Deeply Rooted: BCA’s Farming Agrarian History

This has been a strange weather year. Almost no snow this winter, and then, just when it seemed the earth should be awakening into spring, snow returned.

Like many homeowners, I find myself looking at my yard and wondering what I should do. Is it time to water? Should I finally clean out those messy flower beds? Is it too early to plant vegetables or flowers?

Somehow, this got me thinking about farmers.

And, as often happens with my thinking, one thought led to another. I began thinking about the temples I serve and about the Buddhist Churches of America. Many of our temples have deep roots in small Japanese American farming communities, communities that have changed dramatically or disappeared altogether.

That raises a larger question: What happens to Jodo Shinshu when the communities that once sustained our temples change?

Jodo Shinshu itself owes much of its historical development to the agrarian society of Japan. Long before the elaborate robes, rituals and institutional structures we associate with Hongwanji today, the Dharma was carried into villages and farming communities and became part of the lives of ordinary people.

While studying in Japan, I became increasingly aware of the challenges facing rural Jodo Shinshu temples. In a discussion with a Hongwanji official, I was told that of the approximately 15,000 Jodo Shinshu Hongwanji-ha temples in Japan, perhaps as many as 5,000 could close within the next decade as the rural communities that have supported them for generations continue to decline. Young people have moved to the cities, villages have grown older and smaller, and temples that once stood at the center of community life now find themselves with fewer and fewer families.

The conversation stayed with me because the situation in Japan raises a question that also confronts us here in America: What happens to Jodo Shinshu when the social world that once sustained our temples changes?

That question reminds me of a Buddhist story I first heard many years ago from my friend Bhante Seelawimala.

One day, according to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha encountered a farmer named Bharadvaja. Bharadvaja was working in his fields when he saw the Buddha walking on his alms round.

The farmer challenged him rather directly. In effect, he said, “I plow. I sow. I work. And after I have worked, I eat. You should plow and sow too if you want to eat.”

It is not difficult to understand Bharadvaja’s point of view. He saw a religious mendicant standing before him while he was doing the hard work necessary to survive.

But the Buddha replied that he, too, was a farmer. His farming was different.

Faith was the seed. Wisdom was the plow. Effort was the rain. Mindfulness guided the work. Through spiritual cultivation came a different kind of harvest: liberation from suffering.

I have always loved this story because the Buddha did not dismiss the farmer’s world. He entered it. He taught the Dharma, using the language of soil, seed, rain, labor and harvest.

Perhaps that is because farming naturally teaches something very close to Buddhist truth. A farmer learns quickly that control is limited.

You may prepare the soil carefully. You may choose good seed. You may plant at exactly the right time and work from before sunrise until after sunset. And still, things can go wrong.

There may be too much rain or not enough. There may be insects, disease, wind, hail, frost or fire. The market may collapse just when the crop is ready. Human effort matters enormously. But human effort is never the whole story.

Years ago, I asked a member of the Honeyville Buddhist Temple why so many farmers seemed to enjoy gambling.

He laughed. “Gambling a little in a casino is nothing,” he told me. “A farmer’s life is a gamble. Hell, a few dollars on a craps table is nothing compared to one hundred thousand dollars on seed for a field you can’t even be sure you’ll bring to harvest.”

I have never forgotten that. Behind the humor was a profound recognition of uncertainty. You work. You plan. You invest everything you have. And then you discover that the result depends upon countless conditions you do not control.

That sounds remarkably close to Buddhism.

We often imagine that our lives can be mastered through intelligence, discipline, hard work, achievement or what Shin Buddhism calls self-power. Yet sooner or later, life teaches us otherwise. We encounter aging, illness, loss, disappointment, our own foolishness, the unpredictability of other people and sometimes just plain bad luck. We discover that we are not entirely in control of the field.

Perhaps this helps explain why Jodo Shinshu took such deep root among the farming communities of Japan. Village life and agriculture created a worldview in which interdependence was not an abstract Buddhist teaching. It was something people experienced every day.

The same thing happened when Japanese immigrants came to America.

Many of the earliest Buddhist communities in the western United States developed among people working in agriculture, railroads, mining camps and small rural towns. Japanese immigrant families labored in fields and orchards throughout California, Utah, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and elsewhere.

They faced poverty, discrimination, alien land laws, wartime incarceration and displacement, and the ordinary hardships of immigrant life. Yet they built temples.

They created Dharma schools, Japanese language schools, Fujinkai organizations, youth groups, and Obon festivals. The temple became much more than a place where religious services were held. It became a center of community life.

People shared food and labor. They cared for children. They celebrated weddings and mourned deaths. They helped newcomers find work and helped struggling families survive. In many ways, the temple became an extension of agrarian life itself.

The rhythms of the temple often followed the rhythms of the seasons. And mutual dependence was not simply a Buddhist concept discussed in a Dharma talk. It was how people survived.

Serving temples in Utah and the surrounding region has made me increasingly aware of this heritage.

The Salt Lake Buddhist Temple is in an urban setting today, but many of the families who sustained it came from farming communities throughout Utah and the Intermountain West. The Ogden Buddhist Temple developed in a region shaped by agriculture, railroads and labor. Honeyville Buddhist Temple still sits amid fields and open land where the agricultural character of the community remains visible. The Idaho-Oregon Buddhist Temple reflects a similar history of families shaped by farming, distance, endurance and mutual dependence.

When I visit these temples, I sometimes feel that something of that agrarian spirit remains. There is a certain directness and practicality. People understand that when something needs to be done, somebody has to do it. Someone cooks. Someone cleans. Someone fixes the furnace. Someone sets up chairs. Someone brings food to a family after a funeral.

It is Buddhism with its sleeves rolled up.

And underneath it is an understanding that no one survives alone. Farmers know that they depend upon rain they did not create, sunlight they cannot command, soil they did not invent and countless conditions they cannot control. There is humility in that recognition.

Shinran described human beings as bombu, ordinary foolish beings filled with blind passions and limitations. This recognition is not intended to lead us into despair. Rather, it opens us to humility, gratitude, and Other Power, the boundless compassion of Amida Buddha.

The Nembutsu, Namo Amida Butsu, is therefore not a declaration of spiritual accomplishment. It is gratitude.

I am sustained by conditions I did not create. I am embraced by compassion I did not earn. I am the beneficiary of countless lives, countless causes, countless people.

Perhaps farmers understand this particularly well.

Today, many of the people who built our early agricultural temples are aging or have already passed away. The communities around our temples have changed. Their children and grandchildren have moved to cities and suburbs and entered professions their grandparents could hardly have imagined.

That is not necessarily something to lament. Buddhism has always changed as it moved into new cultures and new circumstances. But we should ask what is worth carrying forward.

The inheritance of our agrarian temples is not simply nostalgia for farms, Japanese American communities, or an earlier era of the BCA. Their deeper inheritance may be spiritual: humility, endurance, gratitude, mutual responsibility, and the awareness that our lives depend upon countless others.

Modern life can easily hide these truths from us. Food appears in supermarkets. Water comes from a faucet. Heat comes from a thermostat. A package ordered on a telephone appears at the front door the next day. It becomes remarkably easy to imagine ourselves as independent.

But we are no more independent than the farmer standing in the middle of a field waiting for rain.

The story of Bharadvaja reminds us that Buddhism has always spoken to ordinary people living uncertain human lives.

The Buddha met a farmer in his field and spoke to him about seeds. Centuries later, Shinran’s teachings found fertile ground among ordinary people in the farming villages of Japan. Still later, Japanese immigrants carried those teachings across the Pacific and planted them in the fields and small towns of the American West. They planted temples as well.

Some of those temples are now struggling. Some will undoubtedly change. Some may eventually disappear. But perhaps the most important question is not whether we can preserve every institution exactly as it has been. The question is whether we will continue cultivating what our predecessors planted.

Faith is still the seed. Wisdom is still the plow. Compassion still requires cultivation. And none of us controls the rain.

We simply receive this life, work the field before us and entrust ourselves to conditions far greater than ourselves. Then, perhaps, we begin to understand the harvest.

Namo Amida Butsu.