Best Joke? :
Numerous scholars of "religion" have criticised the terms commonly used.
"While there is a staggering amount of data, phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterised in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religion," writes religious historian Jonathan Z. Smith, "there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study."
Timothy Fitzgerald studied philosophical theology but decided that social anthropology was a more useful field for researching the conversion movement of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in India. Fitzgerald wants "to reconceptualise what is now called religious studies as the study of institutionalised values, and the relation between values and the legitimisation of power in a specific society."
The discovery of Buddhism "was therefore from the beginning, in a somewhat literal and nontribial sense, a textual construction," according to Tomoko Masuzawa, whose book is intriguingly titled, "The Invention Of World Religions, Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved In The Language Of Pluralism."
"It was a project that put a premium on the supposed thoughts and deeds of the reputed founder and on a certainbody of writing that was perceived to authorize, and in turn was authorizedby, the founder figure."
Even the term "Theravada Buddhism," used to distinguish Buddhists of Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka (the former Ceylon) from their northern cousins, is disparaged by Pali scholar Peter Skilling who suggests that it"came to be distinguished as a kind of Buddhism or as a 'religion' --remembering that 'Buddhism' is a modern term and that 'religion' is a vexed concept -- only in the late colonial and early globalised periods, that is, in the twentieth century."
"The Invention Of World Religions", or, "How European Universalism Was Preserved In The Language Of Pluralism."
The old labels and methods of classification don't work very well in Asia. I'm now convinced that "religion," "Buddhism," "Theravada Buddhism,"and even "Hinduism" are terms invented in the 19th and early 20th century by mostly Western scholars (with some eager assistance from Asians struggling to resist missionaries and colonial power) who constructed doctrinaire world views based on the recently translated Pali and Sanskrit texts. The living traditions in Southeast Asia practiced by Asians were ignored or denigrated, until they were re-invented and re-packaged to conform to modern Western sensibilities and exported to America and Europe with great success.
Meanwhile, the unexpurgated local traditions continue, and, if recent reports are true, are flourishing and proliferating despite state (and intellectual) attempts at centralisation and control. The shop worn labels of"religion" and "Buddhism" make it difficult to see the inextricable hybridity of culture and values because we want to identify the separate strands believed to be part of a syncretistic amalgam ("this is Buddhism, this is animism, this is Brahmanism"😉. Perhaps "Buddhism" is simply a reification of disparate practices and it would be better to speak of "buddhisms" in the lower-case plural, just as some Christian theologians use the term "christianities" to emphasize the proliferation of sects after the death of Jesus, and before church councils canonised scriptures.
I accept the social constructionist argument that both"Buddhism" and "religion" were categories created in the 19th century by scholars to distinguish Christianity from the other two ethnic monotheism and from the heathenism, paganism and idolatry missionaries and colonisers were discovering outside Europe and North America. So does that clear the decks?
If you follow the argument so far, there is no such thing as "religion" in the singular, or even a monolithic "Buddhism,"and the label.
"Theravada Buddhism" applied to the what was called, disparagingly, "Hinayana" (lesser vehicle) by the Mahayanists is equally a misnomer of little use in speaking of the living traditions practiced by millions of Asian Buddhists, from Ceylon to Korea. Other than stories about the founder, written down hundreds of years after his death, we have Pali and Sanskit texts translated by European philologists in the 19th century. These were then used to construct an "original" Buddhism and to ridicule actually existing Buddhists, encountered by Christian missionaries as corrupt and superstitious.
The fundamental difference for buddhisms, then, is between the 19th century Western enthusiasts for Buddhism, from Schopenhauer to Thoreau, and the masses worshipping Buddha images in temples throughout Asia for a thousand years.
That amuses me.
-m. 😉
Light Relief: Some Buddhist Humor
19 Sep '12 01:44
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