To view the diacritics on this page, you must install the Indic Times font on your machine and have a browser capable of displaying the Unicode (utf-8) character set.
A Review of Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism
Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism.
Edited By Donald. S. Lopez , Jr. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 298 pages, ISBN 0-2264-9309-1 (paperback), $16.95
Prof. Lopez is probably the most prolific of editors in the field of Buddhist Studies today and this volume of six essays, in their various ways exploring the Orientalist motif, amply justifies its place on the shelf of anyone seeking to understand the manner in which Buddhism has been understood in the West, and indeed in its ancestral homelands, since the inception of its academic study in the nineteenth century.
Taking the contributions one-by-one, Charles Hallisey's "Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravāda Buddhism" concentrates on the crucial period of European Buddhist scholarship characterized by the endeavors of T.W. Rhys Davids, R. Spence Hardy, Paul Bigandet, and Adhemard Leclere. Hallisey suggests that the work of these scholars does not easily conform to the simplistic assumption that they were engaged in the Orientalist construction of Buddhism through the imposition of a "Manichaean division between East and West." Rather, their output should more properly be regarded as an "elective affinity between the positive historiography of European Orientalism and some [indigenous] Buddhist styles of self-representation." Much of Hallisey's discussion focuses on the contrast between the positivist methodologies adopted by the academic Rhys Davids and the work of the other three writers who, by and large, adhered to the customary categories of Buddhist scholasticism in their characterizations of the Theravāda tradition. Hallisey suggests that this lack of confidence with modern modes of analysis may have been because they felt themselves somewhat outside the mainstream of academic life. Having acknowledged this, it would be unwise to see Rhys Davids as a mere champion of a de-mythologized Buddhism for it is clear that many of his characterizations, particularly his neglect of cosmology and ritual, were already at work amongst his elite Sri Lankan monastic informants. Indeed, such currents cannot be laid simply at the door of factors such as "protestantization" for they were also at work concurrently in a Thailand essentially undetermined "by the presence of antagonistic Westerners." Additionally, Hallisey shows that the work of his chosen figures depended heavily on commentarial writings in vernacular languages even though Rhys Davids himself is generally regarded as the quintessential "Pali-text puritan." Hallisey concludes by suggesting that examination of the commentarial and sub-commentarial writings employed in this seminal period for Buddhist Studies would shed a good deal of light on the reciprocal interactions between European savants and Buddhists.
Stanley K. Abe's "Inside the Wonder House: Buddhist Art and the West" investigates "the genealogy of the concept of Greek and Western influence on the art of Gandhāra" and the continuing scholarly fascination with the concept of Graeco-Buddhist art from G.W. Leitner's invention of the term in 1870, through its full-blown appearance in Alfred Foucher's monumental L'art greco-bouddhique du Gandhāra, down to the controversy surrounding the exhibiting of a "fake" Gandhāran sculpture of a bodhisattva in Nara in 1987. Abe demonstrates the manner in which nineteenth-century art historians approvingly contrasted the "mysteriously Grecian touch" apparent in Gandhāran Buddha images with the "hideousness" of the features of the earliest Indian sculpted Buddha's. He also shows the extraordinary currency of terms such as Graeco-Buddhist, Romano-Buddhist, Indo-Hellenic, and the like, among those who found it inconceivable that Indian artists could have reached the summits of aesthetic achievement unaided. This dubious outlook, one ". . . best calculated to flatter the prejudices of European student and to offend the susceptibilities of Indians . . ." [Coomaraswamy's words], was only finally resisted by critics influenced by the antimaterialistic school of Ruskin and Morris, writers as diverse as Ernest Binfield Havell and Ananda Coomaraswamy. Nevertheless, the influence of the Foucher thesis is still present today, particularly in introductory works on the history of Buddhism. The essay concludes with a rather too brief consideration of the way in which late nineteenth-century quests for additional examples of putative Graeco-Buddhist art, particularly in the expeditions of Aurel Stein, were inextricably bound up with the wider political and economic contexts of the "Great Game." The unconscious motive here seems to have been that any expansion of the British sphere of influence could be more easily justified if a classical European presence in Central Asia was conclusively demonstrated.
Robert H. Scharf's "The Zen of Japanese Nationalism" provides a fascinating insight into the intellectual and political background to the work of Nishida Kitaro, DṬ. Suzuki, and other Zen propagandists traumatized by the rapid modernization and Westernization of their homeland during and after the Meiji period (1868-1912). Scharf traces the emergence of a new kind of lay, university-educated, Buddhist intellectual in response to government-inspired hostility towards traditional Buddhist institutions and ideas. Protagonists of the New Buddhism (shin bukkyo) tended to agree with Buddhism's detractors who held that, for too long, an unrepresentative monastic elite had strayed from the spiritual heart of the tradition preferring to dissipate their energies in petty sectarian rivalry. Future Buddhists were therefore encouraged to reject all degenerate accretions and embrace the "true" teachings of the Buddha; teachings that were characterized as modernist, scientific, cosmopolitan and socially reforming. In addition, the new Buddhists promoted a "romantic ennoblization of the Japanese character" more or less in line with official ideology. As such, Suzuki and his fellow workers shared many of the presuppositions of contemporary Japanese opinion-formers, not least the so-called myth of Japanese uniqueness (nihonjinron) in which a putatively introspective and holistic Japanese national character is contrasted favorably with the loss of self in meaningless activity so much a part of the Western personality complex. Sharf also shows that Suzuki's intellectual development was influenced by the emergence of a newly westernized Japanese university system but, most importantly, by Paul Carus, the German-born follower of Schleiermacher and UṢ.-based founder of the Religion of Science. Suzuki actually moved to Illinois in 1897 to work as a translator and proofreader on Carus' journal The Open Court. As a result of this exposure to Carus' protestant championing of the primacy of religious intuition, Suzuki came to view Zen practice, despite much evidence to the contrary, as providing unrivaled access to pure, unmediated mystical experience. This fact leads Scharf to accuse Suzuki of reappropriating "Japan from Europe as an exoticized object." Another important theme covered in the essay is the view expressed in Suzuki's Zen and Japanese Culture (1959), but also present in the work of Hisamatsu Shin'ichi (1889-1980), that Zen is the basis of all significant Japanese art and culture. The immediacy of these cultural artifacts are, unsurprisingly, directly related to the Japanese inclination ". . . to experience the world more directly than . . . the peoples of other nations"--another nice nihonjinron theme.
Giuseppe Tucci became the director of the Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente (IsMEO) in 1947, three years after the execution of Giovanni Gentile, "the official philosopher of fascism" and its first president. Gustavo Benavides' essay "Guiseppe Tucci, or Buddhology in the Age of Fascism" examines Tucci's work prior to this period, work by and large influenced by his arrival in Japan in 1937 to strengthen cultural ties between that country and Italy. The bulk of Tucci's output from 1937 until the end of the war is concerned with Japanese, and specifically Zen, spirituality and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Tucci ploughs a similar furrow to that found in the contemporary Japanese writing so ably characterized by Sharf in the previous essay in this collection. In popular books and journals such as Yamato, Tucci extols the spiritual riches of Japan, riches rather uncritically conflated with the nihonjinron currents of the time. A leitmotif in Tucci's work is the supposed connection between Zen, the ideology of Bushido, and the discipline of war. Here the immediacy and spontaneity of Zen experience are mirrored in the nobility of battle. Whether one is a Zen master, samurai, or future combatant preparing for the inevitable European showdown the existential logic is the same. Success calls for transcendence of the boundaries of the finite self. Only here may one find liberation from the "tyranny of time." In this way both Zen and war are means to escape from the "the cold rationality and impersonality of the modern age." It seems that Tucci's "heroic vision" underwent significant transformation at the end of the war and his later work represents a return to the field of Tibetology and a differently Orientalist appropriation of Buddhism, this time in the direction of an "Asian humanism." Nevertheless, the connection between Buddhist Studies and European fascism in the earlier part of this century is a curiously under-researched topic and Benavides must be congratulated for so clearly illuminating one small part of this much larger story. In this connection, Bhikkhu Nānajīvako's "The Technicalisation of Buddhism: Fascism and Buddhism in Italy, Giuseppe Tucci--Julius Evola" in Buddhist Studies Review 6/1 (1989): 27-38, 102-15; and 7/1-2 (1990): 3-17 may be profitably consulted. For parallel work on Germany during the 1930s, see also Helmut Klar, "Der Buddhismus zur Nazizeit" in H. Klar. Zeitzeuge zur Geschichte des Buddhismus in Deutschland, ed. Martin Baumann, Forschungsberichte No. 11 (Konstanz: University of Konstanz, 1995), 29-34, 101-8 [for an interview with Klar]. See also Martin Baumann, Deutsche Buddhisten, 2nd enl. ed. (Marburg: Diagonal 1995), 65-67; and more generally, Rainer Flasche, "Gab es Versuche einer Ideologisier ung der Religionswissenschaft waehrend des Dritten Reiches?," in Gnosisforschung und Religionsgeschichte. Festschrift fuer Kurt Rudolph zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Holger Preissler and Hubert Seiwert (Marburg: Diagonal 1994), 413-20; reprinted as [translated by Gregory D. Alles] "The Study of Religion in the Third Reich: A Report on Work in Progress" in Religion 27 (1997) [forthcoming].
Luis O. Gomez's "Oriental Wisdom and the Cure of Souls: Jung and the Indian East" assesses Jung's engagement, such as it is, with Buddhism and with the practice of yoga. Jung's interest in Eastern religious thought and practice appears to have been prompted by a ten-year "creative illness" starting with the break from Freud in 1913. His vision of an other-worldly, primitive, and ethereal East overwhelmed by archaic desires for union with maternal nature, in contra-distinction to the Westernized predilection for world conquest, an outlook shared by his friend Heinrich Zimmer, is much as one would expect from someone so heavily influenced by the tail-end of the Romantic period. Gomez notes that Jung is an "easy prey for the postmodern Orientalist hunter" and evidence garnered mainly from his 1943 lecture, subsequently published as "The Psychology of Eastern Meditation" confirms his "spasmodic and rather amateurish" approach to Oriental Studies. The lecture masquerades as an explication of the Guan-wuliangshou jing [Skt.= Amitāyur-dhyāna Sūtra], a Chinese or Central Asian text in the Pure Land tradition clearly based on the two Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtras. Gomez shows how Jung's "ambiguous tolerance" enables him to focus on the text's two introductory visualizations on water and the sun, in confirmation of his own theory of archetypes, while entirely ignoring the bulk of the Sūtra with its richly detailed depictions of Amitābha's paradisiacal domain. We discover that Jung's hermeneutic employs a threefold movement of "recognition, appropriation and distancing" from the central concerns of the text itself. However, and despite acknowledging Jung's desire to find verification of his own insights in Eastern thought, Gomez concludes on a rather upbeat note arguing that the inaccuracy of Jung's generalizations have, at least, become a "blanket blessing" for the Asian religious traditions in general.
Donald S. Lopez, Jr.'s own contribution to the volume, "Foreigner at the Lama's Feet" is the only essay that strays into the field of late twentieth-century Orientalism. Largely an autobiographical account of the author's own doctoral fieldwork/vision quest at a Tibetan monastery in South India, although with some reference to seminal works on Tibetan Buddhism by Ippolito Desideri, Alexander Csoma de Koros and L. Austine Waddell, Lopez highlights some of the practical and conceptual difficulties encountered by a foreign layperson wishing to gain "indigenous" insights into the forms of philosophy studied in the Tibetan monastic university system. One of the most obvious practical obstacles in Lopez' work was his informant's reluctance to allow the use of audio recordings. Interestingly, this was not because of any concern over the unauthorized dissemination of esoteric secrets. The situation was both more mundane and yet more significant than that, for in reality the Lama's prime concern is the embarrassment engendered by a badly fitting pair of dentures! In building up this picture of frustration, Lopez gently comments on the Orientalist coloring implicit in his own control of the text that emerged through an attempt to faithfully record, in full knowledge of the pitfalls, the commentarial utterances of his chosen informant.
The book is well produced by the University of Chicago Press and the editor has satisfactorily avoided many of the fissaparous tendencies that afflict collections of this sort. Each chapter is rigorously footnoted, a fact that the present reviewer found particularly valuable, although the absence of an index may be regarded as a minor inconvenience. All in all, congratulations are in order for Lopez and his collaborators in opening up and illuminating a much neglected and intrinsically fascinating historical phase in the Western preoccupation with the "timeless East."
