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I. Nation and Identity
- University of Illinois Press
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Part 1 Nation and Identity American Buddhism began in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century with the transmission of ideology, artifacts, and people: Buddhism, Buddhist art, and Buddhists. These ideas and objects found their way to the Americas as part of transnational exchanges of translated texts or transported statuary made possible by the process of modernity and colonialism. For example, a Burmese Buddha statue could end up in New York via London, or a French translation of the Lotus Sutra might appear in New England. In this section, we attempt to track some aspects of the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural history of what scholars now call “Buddhist modernism” in an effort to understand the larger context of the early years of Buddhism in America. In many ways, large-scale emigration of Japanese Buddhists to the Americas was part of a larger transnational process of identity-formation necessitated by increased global interaction. Virtually all Asian forms of Buddhism in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were undergoing similar dynamic transformations. In Japan, Buddhists were being forced to develop strategies to counter the domestic anti-Buddhist ordinances of the new Meiji government that identified the Japanese nation with an emperor-centered state Shintō. At the same time, a new “Japanese” Buddhism was being constructed in relation to other forms of Buddhism in the Asian world: notably the IndoTibetan , Theravada, and Chinese. Buddhism itself was, in the international arena, being defined against other major religions 2 part 1 (especially Christianity). However, the growth of nativism and nationalism that Japan experienced at the turn of the twentieth century also meant that Buddhism also served as a repository of Japanese nationalism and identity for its expatriates. Modern Japanese Buddhism thus emerged as both “national/Japanese” and “transnational/non-Western,” notions that became central to the experience of Buddhism for Japanese in the Americas. TheoriginsofJapaneseAmericanBuddhism(andthus,tosome extent of Buddhism in the Americas) cannot be fully understood outside of the context of the religious landscape of United States at the time. In Hawaii in particular, the influx of tens of thousands of Buddhist “heathens” prompted Christian clerics and American government officials to fret about the future of an American territory that did not have a clear Christian majority. National and religious identity-formation was also a major theme in the Americas at that time: Notions of the United States as a Protestant nation were also being contested on the East Coast in response to the influx of Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Italy. American nativism and nationalism at the turn of the century rhetorically foregrounded demands that Jews, Catholics, and Buddhists conform to a core Anglo-Protestant American identity. But while other ethnic groups might assimilate to “whiteness”—a racial, if not religious, “melting”—Japanese Buddhists faced the double bind of religious and racial differences. Despite similar motivations for immigration, Asian immigrants were distinguished from their European counterparts by unequal treaties, low wages, and hostility to “heathen religions,” and ineligibility for citizenship, voting rights, and land ownership. It was in this context that pioneer Issei Buddhists started establishing temples in the Americas: first in Hawaii, then in the mainland United States, South America, and Canada. These temples established by and for immigrants were more than just religious sites: like the Christian churches and Jewish synagogues of many European immigrants, they became centers of social and cultural life that addressed the practical needs of a growing and increasingly more settled community. This sociocultural dimension of Buddhism set the stage for a dynamic process of identity formation, both religious and national. Although here the focus is on Japanese American Buddhism, we hope to foreground the importance of these kinds of studies in coming to a more complete picture of Buddhism in the United States. [54.227.136.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:18 GMT) Nation and Identity 3 Both the transnational-translocal characteristics shared by Buddhism in the Americas and the religion’s highly localized nature are the primary focal points of the following chapters by Cristina Rocha and Masako Iino, who explore the impact of Buddhism in Brazil and Canada, respectively. Rocha’s study of Brazilian Zen argues that an understanding of local-translocal interactions can best be understood through the notion of “creolization ,” a term Rocha uses in lieu of the more commonly used “syncretism” (associated with two clear systems that become “impure ” when mixed) and “hybridity” (a term originating in the biological sciences and carrying the implication that hybrids are “native to...