[Buddha-l] American Mahayana/British Theravada?

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Tue, 2006-01-17 at 18:18 +0100, Stefan Detrez wrote:

> I seem to have this strange intuition that the majority of British
> buddhologists are mostly dealing with the Theravada, while American
> buddhologists are more 'into' the Mahayana, and not to mention the
> Vajrayana, which seems to be gefundenes Fressen for scholarship there.

For the most part that is true, I think. It has never been clear to me
why this might be, unless it is that British Buddhologists are a lot
smarter than their USAmerican counterparts. (See more on this below.)

> Rupert Gethin, Peter Harvey, Richard Gombrich, K. Norman, Warder, Sue
> Hamilton, Steven Collins and our very own listmember Lance Cousins,
> are, in my opinion ,pretty representative for the UK when it comes to
> fine buddhological scholarship, to name some examples that make (half)
> my point. 

It may be worth noting that A.K. Warder spent most of his professional
life in Canada, and Collins was in Canada for a couple of years and now
at University of Chicago.

> On the other hand, in America, there's the literary tradition of
> Whitmanian and Emersonian pondering of the impressive 'grandeur' of
> the world and everything in it. 

Well, that may be the case, but I see two possible flaws in that
hypothesis. First, I think Emerson's attitudes toward religion (as
expressed in his address to the Divinity school at Harvard and in his
essays such as Nature and Self-reliance) were much more compatible with
the relatively spare mood of Theravada. He would surely have hated the
tone of much of the Mahayana. Even his Transcendentalism is remarkably
spare in contrast to the wild flights of fancy one finds in much of the
Mahayana. In his Unitarian sermons, Emerson repeatedly dismissed almost
all of Hinduism as superstition and savagery. Even when he later admired
the Upanishads (or some caricature of them), he had no enthusiasm for
either their ritual implications or for the scholasticism associated
with them. I think he would have felt much the same about much of
Mahayana, had he known anything about it. (Knowledge of Buddhism was
pretty scanty in the 19th century. Henry David Thoreau thought the
Bhagavad-gita was a Buddhist classic!) 

And the second flaw I see in your hypothesis is that hardly anyone reads
Emerson any more. To find an American who has read Emerson, you have to
begin your search among the pot-bellied graybeards, old farts like Jim
Peavler and me. (Peavler has probably read Emerson twice. He seems to do
most things twice.)

> The transcendentalist naturalism or whatshamacallit with its sporadic
> references to the Buddha of (particularly) the Mahayana seems to echo
> in the American preference for the Mahayana. Excluding Richard Salomon
> and Alex Wayman, I'm not familiar with American buddhologists dealing
> solely with the Theravada... 

Charles Hallisey (Harvard trained, working at University of Wisconsin),
George Bond (Northwestern University), Karen Lang (Virginia) and Grace
Burford (Prescott College) come to mind. Except insofar as just about
everyone who teaches Buddhism teaches the whole range in the classroom,
Hallisey, Bond and Lang do most of their research in Theravada. Bruce
Burrill could probably rattle off a few more. Wayman, by the way, was
best know for his work in Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism, not for his
work in Theravada. 

> Could it be that American buddhology was built on those early
> acquaintancies with Buddhism, freshly imported by colonizing
> orientalists, while the British built a legacy on the remains of their
> colonial past?

I think there may be something to that. The American fascination with
Buddhism in the 19th century has been ably chronicled by Thomas Tweed,
who detected four major strains of enthusiasts: anti-religious
rationalists (which would include quite a few Unitarians and
Universalists and scientists), supernaturalists and spiritualists of
various kinds, Theosophists and post-Emersonian Transcendentalists.

In the 1950s, when Buddhism became a household word in the USA, most
attention seems to have been on Zen. In the 1960s and 70s Tibetan
Buddhism caught the fancy of people who had taken way too much LSD, and
as people discovered that Zen actually required some self-discipline, it
quickly fell out of favor. One of the aftermaths of the Vietnam war was
an interest in the potentials of Buddhism for social activism and what
most people now call "engaged Buddhism." To follow the trajectory of
Buddhist studies in the USA, you have to follow the drugs: alcohol
(Zen), psychedelics (Tibetan Mahayana), cocaine (Vajrayana). American
academics don't do sobriety, which could be why they also don't do
Theravada.

Not long ago I was helping one of my students make decisions about where
to apply for graduate school, and I happened to take a look at the
website for Boston University. I was amazed to see that they now offer a
wide range of courses on American Buddhism, American Hinduism, and
American Islam. They have relatively few courses on Asian religions in
Asia. I suspect this trend will catch on in the United States. (Even I
have given in to it; well more than half of my course on Zen Buddhism
this semester will be on American Zen.) 

I think this trend of Americans specializing in American Buddhism will
catch on for two reasons: 1) Americans, as a rule, have almost no real
interest in any culture except their own, and 2) most Americans have
such poor training in languages (including English) that they lack the
intellectual equipment to study Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, Tibetan,
Tokharian, Mongolian, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese texts. So if they
want to study Buddhism they read Alan Ginsberg, Ken Wilber and Elizabeth
Claire Prophet. (At my university, undergraduates are required to take
only ONE SEMESTER of a foreign language. And for most of them, this will
be their first exposure to a foreign language. Can you believe it? What
do you think the odds are for getting an American student who has never
studied any foreign language before the age of 18 up to speed in
classical Sanskrit or Pali or Tibetan?)

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico