Buddhism in the Global Eye

Beyond East and West

John S. Harding, Victor Sogen Hori, Alexander Soucy, John S. Harding, Victor Sogen Hori, Alexander Soucy

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350283176
• eBook ISBN: 9781350140653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

Buddhism in the Global Eye focuses on the importance of a global context and transnational connections for understanding Buddhist modernizing movements. It also explores how Asian agency has been central to the development of modern Buddhism, and provides theoretical reflections that seek to overcome misleading East-West binaries. Using case studies from China, Japan, Vietnam, India, Tibet, Canada, and the USA, the book introduces new research that reveals the permeable nature of certain categories, such as "modern", "global", and "contemporary" Buddhism. In the book, contributors recognize the multiple nodes of intra-Asian and global influence. For example, monks travelled among Asian countries creating networks of information and influence, mutually stimulating each other's modernization movements. The studies demonstrate that in modernization movements, Asian reformers mobilized all available cultural resources both to adapt local forms of Buddhism to a new global context and to shape new foreign concepts to local Asian forms.

Part One

World Religions

One feature of modernity is that religion as a category came into existence. This process involved, in the first instance, distinguishing the religious from the secular. The religious involved human activities and thought that dealt with the other world, the supernatural, the numinous, salvation, and morality. The secular, on the other hand, was seen as the realm of human endeavor, focused on this world: politics, economics, and so on. Another major distinction that came about was the recognition that religion, as a category, grouped together cross-cultural phenomenon that dealt with these issues but in different ways.

The concept of “religion,” or rather “the religious,” in the premodern period referred almost entirely to Christian monastic life (Beyer 2006: 70–71; Calhoun, Juergensmeyer and VanAntwerpen 2011: 7–8). This meaning of “religious” still holds as one (though infrequently used) meaning of the word but has been expanded. As Christian kingdoms started to explore the unknown worlds, particularly Asia, they encountered and attempted to understand sophisticated systems of philosophy and practice (Mungello 2005: 77–106). As part of the Age of Enlightenment and the application of the burgeoning scientific process, they started to see beyond the myopic view of Christianity as the only religion. This entailed perceiving a range of phenomena that fit into a broad category of religion as well as the recognition that there were, in fact, several religions within this newly conceived category, of which Christianity was only one (Harrison 1990: 14).

The repercussions of this discovery, and the spread of this view to the people whom Western imperialists either subjugated or dominated in other ways, were that the traditions with which they came in contact started to assume this view and react to it. Beyer describes that these reactions were as diverse as the traditions themselves, and there was a multitude of voices within these traditions that responded to the emerging conceptual model of a unitary category called “religion,” which comprised a number of religions. Hinduism was born out of this process, bringing together a dizzying mélange of beliefs, practices, ritual experts and so on, under a single label. The fit has always been an uncomfortable one, as anyone who has tried to teach a course on Hinduism will attest. Nonetheless, we see today that the process has brought into existence the notion of there being a Hinduism, so that overseas Indian communities regroup themselves in this way. The emergent models for mapping religious identity can entail distorting or damaging consequences. For example, these recently invented categories of religious identity have been the basis for an, at times, alarmingly violent Hindu nationalist movement in India.

Buddhism was similarly brought into existence by this process, as Hori surveys in this section. The Buddhist reformers in Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were particularly invested in restructuring Buddhism to position themselves favorably in this new category. Portraying Buddhism as a respectable world religion imparted a rational and modern validity that could usefully defend the tradition from domestic critics while also fending off the onslaught of Christian missionary campaigns. Harding explores some examples in the promotion of Buddhism while problematizing misleading constructions of East and West in the representation and spread of the tradition. McMahan’s analysis of the similarly co-constitutive religious-secular binary elucidates a range of Buddhist reconfigurations including some that de-emphasize the religious tradition itself. The formative role of secularity informs all the studies in this section, from Hori’s investigation of the origins of Buddhism as a world religion to Soucy’s analysis of how Vietnamese women’s practices resist new Buddhist orthodoxy, shaped by secular influence.

Throughout, the globalization of Buddhism is intertwined with the recognition of Buddhism as a world religion, its restructuring in relation to this modern category, and ongoing developments through which dynamic forms and select representations of Buddhism navigate shifting influences. The chapters in this part move from the origins of world religions to a variety of global Buddhist examples while challenging assumptions about East and West, engaging the interconnection between religion and secularism, and analyzing competing Buddhist practices and conceptions that construct new models of authority.

1

Buddhism and the Secular Conception of Religion

Victor Sōgen Hori

Discussions about the modernization of Buddhism immediately run into a problem. In Asia-related academic fields, there is an East-West binary trope at work that skews the discussion of modernization. This is the Orientalist stereotype (in Edward Said’s sense) that depicts Asia as backward and the West as progressive. J. M. Hobson put it bluntly. In the study of economic development, he noted, “the West is generally thought to be the prime mover of the international system and of progressive economic development in the last 500 years while the East is demoted to the status of passive recipient of Western actions—whether these take the form of either Western largesse or exploitation” (Hobson 2005: 1). In this picture, to modernize is to Westernize.

In this chapter, I propose to set aside the East-West binary stereotype and instead view the modernization of Buddhism as a two-sided process in which both East and West mutually influence each other. “The West” is not a static entity (App 2010: xiii). The West, too, is constantly changing and evolving. In fact, it is evolving partly in response to stimulus from the East. Both East and West evolve in response to the other. Each side is “Other” to the other. This is a complicated story and to tell it, I suggest we focus on an example, the historical moment when Buddhism gained the rank of a “world religion.” To make possible this new category of “world religion,” the concept of “religion” itself had to modernize. If we track the evolution of the word “religion,” we will see that the encounter with Asia helped Europeans modernize their conception of religion.

“Religion,” “World Religion,” Secularity

Before the advent of empirical science in the sixteenth century, “religion” in its premodern meaning referred to the adherents of Christianity, Mosaism, Mahometanism, and heathenism (App 2010: 101–2; Masuzawa 2005: xi). The four were not equals. When Western churchmen and scholars used the word “religion” in its premodern sense, they were thinking of Christianity convinced of its supremacy and its exclusive possession of truth. They made no strong distinction between “religion” and their own faith, which they took to be “true religion.” “Religion,” in effect, was a class with one member. Christianity in premodern Europe provided an entire world view that included a historical account of mankind, a geography of the then known physical world, and a revelation from God bespeaking its divine origin. Premodern religion was also closely associated with membership in an ethnic or national group. The conviction that one’s group had the only true religion encouraged an attitude of intolerance toward other groups and their religious convictions. This was a time when a person could be imprisoned for avowing atheism or punished for holding heretical opinions. The bloody and brutal Thirty Years’ War, 1618–48, testified to the viciousness of the fight over religious difference. This premodern conception of religion persisted into the modern period. Even in today’s modern world, there are premodern voices, which equate “religion” with “true religion.”

The modern concept of religion, on the other hand, is a product of powerful historical movements. In the early sixteenth century, the Reformation made a sweeping critique of the Roman Catholic Church’s dogma, institutions, and social position. Protestants challenged the authority of the Pope and the intermediary role of priests. One relied instead on scripture and attained salvation through faith, not good works. Numerous Protestant groups emerged seeking freedom from both the Catholic Church and the state monarchs aligned with the church.

The Reformation overlapped with the scientific revolution. In the sixteenth century, Copernicus published his theory, which placed the sun, not the earth, at the center of the universe and thereby radically revised the European conception of the position of the human being in the universe. The revolution in science also created a methodology for making scientific discovery and redefined who had the authority to declare what is factual truth.

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment continued these developments. In the Enlightenment, Europeans idealized the rational and the natural. Human beings endowed with the power of reason did not need to rely on divine revelation and felt no necessity to invoke a supernatural being who created the universe. Rationality promised a way of seeing the world free of religious and political strife. The power of reason was natural, part of the original endowment of all human beings everywhere. People came to understand religion as a natural faculty of the human being, not a divine revelation given to humans by God. This implied that the term “religion” could be used in a plural sense and that religion could be understood as a general class with many particular religions.

Secularity is an essential part of the modern concept of religion. The word “secular,” however, can be used with different meanings. “Secular” sometimes indicates the complete absence of religion. For example, the secularization thesis claims that as societies modernize, they become more rational and less religious, until religion atrophies and disappears altogether. So too, when people advocate the secular separation of church and state, they mean that there should be no element of religion influencing the government of the state. The weakness of this interpretation of “secular” is that it is as totalistic and exclusive as the concept of religion it claims to modify. Just as premodern “religion” was associated with Christianity’s claim to exclusive possession of religious truth, so also this hard interpretation of “secular” seeks for the total exclusion of religion. The two, “religion” and “secular,” share an extremist fervor, both seeking to claim exclusive possession of truth.

There is, however, a softer understanding of “secular.” In this meaning, “secular” indicates the presence of religion but under a system of rights and regulation, which protects and regulates the expression of religious opinion. According to Roetz, this is what George Holyoake (1817–1906) meant when he first coined the term “secularism.” The secularist project is not “primarily a program of fighting religion . . . [but] rather a struggle for a system of rights that would allow the free expression of all . . . opinions” (Roetz 2013: 10–11). The modern concept of religion contains the element of secularity understood as the fair and open regulation of religious expression. In this chapter, we understand the secular to be that zone where a religion gives up its claim to exclusive possession of truth and concedes a place for the “Other.”

Starting in the fifteenth century, explorer ships set out from Europe to Africa, Asia, and the newly “discovered” Americas. The encounter with the Other in foreign cultures caused Europeans to question their own heritage especially when they examined cultures, such as China, which claimed to be just as ancient and civilized as the West. The East-West binary typically emphasizes how the West influenced Asia. However, Asia also influenced the West. Europe imported both material goods and philosophical ideas from Asia. The impact of the foreign Other on Europe was so strong that some scholars call the European Enlightenment “an intercultural phenomenon” (Roetz 2013: 12–13).

Tolerance for other religions was not always the case. In the beginning, the European Christians looked down upon “heathen” religion as primitive savagery and felt confirmed in their belief in the unique truth of Christianity (Hunt, Jacob and Mijnhardt 2010: 1–20). But where most Europeans emphasized their difference from the strange peoples of foreign lands, some few Europeans were impressed by the apparently universal presence of religion in these foreign lands, primitive though it may have been. In 1723–37, Jean Frederic Bernard and Bernard Picart published Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Religious Ceremonies and Customs of All Peoples of the World). This tome has been called “the book that changed Europe” because of its great influence in altering European attitudes to religions other than Christianity (Hunt, Jacob and Mijnhardt 2010). Bernard’s opening essay “Dissertation sur le culte religieux” did not distinguish between true and false religion. Under religion, it included every kind of worship (Hunt, Jacob and Mijnhardt 2010: 15–16). Picart’s illustrations emphasized what the savage foreign peoples shared with civilized Europe, not what made them different. He put together Inca sun worshippers with Catholics in procession, a Jewish synagogue with a Buddhist temple. The “analogies could only be unsettling to those accustomed to thinking of their own religion, or Christianity, or monotheistic religions more generally, as superior in their difference and separateness” (Hunt, Jacob and Mijnhardt 2010: 156). The book sowed the radical idea that religions could be compared on equal terms and that all religions were equally worthy of respect and equally open to criticism (Hunt, Jacob and Mijnhardt 2010: 1). The tolerant and respectful attitude toward other religions would develop centuries later into a modern conception of religion.

The Jesuits in China

In the mid-1500s, priests of the Society of Jesus—the Jesuits—began missionary work in Asia, intending to convert its peoples to Christianity. The Jesuits’ mission in Japan was shut down by the Japanese shōgunate government in the early 1600s, but the Jesuits’ China mission continued into the nineteenth century. A short study of the Jesuits’ China mission is extremely informative for several reasons. First, we see how knowledge of the East came to the West, how the Jesuits provided contemporary Europe with a stream of information about an Other culture, and how Europe responded. Second, in the Jesuit policy of cultural accommodation, we see Jesuit attempts to define secularity before the term “secular” had been created. Third, the Jesuits taught Europe about Confucius. We see that different European groups appropriated the figure of Confucius for quite different political reasons.

Not in the Bible

Through their translations and writings, the Jesuits created a place for China in the European worldview. The Jesuits made the serious study of local language an integral part of their missionary effort in foreign countries. They created in-house Latin translations of Chinese texts, the Confucian Four Books—The Analects of Confucius, Great Learning, Doctrine of the Mean, and Mencius. They used these translations as language textbooks for teaching missionary priests newly arrived in Asia. Over the years, these translations were revised and improved until finally they were taken to Europe and published in 1687 as Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (Confucius, Philosopher of the Chinese) (Mungello 2005: 82). The book contained a biographical essay, “The Life of Confucius,” and Latin translations of the Confucian Analects, The Great Learning and The Doctrine of the Mean. Translated again from Latin into the languages of Europe, the tome became a philosophical sourcebook for Europeans allowing them direct access to Chinese Confucian philosophical thought.

Europe learned about China on several fronts. The Jesuit priest Martino Martini published a detailed atlas of China in 1685. Other Jesuits produced books, translations, maps, essays, and letters. Although he himself had not been to China, the Jesuit priest Jean-Baptiste du Halde (1674–1743) collated missionary reports written by other Jesuits and created the 1735 four-volume Description Geographique, Historique, Chronologique, Politique, et Physique de l’Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie Chinoise (Jones 2001: 18–19). This became the standard reference work on China.

This newly acquired knowledge of China challenged the European worldview based on the Bible. In 1650 to 1654 in London, the Anglican archbishop James Ussher published a chronology of the Christian world based on Biblical sour...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Spelling Conventions
• Introduction
• Part One World Religions
• Part Two Global Flows
• Part Three Asian Agencies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright