Writing as Enlightenment: Buddhist American Literature into the Twenty-first Century

Introduction

Introduction John Whalen-Bridge and Gary Storhoff Is it not singular that, while the religious world is gradually picking to pieces its old testaments, here are some coming slowly after, on the seashore , picking up the durable relics of perhaps older books and putting them together again? —Henry David Thoreau, Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844 Now that Buddhism has taken root in America—a process characterized by Zen pioneer Sokei-an as “holding the lotus to the rock”—those who have managed to survive their first enthusiasm are busy tending the new growth. The ground has been broken and we are now in a period of cultivation and settlement. —Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake In his recently published North American Buddhists in Social Context (2008), Paul David Numrich wonders if scholarly research on American Buddhism really constitutes a “field of study.” Although the interest in Buddhism in North America is, as Thomas A. Tweed asserts, much greater currently than in the past (2000, xv),1 Numrich feels that it is too early to tell whether Buddhist Studies in the United States represents a true field of study. In fact, Numrich equivocates in his judgment, concluding that in the first decade of the twentyfirst century, Buddhist study in North America has attained only the status of a “protofield,” not having “progressed beyond the earliest stages of development” (8). In order to evaluate the strength of Buddhist Studies in North America, Numrich devises three criteria: 1 2 Writing as Enlightenment 1. specialization, which includes scholarly training, research questions , and professional commitment; 2. organization, which includes meetings and conferences, academic programs, university departments, and so on; and—perhaps most important 3. publications such as books, refereed articles, and journals (1–13). Even though Numrich acknowledges that the impressive number of publications in North American Buddhist Studies constitutes the best case for a fieldof -study status, he also is concerned that there is yet to be a “high level of cross-disciplinary productivity, sophistication, and integration” on the topic of Buddhists in America. He concludes, “scholars have yet to achieve significant interdisciplinarity” (9). Our series from the State University of New York Press, Buddhism and American Culture, is an important interdisciplinary milestone, for it is the first edited collection on the comprehensive topic of Buddhism in the expressive arts and living styles in the United States. In short, the series answers Numrich’s urgent, timely call for a cross-cultural discussion of Buddhism in the United States. This series attempts to increase understanding of how Buddhism has become an important cultural dimension of America, and it is necessary to look at the contexts of literature, film, visual art, and social thought—to name just four domains—to do this work. The first volume of this series, The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature, demonstrates the profound influence of Buddhism on American literature since the beginning of the twentieth century; the eleven essays included in that volume constitute an astute examination of literary work within the context of a decidedly immigrant faith. Indeed, Emergence represents the most complete treatment to date of Buddhism in literature, including discussions of seminal writers of High Modernism such as Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound; innovative treatment of the Beats, such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; and—perhaps groundbreaking for contemporary studies of American Buddhism—analyses of Buddhist principles in literary works by contemporary writers of color, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Lan Cao, and Charles Johnson. Our second volume in this series, American Buddhism as a Way of Life, explores in wide-ranging essays how Buddhism has been transmitted to America spiritually and materially in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Rather than focus solely on a cultural practice such as literature, however, this volume considers particular social problems as a way to understand the social context of American Buddhism. We have become used to a discourse in which “Buddhism is a philosophy rather than a religion,” but to the degree that this is so, Buddhism is also at variance with traditional approaches to philosophy. We 3 Introduction can think of it as philosophy as a “way of life”—to paraphrase Pierre Hadot, from whose book Philosophy as a Way of Life we took our title. American Buddhism is “a way of life, both in its exercise and effort to achieve wisdom, and in its goal, wisdom itself. For real...