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 further. 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 themselves. Jaffe persuasively demonstrates that the construction of at least one iteration of the new world religion “Buddhism,” namely modern Japanese Buddhism, is the result not simply of the Japanese encounter with the West but also with the Buddhist world of South and Southeast Asia in the wake of the 1868 Meiji revolution. For many Japanese Buddhists, Jaffe argues, “South Asia was a central ‘contact zone’ . . . where Buddhist texts, ideas, practices, and scholarship, both Asian and European/American, were transformed . . . and disseminated” (107). This transformation, Jaffe asserts, was no straightforward response to Western ideas. Rather, it was a process of reconceptualization and transculturation (238) in which the Buddhist “modern” was negotiated by a plurality of actors, including Western scholars, their South Asian mentors and students, and Japanese seekers and pilgrims. The latter not only acquired new knowledge and, especially linguistic, skills that allowed them to remake their own tradition but in turn also contributed East Asian Buddhist notions, both modernist and traditional, to the remaking of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism (chapter 5). It is to Jaffe’s credit that he vividly captures the fluidity and dynamism of these Asian entanglements in a richly documented, engagingly narrated, and methodologically innovative fashion.

Articulation (sociology) · Buddhism · Construct (python library) · Orientalism · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Theology · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy