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Anagarika Dharmapala, Gananath Obeyesekere, Gregory Schopen, Henry Steel Olcott, Martin Luther, religion, Robert M. Gimello, Sri Lanka, Stephen Prothero
The anti-Protestant view of religious studies has come out particularly strongly in the study of Buddhism. By most accounts of the field, one of the leading scholars of contemporary Buddhism is Gregory Schopen. Most of Schopen’s work criticizes scholars’ emphasis on Buddhist texts, advocating a turn instead to archaeological and epigraphic data. Schopen claims that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Buddhist scholarship focused on texts because of “Protestant presuppositions” about what religion really consisted of. He advocates instead for a scholarship of Buddhism in which “texts would have been judged significant only if they could be shown to be related to what religious people actually did.” What Schopen never considers, to my knowledge, is the idea that scholarship in Buddhism might be seeking the truth found in Buddhist ideas, rather than “what religion was” in remote and hoary periods of human history. Perhaps, in other words, we think about texts not because we have been trained to think as Protestants, but because we are trying to think as Buddhists.
Anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere took methodological anti-Protestantism a step further, effectively labelling not merely scholars of Buddhism but Buddhists themselves as regrettably Protestant. Obeyesekere coined the unfortunately widespread term “Protestant Buddhism” to describe what I have called Yavanayāna, the new modernist and rationalist form of Western-influenced Buddhism whose roots go back to nineteenth-century Sri Lanka and the reformers Henry Steel Olcott and Anagarika Dharmapala.
What’s wrong with calling this modernized Buddhism Protestant? First of all, neither Olcott nor Dharmapala were Protestants themselves. Dharmapala was born and raised a Sri Lankan Buddhist. While born and raised a Protestant family, Olcott had converted away from Protestantism to “spiritualism” well before calling himself a Buddhist. Moreover, as Stephen Prothero has rightly argued, Protestantism was only one influence on Olcott’s thought; secular modernism was at least as important. For example, Olcott was a firm believer in the theory of evolution, rejected roundly by the Protestants of his time, and was enthusiastic about Buddhism partially because he took it – unlike Protestantism – to be compatible with evolutionary theory.
But beyond that historical point, one must also ask: what’s wrong with Protestantism? The term “Protestant Buddhism” carries the whiff of an accusation that there’s something wrong with this Buddhism, that these Buddhists are not really Buddhists but Protestants in Buddhist disguise. In a class I took from him, Robert Gimello once criticized Yavanayāna Buddhists who would make claims like “??kyamuni and I have got it right, and 2500 years of Buddhist tradition has got it wrong.” The class laughed, and Gimello added “I think that’s extremely arrogant.” Looking back on that experience, I sorely wish I had raised my and and asked the following question: “So may I clarify, Prof. Gimello? You are, in fact, telling us that the Protestant Reformation should never have happened?”
For after all, what was Martin Luther doing except to say “Jesus, Paul and I have got it right, and 1500 years of Catholic tradition has got it wrong”? To make a claim like Gimello’s is effectively to claim that Protestantism is a tradition founded on illegitimate arrogance. And one can reasonably make that claim – as a matter of anti-Protestant apologetics. Indeed Gimello – always a devout Catholic – has since moved to the University of Notre Dame to help develop “robustly Catholic” theological views of Buddhism. I believe in the value of apologetics, of theological or sectarian claims aimed at persuading members of one tradition to move to another. I only have a problem with apologetics when it poses as neutral, disinterested scholarship, as Gimello had once claimed his class to be. It may well be that a “robustly Catholic” sectarian apologetic helps us understand Buddhism better – but only if we acknowledge that that is what it is.
Very good, sir – again! This is more reason why Buddhist/Asian philosophy (and/or eschatology/soteriology) should be in our Philosophy Departments in the West. For I would argue that there is a flaw in saying “we think about texts not because we have been trained to think as Protestants, but because we are trying to think as Buddhists.”
We, who study the texts, don’t care so much about “Buddhists” as we do the mind of the Buddha himself and the other great philosophers of the tradition. The average Buddhist over history is not interesting – to us. He/she is poor and illiterate and indeed knows maybe a couple mantras and ritual activities.
So Schopen has a point if we are trying to say we study “Buddhism.” Labels like that are always shifty things, but you and I might be wrong to say we are scholars of “Buddhism” when in fact what we do is “Buddhist Philosophy.”
Yeah, I suppose you’re right. In my case especially, I’m really not trying to think as a Buddhist as such, since I don’t identify as one.
I don’t want to say that the average Buddhist over history is not interesting to us. Everybody has some wisdom to offer, including the poor and illiterate. Indeed, some of history’s great masters have been exactly that – the Buddha would probably have been illiterate, Jesus was poor, Ramakrishna was both. But, yes, there’s a huge difference between those great masters and everyday people of whatever stripe – there’s no reason to believe an everyday Asian Buddhist is any wiser than the white guy I bumped into on the subway yesterday.
In some ways the picture of one engaged in vigorous polemics with Buddhist thought such a Shankara is a more reliable indication of the contemporary attitude towards texts. He certainly took them as central and is considered to have been the force that reduced the Buddhist presence to the margins of the sub-continent. Exaggeration no doubt.
In Rishikesh long ago I met a member of the separated brethren from Belfast who was studying with an austere outfit called Yoga Niketan. They were I thought the ‘clear-light’ (i.e.no stained glass) version of Hinduism whilst the Sivananda people that I favoured were the smells and bells High Church, Catholics. Pure Occidentalism.
Having looked at a few papers of Schopen I have to say that I find him brisk, crisp and lucid; an oasis in the dusty desert of the profeseriat. The things that are commonplace in Buddhism relics, stupas, the living ‘dead’ saints, smaranajatis/indulgences, the desire to be buried close to the saints tomb and so forth are commonplace in the Catholic tradition but obviously the cold Northern eye of the 19C Rationalist Protestant would find it alien. Miracles are an embarrassment to them. The more interesting question is – what is the folk metaphysics underpinning these beliefs and how do they connect to the higher teachings?
Schopen does write well, especially since he’s polemical: he is not afraid to say what he has to say, and I appreciate that. My point is that it’s not just Protestants who find this stuff alien, but secular modernists, and reformist Buddhists themselves.
You are right, though, that the question of how these phenomena connect to higher teachings is significantly more interesting; and that’s something Schopen rarely explores. One of my problems with his work is that it’s the ideas that make these phenomena interesting; there’s no particular reason, in my opinion, to care what st?pas were worshipped at by fifth-century Indians except insofar as that practice sheds light on Buddhist ideas today.
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“Schopen claims that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Buddhist scholarship focused on texts because of “Protestant presuppositions” about what religion really consisted of.”
!!! As if the entire Scholastic period had not been one long conversation commenting on texts!
“What Schopen never considers, to my knowledge, is the idea that scholarship in Buddhism might be seeking the truth found in Buddhist ideas”
It is a short step from such archeology you criticize to the easy deconstruction which just “plays” with a text, seeing what it can be made to “mean.” I was looking into Derrida’s Glas yesterday and reminded of this– he plays so much with Hegel that one could be forgiven for forgetting that this is only interesting if Hegel himself is worth engaging with. I don’t believe Derrida ever really forgot this, but alas, he begat an easily-imitated style that was justly criticized for being ‘parasitic’. (Of course Derrida is more often called “Talmudic” than “protestant.”)
On a somewhat different note, I’ve also encountered descriptions of certain schools of Buddhism, in particular Jodo Shinshu in Japan, as “protestant” because of a reliance upon “faith” (or what gets translated as “faith”). I am not a scholar of Buddhism but it strikes me that the contrasts between Rinzai and Soto Zen (“fast” vs “slow” enlightenment, to over-simplify), also find some resonance here. While my feeling is that to uncritically discuss Buddhism (or any non-Christian religion) in terms of ‘protestantism’ is just begging for misunderstanding (if it is not itself already a misunderstanding), still it seems uncontroversial to observe similar cultural movements. In this sense I see the comparativist project as legitimate, noting ‘family resemblances’ between Shinran and Luther, for instance. (I believe Karl Barth noted the same thing).