In Search of a Generative Problem Space for Buddhist Studies

This proposal is in response to the CFP named as "What is “the West?” - a discussion on theory and method in the study of Buddhism outside Asia; contact Scott Mitchell.

In consideration of the East-West framework which continues to pervade the field of Religious Studies, and Buddhist Studies in particular, I hope to trouble the waters in new and productive ways. In this paper, I make two main arguments, which both build on prior efforts to theorize Buddhist transnational histories through concepts such as “global Buddhism” (McMahan 2008), “complexes global loops” (Jaffe 2019), “circular histories” (King 2021), and “Buddhist ecumene” (Ober 2023); as well as efforts to bring into view approaches to modernity that are distinctively Asian (Samuels, McDaniel, and Rowe 2016) and Asian-American (Cheah 2011, Williams 2019, Han 2021, Mitchel 2023). These currents of scholarship helpfully reveal, and more or less upend, racialized conflations of the West with modernity itself. Yet, while hegemonic frameworks for modernity may have exploded into the more capacious renderings of multiple modernities (McMahan 2015 and Gleig 2019, for example), something of the “West” remains perhaps insufficiently interrogated and reconfigured.

To begin, I will make the case that, much as the expression is cringeworthy and historically paradoxical, India is in fact a “Wild West” of contemporary Buddhism, and perhaps even *the* Wild West *par excellence*, given what is at stake for the tradition as a whole, in its very birthplace. At the very least, with its heterogeneous and often discordant revivalist currents (and political undercurrents), India can be understood both as a Buddhist homeland and critical frontier, one which can help us make more sense of what is unfolding for Buddhism in Europe and the Americas. To draw India out of the map of whatever we call the “West” would be shortsighted and problematic. It is perhaps more useful to delineate, if we must delineate at all, between Buddhism in parts of the world where Buddhism is religiously dominant, versus contexts where it is squarely a minority tradition. This curtails the orientalist baggage of the East-West dichotomy and avoids the conceptual confines of the nation-state: is it not, then, a more salient and less ambiguous fault line?

Secondly, I will suggest that a comparative framework which intrinsically and extrinsically considers Buddhisms of the Global South/majority might be more generative. I will draw on prior research of the late Sharon Smith (a.k.a. Vijayatara), an ethnographer of Black British Buddhists in a working-class neighborhood of London, who drew attention to “the rest outside the West” of self-proclaimed Western Buddhism, playing on an expression of Stuart Hall in famous essay. I will add my voice to the chorus of scholars who have poignantly interrogated who, *in the West*, gets included and excluded from conceptualizations of Western Buddhism. While this tends to fall along racial lines, and somehow completely disregards Buddhism south of the Texan border (excluding Latin America from “the West”), it also raises issues of class and generational transmission (i.e. revert/convert versus heritage Buddhists). These do not line up neatly to race or geography. This will lead to me hypothesize that we need new theories in Religious Studies to bring into view subaltern Buddhism and its distinctive permutations. Inspired by the scholarship of Rima Vesely-Flad, I will draw out what I see as the modernism of Black Buddhists in the U.S, and consider its similarities with the Buddhist articulations of Ambedkarites in Hungary and in India, despite the incommensurable dimensions of race, caste and Roma social identities. Developing an argument made in passing many years ago by scholar Jeff Wilson in his work on mindfulness in the U.S., I will also point out the methodological congruence of Black Buddhist thinkers with their white Buddhist counterparts of a more Victorian inheritance. While their fusion hermeneutics are in fact very similar in method, their aesthetics, soteriologies, practices and receptions are predictably different. Why? Perhaps because, regardless of the middle-class status most leading Black Buddhist teachers appear to have, their creative Buddhist imaginaries are distinctively subversive and liberatory in a context shot through with the legacy and habitus of white supremacy and Christian hegemony. This is a subaltern Buddhism of the Global South/majority in context of racial and religious minoritization.

In summary, while the Buddhism in the West Unit of the AAR may at this juncture be tempted to re-brand as a Global Buddhism(s) Unit, fittingly inspired by the capacious intellectual space created by the esteemed *Journal of Global Buddhism*, I suggest that we are at risk of glossing over important fault lines and subsuming our usual “problem space” (to borrow an expression from the anthropologist David Scott) into the same framework, simply enlarged. There are indeed dynamic delineations in the Buddhist world that are worth thinking through, such as majority/minority religion and caste/casteless/subaltern Buddhism, all of which intersect in creative ways with socio-economic status, issues of inter-generational transmission or lack thereof, and, of course, geographical contexts saturated with history.