“All About the Bodhisattva Ethic”: John Harding and Charles Prebish remember Dr. Leslie Kawamura
Dr. Leslie Kawamura, 2009
By Danny Fisher, Op-Ed: Shambala Sun
The death of the University of Calgary’s Dr. Leslie Kawamura this past week was a tremendous loss to the world of Buddhism; he was a rare person who played hugely significant roles in the development of both Buddhism in North America and academic Buddhist Studies on this continent.
I spoke to John Harding — Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Lethbridge, and a co-editor of Wild Geese: Buddhism in Canada — and our friend Charles Prebish — the recently-retired Charles Redd Chair in Religious Studies at Utah State University, and author of (among many other important works) Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America — about Dr. Kawamura and those pioneering efforts.
First, John…
John, would you say something about the Kawamura family’s role in the Jodo Shinshu community in Western Canada?
Their stories are connected to several temples including the first Buddhist temple in Canada east of the Rocky Mountains — this was the temple founded in Raymond, Alberta, in 1929. Rev. Yutetsu Kawamura was the second minister there and Leslie Kawamura was born in that temple in 1935. Remarkably, Yutetsu Kawamura was among the ministers who celebrated the 75th anniversary of this temple in 2004. He was in his mid-nineties then and had served at a number of other temples during the intervening decades—including in Hawaii and British Columbia. He had only just avoided deportation during the forced relocation policies of the early 1940s, but went on to be appointed to the Order of Canada and other high distinctions.
Rev. Yutetsu Kawamura was born and trained in Japan, but his memoir, The Dharma Survives with the People, indicates his innovative ideas calling for greater adaptation of Jodo Shinshu to Canada, including reaching beyond the traditional Jodo Shinshu community and fostering the training of Canadian-born ministers including those without Japanese ethnicity.
