Buddhist
Studies from India to America: Essays in Honor of Charles S. Prebish.
Edited by Damien Keown. London and New York: Routledge, 2006, xxvii + 291 pages. ISBN 0-415-37124-4 (hardback), US $115.
Reviewed by
David L. McMahan
Associate Professor
Franklin & Marshall College,
dmcmahan@fandm.edu
If the title Buddhist Studies from
India to America sounds formidably broad, it is because it reflects
the unusually variegated career of the scholar to whom this volume
is dedicated, Charles S. Prebish. Prebish has published seventeen
books and nearly seventy-five articles ranging from scholarship on
early Buddhism in India to Buddhism in contemporary North America.
His thirty-year career has produced innovative theories on Buddhist
monasticism, ethics, and the development of sectarian Buddhism in
India, as well as ground-breaking work on Buddhism in America, and
even a book on religion and sports. The essays in this book address
a panoply of things Buddhist and include contributions that are as
original and wide-ranging as Prebish's own work. They are divided
into four sections: "Vinaya studies and ethics,"
"Buddhist traditions," "Western Buddhism," and
"inter-religious dialogue."
In the first section,
Steven Heine's chapter on Døgen's understanding of the precepts
represents an example of the best of the scholarship in the volume.
"Døgen and the Precepts, Revisited" delves into Døgen's
historical context, placing him in relation to his predecessors and
contemporaries in order to tease out the significance of the new system
of sixteen-article precepts he advocated with regard to the theory
and practice of Zen. This system was a streamlined version of the
precepts that did not include the prāṭimokṣa. While
Døgen placed a great deal of importance on the precepts, he
saw them as subordinate to the practice of zazen. Heine suggests that
Døgen propounded the sixteen-article precepts in order to mediate
between Esai's insistence that the precepts take precedence over zazen
and the antinomian view of Nønin and his Daruma school, which
claimed that since all beings are originally awakened there is no
need for precepts.
The "Vinaya
studies and ethics" section also includes an interesting essay
by the volume's editor, Damien Keown, in which he speculates on the
reasons Buddhism never developed ethics as a distinctive
branch of theoretical inquiry, even while it has always placed a strong
emphasis on morality. This chapter is deeply informed by Keown's work
in this subject and contrasts the Buddhist situation with ancient
Greek development of meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics.
This section also contains Judith Simmer-Brown's reflections on the
prospects for a Tibetan-American bhikṣuṇī sangha.
Simmer-Brown notes some of the difficulties facing new bhikṣuṇīs,
especially a lack of "patronage, community, training, and education"
(58). In a very different kind of essay, Robert L. Hood discusses
the difficulties some Buddhists — especially monks without family
ties — face when encountering western medical practice. Using
the experience of the Burmese monk, Venerable U Sacca Vamsa, as a
case study, Hood stresses the need for monks to have durable power
of attorney and to name healthcare decision-makers.
The next section,
"Buddhist traditions," offers an assortment of scholarly
treatments of Buddhist literature, one translation, and even an anomalous
teisho by John Daido Loori. The literature treated here ranges
from Indian sūtras to Tibetan commentaries to Japanese
Pure Land texts. Michael Bathgate's chapter on øjøden
narratives in Pure Land traditions is notable for addressing a neglected
genre of Buddhist literature: popular narratives of people who achieved
rebirth in Amida's Pure Land. Bathgate argues these popular edifying
biographies compiled between the tenth and twelfth centuries in Japan
were written to establish karmic connections between those who had
achieved rebirth in and those still on the path to the Pure land.
Written for encouragement and inspiration, they would eventually clash
with Hønen's insistence on the sole practice of chanting the
nembutsu and Shinran's doctrine of grace, as opposed to trying
to establish the conditions for rebirth in the Pure Land, oneself.
In other offerings, Mavis Fenn gives a close reading of the Kūtadanta
Sutta as a foundation for contemporary Engaged Buddhism and Leslie
Kawamura provides a translation and interpretation of Mi-pham discussing
the three self-natures (svabhāvas) in Yogacāra.
Two chapers in this
section stand out for their penetrating examinations of texts in their
historical contexts: those of John Powers and Reginald Ray. Powers'
piece on Tsong Kha Pa's distinction between sūtra and
tantra stands out as a model of textual scholarship that
illuminates the competitive agendas between rival groups in their
historical contexts. Powers asks why Tsong Kha Pa, in his Great
Exposition of Secret Mantra (sNags rim chen mo), would compose
a text whose central argument is something that was largely taken
for granted in his time and place: the soteriological superiority
of tantra to sūtra. Powers concludes that the famous
Tibetan philosopher had a hidden sectarian agenda: to advance a view
of tantra that affirms cenobitic monasticism and adherence
to traditional morality while still affirming the superiority of tantra.
Tsong Kha Pa makes deity yoga — something entirely compatible
with the Vinaya — the essential tantric practice and relegates
sexual yoga practices of the highest yoga tantras to a small
elite. Why does he do this within the context of a discussion of the
superiority of tantra to sūtra? Because, argues
Powers, one of the tantric vows — which Tsong Kha Pa no doubt
took himself — was to avoid dispute with other tantrikas. Thus
he advanced his reformist agenda through exploring a non-controversial
question, embedding within the discussion a polemical and sectarian
definition of tantra.
Reginald Ray's piece
on the use of the term citta-måtra in the Lankāvatāra
Sūtra asks why there has been such a reductive interpretation
and easy dismissal of the Cittamātra school in Indian and Tibetan
Mādhyamika literature. Through a detailed analysis of how this
term is used in the sūtra, he argues provocatively and
convincingly that the Indian and Tibetan Mādhyamikas, from Sāntideva
to comtemporary Tibetan Gelugpas, maintain an unfairly reductionistic
view of Cittamātra as "idealistic," failing to take
into account the subtleties of the term. Ray also locates the Lankāvatāra
as a product of forest yogins, rather than settled monastics,
and suggests tantalizing connections between the text and the much
later gzhan stong school of Tibetan Buddhism.
The remaining sections
of the book contain an assortment of pieces on topics related to
modern Buddhism, along with one chapter on religion and sports.
Martin Baumann introduces Paul Dahlke, an early-twentieth-century
German Buddhist who was quite influential on the emerging conceptions
and practice of Buddhism in Germany, yet who is almost completely
ignored outside of Germany. Paul Numrich draws upon his considerable
fieldwork in North American urban Buddhist communities to reconsider
the analytical usefulness of the concept of "two Buddhisms,"
arguing that it does in fact remain a useful distinction in understanding
the significance of race and ethnicity in Buddhism in North America.
Other chapters include Franz Metcalf's interpretation of "experiences
of no-self" reported by the practitioners of the Zen Center
of Los Angeles in terms of Winnicott's psychological theory; a study
by Brian Aitken of the relationship of sports to religion, rooted
unfortunately in some rather outdated notions of religion; George
Bond's thoughtful account of the Sarvodaya movement's continuities
and discontinuities with older forms of Sinhalese Buddhism in Sri
Lanka; an attempt by John Keenan to intertwine Buddhist and Christian
concepts and critiques of creation, a theological piece that is
puzzling for its assumption of a Christian readership ("we
Christians"); and an essay by Donald Swearer in praise of the
famous Thai reformer Buddhadasa's ecumenical vision of Buddhism
and Christianity.
The volume necessarily
contains the weakness endemic to the genre of the Festschrift:
it is something of a grab-bag of many things Buddhist without a coherent
thematic center. The essays are so wide-ranging in subject-matter
and methodology that few will find all the chapters of interest
— yet few students and scholars of Buddhism will fail to find
something of interest, either. There are, as I have suggested
above, many well researched, original, and interesting essays, and
this makes the volume a valuable contribution to a number of sub-fields
of Buddhist Studies and to the field as a whole.