Search Results

This chapter examines how Buddha's teachings at Wat Phila and the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center (CIMC) are presented ideologically and interpreted and lived by the practitioners. The chapter conceive of the organizations as containers and explains what is inside each container and how practitioners gather these ideas into their personal understanding, practices, and ways of seeing the world. By exploring the contents of the organizational containers and practitioners' individual understandings, the chapter concludes that the people at Wat Phila and the CIMC share some common understandings of the Buddha's teachings, amid their many differences.

This chapter investigates how practitioners at Wat Phila and the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center (CIMC) structure themselves inside each organization into communities or groups and relate to those groups. People at both centers rely on the centers for religious or spiritual and social support, though the forms that support takes are quite different. Practitioners at Wat Phila and the CIMC define the word “sangha” and form communities within their organizations in different ways. While practitioners at Wat Phila view the monks as the sangha and tend to conceive of themselves as one large community of monastic and lay members held together by merit, practitioners at the CIMC tend to view everyone involved in the center as the sangha and to conceive of themselves as a community of small groups joined by support and interconnection between practitioners. Despite recent concerns in the broader sociological literature about the strength and vitality of associations and communities in the United States, Wat Phila and the CIMC further show that Buddhist and other religious groups continue to provide support through communities, though in different ways to different constituencies.

Based on how practitioners at Wat Phila and the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center (CIMC) constructed their organizations, the Buddha's teachings, and their communities, this chapter explores how practitioners construct personal identities in light of the Buddha's teachings and their involvement in Wat Phila or the CIMC. Practitioners at Wat Phila and the CIMC emphasize the Buddha's teaching to “come and see” in their conversations about their personal identities. Regardless of what they draw from the tradition, most of them do develop some kind of identity in relation to the Buddha's teachings, rather than to Wat Phila or the CIMC as organizations. At both Wat Phila and the CIMC, many practitioners describe themselves through achieved religious or spiritual identities that they have chosen in the United States. The fact that Wat Phila and the CIMC include practitioners with such a range of religious and spiritual identities shows that identity is not a central organizational concern at either center. Rather than a subcultural identity theory, Wat Phila and the CIMC point to the need for more of a cohesive particle theory of minority religious identity

This chapter contributes a gendered perspective to discussions of the history and practice of Buddhism at Wat Phila, the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center (CIMC), and the United States more generally. It also contributes more broadly to existing research about the gendered nature of organizations. As an analytic lens, gender at Wat Phila and the CIMC points to how the organizations are differently structured and provide places for women and men to be involved in different ways. It also points to women's greater involvement in religious organizations in the United States and to the importance of recognizing those differences while examining how organizations function and operate, and how people influence those organizations and are influenced by them in their daily lives.

This chapter compares the ways in which immigrants and converts are adapting Buddhism in the United States to the ways that practitioners of other religious traditions have adapted those religious traditions since 1965. The chapter points to the commonalities in adaptive strategies as well as to the distinctly Buddhist ways of adapting that is evident in Wat Phila and the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center (CIMC). The history and development of Wat Phila, the CIMC, and Theravada Buddhism in America point to the importance of examining all global paths and networks along which a religious tradition arrives in the United States and adapts and changes in the new environment. The chapter concludes by considering the future of Theravada Buddhism in America.