Trent Walker's Articles on Lions Roar

What does cultural appropriation mean in a Buddhist context? According to Chenxing Han and Trent Walker, the answer is not as simple as we might like it to be. Museum-quality Cambodian Buddhist antiquities decorating a New York penthouse. A Chinese man in a monk costume begging for alms on the streets of Phnom Penh. Garden-variety Buddha statues sitting on the floor of a California yoga studio. Canadian college students cavorting in monastic garb at a Halloween party in Ontario. What do these four situationally and geographically disparate phenomena have in common? All of them might be censured as examples of cultural appropriation, a term that was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in March 2018 and defined as “the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the practices, customs, or aesthetics of one social or ethnic group by members of another (typically dominant) community or society.” The OED traces the first citation to a 1945 essay by Arthur E. Christy that discusses “European cultural appropriation from the Orient.” There’s a temptation to reduce cultural appropriation to reassuring lists — here’s how to spot it, here’s how to stop it — as if we were dealing with halitosis or athlete’s foot, embarrassing but eliminable with a simple remedy. The term began to enter widespread usage in the 1980s. Through the myopic lens of Google search, this might come as a surprise. Enter “cultural appropriation” into Google Trends and you’ll see a spike in queries beginning in 2015, as if the term was tracking with the rising pitch of American culture wars around issues of race, representation, and identity. Since then, hardly a month has passed without the two of us—a writer trained in Buddhist chaplaincy (Chenxing) and a scholar of Southeast Asian Buddhism (Trent)—discussing a fresh controversy about cultural appropriation in the news. We’re surely not the only couple who has spent many an evening debating the ins and outs of these headlines, though the time might have been more enjoyably (and age-appropriately) spent binge-watching Netflix (we are, after all, millennials). And yet we find ourselves drawn back, again and again, to these labyrinthine conversations, even if they feel more like going down a rabbit hole than getting out of the woods. Conflicts over cultural appropriation erupt on social media and college campuses with geyser-like regularity, in realms as varied as fashion, food, film, literature, sports, and politics. Disagreement is practically assured, as Jia Tolentino observes in the acerbic opening to her 2016 New Yorker essay “Lionel Shriver Puts on a Sombrero”: “No matter your opinion on cultural appropriation, you can be certain that many people think you are wrong.” Our role, obviously, is not to be a final arbiter in these debates. As nonsectarian lay Buddhists who have lived most of our lives in America (with stints in East and Southeast Asia), and as a Chinese American and a white American, respectively, we do not inhabit three of the racial/ethnic identities that frequently come up in the literature on cultural appropriation—Indigenous, Black, and Latinx—though we are more connected to a fourth: Asian. In this article, we focus on Buddhist examples of cultural appropriation, though this still feels impossibly broad. We won’t attempt to be comprehensive, though we do hope to facilitate nuanced dialogue on a topic that too easily devolves into shouting matches. There’s a temptation to reduce cultural appropriation to reassuring lists—here’s how to spot it, here’s how to stop it—as if we were dealing with halitosis or athlete’s foot, embarrassing but eliminable with a simple remedy. This article is neither mouthwash nor antifungal. We offer no cures, no recipes for success, no insurance against failure. If anything, we seek your companionship, dear readers, in traversing cultural appropriation’s rugged terrain and apprehending its convoluted contours. In the span of this short piece, it’s impossible to map every rock and river, building and boundary. But our peregrinations can hopefully yield some insight into the complexities of this landscape, inviting us into relationships of responsible stewardship rather than rapacious conquest. Theft. Cultural appropriation goes by many guises: Appreciation. Recognition. Adaptation. Translation. Or, less rosily: Theft. Fraud. Disrespect. Bad taste. We have structured this article on the latter set, which map onto the four examples at the beginning of this piece. We offer these four categories not because they are mutually exclusive (they are not) and not for the sake of being dour (we like to think that we’re not), but because they have helped us understand, on a more granular level, the outrage that often surrounds instances of cultural appropriation. From 2016 to 2018, we lived a short walk away from the National Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The open-air galleries brim with beauty: wood, bronze, and stone Buddha images from all periods of Cambodian history, some more than 1,500 years old. Yet many of the most exquisite examples of Khmer Buddhist art remain abroad, appropriated during the colonial era or looted from Cambodian temples during the chaos and violence of the 1970s. Thanks to longstanding efforts by Southeast Asian governments, international experts, museum professionals, and American prosecutors, dozens of illicitly trafficked Khmer art objects in the US have been returned to their country of origin in recent years. This past June, the federal government, led by efforts from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, repatriated twenty-seven smuggled antiquities to Cambodia. The statues, including magnificent bronze images of the Buddha sheltered by the naga Mucalinda and an imposing stone icon of the “Mother of All Buddhas,” Prajnaparamita, had been stolen from Cambodia and sold by two high-end galleries on the Upper East Side. The repatriated pieces are embodiments of Cambodian genius and Buddhist devotion. Why were they sold to customers in New York? The simple answer is that wealthy collectors are willing to pay vast sums to display prized Buddhist antiquities in their homes. Buyers wouldn’t necessarily have known they were purchasing stolen heirlooms. But the illicit trade in Buddha images across Asia is profoundly destructive: icons cut from foundations, heads hacked off cliffsides, local traditions interrupted, their continuity sundered. The trade in Buddhist manuscripts is no less damaging. Between our Phnom Penh apartment and the National Museum, several shops catering to tourists sold folding fans, greeting cards, and other tchotchkes made from cut-up palm-leaf manuscripts. Over 95 percent of Khmer and Pali manuscripts in Cambodia were lost between 1970 and 1990. The desecration of the few that remain would be easier to prevent if there wasn’t such a strong demand for these items. Such cases of outright theft may go beyond what we normally consider cultural appropriation. After all, the culprits in these examples are stealing or destroying Buddhist icons and sacred texts, not merely using them in an unacknowledged or inappropriate way. But perhaps the core motivation is the same: taking something that doesn’t belong to us and using it for our own purposes. Fraud. On the same street that was home to the tourist shops and the National Museum in Phnom Penh, we’d occasionally come across Chinese nationals dressed in monastic garb, selling small amulets. These men and women were part of a global racket that involved wearing the robes of monks and nuns during the day, using high-pressure tactics to sell their wares, and returning to lay life at night. Despite drawing the ire of local Cambodians, who immediately recognized these wandering vendors as fraudulent, they were a relatively peaceful presence on a busy street. The fake bhikshus and bhikshunis had appropriated a status that wasn’t properly theirs. But were they hurting other people? Swindling others, especially through claiming false status as a Buddhist monastic, is thought to incur grave karmic consequences. The damage to the reputation of Buddhism is significant, not to mention the way such appropriation of religious garb can cause people to lose trust in the dharma. At the same time, we wondered: what causes and conditions led these people to leave rural China and come to Cambodia to make a living in this way? From our position of privilege, it’s hard to condemn such a choice, heartless not to consider the penury behind it. It’s hard to admit that, more often than not, what lies beneath ethical judgment is a cruder, more subjective sense: that cringe factor we feel upon encountering something that seems to be garish, tacky, or just plain bad taste. It can feel harder to sympathize with cases of fraud driven by motivations beyond economic hardship. This may explain the outcry over white American poet Michael Hudson’s decision to appropriate the name of a Chinese American female high school classmate, Yi-Fen Chou, as “a strategy for ‘placing’ poems” (Hudson’s tactic succeeded; “Yi-Fen Chou’s” poem was included in The Best American Poetry 2015). To Tolentino’s point, Hudson’s decision was vehemently pilloried in some circles and vociferously defended in others—though Chou’s family made it clear that they considered his actions to be fraudulent and unethical. This literary controversy was invoked earlier this year when another one erupted, this time in the usually peaceable realm of “the Buddhist Anglosphere,” to borrow a phrase from An Tran’s LitHub article on the topic. Detailing the intricacies of the debate over Matty Weingast’s The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns is beyond the scope of this article, though it bears noting that the collection has been reissued with a new subtitle: “Original Poems Inspired by the Early Buddhist Nuns.” The title change addresses the concerns of those who consider it spurious to claim The First Free Women as a...

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