The cover photo of Jiemin Bao's Creating a Buddhist Community shows the beginning of a procession of monks around the ordination hall of their temple. There is a large group of laypeople in between the monks and the hall. Within this photo there are monks and laity, young and old, Asian and non-Asian, some dressed in t-shirts and some dressed in formal Thai clothing. Some are making donations, and some are taking pictures. This assemblage of people demonstrates one of the key themes of Bao's book—inclusion. The second aspect this photo highlights is that this book is about place, one particular place. This study of Wat Thai in Silicon Valley, California, is more than a case study, however. Bao uses this place to enter into conversations about race, class, identity, and gender within American Buddhism.
The seemingly disparate groups that make up Wat Thai are not analyzed as separate types of Buddhists. Instead, Bao discusses Wat Thai in the way the temple sees itself—as one community. Through this, Bao helps to put to rest the essentialized categories of “white convert” and “immigrant Buddhist” that have dominated so much of the earlier conversation of American Buddhist scholarship. In this way, the focus of Bao's book fills a niche by illuminating the range of activities and practices that take place at an American Buddhist temple. Bao rightly concludes, “no study has examined how a diverse assemblage of participants at a single Buddhist temple crosses ethnic, racial, and religious boundaries” (p. 5). Bao highlights the inclusion she witnessed in her fieldwork over the course of nine years within this temple. This long-term fieldwork and close engagement with members of the temple at all levels is apparent throughout the book. There are detailed descriptions of the space and people that make up Wat Thai, and the reader gets a vivid sense of this community.
After the introduction, chapter 2, titled “Creating a Temple Community,” establishes the reader in the space of Wat Thai and the dynamics of the community. The rest of the chapters highlight the features of this community building, including fundraising and temple economics, temple structures and art, monastic labor and roles, merit-making opportunities, and Thai-American identities. The reader can get a sense of Bao's approach here. She is most interested in the production, creation, building, shaping, and becoming of this temple and its members.
While chapter 2 focuses on people and practices, chapter 3, “Erecting a Chapel: Carving Out Cultural Space,” looks at the space of the temple and how its diversity of style and form is also a practice of inclusion. For Wat Thai, the process of temple building had to be completed in negotiation with American laws and society while also maintaining the regulations of Buddhism, creating a temple with cultural symbols from both the United States and Thailand.
In chapter 4, “Monks in the Making,” the book returns to a focus on the community members. Bao describes the ways that monastic practices differ between Thailand and the United States, citing contrasts in the meaning of the temple, Buddha images, and the monastic figure.
Chapter 5, “Merit Making: Transnational Circuits,” is the most important chapter for readers with an interest in Buddhist studies. Here Bao adds to our knowledge of the Buddhist relationship with economics, linking capitalism to Buddhist practices of merit-making and middle-class status to being a good Buddhist. She makes the simple point that Buddhist temples need money to survive, which unfortunately is not acknowledged often enough within Buddhist studies. However, more engagement with Buddhist studies scholarship here, in particular chapter 3 of Ingrid Jordt's Burma's Mass Lay Meditation Movement, would bring this chapter more into conversation with scholars of Theravada Buddhism.Footnote 1
While chapter 4 is concerned with the Thai and American experiences of monastics, chapter 6, “Shaping and Performing Thai American Identities,” is concerned with identity formation among Thai youth. Wat Thai's temple school utilizes song, dance, music, language training, body language, and Buddhist ethics as part of the formation of Thai values. Bao suggests that youth respond to these practices by including some and excluding others, creating their own performance of Thai American identity. This chapter, the one most devoted to issues of Asian American studies, reveals the ways “young people have developed multiple, shifting, inconsistent, and fragmented identities” (p. 143).
In the conclusion, Bao pushes for the field of American Buddhism to focus on “interdependence and interconnections” (p. 144). Bao's work, along with that of other scholars, illustrates a new wave of American Buddhist scholarship.Footnote 2 All of these works centralize the importance and meaning of race and class within American Buddhism without delineating categories and labels for varying groups within this population. As part of this new wave of American Buddhist scholarship, Bao's book bodes well for the future of this area of study.
Perhaps because of this focus on the field of American Buddhism, there is less contribution to Asian American studies and Thai Buddhist studies in this book. Issues of identity and temple economics could have been more successfully argued with more engagement with Asian American and Thai Buddhist scholarship. Although Bao is able to highlight important aspects of Thai Buddhism, I would have liked to see this expanded further. Thai Buddhist ideas of missionizing, ritual, temple space, and monasticism are all present here but could be in conversation in a more substantial way with studies of Thai Buddhism that discuss monasticism and merit-making in the Thai temple context.Footnote 3 Bao focuses on the connections of Wat Thai to Thai Buddhist culture, but not how a Thai American temple community could contribute to the academic conversations within Thai Buddhism.
I have one more minor critique. Bao refers to one Thai monk throughout the book as “The Smiling Monk.” I have no doubt that this monk often had a smile on his face; however, this epithet hints at an older Orientalist and more recent Hollywood stereotypical trope of the happy, smiling Asian. In order to avoid this, I would rather this monk be consistently referred to by a monastic pseudonym instead of a characteristic trait.
I would recommend this book for a class on American or Thai Buddhism, or Asian American studies, and to any scholar involved in these fields. This would be a good ethnography to add depth and reality to a class on any of these subjects. The words of the informants are used evocatively, and the main themes of the book—gender, race, class, economic and religious capital, inclusion, and identity—are woven deftly throughout.
