The Making of American Buddhism by Scott A. Mitchell (review)

In this work, Scott Mitchell examines the Japanese American community's propagation of Shin Buddhism in the early to middle of the twentieth century. In the course of this work, he has performed an act of academic alchemy, turning the prima materia of archival records into scholarly gold.

Mitchell's argument is that through this period, it was the Japanese American community, immigrants (Issei) and their children (Nisei), who made an American form of Buddhism possible. To quote:

In making communities, in starting magazines and publication projects, in hosting scholars and conventions, in organizing translation and scholarly projects, Nisei Buddhists built religious infrastructure. Without this infrastructure, the Buddhist modernists, Beat poets, and white converts who are usually credited with popularizing Buddhism in the later twentieth century would not have had place to publish their ideas nor communities in which to learn Buddhist practice. Religious infrastructure is a necessary precondition for the spread and popularization of Buddhism, and in the case of the United States, this infrastructure was first built by immigrants and their children, by Japanese American Jōdo Shinshū Buddhists.

(5–6)

By presenting this as a history of actual people engaged in the business of living in the United States as Buddhists, as immigrants and children of immigrants, and as Americans, Mitchell has made this history very present as a lived experience. This complex of identities was particularly fraught at the time because of racist reactions to immigrants from Asia and the equation of American society with Christianity—factors that, of course, continue into the present as well. The opening prologue introduces not abstractions about race and religion but the personal reflections of Hiroshi Kashiwagi, who grew up experiencing firsthand the tensions of race and religion.

In the following seven chapters, various dimensions of the history of Shin Buddhists in the United States are examined. In order to explore these as facets of history, Mitchell avoids organizing the work along a linear chronology, choosing instead to "move backward and forward through time and across geography as we follow the flows of Buddhist culture throughout the pan-Pacific Buddhist world" (20).

The importance of this work is twofold, each aspect inextricably involved with the other. One is the recounting of a history that was not simply neglected but was actively—though probably unintentionally—marginalized by much of the scholarship on Buddhism in America. The other is a highly sophisticated critique of earlier methodologies employed in that scholarship. These are two aspects of focusing on the messiness of actual lived religion, messiness being positively valorized by Mitchell as accurately representing how people live their religious commitments.

Like messiness, what Mitchell calls "distinctive simultaneity" is an epistemically valuable insight into the multiple dimensions of lived religion, a perspective that should be much more widely deployed in the study of religion generally. Distinctive simultaneity means taking into account several perspectives at the same time (20). Thus, something like the Berkeley Bussei (a periodical) is not only Shin, or Buddhist, or American, or Japanese, or even any hyphenated compound of these categories. Instead, it is all of these, each fully as such, and all at the same time. Any one particular perspective removes the messiness, simplifying the complexity, thereby distorting our understanding.

An appreciation of the messy complexity of lived religion also leads to a critique of a simplifying binary separating the religion of immigrant communities from the religion of convert communities. Mitchell points out that much of the historiography of Buddhism in America is structured by the "persistent meta-narrative" that historically there have been "two streams" of Buddhism in the United States (8), also familiar under the expression "two Buddhisms." The metaphor of two streams, or the idea that there are two Buddhisms, very effectively summarizes so many of the binaries that are familiar from the literature, despite scholarly attempts to rephrase or nuance the categories. Most of those binaries are versions of immigrant/convert, traditional/modern, at times seeming to be code for Asian/White...