Rev. Danny Fisher

Today’s quote is from Utah State University’s wonderful Charles Prebish, author of more than twenty books including the absolutely essential, must-reads Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America and Buddhist Monastic Discipline: The Sanskrit Prātimoksạ Sūtras of the Mahāsāmg̣hikas and Mūlasarvāstivādins.  He is also co-founder of the following: The Journal of Buddhist Ethics, the Buddhism Section of the American Academy of Religion, and Routledge’s “Critical Studies in Buddhism” series. In addition, he was very deservedly honored with the “festschrift” Buddhist Studies from India to America: Essays in Honor of Charles S. Prebish in 2005, which acknowledges the tremendous debt our field owes him for all of his efforts.  This is it:

Over the thirty-five years that I’ve been investigating Buddhism in North America, both as a practitioner and a scholar, I’ve seen the landscape change dramatically. In the seventies, the groups were almost completely exclusive…and continued that way on into the eighties, at which point people studying American Buddhism argued heatedly in the literature about how to classify the many kinds of groups of people who were coming together to practice various kinds of Buddhism. Maybe some of the distinctions we are talking about between different types of people who practice the dharma may be starting to dissolve in a way that could be very efficacious for the evolution of a genuinely American Buddhism, one that is inclusive of all types of Buddhism and all types of people practicing Buddhism.