Brighton – While families named Momii, Chikuma, Shibao and Motooka tilled the rich soils surrounding the city in the late 1930s, producing lush rows of vegetables, they also were devoted to their spiritual lives.
They used old tractors, plows and their backs to build a place where their large families could gather, meditate and listen to the teachings of Buddha.
“They worked hard all summer when they could,” said Mary Shibao, whose future husband labored alongside his elders for the cause. “He was 14 or 15 at the time, and he said that was the hardest work he had ever done.”
The Brighton Buddhist Temple was finally dedicated in February 1940, eventually serving some 160 members. But like Jodo Shinshu Buddhism nationwide, the number of worshippers in the Adams County area slowly declined, to about 20.
Those remaining followers – Japanese-Americans now in their 70s and 80s – will gather today for the final service.
The building is being sold to a local developer, and the temple’s gleaming Buddhist shrine – Onaijin – will find a home at the Tri-State/Denver Buddhist Temple. The stately wooden structure stands tall near Brighton’s downtown, surrounded by some of the city’s oldest buildings and a new strip mall.
The developer promised not to raze the structure, said Shibao, who believes its fate was sealed when interest in Buddhist teachings waned.
“We’re losing all our parents,” said the 79-year-old. “And the younger generation didn’t go to church like we did.”
Many children of first- and second-generation Japanese-Americans who followed this form of Buddhism have married into other religions. Others simply drifted away from its teachings, say church officials.
“Contact with American culture – one with little reverence for ancestral lines – has estranged young Japanese-Americans from the rituals and ideas their forebears transplanted into the ‘North American Buddhist Mission,”‘ says The Christian Century Foundation.
Buddha Shakyamuni, founder of Buddhism, lived and taught in India more than 2,000 years ago. He told his followers that mankind’s suffering was caused by confused and negative states of mind and that happiness and good fortune arise from peaceful and positive states of mind.
The City University of New York, in a national phone survey on religious affiliation, estimated that about 46,000 Buddhists live in Colorado.
The Brighton temple began shrinking in numbers and support over the past two decades, Shibao said. An annual beef teriyaki dinner, a Buddhist Sunday school and Japanese language school all took place under the temple’s roof but eventually were dropped.
“So many of us can’t even drive to the temple,” Shibao said. “We try to keep things up, but it’s hard.”
The president of the Brighton temple, 77-year-old Kenso Kagiyama, said “even the top officers can’t make it here a lot of the time.”
The Brighton congregation also was hurt by younger Japanese-Americans moving away from their farm roots to jobs in suburbia, said the Rev. Kanya Okamoto, minister of the Denver Buddhist Temple. “Farming is hard work and a lot of young people didn’t want to do that anymore,” Okamoto said.
Meanwhile, the burden of upkeep and other expenses is too much for the remaining Brighton followers to handle.
But Buddhism won’t disappear in Brighton, Okamoto said. Many members will now have services in their homes – intimate settings that reflect the quiet nature of Buddhism.
“For every ending,” Okamoto said, “there is the beginning of something new.”
Staff writer Monte Whaley can be reached at 720-929-0907 or at mwhaley@denverpost.com.
