By Rev. Steve Kanji Ruhl
Zen Buddhist Minister
As an American practicing within an Asian religion, I try to stay vigilant concerning issues related to cultural appropriation – especially the purloining of spirituality, seizing traditions from foreign nations while indulging Romantic fantasies about “exotic” spiritualities of the “Other,” arrogantly claiming for ourselves an array of beliefs and practices that have never belonged to us. Such issues have validity. So do issues relating to spiritual dilettantism – the shallow, selfish dabbling in religious traditions of other people.
In Kyoto, Japan, where I’m visiting, I ponder this as I rest on a futon spread on rice-straw mats in the small cubby of my ryokan. Serenaded by patter of an evening rainfall, it occurs to me that I need to distinguish between appropriation and assimilation. In any specific instance of cross-cultural encounter, what actually is transpiring?
To know this in regard to Buddhism, context helps. Since at least the era of Emperor Ashoka, ruling his Indian kingdom of the third century BCE, Buddhism has thrived as a missionary religion. Ashoka sent Indian missionaries packing in all directions to spread the Buddha’s teachings. They flourished in Sri Lanka and southeast Asia, and so did their latter-generation disciples in China and Tibet. Eventually Buddhist teachers in China trained students who hailed from Korea and Japan, who took Buddhism back to their home countries. Did these cultures – did Japan, in particular, where I’ve been dwelling these recent months – appropriate a foreign religion from India? Or did Japan assimilate it? Clearly, I reflect, it was the latter. This has been true of Buddhism’s expansion throughout its history, including its recent exporting to America, brought to us by Asian teachers such as Nyogen Senzaki, Shunryu Suzuki, and many others. In the United States we’re assimilating this Indian religion of Buddhism and adapting it to our own purposes, as the Japanese and Chinese and other non-Indian cultures have done for centuries.
Civilizations have interacted this way throughout millennia. When not warring against each other, or colonizing or enslaving each other, they assimilate foreign cuisines, customs, sciences, arts, clothing – and religions – in mutual borrowings and adaptations. It’s how humanity grows.
Moreover, fundamental Buddhist principles of clear mind and beneficence do not exist exclusively in Asian cultures, ripe for appropriation by the West; they exist universally in people, innately, as part of our birthright, needing only to awaken through spiritual training. Buddha nature is human, and so is the Buddhism that allows us to realize it. Nobody “owns” Buddhism. It belongs freely to everyone. In the words of the thirteenth-century Zen teacher Dōgen: “How could practice-realization be within any boundary?”
Still, we must remain scrupulous in paying attention to how we use forms and practices specific to religions that come to us from foreign cultures, Buddhist or otherwise. What criteria might we use, then, to establish whether intercultural contact represents an egregious case of appropriation or a healthy one of assimilation? As I ponder this, listening to the rain in Kyoto, two standards occur to me.
The first: Is there a current or historical power differential in the relationship of the cultures involved, due to colonialism or conquest? And does it result in the dominant power seizing religious elements from the colonized or conquered people for its own purposes? Back in the States, when non-Native American people sport with the spiritual practices of, say, Lakota or Navaho people without training or permission, and flaunt elements of Native American clothing, ceremonies, or customs, we can consider it a possible instance of appropriation because of the enormous power differential between dominant white culture and oppressed Native American culture. Is it the same situation when Americans like me practice Japan’s Zen Buddhism? Are we appropriating it? But I recall immediately that Japanese teachers came to us, seeking to share the dharma, seeking converts, and we responded. Moreover, in recent decades the power relationship between Japan and America, despite mid-century travails of World War Two, hasn’t manifested as colonizing or conquest. Today a rough socio-economic parity exists, and the cultural exchanges play out mutually – as I’m seeing constantly here in Kyoto, where Western fashions, music, and technologies abound. And finally, when we Americans sit zazen and wear rakasus and take Japanese dharma names, we’re not appropriating traditional forms; we’re paying homage to them, honoring what our Japanese teachers have given us, what they’ve authorized us to employ and what they’ve asked us to perpetuate on our own soil. We’re expressing our gratitude. Not to do so, it seems to me, would constitute the real act of appropriation, by erasing Zen’s Japanese roots and pretending that Zen belongs solely to us.
This implies the second standard in distinguishing between appropriation and assimilation: What is the intention? Is it to honor a foreign religious tradition or merely to profit from it through commercial exploitation? In the States, we might find an example of cultural appropriation in the spectacle of Hindu yoga being turned into a pop feel-good exercise program for predominantly white people in gyms and at resort spas. But is that what we see in American Buddhism, too, among non-Asian people in the U.S.? Certainly some of that exists. Mostly, however, we see a process of sincere conversion – a process of assimilating, not appropriating.
For me, exploring Japan while living here for three months isn’t the Orientalism of a besotted Westerner, infatuated by the enigma and fabled exoticism of the East. (Okay – maybe it is a little bit of that.) It’s not sentimental nostalgia for the imagined splendors of a bygone era. (Okay – maybe it’s a little bit of that, too.) At heart, it feels much more like the expression of an authentic, intimate act of connecting – karmic, predestined, at levels both psychic and cellular.
Though I’m an agnostic about reincarnation, I certainly consider it feasible. Here in Japan I’m considering it more earnestly. The possibility of reincarnation hugely expands ways of understanding personal identity as well as issues of cultural appropriation. In this lifetime I’m a twenty-first century white male in America who’s practicing Zen Buddhism, but in another lifetime I may be a thirteenth-century Japanese woman living as a Buddhist nun. In this current existence, therefore, I’m not appropriating the spiritual tradition of another culture; I’m returning to something I know intimately. For me, absorbing a foreign religion on its own turf, here in Japan, or adopting that religion back in Amherst, Massachusetts, doesn’t feel like an act of appropriation; it feels like an act of recovering something precious: “I know this place. This way of life. I’ve been here before.” In Kyoto I wander among temples and streets previously unknown to me in this current “Steve Ruhl” existence, yet I do so in perpetual recognition. This subtle déjà vu of rediscovery, this familiarity and ease, suggests a primal bond sourced, very possibly, in past-life experience. It doesn’t feel like appropriating a foreign culture. It feels like returning home.
Excerpted and adapted by permission from the author, from the memoir Appalachian Zen: Journeys in Search of True Home, from the American Heartland to the Buddha Dharma, by Steve Kanji Ruhl (Monkfish Book Publishing Company, Rhinebeck, NY, 2022.
Reverend Steve Kanji Ruhl, MDiv, is an innovative Zen Buddhist minister ordained in the Zen Peacemaker Order. He received an honors BA in Religious Studies from Penn State University and his Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University, and he is a faculty member of the Shogaku Zen Institute, a Buddhist Adviser at Yale University, and teaches through his Touch the Earth cyber-sangha. Kanji has been a guest speaker or workshop facilitator at Harvard’s Center for World Religions, Yale Divinity School, the International Conference on Socially Engaged Buddhism, the Omega Institute, and elsewhere. He is the author of Appalachian Zen: Journeys in Search of True Home, from the American Heartland to the Buddha Dharma and Enlightened Contemporaries: Francis, Dogen & Rumi -- Three Great Mystics of the Thirteenth Century and Why They Matter Today, as well as two volumes of poems. More information at www.stevekanjiruhl.com
