery that now functions as an ecumenical contemplative center, two groups of Western Buddhist teachers—the self-identified “pioneers” or first-generation of teachers and what they called the “NextGen” of younger teachers—gathered together to recognize and to facilitate continuity between the two distinct generations. Each group presented the other with a set of declarations and requests. The “Three Statements” of the younger group opened by expressing deep gratitude to their elders for translating the Buddhist teachings from Asia and bestowing mentorship and support, continued by acknowledging their responsibility to maintain the dharma and carry forth the transmission they had received, and ended by declaring that they would transform the dharma in their own unique way—being called, in particular, “to bring the Dharma more fully to the needs of our diverse world, serving the Buddhist community more equally, and answering the call of injustice and inequality everywhere in our world.”1

This ceremony took place on the day before the 2011 Maha Teacher Council, the most recent in a series of international Buddhist teachers conferences.2 The first of these, co-organized by the Dalai Lama and Lama Surya Das, took place in 1993 in Dharamsala, India, and brought together twenty-two teachers to forge connections across lineages and discuss the challenges of bringing Buddhism to the West. A second major gathering occurred in 2001 at Spirit Rock, in California, with the Dalai Lama and other notable Asian Buddhist teachers in attendance.3 Ten years later, at the 2011 conference, 230 mostly American teachers met to discuss three main issues: “the promise and the pitfalls” of the wide dissemination of the dharma into secular Western culture, the challenges of adapting the dharma to these new contexts without sacrificing its depth, and “passing the torch as it were from elders to the next generation.”4

It was the last of these—the informal transmission to the next generation—that marked the 2011 conference as particularly distinct. As Surya Das noted, for the first time the conference organizers had “consciously” included forty-five to fifty “young” (younger than forty-five) dharma teachers in order to explore how the elders could best “help the younger generation empower themselves” and “genuinely serve as midwifes at their delivery.” Similarly, co-organizer Jack Kornfield asked, “How can those of us who were pioneers in the ’60s and ’70s, support them without getting in their way and let them know that they have our blessings and support?”5

While the reflections of Surya Das and Kornfield suggest an intentional and smooth generational transition, Rachel Zoll, one of only two reporters invited to the event, presented a tenser and more dramatic situation: it was a meeting of “elders versus young people,” or “the preservers of spiritual depth versus the alleged purveyors of ‘Buddhism-lite’” to “tackle their differences” on issues that had been “percolating for years” in Buddhist circles with nothing less than the “future of Buddhism at stake.” According

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