The Making of American Buddhism

Scott A. Mitchell’s The Making of American Buddhism strives to transcend a plethora of perceived dichotomies: those between Buddhism as living faith and Buddhist studies as academic discipline; between Buddhist celebrities and Buddhist lay community members; between convert Buddhism and immigrant Buddhism; between lionizing and trivializing views of the past in modernity; between classical Buddhism and Buddhist modernities; between religious history and religious theory. To do so, Mitchell attempts to deepen our understanding of what constitutes “American Buddhism”—the “unloved stepchild of Buddhist studies” (64)—through a multifaceted narration of the story of the Jodo Shinshu (Japanese) Buddhist community based in Berkeley, California, from roughly the 1930s to the 1960s.

The book draws from a close, intricate, and impressive reading of the Berkeley Bussei periodical, creatively interpreted by the larger fields of Buddhist studies, Buddhist modernities, Asian American studies, cultural and religious theory—though engagement with other landmarks of American religions scholarship is drastically limited. Out of that reading, Mitchell crafts a vivid depiction of the interaction between the glamorous and charismatic leaders who are pivotal to the cultural revolutions’ “Zen boom” (137) in the traditional narrative of American Buddhism (D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts) and underrecognized figures in the emergence of that tradition (such as Hiroshi Kashiwagi, Mihoko Okamura, Jane Imamura). Particularly, Mitchell is keen to highlight the agency of these Japanese American Buddhists, such as the Imamura family, who have often been “elided, relegated to the past, or authenticated via . . . relationship to white converts” by accounts and genealogies of American Buddhism that have fixated on the “missionary work and the activities of white sympathizers and converts” (143).

Given the scope, Mitchell’s narrative revolves around the hinge point of the “Nisei generation” (second generation, American-born Japanese) (85-93). This generation plays a crucial mediatory role in contextualizing Buddhism for midcentury American culture and developing the institutions, patterns, and practices that will forge Buddhism into a recognizable presence on the American religious landscape. This generation lives in the wake of the racial trauma of WWII Japanese incarceration, the exclusion of Buddhist Chaplains from religious freedom protections, and the refusal of Buddhists burials for soldiers, and they continue to face cultural pressures and misunderstandings throughout the postwar surge. But they also demonstrated more dexterous capacity to craft rhetorical, symbolic, institutional, and communal projects that envisioned Buddhism as an “integral part of their American identity.” By forging new ideas, literatures, congregations, buildings, and transpacific networks, these Nisei Buddhists advanced the argument that they were both “good Americans” and “good Buddhists” simultaneously (72). Such a transitional generational effort projected a Buddhism that seemed compatible with American modernity, even while still in continuity with distinctive homeland traditions. At the same time, that effort also advanced the apologetic that Buddhism was uniquely positioned to offer spiritual and ethical resources to counter the metaphysical impoverishment of the midcentury American soul. In contrast to the ostensible dogmatism of Christianity, this renewed Buddhism could present itself as quintessentially modern, scientific, pluralistic, and poised to “compensate for the lacks and disconnects engendered” by American modernity itself (72).

Despite having been overlooked in previous popular and scholarly narratives in favor of white converts and orientalizing intellectuals, these Nisei Buddhists, Mithcell argues, were also crucial in launching, sustaining, and shepherding the networks, ideologies, institutions, activities, and cultural products that firmly established Buddhism in America. Mitchell is at his best here when offering gritty recountings of the “generative labor” (174) that these Nisei Buddhists offered to the development of the community. A delightful incident is when Mitchell dwells on the significance of Jane Imamura giving D. T. Suzuki rides to and from the airport—a highly relatable anecdote for those of us who have suffered such indignities!—especially in the pre-interstate era when the trip took most of the day (135, 105-109). Mitchell expounds upon such details to articulate the significance of the more mundane, and often neglected, acts that allow a community to thrive. These include the art, production, buildings, financing, networks, cooking, subtle political acts, and seemingly (to many grand narratives) trivial gestures of hospitality that all, in fact, construct and sustain the “religious infrastructure” or “networks of exchange” that allow for the “dissemination of shared resources, cultures, and identities . . . across space and over time,” thereby fostering the world of American Buddhism (119).

While Mitchell spends valuable time dwelling on these vividly small details, his quest to overcome interpretive dichotomies also leads him to careen back and forth between massive theoretical questions. At one point, for example, when attempting to debunk the “two streams of American Buddhism” paradigm, and noting how even “correctives” tend to tacitly allow old paradigms to inevitably shape the conversation, Mitchell responds with a dismissive: “What if we simply stopped having this conversation?” (161). Not himself against theoretically laden interpretations (“genre,” “ecumene,” “value”) and not unwilling to enter various historiographical melees (for some examples: with Stephen Prothero (11); with “Western feminist” (107) reading of Nisei bomori as “merely subjugated or passive victims”), Mitchell relishes playing the role of “complicator” to other narratives. This seems to be consonant with his commitment to methodological “messiness” in lived religion (18-24). Insofar as this approach enlarges a dizzyingly wide range of subjects and sites from whom we can learn, and insofar as this testifies to the complexity of historical experience, that’s all to the good.

At other times, Mitchell’s penchant for probing “what if” counterfactuals, perhaps as a type of evocation of paradox, could come across as a posture of metanarratival adjudicator of the field, seemingly deciding when analytic intelligibility or other investigatory heuristics were dispensable and when they were not in haphazard ways. Repeatedly belaboring “what if” interoggatives, as if other scholars are typically attempting to blindly present exhaustively totalizing accounts, or that students of a given historical experience don’t need heuristics, frames, and conversations through which to refine and challenge previous understanding, made the book less convincing to this reader.

All in all, nevertheless, this is a very important book—especially when making a mess [!]—in enhancing our understanding of the  the American religions landscape, the journey of Buddhism in America, the field of Buddhist studies itself, as well as reflecting on the ways in which historical narratives about the past get crafted and the ways in which theoretical tools get used to interpret historical experience.   

Daryn Henry  is an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia.

Daryn Henry

Date Of Review:

July 22, 2024