Introduction: Alternate Buddhist Modernities (original) (raw)

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