Charles S. Prebish
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Westward Dharma: Buddhism beyond Asia Paperback – December 2, 2002
by Charles S. Prebish (Editor), Martin Baumann (Editor)
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The first authoritative volume on the totality of Buddhism in the West, Westward Dharma establishes a comparative and theoretical perspective for considering the amazing variety of Buddhist traditions, schools, centers, and teachers that have developed outside of Asia. Leading scholars from North America, Europe, South Africa, and Australia explore the plurality and heterogeneity of traditions and practices that are characteristic of Buddhism in the West.
This recent, dramatic growth in Western Buddhism is accompanied by an expansion of topics and issues of Buddhist concern. The contributors to this volume treat such topics as the broadening spirit of egalitarianism; the increasing emphasis on the psychological, as opposed to the purely religious, nature of practice; scandals within Buddhist movements; the erosion of the distinction between professional and lay Buddhists; Buddhist settlement in Israel; the history of Buddhism in internment camps; repackaging Zen for the West; and women's dharma in the West. The interconnections of historical and theoretical approaches in the volume make it a rich, multi-layered resource.
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388 pages
Language
English
Publisher
University of California Press
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Editorial Reviews
From the Inside Flap
"Like seeds on the wind, Buddhist teachings continue to reach new lands. This outstanding book brings to light, in rich detail, the current flowering of Buddhism in the West. Long a world religion, Buddhism is now a global one."—Kenneth Kraft, author of The Wheel of Engaged Buddhism
"Westward Dharma deserves a place on the growing bookshelf of contemporary Buddhist studies. Prebish and Baumann broaden our horizons from North America to the wider Western world, exploring key aspects of Buddhism's most recent geographical and cultural expansion."—Paul David Numrich, coauthor of Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs in America.
From the Back Cover
"Like seeds on the wind, Buddhist teachings continue to reach new lands. This outstanding book brings to light, in rich detail, the current flowering of Buddhism in the West. Long a world religion, Buddhism is now a global one."―Kenneth Kraft, author of The Wheel of Engaged Buddhism
"Westward Dharma deserves a place on the growing bookshelf of contemporary Buddhist studies. Prebish and Baumann broaden our horizons from North America to the wider Western world, exploring key aspects of Buddhism's most recent geographical and cultural expansion."―Paul David Numrich, coauthor of Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs in America.
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Product details
Publisher : University of California Press; First edition (December 2, 2002)
Language : English
Paperback : 388 pages
Customer Reviews: 5.0 out of 5 stars 5 ratings
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Charles S. Prebish
Charles Prebish came to Utah State University in January 2007 following more than thirty-five years on the faculty of the Pennsylvania State University. During his tenure at Utah State University, he was the first holder of the Charles Redd Endowed Chair in Religious Studies and served as Director of the Religious Studies Program. During his career, Dr. Prebish published more than twenty books and nearly one hundred scholarly articles and chapters. His books Buddhist Monastic Discipline (1975) and Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America (1999) are considered classic volumes in Buddhist Studies. Dr. Prebish remains the leading pioneer in the establishment of the study of Western Buddhism as a sub-discipline in Buddhist Studies. In 1993 he held the Visiting Numata Chair in Buddhist Studies at the University of Calgary, and in 1997 was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation National Humanities Fellowship for research at the University of Toronto. Dr. Prebish has been an officer in the International Association of Buddhist Studies, and was co-founder of the Buddhism Section of the American Academy of Religion. In 1994, he co-founded the Journal of Buddhist Ethics, which was the first online peer-reviewed journal in the field of Buddhist Studies; and in 1996, co-founded the Routledge "Critical Studies in Buddhism" series. He has also served as editor of the Journal of Global Buddhism and Critical Review of Books in Religion. In 2005, he was honored with a "festschrift" volume by his colleagues titled Buddhist Studies from India to America: Essays in Honor of Charles S. Prebish. Dr. Prebish retired from Utah State University on December 31, 2010, and was awarded emeritus status. He currently resides in State College, Pennsylvania.
Top reviews from the United States
Steven H Propp
TOP 500 REVIEWER
5.0 out of 5 stars A USEFUL MODERN OVERVIEW OF BUDDHISM IN THE WEST
Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2011
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The authors state in the Introduction to this 2002 book, "The globalization of Buddhism does not only refer to a spread from the center to the periphery, that is, from Asia to Western countries. It also encompasses the emergence of new centers, with regionalized Buddhist interpretations of practices. The creation of consciously labeled Western Buddhist forms is a development within this overall process... In this volume, the contributors can only break some of this ground and provide important snapshots and material related to the ongoing globalization and the 'Westernization' of Buddhism." (Pg. 7)
This book includes a wide variety of essays, on topics such as "The Spectrum of Buddhist Practice in the West," "American Buddhism in the Making," "Repackaging Zen for the West," "Scandals Emerging in Western Buddhism," "The Encounter of Buddhism and Psychology," etc.
Here are some additional quotations from the book:
"Unlike all the preceding Buddhist traditions discussed here, this school believes that all practices that rely upon one's own powers---of meditation and so forth---are fruitless." (Pg. 44)
"This cognitive, modern strand of Theravada Buddhism has remained rather small in Western countries... The highly intellectualized and anti-ritualistic strand does continue to these days, although it has rarely captured a widespread audience." (Pg. 56)
"Despite this, positive evaluations of Buddhism started to appear in South Africa by the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, mostly from Unitarians and Theosophists." (Pg. 153)
"The disciples (at Shambhala) were also unrestrained in their sexual liaisons, believing that sexual jealousy indicated a failure to grasp Chogyam Trungpa's teaching. The resulting tensions led to emotionally-charged relationships between individual members of the ... community..." (Pg. 233-234)
John L. Murphy
5.0 out of 5 stars Solid, scholarly overview
Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2010
Buddhism beyond Asia's explored by 22 scholars in this 2002 collection. It focuses on the transformation, since the later 19c, of the Buddha's teachings into Western, and cross-cultural, and analytical transformations that try to retrieve a purer, primitive, or truer original teaching. Thomas Tweed sums up these evolving trends: "If modernist Buddhists have de-mythologized and rationalized traditional Buddhism one may say that post-modernist Buddhist practitioners secularize and psychologize modernist Buddhism." (60)
Tweed distinguishes a "migrant religion trajectory" from a "missionary-driven transmission," in turn separate from a "demand-driven transmission" as the three methods of current transfer. (62-3) He notes how the 'foreign' religion might have deliberately been fetched from abroad by sympathizers and initial converts. In the case of Buddhism, texts in Asian languages were transmitted and published, Buddhist ideas and practices were adopted, and Asian teachers were invited to lecture." (52) Westerners rely on Eastern exchange, as transport, globalization, and immigration thicken the ties rather than allow the crude models of Orientalist domination or imperial manifestation to control the emergence of a dharma-practice adapted not only to secular First World settings, but contemporary capitalist and countercultural markets all over Asia, Brazil, Oceania, and North America.
Tweed pioneered efforts to try to define who in this milieu's actually Buddhist. Besides converts, "night-stand" sympathizers who try out practices often in privacy and those who mix and match Buddhist with other religious or therapeutic or esoteric approaches complicate easy tallying. It seems that in Europe, most Buddhists still are of Asian origin, but the authors agree that Westerners continue to make it, as in France, one of the West's fastest-growing denominations. B. Alan Wallace, Martin Baumann, and Charles S. Prebish all discuss the ramifications of this acceleration, as Tibetan Buddhism and vipassana "insight" meditation widen the appeal beyond the slightly earlier arrival of Zen midway through last century.
For section two, the territory of Western Buddhism emerges. Baumann looks at Europe, while Richard Hughes Seager examines in America the three strands Tweed separates. Bruce Matthews does the same for Canada, Michelle Spuler for Australia and New Zealand, Michel Clasquin for South Africa, and Frank Usarski for Brazil. In "Buddhism in the Promised Land," Lionel Obadia looks at the tiny Israeli community, comfortable in its Jewish identity while taking on the dharma. A Zen master, Soen Nakagawa, founded an early center with the pun of "Ki"="Basis" and "Butsu"="Buddha" as similar to the Hebrew for "Kibbutz." (181) He also translated poetry based on the linguistic happenstance between "mut"="die" and "Mu"="emptiness" from Japanese. (182) It makes an intriguing counterpart to Rodger Kamenetz' Tibetan-Jewish dialogues documented in "The Jew in the Lotus" and "Stalking Elijah" (see my reviews) during the 1990s.
Section three surveys how changes happen, more topical and less geographical. Duncan Ryukan Williams studies Buddhism in the Japanese-American internment camps during WWII; Douglas M. Padgett reports from a temple in suburban Tampa, Florida; David L. McMahan takes up the repackaging of Zen for Westerners into its current ubiquitous use as a name-brand conjurer of sold serenity, hip detachment, and instant well-being; Sandra Bell briefly retells the sadly familiar stories of scandal at the San Francisco Zen Center and at Chogyam Trungpa's Vajradhatu/ Shambhala Training-- these episodes have been covered elsewhere in more detail as the subject deserves, but her summary may serve as an introduction for the newcomer. It seemed more than these two prominent examples might have broadened the material beyond these two oft-told tales.
Lifestyle in section four gives testimony from those who practice. Ajahn Tiradhammo looks at how the Thai Forest Tradition faces the task of dealing with the Asian model of a strong leader and obedient followers when Westerners and Western influences broaden the traditional expectations in a monastic discipline. Karma Lekshe Tsomo tells an intriguing predicament: unlike Christian monastics, Buddhist monks and especially nuns must support themselves while in their pledged status. This leads to many who study in Asia finding themselves unable to continue as nuns, and they must go to the West to work to afford to go back to an Asian monastery for more training. Or, they leave and return to the West, often "disrobing" and teaching as lay instructors. Out of such shifts, Sylvia Wetzel sees a new in-between type of full-time, often necessarily professional, Buddhist practitioner who is "neither monk nor nun." Gil Fronsdal, a leader in the expansion of the vipassana movement into ethically interdependent awareness and therapeutic venues, looks at the tension when people try to expound "virtues without rules" in their often New Age-affiliated interpretations and modifications of Buddhist dharma into a self-help, transformative type of holistic healing.
The final section shows similar widening of styles. Judith Simmer-Brown examines "women's dharma in the West;" Christopher S. Queen in an excellent article takes on the "interbeing" promoted by Thich Nhat Hanh and the "universal responsibility" advocated by the Dalai Lama. Queen shows how "engaged" Buddhism as Bernard Glassman's Zen Peacekeeper Order, Nhat Hanh's "Order of Interbeing," methodological agnosticism, and globalization align with Joanna Macy's popular concept of interdependence to create a Buddhism that demands social action. Franz Metcalf follows a similar path, showing how intertwined the dharma can be with psychoanalysis, yet how fundamentally difficult it may be for Buddhism to resist the pull of appropriation of the dharma-- as may have happened already with yoga, meditation, and arguably Zen in many Western adaptations or distortions-- into a more "transformative" but perhaps less faithfully Buddhist contribution to healing. Metcalf hopes that Buddhism can overcome the diminishing tendency by some Westerners to commodify it as "a form of religious psychotherapy." (360)
Ian Harris takes on art and modernity, musing how romanticism, modernism, and commodification alter what passes as Buddhist when entering the Western market. His example of a Tibetan artist raised as a dogmatic social-realist in Communist-occupied Lhasa, Gonkar Gyatso, and the artist's subsequent attempts to intergrate Buddhist themes into his "modern 'thangkas'" that led to his flight to Dharamsala, shows a cautionary tale about too reductive an approach taken by observers into whatever's authentically Buddhist. For, it's a subject perpetually open to the unexpected, as cultures merge and practitioners migrate. As these scholars here remind us, Buddhism can never stand still; its very nature is to undermine permanent or defined categories that resist change.
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