Imali Berkwitz was born into a Theravada Buddhist family in Sri Lanka in the early
1970s to S. Dabare and S. Dabare. She goes by the nickname of Usha, and currently lives in a beautiful house in the Ozarks. When I entered her house, I automatically noticed the interior decorations, as well as the archways and large open spaces within the house. She explained that the house was custom built to resemble her house from when she was growing up in Sri Lanka.
Imali’s religious journey started during her childhood in Sri Lanka. She explains in the time she was growing up, Sri Lanka was a very conservative country where 70% of the population claimed the religion of Buddhism. Other religions practiced in the region are
Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. She explained Sri Lanka’s prevailing blend of religion and culture. She grew up in a “strict family” of “good Buddhists” consisting of her parents, her two sisters, and her grandmother. The family that she was brought up in acts as a significant backbone for religion, playing a large role in her life.
Her parent’s biggest hobby was traveling, so she got to do a lot of that while growing up.
She reminisced about the different trips they took across the country, exploring the history of Sri
Lanka, as well as the different aspects of the Buddhist religion. As a family, she remembers visiting different temples around the country and partaking in practices such as offering flowers, burning incense, and lighting oil lamps, which are all special routines that they still practice today. She also recalls bringing Buddhist monks to their house yearly to offer almsgiving.
An important part of the Buddhist religion that Imali respects and protects faithfully is the
Five Precepts: refrain from killing others, stealing, lying, sexual misconduct, smoking, and using
Missouri State University Spring 2011 Religious Lives of Ozarks Women

2 alcohol. Adhering to the Five Precepts, as well as being a vegetarian, giving alms, and praying for people, puts her on the correct path toward reaching Enlightenment.
Imali has a master’s degree in education from Missouri State University where her husband is a religious studies professor. Besides Sri Lanka and Missouri, Imali lived in
California for eight months; Imali lived in London for six months while her husband taught in the Missouri-London Exchange Program. This is where their first daughter was born.
Her husband has been a significant impact to Imali’s spiritual journey. Although there has never been a time where Imali has turned away from her religion, she recalls her teenage years were a time in her life when she strayed the most. She says that marrying helped her to become a more mature Buddhist. Imali met her husband in Sri Lanka when he was there working to get his
PhD. She started to help him with his work by taking him to sacred places, translating things, and helping him become more familiar with the country and the religion. As their relationship progressed, Imali was still unfamiliar with his religion. This created tension because she knew that her parents had always wanted her to marry a good Buddhist. Not marrying a Buddhist would automatically force her children to become the religion of the husband. He brought his parents to Sri Lanka to meet Imali’s family. He proclaimed that he did, in fact, practice
Buddhism, and that his educational specialty was also in Buddhism. This made her parents happy, and they consented to their marriage.
Since then, Imali has felt a big responsibility about her religion, and her interest in
Buddhism continued to grow in order to help her husband with his religious practices. When they take trips to Sri Lanka, she likes to take him to places she visited while growing up. It is motivating for him to see the important and interesting sites that Imali saw growing up. They also take trips to slaughterhouses to try to save cows and chickens. I was very shocked when she
Missouri State University Spring 2011 Religious Lives of Ozarks Women

3 brought this up. She explained further that taking her husband to the slaughterhouses to see how they treat the animals caused him to stop eating red meat, a practice that she had done her whole life. She says that after she got married, she not only refused to eat red meat, she stopped eating fish as well.
I was interested in hearing about the transformation that Imali experienced while moving from Sri Lanka, where Buddhism is the predominant religion, to the Ozarks, where Buddhism hardly exists. She stated that she hasn’t encountered Buddhism here as she had in Sri Lanka. She states:
The problem is, actually, I don’t find Buddhists here. Sometimes I actually confront a
Buddhist from different countries, like Vietnam, Japan, and China, but Buddhism has two different schools [. . . .] We are Theravada in Sri Lanka, but the other parts, like Japan and Vietnam, those are Mahayana. So, I think the practice is really different.
She also pointed out that there are no Sri Lanka temples in the Ozarks; there are Laoist temples in Arkansas and St. Louis, but she finds those temples to be very different, and she is not that interested in them, mainly because the practice is different in significant ways. She goes on, saying, “So I find it kind of awkward. It’s difficult for me to live here because I don’t have a temple. But you don’t need to have a temple, honestly; I have a Buddhist shrine in my upstairs with incense and oil lamps, and I do those things every day.”
Three years ago, when Imali and her husband wanted to have a second child, Imali was diagnosed with cancer. She was put on the bed for a full year and went through aggressive treatment, which entailed six months of chemotherapy and another four months of radiation and surgery. After recovering, she went to a couple of gynecologists; each told her that she would not be able to have another child. Despite the news from the doctors, she kept wishing that she
Missouri State University Spring 2011 Religious Lives of Ozarks Women

4 would be able to have another child. She pondered what her grandmother had told her earlier in her life, that never killing anyone, never breaking an egg, and respecting the Five Precepts will help one live a long, happy, and healthy life. Imali wished to have another child, keeping in mind all of the positive merits she had performed throughout her life.
A few months after her recovery, the Berkwitz’s had their second daughter. Imali cherishes her kids and wants them to become good Buddhists, just as she is. She encourages them to not waste their food, and when they visit temples, they offer flowers and partake in burning oils. They also give to the poor and needy. Imali Berkwitz is truly living the life of a devoted Buddhist. Her optimistic outlook on life and her attempts to always help, pray, and provide for others rather than hurt them, has certainly benefited her when reviewing the karmic law and the magnitude that it plays in the Buddhism.
Missouri State University Spring 2011 Religious Lives of Ozarks Women