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

[Richard Nance]

Regarding "Western Self, Asian Other," I agree with Joanna that Quli
needs to provide much more evidence to back up her claims,
particularly since the evidence that she does provide is sometimes
less than compelling.

So, for example, on p. 9, she identifies a particular scholarly
practice as worthy of critique. The relevant practice is that of
identifying "contemporary Buddhisms as... 'distortions' of Asian
transhistorical essences now contaminated by Western ideas." Which
scholars make such mistaken identifications? In a footnote, Quli
specifies those she has in mind, singling out Robert Sharf's paper
"Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience"
(_Numen_ 42:3 (1995)), among others, for criticism.

Quli says that Sharf's paper "describe(s) Buddhist modernism as a
'distortion.'" (p. 30). But it doesn't. In fact, the term _distortion_
doesn't occur in Sharf's paper. Nor do related terms like _distort_
and _distorted_.

What Sharf does say -- among other things -- is this:

"The similarity between the lay Zen in post-Meiji Japan and the
vipassana revivals in Southeast Asia is striking, but not, perhaps,
surprising. Indeed, analogous movements have altered the face of
Buddhism in Korea and Vietnam as well. In each case, the threat
posed by the wholesale imposition of Western values prompted
Asian intellectuals to turn anew to their own cultural heritage so as
to affirm and elevate their indigenous spiritual traditions. At the
same time, these "indigenous" traditions were reconstituted so as
to appropriate the perceived strengths of the Occident. This took
the form of various reform movements that tended to reiterate the
iconoclastic, anti-institutional, anti-clerical, and anti-ritual
strategies of the European Enlightenment. As the reformers would
have it, "true" Buddhism is not to be sought in moribund institutions,
empty rituals, or dusty scriptures, but rather in a living
experience. Buddhism properly understood is not a religion at all,
but rather a spiritual technology providing the means to liberating
insight and personal transformation. By rendering the essence of
Buddhism a non-discursive spiritual experience, Buddhist
apologists effectively positioned their tradition beyond the compass
of secular critique...

The urge to reduce the goal of Buddhist praxis to a mode of nondiscursive
experience would seem to arise when alternative
strategies of legitimation, such as the appeal to institutional or
scriptural authority, prove inadequate. Breakdowns in traditional
systems of authority may in turn result from a variety of historical
and socioeconomic circumstances. The situation encountered
repeatedly above involved an Asian nation coming into sustained
contact with the culture, science, and philosophy of the West. Such
contact brought in its wake the scourge of cultural relativism. By
privileging private spiritual experience Buddhist apologists sought
to secure the integrity of Buddhism by grounding it in a transcultural,
trans-historical reality immune to the relativist critique."

Whatever problems Sharf's paper may have, identifying Buddhism with a
transhistorical essence isn't one of them. Rather, Sharf is noting
that such an identification has at times been made by _Buddhist
apologists_ (not _scholars of Buddhism_, though, of course, the two
groups may overlap) in their attempts to accommodate (or to resist)
forces of modernity. That claim may be true, or it may be false -- but
it's importantly different from the claim that Quli wants to attribute
to Sharf.

In short: a straw is being torched here. Whether knowingly or
unknowingly, Quli has managed to misrepresent -- distort -- the
central claims of Sharf's essay. This isn't to say that the sort of
phenomenon to which she's attempting to draw her readers' attention
never occurs. But she owes it to her readers to be more precise about
where it occurs.

Much more could be said about the article, but I'll shut up for now.

Best wishes,

R. Nance
Indiana