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Many Petals of the Lotus: Five Asian Buddhist Communities in Toronto, by Janet McLellan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 264 pp. $60.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-8020-4421-2. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8020-8225-4.
Asian religions have long held the fascination of the exotic for American scholars and intellectuals. With the rapid growth of Asian populations in Canada and the United States, though, what was exotic and distant is becoming local. Buddhism and other religions historically associated with Asia are now important topics for students of migration and racial and ethnic relations in North America.
Janet McLellan's book offers a detailed study of Asian Buddhist communities in Toronto, a center of Asian settlement in Canada. In the first chapter, McLellan, a lecturer in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, provides a historical overview of Asian Buddhism in Toronto and in Canada in general. Each of the five following chapters is devoted to the city's major national Buddhist groups: Japanese, Tibetan, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Chinese. The Japanese were the first of these nationalities to establish a presence, since Japanese Buddhists arrived in Canada in the late nineteenth century. They also experienced the most intense discrimination of these groups. Canadian Japanese were interned during World...