Finding Buddha’s path on streets of San Francisco
Perry Garfinkel
A block off Grant Avenue in San Francisco’s Chinatown - beyond the
well-worn path tourists take past souvenir shops, restaurants and a dive
saloon - begins a historical tour of a more spiritual nature.
Duck into a nondescript doorway at 125 Waverly Place, ascend five
narrow flights and step into the first and oldest Buddhist temple in the
United States.
At the Tien Hau Temple, before an intricately carved gilded wooden
shrine and ornate Buddha statues, under dozens of paper lanterns,
Buddhists in the Chinese tradition still burn pungent incense and leave
offerings to the goddess Tien Hau in return for the promise of happiness
and a long life.
Established in 1852 by Chinese immigrants who came to California
during the Gold Rush and named for a 10th-century provincial woman who
protected people at sea, the original temple burned down in the fire set
off by the 1906 earthquake but eventually found its new home in this
three-block-long alley.
Over the next 150 years, San Francisco would continue to water those
early seeds of Buddhism planted in America, as geography, social history
and waves of immigrants made it fertile ground for a once esoteric
tradition now grown so popular that the Dalai Lama regularly fills
football stadiums.
“Since the 1800s, San Francisco was the most important gateway for
people coming from the Pacific Rim,” said Charlie Chin, artist in
residence at the Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco,
who also leads tours and gives lectures. “They weren’t proselytizing
Buddhism, but they brought it here with their other cultural beliefs and
practices.”
Today, a spiritual tourist, whether Buddhist or not, can find
inspiration if not enlightenment following in the footsteps of American
Buddhism on a pilgrimage throughout the Greater Bay Area.
The Buddhism the Chinese brought was a spiritual mix of traditional
folk beliefs, Taoism, Confucianism and Chan, the antecedent of Japanese
Zen.
Though there are differences, central to both Chan and Zen is
meditation, or zazen in Japanese, as well as the Buddha’s basic lessons
of compassion, impermanence and awareness of the present moment.
Japanese immigrants arrived in San Francisco in the late 19th century
as agricultural labourers, bringing Zen and its variations. In 1898,
they founded the Buddhist Temple of San Francisco in the downtown
district. Based on a sect of Buddhism called Jodo Shinshu (Pure Land),
America’s first Japanese Buddhist temple also burned down in 1906 but
was re-established in 1913 at 1881 Pine Street, not far from the current
Japantown.
Now part of the Buddhist Temples of America, whose national
headquarters are nearby at 1710 Octavia Street, the San Francisco center
has pews in its worship hall that make it look like a Christian church
or Jewish synagogue - that is, until you catch sight of the elaborate
altar with a golden statue of the Buddha in the centre.
On the roof of the Temple is one of the most sacred Buddhist
monuments in San Francisco. Housed in a domed tower (stupa in Sanskrit)
that is topped by a spiral that looks like a braided hair knot is a
small box containing what are said to be a bit of the Buddha’s ashen
bone relics, a gift sent in 1935 by the ruler of Siam. Visitors may ask
to view the box.
It was not until the 1950s that interest in Buddhism grew with the
next wave that migrated to San Francisco. Though these immigrants were
not Asian, they did settle in downtown at the edge of Chinatown, where
an intrepid pilgrim can continue to follow their footsteps.
In fact, starting in the mid-50s and continuing into the 1960s, a
series of events and trends turned San Francisco into a hothouse for new
varieties and strains of American Buddhism.
At the busy intersection of Columbus Avenue and Broadway, which
separates Chinatown from the bohemian-style cafes, neon-lit Italian
restaurants and the block-long red-light district of North Beach, the
poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti helped found the City Lights Bookstore in
1953 as the first all-paperbound bookshop in the country.
Across from where entertainers like Lenny Bruce worked out new
material at the Hungry and the Purple Onion (still showcasing comedy),
Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl and Other Poems’ in 1956.
City Lights became an unofficial headquarters of the Beat literary
movement, the hangout of Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Philip
Whalen and many other authors who were reading, practising and writing
about Buddhism.
“I made a beeline to City Lights as soon as I moved to San Francisco
in the 1960s,” said Wes Nisker, a Bay Area FM radio commentator who now
teaches and writes about Buddhism and performs the one-man musical “Big
Bang, the Buddha and the Baby Boom.”
“It was the epicentre for a radical new kind of Buddhism that was
beginning to flower in America. As a budding Buddhist myself, I had to
make it the first stop for my own personal pilgrimage.”
In 1959, Shunryu Suzuki, a Buddhist priest from Japan, came to San
Francisco to teach Zen to ethnic Japanese in the city’s Western Addition
and Japantown. But so many Westerners were attending his talks that
three years later Suzuki-roshi (roshi means teacher) established a
separate Zen center on Page Street, down the hill from Haight and
Ashbury Streets, crossroads of another ‘60s movement also in search of
peace, love and happiness.
“It was a time of great foment, when there was enormous interest in
one’s inner life,” recalled Yvonne Rand, the resident teacher at
Goat-in-the-Road, a Zen centre in Mendocino County, who first attended
Suzuki-roshi’s meditation classes in 1966 and quickly became his
secretary.
“Roshi attracted people in the arts, civil rights activists and other
agents of social change and consciousness - all hanging around the Bay
Area.”
The teacher’s enthusiasm for integrating Zen practice into everyday
life spawned several offshoots: Greens, a gourmet vegetarian restaurant
at Fort Mason overlooking the bay; Tassajara Bakery, several blocks from
Haight Street; the Zen Hospice Project, which has become a national
model; and three other Bay Area meditation centres, including Tassajara
Zen Mountain Center, a three-hour drive south of San Francisco near
Carmel Valley, which opened in 1966 as America’s first Zen monastery.
New York Times
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