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5. Buddhist Modernism in English-Language Buddhist Periodicals
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5 Buddhist Modernism in English-Language Buddhist Periodicals Lori Pierce In April of 1901, Kakuryō Nishijima published the first issue of the Light of Dharma. It began life as a bimonthly journal and was, according to its editor, a “religious magazine devoted to the teachings of the Buddha.” The first issue commemorated the Japanese festival of Hanamatsuri and was designated as the “Buddha Birthday number.” The cover recorded 1901 as the Buddha Year 2444. The front matter included an image of the Daibutsu, the large Buddha statue in Kamakura, famously painted in 1887 by the water color and stained glass artist John Lafarge. The title of the journal deliberately evoked Sir Edwin Arnold’s best-selling paean to the Buddha, The Light of Asia. The mission of the journal was stated simply: to make known the dharma as the “universal law of nature.” “The divine light of dharma will guide every suffering mortal to the Realm of Immortality and Peace.”1 Writing for an exclusively Englishspeaking and predominantly American audience, Nishijima informed his readers that “[i]t is a fact, now recognized by religious and scientific students in America and Europe, that the knowledge of this Divine Law is slowly, but surely, penetrating and permeating the sincere, deep-thinking minds of the West, and the time has now come for the Buddhists from the so-called Buddhist countries of the Orient to meet with the intellectual and spiritual demand of the Occident of the present age.”2 This statement, flattering to American readers but challenging to Asian readers, demonstrated the editor’s vision that Light of Dharma would be a vehicle through which the dharma could be effectively spread from East to West. The journal, published from 1901 to 1907 by the North American Buddhist Mission in San Francisco, appealed to a very specific audience: a small but growing number of Europeans and Americans who considered themselves 88 lori pierce to be Buddhists or who were sympathetic to Buddhism.3 Nishijima’s declaration , the image on the frontispiece, and the title of the periodical would have resonated deeply with an audience of white Buddhist sympathizers who were—by the early-twentieth century—a generation after Buddhism had been “discovered” by Western Orientalist scholars quite familiar with these tropes. Journals such as Light of Dharma had become a popular method of disseminating the tenets of the faith, philosophy, and practice to an enthusiastic, albeit perhaps naïve Western audience. Light of Dharma and other Englishlanguage Buddhist periodicals played an unusual role in the dissemination of Buddhism to the West. They propagated a peculiar hybrid faith—what I would call a “Buddhist modernism” that relied on the iconographic reiteration of the image and life of the Buddha, content that stressed doctrinal unity through a common catechism, the use of English as the vernacular, and an emphasis on the textual authority of Orientalist scholarship. The Buddhist modernism expressed in the pages of these periodicals can be understood as an attempt to lay out a common set of principles that could facilitate dialogue and discussion among Buddhist sects and between Buddhists and other religionists. Buddhist modernism de-emphasized sectarian difference by focusing on the life of the founder, the important texts, and the search for authentic religious impulse. Buddhist modernism was the search for common ground, the creation of a hybrid form of the religion that “existed everywhere and nowhere,” but could be recognized by any member of the faith.4 Light of Dharma was not the first Buddhist journal in the English language. In 1888, Angarika Dharmapala began publishing a supplement to Sarasavi Sandaresa in English called the Buddhist. Nor was Light of Dharma the first Buddhist periodical published in the United States: The Buddhist Ray was published from 1888 to 1894, in Santa Cruz, California. In fact, between 1888 and the onset of World War II, more than a dozen English-language Buddhist periodicals were published in Europe, Asia, and North America. The most well-known of these enjoyed an extensive if not voluminous circulation throughout the United States, Asia, and Europe as they were read and exchanged within the small community of English-speaking Buddhists and Buddhist sympathizers. At least six were long-lived, relatively sophisticated in their presentation and appearance, and influential enough to garner the attention and contributions of well-known Orientalist scholars and Buddhist reformers and teachers. As Thomas Tweed has suggested, the popularity of Buddhism in the United States can be measured by the “public conversation” that...