Heartwood:
The First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America.
By Wendy Cadge. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 2004. x + 268 pages, ISBN: 0-226-08900-2 (paperback),
US $22.50.
Reviewed by
Jeff Wilson
Department of Religious Studies
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
jeffwilson@unc.edu
Heartwood:
The First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America is
arguably the most significant publication on American Buddhism
in several years. While experts such as Charles Prebish, Duncan
Williams, and Kenneth Tanaka have edited a number of excellent
anthologies on Western Buddhism, and some notable book-length
overviews of the phenomenon have appeared (such as Richard
Seager’s Buddhism in America, 1999), not since
Paul Numrich’s path-breaking Old Wisdom in the New
World (1996) has such a substantial, in-depth ethnography
of multiple Buddhist temples in America been produced.
The heart of this
book is Cadge’s fieldwork at two Theravada-associated Buddhist
congregations on the East Coast. Wat Mongkoltepmunee (a.k.a.
Wat Phila) is a Thai-dominated temple in Philadelphia in the
Dhammakaya lineage, while Cambridge Insight Meditation Center
(CIMC) is a primarily white convert center focused on Vipassana
meditation as taught in a number of twentieth century lineages.
Preparing food, serving the monks, meditating, chanting, teaching
English, and participating in other aspects of the lives of these
groups, Cadge presents a richly textured portrait of two thriving
communities of American Buddhists. In the process we learn many
details about how each was set up, the activities and viewpoints
of the attendees, the roles of laypeople and teachers, and how
Buddhist identities are asserted, reformulated, and disputed.
What is perhaps
most interesting about Cadge’s account are the similarities
she discerns between Wat Phila and CIMC. Prevailing narratives
about Buddhism in America have tended to highlight differences
between so-called “ethnic” and “white”
or “cradle” and “convert” Buddhisms. While
Cadge is sensitive to the many ways in which her two groups of
consultants imagine and enact Buddhism differently, she also demonstrates
that similar attitudes and practices can be found in both communities.
Rather than poles, the Thai temple and the white meditation center
are positions on a shared spectrum, with individual practitioners
falling in a wide range of points with significant overlap. The
dual focus of her work allows Cadge to avoid the mistakes made
when focusing on just a single type of temple, and she is thus
able to resist making claims of uniqueness for either of her two
communities.
In the course of
her ethnography, Cadge tackles and partially deconstructs many
assumptions about Buddhism in America. As it turns out, the largest
portion of the Asian-American community is not simply holding
on to Old World traditions. Rather, most participants at Wat
Phila have achieved their Buddhist identities as adults through
a process of re-conversion, consciously re-inventing themselves
on American soil through a process of deeper dedication and active
searching that goes well beyond ideas of “baggage Buddhism.” Meanwhile,
Cadge deftly demonstrates that superficial notions of white convert
Buddhism as individualistic overlook the informal but real networks
of relationships that are established at meditation centers,
which many practitioners come to value deeply. Cadge’s
work builds on but also goes beyond the common ideas of “two
Buddhisms” in America; she doesn’t seek to reject
such typologies, but instead complicates them by offering a variety
of other possible categorizations, most notably a three-part
scheme based on where the founders of a temple were born, where
the attendees of a temple were born, or what lineage a temple
associates itself with. None of these categorizations actively
discards the two or three Buddhisms approaches advocated in earlier
studies. Instead, they cut across the grain in creative ways
that offer new possibilities for conceptualizing and organizing
American Buddhism. And by offering multiple possible typologies
and refusing to commit to any single one, Cadge highlights the
diversity of American Buddhism that makes any attempt at a final
systemization futile.
Heartwood is
a study in how to do ethnography in America right, and new researchers
preparing to go into the field will find a useful model to emulate
in its pages. Cadge pays careful attention to the roles of material
culture, gender, ethnicity, food, cosmology, sectarian identity,
and other issues that recur in the stories of Wat Phila and CIMC,
and she adeptly situates herself without becoming the center
of the story. She is particularly good at teasing out the nuances
in how different people describe their faith and their understanding
of Buddhism, showing how both communities include a considerable
range of ideas and orientations that would be overlooked by more
superficial treatments. One of the most interesting phenomena
she perceives is the relationship between sound and silence in
each community. The Asian-American temple is considerably louder
than the hushed atmosphere of the meditation community. Though
she doesn’t explore this possibility, it may be that a
further connection can be made between the orality of the Thai
temple, where teachings and traditions are passed down through
families and talks by monks, and the greater textuality of the
converts, many of whom first encounter Buddhism through books
and continue to seek wisdom as much through written works as
from their peers at the center.
While Heartwood is
overall a very strong work, there are a few areas of relative
weakness. For one, Cadge doesn’t adequately inform the
reader that the Dhammakaya lineage of Wat Phila is a small minority
strain within Thai Buddhism that is viewed by some researchers
as a New Religious Movement. While certainly sharing much in
common with the more representative Mahanikaya and Dhammayut
lineages, some aspects of this Dhammakaya temple may not apply
to other forms of Thai Buddhism in the United States, and Cadge
might have made this point more explicitly. Also, Cadge uncritically
accepts the rejection of ritual by her CIMC consultants even
while telling us that silent seated meditation forms the backbone
of the community. In doing so she misses the highly ritualistic
nature of meditation practice, an activity that is performed
in repetitious, stereotyped patterns, according to clear rules
about posture and process. A religious activity doesn’t
have to be “smells and bells” to be ritual.
Cadge’s book
is important not only because it provides such a competent view
into the workings of two American Buddhist communities and expands
on previous work in the study of Buddhism in the West, but also
because it contributes to such other fields as American religion,
transnational religion, and Asian-American studies. She is comfortable
discussing and even refuting major ideas from these other fields;
for instance, Cadge points out how her communities clearly violate
the claims about clear boundaries and growth propounded by Christian
Smith in his work on American evangelical Christians. If Heartwood is
any indication of the health of the field, then Buddhism in America
continues to be a fit area of study that is both building on
its past and producing new ways to approach its subject.