Defining Buddhism(s)

A Reader

Karen Derris, Natalie Gummer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781134937325
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

'Defining Buddhism(s)' explores the multiple ways in which Buddhism has been defined and constructed by both Buddhists and scholars. In recent decades, scholars have become increasingly aware of their own role in the construction of how Buddhism is represented - a process in which multiple representations of Buddhism compete with and complement one another. The reader brings together key essays by leading scholars to examine the central methods and concerns of Buddhism. The essays aim to illuminate the challenges involved in defining historical, social, and political contexts and reveal how definitions of Buddhism have always been contested.

Part I

DEFINING BUDDHIST HISTORIES

DEFINING BUDDHIST HISTORIES: INTRODUCTION

The engagement with the past is always a project in which present concerns and future aspirations loom large; history is constructed through the interpretive lens of the historian, Buddhist or non-Buddhist. The historian’s own theoretical and definitional understandings of history, the sources she privileges, and the values she ascribes to historical narratives for shaping the present and future all significantly determine the construction of historical narratives. Contemporary historians either reject or nuance positivist approaches to history, which proceed from the notion that a historical account can accurately define what “actually” happened in the past; instead, historians now generally acknowledge that histories, even of a “single” context or event, are always multiple and often contradictory and contested. Indeed, as some of the essays in this section suggest, different Buddhist conceptions of the past and its relationship to the present and future have the potential to alter and enrich scholarly notions of history significantly.

These general reflections provide a useful starting point for examining the ways in which Buddhists and scholars of Buddhism have defined Buddhist histories and historiographies. Orientalist and colonial accounts of Buddhism most often pronounced (and denounced) Buddhists as lacking a fully developed historical consciousness of their own tradition. Defining a Buddhist history therefore became the self-delegated mandate of these early scholars of Buddhism, who set a narrow agenda of uncovering Buddhism’s origins and the original teachings of the Buddha. The Buddhist history worth knowing—a history apparently unknown to Buddhists themselves—lay in the far distant past. As the articles by Charles Hallisey and Gregory Schopen in this section examine, this narrow prescription for defining Buddhist history has bequeathed a legacy that continues to influence contemporary historians, both within and outside Buddhist traditions.

Scholars have responded in a variety of ways to these early definitions of Buddhist histories. Some historians, led by Schopen’s foundational work, seek to deepen and enrich our understanding of early Buddhist social history by challenging Orientalist scholars’ almost exclusive reliance on textual sources, which, they assumed, best preserved the “true” Buddhism taught by the Buddha. Others, like Jonathan Walters, continue to investigate the canonical texts privileged by previous scholars, but rethink in fundamental ways how we might go about interpreting them. Another significant recent trajectory in historical studies of Buddhist traditions involves identifying and describing Buddhist models of historiography. Contesting the Orientalist dismissal of Buddhist historical visions, scholars such as Hallisey and Dale Wright articulate Buddhist models for understanding and constructing the past, and bring those models into conversation with the assumptions and approaches of modern historians. Underlying these varied approaches and focal points is a shared interest in recognizing the agency of Buddhists as authors of their own histories, and in understanding those histories in their local contexts of meaning. This growing awareness of Buddhists as historical interpreters of their own traditions has led scholars of Buddhist traditions to question their own theoretical assumptions about the meaning and value of history, and to investigate the sources of those assumptions. Scholars increasingly recognize and evaluate multiple models for defining history.

The articles in this section highlight the questions that have guided historical inquiry in recent decades, questions that ask how constructions of historical Buddhisms are shaped by explicit or implicit theories of history, as well as by the sources examined and the interpretive methods employed. Concomitant with such avenues of inquiry comes a greater attentiveness to the ways in which accounts of the past (whether Buddhist or scholarly) serve different goals and agendas in the present, and therefore to the historical locatedness of the very concept of history. As these essays demonstrate, scholars of Buddhism increasingly recognize the dialogical nature of the historiographical process, not only in terms of the dialogue between past and present, but also in terms of the dialogue between scholarly and Buddhist conceptions of the past. Each of these essays interrogates the assumptions that have long dictated the ways in which Buddhist traditions have been defined in scholarship, and explores alternative modes of historiographical engagement that emerge from a dialogue with Buddhist conceptions of the past.

Gregory Schopen’s essay, by calling into question the sources privileged and the interpretive methods employed in many scholarly constructions of Buddhist histories, illuminates some of the assumptions on which such approaches are founded. Schopen’s trenchant critique of scholars’ near-exclusive focus upon textual sources in defining Buddhist histories is supported by his argument that canonical texts are “faulty witnesses” to Buddhist history; in his view, texts tend to represent the normative ideals of the tradition, which are often quite different from the ways in which Buddhists actually lived. Schopen shares the perspective of social historians more broadly in critiquing scholarly reliance upon textual sources as having produced impoverished and inaccurate accounts of Buddhist social history. According to Schopen, these textually based accounts reveal more about the assumptions of Western scholars than they do about the history of Buddhism; an unacknowledged Protestant bias rooted in the Reformation informs the notion that the history of religions is to be found in texts rather than in the evidence of material culture, such as inscriptions, architecture, or art. These alternative sources for history have either been ignored by historians or interpreted so as to support the vision of a Buddhist past derived from textual sources. As a result, historians have produced a distorted vision of Buddhist history, ascribing the ideals of the small monastic elite who authored and preserved the canonical texts to all Buddhists rather than investigating the ways in which the vast majority of Buddhists lived. An ethical charge is implicit in Schopen’s argument: scholarly definitions of Buddhist history have largely erased the presence of Buddhists from constructions of the past.

By positing a significant disjuncture between lived Buddhism and the normative Buddhism articulated in textual sources, Schopen neither intends to dismiss the canon as irrelevant, nor to represent actual Buddhists as degenerate and at odds with their own tradition. Rather, he seeks to broaden both our conceptions of Buddhism and the sources that we draw upon in order to engage with early Buddhist traditions in all their complexity. Schopen’s work represents just such a complicated history, in which Buddhists lived according to varied and frequently contradictory agendas that were often in tension with the normative ideals prescribed in the textual corpus.

Jonathan Walters shares Schopen’s concern to shift the focus of historical inquiry to the thought and practice of actual Buddhist communities, and concurs with Schopen’s critique of reading canonical texts as transparent accounts of early Buddhist history. Walters, however, argues that canonical sources remain an important resource for defining Buddhist histories—if they are approached through more nuanced and productive interpretive questions. These framing questions effect a movement from a notion of suttas (Sanskrit: sūtras) as straightforward historical accounts to a much more complex vision of suttas as texts that possess their own histories, and that should therefore be viewed as “actions within the sociohistorical circumstances of their production rather than as passive transmitters of neutral information” (133). Rejecting a conception of suttas as static entities that are products of a single historical context, Walters explores the potential for constructing a multilayered history of any text constituted by a complex readership, process of composition, and material transmission.

Walters seeks to deepen our understanding of suttas as dynamic evidence of the ways in which Buddhist self-representations evolve through time by proposing four different “modes” of interpretation. Each of these interpretive strategies (described in detail by Walters) poses a different set of questions and illuminates different aspects of a text’s history, as Walters clearly illustrates through close readings of a single sutta. Walters sees value in each of these approaches, and especially in the multifaceted history that emerges through their combination. He finds particular potential in “later reading mode,” which asks how subsequent Buddhists interpreted and augmented the texts they inherited. The result of this mode of inquiry is a history of reading, one that significantly challenges historians’ predilection to project the motivations and assumptions of modern historiography onto the composers and historical interpreters of the suttas. “Later reading mode” necessitates that historians consider instead how Buddhists engaged with their own canonical tradition according to agendas that emerged from their own sociohistorical circumstances. Such an approach privileges the agency both of Buddhists and of the suttas themselves in the process of defining Buddhist pasts. This approach toward the study of history thus emphasizes the dialogical relationship between the histories produced by scholars and Buddhist engagements with the past: the historian begins from the assumption that the textual history that matters is the history of how Buddhists themselves have interpreted, valued, and lived in relation to the past embodied in their literary inheritance.

These varied modes of interpretation take us very far from the reductionistc vision of a sutta as merely a historical record of its moment of origin; Walters enables us to understand suttas as embedded in and evolving with the cultural worlds that produce, read, interpret, and preserve them. This complex history of suttas proves significantly richer and more illuminating than the pale shreds of history putatively preserved within suttas.

Like Schopen, Walters aims to construct a history of Buddhism that accounts for the complex ways Buddhists have engaged with and continually redefined their own traditions. But if Schopen argues that Buddhists accomplished this in spite of the normative prescriptions dictated in suttas and other canonical texts, Walters argues that suttas were fertile sites for the production of meaning by Buddhists who actively participated in constructing the vision of Buddhism portrayed in their textual traditions. Taken together, these essays challenge core assumptions that have guided previous studies of Buddhist history, and offer fruitful avenues for future inquiry, avenues that privilege the agency of Buddhists in defining their own tradition. The remaining two essays in this section reflect more explicitly on how Buddhist modes of engagement with the past could shape—and have already shaped—the scholarly construction of Buddhist histories.

Dale Wright’s study seeks to illuminate the theory of history implicit in an early eleventh-century Chan Buddhist transmission text, and to generate a dialogue between that theory of history and contemporary historiographical practices and assumptions. Through his examination of the structure, terms, and metaphors employed in the text, Wright constructs a model of Chan historical awareness in which putatively ahistorical enlightenment experiences are narrated in chronological sequence and situated within particular times and places. Hagiographical accounts of an unbroken lineage of enlightened masters, beginning with the ancient Buddhas and continuing through Indian and Chinese masters, employ familial terminology and genealogical metaphors to establish ongoing relationships and obligations between the past, present, and future generations of the Chan tradition as they trace the ongoing transmission of enlightenment from one generation to the next. By contextualizing awakening experiences within particular historical moments, the transmission text renders those experiences tangible and meaningful for the self-understanding of the heirs of the tradition. Wright argues that this historicization of the transmission of awakening must be placed alongside, and used to evaluate, the Chan and Zen rhetoric of timelessness that has captured the attention of scholars and contributed to the representation of Chan as a tradition lacking a developed sense of history. To the contrary, Wright suggests, the narratives of awakened masters were constitutive of a Chan understanding of the tradition through time. These narratives also enabled Chan practitioners to strive for enlightenment, an experience described as transcending time, by patterning their lives on the temporally embedded accounts of their lineage ancestors. Wright argues for recognizing this narrative form as a kind of history, albeit a history founded on very different priorities and theoretical assumptions than the histories produced by scholars in the modern West.

Wright proposes that Chan and Western historiographical traditions have much to learn from one another, and seeks to initiate a dialogue between the two. The Chan model of history differs radically in both form and function from modern Western notions of history; Wright highlights in particular the relationship of the historian to the past he recounts. Chan historians envisioned the past as dynamically engaged with the present; the active exchange between past and present allowed for the revision of historical narratives to suit the understanding and needs of the historian’s present context. At the same time, the ongoing revision of an idealized past in light of the present precludes a critical engagement with the past. By contrast, Wright suggests, much of modern Western historiography proceeds from the assumption of a rupture between past and present that enables an “objective” and disinterested representation of the past. While this distancing of the historian from her object of study permits a critical engagement with the past, it does not facilitate the use of the past to critique and inform the present. Indeed, Wright contends that comparison with the Chan historiographical tradition reveals the degree to which modern historians “assume the universality and noncontextual truth of their own modern ideas and practices of historiography” (89). Wright challenges scholars not only to take seriously the Chan affirmation of the past as a valuable resource for the present, but also to recognize the historicity of their own notions of history, re-examining and perhaps altering their practices as a result.

Wright urges us to engage with Buddhist historiographical practices; Charles Hallisey demonstrates that Buddhist visions of the past have already influenced Western scholarship. Hallisey’s influential study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship on Theravāda Buddhism challenges the assumed division between “Western” and “Buddhist” accounts of the past. His work not only significantly enhances our understanding of the complex processes by which Orientalist representations of Buddhist traditions were constructed, but also proposes alternative approaches to the history of Buddhism that emerge from the Orientalist encounter with Buddhism. Inspired by Edward Said’s mandate that the scholar must be ever vigilant in the face of received ideas, Hallisey constructs a nuanced history of the methods, sources, and priorities of early Western scholars, whose definitions of “Buddhism” still constitute a complicated inheritance for scholars today.

Hallisey concurs with those who critique Orientalist scholars’ essentialist representations of a “pure” Buddhism of the past in relation to which the lived Buddhist traditions that these scholars encountered were deemed degenerate, but his approach takes us in an important new direction by investigating the ways in which Orientalist scholars (some of whom were colonial officers in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia) were influenced by the modern Buddhists and Buddhist traditions that some scholars denigrated. Hallisey questions the assumption of an unbridgeable divide between “West” and “Orient,” a paradigm he identifies as still operative in post-Orientalist critiques of the West, and seeks instead to “develop more nuanced accounts of the interactions between Europeans and non-Europeans, ones which are able to avoid a Manichaean division between East and West and remind us that cultures are not only different but connected” (94). Hallisey demonstrates such connections by illuminating the mutual interaction and transformation of scholarly and Buddhist practices i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Defining Buddhism(s)
• PART I: Defining Buddhist Histories
• PART II: Defining Buddhist Ideologies:
• PART III: Defining Buddhist Identities: Re-membering the Dismembered Body of Tibet: Contemporary Tibetan Visionary Movements in the People’s Republic of China
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects