Thung Luu Tang, biology freshman from San José City College, said she has gone back and forth between identifying as a Buddhist while growing up in America.
“(As a kid) I didn't know what Buddhism was,” Tang said. “I just knew we went to temples and everything, but technically, I was a declared (Buddhist) because my parents put it upon me.”
Tang said she grew up visiting local Buddhist temples, attending many holiday events and visiting the cremated remains of her dead loved ones stored at the temples’ altar.
Tang said her friends in highschool used to ask her about what Buddhism was, but she was unable to explain it.
She said she would instead tell her friends to go on the internet to look it up.
“I'm like, ‘What do I know?’ ” Tang said. “ ‘You know, look it up. I don't know anything.’ ”
Tang said in her junior year of highschool she decided to attend a religious retreat to learn more about her religion.
She said she lost interest near the end of the retreat and did not advance far in her studies because she couldn’t overcome the language barrier because she was not fluent in Vietnamese.
Tang said despite being born in Vietnam, she is not confident in speaking Vietnamese because she grew up in the United States.
“As far as like, the words that they use, it’s advanced man,” Tang said. “They're using some other worldly language.”
Tang said she didn’t want to open Google Translate on her phone because she was afraid that would be considered rude.
Tang said she knows enough words to have a conversation in Vietnamese, but learning about Buddhism was still difficult, even at home.
“It has always been hard like ever since I was a kid,” Tang said. “I remember, our parents tried helping us recite the prayers. Never stuck.”
Tang said she decided to reconnect with Buddhism later in high school after she realized she didn’t want to lose ties with her roots with her home country.
Vietnam Buddhist Sangha (VBS) has the second largest number of religious followers in Vietnam, according to the 2022 Report on International Religious Freedom on Vietnam from the U.S. Department of State. This accounts for five million followers and 5% of the overall population.
“I don't want to lose ties with my culture and everything,” Tang said. “It connects people everywhere you go in Vietnam, there's at least a temple and everyone has their own temple. Coming here, temples aren't really seen.”
Eric Timothy Wen-Tian Ching, a 2018 San José State alumnus who grew up volunteering and attending the San José Buddhist Church Betsuin, a Buddhist temple located in San José Japantown that practices primarily Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, said he grew up going to church weekly since he was in kindergarten.
Jodo Shinshu Buddhism is the practice of compassion, expressing care, concern, empathy and love, according to a Jan. 7, 2019 article from Lion’s Roar, a magazine and nonprofit organization that aims to provide Buddhist teachings, news and perspectives.
Ching said he grew up going to classes at Dharma school on Sundays to learn about Buddhism.
“(I was) a little kid running around the area, playing games with older kids or learning about Buddhism,” Ching said.
Ching said many of the chants performed at the temple are performed in 10th century Japanese or Chinese.
He said most followers who visit the temple will be able to understand the general meanings of most of the prayers.
“All the return characters are readable or legible to Chinese, Japanese, and pretty much anyone from those regions,” Ching said. “But all of the words are Japanese pronunciations of Chinese words. That makes absolutely no sense. If you have no idea what you're listening to.”
Ching said the copy of a Buddhist text used by San José Buddhist Church Betsuin has been translated three times through Chinese, Japanese and English.
He said many Buddhist holy texts were also translated after originating from India and traveling through a number of countries in Asia.
“When you get down to it Buddhism came from India, got translated from to Chinese, and then from Chinese to Japanese, then from Japanese to English,” Ching said. “That's assuming that it was only translated once into Chinese. There's like, multiple different Chinese dialects. So it could have been translated more than three times.”
Funie Hsu, associate professor of American Studies at San José State, said many Asian Americans see Buddhism as “a real area of confusion and mystery” especially if there is a language barrier.
Hsu said the language barrier can become an obstacle for Buddhist who are second or third generation immigrants because they may not speak or understand the primary language of their local temple.
She said a lot of Buddhist texts, such as sutras, are not translated into English.
“So there can be a sense of just feeling lost when suddenly young people have to go to the temple,” Hsu said.
She said she is a Taiwanese American who identifies as a heritage Buddhist, someone who was born into the religion and grew up with Buddhism as being part of their culture.
Hsu said she still practices Buddhism with a combination of practices she learned from her family and through her own reading.
“I'm someone that had Buddhism as part of my immediate family life as I grew up and I am still a practicing Buddhist,” Hsu said.
Hsu said some Asian Americans who are heritage Buddhists can experience confusion identifying with their religion because they may not feel they are practicing Buddhism correctly or at all.
She said this confusion may come from not being able to apply many Western interpretations of what religion is supposed to be to Buddhism.
“I actually think that's one of the reasons that younger Asian American Buddhists who might be second generation or third generation might have a hard time trying to identify if they do feel like they're Buddhist or not,” Hsu said.
Todd Perreira, religious studies lecturer, said he identifies as a Buddhist who was trained in a form of Buddhism that derived from Thailand.
Perreira said he was trained to not see Buddhism as a religion, but more as a philosophy and a way of life.
“Part of the challenge I think we have is that we have sort of a Christian Protestant model for what it means to be religious,” Perreira said.
Perreira said Buddhism does not have a popular central holy text and is mostly passed down to the next generation orally instead.
He also said it is extremely diverse in the ways it can be practiced, which is very different to Christian practices.
“We're not dealing with a Christian world where we've got one Bible for all the flavors, or one Quran for all Muslims,” Perreria said. “The Buddhist world is inherently pluralistic and diverse, both culturally and textually.”
Justice studies senior Haiyen Nguyen said chooses to practice Buddhism through a more spiritual style.
Nguyen said she considers Buddhism to be more of a way of life and rarely visits her local temple, unlike her grandmother who visits the temple on a weekly basis.
“I have kind of taken more of a spiritual stance when it comes to Buddhism now, more so of like, I believe it's more of a way of life,” Nguyen said. “My grandma was extremely devout. She believes that you have to go to the temple all of the time.”
Nguyen said she wears prayer beads and believes in focusing more on practicing Buddhism through being aware of the different types of energies around her.
However, she said she grew up resisting against her family’s strict way of practicing Buddhism.
“I didn't like how controlling my mom and my grandma had portrayed it (Buddhism) to be as we got older,” Nguyen said.
Nguyen said her grandmother practices a form of Buddhism that has stronger Western influences sharing resemblance with some Christian practices.
“It's become very much like it has to be practiced in a temple, but reality is that a lot of the Buddha's, a lot of the monks and the nuns that used to be that used to practice in Vietnam, they didn't have temples,” Nguyen said. “They didn't have actual structures, they practiced along they would walk.”
Ching said it is very difficult to talk about religion without discussing how Western religion influenced Buddhism.
He said even his religious classes at San José Buddhist Church Betsuin discussed the history of Christianity.
“We did learn a little bit about stuff like Christianity because they are pretty major in the U.S.,” Ching said. “You kind of can't talk about religion or philosophy without talking about Christianity in some way, and how it's altered or slightly informed how we perform Buddhist practices in the U.S.”
Ching said the form of Buddhism the temple practices is very adaptive to its environment to some degree.
He said for example, San José Buddhist Church Betsuin has pews.
“If you were in Japan or China, there would be no pews,” Ching said. “You would be kneeling on the floor, essentially.”
Hsu said although some may interpret the changes in some Buddhist practices as submission and assimilation, she sees it from a different perspective.
She said she instead sees it as a skillful means to ensure Buddhism temples can continue to practice.
“From a Buddhist perspective, it might not necessarily just be assimilating out of kind of like a submissive position,” Hsu said. “But this is the skillful means that enables them to not just ensure that their temple can persist and that there's a place of refuge, a spiritual refuge and a place of literal refuge for people in this heightened time of anti-Asian violence.”
