Beyond Postcolonial Buddhist Studies: Imperial Entanglements, Decolonial Possibilities, and Metamodern Futures

Curators of the Buddha (1995) explored how Western scholars curated Buddhism to fit their own ideological preoccupations, distorting its histories and epistemologies in the process. Three decades later, calls to decolonize Buddhist Studies have become increasingly common. Yet, what exactly decolonization entails remains contested. 

This paper argues that rather than simply dismantling the Orientalist legacy of Buddhist Studies, we must rethink the epistemic structures of the discipline itself. I propose a metamodern approach—one that moves beyond critique to reconstruct Buddhist Studies in ways that actively engage Buddhist epistemologies as generative theoretical resources.

Often, decolonizing Buddhist Studies is framed as exposing its Orientalist foundations, re-centering Asian voices, and acknowledging the field’s complicity in colonial projects. While these interventions are necessary, they obscure the fact that Buddhist Studies was not simply a Western imposition on a passive East. In actuality, however, Buddhist Studies was co-produced through complex transnational entanglements, shaped not just by European Orientalists but also by Japanese intellectuals. During the Meiji era, Japanese scholars sought to reframe Buddhism to resist Western hegemonic classifications, but in doing so, they also helped construct many of the categories and resources that still define the field today: often in ways that aligned with Japan’s own imperial ambitions. (As Robert Sharf demonstrated in Curators, Zen Studies was itself a product of Japanese nationalism; a similar case can be made about the Buddhist Studies more broadly). 

Thus, if we are to take decolonization seriously, it is insufficient to merely critique how Buddhism was curated by Western scholars alone; we must also examine how Buddhist Studies took shape through interactions between Asian and Euro-American intellectuals, as well as within shifting imperial and national contexts. Restated, this history suggests that the field’s postcolonial critique must account not just for Western Orientalism but also for the entangled processes of knowledge production within Asia itself.

This broader transnational history complicates straightforward calls to “decolonize” Buddhist Studies. If the very frameworks through which Buddhism has been analyzed emerged from interwoven colonial and counter-colonial projects in several registers, then postcolonial critique alone will not suffice. The real challenge is to rethink the epistemic structures of Buddhist Studies itself.

To that end, I will turn to Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s “cosmopolitan ecology of knowledges” as a way to move beyond critique and toward reconstruction. Santos critiques Western modernity’s “abyssal thinking,” which divides dominant (Western) epistemologies from marginalized (non-Western) ones, rendering the latter illegible within academic discourse. His ecology of knowledges offers a different approach: one that does not simply analyze non-Western traditions through Western theoretical lenses but cultivates epistemic dialogue on equal terms. Applied to Buddhist Studies, this means not merely critiquing its Euro-American biases but actively integrating Buddhist conceptual frameworks—its hermeneutics, its ontologies, its categories of knowledge—as generative theoretical resources in their own right.

Going even further, I propose a metamodern approach to Buddhist Studies—one that moves through and beyond both modernist framings and postmodern critique. Rather than merely dismantling Orientalist narratives of Buddhist modernism or nostalgically recovering the supposedly authentic Buddhist traditionalisms, this perspective is both critical and reconstructive. It asks not simply how Buddhism has been shaped by external forces, but how Buddhist thought itself might shape academic inquiry in new ways. A metamodern approach foregrounds the epistemic diversity within Buddhist traditions, allowing Buddhist concepts to do theoretical work rather than remain objects of study.

By tracing the transnational construction of Buddhist Studies and Orientalism—including the role of Japanese scholars in shaping its foundational categories—this paper moves beyond conventional postcolonial critiques to consider how Buddhist epistemologies might actively reshape the field. Instead of merely dismantling Orientalist legacies, I ask: What would it mean for Buddhist Studies to be constitutively pluralistic: neither beholden to Euro-American epistemologies nor defined solely by reactionary critique? And how might this shift transform not only Buddhist Studies but Religious Studies as a whole, forcing the discipline to confront its own epistemic limits and reimagine what a genuinely global study of religion might look like?