Issei Buddhism in the Americas

III. Race and Print Culture

Part 3 Race and Print Culture The question of how Buddhism is presented and represented to the larger American public has been a concern of Buddhists from the beginning. This was, in part, because of an increasing awareness among Issei Buddhists that Euro-American audiences often became sympathetic (if not actual converts) to Buddhism through what Thomas Tweed has called “book Buddhism,” or an encounter with Buddhist ideas through print rather than through Buddhist individuals. Representations of Buddhism thus became a central concern fairly early on. Bishop Yemyo Imamura of the Nishi Hongwanji writes in his preface to Ryusaku Tsunoda’s 1914 book on Shin Buddhism: “[W]hat we have been teaching in our church and school is so little known, or, rather, to my great regret, has so often been grossly misrepresented to the public, that some of them often speak slightingly of our faith as if it were a form of superstitious idolatry, and our educational work as a system of bigoted nationalism that lays a stumbling block on the way of Americanizing our people.”1 Other broad-minded Issei Buddhists shared Imamura’s intense wish to convey the message that Buddhism was not a “superstition ” but rather a “universal” world religion equal in stature and influence to Christianity. By so doing, they wanted to assert that Buddhism was not “anti-American,” but rather in accord with certain progressive lines of American thought. The two essays in this section deal with representations of Buddhism in the publishing world, especially as found in Buddhist 84 part 3 periodicals, magazines, and books at the turn of the century and in the first decades of the twentieth century. They also address how such representations became crucial to the transmission of the religion, not only to the larger public, but also to Americanborn Nisei. Buddhist cosmopolitanism—“Buddhist modernism” as Lori Pierce dubs it—coincided with the rise of periodical culture throughout the United States. Literacy rates were growing, and magazines had become cheaper to distribute. It was in this context that journals such as the Light of Dharma, which Pierce takes up in her chapter, and Beikoku Bukkyō and Berkeley Bussei, which Tomoe Moriya discusses, became central to defining Buddhism in the United States. Pierce notes that not only were Issei Buddhists at the forefront of Buddhist scholarship (e.g., attempting to counter Orientalist European scholarship that denigrated Japanese Buddhism as a corruption of “original” Indic forms of Buddhism), they also pioneered publications that sought to portray Buddhism in a positive light. In this latter capacity, as Pierce notes, they began the effort “to engage in theological conversations with other Buddhists around the world, and to use the medium as a casual and inviting forum for the dissemination of their faith.” The cosmopolitan outlook of these Issei Buddhists meant that they advocated a “universal” Buddhism: in other words, the promotion of Buddhism as a world religion open to all people. They believed this to be true not only vis-à-vis Christianity, but also vis-à-vis particular Japanese sects. The journals that they published were influential: They “were circulated to individual subscribers as well as to public and private libraries, churches, and other Buddhist institutions creating a self-reinforcing and self-referential audience and cadre of experts who could be called upon to interpret Buddhism for beginners.” According to Pierce, Light of Dharma, edited by Nishi Hongwanji leaders Nishijima and Sonoda, was especially critical to the larger project of including Japanese Buddhism in scholarly, intellectual, and religious discourses about Buddhism in the modern world, and of promoting a vision of a “universal” Buddhism. (Although the editors of the Light of Dharma were Nishi Hongwanji leaders, they published virtually nothing on the sect or its founder Shinran.) Light of Dharma was also able to participate in Race and Print Culture 85 a broader, global discussion of Buddhism because, unlike other more Japanese-specific periodicals, it was an English-language journal that featured and referenced other English-language journals published in South Asia or Britain. Such periodicals helped to promote and to foster a growing number of what could be called “Buddhist intellectuals” among the Issei Buddhists. Tomoe Moriya takes up two such individuals—Yemyō Imamura and D. T. Suzuki—in her study of publication culture among the Issei and Nisei. She suggests that these intellectuals held five perspectives in common: (1) nonsectarianism, (2) a relative evaluation of any ethnic culture (an identification...