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

[Stefan Detrez]

2006/1/18, Andrew Skilton <skiltonat at cardiff.ac.uk>:
>
> 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 a!
> ny.)


I was thinking of the names you mentioned, but I realized the following:
most of them don't specialize in the Theravada, so I left them out. Paul
Williams specializes in Madhyamaka, David Snellgrove in Tibetan Buddhism,
Tim Barrett (who's work is unfamiliar to me) in Chinese Buddhism, David
Ruegg and Stephen Hodge in Tibetan Buddhism. And, you, Andrew Skilton (who's
fine translation of the Bodhicaryavatara AND A Concise History of Buddhism
complement my Buddhist book collection), of whom I thought mentioning in the
list, seem to specialize in Mahayana, too.

Regarding the domination you mention: here in Belgium people interested in
Buddhism only seem to know of Tibetan Buddhism and 'trendy' Zen. Plenty of
Vajrayanins among them speak with the same disdain about the Theravada  you
find in some historical Vajracentric works in the style of 'Oh, but the
Buddha with his compassion ( plus consequent rhetoric) ... saw that the
people were not smart enough to understand, so he waited for them to mature
spiritually and THEN expounded on deeper details 'n stuff', or 'Buddhism in
the Tibetan variant is the most accomplished one you can get', much like the
way Muslims speak about Christianity. But then again, this might be, as you
suggest, a form of popular engagement, not to say proletarian snobbishness.

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.
>
> 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?


The 60-ties Hippies can be blamed for not being enough open-minded to
include the Theravada (which at the time of their charas-smoking visits was
probably inexistent in India.) Earlier you have, of course, Zen introduced
by Americans  who married Japanese women in WW2, or rather, by Japanese
women who married American soldiers.
Still earlier you have the Chinese probably unofficially introducing Ch'an
in the late 19th century. And Tibetan Buddhism which was popularized by one
of them boozing Trungpa's.
So, as far as my knowledge reaches (0.00000000000001 aeons back) I don't see
the Theravada drip through the cracks of that early form of globalisation in
the States. Tis should have been a discrete thing, or a later thing, or
both.

Stefan
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