[Note: The following presents in revised form a section from “The Study of Buddhist Tantra: State of the Art,” a Numata lecture given at the University of Calgary under the auspices of the Department of Classics and Religion at the invitation of my friend and colleague Prof. Wendi Adamek, Numata Chair in Buddhist Studies, in March 2015. This provides me with another opportunity to thank Prof. Adamek and the University for their kind invitation.]
One of the pervasive influences of religious studies on the Western study of Buddhist thought and practice has been the tendency to conceptualize religion primarily in terms of institutional forms (churches, or sects, or cults), each based on and distinguished from one another by doctrinal claims. Framing institutions by the doctrines with which they are identified has acted as the model for representiing Buddhist praxes. As an academic discipline, religious studies is still structured by its historical roots in Christian theology. The history of Christianity is, in large part, written in terms of schisms created by differences in doctrinal interpretation. This is not to say that there are not important social, economic, and political dimensions of this history, but for scholars of religious history in the West, these seem to often be interpreted in terms of their instrumental role in the establishment of doctrinally distinguished institutions. There is the famous instance, for example, of the Church of England being a consequence, if not only of the King’s need for a male heir, then of the acquisitive expansiveness of the throne that led to the secularization of monastic lands. As well as historians of religion may know this, when religions are presented, it is often doctrinal matters that are highlighted. Doctrines are made the defining characteristic distinguishing one institution from another, implicit in which is the notion that people are motivated by doctrines when they not only choose to join one neighborhood church rather than another, but also when they burn those other churches, destroy statues, attack priests—or engage in long-term violence justified by religious identity: Ireland, India, Near East.
The presumption that doctrine is fundamental and determinative of religious actions and affiliations is evident, for example, in Colin Campbell’s argument for understanding “cult” in terms of an “ideal type.” [Ideal types were employed by Max Weber and continue a role in sociological theory <link>.] Campbell says that the key to formulating an ideal type for the category cult is “the identification of a distinctly cultic system of beliefs, which possess internal coherence and imply a particular form of social organization.”[1] As is so often the case, the causal relation implied is from doctrine/belief to social organization—doctrine/belief being given not only intellectual primacy, but agency as the source from which actions, including the way institutions are organized, and arise.
Given this intellectual background, it was relatively natural to then project the same kind of doctrinally motivated institutional historiography onto Buddhist thought and practice as well. As a consequence, Buddhist history, as presented in Western treatments, is often written in the same fashion, that is, as a series of institutional forms marked by doctrinal positions that distinguish them from one another. (The writing of philosophy is also marked by a tendency to take “the view” as primary. Thus, ways of writing that use locutions such as “the Madhyāmika says…” And also in headache-inducing locutions such as “Zen says…”). My own personal history as a teacher includes having emphasized doctrine when I presented the “six schools of Nara Buddhism.” (see “The Six Nara Schools” by Mikaël Bauer, link).
In the West, it is now coming up on two plus centuries that Buddhist thought and practice have been studied. Historiographies other than those based on doctrine are now available—ones, for example, that give prominence to issues defined by culture, society, economics, gender, race, class, colonialism, power. These alternatives on how history is to be understood and written mean that it is no longer adequate to simply presume that doctrine determines or defines social structures.
Reflecting on the standard presentations of the history of Buddhism, rather than a sequence of doctrinally inflected institutional entities, what we may be seeing is a wide range of different kinds of things that have all been rather magically transformed into institutions, by the reductionist presumptions of Western religious historiography. One fairly clear example of what is not a church, sect, or cult is Chöd, a practice that largely exists outside and between formal sectarian institutions. Thus, there are Bön Chöd practitioners, Nyingma Chöd practitioners, and so on… (see Sarah Harding, “Chöd: A Tibetan Buddhist Practice” <link>).
Not only is the privileging of doctrine artificial, but it leads to mistaken inquiries. Let us take, as an example, the body of literature known as the abhidharma. This is primarily a bibliographic category, despite which it seems quite natural to some scholars to speak of an Abhidharma school. This is ambiguous enough to work, in that there are self-identified groups in medieval India, such as the Vaibhāṣikas, who do seem to have had an institutional coherence. That, however, does not apply so well to the literature more broadly—creating a “school” of Abhidharma with a set of doctrines unique to it, only serves to obscure the complexity of the thought and practice recorded in those texts by reducing it to a set of formulae.
But the idea that the Abhidharmikas constitute an identifiable institution marked by doctrinal positions, leads to questions such as What was the meditation practice of the Abhidharmikas? Seemingly natural if your view is that institutions with doctrinal identity are primary, and secondly, the additional assumption from Western religious historiography that such institutions move toward a state of being religiously comprehensive (churches rather than sects, though note that even the latter is a doctrinally marked institution).
Thus Aaron Proffitt, discussing how Kuroda Toshio’s ideas, which revolutionized the study of medieval Japanese Buddhism, can be extended—“Kuroda’s theory may be employed to suggest, as scholars of Tibetan, Indian, and Chinese Buddhism have suggested, that the traditions often subsumed under the rubric of Esoteric/Tantric Buddhism were likely never understood as a thing unto itself, as a “kind” of Buddhism, but was rather a Mahāyāna polemical sub-discourse used by Buddhists to draw upon and critique other Mahāyāna strategies and technologies” (dissertation 196–197, revised as Esoteric Pure Land Buddhism <link>).
This is not to say that all of the entities discussed in the Western historiography of Buddhism are inventions, but rather that each one needs to be critically re-examined—was there an institution? was it defined by its members in doctrinal terms? or is this a dysfunctional artifice of scholarly invention?
[1] “Clarifying the Cult” British Journal of Sociology, 28.3/Sept. 1977: 375-388, 375.