Mainline decline, Buddhist style - Buddhist Churches of America

SINCE IT WAS established 97 years ago, the Buddhist Churches of America has provided a cultural shelter and a religious center to four generations of Japanese-Americans. The BCA's sponsorship of a wide array of cultural activities--youth sporting events and mixers, scouting programs, women's auxiliaries--enabled older Japanese-Americans to hang together in their adopted country. With 60 temples throughout the nation, the BCA has long been the best-organized Buddhist organization in the U.S.

But three years shy of its centennial celebration, the BCA's future is clouded by declining membership, an unmet demand for doctrinal renewal and a simmering war between the sexes. Membership has dropped significantly congregants have died, intermarried or drifted away. in 1960, BCA claimed to have 50,000 families. By 1977 that number had plunged to 21,600, and last year membership dropped another 22 percent to 17,755 families.

In recent years attrition has prevented a growing number of churches from making annual apportionment payments, the funds that uphold much of the BCA's budget. In 1990 the 81-year-old Bakersfield Buddhist Church in Bakersfield, California, was forced to close. Younger ministers blame the membership problems on the reluctance of the church's aging leaders to update doctrines and policies to make them relevant to third- and fourth-generation Japanese-Americans. And women complain that the male-dominated hierarchy is insensitive to their desire to become equal partners in church affairs.

In 1994 the claim of male insensitivity escalated into a sexual harassment lawsuit. The church's director of Buddhist education in San Francisco, Carol Himaka, a Buddhist clergywoman, charged another minister with making a series of crude, sexually explicit phone calls. She sued the church after it allegedly looked askance at her claims. Both the church and the male minister denied the charges, and the suit was dismissed for lack of evidence.

BCA ministers and board members point to the Himaka case as the fault-line along which decades of generational and gender tension have come to a head. "This case is important because for the first time, the status quo is being challenged and the BCA can't handle it," contends Lucy Hamai, a board member of the BCA temple in Berkeley, California. "This is a chance for us really to come out and change, and we're not doing it."

Founded in 1898 in San Francisco by Japanese missionaries, the BCA. is the American branch of Jodo Shinshu, a hybrid of Pure Land Buddhism and Japanese family rites dating to the 13th century. Established by the Japanese monk Shinran (1173-1263), Jodo Shinshu departs from traditional Mahayana Buddhism--the "middle way"--which emphasizes meditation and the practice of compassion to achieve enlightenment.

Shinran, who sought a Buddhism that could be practiced by ordinary people as well as religious ascetics, advocated that Buddhist monks be allowed to marry. He taught that enlightenment comes after rebirth in the "Western Pure Land," a state achieved by calling on the name of Amida Buddha and relying on his grace for deliverance.

But to many Japanese-Americans, Jodo Shinshu has become stale, better known for its ritual commemoration of dead ancestors than for its doctrine of salvation by grace. And contact with American culture--one with little reverence for ancestral lines--has estranged younger Japanese-Americans from the rituals and ideas their forebears transplanted into the "North American Buddhist Mission."

Some ministers--like Wilham Masuda, minister of a BCA temple in Mill Valley, California--see openness to non-Japanese members as the key to saving the BCA from irrelevance. Besides increasing the numbers of dues-contributing members, new, non-Japanese members would revitalize church doctrine, Masuda believes. He says about 10 percent of his 85 members are Caucasian, giving his temple one of the largest non-Asian presences in the BCA. Many more members are mixed-race.

Today, as many as 70 percent of Japanese-Americans are marrying outside the community, opening the door for many non-Japanese to become church members. But few walk through that door, some critics argue, because the message of the church doesn't draw them in. On the other hand, Masuda says, non-Japanese who join even for a short time become activists, injecting new vitality into the church. "There's a tension in that that is good in many ways. It's a creative force coming in from the outside to see if this teaching is vital for American life today."

That creativity can be threatening to older Japanese-Americans, says Alfred Bloom, retired dean of the BCA seminary in Berkeley. They retain vivid memories of their humiliating internment during World War Il and are reluctant to lose their stake in church affairs to non-Japanese members. According to Bloom, that reluctance meant quiet death for a 1984 plan to recruit 200,000 new members. "They're really ambivalent about wanting members from other ethnic backgrounds. It comes down to a matter of control."