[Buddha-l] Re:American Mahayana/British Theravada?

[Andrew Skilton]

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

> 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.

Well, lists are invidious, are they not? (tell that to the abhidharmikas) but is not this list a bit selective? What about Paul Williams, David Snellgrove, Tim Barrett, David Ruegg, and Stephen Hodge, just to start a counter list?  And, as implied by Richard, what about those Brits who move abroad (Emmerick) or them 'furriners' who move here and study non-Theravada?  Surely they count, cos their work is sustained in the UK environment.  At which point the counter list becomes longer still * Skorupski, et al. Not that length counts. And I cannot tell if the discussion (at least in richard's response) is about 'academic' scholarship or popular interest.  While the former in the UK may have (in the past?) tended to follow Stefan's suggested divide, the patterns of popular engagement on the ground, i.e. ordinary folks attending meditation/dharma classes etc, is surely more diverse, but nevertheless dominated nowadays by Tibetan organisations? (Don't ask for data, I do not have any.)

Stefan:
>> Could it be that ... the British built a legacy on the remains of their
>> colonial past?
Richard:
>I think there may be something to that. 

Sure, and more decisive than the empiricist/transcendentalist thread explored by Stefan, entertaining though that it is. One need only think of the UK's history of physical and political engagement with particularly Sri Lanka and Burma. Add to this the perceived foreign policy need to train young men to wheel, deal and control their colonial subjects, plus the occasional embarrassment of one's chaps going native. Also bring to mind the pre-existing cultural exchange between britain and India, resulting in the emergence of Sanskrit studies here, which in turn acted as the model to some extent for 'our' engagement with buddhism. All leading towards the resulting accumulation of cultural artefacts and materials still archived in the UK and the resulting pattern of establishing Pali studies in HE institutions in the UK from the late 19th century onwards (not to mention the Pali Text Soc. which also surely arose out of this colonial contact.) From this side, to me at least, the colonial connection seems obvious, overwhelming and unremarkable.  Would it not be more remarkable if there were countries with a strong colonial connection to another (Buddhist) country that did not thereby retain some discernable 'interest' in that colonised culture?

Maybe I am being dumb or something, but can't we also see the US preference for Mahayana/Vaj (if such exists) resulting from patterns of immigration to the US either from East Asia in the C19th, or Tibet and Japan in the mid-C20th? And are there not nowadays a number of excellent US scholars working in areas of Theravada adjacent to the cold war border in E/SE Asia, i.e. resulting in the last case from American colonial activity, much as British interests had been moulded in the previous centuries? 

Andrew  


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Andrew Skilton 

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