Whose Dharma Is It Anyway? Identity and Belonging in American Buddhist (Post)Modernities (original) (raw)
Related papers
Identity in American Buddhism (syllabus, fall 2022), Poceski
2022
Course description How are religious identities constructed, and how they intersect with other key identities, fashioned by diverse individuals and communities, within the context of modern life? The course explores this essential question via the lenses of the historical growth and ongoing transformation of Buddhism in America. To that end, it analyses the ways in which Buddhists try (or fail) to reconcile their multiple identities with the central Buddhist doctrine of no-self. The focus of the course is on the key processes of identity formation as important factors in the making of American Buddhism, and the complex patterns of interaction among discrete identities. Students explore the historical events and central issues that continue to shape the growing presence of Buddhism as an integral part of America's remarkably diverse religious and cultural landscapes, in relation to the ways individuals and communities fashion overlapping identities based on religious
he front cover of Buddhism Beyond Borders: New Perspectives on Buddhism in the United States is decorated with a flag. Not an American flag, as one might assume given the subtitle of the edited collection, but rather the Buddhist flag designed in 1885 by the Colombo Committee, a group of Ceylonese Buddhists, and modified by Henry Steel Olcott, the first " White Buddhist. " Although Olcott and the Protestant Buddhism he produced has generally been dismissed if not reviled by Western Buddhist scholars as inauthentic and diluted, he is still revered by Sri Lankan Buddhists in the U.S. who not only decorate their temples with the flag, but sometimes even include a statue of Olcott himself. The choice to represent the collection with a universal rather than national flag and the contrast in how such a symbol has been received in scholarly and practice communities signifies much of what is explored in Buddhism Beyond Borders. The text aims to expand both the geographical boundaries of American Buddhism and the theoretical parameters that have often defined its academic study. Hence it shifts attention from the bounded category of nation to the cultural flows of the transnational and replaces the static binary framework of traditional (authentic) Asian Buddhism vs modern (inauthentic) American Buddhism with a dynamic model that reveals/revels in fluidity, hybridity and multiplicity. In doing so, the collection also makes a compelling case for bringing the subfield out from the margins into the mainstream of Buddhist Studies by showing its subject matter is not a deviant from the norm but, in fact, exemplifies what Buddhism as a living, moving tradition has always done: creatively adapt, absorb and assimilate. As Richard Payne advocates in his Afterword, the text suggests the need to replace a rhetoric of rupture that emphasizes difference and opposition with a narrative of similarity and continuity that is more faithful to the historical complexity of Buddhism's spatial and temporal movement. Before reflecting on the text's conclusions, however, let's look further into its conception and content. The immediate origin of Buddhism Beyond Borders lies in a four-day conference held in March 2010 at the Institute of Buddhist Studies at the Graduate T
2009
Religious identity is oftentimes inextricably linked with ethnic and racial identity, and this is nowhere as clear as in American Buddhism. The "two Buddhisms" typology, a product of scholars describing Buddhists through a racial lens, has characterized American Buddhism into two different types: Buddhism practiced by persons of Asian ancestry who were raised in the tradition, versus Buddhism comprised of persons who choose later in life to accept and/or practice Buddhist teachings. While it seems that Buddhists raised in the tradition have a different understanding of Buddhism than those who accept Buddhism as adults, the language used has tended to emphasize the racial identity of adherents at the sacrifice of religious identity. What I propose, as a correction to the overemphasis on race in American Buddhism scholarship, is a model of denominationalism which will place emphasis on religious identity, while incorporating racial and/or ethnic identity at a secondary level.
2016
Over the last 20 years, scholars of Buddhism, including scholar-practitioners, have discussed the intersection of race, ethnicity, and religious identity in their scholarship on American Buddhism. The conversations on Buddhist identity also occur in popular magazines intended for public readership, in addition to scholarly discourse. But the presentation of Buddhist identity in both popular and scholarly publications is not typically the way Buddhists themselves talk about their identity. As a remedy to the gap in conversation between Buddhist and scholars of Buddhism in the United States, I propose using a set of terms that Buddhists themselves use, couched in the language of “traditions”. This shifts the conversation away from the historically racially-based categories, and uses identities that Buddhists themselves employ when they self-identify as Buddhists.
Buddhism Beyond Borders: New Perspectives on Buddhism in the United States
2015
Explores facets of North American Buddhism while taking into account the impact of globalization and increasing interconnectivity. Buddhism beyond Borders provides a fresh consideration of Buddhism in the American context. It includes both theoretical discussions and case studies to highlight the tension between studies that locate Buddhist communities in regionally specific areas and those that highlight the translocal nature of an increasingly interconnected world. Whereas previous examinations of Buddhism in North America have assumed a more or less essentialized and homogeneous “American” culture, the essays in this volume offer a corrective, situating American Buddhist groups within the framework of globalized cultural flows, while exploring the effects of local forces. Contributors examine regionalism within American Buddhisms, Buddhist identity and ethnicity as academic typologies, Buddhist modernities, the secularization and hybridization of Buddhism, Buddhist fiction, and Buddhist controversies involving the Internet, among other issues.
Paths to Enlightenment: Constructing Buddhist Identities in Mainland China and the United States
Sociology of Religion
How do national contexts influence the construction of religious identity in faith communities? In this paper, I examine the construction of Buddhist identities in two similar ethnic Chinese Mahayana Buddhist temples but in distinct national contexts, one in mainland China and the other in the United States. While both are Chinese Mahayana Buddhist temples, they have distinctive temple-level cultures: a strict culture in China and a permissive culture in the United States. Individual-level cultural frameworks also differ. In mainland China, the Buddhists learn their religion dutifully while their US counterparts critically explore religion inside and outside their temples. Relying on theories in cultural sociology, I argue that national contexts influence both individual-level cultural frameworks and temple-level group styles to produce different religious identities. This paper has implications for future studies that examine how communitybased religious identities vary according to national context.
• Review of American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity, by Ann Gleig
Nova Religio, 2020
In an engaging and comprehensive scholarly and ethnographic study of current trends in meditation-based convert Buddhist groups in North America, Ann Gleig attempts to answer McMahan’s question. Her volume reveals that central modernist features as outlined by McMahan and others (Baumann 2001, Lopez 2012)—such as privileging individual experience and meditation over ritual, the appeals to the rational and scientific foundations of the Buddhist tradition over its “traditional” or “cultural” elements, and its mostly white, liberal, and upper-middle-class audience—have become increasingly questioned across American convert groups. Modernity, Gleig concludes, can no longer contain these current developments that are better defined by its postmodern features, such as “its suspicion of meta-narratives of science and universalism; its reevaluation of religious epistemologies, practices, and communities discarded and denigrated in modernity and its celebration of difference, diversity, and hybridity; and its challenge to assimilative modern liberalism”
Buddhist–Christian Studies, 2021
The possibilities and challenges of combining Christian and Buddhist belonging, both of the natal and the convert variety, have been discussed most often within the paradigm of dual or multiple religious belonging. In the first section of this article, I will critically discuss the usefulness of this paradigm, especially with regard to the appropriateness of the term "belonging," compared to other terms such as "identity" or "participation." In the second section, I will survey some of the approaches within Buddhist-Christian Studies that have been put forward to make sense of Buddhist-Christian dual belonging. Finally, I will discuss some recent trends in the development of Buddhism in the West that suggest that the category of convert Buddhist belonging, which has mostly been used to describe Western Buddhist practitioners, is being superseded for many members of the younger millennial generation by new and unknown forms of engaging with Buddhist practices that even call the Buddhist tradition into question. The notion of Buddhist belonging (or should we say, post-Buddhist belonging?) may be in need of further reimagining, beyond the categories of natal and convert.