1. The Making of Buddhist Modernism. By David L. McMahan. Oxford University Press, 2008. 299 pages. $29.95. 2. Anne M. Blackburn, Cornell University.
摘要
Scholars of Buddhism brave enough to enter box-store book shops have seen the expansion of shelves devoted to Buddhism and other Asian religions. Interested readers there find some access to histories of Buddhism, but even more volumes attentive to meditation and the intersection of Buddhist practice with self-help and the healing arts. In The Making of Buddhist Modernism, David McMahan has taken seriously as a research-worthy phenomenon these shelves, and the wider twentieth- and twenty-first-century Euro-American Buddhist world toward which they point. Although McMahan often focuses on North American contexts and interpreters, he intends to clarify the emergence of a global phenomenon, albeit one unevenly present around the globe. In his study, the term “Buddhist modernism” is used to refer to “forms of Buddhism that have emerged out of an engagement with the dominant cultural and intellectual forces of modernity” (6).
It is a difficult undertaking to provide an intellectual history, or even a history of the intellectual conditions of possibility, for new manifestations of Buddhism that are in some cases anti-intellectual (or at least a-scholastic), that draw on a wide variety of Buddhist and non-Buddhist sources, and that depart from the genres of intellectual self-expression most familiar to historians of Buddhist thought: treatises, commentaries, and the like. Despite these obstacles, McMahan has developed an ambitious—and often successful—account of the conjunction between “modernity” and Buddhisms during the last two centuries. His examination moves in two directions. First, he explores how modern discursive conditions and the tacit understandings of modern persons have caused a selective engagement with, and reorientation of, Buddhist traditions. McMahan writes:
I shall try to illuminate not only how Buddhism's encounter with modernity has changed it but also how the conditions of modernity have created implicit parameters for what interpretations of Buddhism become possible and impossible. …
