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

[JKirkpatrick]

Here goes. Since this article is a 29 pager, I'm going to respond
to it sort of piecemeal, as I go along, instead of having to
muster copious notes to tide me to the end and longer comments:
 
She writes, and I excerpt here, with my comments added under
quotations from her article:
 
...the main project of Buddhist Studies, which is overtly
concerned with
a non-Western Other. [In my view this mainly pertains to the
classically trained Buddhologer scholars/philologers, etc;  many
in the past 2 decades have moved beyond this fixation. JK]
 
When mapped onto an
essentialized Self/Other or West/East complex, Western Buddhists
(of
both the convert and so-called "ethnic" varieties), as well as
Asian Buddhists
of all stripes, are reduced to stereotypes of "traditional" and
"modern"
that fail to capture the multifaceted nature of their religious
traditions, beliefs, and practices. [This may be reliable. We
come across such binaries too often in much scholarship of all
sorts, not just Buddhistic, and of course in journalism. We have
already on the list attacked the use of such binaries. JK]
 
The dominant framework of "Buddhist
modernism" makes use of an etic perspective to describe Buddhists
in
ways that they would likely not describe themselves, and
furthermore
employs distortional dualities that muddy our understanding of
Buddhism
and Buddhists in the contemporary period.
[OK, how about some examples? JK] 
 
What I would like to call attention to in this paper is the issue
of
an etic, ascribed identity-"Buddhist modernism"-and its
relationship
to a discourse dominated by tropes of decay and decline. Western
Buddhist
Studies scholars appear to be experiencing a certain amount of
guilt
over our field's complicity in the colonial project,
[Ok, so name some of such scholars! So far no evidence adduced to
illustrate her assertions.  I as a Buddhist and a scholar, though
not a Buddhist scholar, don't feel any complicity in a colonial
project at all, since I personally have never been one, nor
benefited from being one. What guilt?  Let us not overlook the
FACT that over the centuries ethnic Buddhists of such ethnicities
as China, Tibet, Japan, Indonesia, Khmer, Burma, & Thai, to name
a few majors, also established significant colonies outside their
borders. Quli 
exhibits a lack of historical perspective in such assertions. JK]

 
We may seek to correct, or at least distance
ourselves from, the West's interference with and transformation
of
Buddhism, particularly Buddhist nationalisms and
Western-influenced
forms like so-called Protestant Buddhism. But nostalgia can never
correct
the past, and ... these forms are here to stay. More importantly,
these forms are seen by Buddhists themselves as authentic, even
"traditional," and unless we wish to continue to force our own
subjective readings of the past onto the subjects of our study in
a quite colonial fashion, we would do well to incorporate a more
emic, less dismissive perspective.
[I'm with her on this, especially on the Protestant Buddhism
diss. That one is really ridiculous.]
 
This essay seeks to recognize how Buddhist Studies continues at
times to employ Orientalizing strategies even as it seeks to
distance itself
from them, notably in the attempt to discount convert Buddhists,
Asian
American and other "ethnic" Western Buddhists, and certain forms
of
Asian Buddhism as "modernist," that is, not traditionally Asian
and
therefore not authentic.
[But not only "Western" Buddhist scholars, whom so far she
doesn't name by the way. We also find Asian Buddhist critics
(more often Tibetan Buddhists living in India if not here, or any
more in Tibet) insisting on "orientalist figures" of the purity
and correctness of "tradition;" for them, an emic position. For
ex.: the drastic criticism that Gendun Chophel received from
monks of his order before and after he returned to Tibet when he
was thrown into prison, because he "dared" to "tamper" with
tradition by publishing his version of Madhyamaka. Some western
scholars, OTOH, see him as a provocative and interesting
moderniser. (See, Lopez,Jr., Donald S. The Madman's Middle Way.
U. Chicago Press, 2006.) JK] 
 
 
Joanna