the making of buddhist modernism nov 2008

[...]... as the ever-distant and mysterious Other of the Orient Echoes of Romanticism 12 the making of buddhist modernism ring in modern Buddhist appeals to a return to the natural, to the probing of the deep interior of consciousness, to the suspicion of external authority, to the reveling in creative spontaneity, and to the perception of the oneness and interconnectedness of all life These themes bear on the. .. established many of the enduring motifs of Buddhist modernism from the early period Crucial to reconstructing the history of the thematic elements of Buddhist modernism that I address is the attempt to untangle their western historical, cultural, ideological, and philosophical sources from their traditional Buddhist sources In this way I hope to show some of the ways specific strains of Buddhism have... Europeans, the intelligentsia of North America, and the burgeoning middle class in various Asian nations What is important here, though, is that regardless of whether disenchantment has been universal, the development of Buddhist modernism has often operated on Weberian assumptions The disenchantment of the world has been felt among the class of people among whom are found the architects and adherents of Buddhist. .. levels The successors of the Romantic movement were among the most important influences in Buddhist modernism: the American Transcendentalists, Theosophists, and adherents of other alternative spiritualities and, later, the Beat poets and the countercultural figures of the 1960s Romanticism in this broad sense provides many themes that have become important to Buddhist modernism, especially in the West... from the material world Protestantism gave unprecedented value to internal scrutiny and to the experience of God within, while Romanticism located the source of morality, creativity, and spirituality in the deep interior of the soul This inwardness of various facets of modernity became crystallized in another, 14 the making of buddhist modernism later discourse that had an immense impact on later Buddhist. .. of Buddhism, adopting some features of them and countering others in accordance with various strategic interests Seeing Buddhist modernism strictly in terms of western representations occludes the agency of Asian Buddhists as cocreators of modernist versions of their traditions (Snodgrass 2003: 10–15, King 1999: 149) Second, the many modernist scholarly and popular constructions of Buddhism, some of. .. particular shore The stratum of literature I have often found most useful for analyzing Buddhist modernism is neither scholarly literature nor the growing body of thirdhand and generally uninformed books—for instance, those on Zen and golf (seven are listed on Amazon.com as of this writing!)—but rather the works for the general but educated reader that are either influential formulations of Buddhist modernism. .. representative of Buddhism as a whole My general method is to work backward from themes common in contemporary Buddhist literature popular in the United States (though not necessarily written by westerners) and then look for earlier sources of these representations in the works of seminal Buddhist modernizers, thus tracing some of the most recent manifestations of Buddhist modernism to those in the formative... modes of interpretation that they would be unrecognizable to most Asian Buddhists Analysis of such representations are an important part of this study, yet the understanding of Buddhist modernism primarily as a collection of western representations of Buddhism is inadequate, for two reasons First, many of the important creators of Buddhist modernism were not westerners but Asian Buddhists who actively engaged... context, the way it will find a niche in the new situation and mold itself to its contours This distinction between the theoretical and the tacit also informs my understanding of what I am calling the discourses of modernity They have explicitly theoretical aspects, yet they are themselves tacit dimensions of modernity: they make up the inarticulate, normative ways of being that seem uniquely rooted in . alt="" The Making of Buddhist Modernism This page intentionally left blank The Making of Buddhist Modernism david l. mcmahan 2008 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford. institutions in a time of rapid and unprecedented transformation of societies. Many modernizing interpret- ers of Buddhism, both Asian and western, have proffered the theme of the rescue of the modern. assessments of American punk music, and perhaps comparisons of the nightclub scene to an anteroom of a Buddhist hell realm. The conversations en- tered the stream of discourse that makes up the growing