US Buddhism

Buddhists make up roughly 1% of the adult population in the United States, and about two-thirds of U.S. Buddhists are Asian Americans, according to Pew Research Center estimates. Among Asian Americans, 43% of Vietnamese Americans and a quarter of Japanese Americans identify as Buddhist, with most of the rest identifying as either Christian or religiously unaffiliated. 5 facts about Buddhists around the world BY KELSEY JO STARR Pew Research Center April 5, 2019

Given those statistics it seems I am part of a very small group of American Buddhists even though it is sometimes ridiculed as part of the '60s. Of course, one does not have to join anything to just start practicing so the influence may be a very hard thing to measure.

More and more I think about how comfortable and challenged I am with Dharma talks. That contrasts with how I feel more and more distant from Christian theology. As I have said before I like the sermons and talks that have suggestions that are very similar to Buddhist practices. But when I think about Jesus dying for our sins or the mystery of the Triune God, that all just seems so distant. I don't think anyone could convince me because I have honestly been trying to convince myself my whole life. As a young person I chose to go to church and I have always been attracted to the study of the Bible and theology. But I remember when Bishop Spong said "Jesus did not die for my sins!" that feeling of liberation from orthodox Christian theology.

I often think also how I would be labeled a heretic in another age. I think to myself how Jesus was another Buddha. After his untimely death following three years of ministry and teaching, it is apparent that there were several schools of Jesus' has thought. I'm sure most Christians don't realize that Paul's letters were the first Christian writings that we have and that the Gospels we're not contemporary accounts but written many decades later. It's clear from Paul's writings that the orthodoxy became important early and the life of what is now known as Christianity. We also know that emperor Constantine wanted a unified faith and we ended up with the Creeds by him forcing the issue. And we have the  Nag Hammadi Codices—13 codices that include complete copies of the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip that were obviously hidden by monks because they were supposed to be destroyed. Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria in the fourth century C.E. made sure that there was orthodoxy in biblical texts. So it seems to me that contemplative monks and modern theologians are rediscovering what Jesus was trying to teach. So as I have said before, the church congregation is my Sangha but that has become interesting during this isolation due to the coronavirus pandemic.