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Mary MacVean, Los Angeles Times: Every Thursday at lunchtime at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, several dozen people turn off their cellphones and take seats in the bright pink chairs of the Billy Wilder Theater.

They come to spend half an hour with Diana Winston, a former Buddhist nun and one of the nation’s best-known teachers of mindfulness meditation. The lights go down, and Winston takes a seat in an office chair and speaks quietly into a microphone.

Occasionally she is accompanied by a guest playing about 20 Tibetan bells, the haunting, wave-like sounds enhancing her voice, which is so soothing it’s as if …

Transcending a different type of PTSD — helping children of the night

October 9, 2011

Dr. Norman Rosenthal: Lately there has been a storm of publicity – and deservedly so – about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in veterans of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The public has become better educated about this potentially disabling disorder and its symptoms, such as hypervigilance, an exaggerated tendency to startle, flashbacks, nightmares and emotional numbness, to name just a few.
Mental health professionals have emphasized the need to diagnose and treat PTSD wherever it arises. In this piece, I would like to draw attention to yet another group suffering from PTSD – child victims of prostitution who, against all odds, are trying…

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Meditation helps homeless children

June 11, 2011

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Beverly White and Julie Brayton: Thousands of adults and children live on Southern California streets, and so did Kelsey.

She was cast out by her abusive Midwestern family.

“I been kicked out of my house since I was nine, on and off. This last time, my father was sexually abusing me,” said Kelsey, who is 17 years old.

Living on the streets in Los Angeles was so horrifying and dangerous, Kelsey sought shelter at Children Of The Night, where she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress and introduced to Transcendental Meditation.

“When you take like twenty minutes sit down and do TM, and calm yourself and be peaceful…

Meditating one’s stress away

February 2, 2011

A handful of people gathered Sunday morning at the Japanese Tea House in Brand Park to meditate in a class that applies Buddhist teachings for overcoming stress and anger.

The group’s teacher, Caroline Green, with the Kadampa Meditation Center in Los Angeles, advised the class in the beginning to improve their back posture.

“Straight, but not tense,” she suggested. “Place your feet flat on the floor, your right-hand palm on your left, your tongue gently touching the back of your teeth.”

All this for the goal of achieving a “relaxed and alert” state of being, in which the class could deeply breathe in and out. As the first breathing meditation advanced, Green requested that the class ignore stray thoughts and outside sounds, then asked them to picture any stresses “as dark smoke that dissipates in the atmosphere.”

Green, who started meditating in 1998, admitted she is shy and said it’s the reason she declined to teach when she was first asked to do so in 1999.

“But these teachings have helped me so much,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I want to share that with other people? I find that the stuff that used to drive me nuts, now, they just roll of my back. It’s not a problem.”

Self-Realization Fellowship elects Sri Mrinalini Mata as new leader (LA Times)

January 12, 2011

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The organization, which follows Hindu and Christian teachings, selects Sri Mrinalini Mata, 79, to succeed longtime leader Sri Daya Mata, who died in 2010. Mrinalini Mata has been vice president of the group since 1966.

The Self-Realization Fellowship, a Los Angeles-based organization that follows a spiritual path rooted in both Hinduism and Christianity, has elected a new leader, the fourth since it was established in 1920.

The fellowship announced Tuesday that Sri Mrinalini Mata, who became a Self-Realization nun at the age of 15, was elected president last week by its eight-member board of directors. She succeeds Sri Daya Mata, the group’s longtime leader, who died in November.

The selection of Mrinalini Mata, 79, means that the fellowship will continue to be led by a woman, and by a direct disciple of its founder, Paramahansa Yogananda, an Indian yogi who is credited with helping to popularize yoga and meditation in the West. Mrinalini Mata has been vice president of the organization since 1966.

Zen meditation, a cure for unhappiness in South LA

December 8, 2010

As you read this article your mind is likely to wander off onto other thoughts; trouble at work, your evening plans, a mounting to-do list… and you might be all the more unhappy in life as a result of such distracted thinking.

According to a recent study in the November issue of Science Magazine, whether and where people’s minds wander is a better predictor of happiness than what they are doing. The study included more than 2,200 people around the world who agreed to use an iphone app called trackyourhappiness.

A team of Harvard psychologists contacted the participants at random intervals to ask how them how they were feeling, what they were doing and what they were thinking. The team received a quarter-million responses. When the replies were analyzed, researchers found that no matter what people were doing, they tended to be happier if they focused on the activity instead of thinking about something else.

Kelly “Doman” Stevens, an American monk who lives and practices at the Hazy Moon Zen Center of South Central Los Angeles, said that this study simply corroborates what Buddhists across the globe have known all along. In fact, the ancient East Asian religion is even one step ahead of the Harvard researchers and their iphones. Monks found Zen Meditation to be a cure for said “monkey mind” (a Buddhist term meaning “unsettled”) centuries ago. And now one group of monks is spreading their knowledge to those in need of a little clarity in the South Central Los Angeles community.

Giving Tradition a Chance (Los Angeles Times)

December 1, 2004

Teresa Watanabe, LA Times: Shin Buddhists celebrate Little Tokyo temple, but ponder faith’s future

In an elaborate ritual reminiscent of ancient Japan, a procession of children in golden crowns and painted faces, traditional court musicians and silk-robed Buddhist priests recently wended its way through Little Tokyo in Los Angeles.

The occasion was the 100-year anniversary of the oldest Buddhist temple in Los Angeles, representing the most popular Buddhist tradition in Japan and among Japanese Americans known as Shin, or Pure Land.

But amid the congratulatory speeches at the Higashi Honganji Temple’s commemoration a few weeks ago, an underlying question lingered:

Can this 780-year-old Japanese Buddhist tradition survive assimilation in America?

As it enters its next century in the United States, Shin Buddhism is encountering myriad challenges not uncommon among various immigrant churches here. With notable exceptions in Orange County and elsewhere, the tradition is failing to retain large numbers of American-born youth. The small number of immigrants from Japan has hamstrung efforts to recruit new Japanese members. And outreach to non-Japanese has been limited by a shortage of American ministers and a culture made more insular by anti-Japanese discrimination in the past.

As a result, the larger of Shin Buddhism’s two branches has lost nearly two-thirds of its registered members in the United States over the last 30 years, from 50,000 families in 1960 to about 17,000 today, according to the Buddhist Churches of America in San Francisco. Higashi Honganji, in the smaller branch, faces similar declines.

The trends have kicked off lively debate over the future of a faith little-known outside Japanese American communities, even though it has more followers than the more familiar Zen and Tibetan schools. Shin Buddhist leaders have also tried to launch a renaissance, reaching beyond their ethnic enclaves with websites, Buddhism classes and the like.

Religious scholars, such as Don Miller of the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture, say that a transformation of immigrant churches is often inevitable as passing generations become more Americanized. As examples, sociologists point to the decline of once robust Italian Catholic parishes and the Pan-Asian American congregations once dominated by Korean immigrants.

At Higashi Honganji, a graceful building with a traditional tile roof and a glittering sanctuary of golden statues on 3rd Street and Central Avenue, the three-day centennial celebration put equal emphasis on past and future. Both a traditional service of elaborate chanting and another with contemporary music were offered to the 500 attendants. “We feel we have as good a form of Buddhism for the contemporary world as any,” said head minister Noriaki Ito. “But in order for us to survive another 100 years, we’re going to have to at least loosen our ties to Japan and focus on the universal aspects of Buddhism.”

The congregation was founded in 1904 by the Rev. Junjyo Izumida to serve working-class Japanese immigrants. During World War II, Izumida was interned at Manzanar with other Japanese Americans and the temple, its members believe, was safeguarded by non-Japanese friends.

At its peak in the early 1960s, the temple, then located in Boyle Heights, boasted 450 families. That was enough people, Ito said, to supply 20 sports teams, Boy Scout troops and a bustling Sunday school of 100 children. But then Japanese Americans started moving to the suburbs, integrating into the mainstream with high rates of intercultural and interfaith marriage. Competing institutions arrived in Little Tokyo.

Today, the Boy Scouts are gone. So are the sports teams. The adult Buddhist group disbanded in 1999. Although the official church membership has declined to 400 families, Ito said only about 100 of them regularly attend Sunday services.

“It all just kind of faded into the sunset,” Ito said of the activities at the current temple, which was built in 1976.

The forces that pulled so many families away from the church are evident in the life of Higashi Honganji member Yuriko Harada. Harada, 73, experienced the Shin Buddhism of Japan during her childhood, when her family returned to the countryside near Hiroshima after their World War II internment in the U.S.

Every morning, Harada recalled, her mother and grandmother would chant sutras before their household altar. Every meal, they would instruct her to be thankful for the sacrifices made by all living things to provide their food. Once, she recalled, her grandfather stood with her in their rice field, showing her a new grain. “It’s important never to waste even one grain of rice, because so much effort and time from so many people were needed to produce it,” she said he told her.

Harada said her grandmother often took her to clean the family gravesite and would tell her about each ancestor memorialized on the tombstone. Rice cakes and flowers were offered to them at the home altar.

That, to her, was Buddhism: a heart of gratitude, respect for all living things, remembrance of ancestors. But after Harada returned to America, those traditions weakened amid raising four children and helping her immigrant husband run a market in East Los Angeles.

She still retains an altar in her home, but her children do not. She is active in her temple, but not all of her family is. Her son, Craig, is a temple board member and sends his 3-year-old son, Ryan, to its preschool, but said most of his old temple friends no longer attend. One daughter, Gay Harada-Quan, married a man outside her faith and ethnic group and said her husband and children have no interest in Buddhism. Another daughter, Vickie Kanamori, determinedly sent her two children to temple school but candidly said “it was always a battle” with her son.

One survey of Japanese Americans in Northern California and Washington state taken between 1998 and 2000 showed that affiliation with Buddhism steadily declines with younger generations. Among respondents 60 years and older, 37.4% were Buddhist, 35.7% were Christian, 7% were other religions and 20% chose no faith. Among those between 18 and 29, however, only 10.7% were Buddhist, while 21.5% were Christian, 32.1% chose other paths and 35.7% listed no faith, according to the survey by professors at the University of Washington and elsewhere.

USC religion professor Jane Naomi Iwamura cites other reasons behind the attrition: proselytizing by evangelical Christians, a growing trend among Americans to shun any religious affiliation and, among many young Buddhists, a weak understanding of their faith.

Shin Buddhism was founded by Shinran Shonin as a path for the masses, compared to the monastic traditions of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism. While those schools focus on lengthy meditation and other rigorous self-disciplines to attain enlightenment, Shin Buddhism preaches salvation not through self-efforts but faith in the power of immeasurable light and life, wisdom and compassion, represented by the Amida Buddha.

The Shin tradition’s message of faith has drawn comparisons to Christianity — one reason, Buddhist scholars say, it has been less appealing to American converts seeking a path distinctly different from their own Christian or Jewish upbringing.

But now Shin Buddhists have begun actively working to raise their profile. A seminal development was the 1998 publication of the first introduction to Shin Buddhism by a major publisher: “River of Fire, River of Water,” by Taitetsu Unno, the nation’s foremost authority on the tradition. The book helped fuel new study groups and sanghas of mostly converts in such places as New Mexico and Connecticut, according to Jeff Wilson, a contributing editor to Tricycle, a leading Buddhist journal.

Among congregational efforts, the West Covina Buddhist Temple has started a successful website, www.livingdharma.org, seeking to relate the faith to American culture. It includes interviews with celebrity Buddhists such as actress Sharon Stone and essays on the Buddhist message in such films as “American Beauty.”

At Nishi Hongwanji Temple in Little Tokyo, Mexican American minister William Briones is taking the Buddhist message to blacks and Latinos in East Los Angeles through talks at high schools and other locales. His temple, part of Shin Buddhism’s larger branch, will celebrate its centennial next year.

One of the region’s most dynamic congregations is the Orange County Buddhist Church in Anaheim, which has grown to 1,000 members from 650 in 1986 under the leadership of the Rev. Marvin Harada. Boosted by a 5% hike in Orange County’s Japanese American population in the 1990s, the temple also reaches out to the wider community with such classes as “Buddhism in Western Literature,” and a new publishing arm. Harada said those of non-Japanese descent now account for up to 10% of temple membership.

Harada’s temple is also one of the few to offer meditation services. Official Shin doctrine frowns on meditation as an attempt to gain enlightenment, but Harada said he offers it as a way to relax and open the mind to Buddhist teachings.

The Rev. Koshin Ogui, the newly elected reformist bishop of the Buddhist Churches of America, is likely to encourage such measures despite resistance from Japan. He said he began promoting meditation several years ago in Cleveland, where six of every 10 callers wanted to learn the practice.

“I used to answer that we don’t practice meditation, until I realized that if I lose six of every 10 people … I would bankrupt my store,” he said with a laugh.

Ogui, 64, is also pushing a lay-training program to produce more homegrown ministers equipped with an American cultural IQ. Among his organization’s 65 temples, at least 12 have no minister or share one. The bishop supports efforts to project a Shin Buddhist voice into the public arena. Since last year, his organization has passed resolutions opposing the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemptive war and prohibitions against gay marriage.

Ogui’s goal is no less than to transform Shin Buddhism into a major American faith. But ask for a bottom line on his chances to succeed, and the Buddhist master will not answer.

“Seeking conclusions is a modern sickness,” Ogui said. “Rather, find meaning in the process of becoming.”

Original article no longer available

Quiet the mind, heal the body

December 1, 2003