Monday, May 09, 2005

Interesting article in current issue of First Things, a somewhat learned journal that claims to be "interreligous," but seems to me to be just a pulpit for Catholic Orthodoxy. Anywho, the article is "When East is West," by Peter J. Leithart, and the basic premise is this: the Buddhism now embraced by many in the West, is really just a fairly new creation stemming from the work of Henry Olcott. Even more provacatively, Leithart portrays Olcott's work as basically just "a reshaping of traditional Buddhism according to a liberal Protestant model."

Olcott (an easy target for critics of the western Buddhism, given his eccentricities) was undeniably a key figure in bringing Buddhism to the attention of Western audiences. Leithart doesn't really criticize Olcott, but wants to make this argument, I guess in an attempt to poke some gentle fun:

"Westerners who convert to Buddhism are frequently attracted to a form of Buddhism that is the creation of the modern world. Western converts are often attracted to precisely those features of Buddhism that owe most to liberal Protestantism: tolerance, elevation of reason, compatibility with science, hostility to elitism and hierarchy in religion and so on."

I suppose Leithart is trying to argue that the Buddhism now embraced by Americans is really just a religion drawn from the values of more progressive branches of Christianity. There is some truth in that, I suppose, but it hardly goes far enough in explaining the deep appeal of Buddhism among educated folks in the west.

An irritating subtext in the article is the author's obvious prejudice against the attempt by people in the U.S. to take what they see as the good features of Buddhist thought and create something new out of it for a U.S. audience. This is portrayed as a shallow corruption of traditional Buddhism, but plainly ignores I believe the well-documented history of Buddhism's being adapted to local cultures and needs as it spread throughout Asia. Why should it not do so when it moves into Western societies?

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