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The Buddhist Churches of America (BCA) archive collection is a world unto itself. The BCA collection(opens in a new tab), which documents the history (1832 to 2016) of the largest Japanese American Buddhist organization, now based in San Francisco, includes nearly 300 records cartons, over 120 document boxes, 60-plus flat boxes and panorama folders.
Among the 430 linear feet of materials are a series of photographs of California-based Buddhist churches with their congregants in the foreground, ministers' writings, financial documents, audiovisual materials and scrapbooks.
More than a bounty of text, image and ephemera that paints a fulsome picture of community life primarily anchored by Buddhist centers — though it certainly is that — the collection and its interdisciplinary array of potential uses and collaborations is emblematic of the Library's mission, of its literal and symbolic presence at the heart of the UCLA campus, and at the heart of the city of Los Angeles itself.
"This archive is ideally suited to bring together multiple programs and departments across the university in a collaborative research and teaching program," said Robert Buswell, recently retired distinguished professor of Buddhist Studies. "But beyond just UCLA, this archive project is also uniquely positioned to bring UCLA faculty, students and staff together with the broader Los Angeles community."
(opens in a new tab)UCLA Library Opens Access to BCA Collection
The BCA records are a central part of a broader Archive of Buddhism in Los Angeles, a UCLA-sponsored interdepartmental project Buswell has been working on since 2014. "This is the kind of material that you can use to tell the history of Buddhism in the West," Buswell said. "Did you know that L.A. is the most diverse Buddhist city in history? It's quite a startling thing to think about, actually."
Su Chen is the head of the UCLA Library Richard C. Rudolph East Asian Library, and she's the staff expert who was approached in 2016 when the BCA sought to transfer their archive. Chen was among those working with Buswell on the Archive of Buddhism Los Angeles research project, aimed at building an archive that engaged across the many and varied Buddhist traditions and languages active within the region.
"This is a huge community," Chen recalls, "but it was about to get bigger, because the BCA collection is a national archive, not a chapter or regional one, and it covers almost 150 years of history.
"I thought the BCA coming to UCLA Library was a great idea," Chen says. "But it was already housed at the Japanese American National Museum." By all reports, JANM took the stewardship and early forays into sorting the contents seriously, but they had neither easy nor cost-free processes of making the contents available. "I said, at UCLA Library, we do things differently," recalled Chen. "We collect, we open up, we preserve and we share with society — with everybody!
Lizeth Ramirez, a UCLA librarian archivist who focuses on Los Angeles communities and cultures, has seen the rewards of this open dynamic up close through use of BCA and countless other UCLA Library collections. "There are so many ways for people to access this collection," she says. "It's not just the history of the Buddhist Churches of America, it's also the history of Japanese Americans and other Asian Americans. Locally, it's the history of Los Angeles."
Ramirez, who is one of two librarians along with Dalena Sanderson-Hunter, focused on building and optimizing Los Angeles collections for teaching, learning and research, uses the BCA collection in her instruction frequently. There are also members of the churches who are still very active, and they're aware that UCLA has these materials.
(opens in a new tab)Preserving the Cultural History of Los Angeles
Collecting materials about the infinitely rich and layered history of Los Angeles is a priority for the Library, one that amplifies UCLA's deep engagement with the city itself. Ramirez has witnessed all kinds of people interact with the BCA archive, and although there's considerable excitement in academic circles, she says it's even more moving when local community members are able to discover their own stories within it. "You don't realize how much emotion comes into working in an archive when people do access these materials that can give them a direct link to even their own family that they didn't have before," she says.
Many of the pictures from the digitized collection commemorate events, whether it be the dedication ceremony for a new building or bell, a funeral or an annual conference — in many cases rendered all the more salient by modern forces of gentrification and development that might threaten historical sites and areas.
Mike Sonksen is a third-generation Angeleno, poet and a literary scholar whose own life has revolved around just such a congregation in East Los Angeles. "Around Southern California, there are dozens of Buddhist churches in the Japanese American community and beyond, and these spaces have become centers for festivals, Japanese language schools and community organizing for nearly a century," he says.
The new spiritual leader of Sonksen's Boyle Heights Buddhist temple is Kyohei Mikawa, who holds a Ph.D. in Buddhist philosophy, and speaks movingly to the fact that the gathering of intersectional histories at the Library, which the BCA acquisition represents, is rooted in the function of these temples as community centers that, as he says, is very much still ongoing in ways that "transcend religiousness." In fact, Mikawa keeps meticulous records of the community activities there to send to its sponsor foundation's headquarters in Japan — but more to the point, as he has been in the post less than a year, Mikawa describes the value of the oral histories the congregation's elders are sharing with him. "The history of this building has changed and grown along with the demography of this neighborhood and is always in my heart," says Mikawa. "And it's grounding for me to acknowledge every day that those who have come before and passed are still present with us, even in their absence, and we should not forget."
"It's why these archives are so important," says Buswell, "because this is the raw material from which future scholars will tell the history of a tradition. You can be sure that 50 years from now, 100 years from now, people will be looking into this archive for the source material through which to understand the early transmission of Buddhism into the Americas, and especially into Los Angeles. This is why it's so important that this material gets preserved now, before it is lost forever."
(opens in a new tab)Library Experts Accelerate Use of Collection for Teaching and Learning
Jesse Drian was a Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Buddhism Public Scholar at the East Asian Library from 2023-2024. Brought to UCLA by Su Chen and UCLA Chinese Buddhism professor Stephanie Balkwill through a fellowship offered through the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Drian spent the year at the Library in intimate discourse with the BCA archive. He points out that the granular detail and variety of the holdings "allows us to examine, for example, the photographs together with historical newspapers to better contextualize the event as well as the people and places depicted. Also, we can see how these events bring the community (sometimes the local community, sometimes an event bringing together scholars and researchers from across California, North America or the world) together in different ways."
Jean-Paul deGuzman, UCLA lecturer in Asian American Studies and the race and indigeneity in the US cluster, is also an ordained priest in the Jodo Shinshu Hongwanji-ha, a denomination of Japanese Pure Land Buddhism and the mother organization of the Buddhist Churches of America, as well as a member of the BCA's archives and historic preservation committee. Last spring deGuzman taught the seminar Buddhism and Intersectionality for the first time. "Buddhism is one of the fastest growing religions in America, yet is often characterized by misconceptions and stereotypes," he says. "I knew the time was right to use the BCA collection as a laboratory for students to explore themes of race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, war and memory through the lenses of Buddhists, and specifically Asian American Buddhists."
With the assistance of long-time collaborators Courtney "Jet" Jacobs and Jimmy Zavala from UCLA Library Special Collections, joined by Drian, whose knowledge of the collection deGuzman calls "irreproachable," he was able to bring his class to examine several boxes "bursting with history."
"Thanks to Jesse's dogged and detailed labor, students held in their hands priceless artifacts such as correspondence between the head ("bishop") of the Buddhist Mission of North American (the predecessor of the BCA) and the office of President Roosevelt in the months leading up to the forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese Americans," says deGuzman. Though mainstream society usually associates post-WWII Buddhism with the Beat Generation and writers like Alan Watts, deGuzman's students found in the pages of Berkeley Buddhist Temple's newsletter, "poetry and prose that was just as moving and philosophical as anything from the Beats. Students then wrote about the artifacts they found in extended research papers."
The Archive of Buddhism in Los Angeles, of which the BCA trove is such a cornerstone, is envisioned as a collaboration involving faculty, students and staff associated with the UCLA Center for Buddhist Studies, the East Asian Library, UCLA Library Special Collections, the UCLA Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and the International Institute, along with Asia Institute associations at UCLA (e.g., the Centers for Korean Studies, Japanese Studies, Chinese Studies, India and South Asian Studies, and Southeast Asian Studies, and the Program on Central Asia). Buswell recounts that they have also discovered important potential synergies with the interests of the ethnic studies programs and specifically the Asian American Studies Center, and further synergies on campus, such as with the Center for Oral History Research within UCLA Library, which has begun to conduct interviews with leading historical figures in the Los Angeles Buddhist community(opens in a new tab).
One of the strengths of the Library is notably as a multi-disciplinary, interdepartmental hub for Asian Studies. As Buswell says, "We have traditionally tried to always look at the intersections between traditions, not just at China, Japan and Korea in isolation from one another, but the ways in which they interact. And that's exactly what these archives do and why we are so grateful to UCLA Library for their stewardship of these materials."
Drian is the one person the Library singularly credits with making Herculean headway into the BCA archive's holdings, especially this past year. Professor Balkwill and Chen, who brought him to UCLA and to the Library for the express purpose of engaging with the BCA archive, described how, "since he is specialized in this area, Jesse immediately jumped into going through boxes to create teaching aids. I was so happy I'd found him!"
Drian's academic background is indeed in Buddhist studies, but within that discipline, he has become increasingly interested in the methodology of research itself, especially with regard to the challenges large bodies of information create for navigating collections and serendipitous discovery. "It's an immense collection that involves a lot of micro-level information about individual people and events," he says, "but the information can come together in interesting ways to help us see broader perspectives. How do we preserve the details of local history, local communities, individuals, etc. while also making it accessible (i.e., understandable) to those without sufficient connections or knowledge to understand the value of the micro-level details?"
The BCA has attempted an institutional accounting before, releasing a book in 1974 that detailed their history to that point. "We have that book at the Library(opens in a new tab)," says Drian, "and now we also have all the materials that were collected to make that book in the first place. So we get to see their internal thought process, methods and framing in practice, too." Sometimes it's clearly about local institutional history. And then sometimes it's photo albums of random events. "It's these mixes where different registers intersect and you see different sides of the stories."
Balkwill, whose own research and curiosity has spurred to imagine ways to incorporate the BCA collection into her classes at UCLA, recalls the magic of just one such scenario.
"I pulled a little photo book from one of the boxes which belonged to a monk who had traveled from Japan to Southern California and was later at an internment camp during World War II. It was photos of his journey, including people dressed in monastic silk robes on this big boat heading into California. In another box, there was a journal he kept while interned in a camp, including some of his poetry and his calligraphic writing in Chinese—as well as English. This was wonderful, because my students could actually see the personal thoughts of a practicing Zen priest facing persecution and incarceration. That was really impactful," she says.
But the story doesn't end there. This priest also did a lot of dharma teaching within the camp, so the journal included some of his sermons and notes for them as well. "My students had previously read all about the experience of internment for Japanese Buddhist communities in a book by USC professor Duncan Williams. So in fact, they'd already learned about this particular individual whose writings and photo-journals they then discovered in the archive. It was a wonderful moment where something they'd read about finally felt real."
2023-2024 Charles E. Young Research Library by the Numbers
- 442Group presentations
- 15,246Patrons who engaged in Library programs
- 5,261Reference sessions
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Hero image generated using Adobe Firefly(opens in a new tab) text-to-image feature; prompt editor: Courtney Hoffner. For more information, see the Library's guide: Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Tools and Academic Use(opens in a new tab)
