Rev. Danny Fisher

Our pal in the Buddhoblogosphere Dr. Scott A. Mitchell of the buddha is my dj and the DharmaRealm podcast has a (pardon my emphatic French) kick-ass guest post at Beliefnet’s One City: A Buddhist Blog for Everyone today.  Here’s the choicest snippet:

If we take that old Zen refrain seriously — that Dharma doors are boundless — then we must take this diversity of American Buddhism seriously. So when I say that I don’t believe in American Buddhism, what I mean to say is that I do not believe in its singularity. I believe, deeply and passionately, in its multiplicity, in American Buddhisms.

I believe in, and celebrate the necessity for, multiple Dharmas — or, perhaps more specifically, multiple approaches to understanding the Dharma. There are multiple ways of approaching the Buddha’s teachings because, at the end of the day, sentient beings are numberless, and we’ve each got our own individual karmic burdens to work out. So there can’t be one Dharma just like there can’t be one way of being human.

I see American Buddhisms and the Buddha’s Dharma not as “one” thing but rather as multiple, overlapping things with fuzzy and ill-defined borders, a crazy Venn diagram of ideas and practices that are all related and, collectively, can be called “Buddhism” or “Dharma.” But no one of these things can stand in for the whole.

Just like we can’t point to one of the Five Skandhas and say “that’s the essence of ‘me’”, we can’t point to one brand of Buddhism, one part of the vast library of the Buddha’s teachings, and say “that’s the essence of Buddhism.” It is only when looked at collectively can we describe them in their entirety as “Buddhism.”

Dharma doors really are boundless, and for a good reason. If you haven’t found one that works for you, try another.

I agree wholeheartedly.  Read the rest of Scott’s post here.