Real world realities

As a language nerd, it always bugs me when people talk about “lived experience,” as if there were any other kind. I know, of course, that with so much of our lives these days spent looking at screens, the lines between IRL, VR, and AR are rather blurred. Indeed, it seems that for many folk there’s even another reality: delusion. But let’s not go there.

In the real world, religious institutions have been struggling for a long time. Just do an online search for “small churches closing,” and you’ll find a cornucopia of articles. For example, as far back as 1970, the Catholic Herald predicted that a third of Canada’s Catholic churches would close within 10 years.[i] It’s the same for other religious institutions. A Pew Research Center study from 2020 noted that more than a third of Conservative synagogues and one out of five Reform synagogues in the United States had closed between 2000 and 2020.[ii]

I have been tracking Buddhist sanghas in Canada since 2009.[iii] By 2011, we found 483 groups. Just prior to the pandemic, we had slightly more than 600—healthy growth. Since the pandemic, we’ve had a net loss of more than 50. That number does not include centers that are still operational but with diminished membership.

Follow the money

The economics of running a Buddhist center have only become more difficult in these post-pandemic inflationary times. Unless you are part of a large, well-funded multinational lineage, it’s a tough go. As Eshu Martin from Zenwest once told me after he had to give up being abbot there: “People say the Dharma should be free. Yes. Water is free too, but plumbing costs money.” He became a clinical hypnotherapist. Koun Franz, teacher at Thousand Harbours Zen, in Nova Scotia, and a former associate editor at Buddhadharma Quarterly in Halifax, became a licensed psychotherapist. Their stories are not unique.

In other words, being a Buddhist teacher in the modern Western world is often an avocation rather than a vocation. We simply do not have the cultural infrastructure to maintain traditional monastic institutions. Even in monastic Buddhist centers in Canada, I’ve heard multiple accounts of how residents have to provide their own financial support.

#Buddhistcommunity

Buddhist practice has moved online too, especially since the pandemic pivot. There are virtual sanghas, online summits, digital training courses, and such. But it isn’t just because there has been a cultural shift. It’s also about money, and another factor in the decline of physical Buddhist centers. Cyberspace offers a degree of scalability that the physical world cannot, and it provides a new—and in many cases lucrative—revenue stream, but it also comes at a cost. Just as physical artifacts in the music industry evaporated in the transition from vinyl to cassette to CD to streaming services, so too in the book world physical artifacts are evaporating as we transition to the post-literate world of podcasts, Substack, and the like. Like the music business, the writing business has also seen creators earning less and less at each step of the dematerialization.

Books and practice in Indra’s Net

So the Buddhist book ain’t what it used to be. Now, it’s just one dimension of an integrated economic ecosystem. As part of my research for this article, I spoke with Rob Preece,[iv] a British Vajrayana teacher, thangka painter, psychotherapist, and author, who wrote five books for Snow Lion between 2000 and 2006, and has subsequently self-published six with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing’s print-on-demand platform. From his perspective, modest sustained book sales from self-published titles are just fine, part of a virtuous circle that includes one-on-one counseling, mentoring, online training courses, and books. Each one leads to the others.

Getting ahead of myself a bit here in this series, I’ll tell you that it was the maturation of both print-on-demand and the era of online micropayments ushered in by iTunes in the early 2000s that created the convergence underpinning the self-publishing boom. Before that, publishers were gatekeepers, the cost of entry to the world of lithography was high, and authors were beholden. With barriers to entry disrupted by radically inexpensive print-on-demand and seamless distribution through online vendors such as Amazon, the book world was turned on its head. In the tsunami of what followed—and what is about to expand exponentially with artificial intelligence generating what are projected to be millions of books whose existence threatens the entire concept of intellectual property and copyright—discoverability is the new key to a book’s success.

This is why traditional publishers are now so focused on a potential author’s online presence. How else are they to evaluate the likely readership? Sure, celebrity culture promises some certainty for A-list Buddhist teachers that justifies return on investment for publishers to pull out all the stops, but charismatic teachers can only do so much of the heavy lifting. On the one hand, Buddhism is already pretty marginal in the North American spiritual landscape, so it’s not like there is a huge pool of superstars. That’s the sound of one hand clapping. On the other hand, a lot of books from those superstars turn out old wine in new bottles—as one jaded Buddhist publisher who wishes to remain anonymous told me.

Meanwhile, in Japan

Nathan Jishin Michon is a Shingon priest in Japan. He is a frequent contributor to books about Buddhist spiritual care and author of Refuge in the Storm (North Atlantic Books 2023), about Buddhist perspectives on crisis care. I spoke with him to learn more about modern Japanese book culture in relation to Buddhist practice. Although Buddhism has been in Japan for millennia, it is no longer the driving force it once was, although the reasons are historically very different from the decline of religious institutions in the West. He laughingly told me that Buddhism was for sad stuff like funerals, whereas for happy stuff like births and weddings you do Shinto. These days, it is the newness and Westernness of mindfulness that interests young Japanese people more than traditional Buddhism.

And yet, Japan has a strong book culture. For example, reading is a staple on trains. If you go into a bookstore looking for Buddhist books, there are as many books published in Japanese as those imported in English. In Japan’s many, many used bookstores, foreign Buddhist books are never in short supply, indicating that readership is strong.

The content of Japanese Buddhist books often centers on temple family histories, ritual etiquette, and traditional basics. And of course, the graphic novel format of manga is both extremely widespread and extremely sophisticated. It’s rare to find Japanese Buddhist books that grapple with the challenges of the modern world.

Talkin’ ’bout my generation

When I speak to colleagues in the education sector, the decline of book culture is often a topic. Students can’t read, won’t read, can’t write, won’t write, can’t think, won’t think. Course packs were the first step down a slippery slope. Putting books on digital platforms only made things worse, because the devices are constantly pinging with notifications that shatter any flow of attention. Artificial intelligence tools have not only short-circuited critical thinking and writing; they’ve also vastly expanded the time required by teachers to assess and evaluate what students are doing.

Let’s face it: reading a physical book, using an online print resource, participating in a Zoom meeting, or attending a spiritual event in the real world each resonate with very different parts of the brain. We experience them and learn from them in radically different ways that are not necessarily easy to translate from one mode to another.

The question for Buddhist teachers and community leaders is, how do we navigate such complex tides in getting the raft to the other shore?

Next up

In the next two segments of this series, we’ll delve into the business of book publishing in general, and Buddhist book publishing in particular, exploring how publishers, distributors, vendors, publicists, sales channels, taste-makers, and others are working hard to shape a prosperous future. Your comments and questions are always welcome.

[i] One third of Canada’s churches ‘to close within 10 years’ (The Catholic Herald)

[ii] Jewish Americans in 2020 (Pew Research Center)

[iii] Highlights from the Survey of Canadian Buddhist Organizations (Journal of Global Buddhism)

[iv] Rob Preece & Anna Murray Preece (Mudra)

Related features from BDG

So, You Want to be a Buddhist Author, Eh? Part One of A Six-Part Exploration Into the World of Buddhist Publishing
Sumeru Books, Canada’s Buddhist Hub

More from Bodhisattva 4.0 by John Harvey Negru