Why Tendai ?

I have always been a spiritual person, even when I haven’t behaved like one. When I was a kid, our family navigated an interesting but erratic path from the Lutheran Church, to Roman Catholicism, to a United Church of Christ school, eventually sending me to a Methodist College, where I thought I would become a religion major. Things didn’t work out that way, but by the time I was a young adult, one thing was quite clear to me: It’s OK to change your religion.

I ended up marrying a Jewish woman and converting to Judaism. My Hebrew name is Eliezer Pincas ben Avraham Aveinu. Judaism is a beautiful tradition, but it is also very much family-centered, and my spouse was more secular in her Judaism. She is already Jewish and never felt the need for the kind of active identification that I did. Consequently, I became interested in Buddhism, largely because I was practicing Japanese martial arts, which afforded me a gateway into Japanese culture and spirituality. In retrospect, I suppose Japanese Buddhism was part of my karma.

I thus began to study Buddhism in general, and Japanese Buddhism in particular. For a time, I attended Ekoji Buddhist Temple in Fairfax Virginia, a member of the Buddhist Churches of America (BCA) and hence part of the worldwide Jodo-Shinshu movement. The people at Ekoji are wonderful, lovely people who practice the Dharma with sincerity, and the Temple is a splendid facility; but I was never really on-board with the “Nembutsu-only” approach to the Dharma, which Shinran Shonin preached in medieval Japan. The whole Tariki-Jiriki thing about “self-power” versus “other power” did not sit well with me— the Buddha clearly told his disciples to rely on themselves, and I could not square that with Shinran’s “just say Nembutsu” practice. I realized that I needed to keep looking.

In my study of Japanese Buddhism, one fact kept coming up: almost all of the various schools of Japanese Buddhism, trace their lineage to the Tendai School. It began to seem to me that the Tendai-shu, was a kind of Roman Catholic version of Buddhism—the “mother school” from which all the others emerged. This appealed to me. Moreover, I learned that in Tendai Buddhism, almost ALL of the traditional practices of the Buddha Dharma are taught— not only Nembutsu, but also Zen meditation, Bija chanting, esoteric practices like mudras, mantras and mandalas, and even practices I had never heard of, like Kaihogyo and the Goma rites. It looked like one huge spiritual menu, with something for everyone. I found this very attractive.

Eventually I found my way to the Tendai-shu New York Betsuin. The training has proven to be much more rigorous than I bargained for, but my assessment that Tendai Buddhism is wide, eclectic and tolerant of all forms of Buddhist practice was essentially correct. There is, indeed, “something for everyone” in the Tendai-shu. Tendai Buddhism is not as widespread as Jodo Shinshu, or as well-known as the Zen schools; but it definitely has more to offer, in the way of spiritual practices, than the other schools of Japanese Buddhism. If you are interested in Buddhism and live in the United States, you should consider checking out one of the several Tendai Sangha's here in North America.