Book Review: Ann Gleig. American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019 (original) (raw)
Related papers
• 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”
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
The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism
A Brief History of Buddhism in America, 2024
The history of Buddhism in the United States is one whose brevity belies its complexity. This chapter provides a survey of that history, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and leading up to the contemporary moment. It focuses on how Buddhists and Buddhist sympathizers have adapted and revised teachings and practices to create new cultural forms that can meet their spiritual needs. This tendency to adapt, revise, and collage Buddhist ideas and practices into new forms, this chapter argues, is not limited to the late twentieth century but is present in even the earliest American engagements with Buddhism. While the history of Buddhism in the United States coincides neatly with the transnational development of "Buddhist modernism," the chapter concludes with a short re ection on the prospects and limitations of the recent postmodern turn in American Buddhism.
Imagining Buddhist Modernism: The Shared Religious Categories of Scholars and American Buddhists
Imagining Buddhist modernism: the shared religious categories of scholars and American Buddhists, 2019
Scholarship on religion has often centered on the gaps between academic analysis and the self-understanding of religious people. In the study of Buddhism in America, however, many scholars and practitioners share cultural histories, material circumstances, and textual space. This article examines the nature of the relationship between particular academics and particular convert Buddhists to argue that they share a way of thinking about religion: perceiving a strong dichotomy between modernity and tradition, and a resulting willingness to take Buddhist modernist narratives at face value as descriptions of religious life. This normative modernism, along with reactions against it, leads to the collapse of descriptive and prescriptive discourse on American Buddhism. By contrast, scholarship that does not participate in the dichotomy between modern and traditional religion reveals a much richer, messier, and more accurate picture of Buddhism in America, and the Buddhists whose practices and self-representations exceed the boundaries of modernism.
A Critique of Western Buddhism: Ruins of the Buddhist Real
READ AT NO COST ON OPEN ACCESS: https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/a-critique-of-western-buddhism-ruins-of-the-buddhist-real/ What are we to make of Western Buddhism? Glenn Wallis argues that in aligning their tradition with the contemporary wellness industry, Western Buddhists evade the consequences of Buddhist thought. This book shows that with concepts such as vanishing, nihility, extinction, contingency, and no-self, Buddhism, like all potent systems of thought, articulates a notion of the “real.” Raw, unflinching acceptance of this real is held by Buddhism to be at the very core of human “awakening.” Yet these preeminent human truths are universally shored up against in contemporary Buddhist practice, contravening the very heart of Buddhism. The author's critique of Western Buddhism is threefold. It is immanent, in emerging out of Buddhist thought but taking it beyond what it itself publicly concedes; negative, in employing the “democratizing” deconstructive methods of François Laruelle's non-philosophy; and re-descriptive, in applying Laruelle's concept of philofiction. Through applying resources of Continental philosophy to Western Buddhism, A Critique of Western Buddhism suggests a possible practice for our time, an "anthropotechnic", or religion transposed from its seductive, but misguiding, idealist haven.
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.
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.