Seeking Śākyamuni

In the wake of the orientalist critique and the discursive turn in the humanities, the category of “religion” has come under suspicion of being a Western construct forced upon non-Western, often colonial, subjects by brute epistemic violence for sordid political and economic motives. In seeking to salvage their subject matter, scholars of religion increasingly turn to a strategy of embracing the constructed nature of “religion” but contextualizing it within the project of a global history: “religion” is argued to be not simply a Western imposition but rather a global co-creation, not merely a tool of subjugation but a means of creative self-re-articulation. Richard Jaffe’s Seeking Śākyamuni follows this broad strategy, yet goes one step farther. Its focus is no longer on the interaction between Western efforts to construct a world religion called “Buddhism” and the indigenous Asian responses to these efforts, but rather on the creative interactions between Asian Buddhists...

Articulation (sociology) · Buddhism · Colonialism · Construct (python library) · Epistemology · Indigenous · Orientalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · South asia · Subject (documents) · Theology · Anthropology · Chinese history and philosophy · Ecology · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy