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

[Dan Lusthaus]

Margaret wrote:

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One of my favourite statements is from Eva Dargyay, writing in 1988:

'The ethnographic details reported here should caution us against rushing to
label one or the other activities or ideas as “truly Buddhist” or
“non-Buddhist.” This would not only distort the facts, as such labels were
never used by the people involved, but it would also jeopardize the validity
of our findings. It is not the researcher’s business to define what
constitutes true Buddhism and what constitutes a less authentic form of this
religion if the Buddhists themselves feel they are genuine followers of
their faith.'

(Eva Dargyay. 1988. ‘Buddhism in Adaptation: ancestor gods and their tantric
counterparts in the religious life of Zanskar’, *History of Religions*,
28.2: 123-34; page 133)

Margaret
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Buddha-l does go in cycles -- this is an issue we have visited on numerous 
occasions. Dargay's generosity pretty much represented the sentiments of the 
field until Aum Shin Rikyo gassed the Tokyo subway and became murdered a 
number of judges while otherwise terrorizing the Matsumoto prefecture of 
Japan. Their claim to be Buddhists, given that their doctrines, etc., were 
so far afield from what other Buddhists engaged in, has led some to rethink 
that generosity.

Similarly lots of new agers declared themselves Buddhists with highly 
distorted ideas of what that might mean. The loonies shouldn't get to define 
what a Buddhist is. Sectarian self-identification in East Asia is more 
complicated than one might imagine.

An ethnographer, to the extent that s/he is engaging in descriptive 
ethnography, should not be in the business of sanctioning practitioners. 
Scholars and historians, on the other hand, are in a position to evaluate 
the extent to which current practices and claims are concordant with, or 
deviate from what was historically the case, and in some ways more 
accurately than the actual practitioners.

I am not an ethnographer.

Happy New Year.

Dan