Edited by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

One of the ways that one can distinguish the academic field of

Buddhist studies, or "Buddhology," from other non-Western fields in

the Western academy is by considering the particular manner in which

its object of study--Buddhism and the Buddhists that perpetuate

it--has faded to be fully docile. Not only has this object of study

been engaged in missionary activity for most of its history, it has

even had a certain degree of success in the modern West, including,

significantly, among a fair number of professional Buddhologists.

That such success might pose a challenge to the dominant ideological

matrices in the West has produced interesting ambivalences both in

Western academic conceptions of Buddhism and in the self-conception

of the field's practitioners. I can hardly explore such ambivalences

here, but I would at least suggest that they help to account for why

Buddhology is one of the last fields in the humanities (well behind

its cousin fields of Sinology, Indology, and Middle Eastern studies)

to consider the insights of what is currently known as cultural

studies, much less to engage in self-conscious reflection about the

complicity of the field's practitioners in a variety of colonialist

and orientalist projects. Yet far from concluding that Curators of

the Buddha is merely a belated effort at postorientalist critique, I

submit instead that the complexity of the reasons for that very

belatedness makes this a landmark book, all the more admirable for

the willingness of its contributors to address some necessarily

controversial matters.

The essays that editor Donald Lopez has brought together open up for

interrogation key moments of contact between Western scholars and

Buddhists in the last two centuries. Charles Hallisey discusses a

set of tendencies among Victorian Buddhologists that might be

subject to postorientalist criticism--among them, the tendency to

privilege early or classical Sanskrit biographies of the Buddha over

later, vernacular ones and to portray early Buddhism as free of

ritual--but he shows instead that an "intercultural mimesis" was at

work based on what Theravada Buddhist themselves were claiming

during the same period. Gustavo Benavides studies a side of the

great Tibetologist Giuseppe Tucci not often noted: his romantic

fascination with what be thought of as Buddhist timelessness and Zen

mystical experience, and the intersections of that fascination with

Tucci's involvement with Italian fascism during the 1930s and 1940s.

Stanley Abe traces Western art-historical theories attributing the

development of the Indic image of the Buddha in Gandhara to Greek

influence. Robert Sharf looks at the form of Zen Buddhism imported

to the West by Japanese apologists such as D.T. Suzuki and shows

that it was a construction based on a combination of Western

religious sentiments and Japanese nationalistic aspirations, rather

than an accurate portrayal of traditional Zen Buddhism. Luis Gomez

explores Carl Jung's ambivalent relationship with Buddhism; Jung

appropriated its ideas and authority, even while ultimately

asserting the superiority of his own Western orientation, and

betrayed in the end his rivalrous attitude toward the healing

traditions of Buddhism. Finally, Lopez considers the Western

characterization of Tibetan Buddhism as being in urgent need of

preservation, by providing autobiographical reflection on his own

dissertation fieldwork, for which he read texts with an erudite lama

in a Tibetan refugee camp.

This outstanding collection uncovers a plethora of important

tensions and dynamics in the academic study of Buddhism that merit

careful examination and that are by no means construed in the same

way by each of the contributors. Space restrictions allow me to

comment on only one such matter here: a tendency in some cultural

studies circles for Western scholarly self-critique of pan

projections and distortions to turn out to position, once again,

Western agency as the central cause of the events of world history.

I am therefore gratified to see evidence to the contrary in Lopez's

essay, in which he notes that the orientalist scholar's proclivity

to reduce Buddhism to a collection of texts is an imitation of the

strategies of Buddhists themselves, who, at least in Tibet have been

preserving if not fetishizing texts for centimes in ways not

entirely unlike the ways that European orientalists have. A similar

point is developed still further in Hallisey's piece, which

characterizes the "productive `elective affinity'" (p. 43) between

traditional Buddhist apologists and their Western observers and

enthusiasts, thus drawing our attention to the fact dug Asian

Buddhists pursue agendas and strategies of their own and have not

merely been abject victim of Western machinations.

Sharf's essay is in some ways the one that goes furthest with this

theme, although the agency of Suzuki and others whom he analyzes

cannot be called nonWestern without equivocation, especially in view

of Sharf's central argument that Suzuki and company's ideas were

more a product of modern or Western conditions than of traditional

Japanese ones. Indeed, it is ironic that the single essay in this

volume that offers a sustained look at Asian activities is the one

that, by arguing that Suzuki's "Zen" is really occidental mysticism

in disguise, ends up in chilling consonance (are we to dub this

post-postorientalism?) with the nineteenth-century orientalists

described by Abe, who found Greek influence virtually everywhere.

Occidental mysticism (conjoined with Japanese nationalism, a further

complicated factor) surely is deeply at work in the Zen of Suzuki

and his colleagues; this insight leads to an important correction of

the record, for which we must be grateful to Sharf, along with

Leslie Pincus, Bernard Faure, and others who have recently made a

similar point. And yet, in making this argument, Sharf curiously

ignores another set of sources for Suzuki's mystical Zen, namely,

the ample material in Buddhism itself that also collapses the

subject-object distinction and talks of transcending time and space,

and that certainly influenced Suzuki and Nishida as much as Otto,

Schleiermacher, and James did. This omission--with only the barest

admission to the contrary--is particularly suspect when it becomes

evident that a historical argument is serving to delegitimize the

new Zen; as is the case, for example, when one is instructed that a

word like keiken, "experience," is a Western-influenced neologism

unknown to premodern Zen sources. This is a telling example that

gives credence to Sharf's argument, and yet, if one is worried about

precedent, one would also have to notice that Buddhists have long

popularized practices in order to appeal to lay supporters and have

long invented neologisms and adopted foreign idioms as part of the

process of introducing Buddhism into Dew cultural contexts. In any

event, the inadequacy of the appeal to history is only part of the

concern here, for our recognition (which is itself historical!) that

Buddhism was and is a missionary tradition, dependent on universal

and ahistorical claims, suggests a potentially imperialistic

aspiration of the historical method altogether, especially in the

study of Buddhism. That is, to make historical precedent a gauge of

legitimacy can serve to limit the ability of Buddhist tradition to

reconfigure its ideas and practices in new forms in order to gain

power and influence today. In short, Sharf's essay demonstrates a

bind in which the postorientalist Buddhologist is caught: well aware

of the problems in decontextualizing traditions, we can also see

that to confine ourselves to a rigorous poststructuralist

methodology--by which I mean to hold as a fundamental axiom that

there are no universal truths that can Boat free, landing in any

place and taking on any new guise unscathed--in this field is

precisely to deny Buddhism its own agency and participation in

modernity.

All this seems to suggest that competition with Buddhism, such as

dud which Gomez finds in Jung's case, is far from over in Western

academia. If Sharf protesteth too much, he shows at least how much

Buddhism's missionary message needs to be debunked if we are to

preserve the imputedly unique status of the rational Western subject

position.