Most of my students are native Taiwanese, and traditionally Taiwan has looked to Japan as its role model when it came to Buddhist studies. During the last decades, however, the situation has changed and an increasing number of aspiring young local scholars proceed to the US or Europe in order to further their understanding and perfect their skills.
The aim of my course on recent advancements in Western Buddhology is to offer an introduction to the latest developments in the field of Occidental Buddhist studies. For almost ten years, I have been trying to expose my students at the Fa-kuang Institute of Buddhist Studies to a spectrum of material, topics, and views as broad and variegated as possible - primarily by reading with them relevant book reviews. A rare exception was the last term (Spring/Summer 1999) when we covered Richard Salomon's Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhara: The British Library Kharosthi Fragments which had just been published. In my mind, it was important for the students to get some feeling for the meaning of these newly discovered manuscripts.
Of course, not everybody doing research in the West has to be Caucasian. The first book we talked about this term, for example, Compassion and Benevolence: A Comparative Study of Early Buddhist and Classical Confucian Ethics, was written by a young scholar of Korean descent -An Ok-san. I felt the topic treated in the book which is based on the author's dissertation might be of interest to my students most of whom grew up in an environment still strongly influenced by Confucian values.
With the second book review we ventured into the Land of No Buddha: Reflections of a Sceptical Buddhist. Although this collection of essays is not so much academic in nature, its author, Richard P. Hayes, happens to be an active member of the scholarly community. Moreover, much of what he muses about in his book should be of interest to any thoughtful person living in the "New Dark Ages," not to mention those involved in religion or spiritual quests. You can find more about the work at the author's web site.
From the present, we turned to the early days of the teaching when artistic expressions of religiosity differed considerably form what seems the norm today. In her Absence of the Buddha Image in Early Buddhist Art: Towards its Significance in Comparative Religion, Kanoko Tanaka touches upon an important theme which is, apart from visual representations (or the lack thereof), also reflected in Buddhist literature. The Tathagata-jñana-mudra-samadhi sutra, for example, which was the topic of my Master thesis, begins with this very motif and I humbly feel some more research could be devoted to the whole complex.
Of course, the presence or absence of the holy can be treated from different angles, the philosophical being not the least And the next book we touched upon dealt indeed with philosophy -it was Jeffrey Hopkins' Emptiness in the Mind-Only School of Buddhism: Dynamic Responses to Dzong-ka-ba's The Essence of Eloquence: I. In order to balance this heavy intellectual dose, we then looked at Buddhisten in Indien heute: Beschreibungen, Bilder und Dokumente by Detlef Kantowsky which discusses much of what is happening in native Buddhist terms in present day India. This should be of special interest to my students in the light of recent "missionary" work carried out by Goenka and his followers in Taiwan. A delicate topic, but why not face facts?
The next two books we talked about dealt with topics related to Japanese Buddhism. Galen Amstutz's Interpreting Amida: History and Orientalism in the Study of Pure Land Buddhism centres around one of the Japanese schools, the Jodo Shinshu. To be more exact, it tries to show which factors played a role in the Western (mis)conception of this movement, and as such it is written in a rather critical tone. The other book, Japanese Mandalas: Representations of Sacred Geography by Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis, approaches Buddhist culture through the visual medium. The first thing the average reader associates with "mandala" is either Tibetan tantra or Jung's psychology but here is a work which shows the development of the mandala concept in a Far Eastern context and thus fills a palpable gap in our appreciation of the Buddhist heritage.
After so much material from Nippon, we turned to a rather different subject -the ancient Indian order of Buddhist nuns and its regulations. This topic has been thoroughly treated in Ute Hüsken's Die Vorschriften für die buddhistische Nonnengemeinde im Vinaya-pitaka der Theravadin. Though it seems to refer to a distant time and far away place, the topic of the role and status of female renunciate communities is today not only discussed in the context of Southeast Asian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions but is also of relevance to the situation in Taiwan where for the first time in Chinese history the order of nuns outnumbers the dwindling flock of monks by a wide margin. The ensuing picture has still to be sorted out in terms of its sociological, economic, and religious significance.
Still based on Pali sources but dealing with a distinctly different topic was the next book discussed -Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pali imaginaire by Steven Collins. Here the author tries to tackle the concept behind the traditional ideal of Buddhist practice. Following the track laid out in some of his earlier research, Collins approaches his question not from the simple viewpoint of intellectual history. He rather takes both Buddhist thought and the expressive vehicles of image and narrative into account arriving at a much more comprehensive view than mere philosophical discourse would allow.
From the earliest strata of Buddhism, our attention was drawn to later and latest developments. Donald Lopez' Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West is devoted to the task of analysing how the West came to perceive Tibet and its particular form of Buddhism. This enterprise parallels Amstutz' Interpreting Amida both in the "orientalist" coloured approach and the critical attitude. The field discussed, though, is rather different in terms of influence on the Occident. While the impact of Sino-Japanese Amitabha piety on Western Buddhists is negligible, Tibetan forms of the religion have been spreading quickly. This holds not only true for America or Europe, it's also the case in Taiwan. And while Western scholars begin to reflect in depth on the origins of the Tibet pictures in their mind, we still have to wait for the same to happen there.
Much valuable material can be found in collections of papers or articles, and the next two books which were introduced belong to this very genre. The scope of the first one was defined in geographical terms -American Buddhism: Methods and Findings in Recent Scholarship by Duncan Williams and Christopher Queen- while the second, Mandala and Landscape edited by Alexander W. Macdonald, dealt with space from a distinctly different angle. The studies brought together in both works expose the reader to many different voices and, as they vary in quality, offer a more representative picture of the realities of the academic world.
Some of the reviews we read discussed books which probe into the vagaries of Buddhism in the West, and "West" here very often simply meant "America". Thus it was a welcome change to touch upon Lionel Obadia's Bouddhisme et Occident: La diffusion du bouddhisme tibetain en France. The title is clear enough. And by employing sociological and anthropological methodology, the author chooses an approach markedly different from the bulk of more traditional text-oriented Buddhological scholarship.

After this excursion, though, we faced two more books which covered similar ground: The Faces of Buddhism in America edited by Charles S. Prebish and Kenneth K. Tanaka, and Prebish's Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America. One basically the outcome of a conference held in 1994, the other the fruit of a single scholar's decade long work in the field, both testify to the richness and complexity of old Asian traditions recently transplanted into the soil of the New World. And despite the "Western" topic they treat a number of points in them well deserve more attention form Taiwanese scholars, the changing notion of sangha for example.
And the final product of recent Western Buddhist studies which we covered this term dealt with a country which is, like Taiwan, an Asian island once heavily influenced by the Dutch-Sri Lanka, the "Lion Country" of the ancient Chinese, which by now for years has been making headlines with a cruel, protracted civil war. Some of the basic factors behind this conflict are broached in Buddhist Fundamentalism and Minority Identities in Sri Lanka, a collection of essays edited by Tessa J. Bartholomeusz and Chandra R. de Silva. Though the situation often differs in detail and Taiwan never regarded itself the bastion of Buddhist orthodoxy, the fate of Sri Lanka should provide any conscientious Taiwanese with much food for thought, especially in ethnic terms.
 

 

 

 
This page was last updated on January 18th, 2000.
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