[Buddha-l] American Mahayana/British Theravada?

[curt]

I think that Alan Bennett was the first person of European descent to 
ordain as a Buddhist monk - and he did so in Sri Lanka. I think one of 
the next to do so was whathisname Sangharakshita - who ordained in India 
with a Burmese order. I've always heard that the English have a fondness 
for precedence and boiled food - so maybe that's all there is to it. 
Americans, on the other hand, have a fondness for sex, drugs and 
rock-n-roll - which go much better with Zen and Tantra than they do with 
Theravada. Nevertheless, I think that Americans have done a more 
thorough job of "westernizing" Theravada (as in the Insight Meditation 
Society) than the Brits have.

Its ironic that Alan Bennett, the occultist and close personal friend of 
Aleister Crowley, should have steered the English toward Theravada 
instead of something spicier. Another irony is that the one person 
probably most responsible for America's love affair with Zen was, of 
course, Alan Watts, an Englishman. And the runner-up for that honor goes 
to D.T. Suzuki, who was married to a British Theosophist, Beatrice 
Erskine Lane, who is also sometimes identified as a member of the Bahai 
faith.

For any graduate students out there who want to follow Richard Hayes' 
advice to focus on American Buddhism and only use English sources for 
your research - researching Beatrice Erskine Lane's contribution to 
"American Zen" would probably be a gold mine. Or perhaps not - I just 
saw on this page 
(http://www.baysidechurch.org/studia/print.cfm?ArticleID=129&detail=1) 
that, ironically, there is a biography of her emphasizing her research 
on Mahayana Buddhism - but it's in Japanese and has never been 
translated into English!

- Curt

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.
>
> 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.
>
> I think this has to do the legacy of the Horners and the British 
> affinity with empiricism which as a philosophical point of view can be 
> conveniently molded to show similarity with the Dharma (not to mention 
> Kalupahana's endeavours).
> .
> 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. 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...
>
> 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?
>
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