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American Dharma
Buddhism Beyond Modernity
By: Ann Gleig
376 Pages
- Hardcover
- ISBN: 9780300215809
- Published By: Yale University Press
- Published: February 2019
$35.00
Ann Gleig’s American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity is a significant contribution to the critical literature on Buddhism in the United States. By way of interviews, discourse analysis, and multi-sited ethnographies, Gleig advances the conversation both in theoretical terms and in concrete discussions of emergent trends within 21st century communities. To set her argument, she begins by outlining major patterns in the historiography produced over the last thirty or so years with particular attention to its interpretive binaries such as immigrant/convert, secular/religious, and spiritual/psychological. She then takes a sustained look at how these binaries are undergoing complex recombination, as forces ranging from generational change to systematic efforts to achieve racial and gender equity, reshape Buddhist communities. The modernist/traditional binary is of particular importance to her central, spacious thesis that American dharma—by which she means the Buddhism of meditation-based convert communities—“cannot be contained within the paradigm of Buddhist modernism” (12). After detailed discussions of how selected practitioners are breaking new ground on both philosophical and cultural-political fronts, Gleig concludes by considering a number of concepts that might best characterize the variegated landscape of Buddhism in the United States today.
A self-described researcher and long-time, if sporadic, participant in meditation-based Buddhist groups, Gleig has an even hand as she moves through the nuanced positions being staked out by various partisans, even as she clearly writes as an advocate for progressive change. However, she consistently subordinates her insights into the positions articulated by gen X’ers, millennials, and others, moving into leadership spots increasingly vacated by baby-boomer pioneers, to her overriding argument about the decentered, post-modern character of 21st century American Buddhism. As the author proceeds, she both critiques and reconsiders the meaning and import of Buddhist modernism as it bears on shifting understandings of meditation, devotionalism, Buddhism’s soteriological goals, the impact of the Buddhist blogosphere, and the intersectional sensibilities of academic post-modernism and its preoccupation with post-coloniality, gender, and race. Throughout her analyses, Gleig brings the accomplishments of 19th and 20th century Asian Buddhist innovators into meaningful play with challenges that face practitioners today, as they work to create forms of the dharma that balance American humanist norms with authentic practice and reshape communities in ways that embody genuine diversity. In short, Gleig brings the discussion of the state of the Americanization process up to date, while implicitly underscoring how far Euro-American Buddhists have traveled from the 1990s, when they could celebrate the Americanization of dharma as a sui generis expression of the nation’s democratic genius.
Much of the strength of Gleig’s argument comes from its focus on a limited number of important communities and the cast of characters within them who are engaged in the ongoing debates. She takes communities related to Zen and Vipassana as her primary dataset, which gives her both fertile ground for a reconsideration of the strengths and weaknesses of Buddhist modernism and a range of articulate leaders who care deeply and have thought long and hard about the future of American Buddhism. As a result, her chapters on the controversies over secularized mindfulness, sexual misconduct among teachers and students, the goals of Buddhist practice, implicit and explicit racism in the community, and the aspirations of post-boomer practitioners give readers a powerful sense of the forces at work in the community. Throughout, Gleig manages to present her complex material with analytic precision and intellectual clarity, her arguments often circling back to the mixed legacies of Buddhist modernisms originally forged between forces East and West in the colonial-imperial heyday.
The highly focused quality of Gleig’s argument does, however, generate lacunae in her discussion. For reasons she never makes clear, Gleig pays little attention to Tibetan Buddhism, a nexus of communities of great significance to boomer Buddhists in which modernism, traditionalism, and post-colonialism are interwoven in exquisitely complex ways. She never mentions the Soka Gakkai, chanting Buddhists in the Japanese Nichiren tradition who, though certainly modernist, have never been accorded parity with meditators by Americanizing theoreticians. Predictably, the substantial communities associated with immigrants and refugees from South, Southeastern, and East Asia do not factor into Gleig’s thoughts about in what an American dharma consists, although the numerous intersectional positions to be found in these communities must certainly strengthen her general post-modernist thesis. Such exclusions reflect a historiographic fixation on Euro-American/convert meditating communities that has characterized the critical discourse about American dharma since its inception—a hermeneutical blind spot that severely hampers a synoptic understanding of Buddhism in the U.S. That said, it is not this reviewer’s intention to criticize a book for not accomplishing something it did not set out to do. Such concerns aside, Gleig’s excellent book will bring readers up to speed on fascinating developments in the important Zen and Vipassana sectors of the larger American Buddhist community, while setting a new standard for critical commentary about the ongoing evolution of modernism, traditionalism, and dharma in the United States.
Richard Hughes Seager is Professor Emeritus in Religious Studies at Hamilton College.
Richard SeagerDate Of Review:February 29, 2020
Ann Gleig is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Central Florida. She is co-editor of Homegrown Gurus: From Hinduism in America to American Hinduism and has published widely on contemporary Buddhism.