A Buddhist Crossroads

Pioneer Western Buddhists and Asian Networks 1860-1960

Brian Bocking, Phibul Choompolpaisal, Laurence Cox, Alicia M Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317655176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Buddhism in Asia was transformed by the impact of colonial modernity and new technologies and began to spread in earnest to the West. Transnational networking among Asian Buddhists and early western converts engendered pioneering attempts to develop new kinds of Buddhism for a globalized world, in ways not controlled by any single sect or region. Drawing on new research by scholars worldwide, this book brings together some of the most extraordinary episodes and personalities of a period of almost a century from 1860-1960. Examples include Indian intellectuals who saw Buddhism as a homegrown path for a modern post-colonial future, poor whites 'going native' as Asian monks, a Brooklyn-born monk who sought to convert Mussolini, and the failed 1950s attempt to train British monks to establish a Thai sangha in Britain. Some of these stories represent creative failures, paths not taken, which may show us alternative possibilities for a more diverse Buddhism in a world dominated by religious nationalisms. Other pioneers paved the way for the mainstreaming of new forms of Buddhism in later decades, in time for the post-1960s takeoff of 'global Buddhism'.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Buddhism.

INTRODUCTION

A BUDDHIST CROSSROADS: PIONEER EUROPEAN BUDDHISTS AND GLOBALIZING ASIAN NETWORKS 1860–1960

Alicia Turner, Laurence Cox and Brian Bocking

Single-country approaches to the study of Buddhism miss the crucial significance of international networks in the making of modern Buddhism, in a period when the material basis for such networks had been transformed. Southeast Asia in particular acted as a dynamic crossroads in this period enabling the emergence of a ‘global Buddhism’ not controlled by any single sect, while India and Japan both played unexpectedly significant roles in this crossroads. A key element of this process was the encounter between Asian Buddhist networks and western would-be Buddhists. Those involved, however, were often marginal – ‘creative failures’ in many cases - whose stories enable us to think this history in a more diverse way than is often done. In other cases as isolated figures they could pave the way for the ‘mainstreaming’ of new forms of Buddhism by established actors in later decades. This article introduces the special issue of Contemporary Buddhism entitled ‘A Buddhist crossroads: pioneer European Buddhists and globalizing Asian networks 1860–1960’. The research described in this issue often raises other methodological questions of representativity and significance, while posing important challenges around collaborative research and the use of new technologies.

A cacophony of voices in the making of modern Buddhism

The period from the later nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth centuries—roughly between the Indian Revolt of 1857 and the withdrawal of most European powers from direct rule in Asia—was one of immense change across Southeast Asia and the Buddhist world. This century saw the emergence of the elements that we now take to constitute modern Buddhism, or the multiple modern Buddhisms: the rise of the laity as practitioners and organizers (including meditation movements), new roles for women, for scholars and indeed for monks, the development of national sanghas and ethno-nationalist Buddhist discourses, and the association of Buddhism with a de-mythologized rationalist and scientific discourse. Moreover, the period saw the creation of new Buddhist institutional structures across Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka and multiple ‘Buddhist Revivals’ (late nineteenth century, turn of the twentieth centuryand,finallyagain, around 1956 with the BuddhaJayanti). It also saw the culmination of colonial empires (British, French, Japanese) and nationalism, decolonization and the creation of multiple Buddhist nation-states. It was the formative century for Buddhism, Asian modernity and their various hybrids.

The histories of modern Buddhism have, with some recent exceptions (Blackburn 2012; Jaffe 2004, 2006; Kirichenko 2012; Tweed 2011) tended to be insular—focused on the unfolding of Buddhism and modernity in a single country, perhaps unconsciously moulded by the ideas of Buddhism as a national entity that came to dominate the twentieth century. Yet, as we showed in an earlier special issue of Contemporary Buddhism, this is to write history backwards, taking the institutions and approaches which eventually became dominant, refining their own origin myths and drawing on their texts and archives. These histories are too often written about the winners, even if not always from supportive standpoints, despite the possibility of returning to contemporary sources and showing a very different picture. What global Buddhism had become by 1960, on the eve of its mass export to the West, was not at all that which was dominant in 1860. Buddhist modernism had to be made; the process whereby it became largely accepted by most of the surviving groups, as at least normative and an adequate self-representation to the outside world, was a long and winding road and the institutions and ideas characteristic of this final phase of establishment were not necessarily either those which started the process or those which appeared most significant at the time.

The more closely one investigates the changes enacted, the more it becomes clear that the creation of modern Buddhisms was not set mainly on a national stage, nor was it the product of local conversations alone. Instead, it was the fruit of extensive interactions and interconnections across a wide variety of national, ethnic, cultural and colonial boundaries (Bocking 2010, Turner 2010). As Richard Jaffe has encouraged us to understand, modern Buddhism was made and remade through a dizzying array of interactions and connections across Asia. The diverse modern constructions of Buddhism:

involved a wide variety of Indians, Thais, Sri Lankans, Japanese, Koreans, Tibetans, and Chinese who listened and responded not only to what Europeans and Americans said about Buddhism, but who also talked among themselves Consideration of these exchanges in Asia reveals the emergence of atightly linked global Buddhist culture in the late nineteenth century and illuminates the diverse ‘complex global loops’ through which ideas were transmitted. (Jaffe 2004, 67)

The more we come to understand the significance of these conversations and interconnections, the more the stories of those who crossed boundaries becomes important.

The articles gathered in this issue of Contemporary Buddhism shed light on such global loops. They are stories of unusual Buddhist figures who operated across boundaries to create their own hybrid interpretations of modern Buddhism. These stories complicate the picture of Buddhism in its modern modes by asking us to consider voices and conversations outside of the standard histories. They embody stories of Buddhism from the margins, but more than this, they represent the invention and imagination of modern Buddhism as a highly mobile, global, interactive and interpretative process.

Starting from the margins?

The papers collected here offer an alternative way to explore the making of modern Buddhisms. This alternative approach by no means provides a total picture (nor would it help to substitute one over-canonical account with another), but rather highlights a series of dimensions of ‘Buddhist Revival’, variously construed, wherein a new exploration of sources can offer a different and perhaps more adequate perspective.

Firstly, the authors in this issue approach Southeast Asia (and by extension South and East Asia) in this period as a dynamic ‘Buddhist crossroads’. Frequently seen by westerners and by some Asian reformers as the locus of the ‘original’ teachings, lacking the academic and industrialized resources of the emerging Japanese empire and fragmented between British, French and independent states, Southeast Asia was a particular if diverse centre for interactions between different interpretations, organizations, individuals and agendas, interactions which proved fertile in the development of a ‘global Buddhism’ not controlled by any particular sect.

Secondly, in a period marked in turn by conquest, direct colonial rule, anticolonial struggle and decolonization, encounters between European would-be Buddhists and Asian Buddhist networks (including financial sponsors, lay Buddhist organizations, monastic institutions, teachers and popular audiences) were—as several articles in this issue demonstrate for the first time—key elements in the formation of this new Buddhism.

Thirdly, however, with the emphasis on pioneer, those Buddhists—Asian, as well as European—who explored new possibilities were often correspondingly lacking in institutional resources (and hence reliant on such networks in their search for a base). Often they struggled for legitimacy and recognition from both Asian and western audiences, were at times isolated or seen as eccentric and often did not personally reap the benefits that those familiar with the later institutionalization and ‘mainstreaming’ of the new forms of Buddhism might expect.

The stories told here are less teleological and less rounded than is usual, in that many of the individuals involved were lost to history and the organizations (if any) they founded did not survive. Here, asking the question why they were forgotten can tell us much about those forms of contemporary ‘global Buddhism’ which have persisted. The story is also far more diverse and complex than when written ‘backwards’ from today’s Buddhist high ground. Rather than project the winners of the present back into the past, the articles in this issue highlight the opening of moments of possibility, particularly in the period before the new Buddhism became established in lay and monastic contexts, showing the contested nature of the outcome to be something far more than a predestined conflict between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’.

Failures and possibilities

On one level, the stories gathered here are studies in Buddhist failures. Most of the ‘pioneer’ figures and their stories documented here, in many cases for the first time, did not achieve success in conventional terms; at the simplest level, they have not been remembered. Any lineages they founded quickly died out. Their organizations became defunct. Most of their often ambitious projects appear in neither international nor local histories. And yet, their lives and their campaigns are significant for understanding Buddhism as it developed over this period of a century.

The Buddhist figures gathered here offer not simply examples of paths not taken, prospects rejected or options that dwindled away in the history of global and networked Buddhism. Instead, they stand as exemplars of what it was possible to imagine and attempt at different points in Buddhist colonial and transnational history. They represent avenues that have since been closed and abandoned in the Buddhist imaginaire, and they tell us something important about the potential that Buddhism was thought to have for cross-cultural understanding and, at times, world historical change. For Dhammaloka, Buddhism was imagined to have the potential to overcome colonialism; for Lokanatha, it had the potential to bring world peace; for Pfoundes it could temper the arrogance of the West. For some of the myriad subaltern whites in South and Southeast Asia, Buddhism offered an alternative culture and belonging. For McGovern, Utsuki and Kirby it offered a new identity. The hybrids of interpretation that these pioneers and border-crossers produced offeraglimpse ofthewide potential that Buddhism represented over this century.

In the conclusion to his recent book, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk, Justin McDaniel begins to reflect on failures as a theoretical lens for Buddhist studies. Referencing the metaphor of a museum that collected hoaxes and failed projects, he reflects on the possibilities entailed in refusing to create ‘an ideal or comprehensive gallery of features.’ The downside to this effort is that his examples, like the stories assembled here, refuse easy and systematic theorization. He writes, ‘There are too many exceptions, idiosyncrasies, too many monasteries, too many agents, too many points to sight. I never have enough tools ofanalysis in my bag’ (McDaniel 2011, 223). What McDaniel produces instead is an insightful picture of the diversity, embraced contradictions and idiosyncrasies of contemporary Buddhism in Thailand.

The stories collected in this issue of Euro-American-Asian and cross-Asian Buddhist encounters and their ‘failures’ constitute a body of work that can start to produce an equally complex representation of global Buddhism as a persistently shifting, interactive, irreducibly complex concatenation of creative failures. The stories of these ‘pioneer’ figures and their remarkable methods of crossing boundaries do not in themselves rewrite the history of Buddhist modernity. The figures involved are remarkable, for the most part, precisely because they are not representative of mainstream narratives, particularly of the sectarian and nationalistic kind; instead they formed their own ‘crossroads’. They highlight unusual and otherwise forgotten perspectives and experiences in the cacophony of voices that made up ‘Buddhism’ between 1860–1960. In foregrounding the unusual, the marginal, we might even pose the question of whether these remarkable figures were only consigned to the past because in some ways they were ahead oftheir time. Can the sometimes extraordinary, yet forgotten, Buddhist lives discussed in this issue help us not only to rethink the global Buddhist past but also point us towards the unenvisaged and unrepresented voices present in the diversity of contemporary Buddhism?

This raises a general problem around mainstreaming and retrospective legitimacy. The figures discussed here were often able to be ‘ahead of their time’ because they were unusual, marginal, caught between worlds and so freer not only to see possibilities which were being opened up by the forces of social change but also to act on them. Yet, as we know, it took only a few decades for some of the approaches developed by such characters to become thoroughly ‘mainstreamed’. Buddhist revival, and indeed anti-colonial nationalism, are in part at least a history of how what were once the strange ideas of marginal or outside eccentrics became the ‘common sense’ (Gramsci 1971) of whole populations and were adopted by traditional sangha hierarchies and the urban middle class. As such positions became ‘respectable’, of course, those who had first experimented with them often became something of an embarrassment (particularly if they did not fit into newly-dominant ethno-nationalist narratives), or simply became forgotten as the institutional memories of established Buddhist traditions or the new mass lay movements acquired the power to privilege their own origin stories (Turner, Cox and Bocking 2010). We might almost say that some of these figures were disposable and deniable: if their experiments proved effective, the ideas could be taken up but their originators discarded. If an experiment failed and could be forgotten, established organizations therefore lost nothing in legitimacy.

The methodological issues around such figures go beyond the politics of memory, however. They also raise the question of representativity. The figures discussed here often existed on the margins ofwhat is now visible: unusual in their own time and not central to the ‘means ofintellectual production’, albeitwith some notable exceptions (Ober 2013). We regard them as of interest both because they are unusual and contradict received accounts and because they are sufficiently visible (because of their extraordinary efforts) that we can say something about them. U Dhammaloka, the unwitting progenitor of this particular research agenda (Turner, Cox and Bocking 2010), is exemplary in this respect.

Hence, in most cases, we are not talking about figures who were sufficiently embedded within the mainstream Buddhist organizations of their day for their perspectives to be amplified then or now as authoritative pronouncements; ‘representative’ in a political sense. Nor are we addressing the larger numbers of those whose involvement made the ‘Buddhist crossroads’ possible, as sponsors, organizational members, disciples, audiences, organizers and the like (Turner 2011, Cox 2010)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: A Buddhist crossroads: pioneer European Buddhists and globalizing Asian networks 1860–1960
• 2. Flagging up Buddhism: Charles Pfoundes (Omoie Tetzunostzuke) among the international congresses and expositions, 1893–1905
• 3. Buddhist councils in a time of transition: globalism, modernity and the preservation of textual traditions
• 4. Three boys on a great vehicle: ‘Mahayana Buddhism’ and a trans-national network
• 5. The Bible, the bottle and the knife: religion as a mode of resisting colonialism for U Dhammaloka
• 6. Ananda Metteyya: controversial networker, passionate critic
• 7. Tai-Burmese-Lao Buddhisms in the ‘modernizing’of Ban Thawai (Bangkok):the dynamic interaction between ethnic minority religion and British–Siamese centralization in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries
• 8. Rethinking early western Buddhists: beachcombers, ‘going native’ and dissident Orientalism
• 9. ‘Like embers hidden in ashes, or jewels encrusted in stone’: Rāhul Sāṅkṛtyāyan, Dharmānand Kosambī and Buddhist activity in colonial India
• 10. Elective affinities: the reconstruction of a forgotten episode in the shared history of Thai and British Buddhism – Kapilavaḍḍho and Wat Paknam
• 11. Brooklyn Bhikkhu: how Salvatore Cioffi became the Venerable Lokanatha
• Index