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The Faces of Buddhism in America

University of California Press

One rarely hears about the practice of Chinese Buddhism in the United States. Even specialists in the American forms of Buddhism have difficulty estimating the number of Chinese Buddhist associations in our country or identifying the group's major characteristics. This lack of knowledge is understandable, considering the small size and general insularity of the community. Nonetheless, the evolution of Chinese Buddhism in America is worthy of greater attention, if for no other reasons than its relatively long history in the United States and the fact that one Chinese organization, the International Buddhist Progress Society, has constructed in Hacienda Heights, California, what is arguably the largest Buddhist monastery in the Western hemisphere, Hsi Lai Temple. In order to introduce the Chinese Buddhist community to a wider audience, this chapter will provide a brief history, describe the principal activities of Chinese Buddhist organizations, and consider issues of identity for those who regard themselves as Chinese, American, and Buddhist.

Soon after I began conducting research on Chinese Buddhism in the United States, several recent immigrants from Taiwan assured me that the history of this phenomenon dates back to the year 458, when a Buddhist monk landed somewhere on the western coast of Mexico. Later, I discovered that this theory was not the invention of a few American Chinese Buddhists but, rather, originally had been raised and debated within the European scholarly community. The theory was first proposed in 1761 by Joseph de Guignes, who cited a memorial found in the Chinese imperial archives that cryptically described the sea route taken by a Buddhist monk named Hui Shan to the land of Fu-sang.1 On the basis of an analysis of the lands and distances described along the journey, de Guignes concluded that Fu-sang was very probably Mexico. Reaction to the hypothesis was

mixed. J. Klaproth thought de Guignes's reasoning and evidence both farfetched. For one thing, the mention of horses and grape vines in the memorial proved that the land could not have been America, since both of these were introduced by the Spanish in the fifteenth century. Fu-sang, argued Klaproth, was more likely an early name for Japan.2

Other scholars rose to de Guignes's defense. Chevalier de Paravey maintained that horses may have already been present in America before the Spanish arrival and, even if they hadn't been, Hui Shan may have used the Chinese term for horse, ma, loosely to describe the South American llamas and alpacas. Furthermore, the presence of what looked to be Buddhist architectural designs in certain Yucatan temples could only be explained by the presence of Buddhist monks to direct construction.3 The German scholar Karl Eugen Neumann and his student, the American folklorist Charles G. Leland, also found such architectural and iconographic parallels too striking to be mere coincidence. Especially noteworthy, exclaimed Leland, was the statuary found in Mexico and Central America that resembled the Buddha in the pose of meditation. In his opinion, not only the artistic styles and crude images of the Buddha, but even the gentle temperament of the mound-builders of Central and North America had been greatly influenced by the teachings of Buddhist missionaries.4

The most detailed study in a Western language identifying Fu-sang with America is Edward P. Vining's eight-hundred-page book, An Inglorious Columbus; or, Evidence that Hwui Shan and a Party of Buddhist Monks from Afghanistan Discovered America in the Fifth Century A.D. Vining's compendium, written in 1885, not only summarizes the arguments on the subject given by some fifty scholars and provides an exhaustive list of parallels in the customs, arts, and religious beliefs of Buddhists, but includes a chapter devoted to demonstrating that the Chinese and Mexicans translated key names and terms from each other's language: the graphs for "Fu-san-guo," for instance, in the seventh century may have sounded similar to Mixteca, the coeval pronunciation for "Mexico"; in the same vane, Wixipecocha, the name given in Aztec stories to a mysterious, light-skinned pilgrim who had visited the region in the remote past, may have been a transliteration of "Hui-Shan, bhikshu" and the name Guatemala may have originally referred to the Buddha's clan name, that is, "Gautama-tlan, the Place of Gautama."5

Ironically, the publication of Vining's massive work marked the end of interest in the subject among the American and European scholarly community, although a smattering of articles and books have continued to appear over the years.6 Chinese scholars, however, picked up where Western academics left off. Professor Wei Chu-hsien has devoted virtually his entire career to cataloguing archaeological, anthropological, and historical evidence for early contacts between Chinese and American peoples. In his

opinion, Hui Shan's expedition represents a relatively late interaction: some one thousand years earlier Confucius may have already made references to the North American hummingbird!7 It is from the work of Wei Chu-hsien and other such scholars that the Chinese Buddhist community in the United States has learned of Hui Shan's voyage to Fu-sang.

Whether or not Fu-sang was a Chinese name for the continent of America will probably never be known definitively. Most of the evidence cited to substantiate the theory is tentative at best, fanciful at worst. The various monographs on the subject give the sense that the issue has much greater symbolic than historical import. Attributing the "discovery" of America to an Asian Buddhist rather than to a European Christian inverts the rhetoric of forebear and newcomer, thereby radically transforming the notions of national heritage and identity. Most Euro-Americans will continue to draw strength from their own mythology. For Chinese Buddhists who come to America, however, to regard this land as Fu-sang is to place themselves within an ancient and noble missionary adventure.

Historical Concerns

Even if Hui Shan did not "discover America" the Chinese were still the earliest Asian group to come to the United States in any great numbers. The first ship of Chinese arrived in California in 1849, one year after gold had been discovered at John Sutter's sawmill. By 1854, over 13,000 Chinese, virtually all men, had come in hopes of unearthing a fortune in "Gold Mountain," as California was called.8 Sixteen years later, the census bureau recorded 63,199 Chinese in the United States, composing 10 percent of the population in California and Montana, and 29 percent of the population in Idaho (excluding Native Americans). The early Chinese population reached its peak in the 1880s, numbering slightly over 100,000.9

Not surprisingly, as the Chinese community grew, it established places of worship. The first Chinese temples to be constructed in the continental United States were the Tin Hou Temple and Kong Chow Temple, built in San Francisco around 1853.10 By 1875 the number of temples in that city had grown to at least eight, and by the turn of the century there were hundreds of "joss houses," as...