How do Buddhists participate in worship in the Diaspora?

 

How do Buddhists participate in worship in the Diaspora?

 

 

Answer:

by: Venerable Nicolas Thanissaro

  

'Buddhist Diaspora' is a term some sociologists seem to have borrowed from Hebrew history and applied to Buddhism as if the spread of Buddhism in the West were parallel to the spread of pre-Israel Judaism. In fact, it is only in Tibet and certain countries subject to Communism (e.g. Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos) that persecution has caused the spread of Buddhists and Buddhist teachings outside their native lands. There is only Tibet where the so-called Diaspora has caused Buddhism to be known better outside its home country than in it.

 

Elsewhere in Asia, Buddhism is still better known in Asia than outside it. 300 million of the 360 million Buddhists in the world live in Asia - so the vast majority have not moved.

 

Thus I think your reference to Diaspora comes from an assumption that Tibetan Buddhist history reflects Buddhist history as a whole. As for worship, I would say that as far as possible, Buddhism outside Asia worships in the same way as Buddhism in Asia. The only examples of differences are where Buddhist worship may have adapted itself to Western attititudes like feminism or liberalism as in the case of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order or the New Kadampa Tradition. Examples of the sort of differences I suppose you are looking for might be equality between the sexes, translation of verses of worship into local languages, less teaching of cosmology and other supernatural phenomena and less emphasis on the monastic community as distinct from the lay community.