A piece of the East finds a nest in the West

With heaps of tofu, vegetables and rice on their plates, a multicultural group of budding Buddhists sits at the long tables in Cambridge’s Greater Boston Buddhist Cultural Center, smiling and talking.

Under normal circumstances, these middle-aged, middle-class white folks might not mingle with second-generation Chinese-American young adults. A Boston University student might not talk with a woman who works at Africana.com, an online forum for African-American issues. A Buddhist nun, with her shaved head and long robes, might not meet a man who recently moved to Boston from Texas.

But at the GBBCC, everyone is part of the community, and as long as you’re interested in dharma and karma, you’re accepted at Friday night’s ‘Dinner with Dharma.’

After several dishes of vegetarian delights are devoured, the group gathers around the Venerable Yifa, a Buddhist nun who runs the temple and lives upstairs with another nun, the Venerable Man Ching. She chooses a topic, such as last week’s ‘Self and Emptiness,’ and leads an hour-long discussion. Though her ‘students’ are confused by some of the topics she presents, Yifa who also teaches a course on Buddhism at BU remains patient.

‘At the beginning, it always seems challenging,’ Yifa said of Buddhist philosophies, such as reincarnation, peaceful compassion at all times and non-attachment, which are not necessarily present in Christianity, Judaism or Islam. ‘Buddhism is very different from these three major religions and provides another answer.’

MASS. APPEAL

Buddhism is one of the fastest growing religions in the United States. Some centers attract Westerners converts as well as curious people. Other Buddhist temples have maintained more of an ethnic following. In Boston, there are about 30 temples with primarily Korean, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Laotian and Chinese membership.

The GBBCC which takes up the bottom floor of a typical business building on Massachusetts Avenue between Central and Harvard Squares is made up of about half Westerners and half ethnic Buddhists. Mostly Chinese and Taiwanese Buddhists attend weekly mediation services, while temple-offered activities such as yoga, vegetarian cooking and Chinese language classes as well as the Dinners with Dharma are populated mainly by Westerners or first-generation, United States-born Asians.

Large glass windows line most of the walls and passers-by often peer into the simply decorated meditation room or the tearoom where the center serves vegetarian food from the large restaurant-style kitchen in back. There is also a small store in the front hall that sells books and Buddhist paraphernalia.

Since Yifa started running the temple, members agree that what they call ‘localization’ has swelled. More college students have started coming to the GBBCC and more English is spoken. The temple, a branch of Fo Guang Shan (a Taiwanese monastery with more than 200 international affiliates), is distancing itself from a strict association with traditional Buddhism, and is adapting to modern and American society and culture.

‘Of course, you are still living in the secular world, you still have to practice in this world,’ Yifa stressed when describing how the ‘humanistic Buddhism’ she practices appeals to a wider audience.

CALLING ALL AGES

One Cambridge couple, 55-year-old Marjorie Jacobs and 52-year-old Peter Martin, has been visiting the GBBCC since it opened in 1999. Both said the temple helped them deal with difficult times at work, but what began as intellectual curiosity grew into a more involved commitment to the center and its philosophy.

Jacobs defines herself as a Buddhist. While Martin is wary of labels, he said he most closely identifies with Buddhist ideas.

Those ideas are the fundamentals that draw many Westerners to Buddhism, Martin, who is originally from England, hypothesized. Some Americans are growing weary of a society that promotes individual gain and not a sense of community, he said.

‘People who actually think they’ve realized that all that material gain hasn’t brought them happiness,’ he said. ‘Thinking people are realizing: there’s something missing in your life.’

Jacobs, who wore the round Buddhist beads that have become a fashion staple around her wrist, added she feels the organized church does not offer the same kind of spiritual exploration Buddhism does. With Buddhism, she said, ‘you’re not in the hands of the priest.’

However, both agreed the precepts of Christianity and Buddhism, along with other religions, are fundamentally similar. Buddhism has simply ‘condensed some of them,’ Martin said, referring to the correlation between Buddhism’s Five Precepts and the Ten Commandments.

While some Westerners like Jacobs and Martin discovered their interest later in life, others’ curiosity is piqued earlier. Over the past year, since Yifa started teaching at BU, more college students have visited the center and several have maintained some level of involvement.

Meditation retreats and summer programs in Taiwan and Japan where students live in Buddhist monasteries are geared specifically toward college students.

Yifa spoke highly of her students’ open-mindedness and eagerness to learn.

It’s likely she relates to their position in life. Yifa herself was 20 years old and in Taiwanese law school when a friend recommended she attend a Buddhist meditation retreat. Two weeks into the retreat, she said she experienced an ‘inside transformation.’

Being a lawyer was no longer important, she says when asked how she became a nun.

SEGREGATED CONGREGATIONS

While Buddhism offers so much for such a varied group of Westerners, it can sometimes be hard to create a sense of community between Westerners and ethnic Buddhists, mainly because of the language barrier that exists between immigrants and Americans. Most immigrants at the GBBCC speak Mandarin Chinese and know limited English.

‘The regular ‘religious’ activities of the center are separated into English-language Friday activities and mostly Chinese-language Sunday activities,’ Harvard graduate student and GBBCC attendee Alison Denton Jones said in a research paper she wrote earlier this year about the center.

Martin, a Westerner who came to the center soon after it opened, said of the ethnic members, ‘they were nice to us, but some people were kind of suspicious.’

Some converts seem like intellectuals who do not really practice or respect Buddhism’s traditions, he said.

The language barrier creates tension, he said. But children of immigrants, who know both Chinese and English, can often serve as a bridge between the groups, he added.

The tension can go both ways, Yifa noted, using as an example Westerners who say they prefer to learn about Buddhism from white teachers.

But one can lose some of the religion’s authenticity that way, Harvard University religion professor Christopher Queen said. Queen, who heard most Buddhist philosophy from whites until he had been studying it for ‘some time,’ said, ‘until you really listen to a traditional account’ you cannot have a complete understanding of the philosophy.

The reality of segregated congregations is changing, Queen observed.

Where there used to be ‘common worshippers’ who ‘didn’t really have anything to do with each other,’ he said, there is now ‘much more openness on both sides.’

THE WOMAN BEHIND THE CENTER

People consistently use words like enthusiastic, energetic, charismatic and committed when describing Yifa.

One of her biggest accomplishments was coordinating the first ever Buddha’s Birthday celebration in Boston, held May 10 in Copley Square. More than 50 Boston-area Buddhist organizations participated in the festival, which included dance performances, colorful costumes, traditional rituals and speeches by both ethnic and Western Buddhists.

Queen described the Buddha’s Birthday as one of Asia’s most important celebrations. Though Boston has such a diverse Buddhist population, Queen said ‘no single leader had the charisma to put it all together’ prior to 2001, when Yifa began her involvement at the GBBCC.

‘She’s a dynamic person, an energetic person, who has a great deal of vision,’ he said. The celebration, he added, was one more achievement in the struggle to make Westerners aware of Buddhism. He said he wished more Western people including Boston media had attended.

STEPPING BACK, MOVING FORWARD

‘I think I probably was too ambitious,’ Yifa said of her own extreme schedule, which involves monthly flights to Los Angeles (where she teaches a seminar at Fo Guang Shan’s branch university, Shi Lai), trips to New York (to give talks to the United Nations) and a research study at Harvard (she is in the process of writing a book). ‘But when you’re looking inside, you find your potentiality,’ she said.

At 40, Yifa said she needs to return to herself and do some more soul-searching. She is looking forward to the next mediation retreat, which will be held on Columbus Day weekend in Deer Park, N.Y.

She has lots of plans for the GBBCC, she said, but many of them include stepping back and letting other people do administrative work while she focuses more on research and herself.

‘Right now, I want to dig up more,’ she said. ‘I need to slow down and look inside me and deepen more about what I know about the truth.’