I am not a Buddhist myself, but I have taught American Buddhism for about a decade, and I must admit I share a certain disquiet about the direction boomer Buddhism is going. I teach religious studies because I believe that studying religion is a truly liberal art. All of the world's great religions provide profound challenges to the unexamined life. At their best, they offer devastating diagnoses of human sickness and radical remedies for it. They demand crazy things -- that we love our enemies, that we deny our selves or that we vow to liberate all sentient beings. At their best, religions are difficult, confusing and mysterious. They don't pat us on the back, assuring us that, in the words of a Buddhist bestseller by Sylvia Boorstein, "It's Easier Than You Think." In fact, they remind us that it's harder than we think, much harder. Like a Zen master stalking his students with a stick, they whack us back to attention when we fall asleep.

Boomer Buddhism, by contrast, is all too often shallow and small. It soothes rather than upsets, smoothing out the palpable friction between Buddhist practice and the banalities of contemporary American life, cajoling even the Dalai Lama to direct his great mind to small American preoccupations like "The Art of Happiness."

Almost four centuries ago, the Puritans came to New England intent on uplifting and improving Protestantism. By stripping Protestantism of all the last vestiges of Catholic superstition, by relying on the authority of the biblical book alone, they would craft a new and improved Christianity. Boomer Buddhists are modern-day Puritans. They too are suspicious of priests and rituals and other "traditional religious trappings." They too believe that America is a sacred place destined to perfect the religious tradition they hold dear. Virtually every "new Buddhist," including Coleman himself, seems to be carrying around a laundry list of the ways America is making Buddhism better. To take just one example, Lama Surya Das -- who, despite the name, is a white guy -- has a list of "Ten Emerging Trends" in American Buddhism. In the United States, he brags, Buddhism is "nonsectarian," "psychologically astute" and "simplified." Each of these trends is, in his view, an improvement.

What seems to be lost on the new Buddhists who populate Coleman's book is the possibility that it may be America's destiny not to make Buddhism perfect but to make it banal. It is, of course, far too early to determine what America's effects on Buddhism will be. The religion has been in Asia for two-and-a-half millenniums; it has been a force in the United States for only a century or so. So far, however, things do not look good. Philosopher George Santayana once observed that "American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native goodwill, complacency, thoughtlessness and optimism." Instead of preserving Buddhism, Americans seem intent on co-opting and commercializing it, dissolving a religion deeply suspicious of the self into an engine of self-absorption.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"