European Buddhist Traditions (original) (raw)

Buddhism in the Early European Imagination: A Historical Perspective

Acta Orientalia Vilnensia, 2005

Centre of Oriental Studies, Vilnius University The article deals with the main historical and cultural approaches of Europeans to Buddhism in various Asian areas. The intention of author is to turn to discussion of those peculiar forms in which the knowledge of Buddhism was presented. This study sets out its aim to explore the way of engagement of the West with the Buddhist tradition, emphasizing the early period of the encounter and those initial imaginative constructions and early discourses that shaped the nascency of the scholarly discipline. Conclusion is made that Buddhism has been represented in the Western imagination in a manner that reflects specifically Western concerns, interests, and aspirations. Europeans saw themselves as possessing the criteria upon which the judgement of the religious, social, and cultural value of Buddhism rests. Buddhism was constructed, essentialized and interpreted through Western images of the Oriental mind that provided ideological strategies ...

Why Do European Buddhists Meditate? The Practical Problem of Inventing Global Buddhism

Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society, 2023

Globalising “Buddhism” beyond its pre-colonial homelands was a complex practical challenge. Actors seeking to bring Buddhism to new audiences in very different cultures met with failure far more often than success until recent decades. Modern-era Buddhist missionaries to Europe had to experiment, selecting elements of Asian Buddhism that could theoretically be transmitted – ordinations, preaching, textual knowledge, rituals etc. – and attempt to institutionalise these as conversion mechanisms. This article uses the lens of Irish and British converts and sympathisers in Asia and Europe in the late C19th and early C20th centuries to explore the European situation – one with fewer Asian missionaries and different relationships between society and religion than those in North America. It explores the sources of their various versions of Buddhism; their organising techniques and repertoires of “Buddhist” activity, their audiences and how they defined “Buddhism” in relation to politics, ethnicity and colonialism. It argues that meditation (and “practice”) became central to European Buddhism because it solved a crucial organisational problem: what could Buddhist globalisers offer to turn audiences into Buddhists?

Early Modern European Encounters with Buddhism

Oxford Research Encyclopedia, 2022

Historians Urs App and Martino Dibeltulo Concu have argued that the European "discovery" of Buddhism as a "religion" can be dated to the 16th century rather than the 19th, and that the presentation of the Buddha as a philosopher by the likes of Eugène Burnouf is a secularized holdover from the Jesuit accounts of the 16th century. These claims have a tenuous basis, and Burnouf's portrayal of the Buddha as a philosopher was a radical break from earlier Jesuit accounts. Unlike the Asian Buddhists who preceded him, Burnouf separated the facts from beliefs and concluded the Buddha was a human philosopher. The essay explores the 16th-century Jesuit encounter with Buddhists in Japan and the accounts that were generated therefrom, with particular attention to the notion that the Buddha taught both an inner materialist doctrine and an outer moral one; it looks to the dissemination and development of these ideas in the 17th and 18th centuries, with a focus on the "African hypothesis" as it is found in various European savants; it turns to the 19thcentury "discovery" of Buddhism by the likes of Ozeray, Abel-Rémusat, Hodgson, and Burnouf. it then draws out the implications of the defense of Masuzawa and Droit's position given in this article for the field of Buddhist studies, particularly with regard to methodological issues.

Introduction Japanese Buddhism in Europe

Brill, 2021

A few decades ago, Buddhism in the West was a topic confined to an isolated enclave of dedicated scholars intrigued by the fascinating narratives of an exotic religion cross-fertilising a Western setting. Going beyond classical prescriptions of the nature of true religion and authentic Buddhism, the field has since evolved into a research tradition, focusing on Japanese Buddhism in the US as a specific sub-field.1 Europe has received far fewer Japanese migrants than the US, and Japanese Buddhism has therefore generally been less widespread, with fewer temples, communities and types of practices. This does not mean, however, that the topic of Japanese Buddhism in Europe is less relevant, or that Japanese Buddhism has not had both historical and contemporary significance far surpassing the number of adherents. Since the opening of Meiji Japan 150 years ago, the number of encounters between what used to be known as simply 'the East' and 'the West' has grown immensely. While Buddhism itself may not have played a primary role, the associated cultural and religious domains have had intellectual, social, cultural, aesthetic and material importance in a broader perspective. This special volume of Journal of Religion in Japan contains a collection of articles dedicated to exploring a field which has not yet been investigated comparatively. It is based on a conference at Aarhus University in 2018 featuring invited scholars involved in the study of specific European trajectories of Japanese Buddhism.

Introduction: Alternate Buddhist Modernities

2020

ncreased transnational communication and movement of people have globalized the notion of religion (Beyer 2006; Picard 2017). There have always been movements of people and ideas, for example along the Silk Road; however, the acceleration of these movements has been acknowledged through a differentiation between "thin" and "thick" globalization (e.g., Vásquez and Marquardt 2003). The process occurred over time, through European exploration, trade, and imperialism, but some scholars note that the peak was reached at the beginning of the twentieth century, before the First World War, when, "the extensive reach of global networks [was] matched by their high intensity, high velocity, and high impact propensity across all the domains and facets of social life from the economic to the cultural" (Held et al., 1999: 21). The formulation of the concept of "world religions," and the expansion of the list beyond Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and the miscellaneous category of Paganism to include other traditions by the early twentieth century (Masuzawa 2005), had effects on traditions around the world. Asian reformers, ranging from Anagarika Dharmapala to Taixu, Western converts, such as Colonel Olcott and Christmas Humphreys, and scholars, including Thomas William Rhys Davids and Max Müller, restructured Buddhism to

Dynamic Encounters between Buddhism and the West

East Asian Journal of Philosophy, 2024

Contents -Dynamic Encounters Between Buddhism and the West Introduction Laura Langone & Alexandra Ilieva 1-6 -Early Encounters With Buddhism Some medieval European travelogue authors offer first insights into a foreign religion. Explorations of an unchartered territory Albrecht Classen 7-24 -Declaring Buddhism Dead in the 19th Century The Meiji oligarchy and protestant mission in Japan a foreign religion. Explorations of an unchartered territory Tomoe I. M. Steineck 25-45 -Between Awakening and Enlightenment The first modern Asian Buddhist and the first Buddhist Englishman Iain Sinclair 47-73 -Sublime Disappearances Feeling Buddhism in late-nineteenth-century Western music Julian Butterfield 75-93 -Absolute Nothingness and World History Universalizing Asian logic as a world-historical mission Niklas Söderman 95-113 -Befriending Things on a Field of Energies With Dōgen and Nietzsche Graham Parkes 115-137 -Wabi-Sabi and Kei How Sen no Rikyū’s Zen-inspired ideas of human placedness and interpersonal respect enable a human-present world-harmonizing (Wa) within object-oriented ontology Jason Morgan 139-157 -The Question Concerning Technology A Japanese reply Tiago Mesquita Carvalho 159-187 -Madhyamaka and Pyrrhonian Approaches to the Skeptical Way of Life Christopher Paone 189-209 -Two Paths A critique of Husserl's view of the Buddha Jason K. Day 211-232

Buddhism in Central Asia III: Impacts of Non-Buddhist Influences, Doctrines

Buddhism in Central Asia III, Impacts of Non-Buddhist Influences, Doctrines, 2023

The third volume in this proceedings series focuses on two more of the six thematic clusters explored in the BuddhistRoad project, namely aspects of non-Buddhist influences and doctrines. The first part, “Impacts of Non-Buddhist Influences,” deals with the varied contacts between Buddhism and other religious traditions like Manichaeism, Christianity or Daoism in Eastern Central Asia between the 6th and the 14th century, and the influences these encounters had on Buddhist practices, materials and beliefs. The second part, “Doctrines,” deals with themes of inter alia Buddhist orthodoxy, transmission of terminology and the geographical instantiation of belief, yet both of the two thematic clusters are in dialogue with each other throughout the volume and thus reflect the lively discussions of the conference itself. Contributors include: Daniel Berounský, Michal Biran, Max Deeg, Lewis Doney, Mélodie Doumy, Meghan Howard Masang, Yukiyo Kasai, Diego Loukota †, Carmen Meinert, Sam van Schaik, Henrik H. Sørensen, and Jens Wilkens.