BG 166: What Young People Want

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Episode Description:

“We always talk about the Sangha as part of the triple gem, but I think it is the least developed part of Buddhism in the West.” – Sumi Loundon Kim

We’re joined this week by Sumi Loundon Kim, author of Blue Jean Buddha and The Buddha’s Apprentices, to explore what young people want from spiritual communities. We explore young people’s need for belongingness, their natural spiritual inclination, and the big questions that they are asking.

Sumi, who is in her mid-30′s now, gives several suggestions for how Buddhist communities can engage more effectively with a younger population. She points out that though Buddhist communities tend to be somewhat asocial when compared to other communities, there are many things we can be doing to better reach a new generation of seekers. Many of these suggestions are surprisingly obvious, but few are implemented on a large scale in Buddhist communities.

Episode Links:

• Blue Jean Buddha: Voices of Young Buddhists
• The Buddha’s Apprentices: More Voices of Young Buddhists
• I Married a Monk

Transcript:

Vince: Hello Buddhist Geeks, this is Vince Horn, and I’m joined today over Skype with Sumi Loundon Kim. Sumi, thank you so much for taking the time–I know you’re a mother of two young ones–thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.

Sumi: You’re so welcome. Naptime is a perfect time to talk.

Vince: Naptime on Buddhist Geeks today! So yeah, I just wanted to share a little bit of your background for people, so they kind of are familiar with where you’re coming from in this conversation. You studied recently at Harvard Divinity School, where you got your Masters in Buddhist Studies and Sanskrit, so you definitely qualify as a Buddhist Geek, no question about that [Laughter]. And you also edited two books, they’re a compilation of sort of essays from younger Buddhists. One was called Blue Jean Buddha, and then the other was called The Buddha’s Apprentices. I was wondering maybe if you could say a little bit about those two books and kind of what the general flavor of those was, because it sounds really interesting?

Sumi: Yeah, so these two books, they’re anthologies of stories by young Buddhists, people from the teens into their early thirties, and the source or the inspiration for these two books basically came from my own sense of loneliness. When I was in my early twenties, I began to wonder if I was the only Buddhist under the age of thirty, because I would go to Dharma centers and be surrounded by the Baby Boom Buddhists, who are wonderful people, wonderful mentors and teachers, but you know I had a really practical need which was that I needed friends and I needed to date somebody [Laughs]. So, in a certain way we could say these anthologies all come about as a form of lust, but I’m just kidding about that [Laughter].

So, I was curious, “Are there other young Buddhists out there, and what are they like?” and so I began looking around asking Baby Boom Buddhists do they know anybody, and often the young people who identified as Buddhists were children of Baby Boom Buddhists, and as well as others who came to it especially during the college years. And I felt so rewarded by the sharing that we had, you know telephone conversations would just go on and on because we were so happy to meet another young person who was interested in the same kinds of things.

So I noticed that since I derived so much nourishment and joy from these peer-to-peer contacts, I felt that there must be a way to share that with others, and so these two books are an effort to help young people connect to the experiences of other young people, because I think that young people learn a tremendous amount through that kind of conversation, whether it’s reading and responding mentally, or actually through online or letters and so on. So far as I know, these books are read by a lot of young people and used in college courses as a way of trying to understand what the next generation of Buddhists in the West might look like.

Vince: Wonderful, wonderful, and that kind of sums up also the topic of the conversation we wanted to have today, which is what does this next generation of young Buddhists… what is it going to look like, and how do we ensure that there are going to be younger Buddhists that continue on this sort of tradition? Because as you’ve said there aren’t a lot, currently demographically speaking, there are not a lot of young Buddhists in Buddhist centers and communities, compared to say Evangelical Christian communities.

So, anyway, we’ll get into those things, but first I wanted to start a little broader, because I know you’re working with young people, and it’s not just in a Buddhist context, and you’re getting to speak with a lot of young people about their interest in spirituality. You get to hear some of the questions they are asking, what’s important to them, and I was wondering maybe if we could just start there, and from your observations, what have you noticed today’s youth are looking for, people in their twenties, early twenties, thirties–thirties is even considered youth in the Buddhist world [Laughter]—what are they looking for, and what kind of questions are they asking do you find?

Sumi: Yeah, so my husband and I arrived on campus here at Duke University, this is in Durham, North Carolina, last fall. He’s teaching and now I’m in my early 30’s or mid 30’s and I’m in a different phase of life now that I have kids and I’m married. And so, I had been away from very young people, college students, for some time. And I was just so struck by the wonderful qualities of young people. I was immediately struck by how beautiful they are. They’re just so fresh, like a new flower. So, that was just like on a visual level. But then as we’ve lived here, we actually live on campus among the undergraduate students. These are people 18, 19 to early 20’s. And we started having conversations with them and these conversations reminded me of the sort of searching quality that people in their early 20’s have.

What I see now, now that I’ve been away from that period of my life a little bit and returning to it through these relationships, these new relationships, is what I’m seeing is that there’s this huge transition happening from the home of the family and from the parent’s home to the great wide world. And because of the fraught nature of this transition and how it can seem scary to some, young people seem to be searching for the belonging. That, I think, is the number one quality that I’ve seen in the students here, a real need, a read longing to belong, to feel cared for, to feel like there’s somebody there for them and to feel that they can connect with like-minded peers in an environment that’s safe and nourishing. So, that’s the first thing that I think young people, I don’t know about today’s youth in particular, I think all young people who are going through this transition are looking for this.

And then the second thing that really made an impression on me is how young people have still a natural spirituality. People often say, “Well, it’s the children who have a natural spirituality.” But, actually I think that that spontaneously arising sense of spirituality still exists into the early 20’s, maybe because we haven’t been defiled by life yet, I don’t know. But that spirituality is very diffuse and it’s often preconscious or subconscious, and it feels to me that young people, whether they know it or not, are looking for ways to ground that spirituality through mentorship, through philosophy or theology, through ethics, knowing how to behave, through community.

And so, I think, that this is the best age group to work with in terms of trying to help people come around to the Buddhist tradition. I guess I sound a little evangelical when I say that, but in my experience the teens, people in their teens, they still have such broad questions about spirituality overall, that the formation period is highly fluid. And then by the time people are in their late 20’s, a lot of questions have been answered and things become more certain and clear. So, it’s really this late teens to early 20’s period that is both fluid, and yet can kind of be directed and sort of set into a mold and then sort of gelled or formed there. So, I think, in terms of supporting young people, Buddhist leaders, Buddhists teachers and other mentors need to really pay attention to this particular demographic. And sum of the two things I see is a need for belonging and a searching to ground spirituality.

Vince: Nice. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. I’m thinking back to my own first exposure to Buddhism at 19 and just all the big questions that really, like, “What’s truth? What’s this enlightenment thing?” I mean it really, what you’re describing, sums up my experience in the people I was hanging out with, really well.

Sumi: Yes. And I guess I should mention as part of that, what are the kinds of questions that young people have? The kinds of questions that young people seem to ask range from huge, very broad questions like, “What is truth? Is there a God? If there is a God, who or what does that look like?”, to sort of like mid range questions like, “I have torrents of emotions and thoughts. How do I manage those? How do I live with those more peacefully, peaceably, to very immediate practical questions like, “I just had a breakup and I feel devastated,” or “How do I deal with my parents who are pushing me to be a doctor but I want to be an anthropologist?”

So, there’s really a range of questions but questions that they aren’t asking that the Babyboom Buddhists tend to ask are things like, “How do I deal with my failing body? What do I do with the financial losses of the past year? I’m entering menopause? How do I relate to that?”

Vince: Right.

Sumi: So, these are not the questions that young people are thinking about yet and some day they will. And it seems to me like a lot of the Dharma teachings, because the majority of Buddhists today are these middle age to late middle age Buddhists, the Dharma talks, the teachings are oriented around sickness, old age and death. But that is sort of the farthest thing from the mind of a 20-year-old, although they are thinking about suffering.

So, in terms of working with young people, I think that Dharma teachers, mentors, community leaders, older people who just happened to be in touch with young people through a range of capacities, should be aware of these kinds of questions and have some way of responding to them because a good response can make all the difference. Here there’s an anecdote in the Zen tradition: A student goes up to his master and says, “Master, what is enlightenment? What is nirvana?” And the master says, “An appropriate response.” And I know that in my own experience, when older people, mentors, caretakers have given a response that was true to my experience, but also helped me move beyond that or learn something from it or think more broadly about it, that has convinced me that, “Wow, this tradition, this Buddhist tradition really is meaningful. It applies to my life. It’s not theoretical. This could really work for me.”

Vince: Do you feel like there are other things that older teachers and mentors, because most people in these Buddhist communities like you say are older, are there other ways that they could be working with younger people more effectively, do you think?

Sumi: Yes, this really goes back to the point about how young people need to feel like they belong. And what I think community leaders can do is to really work on how to make young people feel welcomed, first of all. And then how to connect with them over time. Don’t let them just walk out the door after the first time they walk in, but how to ensure that they’re going to come back by connecting with them, talking to them, being curious about, “Why did you come here? What’s on your mind? What are you thinking about? What are some of the questions you have?” And just taking an interest in them personally.

So not only welcoming, not only taking an interest in them, but then also creating more social activities or more social environment particularly for young people to meet other young people who might be coming into that community so that they begin to form these peer relationships. And I think, you know, the most valuable or one of the most helpful things that teachers can do or mentors or community organizers or administrators can do is to create the space and to organize ways for young people to come together in the larger setting of a community that is probably largely comprised of Baby Boom Buddhists.

So a more social environment, and I think that asking this of Buddhists communities is huge because Buddhist communities in the West generally tend to be pretty asocial. I am not sure if it is because Buddhism in the West draws people who are inherently introverted and asocial and so that the results or whether the people come, they are social but then Buddhism or the meditation makes them a little bit asocial. I suspect it is the first, that people who are already a lit bit introverted and quiet, and you know, it is hard for them to be in community or work towards a community feeling. Those kind of people are drawn to Buddhism.

So unfortunately for Buddhism in the West, the very thing we need for young people is also probably one of the larger issues, or larger problems, that many people have complained about privately. Just a lack of social connection, and I am not really sure why this has been so hard for Dharma centers to do because it seems like people could just say, “Hey, let’s go have a movie night together” or something like that. It may be part of it is that that doesn’t feel Buddhist enough to like go bowling.

Vince: Right.

Sumi: But I think that even though it might be a secular activity, there are things that are happening through friendship, through relationships, through conversation that can’t be measured but are very powerful and very important to developing a spiritual path. So in order to create a feeling of belonging first actually form some communal sense through socializing.

And then the second part of that would be to help young people feel useful. Help them feel like they’re an important part of the community by asking them to do stuff. You know, it could be something as simple as like setting up the meditation cushion or ringing the bell. But I find that as soon as a young person actually has to do something on behalf of others as part of the center’s activity or the community’s activity, then they feel like they belong there. So I think if dharma teachers, community leaders are aware of this, and they simply say, “Hey, would you print up this flyer or would you post this around town or would you email some people you know?” As long as you are keeping an eye on facilitating that kind of activity, I think we are going to have a really good retention rate with their younger population.

And I guess this third thing I would mention about working with young people, the third thing would be that older Buddhists should feel comfortable to be themselves. And they really should not try to be cool, because it is often when people try to be cool, that they’re the least cool. This dharma teacher recently gave a talk, and she referred to “Spacebook”, which is a kind of combination of MySpace and Facebook, which instantly marked her as “uncool,” like she did not act cool [Laughs]. Of course, you know those people listening were very forgiving, but so dharma teachers should just feel comfortable being themselves probably because it is very hard to be cool. Even I at 34 don’t know how to be cool anymore. I like do not know the slang of the younger generation.

Also if teachers are authentic, I think that is where young people really make, where they really make the connection because when a young person is drawn towards Buddhism what they are really seeking is an experience of authenticity, especially in this culture where popular culture is sort of a dominant, visual and auditory experience. Young people are looking for something really authentic, and so it just won’t do if a dharma teacher is not authentic. So, authenticity is a really key element to helping a young person feel like, “Yes, Buddhism provides this feeling of connection. It’s an authentic connection to life, an authentic connection I have with myself, with the teacher. An authentic connection or feeling of spirituality.” So, in that sense, I don’t think dharma teachers need to revise the language in their dharma talks. They don’t need to dumb it down or simplify it. I think they should speak at the highest level possible because that is what young people want to hear, is authentic dharma teachings.

Vince: Beautiful. Those are great suggestions for any person that’s involved with a community I imagine. All of those things, from my perspective being younger, I would be really very interested in. So thank you for sharing those. I hope those suggestions are used.

As you were speaking, I thought maybe another flip question I could ask you, to sort of wrap this conversation up, would just be, if you have anything to suggest to younger Buddhists out there. Because I know we have a lot of people listening to the show that are younger. Are there any ways that they can engage with the communities that they are already part of, or the communities they may want to be a part of, but feeling they are a little outside of? Are there any ways young peoples themselves can contribute to this building of community and Sangha?

Sumi: Oh that’s such a great question. Yes I think so. The two pieces of advice I would give are first, although the Baby Boom Buddhists might look a little bit dull and uninteresting, and they talk among themselves, in fact many of them have been parents. And they actually know perfectly well how to relate to a young person. And sometimes if you ask them about heir own stories, they will tell you things that are far more wild and free than you as a young person might have ever thought possible. It might surprise you—they may look very buttoned down—but back in the day there weren’t any buttons to be buttoned. So for any young people to feel connected to the people they are seeing, I think young people should ask older people questions. And the best question is tell me about how you got started on the path, the path of the dharma? There can be a wonderful sharing. I have learned so much about how much how Buddhism was taken up in the early years. Not just from my peers, but from talking with many Baby Boomer Buddhists.

So that’s just one thing. And the second thing is that, if you as a young person go to a dharma center, a meditation center, and you don’t see any other young people, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other young people involved. It just might mean that they are not there that day. So I would go back a few times and try to find the few who might be coming in and out. And then work to connect with them, obviously email and the internet is the best to go with that. So it takes a little bit of searching, but I know that almost all dharma centers have a young adult population. It’s just—it’s not as visible. So you have to look a little bit.