'Buddhism beyond Borders, edited by Scott Mitchell and Natalie Quli'

Abstract

Buddhism Beyond Borders: New Perspectives on Buddhism in the United States A volume in the SUNY Series in Buddhism and American Culture Edited By Scott A. Mitchell and Natalie E. F. Quli. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015, xiii+287 $80.00 ISBN 978-1-4384-5637-9 (hardcover)The front cover of Buddhism Beyond Borders: New Perspectives on Buddhism in the United States is decorated with a flag. Not an American flag, as one might assume given the subtitle of the edited collection, but rather the Buddhist flag designed in 1885 by the Colombo Committee, a group of Ceylonese Buddhists, and modified by Henry Steel Olcott, the first White Buddhist. Although Olcott and the Protestant Buddhism he produced has generally been dismissed if not reviled by Western Buddhist scholars as inauthentic and diluted, he is still revered by Sri Lankan Buddhists in the U.S. who not only decorate their temples with the flag, but sometimes even include a statue of Olcott himself. The choice to represent the collection with a universal rather than national flag and the contrast in how such a symbol has been received in scholarly and practice communities signifies much of what is explored in Buddhism Beyond Borders. The text aims to expand both the geographical boundaries of American Buddhism and the theoretical parameters that have often defined its academic study. Hence it shifts attention from the bounded category of nation to the cultural flows of the transnational and replaces the static binary framework of traditional (authentic) Asian Buddhism vs modern (inauthentic) American Buddhism with a dynamic model that reveals/revels in fluidity, hybridity and multiplicity. In doing so, the collection also makes a compelling case for bringing the subfield out from the margins into the mainstream of Buddhist Studies by showing its subject matter is not a deviant from the norm but, in fact, exemplifies what Buddhism as a living, moving tradition has always done: creatively adapt, absorb and assimilate. As Richard Payne advocates in his Afterword, the text suggests the need to replace a rhetoric of rupture that emphasizes difference and opposition with a narrative of similarity and continuity that is more faithful to the historical complexity of Buddhism's spatial and temporal movement.Before reflecting on the text's conclusions, however, let's look further into its conception and content. The immediate origin of Buddhism Beyond Borders lies in a four-day conference held in March 2010 at the Institute of Buddhist Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, but its editors look back further to a twelve week lecture series titled Buddhism in America: An Expanding Subfield held in 1994 at the same place for its inspiration. As Mitchell and Quli note, much had changed in the sixteen years since the scholarship produced from that series-Charles Prebish and Kenneth Tanaka's edited collection The Faces of Buddhism in America (1998) and Prebish's Luminous Practice: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America (1999)-laid down the foundations for the emerging subfield of Buddhism in America, and the intention of the 2010 conference was to pick up these tracks and to map the many new ones that had appeared in their wake. To do so adequately, they emphasize, requires studying US Buddhism with attention to both transnational accelerated with post-1965 immigration patterns and the spread of Buddhism via the Internet, and the unique expression of these transnational currents within the particular local U.S. context.To foster this both/and approach, the editors make the wise move of opening the collection with a theory of religion that forefronts it. Chapter one details Thomas Tweed's application of his translocative approach to religion to the study of Buddhism in the United States. Seeing religion as confluences of organic-cultural flows, Tweed calls on Buddhist scholars to abandon the standard area study focus on static fixed location in favor of a more fluid dynamic approach that can track both crossings and dwellings. …