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Buddhism In the Modern World Edited by David L. McMahan Routledge, 2012 $39.95; 352 pages For years a private entertainment of many Buddhists I know has been to collect funny or irritating instances of collisions between the mass media and Buddhist images, words, and ideas. There is in fact a website partly devoted to this pursuit, theworsthorse.com, whose author, Rod Meade Sperry, has immortalized such collisions under the label “Dharma-Burgers.” Of course, there are also those for whom the counting of Dharma-Burgers is itself a part of the problem, a sign of the degeneration of Buddhism in our times, as a result of the encounter between Buddhism and the modern world, especially the machinery of pop culture, mass media, and New Age fantasy. When I teach college courses on Buddhism and Asian history, I notice that my students are often fascinated by pictures and writings that juxtapose Buddhist ideas or people with bits of technology—cellphones, say, or computers—that seem to symbolize all that is modern. Pictures of such juxtapositions (monks holding cellphones and computers, for example, or Buddhist altars with electrically powered prayer wheels) often strike students as highly incongruous, sometimes even shocking or funny. Moreover, while my students often have little knowledge of the particular histories that have brought Buddhist concepts and practitioners into a global network of ideas and cultural exchanges, they are often very curious about Buddhist views on contemporary issues like women’s social equality, environmental issues, sexuality, or war. We might say that these students and many other people are struggling to wrap their heads around the phenomenon of modern Buddhism and the related but rather different entity sometimes called Buddhist modernism. A new book, Buddhism in the Modern World, takes on the task both of addressing the context for such questions and creating the space for ongoing discussion about the nature of Buddhism’s relationship to modernity and to contemporary life. Edited by David L. McMahan, a scholar of Buddhism and modernity, the volume has contributions from a range of well-known and emerging scholars from a variety of fields. It’s a worthy project for McMahan, whose earlier book, Buddhist Modernism, broke important ground in describing and analyzing the contours of the new (and in some cases, older than you might think) Buddhisms of our contemporary era. The new volume in certain ways picks up where McMahan’s first book left off. Rather than being the voice of a single observer, Buddhism in the Modern World is a collection of short essays, ranging over topics from colonial history in Asia to Buddhist ethics and psychology, to yes, Dharma-Burgers of the most jaw-dropping kinds. A picture of Buddha-shaped pudding molds called “Il Buddino” are among the illustrations for the fascinating chapter by Scott A. Mitchell entitled “Buddhism, Media, and Popular Culture,” which examines the Worst Horse website and the phenomenon of Dharma-Burgers among other compelling contemporary developments. Once imagined, it is hard to shake the image of a diner cheerfully spooning up a glistening morsel of the Buddha. At its best, the volume offers a kind of refracted lens for a diverse and plural web of communities and practitioners, shining a light on multiple and often contentious social histories and intellectual, economic and political forces. Working through it in order, a reader first encounters region-specific overviews of contemporary issues and recent history in Southeast Asia (with particular emphasis on Thailand, Burma, and Sri Lanka), Japan, China and Taiwan, Tibet and the Himalayan region, North America, and Europe. In the second half of the book, the conversation shifts to thematic topics—many of them familiar from blogs, magazines, and the occasional news headline or late-night discussion among friends—of Buddhism in relation to gender, science, globalization, media, popular culture, powers of the mind, politics, nationalism, and social activism. Taken together, the essays give a sense of the enormity and complication concealed behind the term Buddhism, and give some sense—surely comforting to Buddhists well-versed in theories of interdependence and impermanence— that the category “Buddhism” itself is highly unstable, slippery, and defined in different ways by different people at different times. One of the striking dynamics highlighted by the book is the arc of colonialism in Asia, and the role of encounters between Asian Buddhists and Christian missionaries, colonial administrators, and later religious seekers in shaping our present-day ideas about Buddhism. One of the better-known examples is the case of Sri Lanka, where the pressures of British colonial rule and missionary activity pushed Sri Lankan Buddhists to redefine and present their tradition in new ways—ways that Sri Lankan anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere famously described as “Protestant Buddhism.” Protestant Buddhism, also called “Buddhist Modernism” (a term coined in 1973 by Heinz Bechert, a German scholar of Buddhism), de-emphasized ritual and devotional activities, and the protective practices associated with warding off natural disasters and illness. The promoters of Buddhist modernism focused instead on “rationality,” ethical content, individual meditational techniques, and compatibility with the emerging sphere of modern Western science. To consider the Sri Lankan case as an example, Buddhist Modernism emerged in large part in response to the pressures of colonialism, and specifically as a response to European Christian missionaries, who accused Sri Lankan Buddhists of being superstitious, ignorant, ethically lax, and not sufficiently involved in social service and charitable work. The great irony of course was that invasions, colonization, and efforts to convert Sri Lankans to Christianity on the part of European powers were responsible for eroding the traditional social roles and educational networks of Sri Lankan Buddhists. Buddhists in Sri Lanka had in fact historically been actively involved in providing education and medical services, and had played significant parts in public and political life. It was from precisely these social and communal functions that centuries of colonial pressure had displaced them, and quite intentionally. Beginning under the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, and continuing with the Dutch in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the British in the nineteenth, Sri Lankan Buddhists found themselves beleaguered. As Stephen Berkwitz describes in his essay in the book, Buddhists were driven out of Portuguese-controlled areas of Sri Lanka, and under Portuguese control Buddhist monasteries (as well as Hindu temples) were dismantled or replaced by Christian churches. Portuguese Catholic missionaries tried aggressively to convert Sri Lankans. The result was a massive disruption of Buddhist “practice… scholarship… customs and institutions.” Despite the greater tolerance on the part of the Calvinist Dutch, who replaced the Portuguese in 1658, the Dutch presence too was detrimental to Buddhist institutions, and the Dutch also continued the effort to missionize. The arrival of the British shifted the terms of the equation in significant ways. They succeeded in conquering the whole island, including the highland kingdom of Kandy, which had managed to survive as independent and Buddhist in earlier centuries. Even more important, the British view of their “civilizing” mission turned out to be markedly disruptive in its own way. Education and health care, traditionally the domain of Buddhist institutions, were replaced by British-built hospitals and schools. British missionaries, unlike their Portuguese predecessors, made an effort to learn about Sri Lankan Buddhism so they could counteract it. What they learned, or thought they learned, did not please them. They saw Buddhism in Sri Lanka as “characterized by atheism, idolatry, and a nihilistic goal of nirvana.” In response, and Berkwitz says due to frustration with their inability to win Sri Lankan Buddhist converts, British missionaries began publishing tracts ridiculing Buddhist doctrines. When Sri Lankan Buddhists took offense at these tract publications and were unsuccessful in having them banned by the British government, they resorted to fighting them via Buddhist publications as well as through a series of highly public debates. In the process, Sri Lankan Buddhists became involved in trying to reform and modernize Buddhism as a way to revive and strengthen it. At the same time, some among the British civil servants in the colonial administration, such as T.W. Rhys Davids (1843–1922), became actively interested in Buddhism. Men such as Rhys Davids (who would go on to become an important early scholar of Buddhism) began to study Pali, the classic textual language of the Theravada Buddhist canon. Other European colonial administrators, adventurers, and scholars of the period elsewhere in Asia focused on Sanskrit and other Asian languages. These men also became interested in the search for Buddhist origins and the figure of the historical Buddha (in a way that paralleled the growing Christian interest of the period in the search for the historical Jesus). Significantly, gaining knowledge about Asian Buddhism was closely bound up with the drive to establish colonies in Asia, both for the British and An international gathering of Buddhists in Ceylon in 1889. Colonel Henry Steel Olcott is seated second row, third from right. for their European counterparts. While Buddhism in the Modern World touches on this colonial history, the brief and somewhat textbook-like format limits the depth of the essays on this point. Readers particularly interested in the connection between imperialism and the European pursuit of knowledge in Asia might want to dig into the short and fascinating study by Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive:...

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