Want to hear something weird? There is an ecumenical program at Stanford medical center- They are training religious figures in the community as counsellors for the sick and dying. So there are now Jodo Shinshu Buddhist (Japanese Buddhist) volunteers for counselling Buddhist patients.
The problem is the Muslim contingent doesn’t have a place to train for this program… so at one point they were asking the Buddhists to use their space. This seems like a weird philosophical question: If Buddhist dogma had an evangelical component (if preaching and converting people to Buddhism was a priority), the answer would be no, since you don’t want to help people enslave themselves to a deistic delusion.
But it doesn’t: you’re practicing Buddhism because it makes you more at peace with yourself and the world, NOT because some higher authority says Buddhism is “Right” and to not be a Buddhist is “Wrong.” What other people do is really their own business. So, the question boils down to one of overcoming xenophobia- do you let the people who are defined by a conflicting belief into your community? After striving to overcome the judgemental tendencies that are in human nature, do you then bring in a group of people whose faith not only believes that there is a “right” way to live, but also that YOU are in the “wrong”? And notice they ask the Buddhists and not the Hasidic Jewish synagogue nearby. On a postive note, the older generation of Japanese Americans, the nissei, remember all too well the experience of being rounded up into desert prisons and forced to give away everything they owned. Japanese American service groups like the JACL and Congressman Honda take this memory in a positive direction, protesting the Patriot Act and anti-arab racial profiling.