Over time I’ve had several teachers and practiced in different traditions.
One of my first teachers was a Zen priest trained in Soto and Caodong. I didn’t stay with him because it wasn’t really what I was looking for. Then I met a teacher who had been trained in Jodo Shinshu as well as Soto and Rinzai Zen. I practiced Pure Land for a while, and it has always been the tradition that suited me most. I live in an area without much Buddhist presence, so I was mainly finding teachers who offered stuff online. The Shinshu guy was the first one I officially did the refuge ceremony with. But shortly after that I actually stumbled on a group in my area.
They were a Tibetan group in the Nyingma school. I practiced with them for like seven or eight years. But eventually my practice with that group hit a wall, and that along with various other reasons led me to looking elsewhere, and I began again looking for a Pure Land group. Still not much in my area, but nowadays there are way more online resources. So I’ve been keeping up with livestreams with a Vietnamese group in Texas. I really like the Vietnamese traditions, and there are a couple groups within a couple hours of me. I’m planning on checking those out and maybe visiting them once a month while continuing to follow the livestreams from the Texas group.
I really prefer the simplicity of Pure Land practice. Tibetan Buddhism tends to be extremely complex, and practices can be very intense, involved, and take up a lot of time. It’s normal for Tibetan lamas to want their students to do formal practice 1.5-2 hours every day. That’s waaaay too much. It had gotten to the point that I just didn’t even have a social life, let alone have time for organizing or being part of any leftist groups. Overall I really like Tibetan Buddhism, but right now the norm is for teachers to push a ngakpa-style study and practice.
Ngakpas are traditionally full-time householder practitioners. Like it’s literally their profession. They’re village priests. That doesn’t work in the West, because people are already working full time jobs, and to be frank, it upsets me that this is the norm. It isn’t the norm in Tibet. Tibetan lamas need to get it through their heads that everyday people do not have hours of freetime to spend on formal practice. IMO, Tibetan Buddhists in the modern world need to focus on concise sadhanas. Concise sadhanas exist and they can take 15-20 minutes instead of over an hour. They’re way more realistic for the modern world. But they’re seen as kind of just preparing people for more intense practices. And I know this isn’t just a problem I have had. I have repeatedly met former Tibetan Buddhists who switched schools because of the intensity and high expectations.
Unfortunately, many of the Zen groups in the West are highly watered down, and they often have similarly high expectations of long sessions of sitting. Theravada groups and Zen groups have also both been heavily impacted by colonization (read Esoteric Theravada by Kate Crosby on this topic).
Personally, I think Pure Land Buddhism is the most suitable for everyday people. It is simple, concise and flexible. It doesn’t rely on the same kind of hierarchical relationships with teachers that Tibetan Buddhism and Zen require. It is easy to learn and put into practice. In fact, it has become quite normal, at least in diaspora, for Vietnamese Pure Land Buddhists, for example, to just practice on their own at home while using online resources, like dharma talks on Youtube, to fill in the gaps. But most Westerners have been conditioned to kind of be put-off by it due to superficial similarities to Christianity. But a huge number of leftists in the world are Pure Land Buddhists. Most Buddhists in China and Vietnam, for example, practice Pure Land (most of the time these groups will be presented as Chan/Thien, the mainland form of Zen, but in practice it is Zen for the monks, Pure Land for the people, precisely because of the simplicity of Pure Land vs. the intensity of Zen).
Anyway, let me know if you have any questions. I’ve been really happy switching back to Pure Land. I keep harping on this, but the simplicity and conciseness of the practice has made it so much easier to just have a normal social life and engage with organizing and leftist groups in my area. I think it actually is more suitable to that kind of thing than the more popular schools in the West (Zen, Tibetan, even Theravada) are. It’s more democratic in its methods, and less reliant in a teacher, which is also nice because if you find out you’ve been following some horrible person (i.e. stories of abuse come to light), it isn’t as devastating as in Zen and Tibetan Buddhism because your practice isn’t so dependent on a teacher.
Oh hey, sorry for the late response. I don’t check lemmygrad often. I just wanted to touch on something you said.
There are entire Pure Land traditions focused more on Avalokiteshvara than on Amitabha. If that’s what you feel drawn to, then I think that’s great. I’d recommend reaching out to u/SentientLight on Reddit. He’s a Vietnamese-American (and ML) who practices specifically in an Avalokiteshvara-centered Pure Land lineage. He can definitely help you get started.