Tibetan
and Zen Buddhism in Britain: Transplantation, Development and Adaptation.
By David N. Kay. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004, xvi + 260 pages, ISBN 0-415-29765-6 (cloth), £70.
Reviewed by
Inken Prohl
Lecturer in Religious Studies, Free University of Berlin
inkenxyz20@yahoo.de
The
New Kadampa Tradition (NKT), which has its roots in the Tibetan
Gelug Tradition, and the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives (OBC),
which is rooted in Japanese Sōtō Zen, were among the first wave
of Tibetan and Zen Buddhist groups to become established in Britain,
in the early 1970s. After three decades of growth and development,
these groups currently represent the largest Tibetan and Zen Buddhist
organizations in Britain. In 1997 there were between 2000 and 3000
members of the NKT, making it the third largest Buddhist organization
in Britain, following the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order
(FWBO) and the Sōka Gakkai International UK (SGI-UK). The OBC is
the largest of the Zen Buddhist organizations, with an estimated
size of approximately one thousand British practitioners. Although
the two organizations are relatively small-sized, institutionally
and numerically, the current fascination of British culture (as
well as of Western cultures in general) with Buddhism, particularly
in its Tibetan and Zen Buddhist forms, is the reason why the exploration
of this field is extremely important and desirable.
Tibetan and
Zen Buddhism in Britain provides, as the subtitle suggests,
a detailed analysis of the transplantation, development, and adaptation
of the NKT and OBC in Britain. In order to give a framework for
analyzing these two organizations, part one of the book surveys
the scholarly literature on British Buddhism, evaluates the key
contributions, and organizes the results thematically. In particular,
the widely accepted “Protestant Buddhism” thesis is
subjected to critical discussion. To contextualize the NKT and the
OBC in Britain, the contours of the broader British Buddhist environment
and specifically Tibetan and Zen Buddhist context are mapped out.
According to Kay,
there is a tendency in observers of Buddhism in the West to focus
narrowly on the Western-convert appropriation and experience of
Buddhist traditions, with the effect that important historical factors
in the incoming traditions themselves are neglected. To avoid this
tendency, part two examines the indigenous Tibetan context of the
NKT before turning to NKT’s development in the West. The author
outlines the background and cross-cultural context of the NKT, in
particular its relationship with the Foundation for the Preservation
of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT). The founder of the NKT, Geshe
Kelsang Gyatso (b. 1931), was originally brought to Britain to teach
at an FPMT center, but in 1991 he split from this organization in
order to found the NKT. This schism, as well as the controversial
debate on the guardian deity Dorje Shugden, NKT’s critical
attitude concerning the Dalai Lama, and its growing insularity,
are examined in the context of traditional Gelug exclusivism. By
situating the development and the self-perception of the NKT within
its appropriate context, the volume demonstrates the extent to which
broader Asian contexts continue to exert a normative influence on
Buddhist development in the West.
Drawing on Robert
Lifton’s definition of the “fundamentalist self,”
Kay’s argument shows that, due to the NKT’s homogenous
organizational structure, its attempts to establish a uniformity
of belief and practice within the organization, and an emphasis
on following one tradition coupled with a critical attitude toward
other traditions, the NKT fits into Lifton’s category of “fundamentalism”
(p. 110). Kay describes how struggles for control of NKT’s
institutional sites and NKT’s repressed memory of its institutional
conflicts both contribute to NKT’s later “fundamentalist”
identity. These sections provide an exiting account of recent European
religious history and, at the same time, challenge the stereotypical
image of unity and harmony within the Western Tibetan Buddhist community.
Part three of the
book examines the historical and ideological development of the
OBC within the context of the biography of its Western founder,
Peggy Kennett (1924-1996), and her relationship with traditional
Japanese Sōtō Zen Buddhism. Kennett was invited by Kōho Keidō
Chisan (1879-1967), the chief abbot of Sōjiji, one of the two head
temples of the Sōtō school in Japan, to become his disciple at Sōjiji.
Kennett received dharma transmission from him, acted as a head priest
of her own village temple in Mie prefecture in central Japan, and
returned to Britain in 1972, where she formed the “British
Zen Mission Society,” later renamed the OBC. Kay provides
a detailed analysis of the developments and innovations in Kennett’s
teaching of Zen Buddhism, including the phenomenology of her Zen
experience, the appropriation of Christian religious forms in adapting
Zen Buddhism to the West, and the strategies she used in order to
legitimate her teachings. Kay demonstrates that Kennett achieved
the last through an emphasis on the authenticity of her own personal
experience of the truth, through the authority of her position within
the Sōtō lineage, and through recourse to the orthodox teachings
of Dōgen and Keizan, the founders of the Sōtō school in Japan. Kay
builds a convincing analysis of the strategies Kennett and the OBC
have employed to bind practitioners to her teaching, showing how
the development of that teaching has been a dialogical process integrating
her ideas and the reinforcement they’ve received from her
followers.
The book’s
final chapter provocatively addresses recent developments in the
NKT and the OBC in the context of the relationship between Buddhism
and British culture, the religious transplantation process, and
the politics and patterns of cultural adaptation. Kay examines the
notion that the conditions of modernity are reflected in contemporary
Buddhist practice, concluding that the NKT actually represents a
critical, even reactionary response to the mechanisms of modernity.
Kay points out that the NKT’s emphasis on one teaching and
one practice represents, for many practitioners, a clear alternative
to the pluralistic, uncertain and unpredictable nature of modern
society (p. 220). Although this observation presents a convincing
and challenging observation of a mechanism at work in Buddhist organizations
in the West, I would hesitate to characterize, as Kay does, such
organizations as “fundamentalist,” due to the vague
and, at the same time, extremely political implications of this
term. However, Kay certainly succeeds in presenting the NKT as a
contemporary Buddhist movement which “simultaneously reflects
and reacts against the conditions of modernity” (p. 222).
Concerning the OBC,
relying on the work of Robert Sharf, Kay argues that the organization’s
emphasis on the spiritual experience of enlightenment/seeing the
truth and Kennett’s individualistic view of religious form
reflect a modern reconstruction of Zen Buddhism as an essentially
meditative tradition. At the same time, the author points out that,
according to Bernard Faure, this mystical, demythologizing, and
anti-ritual interpretation of modern Zen Buddhism is also deeply
rooted in traditional precedents (p. 221). Kay concludes that the
term “Protestant Buddhism” must be applied to the OBC
only with caution, given the traditional Buddhist precedents he
detects in Kennett’s thought. I found this conclusion both
provocative and debatable. The very daily practice at Zen Buddhist
temples in Japan, both past and present, makes Zen priests carriers
of the dharma, fields of merit for the laity. Embodying the dharma,
these Zen priests serve the community in its demands for both this-worldly
and other-worldly benefits. The social function of Japanese Zen
Buddhist temples and priests is, in my opinion, fundamentally different
from that of the OBC in Britain. (In fact, following Faure, that
functioning is also different from Zen’s rhetoric.) In modern
Western, as well as modern Eastern, iterations of Buddhism, forms
of practice become means for bringing about personal, private religious
experiences, and this development might perhaps appropriately be
termed Protestant Buddhism. This does describe the OBC, and the
mere fact that the OBC continues to employ Zen’s traditional
anti-institutional rhetoric does not in itself require us to be
terribly cautious in applying that adjective, “Protestant,”
to it. The larger task is acknowledging and evaluating new forms
of Buddhism, whether we find them in Asia or the West. Here it is
necessary to distinguish OBC-like iterations of Zen Buddhism from
their pre-modern precedents in Japan in order to avoid orientalizing
in our description of non-Western religious traditions.
I found one aspect
of the book less informative. Apart from the opening statement that
the book is the end result of the author’s doctoral research
into contemporary forms of British Buddhism, we learn very little
about the methods the author applied in the field. Statements from
practitioners of both the NKT and the OBC, on which Kay builds his
arguments, make it most likely that fieldwork was conducted, but
one would have hoped for more information about the conditions,
problems, and characteristics of this research. Voices of the members
of these two organizations are heard throughout the study, but the
reader wonders who they are and, more importantly, what made them
join these Buddhist organizations — especially, in the case
of NKT, one described by the author as “fundamentalist.”
Further, the question arises what the practitioners actually do
after or before or in between reading about the teachings they seem
to hold important enough to invest their time, energy, and money
in. This question is especially pertinent in that, though Kay points
that out the exotic sensuality of the rituals of Tibetan and Zen
Buddhism contributes to their appeal in the West (p. 7), we actually
learn very little about forms of practice in these two organizations,
about the aesthetics of their meeting places, the sound of their
ceremonies, or the smell of their rooms during their long periods
of meditation.
Despite these limitations,
Kay’s work offers a wealth of information about the recent
history of Buddhist organizations in the West, particularly concerning
the internal struggles and debates in Western Tibetan Buddhism.
It draws challenging conclusions in approaching and evaluating Buddhist
developments in the West that will, I hope, result in new and lively
discussions among scholars of religions.