Scott Mitchell and the Case of the Mysterious Invisible Buddhists

not pulp fiction (ooh, a doubled cultural reference!)

It’s like one of those weird optical illusion things—you don’t see it, and don’t see it, and don’t see it, until you do, and then you can’t not see it.

The important history of immigrant communities on the West Coast has been overwritten by the dominant American historical narrative of the Westward Expansion. As a consequence, those immigrant communities have largely been invisible. It is perhaps not so curious then that the contributions of Japanese American Buddhists to the history of Buddhism in America have suffered the same fate.

One could come away from some treatments of Buddhism in America with the impression that between the nineteenth-century New England Transcendentalists, like Emerson and Thoreau, and the late twentieth-century popularity of the Dalai Lama, nothing of any importance happened. Filling that gap, Scott Mitchell’s The Making of American Buddhism (link) is a beautifully nuanced and complex treatment of the multiple social and intellectual forces that have contributed to immigrant Buddhism being rendered invisible. At the same time, Mitchell’s work establishes the study of the history of Buddhism in America on a more adequate footing. There have been several important recent works expanding our understanding of what American Buddhism is (noteworthy are those by Hickey, Gleig, Wilson, Williams, and Ama), and taken together with Mitchell’s new work treating Buddhism in the United States as an exotic import of the 1960s is no longer viable.

Scholars of religion, at least in my personal experience, can wind up thinking about a subject area such as “American Buddhism” as something like a jigsaw puzzle. We’ve got some of the pieces, put them together as best we can, but we are aware that the result is an imperfect picture—there are gaps, missing pieces. In this way of thinking, each new work is seen as one of those missing pieces, welcomed because it helps us fill in the rest of the puzzle. While this matches Kuhn’s notion of “regular science,” it is far from the best way to think about scholarship in the humanities.

It is important to note, therefore that Mitchell’s work is not simply another piece to be added to our jigsaw puzzle. Japanese American Buddhists have largely been background figures in the history of Buddhism in America, marginalized because of the history of racism, the pervasive colonialist image of Asians as “passive,” and their immigrant status. Mitchell instead brings to the fore the active role of the Japanese American community and its contributions to the development of American Buddhism and the modernizing versions of Buddhism not commonly associated with immigrant communities. Indeed, some secularizing Buddhists have been dismissive of immigrant forms of Buddhism as if they were inherently “traditional.” The importance of the shift of perspective that Mitchell makes might all too easily be missed by someone just looking for another piece of the puzzle.

A noteworthy theme of Mitchell’s work is the undervaluing of the labor performed by women and minorities. In my own experience, it has seemed wildly obvious that many temples are maintained by the women’s association (fujinkai). They are the ones who populate the kitchen, and organize events, thereby making possible the social life that sustains the temple and its role in the community.

(Yet, today, continuing changes in both demographics and gender expectations have led to some temples closing their women’s associations. This is a significant shift in a form of temple organization that has endured in the United States for over a century, but seems to be rapidly changing today—a shift well worth academic study, and soon.)

This aspect of Mitchell’s work points to a much broader issue for the academic study of Buddhism—what is worth studying?

“Buddhism” is of course too large and vague an entity to be the object of study, despite it being a term of art used in both academic and popular discourses. Only some small part of that immense imaginal entity can possibly be studied by any one person, or even by a committee. What we choose to study is of course an incredibly complex issue for scholarship, and the decision about what to study is grounded in a number of philosophic assumptions.

Using the jargon of philosophy, these assumptions are epistemic (what can we know and how can we know it), ontological (what exists and in what ways does it exist), and axiological (what do we value and why do we value it).

For Buddhist studies, we might oversimplify this complexity by reducing it to a binary—Buddhist texts or Buddhist adherents. This oversimplification reveals that the choice between texts and people is one of values. Many years ago, Donald Lopez uncovered the relation between colonialism and the control of Buddhist texts. The control of texts displaced the authority of living Buddhists, or concealed their role in the academic projects of translation and interpretation. At the same time, in keeping with the emphasis on doctrine in the dominant religious culture of Europe and the United States, doctrinal texts, rather than ones relating to ritual and meditation were the primary object of study.

“The emphasis of textual translation facilitated the exclusion of rituals and practices of Asian Buddhism. This transfer of power from an original indigenous source to Eurocentric intellectual expertise became an integral part of the Western appropriation of Buddhism” “Western Buddhism and Race,” Joseph Cheah and Sharon Suh, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Buddhism, Richard K. Payne and Georgios Halkias, eds., online at <link>, and forthcoming in print (expected this fall).

Mitchell highlights the distortions created by depending on the idea that the primary transmission of Buddhism was textual—that there is a lineage formed by White seekers who read books, whether Walden Pond or On the Road, and thereby became interested in pursuing Buddhism further. Instead, he says, “the rhetorical construction of a white Buddhist lineage depends entirely on transmission through text, and despite running directly through communities of practice in the United States, it conveniently ignores those communities” (11).

Making the decision to study Buddhist adherents, living people whose history is recent enough that this is also in the best sense a book of “current affairs,” Mitchell helps to redress the displacement of living Buddhist masters that was an integral part of the Western appropriation of Buddhism. Mitchell begins with real people attending the Fifth Annual conference of the Young Buddhists Association, held in 1941, and shows us why this event is an important one for the history of Buddhists in America.

buy it, read it, and give it to friends and family for Christmas—they’ll thank you