Literary supplement: The Dalai Lama lights a candle
by Chris  Arthur
Contemporary Review
Vol. 266 No. 1552 May 1995
Pp.271-272
Copyright by Contemporary Review

     The Awakening of the West: The Encounter of Buddhism and Western
     Culture. Stephen Batchelor. Foreword by the Dalai Lama.
     Aquarian/HarperCollins. xvi + 416pp. 12.99 pounds (paperback).
     1-85538-343-8.

A recent history of Buddhism declares that it has touched more human lives
than any other faith. With its influence on the huge populations of India
and China, and its success in Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand,
Vietnam, Japan, Korea, Tibet and elsewhere, there is considerable
plausibility in this claim. Given its immense scale and the impact it has
had on the culture, history and politics of a whole swathe of Eastern
nations, one of the most remarkable facts to emerge from Stephen
Batchelor's fascinating study is how recently Buddhism appeared as a topic
of serious interest on the horizon of the Western consciousness. 'Europeans
and Americans', Batchelor tells is, 'had no coherent conception of Buddhism
until 150 years ago' (xi). What the great Russian orientalist Theodore
Stcherbatsky described as 'perhaps the most powerful movement of ideas in
the history of Asia' has been effectively invisible to the West for the
bulk of its 2,500-year history (the Buddha was born c.563 BC). Yet, as the
Dalai Lama observes in his foreword to The Awakening of the West, 'at this
stage in its history Buddhism is more than an Asian religion' (ix).

Batchelor's wide-ranging, thoughtful and well-informed account demonstrates
convincingly the truth of the Dalai Lama's observation. The reader is taken
from the first encounters between ancient Greeks and Buddhist monks,
through centuries of European ignorance, indifference and rejection, to the
first scholarly studies in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the
most recent and exciting phase of the story, starting only in the 1960s,
when Buddhism began to be practised as a religion by increasing numbers of
people in Europe and America. How many Western Buddhists are there? Recent
assessments suggest anything between 10,000 and 100,000 in Britain and
three to five million in America. Understandably, in view of the difficulty
of arriving at an accurate figure, Batchelor himself does not give an
estimate. However, it is clear from the numbers attending various
meditation classes, retreats and so on which he does cite, that even in
crude numerical terms Buddhism is fast becoming a force to be reckoned
with.

This is an engaging book, written in an easy, accessible style, pleasingly
unencumbered by technical vocabulary or distracting scholarly apparatus.
(Dispensing with footnotes, Batchelor sources his wealth of quotations by a
commendably unobtrusive method.) The author is deeply immersed in the story
he is telling, yet despite his own active involvement with Buddhism, his
account is by no means uncritical, nor does it gloss over those aspects of
Buddhist history which show it in a less than favourable light. Alongside
his account of key personalities, both ancient and modern, whose spiritual
qualities are enormously impressive, he notes the excesses of some of those
jet-setting lamas whose exploits have brought Buddhism into disrepute. It
is sometimes suggested that part of Buddhism's appeal in the modern West
stems from its unblemished record of eschewing persecution in order to aid
conversion. This is a view strongly advanced by Walpola Rahula, for
example, in an influential essay in Zen and the Taming of the Bull (1978).
Batchelor's chapter on the experience of the Jesuits in Japan in the
seventeenth century, and the involvement of Buddhists in the torture and
killing which took place there (pp161-183), provides a useful counterweight
to the historical naivety of such a view.

Such are the number of colourful characters involved, the geographical
range covered and the author's skill at moving between the contemporary
situation and ancient Buddhist history, that the book often reads with the
pace of an adventure story. He manages to convey the sense of writing at a
crucial point in the history of Buddhism, when it may be poised to develop
into new forms specifically suited to its growing presence in the West.
Batchelor is adamant that 'the survival of Buddhism today is dependent on
its continuing ability to adapt' (p278). Properly aware of the enormous
diversity within Buddhism and the dangers of trying to insist on any single
normative type, he suggests a 'spectrum of adaptation' (p337) to identify
the forms which Buddhism may come to take in the West. It might have been
useful at this point to have had some reference to the work of Martin
Willson and Deirdre Green, who have also suggested ways of charting
possible varieties of Buddhism in tho West. However, The Awakening of the
West makes no pretence at being a comprehensive survey, so one cannot
expect everything to be included.

Batchelor is particularly adept at creating eye-catching cameo scenes which
offer fascinating snap-shots of Buddhism's Western presence and forcefully
claim the reader's attention. For instance, it is intriguing to discover
that by the late 1970s, such was the interest in Buddhism in Russia that
'only 3-4 months would elapse between publication of a Buddhist book in the
West and its appearance in a Russian samizdat edition' (p299); or to find
that Windhorse Trading, a Buddhist organization, was one of the 100 fastest
growing companies in Britain in 1992 (p323); or to learn of the Dalai
Lama's lighting a candle at the already crumbling Berlin Wall in 1989 and
his meeting a few weeks later with Vaclav Havel, the first head of any
European state in history to receive a Dalai Lama (xv); or to be given a
glimpse of eleven thousand years of religious history in France, moving
from Cro-Magnon man's cave paintings near Rouffignac to the Centre
Bouddhique now flourishing there (p53).

Sensibly, in view of Rick Field's narrative history of Buddhism in America,
How the Swans Came to the Lake (1986) and Paul Croucher's Buddhism in
Australia 1848-1988, Batchelor confines himself to Buddhism's encounter
with Europe. Different readers will no doubt have different ideas about the
relative emphasis he should have given to the situation in Britain, France,
Germany, Spain and so on, but as a single volume account of so
multi-faceted a story, Batchelor's introduction is first rate. Given that
this is a book likely to make readers want to read more, Robert Ellwood's
excellent article on Buddhism in the West might have been specifically
named, rather than just listing the 16 volume encyclopedia of religion in
which it appears. By and large, though, bibliography and glossary are
appropriate, well-judged and useful.

Three years ago the Bishop of St. Andrews spoke of 'a major step forward in
the spiritual life of Scotland'. He was referring to the purchase of Holy
Isle in the Firth of Clyde by the Samye Ling Community, one of Britain's
most well-established Buddhist groups, and their plans to turn it into an
ecumenical retreat centre. If we contrast the Bishop's remark with those of
typical church-men only a generation or so before him, we surely get a
sense of an altogether new religious climate. One hopes that there will be
sufficient chroniclers of Stephen Batchelor's calibre to chart what forms
of faith are hatched, as this reverse of a spiritual ice age begins to take
hold.