Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism

·期刊原文

Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism

Reviewed by John Clifford Holt

The Journal of Religion

Vol.77 No.1 Jan 1997 p.180-182

Copyright by University of Chicago

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LOPEZ, DONALD S., JR., ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995. 298 pp. $45.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

A volume of critical essays analyzing the motives, assumptions,
interpretive devices, and legacies of scholarly paradigms produced
by nineteenth- and twentieth-century "pioneering" European scholars
has been long overdue in Buddhist studies. This book is aimed at
filling the gap and begins that process successfully. The initial
essay by the editor goes beyond its able introduction of the major
issues discussed in the six essays that follow: it also recounts how
hundreds of Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts from Nepalese monasteries
were first collected by an enterprising British civil servant, Brian
Hodgson (1800-1894) and then disseminated throughout Europe to
leading Indologists of the time, transactions that were to become,
in Max Muller's words, "the real beginning of an historical and
critical study of the doctrine of Buddha" (p. 2). What Lopez sees in
European efforts to have these texts translated and interpreted in
Europe rather than in Asia is an "ambivalence of trust and suspicion
of the native that would come to characterize the study of Buddhism
in the west" (p. 3).

Charles Hallisey's essay focuses on T. W. Rhys Davids's legacy as
"an inaugural hero" of Buddhist studies who privileged historically
earlier texts while neglecting vernacular texts, distrusted Asians
to provide authoritative interpretations, and characterized
"original Buddhism" as rationalistic and free from ritual. Hallisey
raises a series of problems overlooked not only by Rhys Davids, who
"essentialized Buddhism in terms of its pristine teachings," but
also by contemporary scholars influenced by Edward Said's
Orientalism (London, 1978), who often ignore a "heterogeneity of
interests" by essentializing Europe and the Orient as well. In this
context, Hallisey stresses the need for contemporary scholars to
look for relations between the West and the Orient that are not
simply inversions or negations but relations reflecting an
"intercultural mimesis," especially the "elective affinities"
between Western positivist historiography and Buddhist styles of
representation of the same time periods. He suggests that scholars
should ask questions regarding the manner in which selected texts
have been privileged by Buddhist tradition and how those privileges
are maintained.

Stanley Abe's chapter is concerned with how the orientalist
scholarship of art historians Vincent Smith, Alfred Foucher, Aurel
Stein, and others thoroughly aggrandized the significance of Greek
and Roman influence on Buddhist art, aggrandizements that at once
domesticated and legitimated the position of Buddhist art within a
European discourse on the history of world art, a discourse, in
turn, controlled to the exclusion of the native. Greek influence,
from this orientalist perspective, raised Buddhist sculpture
temporarily to a level of aesthetics "acceptable" to Western
standards. In juxtaposition to Smith, Foucher, and Stein, Abe also
notes how E. B. Havell and Ananda Coomaraswamy argued that Buddhist
art cannot be understood unless approached within the context of
Indian Buddhist intentions and spirituality.

Robert Sharf's essay, "The Zen of Japanese Nationalism," is the most
powerful and carefully crafted essay in the book. It focuses on
formative influences leading to D. T. Suzuki's popular presentations
of Zen to Westerners as the quintessential spirit of Japanese
culture. Sharf relates how Suzuki's articulation of Zen was the
product of how "true Buddhism" (Zen) had been portrayed in late
Meiji intellectual circles as rational, empirical, and the key
constituent of bushido (the way of the warrior), how Suzuki came
under the tutorial influence of Paul Carus's "religion of science"
during an eleven-year stay in Illinois, and how Suzuki's
characterization of Zen as "pure experience" was also inspired by
the "Kyoto school" philosophy of Nishida Kitaro, and later
elaborated by Abe Masao and the "occidentalist" art historian
Hisamatsu Shin'ichi. Sharf sees Suzuki and these intellectuals as
the vanguard of a movement whose "agenda was a species of
nihonjinron--a popular discursive enterprise devoted to the
delineation and explication of the unique qualities of the Japanese,
which invariably touts the cultural homogeneity as well as the moral
and spiritual superiority of the Japanese vis-a-vis other peoples"
(p. 136).

Gustavo Benavides's essay is an expose of Giuseppi Tucci, the most
famous European scholar of Tibetan Buddhism in the twentieth
century, and his links to Italian and Japanese fascism, links
especially evident in a series of articles written by Tucci for the
Japanese magazine Yamato. According to Benavides, these essays are
"Tucci's hymns to the military virtues of Zen" (p. 172). Benavides
sees Tucci's fascism and orientalism as emblematic of a deep-seated
modern experience of alienation stemming from a realization of the
limitations of the individual's will, a limitation that can only be
transcended, so it goes, by participating in the collective power of
the state.

Luis Gomez's thorough assessment of Carl Jung's understanding of the
"East," especially Buddhism, and more particularly yoga as it was
articulated in Jung's article "The Psychology of Eastern
Meditation," is an absolute demolition, despite Gomez's best efforts
to soften the blow. In citing Jung's unwarranted appropriations,
inaccuracies, mystifications, and confusions, Gomez sees something
centrally reflective of most European encounters with non-Europeans:
xenophobia mixed with xenophilia as the European first recognizes a
virtue and concedes authority, then appropriates that virtue while
concomitantly assuming authority, and finally distances himself by
asserting differences that separate him from the other. For Gomez,
this threefold movement "is what defines the Orientalist bias, and
the unavowed colonial stance, in Jung's writings on Asia" (p. 229).
Lopez's article begins by describing how the early
nineteenth-century Jesuit missionary, Ippolito Desideri, was denied
by Tibetan monks, despite repeated entreaties, an explanation of the
Mahayana doctrine of emptiness, how Alexander Csoma de Koros, who
had been seeking the origins of Hungarian culture and language in
Central Asia, ended up writing the first Tibetan dictionary, thereby
giving birth to Tibetology, and how L. Austine Waddell, a British
civil servant in Sikkim at the turn of the century, came to
characterize Tibetan Buddhism as a degeneration of "original
Buddhism" replete with superstitious accretions. Lopez then appends
an account of his own attempts during the late 1970s to understand
Buddhism from Tibetan monks in exile as part of his own effort to
answer a call to preserve a culture in danger of disappearing.

Within this autobiographical narrative, Lopez discusses the dilemmas
of the privileged and inquiring outside scholar in creating textual
commentaries out of oral teachings, the perils of appropriation and
objectification in so doing, and the inherent difficulties of
handing down the dharma from teacher to student and from culture to
culture.

As with most collections, some essays are more incisive than others,
though this one clearly reflects an attempt by the editor to provide
threads of continuity throughout. One might also expect to encounter
a fair measure of "grave dancing" in a book of this sort. There is
some of that, to be sure, but not enough to detract significantly
from the book's major contributions. There is no index.