This panel explores a series of new academic directions in understanding Buddhism's transmission and transformation outside Buddhist Asia. “Translating the Tathāgata” examines a failed CIA effort to use a screenplay on the Buddha's life for Cold War psychological warfare, American Buddhist Tradition: The work of the Tibetan Preliminary Practices investigates how American Buddhists engage with Tibetan practices to cultivate tradition, challenging the tradition-modernity dichotomy. Deconstructing the Dichotomy between the Esoteric and Buddhism in the West: the case study of Ananda Metteyya argues that Western esotericism is integral to understanding Buddhism's Western transmission, using Ananda Metteyya's life as a case study. Redacting Forest Spirits: A Discourse Analysis of Psychotherapeutic Uses of Buddhist Metta (Lovingkindness) Meditation Practice analyzes the secular appropriation of metta meditation in Western psychotherapies, highlighting ethical concerns and potential limitations.
“Tathāgata in Translation” explores a failed CIA effort to win the hearts and minds of Asian Buddhists in the early Cold War. Its focus is an unpublished 1953 screenplay on the life of the Buddha, conceived as a psychological warfare tool to promote U.S. bloc-building efforts in Asia. Envisioned as a Hollywood-style epic, The Wayfarer would convince Asian Buddhists to reject Communism and help the CIA forge ties local Buddhist leaders.
To examine its failure, I analyze The Wayfarer's interpretative ambiguity through a close reading of three scenes. I then frame the screenplay as a Translation Zone, in Emily Apter’s sense—a battleground for interpretative dominance. By relocating The Wayfarer from a CIA back office to a wartime frontier, we see that American efforts to court Asian Buddhists failed not from poor execution, but because they became sites of resistance where local actors adeptly re-purposed them to suit their own goals.
This paper takes up the well-worn debate over Buddhist modernism from the perspective of its neglected shadow: Buddhist tradition. Can contemporary American Buddhists ever be “traditional” (as opposed to merely “traditionalistic”)? What would that mean? Based on ongoing ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and liturgical analysis, I argue that the Tibetan Buddhist preliminary practices (ngondro) work to form Buddhist subjects with a visceral sense of tradition, binding together cosmologies, bodily postures, ethical commitments, emotional habits, and sacralized relationships. This “tradition” is neither an ahistorical essence already out there in the world nor a rhetorical posture batting ineffectually at the rupture of modernity: it is one possible outcome of human labor and desire. For American converts engaged in the preliminary practices, both tradition and modernity are live orientations, ways of being in the world in a fraught and often tragic relationship to one another.
Through the life of Allan Bennett/Ananda Metteyya (1872-1923), this paper argues that the transmission of Buddhism to the West cannot be understood without examining Western esotericism. To draw a line between Buddhism and the esoteric in a Western context is a false dichotomy. In his youth, Bennett turned towards Theosophy and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, within which he became the teacher of Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). After a period in Sri Lanka, he gained higher ordination as a Buddhist monk in Myanmar, becoming Venerable Ananda Metteyya. As a monk, Metteyya insisted that there was nothing esoteric or mysterious in Buddhism. In his personal life, however, Metteyya retained constructive relationships with Theosophists and continued to practice the esoteric, yogic meditation he had learnt in Sri Lanka. A dialectical relationship, therefore, existed between the esoteric and Buddhism within Metteya's life and within the Buddhism that he communicated to the West.
Western mindfulness movements, including mindfulness-based psychotherapies, have widely adopted Buddhist metta (lovingkindness) meditation practices. In their traditional contexts, these meditation practices have had an apotropaic function, and Buddhist commentary literature narrates the use of metta practice to transform conflict with "supernatural" beings. This paper engages in a discourse analysis of psychotherapy manuals, such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and psychotherapeutic research articles that include metta meditation practices, focusing on their omission or minimization of the Buddhist origins of metta practice more broadly and Buddhist metta traditions involving supernatural beings more specifically. This discourse analysis shows that adoption of metta practices by contemporary psychotherapy reflects broader patterns in secular appropriation of Buddhist traditions, such as front-stage/back-stage behavior, and that elements of Buddhist cosmology involving supernatural beings are strongly targeted for deselection. This is ethically problematic and may limit the effectiveness of metta practice for spiritually-attuned care.