Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism. (book reviews)

·期刊原文

Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism. (book reviews)

by Jeffrey R. Timm

Philosophy East and West

Vol.47 No.4 Pp.588-595 1997.10

Copyright by University of Hawaii

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Contemporary Buddhology involves the effort to develop strategies
for understanding, and moving beyond, the limits of Orientalism.
This effort arises in response to a realization that much past
scholarship arrogates interpretative authority to serve colonial
political agendas and Western elitism. just as material resources
and emerging markets have been exploited for economic purposes,
Western scholars have often exploited the philosophical capital of
the East," appropriating, rejecting, and redefining in a process of
cultural deforestation and conceptual strip mining. This process
reshapes the very objects of knowledge it claims to know. As
scholars of Asian philosophy we earn our living trading in ideas
about the Asian "other." But we are also collectively changed by
this process as the historical precedents and hidden agendas of the
trade become clearer.

The two volumes under consideration here contribute to this clarity.
Although their approaches are not the same, both are carefully
edited collections of essays that successfully and coherently
examine important dimensions of an increasingly self-conscious study
of Buddhism in the West. Both volumes address enduring patterns of
understandings that have shaped the field of Buddhist studies and
comparative philosophy in general), patterns that are passed on to
each new generation, patterns that are sometimes exposed as
inadequate as well as seemingly inevitable. Greater consciousness of
these inadequacies and inevitabilities deepens our understanding of
problems inherent in identifying Buddhism as an object of knowledge
that we then claim authority to know, and points to the necessity of
continuously modifying and refining our ways of knowing.

Curators of the Buddha, edited by Donald S. Lopez, Jr., begins a
project of formulating the cultural history of Buddhology. How has
Buddhism been understood in the West and why? in pursuing this
agenda, the reader is taken backstage, so to speak, and shown the
historical formation of what have become some of the standard ideas
shaping Buddhist scholarship in the West. These ideas are diverse
and often contradictory: that the text is closer to "true" Buddhism
than the contemporary Buddhist informant; that texts written in a
"classical" language carry greater authority than texts in the
vernacular; that there is such a thing as a Buddhist mind; that
Jung, perhaps, but not Freud, understood it; that Zen is
transcultural and transhistorical, not really a religion at all;
that Tibetan Buddhism is a corruption of earlier Buddhist forms, or
alternately, that it best preserves earlier forms; that Buddhism is
more rational, and less ritualistic, than other forms of human
religious expression; and that Buddhism has neglected programs of
socio-moral transformation or, alternately, that Buddhism has
developed a wealth of resources for such transformation.
A plurality of diverse Buddhisms is made manageable through an
opposition of self and other, implicitly according ultimate
interpretative authority to the West by pointing out the limitations
and inadequacies in the approach of the native exegete and
practitioner. Alternately, the "East" is seen as a field to be mined
for solutions to Western problems. in this view, Buddhism holds
answers to Western problems of human alienation, environmental
pollution, and so forth. These opposing perspectives continue to
shape the manner in which Buddhism is approached, understood, and
taught in the West, even as they are called into question.

Exploring the history of Western Buddhist studies -- which sometimes
denigrates, and at other times idealizes, the object of study --
suggests how deeply our patterns of understanding are wedded with
the colonial ideology of power, control, and exploitation. The
suffering caused by this repudiated ideology is clear, but at the
same time the conceptual framework of Buddhist studies -- a
framework that emerged hand in hand with the colonial enterprise --
continues to influence our approach, our efforts to know" Buddhism.
Moving beyond subtle conceptual manipulations of the "other" is a
complicated challenge.

Each of the six essays in Curators of the Buddha increases the
complexity of the challenge. Charles Hallisey, in his contribution
"Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravada Buddhism,"
reveals how early scholars like Rhys Davids operated within a
textual hegemony that begins and concludes with the presumption that
Buddhists are unable accurately to grasp the origins of their own
tradition. Unpacking the concept of "Greco-Buddhist" art, Stanley
Abe shows how cultural agendas and allegiances shaped the
formulation of our categories of understanding and our ways of
seeing Buddhist images. Robert Sharf establishes the danger of
exempting Zen from a hermeneutics of suspicion. Examining how Zen
was politicized in Japan, considering the influences of
Swedenborgianism and Theosophy in the life of the preeminent Zen
missionary D. T. Suzuki, sounds a cautionary note for any reading of
Zen that elevates it to some transcultural, transhistorical space.
Chapters by Gustavo Benavides and Luis Gomez reveal the Buddhism of
thinkers like Guisseppe Tucci and Carl Jung as ideologically charged
Orientalism.

Taken together, these essays caution us against decisive claims of
knowing in a field marked by "the uncertain combination of the
contempt and the longing" (p. 164), which positions "the Asian both
beyond and below the limits of European normality" (p. 210). But, as
Gomez points out in his contribution "Oriental Wisdom and the Cure
of Souls: Jung and the Indian East": "Suggesting how it could be
possible to encounter self and other without falling into either of
these extremes is not so simple a task" (p. 229). Pursuing this task
involves, perhaps, cultivating a deeper critical understanding, not
simply of the unresolved problems in the field, but of our own
motivations for engaging in the process in the first place. Directed
toward the progenitors of contemporary Buddhology, the hermeneutics
of suspicion may often challenge comfortable certainties we rely
upon as we proceed in our scholarship and teaching. Turning that
suspicion back upon ourselves is a daunting challenge.

In the final contribution to the volume, editor Donald Lopez takes
on this challenge by critically reflecting on his own experiences
and motivation as a "Foreigner at the Lama's feet." In this
concluding chapter, the most engaging and remarkable contribution to
the volume, in my estimation, Lopez contextualizes his work as a
graduate student pursuing dissertation research at a Buddhist
monastery established in South India after the 1959 exile from
Tibet. Situating his own motivations and experiences within the
rhetoric of urgency, he reviews the history of European ambivalence
before the lama by considering historical "penetrations" into
Tibetan culture by early visitors like the eighteenth-century jesuit
priest Ippolito Desideri, who sought to grasp the teaching of
emptiness as groundwork for his Catholic missionary effort;
Alexander Csoma de Koros, whose early nineteenth-century search for
the obscure origins of his Hungarian homeland marks the beginning of
the academic study of Tibet; and L. Austine Waddell, a
nineteenth-century British functionary, who gained access to the
"mysteries" of Tibetan Buddhism by allowing his Tibetan informants
to believe he was a Buddhist or even a bodhisattva, while he assured
his European audience that he was neither.

Of course, by the time Lopez began work at his monastery in the late
1970s, conceptual motivations had shifted. But, as his self-critical
reflection on his own research reveals, the legacy of Orientalism
was still very much in play. The dramatic 1959 exile of the Dalai
Lama from Lhasa, and the establishment of exile communities of
Tibetans in India, once again brought the mysterious land of the
snows into the Western consciousness with a renewed sense of
urgency. This culture and people, as well as the spiritual knowledge
they possessed, was now under the duress of Chinese colonialism, in
danger of being lost forever. Enter American graduate students and
their teachers to preserve Tibetan Buddhism for posterity.
ironically, the program of preservation is in a real sense a
demolition/reconstruction. The primary interest of Lopez and his
cohort was in so-called philosophy," and the point of access to that
philosophy was the texts," not practice, rituals, institutions, or
history.

Displacing the culturally antagonistic motivations of Desideri and
Waddell, who sought to show their own cultural superiority over the
limitations of "degenerate Lamaism," the mission now was to save the
knowledge of the geshes by translating, collecting, and preserving
it before it was too late. Driven by a sense of urgency and a
nostalgia for a paradise lost, or about to be lost, the wisdom of
Tibet is idealized against the degenerate materialism of the West.
This calling drives the effort to save Tibet's answers to the
world's problems, answers that would be lost if not protected
through the power of careful preservation -- a power possessed by
the Western scholar.

This cultural stewardship had a personal side; the collective myths
that guided the effort had a personal dimension that Lopez boldly
confronts. He writes: "Hence, my purpose was not to participate in
the life of the monastery but rather to take what I needed. And what
I needed was what the monastery judged its most precious possession,
the learning of its teachers" (p. 285). Today, with the hindsight of
twenty years, Lopez reflects on the hierarchy separating the
partners in this exchange, a continuation of the Orientalist
fascination/repulsion toward the other. The greatest living Tibetan
teachers, the most revered and learned, were now refugees, exiled
from their institutional and geographical moorings, living in
relative poverty, attempting to continue their traditions and
practices under the duress of difficult historical circumstances.
Enter American graduate students like Lopez, who now, twenty years
later, candidly writes: "I came to the former British colony
carrying rupees owed by the Indian government for American wheat,
rupees which I exchanged for his knowledge" (p. 286). With this
knowledge comes the credentials of the expert, the status of the
scholar and university professor, and with this status a place in a
bourgeois life with material comforts and security unattainable to
the geshes and their Tibetan students. After twenty years, Lopez
sees through some of the self-deception, the nostalgic
meta-narratives that shaped his motives. More of us should look so
deeply.

Recognizing the self-deception and the problematic stories is one
thing; looking beyond the past to envision a non-problematic
narrative capable of guiding our study is something else. This book
raises the important question of "whether or not there is available
to the Buddhologist a position of sufficient retrospect from which
to describe the category of Buddhology within the larger archive
which has been its abode ... " (p. 21). As these essays show,
Buddhist studies is a Western construction, heir to a colonial past.
But is there yet a viable place to stand outside that construction?
Perhaps, at most, we may cultivate a fuller understanding of how the
archives of Buddhology were constructed, loosening the grip of
inherited certainties and freeing the future of Buddhist studies
from a teleology dictated by the presuppositions of the past.
One such presupposition, perhaps no longer pervasive in Buddhist
studies, characterizes Buddhism as a quietistic, inward tradition of
meditating monks interested only in detaching themselves from a
swirling vortex of samsaric suffering. Anyone holding such a view
will find it soundly challenged by Engaged Buddhism, a volume
co-edited by Sallie King and Christopher Queen. Its nine chapters
provide windows onto some of the most important contemporary
Buddhist social activist movements in South and Southeast Asia.
Taken together these essays show a face of contemporary Buddhism
that is not well known in the West, a Buddhism that is actively
engaged in the efforts of social change, collective empowerment, and
political liberation. Change, empowerment, and liberation are
standard themes in the study of Buddhism, but these themes have
often been understood in the context of identifying the cause of
suffering, promulgating the dharma/practice, and achieving a
spiritual enlightenment. Focusing on the social philosophies and
movements of Buddhist leaders like Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Sulak
Sivaraksa, the Dalai Lama, and Thich Nhat Hanh offers another face:
Buddhism as a pluralistic dynamism directed out into a world of
social inequality and political injustice.

Displaying a coherence that is unfortunately absent in many
multi-authored volumes, each chapter considers a particular movement
dealing with three interrelated dimensions: 1) the life and career
of its leader, (2) the application of Buddhist teachings to
contemporary social realities, and (3) the social face of the
community. By surveying individual movements and leaders, Engaged
Buddhism builds its argument chapter by chapter, revealing the
conceptual interconnections among the diverse efforts of
contemporary Buddhist social activism.

In his own contribution, co-editor Christopher Queen maps out the
history of the Ambedkar movement for the liberation of India's
downtrodden untouchables, a lifelong effort of the architect of
India's constitution during the period spanning India's birth as an
independent nation. For Ambedkar, perhaps the most compelling
feature of Buddhism as a religion was that it wasn't Hinduism. Over
the years he considered the options, determining Buddhism to be the
only religion compatible with the ethical and rational demands of
contemporary life, yet professing Buddhism as his own, only six
weeks before his death, in a massive ceremony that included the
conversion of five hundred thousand followers.

Compare Ambedkar, whose eleventh-hour embrace of the faith points to
the ambivalence he felt toward all religious allegiance, with a
figure like the Dalai Lama, who is recognized by his devotees as the
current manifestation of Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of infinite
Compassion.

In his chapter on "Buddhist Principles in the Tibetan Liberation
Movement," Jose Cabezon succinctly maps out the contemporary social
philosophy of the Dalai Lama, a philosophy emphasizing universal
responsibility and global peace founded on principles articulated in
the classical works of Tibetan Buddhism. Central Buddhist principles
like interdependence, compassion, and truth provide the basis for a
social philosophy that extends beyond Buddhism, a philosophy that
claims global relevance and universal applicability. The Dalai
Lama's social philosophy, a "policy of kindness," may sound
simplistic or naive in the face of seemingly intractable global
conflicts and the complex demands of social activism. The vitality
of his social philosophy is revealed in the connection between
personal, socio-moral transformation and the traditional Tibetan
Buddhist approach to training the mind and the heart. In this view,
the personal, inward effort to change oneself, to become more open
to the world with all its limits, becomes a prerequisite for
establishing any meaningful social-political change. The two must be
pursued simultaneously. This may be seen as a powerful corrective to
the Western tendency to objectify social and political injustice,
approaching injustice exclusively as an external problem to be
solved through social engineering.

Additional chapters contribute insights into the Sarvodaya
Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka founded by A. T. Ariyartne, the
social philosophies and activism of Buddhadasa Bhikkhu and Sulak
Sivaraksa in Thailand, and the Vietnamese activist Thich Nhat Hanh.
In an effort to make the volume pan-Asian, the single window offered
on East Asian developments is a chapter by Daniel A. Metraux on the
Soka Gakkai, a wealthy mainstream movement in Japan with
considerable political clout. And perhaps as explanation of the
dominance of male figures in socially engaged Buddhism (the major
exception, of course, is the Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi, who
is not covered in the volume), Nancy J. Barnes' contribution,
"Buddhist Women and the Nuns' Order in Asia," gives a historical
overview of women's engagement in the tradition. Barnes' chapter
deviates somewhat from the format followed by others, but her essay
is an excellent response to the question frequently asked by
undergraduates in Buddhist survey courses, "Where are the nuns?"
As the individual essays show, the social activism of contemporary
Buddhism attempts to connect the development of the spiritual and
the social; the movement toward personal peace and liberation melds
with an intention to change the world. Despite the pressing demands
of local concerns, socially engaged Buddhism typically speaks the
language of universalism: world suffering and world peace. Directing
the power of modernity through education and communication, leaders
like Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama call attention not only to
the suffering of their own communities but speak of systemic
patterns in the human condition that must be changed if any movement
toward world peace is to bear fruit.

Recognizing the place for diverse approaches in understanding the
phenomenon of engaged Buddhisms, the introductory (Queen) and
concluding (King) essays are complementary but do not speak with one
voice. Mapping out a phenomenology and a history of engaged
Buddhism, Queen forcefully argues that there is no historical
precedent for the socially active Buddhism explored in this volume.
Without directly opposing this view, Sallie King points out that all
the movements examined appeal to traditional Buddhist principles in
justifying their emergent social activism. The central principles in
this justification are the Buddhist concept of dependent co-arising
and the rejection of an enduring, substantial self and the central
motif of Mahayana compassion. A view of Buddhism as unconcerned with
the material dimension of human experience, concerned with only the
promulgation of the dharma and the search for some quietistic
nirvana, simply does not follow from these principles. In fact, the
principle of the "middle way" directs attention to a path that
balances material and spiritual in a manner that might best address
the particular, local demands of engagement.

King reflects on the movements that have been charted by suggesting
their position on a variety of continuums like the balance of
spirituality with a materially concerned social activism, the wish
to engage/avoid politics, and the establishment/rejection of a
Buddhist identity, pointing out that some of the leaders examined in
this volume "see some circumstances under which it is useful or
necessary to take some particular form of Buddhist identity with
utmost seriousness, while at another time, in another context,
Buddhist self-negation may be embraced as the most useful or
appropriate" (p. 407). This practical flexibility with conceptual
thinking (upaya), including reflection on the primary question of
self-identity, is a hallmark of the Buddhist tradition and brings to
the emerging dialogue on global ethics a powerful corrective to the
presuppositions of autonomous individuality and enlightenment
rationality shaping most Western approaches to social philosophy.
Bringing uniquely Buddhist principles to bear on contemporary
circumstances of social activism occurs at a time of unprecedented
global interpenetration of cultures and ideologies.

Asking the question of historical origins, Chistopher Queen, quoting
scholars like Bardwell L. Smith, Richard Gombrich, Joseph Kitagawa,
and Gananath Obeyesekere, argues that "engaged Buddhism ... has not
been a typical pattern in the social history of Asia" (p. 18).

Looking to the cultural penetration of Asia by the West, Queen
identifies the missing ingredient: "the influence of European and
American religious and political thought ... on the evolution of
modern Buddhism" (p. 20). Following the logic of Obeyesekere -- that
social engagement is so alien to the history of Buddhism, its
emergence must depend on outside (Western) influences-queen
identifies "three exemplars" of contemporary, engaged Buddhism: the
American theosophist Henry Steel Olcott, Don David Hewavitarne, who
was a disciple of Olcott and Blavatsky, and the Indian untouchable
reformer Ambedkar. None of these "exemplars" emerges from within a
Buddhist tradition. Surprisingly, only Ambedkar, who was educated in
the West and who professed Buddhism as his own just six weeks before
his death, is discussed in either the main body or the conclusion of
the volume. Even then, he occupies the extreme limits of the
continuums mapped out in Sallie King's concluding essay.

Queen's identification of "exemplars" seems strangely consistent
with an earlier approach to the study of Buddhism. Like the early
twentieth-century art historian Alfred Foucher, who proposed a Greek
source for early Buddha images, Queen seems to suggest in his
identification of "exemplars" that only an outside (Western) source
could provide the impetus for an engaged Buddhism. Hence Buddhism,
regarded as essentially quietistic and world-denying, garners its
inspiration for social engagement from the West. Queen seems to
suggest that engaged Buddhism is not a cultural possession of the
Buddhist at all, but is in fact an Asian reflection of the Western,
Christian, Protestant self. if this re?ding is correct, it returns
us to the fundamental issue addressed in Curators of the Buddha.

To what extent can the effort to know the other move beyond
meandering in a house of mirrors? Trapped in a double bind, we claim
to know something about the other, but speak only in the language of
the self. Recognizing the absence of any objective place to stand,
but feeling a need to claim authority and knowledge, it is
surprising that more of us, discovering ourselves in such an
untenable position, don't give, it up in favor of growing vegetables
or building bookcases. But then again most of us who teach or think
or live comparative philosophy will want new books for the bookcases
and something to talk about over the vegetable soup. Both of these
volumes make an important contribution to the ongoing conversation.