Border
country dharma: Buddhism,
Ireland and peripherality
Laurence
Cox and Maria Griffin
Department of Sociology
National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Introduction
Buddhist
tradition distinguishes a "central region" where suitable conditions
for practice – notably a well-developed sangha
– are to be found, from "border regions" where there are
fewer or no monks, nuns, laymen or laywomen (1). If, in the last 150
years, Buddhist Asia has acted as the "central region" to the "border
regions" of western Buddhism, Ireland is arguably a border region to
the border regions, a second-hand recipient of developments in more
powerful societies.
These
categories (relational as so many Buddhist concepts) are similar to
sociological discussions of core and periphery within the global order.
However, some of the most influential accounts of the arrival of
Buddhism in the west (such as Almond 1988 and Tweed 2000) stress rather
the indigenous,
and essentially bounded, development of Victorian Buddhism.
Their
emphasis – that this Buddhism was above all else British
or American
respectively, was a necessary corrective to naïve theories of
unproblematic transmission, but has its own difficulties, in assuming a
single national culture as an effective unit of analysis. Both struggle
to maintain their boundaries, not least with relation to Ireland:
Almond in his use of Irish material with no mention of the intense
cultural and religious conflicts that led to the breakup of the British
state in 1922; Tweed in treating the Anglo-Irish Lafcadio Hearn as
another Victorian American. In other words, even these powerful
cultures are less homogenous, and more contested, than such accounts
imply.
More
generally, when discussion of western Buddhism has not simply meant
Buddhism in the USA (Koné 2001: 155 fn1), it has typically
retained this country-by-country approach in a national-comparative
strategy, most visibly in the seminal work of Martin Baumann (eg 2002).
Within
sociology, the identification of a society or culture with a
nation-state has long been problematised, initially by dependency
theory, which argued that individual societies could only be understood
in terms of their core or peripheral position in the world order, and
that peripheral societies were characterised precisely by a lack of
internal boundedness, so that the bulk of their economic and other
linkages were external (Gunder Frank 1971 etc.) Subsequently,
world-systems theory has argued that the effective unit of analysis
needs to be whatever global order (world-empire or world-economy, such
as capitalism) actually integrates different economic, political and
cultural activities (Wallerstein 1988 etc.)
The
case of "Buddhism and Ireland" illustrates the need for such an
approach. Firstly, a part of what was nineteenth century "Ireland" has
only become a separate state within living memory, and one whose
boundaries – cultural and political – remain highly
contested. In this it shares a history with many, perhaps most
contemporary states. Secondly, by contrast with core or metropolitan
societies, a peripheral or internally-colonised society such as Ireland
is in no position to make over Buddhism in its "own" (intensely
debated) image.
Thirdly,
until the 1960s at least the Irish encounter with Buddhism has been
mediated via international institutions (the British Empire and
Catholic missionary activity); since that point, it has been
institutionally dominated by "blow-ins" from more powerful western
societies. Fourthly, and as a direct consequence, Irish Buddhism
– like Ireland more generally – has been marked by
a constant circle of emigration and immigration; until very recently it
has been rare for Buddhists to be both Irish and in Ireland. Finally,
the languages spoken on the island have all also been spoken elsewhere;
and Ireland has shared a common publishing and reading space at
different times with Britain, France and the US in particular.
If
the Irish situation highlights the problematic nature of single-country
units of analysis, this is not to argue for Irish exceptionalism, but
rather to suggest that a history of "Buddhism and Ireland" is
inevitably a partial approach to the global history of Buddhism, rather
than a separate national analysis. What is particularly visible for
Ireland is not less true for other countries, as Rocha's (2006) account
of Brazilian Zen makes clear, in its intertwining of Brazilians'
interest in Japan's economic and cultural significance as non-western
success story, of Japanese labour migration and of the search for
cosmopolitan cultural capital.
The
paths of first awareness
The difficulties of national categories
A
summary of the first encounters of Ireland and Buddhism highlights the
insufficiency of purely national categories of analysis. The first
knowledge of Buddhism in Ireland came through Latin and the
post-imperial church, with the development of patristic scholarship in
the sixth and seventh centuries and consequent access to the comments
of Origen and Clement on Buddhism. The first relevant Irish-language
material (Dicuil's ninth century geography, drawing on the records of
Alexander's journey to India and oral accounts of India and Ceylon) was
written in a French monastery.
Mediaeval
Europe presents a methodological problem of linking texts (and hence
knowledge) to the location of writers and readers: Old and Middle
Irish, Old and Middle English, Middle Welsh, Old Norse, Norman French
and Latin were all spoken in Ireland, while Irish was a language of
immigration in Scotland and Wales and of monks much further afield.
This was in no sense a nationally-bounded world. If the Barlaam and
Josaphat legend, and Marco Polo's Travels,
were translated into Irish (as well as English, French and Norse), we
do not know where these translations were read, other than by the
provenance of surviving manuscripts.
In
the early modern period, Irish people had access both to the products
of commercial printing (mostly in English and French), such as
Hakluyt's 16th century translation of William of Rubruck and the
various sixteenth and seventeenth century collections of travel
narratives, as well as to the Jesuits' accounts of their work in the
Buddhist East (Offermans 2005) – depending on their levels of
literacy, financial means, and the languages they could read (these in
turn reflecting different positions within the colonial process and the
pan-European wars of religion).
Thus
when, in 1806, Ireland's first commercial woman writer Sydney Owenson
could describe (in a best-selling novel) a Catholic parish priest as
being like "the dalai lama of little Thibet" (cited in Lennon 2004:
146) she was expressing both the level of knowledge available to some
Irish people, and the conflicted and opposing cultures present within
Ireland, which meant that an English-speaking and Protestant culture
found the (newly decriminalised) Catholic church as alien and exotic as
Tibetan Buddhism. There was no unified Irish culture to receive and
remake Buddhism, but rather a conflict between
cultures, which in turn was not restricted to the island of Ireland but
part of a broader conflict within the UK and indeed Europe.
International
mechanisms of knowledge
In
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the ethnographic
knowledge of Jesuits or travellers was largely replaced by new forms of
textual and artefactual knowledge (Lopez 1995), which Irish people in
global institutions were centrally involved in producing.
Most
visibly, there was extensive Irish participation in the British empire
at all levels. Trinity College, Dublin (and to a lesser extent Queen's
College Belfast) played an important role in training young Protestants
for the imperial administration; on retirement some civil servants
joined the ranks of academic orientalists (Mansoor 1944, Lennon 2004).
Other young Protestants, in what can only be called an imperial service
class, became military officers (and brought back loot from the Burma
expeditions of the 1880s and the Younghusband expedition to what is now
the National Museum (Audrey Whitty, pers. comm.) or missionaries, while
smaller categories of museum curator, art collector etc. rounded out
the picture.
The
"other ranks" of the British army and navy recruited massively in
Catholic Ireland and Irish Scotland (Bartlett 1997), while from the
start of the twentieth century a boom in vocations led to very large
numbers of Irish missionaries working in China in particular (Boland
2005), with the consequence that Buddhism became an object of study for
Irish religious institutions.
Said
(2003) is thus right to see European knowledge about Asia as part and
parcel of processes of power. What his account misses out in relation
to Buddhism and other Asian religions, as JJ Clarke (1997) has noted,
is that such knowledge was often drawn on strategically by European
dissidents to critique local sources of cultural power (whether in
c18th Enlightenment or c20th counter culture). Lennon (2004) identifies
a tradition of drawing parallels between Ireland and Asian countries,
underlining a similar position with relation to metropolitan culture
and empire.
Thus
the first Irish Buddhists, members of the declining Anglo-Irish who
"went native" in Buddhist Asia, were far from assimilating Buddhism
within a self-confident metropolitan culture. Rather, it is impossible
to understand the developing relationship between Buddhism and Ireland
outside of the structures of British empire and Catholic "spiritual
empire", and the warring cultures represented by these two within
Ireland: a conflict which led to partial political independence, the
collapse of the Anglo-Irish as landed aristocracy and imperial service
class, and an ongoing sectarianism on both sides of the new border
which has remained determining for what it means to be Buddhist, and
Irish or in Ireland (rarely both) until the start of the twenty first
century. Buddhism took its place in Ireland, not as something operating
within the "limits of dissent" (Tweed 2000), but as one element of a
much wider-ranging dissent – opposition to the world of
empire, and increasingly to the world of local sectarianisms, and an
identification with something outside these terms.
The
first Irish Buddhists
Irish
Buddhist history is not short: the first (anonymous) Irish Buddhist
appeared in 1871, while the first named sympathiser and adherent were
found in Japan and Ceylon respectively in 1890. The first talk by a
Buddhist in Ireland was in 1889, and the first explicitly Buddhist
event in 1929. The first visit by ordained Asian Buddhists, meanwhile,
happened in 1925.
These
first Irish Buddhists appeared, above all, as marginal. In
chronological order we find an anonymous statistic, a fictional
character, an exile, an adventurer, a transsexual, a fraud and a
raconteur. This apparently pejorative language underlines the
marginality of these exceptional individuals.
Up
to now I have highlighted Ireland's peripherality and involvement in
world-systems processes. The reverse of this coin is the intensive
effort of boundary-creation, identity formation and policing of
difference that increasingly defined ethnicity in this decisive period.
After the bloody suppression of the 1798 uprising and the 1800 Act of
Union, a series of mass movements – Catholic Emancipation,
Home Rule, the Land War and finally independence – marked an
increasing rejection by the Catholic peasants and middle classes of
British rule and the local Anglo-Irish ruling class; a resistance which
in turn led to frequent attempts at reasserting control, and powerful
counter-movements from Ulster Protestants in particular. The revival of
the Catholic church in the post-Famine period, and simultaneous
cultural nationalist movements, were part and parcel of this process of
creating cultural and religious division.
Rocha
has argued (2006: 7) that "the adoption of Buddhism in Catholic
countries, such as France and Italy, should be differentiated from its
adoption in Protestant ones". What stands out for the Irish case until
the 1960s, however, is this role of sectarianism
in the reception of Buddhism (2). As Lennon (2004) shows, even Catholic
nationalists working in solidarity with Indian ones could not draw religious
(as opposed to political or economic) parallels. To go further and
"jump ship" would have been a betrayal of Catholic nationalism which
not even Marxists would contemplate.
It
was therefore from the declining Anglo-Irish imperial service class
that it was possible for a handful of individuals, mostly male and
well-educated, and (crucially) already very disconnected from their own
families and backgrounds, to defect from an identity in the process of
decomposition.
Seven
Buddhists in search of a home
The
first Irish Buddhist appeared as a County Dublin statistic in the 1871
census – given the date, most probably a university teacher
or student; perhaps, indeed, the anonymous author of the Dublin
University Magazine's largely
sympathetic article (1873) on "Buddhism and its founder". Irish
universities being strongly confessional, such an admission could not
have been made publicly without risking at a minimum loss of employment
or expulsion. From this point on, there were between one and three
Buddhists in Ireland in the 1881, 1891, 1901 and 1911 censuses, but
identification is at present impossible.
We
are on equally shaky ground with the most widely represented Irish
Buddhist, Kipling's Kim (1900
– 1): the son of an Irish soldier and an Indian woman,
brought up to bazaar life. Kim is represented as torn between two souls
– a practical and cynical "English" one working for the
spymasters of the Raj, and a romantic and "Indian" one whose guru is a
moderately orthodox Tibetan Gelugpa lama, inspired by western accounts
of the then Panchen lama (Franklin 2008, Kwon 2007).
Kim
is of course a fictional character, but grounded in the reality of
imperial lives in India, where civil servants and soldiers of all ranks
took local wives, as did (less visibly) missionaries. Whether such
arrangements – and their religious implications –
were permanent or dissolved on return home, most produced no records.
Nevertheless, this "going native" is the main possibility for attested
Irish Buddhists of this period (that is, those who published their
stories); Kim can stand for the unknown number of those who did not.
Lafcadio
Hearn, Buddhist sympathiser and interpreter of "old Japan" to the west
(and to its modernising, Meiji self) was the son of an Anglo-Irish
soldier who married a Greek woman; he came to Ireland with his mother
until she returned home. Brought up by an aunt (who having married a
Catholic was kept at a distance by the rest of the family), he was sent
to boarding schools before being sent to seek his fortune in the USA at
17; two decades later, he travelled to Japan, where he lies buried at
Jitoin Kobudera temple in Tokyo (Ronan 1997).
Hearn's
Buddhist sympathies are highlighted in Rexroth (1977) and Tweed (2000);
what I want to emphasise here is the significance of this "going
native" beyond the empire for the son of an Anglo-Irish soldier, as
well as the fractured family life and sense of place caused precisely
by Ireland's place in international processes (the British army in
Greece) and by sectarianism (the division within the Hearn family).
A
comparable "going native" can be seen in Hearn's near-contemporary J.
Bowles Daly, a journalist and Theosophist who had written on Buddhist
education in Sri Lanka and joined Col. Olcott there in developing the
Buddhist Theosophical Society schools in the late 1880s and early
1890s, becoming the first principal of Mahinda College in Rajagiriya
(Olcott 1889, Dharmadasa 1992). Daly was a supporter of modernized
Buddhist education, provided by the laity with government subsidy,
against both the Christian mission schools and traditional temple-based
education; after falling out with Olcott he remained active in the
field and visited 1300 monasteries as a commissioner for the
laicisation of monastery landholdings (Dennis 1897). Details are
scanty, but he was clearly a strongly "Buddhist" theosophist, if not a
Buddhist tout court.
Another
Buddhist "going native" appears in Laura / Michael Dillon, best known
to history as the world's first female-to-male transsexual by plastic
surgery (Hodgkinson 1989, Kennedy 2007). Dillon shared with Hearn (and
Kim) a fractured family background and with Daly a prior interest in
theosophy. Of Anglo-Irish aristocratic family, he studied in Cambridge
as a woman before the second world war and returned to Ireland to
qualify in medicine as a man while undergoing pioneering (and
then-illegal) surgery in Britain. He developed a deep interest in
philosophical and spiritual questions, writing among other things an
early work on transsexuality (Dillon 1946).
His
connection with T. Lobsang Rampa, in the early 1950s, marks him as both
the first Irish person to believe
they were being ordained a Buddhist monk as well as, some years later,
the first for whom this was actually true. While working as ship's
doctor in 1958, he was "outed" by the British tabloid press and fled to
India, where he made contact with Asian Buddhists. He was ordained
first as a Theravadin sramanera,
then (when his sex change prevented full ordination) as a Tibetan
Buddhist novice, attached to the (Gelugpa) Rizong monastery in Ladakh
and writing a series of Buddhist works (Jivaka 1962, 1994).
Lobzang
Jivaka, as he became, demands respect not only for his difficult
personal life but also for his conscious wish to tackle his own racism:
he refused special treatment in the monastery, subjecting himself to
Tibetan teenagers' monastic seniority and to food and living conditions
which probably contributed to his death at forty-seven.
T.
Lobsang Rampa, author of The
Third Eye and other works, is
justly famous (see e.g. Lopez 1998) in the history of western Buddhism
as a commercially successful fraud. After publication of the book but
prior to his "unmasking" as Cyril Hoskin, Scotland Yard had requested a
Tibetan passport or residence permit, leading him to move to Ireland,
where Dillon apparently bought him a house.
Rampa,
his wife and their friend Sheelagh Rouse lived there for some years
before moving to Canada: he subsequently dedicated The
Rampa Story to "his friends in
Howth… for the Irish people know persecution, and they know
how to judge Truth" (1960: 3). Despite Rampa's inauthenticity, most
observers judge him personally sincere, and this house has a good claim
to being the first Buddhist community in Ireland; similarly, the
shamrock Buddhas that he sold from this address may yet prove to be the
first Buddhist practice in Ireland, at least for a given value of
"Buddhist" and "practice".
Finally,
we should mention Terence Gray, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who had a
distinguished career in theatre at Cambridge between the wars (in what
is now the Cambridge Buddhist Centre) and a colourful personal life
(marrying a Rimsky-Korsakov and later a Georgian princess (Cornwell
2004)). In 1958, he retired to Monte Carlo and became a regular
correspondent of the London Buddhist Society's Middle
Way (Humphreys 1968)as well as
writing a series of Buddhist books as "Wei Wu Wei", seven of which are
still in print with Wisdom Books. His Buddhism is a very literary
"philosophy of life" in some ways comparable to Alan Watts' and
combining Ch'an with Taoism.
Reflections
By
the late 1950s, if it was possible to live a comfortable Buddhist life
in Monte Carlo rather than suffer the pressures of a Hearn, a Daly or a
Dillon, it was still impossible, for Irish Buddhists at least, to do so
in Ireland. More generally, if the stories above appear those of
marginal characters, whose Irish or Buddhist "authenticity" is often
questionable, this is precisely the point: by comparison with Almond's
or Tweed's Victorian Buddhism, minor and subordinate parts of their own
cultures, "Buddhism" and "Ireland" were almost impossible to hold
together. What we find instead are defectors from the imperial service
class, "going native" in Japan, Ceylon or Ladakh and stepping outside
both their own local culture and imperial arrangements tout
court.
The
pressures involved are underlined by two counter-examples. Firstly, at
least three Buddhist parties visited Ireland in these years. In 1889,
1894 and apparently 1896, the indefatigable Col. Olcott toured the
country discussing both Theosophy and Buddhism, exciting much
controversy, but (as far as can be ascertained) leaving no Buddhist
organisations or individuals. In 1929, the Unitarian minister and
Buddhist sympathiser Will Hayes, a friend of Christmas Humphreys, gave
a week-long lecture series in Dublin, again with no visible effects.
Finally, six "dancing lamas" (Hansen 1996) were brought to Ireland in
1925 by the partly-Irish team who had filmed The
epic of Everest – but
as entertainment alone.
Secondly, Irish Theosophy, a key matrix for both British and American
Buddhism, was a flourishing force throughout this period which involved
among others WB Yeats, AE (George Russell) and James Stephens. However,
it avoided Buddhism almost entirely, developing an interest in esoteric
Christianity, Irish folklore and Hinduism instead. For the largely
Anglo-Irish Theosophists, these choices made possible continuing
relevance and engagement in Irish
politics in the age of independence.
To
be Buddhist, by contrast, was to step out of the conflict (and the
country) – and the only two Irish "Buddhist Theosophists" did
just that: Daly moving to Ceylon, and William Quan Judge, co-founder of
the Society internationally and head of the American section, who had
emigrated at age twelve and whose magazine followed a more "Buddhist"
line.
Thus
the key features of Irish Buddhism in this period are, firstly, that it
is caught between the two opposing cultures of rising Catholic
nationalism and the rearguard actions of the Anglo-Irish imperial
service class; and, secondly, that it is played out on the global stage
provided by the institutions of the British empire in particular. It is
anything other than a debate within a unitary and bounded national
culture.
A
new beginning: the multiple foundations of contemporary Buddhism in
Ireland
If
the previous period marks what linguists call a broken tradition, the
continuous tradition of Buddhism in Ireland dates from the late 1960s
and has its origins in the new Catholic public-sector service class. On
the nationalist and Catholic side, the chains of transmission of
knowledge about Buddhism were typically those of "spiritual empire" to
use a phrase of the day.
Since
the foundation of the Maynooth Mission to China in 1918, over 1500
missionaries from the Columban order alone went overseas (Boland 2005:
132), part of a much broader wave of religious vocations and religious
emigration stretching back to the late nineteenth century. The
Mission's paper, The Far East,
was sold by boys in Cork as late as the 1950s (Bernard Murphy, pers.
comm.) This fits into the broader popularity of, for example, St
Francis Xavier, Jesuit missionary to Buddhists in India and Japan,
whose name adorns many youth centres.
Maynooth's
library shows a continuing and sophisticated interest in Buddhism in
the country's central seminary as well as in donations and bequests
from priests around the country. The key periods are between the 1920s
and 1940s, no doubt reflecting the missionary effort, and from the
1970s onwards, presumably reflecting a response to new religious
movements. In terms of popular culture, a survey of the Irish media
shows a continuing awareness of Buddhism, whether as opponent in
missionary efforts or as an exotic feature of foreign parts.
By
contrast with Brazil, where the Church's secularisation has led to its
losing ground among the poor (Rocha 2006: 104-5), the (highly
conservative) Irish church lost its "moral monopoly" (Inglis 1998) as a
result of second-wave feminism, and the politics of memory as
large-scale institutional abuse of children has become the subject of
documentaries, court cases and national tribunals. Thus the primary
search for Irish ex-Catholics has been for forms of religious
expression which have not been forms of religious control of bodies and
emotions in particular, and this shows up in responses to meditation
practice.
Historical
trajectories
Nattier's
(1998) three-way typology of Buddhism in the west has been criticised
for drawing overly sharp distinctions (see Numrich 2003). For Ireland,
it does adequately describe three very different historical
trajectories. It may be a feature of the relative youth of the Irish sangha
that these boundaries have not yet broken down in the way that they
have done elsewhere.
An
alternative reading is that in a peripheral context the key linkages of
Buddhism in Ireland are not internal
ones. Irish Buddhism, in this sense, is still "dependent": on
international Buddhist organisations, on the networks of ethnic
Buddhist diasporas, or on global distribution chains of
"Mind-body-spirit" literature and CDs. This dependency undermines
cross-Buddhist communication, of which there has been very little. The
sense of local isolation and global connectedness brought about by this
peripherality has marked Irish Buddhism from the start:
"One person had put up a notice in what was called the 'East West
Centre' … saying that they were interested in Buddhism and
was there anyone else in Dublin who was? And after that, I guess about
ten or fifteen people came together, and all of those people at that
time had thought that they were the only Buddhists in Ireland"
(interview A) (3).
Nattier's
categories, in other words, are useful precisely because they are not national
categories, but highlight global relationships in the transmission of
Buddhism which remain determining for contemporary Irish Buddhism.
Import
Buddhism
In
the late 1960s and early 1970s a new Buddhist-sympathetic
counter-culture developed in Dublin, including vegetarian and
macrobiotic restaurants, alternative bookshops and martial arts. For
Catholic participants who later became Buddhists, what showed the way
was personal reading, often at secondary school, of literature
published in the UK and US – despite the orthodoxy of school
or family. This fed into travel abroad, bringing back literature
unavailable in Ireland, and into Buddhist retreats in the UK.
Indeed
the oldest organisation, Kagyu Samye Dzong in north Dublin, came out of
the reflection that "we thought maybe it would be cheaper to pay for
one teacher to come over than everybody going over somewhere else, so
we got together and we did organise many visits with monks and nuns"
(interview B). This group, founded in 1977, organised between 100 and
150 visits by teachers in its early years, starting with Tibetan lamas
but also including some western Theravadin-trained teachers (Ani
Tsondru, pers. comm.)
Insofar
as there was ever an elite
import Buddhism, of the kind Nattier describes for the US, this was it.
Rather than being strongly committed to a single path, however, it was
"very certainly multidenominational, not even that, but just a bunch of
people who were meeting with an interest in Buddhism" (interview A).
A
similar situation holds for the Zen Meditation Group (now Insight
Meditation Group); founded by Dominican father Philip McShane, this
always contained both Buddhists and non-Buddhists. In its early years,
it invited Soto Zen teachers from Throssel Hole in the UK, while in the
1980s it increasingly invited Theravadin teachers from the Birmingham
Buddhist Vihara and Amaravati (Kelly 1990).
One
key difference between this import Buddhism and the kind that Nattier
describes, of course, is that the organizers of these groups did not
themselves engage in long-term training in Asia aiming at certification
and teaching at home – a situation which undoubtedly builds
commitment to a single approach. (As we shall see, such people existed,
but rarely returned to Ireland.) Rather, these were groups initially
dominated by lay practitioners, with considerable control over the
invitation of teachers and the direction of their own centres.
If
imported knowledge, through UK and US publishing circuits,
long-distance travel, retreats abroad and now the Internet, remains
important in Ireland, it has rarely led to new institutional
foundations. What it has produced, as Wendy Jermyn's (unfortunately
unpublished) research has shown, is a proliferation of informal,
essentially private, groups of practitioners: for example, a group who
meet to listen to CDs of Thich Nhat Hanh and meditate in a private
house.
At
a rough estimate (based on the levels of activity of publicly organised
Buddhism and the numbers of non-Asian Buddhists in Ireland), such
informal groups, along with more isolated or "night-stand" Buddhists
(Tweed 2002), account for at least a third, and perhaps as much as
half, of all Irish Buddhists.
Such
groups, like the earlier foundations, retain a greater sense of
independence vis-à-vis their sources of Buddhist teaching
and practice; my own impression, from 17 years involvement, is that far
from being the elite Nattier predicts (1998: 189), these more recent
groups (and individual night-stand Buddhists) are less educated, more
dependent on commercial distribution sources, and more likely to be
women than Buddhists involved in the export groups, whose stronger
organisational hierarchies (necessitated among other things by a
relationship "back" to organizations or lineages based close at hand in
Western Europe) and tighter approaches to doctrine and practice give
greater scope to a particular kind of service-class careerism, and to
men.
The
major condition for these developments is the prior arrival of Buddhism
in more powerful (politically, economically, culturally) countries,
from which it can now be diffused successfully in an Irish market which
is increasingly part of a global one.
Export
Buddhism
Export
Buddhism in Ireland, then, is different not only in its historical
origins (which are very recent – less than two decades in
most cases) but also its sources. Rather than Asian missionaries, its
typical carriers are westerners, themselves often mainly or exclusively
trained in the west. In global terms, this is a second generation of
western Buddhist foundations, with their own characteristics.
The key feature of these is the central role of "blow-ins",
missionaries from other European countries. Thus Marjo Oosterhoff from
the Netherlands (Passaddhi Meditation Centre, arrived 1990),
Dharmachari Sanghapala from the UK FWBO (Dublin Meditation Centre,
arrived 1991), Alain Liebmann from France, trained by Taisen Deshimaru
(Galway Zen Centre, arrived 1991) and others arrived to set up centres
as offshoots or successors of traditions already implanted elsewhere in
Europe.
A
borderline case is that of Peter and Harriet Cornish (Cornish 2007),
who moved to Ireland in the early 1970s, initially practicing within
Chögyam Trungpa's tradition. The Cornishes offered what is now
the Dzogchen Beara centre to Sogyal Rimpoche when he visited in 1986.
(Another such planned centre, in Westport, failed to materialise when
the lamas in question were refused permission to stay.)
The
role of "blow-ins" in the Irish counter culture is well known and
extends to many fields, ranging from the New Age (Kuhling 2004) to
organic farming (Moore 2003). Following the traditional definitions,
Ireland remains very clearly "border country": to the best of my
knowledge no ordinations, in any tradition, have taken place in
Ireland, for example.
More
generally, it has taken a long time for Irish people to take leadership
or teaching positions in export groups, if at all. Thus in Dzogchen
Beara, senior Irish students act as "presenters", leading groups and
presenting videos, but they "are not really teachers in their own
right" (Matt Padwick, pers. comm.). In the (FWBO) Dublin Meditation
Centre, the first Irish-born teacher, trained in Britain, arrived in
1993; the first Irish-trained teacher, ordained in 1998, left for
Brazil; the first Irish-trained teacher to stay and teach was as late
as 2001. The "import" Kagyu Samye Dzong, by contrast, had its first two
Irish teachers in the 1980s and 1990s respectively.
In
terms of peripherality, this situation contrasts sharply with the large
number of Irish-born Buddhists who trained abroad and did not return.
Thus Paul Haller, abbot in 2007 of the San Francisco Zen Centre, comes
from west Belfast and was ordained in Thailand (Breen 2007); Finian
Airton from Dublin was ordained in Throssel Hole around 1984;
Ratnaghosa, chair of the London Buddhist Centre between 1994 and 2003,
grew up in Kildare (Ratnaghosa n.d.) Most famously, Maura O'Halloran,
after studying in Trinity, received Dharma transmission in Japan
shortly before her death in 1982 (O'Halloran 1995). Examples could be
multiplied.
The
point is not
that Irish teachers were excluded by blow-ins, but rather that it
remained, until the turn of the twenty first century, extremely hard to
be Irish, and Buddhist, and in Ireland (in 1991, only 264 identified as
Buddhist in the Republic; by 2006 this number had increased almost
tenfold, to 2175).
As
with other counter-cultural activities, to be foreign meant being
granted a certain leeway in one's lifestyle which was not offered to
Catholic-born Irish people. One British-born Buddhist recounts
"When
I still lived in Inchicore, an elderly lady came up … on the
street, you know 'are you a Protestant or a Catholic?' –
'Well, actually, I'm a Buddhist'. And she said 'ooh, it's alright dear,
so long as you're a Christian'." (interview A).
At
the opposite end of the spectrum, in Northern Ireland, where sectarian
tensions have remained stronger, being Buddhist "at home" has been
particularly difficult until very recent years. Even in the Republic,
Irish Buddhists still often have church weddings and funerals for
family reasons.
The
"export Buddhist" groups cover the whole spectrum of Buddhism: of the
fourteen most organised groups in Ireland, five are broadly Theravadin
(including vipassana),
three Mayahana, five Tibetan and one western (Dharmachari Akshobin,
pers. comm.)
Nattier
predicts correctly that these groups will be evangelical in orientation
(1998: 189), but is wrong (at least for Ireland) to expect greater
ethnic diversity (except via these groups' international connections).
Nor are they more plebeian: the intellectual consistency involved in
acquiring a new ideology and defending its boundaries in the "spiritual
marketplace" requires a higher degree of cultural capital than
"shopping around".
Baggage
Buddhism
In
the censuses of the 1990s and 2000s, those identifying as Buddhist in
the Republic broke down more or less evenly between those of Irish and
other "western" nationality, and Buddhists from Asian countries. Except
for mainland Chinese converts to Falun Gong, most Asian Buddhists were
presumably born into Buddhism.
In
the late 1970s and early 1980s, Vietnamese "quota refugees" arrived
under UNHCR programmes. Of these, some were Catholic, others Buddhist
and others again from the Vietnamese Chinese community (Maguire 2004).
At some point, the Buddhists were able to sustain a temple in a Dublin
suburb.
The
only other "ethnic Buddhist" group combining this length of presence
with a similar organisational capacity is Soka Gakkai, which includes
western and Japanese adherents more successfully than most Buddhist
groups. This too was able for a time to sustain a temple in suburban
Dublin, but has now reverted to private practice (Wendy Cox, pers.
comm.)
Special
mention must be made of Chinese immigrants from the PRC, Taiwan and the
diaspora (especially Malaysia), who comprise about half of the Asian
Buddhist population. While Chinese New Year has some history in
Ireland, the only visible organisation with any claim to be Buddhist is
the well-organised Falun Dafa / Falun Gong. This is present in New Age
circuits; its free paper Epoch
Times is available in Irish
supermarkets; and it holds regular public protests about the treatment
of Falun Gong practitioners in China.
Otherwise,
a combination of very low immigration rates until the late 1990s, small
absolute numbers of most Buddhist ethnicities (in the dozens or
hundreds in most cases) and global downturn make the development of
formal ethnic Buddhist institutions problematic. (In 2009, however, the
Thai community organised a public Wesak celebration). The most likely
route is affiliation to existing, import or export, foundations.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that tentative moves are being made in this
direction.
Creolisation
and not-just-Buddhists
Finally,
we should mention, as Tweed (2002: 28 – 29) observes, not
only Buddhist sympathisers (as in earlier periods), but also
"night-stand Buddhists", "Dharma-hoppers", "lukewarm Buddhists" and
"non-just Buddhists". Alternatively, following Rocha (2006), we can
speak of multiple affiliations and forms of creolisation.
Where Irish people appropriate Buddhism for themselves, within largely
self-directed and informal organisations (or as a purely private
matter), their own cultural orientations towards religion naturally
play a key role. As one teacher observes, "we have Irish Catholic
Buddhists, Irish Catholic pagans, Irish Catholic atheists…"
(Dharmachari Sanghapala, pers. comm.) who deploy the vocabulary of
Buddhism (etc.) within a largely Catholic grammar.
Particular
pressures are exerted by tribal affiliation. Religious affiliation
remains central to many aspects of life in Ireland, formally and
informally: schools and hospitals have with few exceptions an
explicitly religious ethos; marriages and funerals are typically
religious; confirmation and first communion are major events; and so
on. Coulter (1993) documents, in relation to feminism, how only those
university-trained liberal feminists with independent careers were able
to set themselves openly against and outside the church. For
working-class women's groups, the church was (and sometimes still
remains) a central part of family and community, and one which they
cannot do without. These pressures also impact on Irish Buddhism.
As
Catholicism's "moral monopoly" (Inglis 1998) slowly loses its power, at
least for those with the strength or resources to stand outside it,
what increasingly replaces it as a pressure on "night-stand Buddhists"
are the interpretations offered through consumer culture, be it the
"mind-body-spirit" section of high street bookshops, the sub-Buddhist
material in "angel shops" or workshops advertised in health food
stores. To this extent, import Buddhism could equally be described as a
collection of audience cults (Stark and Bainbridge 1985), at times
developing into client cults around teachers based abroad.
These
experiences – of creolisation or multiple affiliations
– are not restricted to working-class women: one
long-standing and well-educated male Buddhist writes
"I
have always been aware that my interest in Buddhism may be rather
superficial, and I am not a good or committed practitioner! However, I
remain a sympathiser and an admirer, often reading Buddhist literature.
But I haven't attended Buddhist teachings in recent years. Moreover, I
retain a certain Christian faith and practice, and have an interest in
some of the teachings of Islam".
As
we have seen, the origins of this import Buddhism are eclectic, both in
the encounter between Christianity and Buddhism, and in the counter
culture of the 1960s and 1970s. For Britain, Cush suggests that the
counter culture was important for western Buddhists in the 1970s and
faded from view in the 1980s, while a counter-cultural "New Age"
revived in its relevance for Buddhists in the 1990s (Cush 1993: 195 -
6). Similarly, Vishvapani writes,
"the
New Age is where people start looking when they want an alternative to
conventional society… Buddhists might see the New Age as a
kind of contemporary ethnic religion which can co-exist with Western
Buddhism as tribal and national traditions co-exist with Eastern
Buddhism" (1994: 21).
Relationships
with Catholicism show similar features: in the 1970s and 1980s there
developed a substantial interest, particularly in Christian-Zen
dialogue and the adoption of Asian practices within Christian
spirituality (see Hughes 1997). This has declined under the watchful
eye of Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, but may revive in future.
The bulk of Irish Buddhists will, for the foreseeable future, have been
brought up Catholic, so that Buddhist organisations in Ireland will
continue to have to engage with people's religious socialisation, and
individuals will still have to negotiate these identities for
themselves. As with Rocha's Brazilian Zen practitioners,
"the
vast majority of the people interviewed were Catholics before they
started to 'shop around' in the religious marketplace and find Zen
Buddhism." (2006: 118).
Finally,
a refusal to identify as Buddhist may also be a conscious, thought-out
Buddhist position:
"I
had this debate with myself at one stage about calling myself a
Buddhist or not, because it's almost unBuddhist to call yourself
Buddhist, particularly because they're labeling and they're
categorizing" (interview C).
Fieldwork
in the 1990s counter culture identified as key themes autonomy and
reflexivity in all aspects of one's life (Cox 1999); this refusal of
categorisation is no doubt related. As the long history of sectarianism
in Ireland finally wanes, there are more general reactions against
religious identification: the last thing many Irish people want to do
is to repeat their own experience of sectarian upbringing, and interest
in the idea of a Buddhist school, for example, has been virtually zero.
Statistics based on practice rather than self-identification might thus
show rather more Irish people who are Buddhist, or part-Buddhist (4).
Conclusion:
the future of Irish Buddhism
Ireland's
relationship with Buddhism has always been determined by global
processes, be these the circuits of mediaeval Christian knowledge and
the publishing of early modern travellers' tales, the involvement of
some Irish people with running the British empire and of others with
the "Catholic spiritual empire", the role of UK and US publishing in
making knowledge of Buddhism available to secondary-school children in
the 1960s and 1970s, "blow-ins" from the broader west European counter
culture, or immigration from Buddhist Asia.
I have argued that the most central feature of "Irish culture" in
relation to Buddhism is that there was not one, but two warring
cultures, in a sectarian conflict which largely squeezed out
alternative religious options, at least at home (to be Irish and
Buddhist abroad was always more feasible).
As
late as 1991, there were only 986 self-identified Buddhists in the
Republic, about 0.025% of the population. By 2002 the figure was 3,894
(about 0.1 percent) and by 2006 it was 6,516 (about 0.15 percent),
making it the third-largest religion after Christianity and Islam.
These twenty first century figures are in line with Baumann's (2001)
European estimates for the late 1990s, albeit on the low end of the
spectrum. They are roughly evenly divided between those of Irish and
other western nationality and those of Asian nationality –
about 45 percent converts in 1991, 57 percent in 2002 and 50 percent in
2006. Thus along with a rise in immigration, there is an equally
significant rise in conversion (paralleled by that to other
non-established religions and non-religious categories). Is this the
"end of history"?
Global
recession has several obvious effects. Firstly, substantial numbers of
recent immigrants have left the country, although events in the PRC in
particular may offset this, and indeed lead to a growth in Falun Gong
in particular.
Secondly,
religious and racial intolerance is rising, whether in the recent
referendum denying citizenship to children of foreign parents born in
Ireland, or proposed legislation against blasphemy. How this will
affect Buddhism is anyone's guess, but it seems likely that
"night-stand Buddhists" in particular will find it harder to remain
broad-minded if the situation worsens. Renewed ethnic closure along
religious grounds is by no means impossible.
Thirdly,
there may be a shift in reasons for interest in Buddhism. The Dublin
Buddhist Centre, one of the most visible ports of call, reports a sharp
drop in meditation classes (perceived as an antidote to stressful work
lives) and rising numbers taking classes in Buddhism.
Finally,
recession increases the number of potential skilled volunteers but also
makes emigration more attractive for young, educated Buddhists.
Despite
these local considerations, Buddhism in Ireland remains, as it has
always been, structurally dependent on global relationships. Until
Asian Buddhists in Ireland are able to bridge the gap to
English-language Buddhist organisations (and vice versa) they are
likely to remain the poor relations of organisations in Britain or at
home. The Irish franchises of international Buddhist organisations will
not cease to be so in the foreseeable future, as training and
ordination resources will remain beyond the reach of all but the
largest groups in Ireland. And "import Buddhists" will remain dependent
on the various circuits of international publishing, touring teachers,
Internet ordering and so on.
To
this extent, Ireland is likely to remain a "border country" of the
Dharma for a long time to come; but the issues raised in this article
are not Irish ones alone, even if they are particularly visible in the
Irish case. Nation-states are important social facts, but as units of
analysis they provide at best a particular insight into what are
necessarily global relationships and processes, and at worst a sense of
naturalness, boundedness and self-sufficiency that can distract our
attention from this broader picture. Similar points, of course, were
made by Nagasena and Nagarjuna.
Notes
1.
The Visuddhimagga, for
example, identifies "remote areas with no faith in the Dharma" and
"border regions in dispute" as unsuitable sites for building
monasteries (Ray 1999: 38, fn 20). The relative lack of monks to
perform ordinations also leads to smaller quorums in these contexts:
see e.g. Findly 2000: 116 fn. 8, citing Gombrich.
2.
In a broader perspective, France and Italy are better described as
pillarised societies, in Lipset and Rokkan's (1967) sense, with
centuries-long conflicts between Catholic, secular-liberal and
socialist cultures. The question of the adoption of Buddhism within the
secular and socialist subcultures of western Europe has yet to be
researched.
3.
The three interviews cited in this section were carried out in 2008
with people who have been involved in Buddhism in Ireland since the
1970s.
4.
Rocha notes (2006: 109) that Brazilians will often identify as Catholic
on census forms because they are baptised. A similar situation applies
in Ireland, although here the key point is that "Protestant" and
"Catholic" are widely understood as ethnic
categories.
References
Almond,
Philip 1988. The British
discovery of Buddhism.
Cambridge: CUP
Thomas Bartlett, “The Irish soldier in India, 1660
– 1922”. 12 – 28 in Michael Holmes and
Denis Holmes (eds.), Ireland
and India: connections, comparisons, contrasts.
Dublin: Folens, 1997
Baumann, Martin 2001. “Global Buddhism: developmental
periods, regional histories, and a new analytical
perspective”. Journal
of Global Buddhism 2: 1 - 43
Baumann, Martin 2002. “Buddhism in Europe: past, present,
prospects”. 85 – 105 in Charles Prebish and Martin
Baumann (eds), Westward
dharma: Buddhism beyond Asia.
Berkeley / LA: UC Press
Boland, Rosita 2005. A secret
map of Ireland. Dublin: New
Island
Breen, Suzanne 2007. “Buddhist teacher to create Zen in the
North”. Sunday
Tribune 19.8.07: 8
Clarke, JJ 1997. Oriental
enlightenment: the encounter between Asian and western thought.
London: Routledge
Cornish, Peter 2007. In
memory of Harriet: another way of dying.
Dzogchen Beara: Allihies, West Cork
Cornwell, Paul 2004.Only by
failure: the many faces of the impossible life of Terence Gray.
Salt: Cambridge
Coulter, Carol 1993. The
hidden tradition: feminism, women and nationalism in Ireland.
Cork: Cork UP
Cox, Laurence 1999. Building
counter cultures. Unpublished
PhD dissertation, University of Dublin.
Cush, Denise 1996. "British Buddhism and the New Age". Journal
of Contemporary Religion 11 /
2: 195 - 208
Dennis, James 1897.Christian
missions and social progress: a sociological study of foreign missions.
New York etc.: Fleming H Revell
Dillon, Michael 1946. Self: a
study in ethics and endocrinology.
London: Heinemann
Dharmadasa, KNO 1992. Language,
religion and ethnicity: the growth of Sinhalese nationalism in Sri Lanka.
Ann Arbor: U. Michigan Press
Findly, Ellison Banks 2000. Women's
Buddhism, Buddhism's women: tradition, revision, renewal.
Boston: Wisdom
Franklin, J. Jeffrey 2008. The
lotus and the lion: Buddhism and the British empire.
Ithaca: Cornell UP
Gunder Frank, André 1971 (2nd edition). Capitalism
and underdevelopment in Latin America: historical studies of Chile and
Brazil. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Hansen, Peter 1996. “The dancing lamas of Everest: cinema,
orientalism, and Anglo-Tibetan Relations in the 1920s”. American
Historical Review vol. 101 no.
3 (June): 712 - 74
Hodgkinson, Liz 1989. Michael
née Laura. London:
Columbus
Hughes, Louis 1997. Yoga: a
path to God? Cork: Mercier
Humphreys, Christmas 1968. Sixty
years of Buddhism in England (1907 -1967): a history and a survey.
London: The Buddhist Society
Inglis, Tom 1998. Moral
monopoly: the Catholic church in modern Irish society.
Dublin: Gill and Macmillan
Jivaka, Lobsang 1962. Imji
Getsul: an English Buddhist in Rizong monastery.
London: Routledge Paul
Jivaka, Lobsang 1994. The
life of Milarepa: Tibet’s great yogi.
Felinfach: Llanerch
Kelly, Eugene 1990. “The Priory Road (Harold’s
Cross) Zen Meditation Group”. Online at http://insightmeditationdublin.com/doc/ZENGRP_HST.doc
Kennedy, Pagan 2007.The first
man-made man: the story of two sex-changes, one love affair and a
twentieth-century medical revolution.
New York: Bloomsbury
Koné, Alione 2001. "Zen in Europe: a survey of the
territory". Journal of Global
Buddhism 2: 139 – 161
Kuhling, Carmen 2004. The New
Age ethic and the spirit of postmodernity.
Cresskill, NJ: Hampton.
Kwon, Young Hee 2007. “The Buddhist subtext and the imperial
soul-making in Kim”.
Victorian Newsletter (Spring).
Lennon, Joseph 2004. Irish
Orientalism: a literary and intellectual history.
Syracuse: Syracuse UP
Lipset, Seymour and Stein Rokkan 1967. "Cleavage structures, party
systems and voter alignments." 1 – 64 in Lipset and Rokkan
(eds), Party systems and
voter alignments. NY: Free
Press.
Lopéz, Donald (ed.) 1995. Curators
of the Buddha: the study of Buddhism under colonialism.
Chicago: UC Press
Lopéz, Donald 1998. Prisoners
of Shangri-la: Tibetan Buddhism and the west. Chicago:
UC Press
Maguire, Mark 2004. Differently
Irish: a cultural history exploring 25 years of Vietnamese-Irish
identity. Dublin: Woodfield
Mansoor, M 1944. The Story of
Irish Orientalism. Dublin:
Hodges, Figgis and Co.
Moore, Oliver 2003. "Spirituality, self-sufficiency, selling and the
split: collective identity or otherwise in the organic movement in
Ireland". Paper to European Society for Rural Sociology conference,
Sligo (August)
Nattier, Jan 1998. "Who is a Buddhist? Charting the landscape of
Buddhist America". 183 – 195 in Charles Prebish and Kenneth
Tanaka (eds.), The faces of
Buddhism in America. Berkeley:
UC Press.
Norman, Alexander 2008. Holder
of the white lotus: the lives of the Dalai Lama.
New York: Little, Brown
Numrich, Paul 2003. "Two Buddhisms further considered". Contemporary
Buddhism 4 / 1: 55 –
78.
O’Halloran, Maura 1995. Pure
heart, enlightened mind: the Zen journal and letters of an Irishwoman
in Japan. London: Thorsons
Offermans, Jürgen 2005. “Debates on atheism,
quietism and sodomy: the initial reception of Buddhism in
Europe”. Journal of
Global Buddhism 6: 16
– 35
Olcott, Henry 1889. Old diary
leaves (fourth series), chapter XI.
Online at http://www.theosophy.ph/onlinebooks/odl/odl411.html
Rampa, T Lobsang 1960. The
Rampa Story. London: Souvenir
Ratnaghosha, Dharmachari n.d. “My early life”.
Online at http://www.angelfire.com/wizard2/ratnaghosha/lifestory1.html
(accessed 23.10.08)
Ray, Reginald 1999. Buddhist
saints in India: a study in Buddhist values and orientations.
Oxford: OUP
Rexroth, Kenneth (ed.) 1977. The
Buddhist writings of Lafcadio Hearn.
Santa Barbara: Ross-Erikson
Rocha, Christina 2006. Zen in
Brazil: the quest for cosmopolitan modernity. Honolulu:
U. Hawaii Press
Ronan, Sean (ed.) 1997. Irish
writing on Lafcadio Hearn and Japan: writer, journalist and teacher. Folkestone:
Global Oriental
Said, Edward 2003 (2nd edition). Orientalism.
London: Penguin.
Stark, Rodney and William Bainbridge 1985. The
future of religion: secularization, revival and cult formation.
Berkeley: UC Press.
Tweed, Thomas 2000. The
American encounter with Buddhism 1844 – 1912: Victorian
culture and the limits of dissent.
Chapel Hill: UNC Press
Tweed, Thomas 2002. “Who is a Buddhist? Night-stand Buddhists
and other creatures”. 17 – 33 in Charles Prebish
and Martin Baumann (eds), Westward
dharma: Buddhism beyond Asia.
Berkeley / LA: UC Press
Vishvapani 1994. "Buddhism and the New Age". Western
Buddhist Review 1: 9
– 22
Wallerstein, Immanuel 1988. "World-systems analysis". 309 –
324 in Anthony Giddens and Jonathan Turner (eds.), Social
theory today. Cambridge: Polity
Thanks
and acknowledgements
We
are very thankful to Dharmachari Akshobin, Philip Almond, Martin
Baumann, Julian Campbell, Wendy Cox, Paddy Dooher, Ian Foster, Brian
Gurrin, James in the Galway Zen Dojo, Eugene Kelly, Dharmachari
Lalitavira, Joseph Lennon, Shane McCausland, Bernard Murphy, John
Murphy, Sandra Noel, Thomas O'Connor, John O'Neill, Marjo Oosterhoff,
Matt Padwick, Hilary Richardson, Cristina Rocha, Andrew Slibney, Rachel
Stanley, Ani Tsondru, Mike Tyldesley, Sandra Watkins, Chris Whiteside
and Audrey Whitty for all their assistance with this research, which
was made possible by a grant from NUI Maynooth Dept of Sociology. Our
apologies to anyone we have inadvertently omitted.