Thirty years since its publication, Donald Lopez’s edited volume Curators of the Buddha (Chicago, 1995) remains an important scholarly engagement of the study of Buddhism and postcolonial critique. Following the groundbreaking work of the Curators volume, the papers in this session augment the ongoing conversation around Buddhism, colonialism, and postcolonialism in one of two ways: by continuing to provincialize Buddhist Studies and Buddhism by analyzing discourse or by studying intra-Asian and intra-Buddhist colonialism. Thus, they seek to answer one or both of two questions: 1) What can be learned from making the curators of Buddhism the objects of analysis?; and 2) What might postcolonial or post-Orientalist studies look like?
Drawing on recent work on religion and empire, this paper looks to Burma’s Konbaung Dynasty (1752–1885) to investigate the entanglement between Buddhism and empire. Scholars working outside of Asia have been publishing new findings on how religion has structured and resisted imperialism (Wenger and Johnson 2022); however, scholarship on Asian history, especially in Southeast Asia, has been less attentive to entanglements between Buddhism and empire. This paper investigates how the Burmese negotiators of the 1867 Treaty for the Further Protection of Trade with the British used Buddhist history, literature, and practices to assert the Burmese sovereign’s right to corner particular markets as Burmese royal monopolies. This paper seeks to complicate the histories we tell about empire and Southeast Asia to show how Buddhist traditions have participated in empire at multiple registers—from resistance to domination.
Calls to decolonize Buddhist Studies are growing, but what decolonization means remains contested. This paper argues that dismantling Orientalist legacies is not enough. The field’s epistemic foundations must be rethought. Starting from the history of Buddhists Studies in Japan, this paper will show how the field was co-produced through transnational entanglements, shaped as much by Japanese intellectuals as by European Orientalists. Indeed, Japanese scholars reframed Buddhism to resist Western hegemonic classifications, yet in doing so, they also helped construct the categories that continue to define the field—often in ways aligned with Japan’s imperial ambitions. This history complicates default postcolonial critiques. Drawing on Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s cosmopolitan ecology of knowledges and a metamodern approach, this paper proposes an alternative: a Buddhist Studies that integrates Buddhist epistemologies as generative theoretical resources rather than mere objects of study, opening new methodological possibilities for the discipline and religious studies at large.
Inspired by Curators of the Buddha, this paper examines the American Vipassana movement through the lens of Orientalism. Departing from the typical Buddhist modernism framework, I explore how the movement established authority by employing both exoticizing and denigrating forms of Orientalism. Exoticizing Orientalism, such as portraying Asia as a source of ancient wisdom and utilizing the “Oriental monk” trope, was employed to legitimate the founders’ authority. Conversely, denigrating Orientalism discredited Asian and Asian American Theravada by depicting it as corrupt and backward, thereby justifying the movement's innovations. This dual approach shaped sectarian boundaries by fostering alliances with other convert meditation-centric lineages while Othering and excluding Asian and Asian American Theravada, thereby solidifying the movement's distinct identity and authority.
Ambivalence–simultaneous love and hate of an object of desire–is a recurrent concept in Curators of the Buddha (1995): it is mentioned explicitly in Donald Lopez Jr.’s introduction as well as the essays written by Luis Gómez and Lopez. While it has been given explicit theoretical treatment in postcolonial studies by authors like Homi Bhabha, such analysis has not yet been adequately applied to Buddhist Studies. This paper revisits ambivalence in order to better understand the “logics of representation” (11) and how this applies to the current state of Buddhist Studies. It argues that the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein is best suited for analyzing ambivalence for its object relations theory as an analysis of desire. In doing so, this paper aims to not only contribute to ‘postcolonial’ Buddhist Studies but to postcolonial critique more generally through the use of the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein.
| Donald S. Lopez | dlopez@umich.edu | View |