I had left the pre-
Coming West Temple, which had a thriving Taiwanese Mahayana Buddhist community in a small out-of-the-way LA County industrial quarter (
barrio/
ghetto) called
Maywood. It was a strange place for an Asian Buddhist temple, but what did I know?
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| C;'mon, everyone, let's go find Buddhism in LA |
It's LA, I had a car.
Nobody walks in LA. Every Sunday I'd get on the freeway from Highland Park and head over for a vegetarian/vegan feast and a sermon in Taiwanese or Mandarin Chinese or some Asian language I could make neither heads nor tails of.
How Wisdom Quarterly came to be
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| When our dharma (duty) meets samsara (cycle) |
But I found a book in the library that looked vintage and full of philosophy. I loved it. I was like Lisa Simpson onto something. I went from that book to the
Bodhi Tree Bookstore, a famous New Age boutique in upscale West Hollywood. That book and the feast kept me coming back to learn more.
I was a new vegetarian, having learned the compassionate diet from
Raja Yoga, and felt at home with other vegetarians, practicing what the famous Indian Siddhartha had practiced.
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| From the sky, Hsi Lai is a bodhi tree leaf. |
There was a model of some pie-in-the-sky dream temple they were going to build on a mountain top in Los Angeles once they could get the money together and find the land. It was a nice model, but I thought they were naive to think they could build a giant golden
bodhi tree leaf in LA's San Gabriel Valley.
(They proved me wrong by soon gathering enough donations from here and abroad to build
Coming West Temple, the largest Buddhist temple in the Western hemisphere with its own accredited Buddhist college,
University of the West.
I would eventually enroll to finish writing an adventurous Buddhist book about the 37 Requisites of Enlightenment. The dean at that time was former US Ambassador from Sri Lanka Dr.
Ananda W. P. Guruge, Ph.D.
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| Faith in Mahayana, worship of maha-bodhisattvas |
Dismayed that "Mahayana" Buddhism was all worship, food, rules, and culture, I returned to
Bodhi Tree Bookstore to see if there might be
another Buddhism. Of course there is! It became clear in the big Buddhist section of the store.
Most books were glossy and fancy, but there were these other pamphlet-like titles tucked in everywhere Bodhi Leaves and Wheel. I started collecting them, noticing that the publisher was
BPS.lk.
It became clear: There are two Buddhisms, a BIG one ("Great Vehicle," the gaudy big tent player representing 90% of Buddhists, an umbrella term for many popular schools), and a
back-to-basics movement (the "Teaching of the Enlightened Elders" who knew the historical Buddha). This second kind of Buddhism was trying to do everything
The Buddha Taught without changing or trying to "improve" it. This was
Theravada, and it was the one for me!
By then I was attending the massive Mystic Dharma Temple in Highland Park, a strange and nearly empty place with lovely Chinese decoration but a Sri Lankan Mahayana abbot (Ven. Chao Chu) in charge. When I asked him about my suspicion that there were two Buddhisms, he said: "Nonsense! There's only one."
So I took to the phonebook and found Ven. Dhammarama's Beachwood Temple in Hollywood. I knocked on the door. He invited me in. But I wouldn't cross the threshold until he answered one crucial question: "What kind of Buddhism is this?" I didn't have the names of the two schools, so that was the only way I could ask it.
He didn't understand. So I asked a different way: "Are you familiar with the
Buddhist Publication Society? They talk about the right kind of Buddhism."
He smiled broadly and opened the door, pointing at a rack of BPS titles. I was home. I came in, we meditated, drank tea, talked about why Chao Chu said there was just one Buddhism.
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| Ancient Buddhism exists in Sri Lanka because Indian Buddhist Emperor Ashoka sent his enlightened monastic children, Mahinda and Sanghamitta, to the island as missionaries. |
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| The sacred island that saved ancient Buddhism |
Ven. Dhammarama knew that monk, both being from the same country (the Buddhist island off the tip of India called Serendip, Ceylon, and Sri Lanka, where Buddhism survived when it vanished from the mainland subcontinent or Jambudipa).
Ven. Dhammarama explained how a Chinese missionary came and took Ven. Chao Chu from Lanka, the Island, to train him in China with the purpose of creating a new syncretic Buddhist tradition fusing the two big schools. That's why.
Wisdom Quarterly: American Buddhist Journal exists because one day Ven. Dhammarama asked me to edit the defunct temple newsletter, which he had called
Sarana (commonly mistranslated as "Refuge" but which really means "Going for Guidance").
I produced a newsletter, but one open to all kinds of Buddhisms (of which there are many more than two), spiritual ideas,
Engaged Buddhism (sensitive to
social justice issues), Dharmic cultures, and Asian art, punk rock, extreme metal, and "musick" in general, New Age, conspiracy theories, whistle blower accounts...
I was only my way to UC Berkeley, so it should have come as no surprise that I was interested in Truth, justice, rebellion, revolution, rock 'n roll, equality, EDM, the Sixties, and all that good Left-leaning stuff most Americans would agree with, even the fiscally conservative folks.
Most Americans, even Republicans, are liberal on most social issues. The historical Buddha certainly seems to have been. The world is not the most important thing; spiritual matters are. But in the meantime, we must correct injustices and love and help everybody.
What is "Buddhism"? It is "the marriage of wisdom and compassion." So Ven. Dhammarama assigned me a female co-editor to bring me back to a narrower vision of what a quarterly "newsletter" should be.
This caused the name change and an increase in outlets, with the other Buddhist temples in LA looking askance at any publication that did not glorify their particular view of things.
It had to become broader and broader to please everyone while failing to please anyone, any single view. That's when helpful Maya had an idea. It should go online if it was going to try to go in-depth in the things it was talking about.
Originally, we only really wanted to talk about sutras (discourses) and their deeper meaning, but so much was going on in the world. No one would understand sutras when they hadn't even understood life and how this society of ours really works. So the Wisdom Quarterly's mission became bigger, but simple, just trying to answer one BIG question: Why do things (really) happen? What's behind the surface, the narrative the media feeds us?
He liked it, but not for the temple. For the temple, it must limit itself just to temple matters, upcoming celebration days. He only wanted a newsletter to appease the committee that ran the vihara and glorify one cultural interpretation of the Buddha Dhamma. But the Dharma is bigger than the great Pali canon.
Ven. Dhammarama and I visited Sri Lanka together so I could find Bhikkhu Bodhi to ordain under him or get his personal advice on where to go to become the sort of Buddhist monk not involved in the world but dedicated completely to the goal the Buddha mentioned in his final words and exhortation to the countless disciples and
devas present: "All things are hurtling towards destruction; work out your
liberation with
diligence."
Other things happened, which are hard to state in brief within the story. So I'll list them here:
- Ven. Chao Chu and I stayed friends and went to the same college, while his American sidekick Dana went to UCLA to get his PhD.
- Then I went to study abroad at Oxford University in England and came back when I got accepted to
- UC Berkeley. Then I won a giant award to study at
- Yale University, to prepare for graduate school at the university of my choice.
- And wouldn't you know, karma being what karma is, karma brought me back to Los Angeles to get my PhD at UCLA.
- I needed to get to India to make real the place I read so much about in the ancient texts, like there's something magic about the philosophical East.
- I took Bhikkhu Bodhi's advice that there might be a better Buddhist country than Sri Lanka for the sort of serious Buddhist meditation I was interested in, one next to India.
- Then living in the SGV, my landlord revealed he was a Buddhist (culturally, not so much in practice) and that a very prominent Buddhist scholar was coming to talk about the Abhidhamma at a nearby temple, asking if I would be interested in attending.
- "Not 100 miles that way, that way, that way, or that way (North, East, West, or South), I said pointing, "is there a human more interested in this topic than I," I answered.
- I went, the scholar blew my mind, told me about a teacher, the greatest in the land, who practiced in accordance with the historical Buddha, was a vegetarian, talk women as well as men, attained and taught the absorptions, had people remember past lives in no long time, kept all the precepts (and Monastic Disciplinary Code), and... TO BE CONTINUED
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