Nova Nirvana Buddhism Blows Into Nova Scotia And Changes The Aura Of The Maritimes. By David Swick It's a beautiful Halifax morning - breezy and foggy - with a latte and oatcake on the horizon. I'm sitting in our most popular café, reading a locally produced prize-winning magazine. The café is owned by a Buddhist and the mag is a Buddhist publication. The oatcake? Oatcakes have been enjoyed in Nova Scotia since the first Scot landed here. This one, the province's best, is made with a recipe from a California Zen center. The great religion of the East has found a new home on Canada's East Coast. No other city in North America has received such a huge influx of Buddhists and is so affected by Buddhist thought and practice. This is weird for two reasons. First, newcomers to Canada rarely want to live in Halifax. We get some people escaping Toronto or Montreal, and every year some native Nova Scotians quit the Diaspora and come home. But the foreign view of landing here was best expressed when a boatload of smuggled Sikhs came ashore, and one gentleman walked up the beach and asked an astonished local to "call a taxi to take me to Toronto." Second, Halifax is well known as a sleepy navy town and a certain mistrust of outsiders used to be part of the regional character, an attitude based in the steely-eyed rationales: If God wanted you to live in God's Country, you would have been born here. So when the first Buddhists arrived in 1979, all that most of us know about Buddhism was that it came "from away." Plus, the Jonestown Kool-Aid massacre had everyone talking of cults. Confusion reigned. Ron Wallace, Mayor of Halifax during most of the immigration, says he was "apprehensive" and "mystified as to why they would move here." A sign appeared in a window above a downtown store: Meditation Offered. Almost no one responded. Some of the Buddhists left town. And that, we figure, was that. They would join the ranks of those who were chased away - by our fickle weather, our long-meagre economy, the ease with which famous Nova Scotia hospitality can slip into plain old xenophobia. But not all the Buddhists left. In the mid-1980s, Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan lama and the group's spiritual leader, moved here shortly before he died. An inspiring teacher and brilliant character, Trungpa urged his community to give Halifax a try. He liked the energy of the place, he said - it was a harbor from the moneyfast craziness of life nearly everywhere else. After his death, some 500 of his followers came to Nova Scotia from Colorado, Vermont and other places. Almost all were white, middle-class, educated Americans. When they first encountered Buddhism, most were young spiritual seekers - hippies. Today, the Buddhists you see in Halifax are remarkably diverse. The connection to meditation and Buddhist teachings continues, but other than that they are liberals, conservatives and socialists; teetotalers and party animals; New Age believers and cynics. They are not a group geared to uniform thought. Some reject the notion that they are in any way a separate community. But whatever you want to call them, the newcomers have had some positive effects. There's a new energy, less pessimism and greater openness to untraditional ideas. Other forces had been building toward change, and the Buddhist invasion helped tip the balance. Now, with Nova Scotia's economy booming, the busy streets of Halifax are filling up with Buddhist-run businesses and organizations. The largest health food store east of Montreal is in a former Sobey's grocery store and the community's Shambhala Center is in an old hall that once housed the Knights of Columbus. The wonderful oatcake I'm enjoying was baked at the Italian Gourmet, a classy food shop co-owned by an American Buddhist named Kate Abato. Before coming Halifax, she had been a China analyst for the U.S. government for 10 years. A few blocks away several Buddhist organizations have moved into a historic building. They include the Nova Scotia Sea School, founded by Crane Stookey, a tall-ship sailor, Buddhist and former Boston architect. Every year teenagers cut down trees, build a boat , and sail it around the harbor and beyond. "I want to help kids grow up," Stookey says. "Boats and the water are a magnificent teacher." Upstairs from the school is Men for Change, a groups that writes curricula promoting respect and non-violence between the sexes, which are used in schools in more than 20 provinces and states. And on the top floor is the magazine Shambhala Sun, which appears on newsstands across the continent. Last year it won the General Excellence Under 50,000 Circulation Award in the Utne Reader's Alternative Press Awards. Buddhists run bookstores, bakeries, clothing stores and organic farms. The community boasts professionals and academics, even a golf pro. They have made movies and directed Symphony Nova Scotia. Celebrity members include jazz musician Jerry Granelli and This Hour Has 22 Minutes star Cathy Jones. Now that most of us have rubbed shoulders with a Buddhist or two - or dozens (more than 1,500 Nova Scotians have taken meditation training), fear of them is melting away. Any remaining antagonism is usually not because they are Buddhist, but because they can be louder, faster and shinier. That is, they're too American. But they are working to change this. They came here, they say, to become less gruff, less money-centered and in less of a hurry. In other words, to become more Nova Scotian, even to the point of enjoying fiddle music, stopping for pedestrians, and gathering in the kitchen at parties. It's been a remarkable marriage: We are learning to open our eyes and shed some of our fatalism, and they are learning to slow down and smell the mayflowers. If we share a symbol it might be this oatcake. David Swick is the author of Thunder and Ocean - Buddhism and Shambhala in Nova Scotia. This article was originally published in enRoute Magazine. This website:Copyright © 2000 Studio Q Int'l Inc / Urban Mozaik Magazine. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed in Urban Mozaik Magazine are not necessarily those of Urban Mozaik Magazine and the publisher cannot be held responsible for them. This website/publication, in whole or in part, may not be reproduced without written permission from the publisher.

	__________________ A sign appeared in a window above a downtown store: Meditation Offered. Almost no one responded. Some of the Buddhists left town. And that, we figure, was that. __________________
	__________________ Buddhists run bookstores, bakeries, clothing stores and organic farms, The community boasts professionals and academics, even a golf pro. They have made movies and directed Symphony Nova Scotia. Celebrity members include jazz musician Jerry Granelli and This Hour Has 22 Minutes star Cathy Jones. __________________