Shin Buddhism is a branch of the ancient Pure Land teachings of the Buddha who lived in India almost 2,600 years ago. For over two millennia, these teachings had spread all over East Asia influencing the religious life of hundreds of millions of people, shaping civilizations, culture, the arts and even architecture. As time moved forward, many denominations were created and the teachings expanded in depth and broad extent across the Asian continent. The Pure Land Way provided faith, hope, and a practical spiritual path for ordinary people. However, the teachings were considered the Buddhism for the masses, the simple folk, and thus were dependent on the tutelage of the learned monastic schools. It wasn’t until the 1200s when the first independent Pure Land School was created by Honen Shonin in Japan. Later, his student, Shinran Shonin, became the originator of Jodo Shinshu, known also in the West as Shin Buddhism. Jodo Shinshu means, “The True Essence of the Pure Land Way.”

Buddhism has been part of the American scene since the times of the Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and later with Henry David Thoreau in the 1840s. The first Pure Land Buddhists arrived in North America during the Californian gold rush in the 1850s. They were humble Chinese immigrants looking for a better life in a new country on a distant and exotic continent. In 1853, the first Buddhist temple was established in San Francisco. It wasn’t until 1899 when the first Shin Buddhist missionaries of the Nishi Honganji arrived in San Francisco. They sought to teach and share the Pure Land message to the newly arrived Japanese immigrants. Over time, the Shin community kept itself within the confines of Japanese-American community and their newly formed temples and centers became important vehicles of cultural identity and spiritual continuity over the next generations. The institution they created, the North American Buddhist Mission, became a vital place of refuge and support in the 1920s and 1930s during times of severe racial and religious discrimination created by the government’s Alien Land Laws and Oriental Exclusion Laws. Ironically, during World War II in the 1940s, when the entire Japanese-American community was imprisoned in internment camps throughout the country, the first major attempts to Americanized Shin were carried out through the creation of the Buddhist Churches of America (BCA) in 1944.

Due to the traumatizing experience in the Federal internment camps, after World War II, the Shin community kept itself under the cultural and religious radar for many decades to come. Like the previous generation, the more Americanized BCA wasn’t only a religious institution but an important ethnic organization to pass on and maintain Japanese cultural identity.

It wasn’t until the 1990s with the modern translation of The Collected Works of Shinran Shonin and other successfully published books like River of Fire, River of Water and later Shin Buddhism: Bits of Rubble turned into Gold by the foremost American Shin teacher, Dr. Taitetsu Unno, did Shin Buddhism begin to garner interest outside the ethnic Japanese community.

The North American Shin Buddhist Association (NASBA) was created in 2005 for non-cultural Japanese who wished to engage in the teachings of Shinran Shonin and the Pure Land Way within an American cultural context. We are an American religious movement inspired and lead by Senpai G. Lewis-Basitas; his innovative Buddhist Faith Fellowship in Connecticut had successfully “packaged” the time-honored teachings to meet the mind-set and cultural realities of North American 21st century life. When we say “American” we mean it in the continental and hemispherical sense that embraces nations from Canada to Panama, and beyond. Our commitment is to share the teachings beyond the English language as we are already proclaiming the Pure Land message for Spanish speakers.

NASBA members are dedicated to deeply and boldly live within the Shin teachings in existential awareness of our limited and foolish natures within the unconditional embrace of the Great Compassion. Understanding our historical role in the ongoing creation of a truly indigenous-based American Shin denomination, we endeavor to proclaim and bring alive the dharma with our generation and culture.

We are not affiliated with any foreign-based religious institution. Furthermore, we are not associated with the Nishi Honganji’s USA affiliate, the Buddhist Churches of America (BCA) or the Honpa Honganji Mission of Hawaii. Although we are a distinctly independent and native association, we have a very high regard to these Shin organizations and feel a deep gratitude to them for conserving and transmitting the teachings of Master Shinran Shonin and Mahayana Buddhism to the people of this hemisphere. Namu Amida Butsu.