Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism
Reviewed by Russell T. McCutcheon
The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
Vol.36 No.1 (March 1997)
pp.12-124
COPYRIGHT 1997 Society for the Scientific Study of Religion
Edited by Donald Lopez of the University of Michigan, Curators of
the Buddha contains an introduction and six substantial essays.
Besides Lopez, the contributors include Charles Hallisey (Harvard),
Stanley Abe (Duke), Robert Sharf (McMaster), Gustavo Benavides
(Villanova), and Luis Gomez (Michigan). As the title suggests, the
essays are generally focused around critiques of various figures in
the history of the study of Buddhism, from Thomas W. Rhys Davids to
C. G. Jung and D. T. Suzuki. Lest the reader see this volume as but
another play on the theme of "great men," scrutiny of the work and
lives of such figures in their historical context simply provides
one an opportunity to, in Lopez's words from his introduction,
"excavate the contested grounds" upon which Buddhist Studies have
been constructed. Accordingly, the volume is not really about
Buddhism nor is it even about scholars of Buddhism. Instead, the
essays together examine the social, political, and economic
conditions that made the very notion of "Buddhism" and "Buddhist
Studies" possible and desirable at a specific moment in European
colonial history.
Lopez's introduction is particularly helpful in situating these
essays within a wider discursive context by allowing the
nonspecialist to read the papers as providing yet more evidence of
how reified, abstract, and totalized categories of scholarship are
complicit with larger issues of geopolitics. Scholars of religion
have so far not done a particularly good job of addressing the
colonial origins of their field. It is not insignificant that the
study of religion dates to the hallowed academic halls of
nineteenth-century colonial empires and was reborn in America in the
1960s, just as, in Lopez's words, the efflorescence of popular
interest in Asian religions during the Vietnam war insured the
permanence of 'World Religions' . . . in the American university
curriculum" (9). Instead of addressing the geopolitical origins of
the field, scholars most often simply immerse themselves in methods
that supposedly elevate and recapture - but often appropriate - the
insider's supposedly pure experiences, a method that sadly forsakes
the requirements of theorizing necessary to the study of human
cultural products. That this volume explicitly seeks to analyze and
historicize the colonialist methods and theories of an earlier
generation of Buddhologists is therefore to be welcomed, for it may
serve to heighten our awareness of the neocolonial practices that
continue to characterize the study of human cultures. Simply put,
the issues that this volume addresses are not isolated and of
relevance only in examining the history of the field; they are of
relevance for all scholars of religion today.
To provide an example of this colonialist and patronizing heritage,
Lopez discusses the case of Brian Houghton Hodgson (1800-1894), who
is credited with sending the first Sanskrit manuscripts for
translation to Eugene Burnouf in 1837. Hodgson was trained in
England to become an officer with the East India Company. He later
studied Persian and Sanskrit at the company's college in Calcutta,
became a tax assessor in Kumaon, in the Himalayan region, and, after
a number of advances within the Indian service (including assistant
reader at the Court of Nepal), ended his career as a colonial
administrator in 1843. Throughout his career, Hodgson collected
Sanskrit manuscripts and employed "natives" to assist him in
translating and studying them. If one sees the colonialist project
as one of essentialization, dehistoricization, decontextualization,
homogenization, universalization, and romanticization - all of which
bore a material and financial profit for the home nation - then one
finds in Hodgson's career as colonial administrator and manuscript
conduit a wonderful example of the colonialist dynamic active in
much nineteenth-century scholarship. For it was largely due to such
efforts that "Buddhism" became a purely textual and philosophical
construct infinitely accessible to readers in Paris and London. Such
readers had little need to inquire about living, complex human
beings and institutions when they had ancient and supposedly pure
manuscripts at their fingertips. Accordingly, once one acquired the
necessary linguistic skills, there was no longer the need for the
"native" informant.
The volume will surely find a number of readers who specialize in
the study of Buddhism in any one of its many epochs and forms (that
"Buddhism" is presumed by many scholars to be divisible into a
pristine but largely dead original or pure form, followed by a
number of varying but nonetheless degraded forms, is precisely the
assumption that this volume tackles throughout!). Yet it should also
attract the attention of readers interested in applying the work of
such diverse writers as Aijaz Ahmad, Pierre Bourdieu, James
Clifford, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said to the study of religion
and culture. Equipped with a host of critical reading strategies
derived from the work of these and other writers, scholars are now
increasingly interested in the mechanisms that created such
transhistorical essences as "religion," "faith", "the West," "the
East," "the Orient," let alone "Hinduism" and "Buddhism." AS such,
Curators of the Buddha owes much to Said's work in the late 1970s -
a debt fully acknowledged by Lopez. However, lest one assume that
this volume is a relatively unoriginal application of Said's now
widely known thesis, Lopez points out that the particular case of
the study of Buddhism is far different from the study of the Islamic
Orient. Traditionally, the latter stood in for a whole host of
political, religious, military, and economic threats to the
uniformity, identity, and power of the European world, whereas the
former was historically ancient (much like ancient Greece or Egypt)
and geographically distant from Europe. All the same, similar sets
of essentializing tools handy in caricaturizing and disarming the
Orient were employed by scholars in their largely nostalgic
representations of the essence of Buddhism - whether that be found
in some Sanskrit or Pali master text or in the timeless insights of
the Zen experience of satori.
That the study of religion is among the last to confront the
challenge of postcolonial criticism (for we have all seen the sparks
fly when it was applied to literary criticism and anthropology) is
indeed intriguing. However, if we agree with Benavides when, in his
essay on Giuseppe Tucci, he notes that "'religion' is the name given
to those practices and presuppositions which, infinitely malleable
both by insiders and outsiders, articulate a culture's, or perhaps
just an elite's, unspoken understanding of itself" (162), then we
might have an indication as to why the study of religion has been so
resilient to such critical scholarship. Given the utter dominance,
from the colonial to the modern era, of defining religion in terms
of personalistic experiences and various states of individual
consciousness, "religion," understood both by the insider and
scholarly outsider as well as the sum total of an individual's
scruples, a private feeling, or one's ultimate concern, has been an
ideal rhetorical and ideological construct. That volumes such as
Curators of the Buddha are now appearing suggests that such reified
categories are not quite as essential and impervious to critical
study as they were once thought to be.
RUSSELL T. McCUTCHEON Southwest Missouri State University
Springfield, Missouri