It brings to light the issue of defining our subject area and the amazing difficulties therein. One of my great pleasures over the last three years has been serving on the committee for an American Academy of Religion group looking at \u201cBuddhism in the West.\u201d Each year we receive a slew of presentation proposals and choose some to be presented at the annual AAR meeting. Here a consistent theme has come up in the discussion of Buddhism in the West: the so-called \u201cTwo Buddhisms\u201d model.<\/p>\n
This model divides Buddhists in the West into two groups: immigrant <\/span>Buddhists and convert<\/span> Buddhists. The immigrant Buddhists generally try to maintain the type of Buddhism they practiced before, preserving ritual, language, and other elements from their home country. Converts pick and choose aspects they find most helpful, often searching for the \u201ctrue Buddhism\u201d to be found when \u201ccultural accretions\u201d are stripped away. What you end up with is two quite remarkably different kinds of Buddhism<\/span>. The immigrant laypeople rarely, if ever, meditate, they donate regularly to temples and monastics, believe in ghosts and take part in (to Western eyes) strange<\/span> rituals. Western converts meditate a lot, spend more on books about Buddhism than at their local meditation center, and avoid anything looking \u201csuperstitious.\u201d<\/p>\n On the one hand, this model looks good and may make good intuitive sense. But for those who have studied Buddhism in the West, and for many simply experiencing it, these categories fall apart pretty fast. We find plenty of converts chanting dutifully in languages they don\u2019t understand, immigrants meditating assiduously, and so on. Those who cling fast to the model say that this is simply the \u201cWesternization\u201d of immigrants and the \u201ccultural appropriation\u201d of some converts, thus showing the model\u2019s continued usefulness, albeit growingly muddled.<\/p>\n Detractors of the model focus on its flaws, sometimes to the point of no longer seeing its usefulness. When I taught Intro to Buddhism to college students, I used this model \u2013 basically. For two days I described the \u201cTwo Buddhisms\u201d as relatively separate and determinable categories, and then on the third day I showed the problem with the model. It was a very useful tool for introducing Buddhism in the West to new students.<\/p>\n If a better way of classifying Buddhism in the West comes along, a way that first year students can easily comprehend, I\u2019m sure I will adopt it. But what Silk\u2019s article brilliantly shows (here in regard to Mahayana Buddhism<\/a> vs Mainstream <\/span>or Theravada <\/span>or Hinayana <\/span>Buddhism) is that sometimes the old yet flawed schema is the best we\u2019ve got. Silk\u2019s article draws us through a great historical survey and a dazzling assortment of conceptual tools that can be used to determine just what is Mahayana Buddhism. <\/span>In the end though the answer seems to be that, even with all this work, we still don\u2019t have an answer.<\/p>\n The same questions and analysis can arise when we ask, \u201cwhat, if anything, is Buddhism?\u201d and (for me especially), \u201cwhat counts as Buddhist Ethics?\u201d<\/p>\n In the end we find that attempts to draw a firm line around our concepts (i.e. to define<\/span> them) are always doomed to failure. Either our method is flawed, or new evidence (counterexamples to our \u2018rules\u2019) will arise to force revision. We tell our first-year students that, \u201cBuddhism radically downplays the role of gods (devas<\/span>).\u201d But then we introduce them to Tibetan Buddhism<\/a>, where the gods \u2013 as benevolent deities, malevolent protectors, and archetypal bodhisattvas \u2013 play an overwhelming role. Or we tell them that meditation plays a central role in the Buddhist path and then later introduce them to Jodo Shinshu, where meditation as we know it is virtually absent.<\/p>\n
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