Curators of Vipassana: Exoticizing and Denigrating Orientalism in the American Vipassana Movement

Curators of the Buddha (Lopez, ed., 1995) was a major contribution to the field of Buddhist studies, particularly its application of postcolonial theory via Edward Said’s critique in Orientalism (1978) in analyzing both colonial-era Buddhism as well as colonial-era Buddhist studies. Thirty years later, these insights prove durable and can continue to inform our studies of contemporary Buddhist groups. One such group is the American Vipassana or Insight tradition, a meditation-centric religious movement (Gleig 2019) founded and led by American converts Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Sharon Salzberg. These founders traveled to South and Southeast Asia in the 1970s and returned with the meditation form they learned there: vipassana or insight meditation. Vipassana meditation itself had developed in part as a response to the crisis of colonialism in Burma, and its practice there inspired trends toward laicization and other traits now deemed central to what Buddhist studies scholars have labeled “Buddhist modernism” (e.g., Braun 2013; McMahan 2009).

But rather than using the framework of Buddhist modernism to analyze the development of American Vipassana, I instead return to the concept of Orientalism as developed in Curators of the Buddha, which is well suited to explain the development of authority in meditation-centric convert Buddhism in the United States in the 1970s and beyond. While the concept of Buddhist modernism applies equally to American convert forms and Asian and Asian American forms of Theravada, the concept of Orientalism reveals patterns in authority construction that are otherwise veiled in the Buddhist modernism paradigm. And while Orientalist modes of description in the Vipassana movement have been discussed by Cheah (2011), these forms of discourse were never directly tied to the Vipassana movement’s development of religious authority. In this paper, I will explore two types of Orientalism--what I call exoticizing and denigrating forms of Orientalism--in the American Vipassana movement while tracing the movement’s rhetoric of legitimacy in a variety of written materials from the 1980s to 2000s. During these early years of its institutional development, the Vipassana movement sought to legitimize innovations, establish authority, and distinguish itself from the perceived corruptions and distortions of Asian and Asian American Theravada.

The burgeoning movement reconfigured religious authority in two ways. The first involved valorizing the founders and their interpretation of Theravada, while the second involved discounting what might be called in modernist parlance “traditional” Asian authority. The latter was achieved through exoticizing Orientalist stereotypes, including painting Asia as the source of mysterious or ancient wisdom and through the trope of the Oriental monk (Iwamura 2011). Materials from American Insight magazines, newsletters, and retreat advertisements highlight their possession of this ancient Buddhist wisdom, generally identified with meditation techniques as well as the Pali canon, while the founders appropriated the charismatic authority of the meditating monk, having “been there” in Asia and trained under authentic Buddhist meditation masters.

The second way in which the Insight movement reconfigured religious authority involved discounting the traditional authority of living Asian (and Asian American) Theravada. This was achieved through the use of denigrating Orientalist tropes that painted Asian Buddhists as corrupt, patriarchal, backward, overly hierarchical, and superstitious. In this way members of the Insight movement argued for a new form of Theravada that was free of these corrupting influences, setting themselves above the living Asian and Asian American Theravada traditions and post-canonical Asian-penned materials (such as the commentaries). 

Additionally, I will explore how these two maneuvers--appropriating Asian Buddhist authority through exoticizing Orientalism, and delegitimizing Asian Buddhist authority through denigrating Orientalism--also coincided with sectarian formation. On the one hand, exoticizing Orientalism helped forge cross-sectarian alliances with multiple meditation-centric Buddhist lineages in the US, such as Zen and Tibetan forms, leading to loosened sectarian boundaries. On the other hand, denigrating Orientalism provided the rationale for heightened sectarian boundaries that Othered and excluded Asian and Asian American forms of Theravada. 

Braun, Erik. 2013. The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cheah, Joseph. 2011. Race and Religion in American Buddhism: White Supremacy and Immigrant Adaptation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gleig, Ann. 2019. American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Iwamura, Jane. 2011. Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lopez, Donald S., ed. 1995. Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McMahan, David. 2009. The Making of Buddhist Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.