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Every morning at 4:55, Egyoku Nakao, 48, head priest at the Los Angeles Zen Center, dons the golden brown robes of her station and presides over 33 students engaged in Zazen, Zen's painstaking sitting meditation. Her authority, like that of hundreds of senseis before her, is absolute; a student would no more contradict her than question the break of day. A few hours later, however, the Japanese-Portuguese American slips into civilian clothes and rearranges the meditation cushions for an innovation called a Practice Circle, where the talk is free and her view is not privileged. "The center is in the process of redefining its mission," she acknowledges. "This is a very complex place. We are trying to figure out how to live and learn together." It is a notion no Zen cleric would have expressed until American Buddhism led the way. Of course, so is the idea of a female head priest.
Very early on, the American Buddhist trailblazers, particularly those working in Vipassana and Zen, made a vital break from Asian tradition: they opted against trying to replicate the Asian monastic system, where intense practice is left to the monks and the main devotion of laypeople is once-a-week temple offerings. "American people don't want to be monks and nuns," says Kornfield. "They want practices that transform the heart." The approach seemed to work: Kornfield's meditation seminars with Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg in Barre, Mass., and at Spirit Rock in California, turned out thousands of graduates. Zendos began spreading to Middle America, and when Chogyam Trungpa died in 1987 at age 47, a contingent of lay American-born Vajrayana Buddhists was able to perform the funeral liturgy along with Tibetans. (Last year Naropa Institute became a fully accredited college for "contemplative studies.")
Then, rather suddenly, a further change occurred. Beginning in 1983 the community discovered to its horror that a probable majority of U.S. teachers, both foreign born and American, had abused their authority by sleeping with their disciples. In a particularly tragic case, the American regent of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism admitted that he had infected one of his students with HIV. The student had then transmitted it to his girlfriend. The result, in many schools, was a radical democratization, with leadership often subdivided to prevent abuse, and even a certain amount of government by consensus. "It doesn't mean we vote on what the dharma is," says Kornfield, "but there is a kind of input from our communities." Women received more authority. Morreale notes that the "almost martial discipline" of the Zen masters softened, and the monastic pattern of "strict practice and intensive retreat," which had continued to mark early American observance, gave way in many cases to "strong daily practice in the midst of one's ordinary circumstances." For many Buddhists, even one so serious as Gere, this seems to mean 45 minutes to an hour of meditation a day.