East is East and West is West...

Here's a press release from the University of California's new Center for Buddhist Studies at Berkeley. Asking the question, "do popular notions of Buddhism conform to what scholars know about the religion as it has been practiced in Asia?" Robert Sharf, the director of the center says, no.

In American pop culture, he said, Buddhism is indistinguishable from modern New Age spirituality that promises meditative insight, happiness and self-fulfillment, yet demands nothing in return such as attendance at church, participation in ritual, moral restraint or study.

Well, I'm just back from a weekend sesshin, and I felt it was demanding, but... well, that's another story. It's a long'ish, and provocative press release actually. I wish I had a deeper grasp of Buddhist history. Perhaps someone who does will post here. Most intriguing to me is the contention that the Japanese teachers who brought Zen to the U.S.:

[P]ackaged Zen for export in a manner that rendered it appealing to Western intellectuals interested in religion but alienated from the church. As a result, many of the ideas that Americans consider central to Zen -- the centrality of spiritual experience for example -- are actually lifted from Western thinkers such as the philosopher William James. Sharf concludes that Buddhism was made to order for a Western audience hungry for "spirituality" but wanting little to do with rituals, moral precepts or institutions.

And as far as rectifying what he sees as misunderstandings, Sharf said, "Most (Buddhist studies) academics don't even try to reach a lay audience because they feel the gap between the scholarly and the popular understandings of Buddhism is simply too great."

I find this particularly interesting in light of a post from some weeks back on the Tricycle.com blog about "Measuring Buddhist Influence in America." A piece in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion entitled "Buddhists and Buddhism in the United States: The Scope of Influence" attempts, in the words of the blogger, "[to] assess the level of influence that Buddhism has exerted on religious Americans, rather than the more conventional numbers game of trying to determine exactly how many Buddhists there are in the country."

Based on their survey conducted in 2002-2003, they found that one out of every seven Americans has had at least a fair level of contact with Buddhism, and that one out of eight Americans reported that Buddhism had influenced their religious life. Those are staggeringly high numbers. To put it in perspective, there are about four million Americans who actively identify as Buddhists. But if we ask how many Americans include Buddhist elements—a little or a lot—in their personal spiritual lives, the number appears to be about 12.5% of the population: that’s 26,125,000 adults. The number who say the Buddhist influence has been significant is almost the same: at 12%, that’s 25,080,000.

I find that a very hopeful figure, but would Robert Sharf say that all these "nightstand Buddhists" (a term that historian of American religions Thomas Tweed coined to describe those who read a Buddhist book before bed or, perhaps, meditate in the morning or evening) are merely deluting the Dharma?