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GenNext: Reborn in the U.S.A.

Sumi Loundon

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Recently I was sitting in a musty old church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, waiting for Jack Kornfield to arrive for an evening dharma talk. As I looked out over the packed pews, I surveyed the sea of graying hairs and found only a handful of young adults. Where were the rising tides of GenNext Buddhists? I had the uncanny feeling of sitting with three hundred versions of my parents: middleaged Buddhist practitioners. And I had to ask myself, When the baby-boom Buddhists are meditating in their wheelchairs, will there be anyone left to be my dharma teacher? Since then, I’ve been wondering where I, a 23-year-old raised for eight years in a small Zen community, fit into the grand scheme of Western Buddhism. Reflecting on the counter-culture my parents adopted in the early seventies, what am I inheriting from them and how is Buddhism in America changing in my generation?

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