[Buddha-l] "Western Self, Asian Other"

[Richard Hayes]

Dear denizens,

There is an interesting article in the current edition of the on-line Journal of Buddhist Ethics. It's entitled "Western Self, Asian Other: Modernity, Authenticity and Nostalgia fpr 'Tradition' in Buddhist Studies," by Natalie E. Quli. It deals with a number of issues that come up repeatedly on buddha-l. One point that interested me in particular was the claim that there is often a bias in the academic study of Buddhism toward Buddhism in Asia and against Buddhism in Europe and the Americas. That is, professors of Buddhism seem much more happy making students struggle with Sanskrit, Pali and Tibetan texts (or translations thereof) than with letting students read materials written in their own language by practicing Buddhists, especially by "white" Buddhists. Moreover, professors of Buddhism are, she claims, much more inclined to have students read texts than take field trips, analyze rituals, or study iconography. The bias for texts, and especially old texts, and especially texts written in Asia, she claims, helps maintain the impression that Asian Buddhism is somehow authentic, while modernized Buddhism is less so. She says that Buddhist studies might well benefit from the kind of self-reflection that anthropologists have been engaged in for the past forty years as a result of an increasing awareness that many of them were trying to preserve an image of a pristine (non-Westernized, pre-modern) "other," often glorified, against which to contrast modern Western society. (If you are an Apache and wish to be studied by an anthropologist, don't call her on your mobile phone and offer to pick her up at the airport in your Prius; anthropologists are interested only in REAL Apaches.)

The article makes a number of other provocative claims. I wonder whether anyone is interested in reading the article and then discussing, right here on buddha-l, various points made in it. It can be downloaded from the Buddhist Ethics website: http://www.buddhistethics.org/current.html . May I make the bold claim that discussions of the article would probably me more interesting if some people actually read it? (I know, I know, I'm betraying my textual bias. Perhaps we should just print the article out, put it in a stupa, and circumambulate it.) 

One interesting observation I will make right off the top: Quli does not cite a single work by Gregory Schopen, who has made the disparaging the reading of Buddhists texts and studying Buddhist ideas into a cottage industry. I wonder why she does not cite a scholar who is probably in fairly deep agreement with many of her claims.


Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes
rhayes at unm.edu