Is ‘Engaged Buddhism’ [still] a thing?” I worried out loud in my e-mail responding to Buddhist Studies scholar Ann Gleig, tasked with writing an encyclopedia article on the topic in early 2020.¹ She had kindly invited me, a newly minted PhD specializing in early Chinese Buddhism but a novice in the field of contemporary Buddhism, to read her first draft with my untutored eyes, based on friendly interactions we had had over social media. “If so, what kind of thing is it?” I added. Based on our conversation on the state of the field—and prompted by her survey—I have come to some provisional conclusions about how scholars might better engage with the term, by tracing its evolving uses over time (periodizing it), in and out of the Anglosphere (provincializing it), and between fields of scholarship and practice (politicizing it). Just as Buddhist Studies has continually generated new schema of multiple Buddhisms in order to plot how ideas, practices, and communities change and reconstitute themselves in interdependent relation to one another over time, so too might it be helpful to pluralize Engaged Buddhism, carefully delimiting when, for whom, and how each Engaged Buddhism becomes or ceases to be “a thing.”² I argue below that a hegemonic form of Engaged Buddhism concretized as an Anglophone scholarly project in the late 1990s that I will label “Academic Engaged Buddhism” (1988–2009), as conceptually built on but distinct from how Anglophone Asian Buddhist leaders deployed “Engaged Buddhism” in the postcolonial Cold War era. While the particular form of post-Cold War, academically sponsored Engaged Buddhism has often hidden from view older, alternative Buddhisms, Engaged and otherwise, it also stimulated new forms of scholarship and practice around the world that embrace, ignore, and reject this project. I suggest in the following literature review that disputes over the coverage, validity, and custody of the label continue to shape both our scholarship and Anglophone Buddhist practice, though these themes are not always made explicit. Because Western Engaged Buddhist scholarship and practice may inform each other deeply, I suggest greater attention be paid to the various kinds of things we and others, as scholars or not, are doing with the term.

“Engaged Buddhism” in Asia and its Critics in the Study of Global Buddhism since the 1990s

My reflections arise in response to recent blowback against a term that seems to have reached its zenith in scholarly popularity in the 1990s and early 2000s. The capacious edited volumes Engaged Buddhism (1996), Engaged Buddhism in the West (2000), and Action Dharma (2003), each involving Christopher S. Queen (1945–), capture the energies of the moment, and Sallie King’s (1952–) Socially Engaged Buddhism (2009) offers a snapshot of a subfield confident it had identified its object of study, identifying it as “a contemporary form of Buddhism that engages actively yet nonviolently with the social, economic, political, and ecological problems of society” (1). Engaged Buddhism emerged “in the twentieth century… a large and powerful movement” (2009: 1) encompassing many individual movements formed in the colonial crucible of Buddhist Asia, though Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022) named it “Engaged Buddhism” in the 1960s. According to King’s narrative, Buddhist leaders like Nhat Hanh, Indian Dalit social reformer Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891–1956), Sri Lankan development planner A. T. Ariyaratne (1931–), Thai social activist Sulak Sivaraksa (1933–), the spiritual leader of Tibet-in-exile, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (1935–), Taiwanese nun and NGO director Master Cheng Yen (1937–), and Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi (1945–) have developed its practical ethics through interpreting Buddhist texts and traditions so as to bring them to bear on social ills: war, oppression, poverty, and environmental ruin. Western Engaged Buddhists—with leaders like Robert Aitken (1917–2010), Joanna Macy (1929–), Ken Jones (1930–2015), Bernie Glassman (1939–2018), and David Loy (1947–)—are said to support, build upon, and adapt the Asian framework. Such a narrative identifies Engaged Buddhism as a rather recent mid-twentieth century “modern” development, in dialogue with (and in shared care of) those who would identify as “Western.”

Work in Buddhist Studies over the last decade, however, has challenged this easy identification. First, historians of early twentieth-century East Asian Buddhism Jessica Main and Rongdao Lai (2013) have argued for scholarly license to apply the term “socially engaged Buddhism” to Buddhist movements that developed before World War II or that were cultural-nationalist in nature (or both), so long as they challenge a secularizing regime that demands religion remain in its private sphere. Second, in his ethnography of how contemporary Japanese temple priests pursue forms of progressive social action, John K. Nelson eschews “socially engaged Buddhism” for what he terms “Buddhist-inspired activism” because the former term, in his view, unnecessarily reifies an aloof, disengaged, insufficiently modern Buddhism against which it is implicitly contrasted (2013: 83–86). In my view both of these interventions respond to a fundamental gap in translation, between an Anglophone academia that reserves a right to its own terms of social analysis and practicing Asian Buddhists (living or historical) who might not recognize themselves as fitting under the description. I read both interventions, then, as underscoring critical power differentials between English and other languages, between Western scholars and non-Western people of study, and between hyperliterate, midcentury Buddhist activists of postcolonial elite background like Nhat Hanh (not to mention prominent Anglophone convert Buddhists) and a great preponderance of ordinary Asian Buddhists (not to mention Asians who “do” some kind of Buddhism) on whose behalf they might speak. In this vein I see their efforts as echoing Victor Temprano’s even stronger contention in his critique of King’s work that the very act of Western scholar-practitioners defining “Engaged Buddhism” is “essentially bound up in the Orientalist project of ‘extraction, appropriation, and distancing’” (2000).³ In this section, I direct attention to how Anglophone historians and social scientists studying Asian Buddhism since the 1990s have acknowledged, negotiated, or ignored both the gap and the bind.

Recent work on late modern East Asian Buddhist organizations like Taiwan’s Fo Guang Shan and Tzu Chi or Japan’s Sōka Gakkai and Risshō Kōsei Kai has embraced a host of tactics in negotiating the appropriateness of the label “[Socially] Engaged Buddhism,” from uncritical adoption of the term without scare-quotes to the principled selection of alternatives: emic self-ascribed terms or etic neologisms. In the earliest English-language monograph on Fo Guang Shan, Establishing a Pure Land on Earth, Stuart Chandler differentiates Chinese/Taiwanese “Humanistic Buddhism” (Ch., renjian Fojiao 人間佛教) from Sallie King and Christopher Queen’s “Engaged Buddhism” through comparing phenomena that are placed under these labels (2004: 78–79). It is perhaps indicative that this scholarly distinction may reflect distinctions observed among Sinophone communities that presently the Wikipedia page for English “Engaged Buddhism” links not to the Chinese page renjian Fojiao but to a separate entity zuoyi Fojiao 左翼佛教, literally “Left-Wing Buddhism” (Wikipedia 2020a, 2020b). C. Julia Huang does not adopt “Engaged Buddhism” to describe Tzu Chi in her monograph on the movement, Charisma and Compassion (2009), but adopts “engaged religion” as an appropriate analytic in a more recent co-authored work (Weller et al. 2017); Yu-Shuang Yao, on the other hand, features “Tzu Chi as Engaged Buddhism” in the title of her monograph on the movement (2012), but analyzes it in other terms in a co-authored article from the following year (Gombrich and Yao 2014).⁴ Scholars of Japanese New Religious Movements have built on the work of Jacqueline Stone (2003), who tested the limits of the label in her now classic contribution to Action Dharma (“Nichiren’s Activist Heirs”). In her Nihon no shakai sanka Bukkyō 日本の社会参加仏教 (Japan’s socially participating Buddhism) (2005), Ranjana Mukhopadhyaya embraces the term, translating it into Japanese (Jp., shakai sanka Bukkyō 社会参加仏教) for describing Risshō Kōsei Kai; and she develops a typology to further extend the category throughout Japanese history.⁵ Levi McLaughlin’s Soka Gakkai’s Human Revolution (2019), however, develops alternate frameworks with which to understand the activist Gakkai. These choices in academic labeling reflect an uneven salience of—or even discomfort with—the term in East Asian Studies and perhaps East Asia in general. The scholarship itself reveals that much contemporary East Asian Buddhist social engagement eludes capture under the label “engaged Buddhism,” though the English word and its cognates may offer unique affordances for certain more globally minded Buddhists to pursue new forms of religiously inspired activism. For instance, Hyun Mee Kim and Si Hyun Choi’s study of young Seoulites’ participation in the recently established Jungto (Pure Land) Society in Seoul (2016) argues that its guiding vision of “Engaged Buddhism” (Kor., silch’ǒn[jŏk] Pulgyo, lit. “Practical Buddhism”) comprises a core ethos for self-fashioning among the precariously middle-class youth they interviewed, eager for forms of religious activity that relieve suffering “here and now,” both their own and those addressed by Jungto’s commitment to causes like environmentalism and North Korean refugee resettlement.⁶

Perhaps nothing is more illustrative of the field’s turn away from “Engaged Buddhism” than the title of Justin McDaniel’s Architects of Buddhist Leisure: Socially Disengaged Buddhism in Asia’s Museums, Monuments, and Amusement Parks (2016), which inaugurated University of Hawaii Press’s ambitious Contemporary Buddhism series (the reincarnated [?] Topics in Contemporary Buddhism series [2004–2015]). McDaniel himself avoids reflecting on the citational riff, and encourages readers to take his diversion into Buddhist theme parks as seriously as his scholarly engagements with texts, doctrine, and politics. Neither do “Engaged Buddhists” feature as any of the titular Figures of Buddhist Modernity in Asia (2016, co-edited by McDaniel along with Jeffrey Samuels and Mark Rowe), a book that profiles over sixty modern Buddhists across the continent, many of whom are activist leaders: the term does not appear in the index. Recent scholarship on Buddhist-inspired humanitarianism in South and Southeast Asia is also keen to develop its own categories beyond “Engaged Buddhism,” often in consultation with the communities they study.⁷ Perhaps the rise in awareness of “bad” Buddhist nationalism in Buddhist-majority countries—think here of Suu Kyi’s fall from grace in light of her inability to respond to the Rohingyan genocide—has also dampened enthusiasm for the term, or at least its commitment to equating authentic Buddhist identity with “good” nonviolent politics.⁸ The field, paralleling Nelson’s “Buddhist-inspired activism,” seems to have flipped the adjective and the noun, preferring to examine what we might call “Buddhist engagement,” by detailing how Buddhists run universities, NGOs, and political campaigns. It is difficult for me to avoid the conclusion that “Engaged Buddhism” no longer seems to describe the contemporary Asian figures or communities that scholars are interested in working with,⁹ and I suspect the waning of the term reflects shifts in both scholarly interest and the Asian Buddhist world overall, away from, if not in reaction to, the term and groups that organize under it.

“Academic Engaged Buddhism” for Western Scholars and Practitioners of Buddhism

If the descriptive-analytical side of Buddhist Studies displays less surety that it can find Engaged Buddhists out there in the field or the archive, the constructive-reflective side still locates them in their classrooms and offices. In “Disengaged Buddhism” (2019) Amod Lele confidently interpellates “Engaged Buddhists” as his interlocutors, directly citing their hermeneutical labors and challenging them to better account for Śāntideva’s (eighth century; read: the authoritative traditional Buddhist) arguments against monastic engagement in projects of imperial governance. Following Lele, we might identify Engaged Buddhism as a textual project, and contemporary Engaged Buddhists as a privileged community of hyperliterate Anglophone scholar-practitioners.¹⁰ Even though Nhat Hanh coined the term for his transnational, multilingual community of followers, and even as Sivaraksa founds the International Network for Engaged Buddhists in 1989 (though still going strong!),¹¹ for Lele “Engaged Buddhists” are simply among the readers of the Journal of Buddhist Ethics.¹² I propose “Academic Engaged Buddhism” as a label for this community of English-speaking scholars and practitioners of Buddhism and the theoretical discourse they produced.

Academic Engaged Buddhism as a late twentieth-century textual project curated a canon of saints, scriptural citations, and interpretations through academic conferences and edited volumes. By repurposing suttas, invoking skillful means and interdependence, and juxtaposing the Engaged Buddhisms of diverse figures like Nhat Hanh, Ariyaratne, or Cheng Yen on the same page, it actually called the parent species “Engaged Buddhism” and its living non-Asian lineages into being. It was overtly theoretical in nature, primarily concerned with reconstructing the thought of prominent twentieth-century Buddhist social activists in the Gandhian non-violent, nation-building mold, especially as that thought was presumed to be in the process of fuller realization within enduring social practices, movements, and institutions.¹³ It facilitated greater academic prestige for a cadre of Asian Buddhist leaders it honored, as well as cultivated a sense of activist purpose for a generation of Western scholars in Buddhist Studies that wished to faithfully articulate the thought and practice of their Asian contemporaries. This exchange was especially fruitful as so many of the Western scholars were also religiously invested in the category (see Temprano (2013: 270–73) on King as a “scholar-practitioner”) and the Asian Buddhists they admired were also fluent in their own textual traditions (as well as Western ones).¹⁴ But it also sowed seeds of discontent by asserting itself as the most evolved and inclusive vision of Buddhism, best able to “see things as they are,” when it was actually unable to account for the positionality of the universalism it claimed.¹⁵ It flattered its Western proponents into imagining themselves as vanguard, “countercultural” spiritual progressives, leading Asia, Buddhism, and the rest of the world out from a violent, illiberal past;¹⁶ and many traditionalist Buddhists around the world, it would seem, have not appreciated the condescension and reject their account of the “real” Buddhism’s origins, trajectories, sociology, and politics.¹⁷

I have identified Fred Eppsteiner’s The Path of Compassion (1988) anthology for Buddhist practitioners and Sallie King’s academic introduction to Socially Engaged Buddhism (2009) as bookends for Academic Engaged Buddhism, which places Queen and King’s three scholarly anthologies (Queen and King 1996; Queen 2000; Queen, Prebish, and Keown 2003) squarely in the middle of a two-decade period. As I traced above, the decade or so since has seen intensified critique and reformulation of both the concept and the discourse in the academic study of Buddhism. At its best Academic Engaged Buddhism was radically inclusive, seeking to represent modern Buddhist thought and practice from around the world and to provide platforms for quite distinct visions of what Engaged Buddhism might be, including voices that preferred other modes of conceptualizing social action. It thematized Buddhist creativity, authenticity, and hybridity in its encounter with “modernity” and “the West,” and prominently countered Western Orientalist stereotypes that Buddhism was necessarily quietist or world-denying; but it was perhaps less interested in inter-Asian and South-South exchange in Buddhism’s traditional homelands and underattentive, by today’s standards, to dynamics of Orientalist appropriation, romanticism, and erasure.¹⁸ It rashly took parts for wholes—a social movement or a humanitarian NGO for a full-blown religion, a leader’s dream for his followers’ aspirations and self-understandings, a left wing for the entire sangha, a strategic coinage (the Chinese modernist reformer monk Taixu’s [1890-1947] “renjian Fojiao,” Nhat Hanh’s “le bouddhisme engagé,” Ambedkar’s “Navayāna”) for the new universal dispensation. At worst, it presumed the unity, coherence, and utility of its object of study as a given, often under the banner of what Western Buddhists at the time took for granted as “progressive,” championing to lesser and greater extent a cosmopolitan global order, liberal democracy, human rights, western or white feminism, and individualizing solutions to structural problems. Academic Engaged Buddhism, I believe, reflected the political preferences of highly educated, liberal, predominantly white Anglo-American Baby Boomers in search of an umbrella concept with which to canonize the Buddhist heroes of the Cold War Era that had just ended, and Nhat Hanh’s term “Engaged Buddhism”—developed extensively in different directions by Anglophone Thai, Sri Lankan, and Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leaders—fit the bill.

“Engaged Buddhist Studies”: Skillfully Negotiating with Engaged Buddhisms in the Anglosphere

The term “Engaged Buddhist Studies” (Kraft 2000; Morgan 2004) was coined at the height of the Anglophone Engaged Buddhism period in order to distinguish a scholarly, self-reflexive discourse and community (“Studies”) from its object (“Engaged Buddhism”).¹⁹ I endorse this invitation to greater reflexivity, and propose that we scholars further query and operationalize the “Engaged” in “Engaged Buddhist Studies.” “Engaged Buddhism” is not solely for scholars to define; its practitioners and scholars co-constitute it within a broader field of power.²⁰ Practitioner identification with the “Engaged Buddhist” label takes place in an English-language discursive politics where both a) religious identities are presumed to be bounded, exclusive, and reflective of authentic inner belief and morality, and b) Western Buddhist, spiritual-but-not-religious, and Religious Left discourses encourage their participants to dispense with, play with, or minimize the importance of labels. At the same time, core ideas and commitments presumed to be shared exclusively among self-identified Engaged Buddhists (reverence for Nhat Hanh and Buddhist traditions; recognition of interdependence of the personal and the political; careful study of Buddhist text and practice in light of current events; aspiration to embody selfless compassion by promoting nonviolent social justice) may also be held by self-identified Buddhists at large and the more loosely identified Buddha-curious.²¹ I conclude by considering the interpenetration of scholarly and practitioner discourses and suggesting some avenues for exploration.

In his critique of the definitional project, Temprano (2013: 269) cites Thomas Tweed’s (2002) article on Buddhist identities to argue that an academic’s scholarly obligations should forestall them from defining authentic from less authentic Buddhism; this task might fall to religious leaders, but is inappropriate for the scholar when wearing their scholar hat. Users of the term “Engaged Buddhism,” whether they support the textual project or not, would do well to reflect on the history of the term and the hats they may be wearing at any given time. The fact of the matter is that the term has always been, and so continues to be, political. I mean this in the sense that critical scholarship on secularism construes all social activity, including principled refusal to engage in governance (or commitment to politics-transcending scholarship for that matter) as political—analogous to how Engaged Buddhists have taken up Nhat Hanh’s nondualistic slogan that “all Buddhism is engaged.”²² Scholars’ decisions to reify or repurpose “Engaged Buddhism,” or to criticize or ignore it, then, are perforce political. They both draw on religious, activist discourses and contribute to them. And they speak from certain, privileged positions within broader fields of power, with their attendant affordances. Those whose Buddhisms we represent and testify on behalf of—“nightstand,” “Engaged,” or unmarked—we also authenticate. My decision to specify Academic Engaged Buddhism as one among several putative Engaged Buddhisms is meant to clarify a social location from or against which we might speak, and to encourage other scholars and practitioners to contrast it against other, specific kinds: individually authored textual Engaged Buddhisms (e.g., “Donald Rothberg’s” or “Alfred Bloom’s”),²³ or Engaged Buddhisms articulated through specific movements and communities (e.g., those of the Upaya Zen Center or the Buddhist Churches of America).

Elise A. DeVido’s (2009) genealogical excavation of Thich Nhat Hanh’s term (evolving from đạo phật đi vào cuộc đời [lit. “Buddhism comes to life”] to le bouddhisme engagé) not only credits Taixu and other Chinese Buddhist modernizers for their articulations of “Buddhism in this world” or “Humanistic Buddhism” (renjian Fojiao), but also French colonial Vietnamese discussions of Sartrean engagement (though “more research is needed,” 436–437). Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), a fervent critic of French colonialism, had not only counterposed la littérature engagée to literature for its own sake, but in fact underscored how all literature was inherently political. Sartrean engagement in fact demands a writer’s honest admission and defense of their political commitments given their place in the world, and it is worth asking to what degree the “engaged” in “engaged literature” mirrors the “Engaged” in the early Nhat Hanh’s “Engaged Buddhism.”²⁴ For Nhat Hanh’s own peacework, at least, the moniker allowed him to forge his own community’s nonaligned path amidst the Cold War; and his later slogan that “all Buddhism is engaged” may be read as an irenic attempt to acknowledge and neutralize political differences between various Buddhist communities in reaction to his movement.²⁵ It may well also be worth looking into how the submerged transpolitical or antipolitical politics of various Engaged Buddhisms and their cognates may offer affordances for effective transnational or international NGO work (see, for instance, Weishan Huang (2018) on Tzu Chi’s ability to navigate mainland China). Whatever legacies contemporary Engaged Buddhists inherit from the high modern moment, Sartre’s voice and Nhat Hanh’s choices amidst the immediate postwar context may offer important lessons to us on why “socially” rather than “politically” was the adverb of choice for the first generation of Engaged Buddhists.

It may well be the case that the majority of Engaged Buddhists who identify as such today exist in the West—heritage or convert Buddhists who read, cite, and work to transform themselves with respect to the late twentieth-century textual project, extending and transforming it thereby.²⁶ I encourage Ann Gleig to share any insights from her post- or ultra-modern American Buddhist informants of older and younger generations: do they (still) recognize themselves under the label of “Engaged Buddhism”?²⁷ If so, are they curating new saints and texts? How, if at all, does a contemporary Engaged Buddhist think about their relationship to the past or other non-Engaged Buddhists, especially given ongoing movements within Western Buddhism to address, in today’s language, its own whiteness as a field and its ongoing acts of cultural appropriation?²⁸ Does the label sound old-fashioned, high modernist, neocolonial—a relic of the late twentieth century? Or does its datedness in fact confer to it a retro, classic flavor?²⁹ How and with what does their Buddhism “engage,” in distinction to what? Can their constructive work—their own continued, self-critical reconstructions of the traditions for which they take political responsibility—help the scholar-hatted among us produce scholarly work that is richer and more precise?

The enthusiasm with which Gleig’s encyclopedia article (2021) attracted positive feedback from so many progressive Western Buddhists working on social justice issues today suggests a community of Engaged Buddhists still finds the label useful and encouraging. Similarly, the degree to which politically “Alt-Right” reactionary Western Buddhists (see Gleig and Artinger 2021) instinctively organize against “Engaged Buddhism” seems to reveal its continued salience in the Anglosphere. Still, I am unaware how the Gen-X and Millennial Western Buddhist activists profiled in Gleig’s (2021) encyclopedia article, who work to address structural racism, confront anthropogenic climate change, and critique the secular mindfulness movement, identify with “Engaged Buddhism” as self-description or a body of texts. The opening anecdote of Gleig’s article stitches Sivaraksa, Macy, and millennial activists together as participants in the Buddhist Peace Fellowship’s 2014 national meeting in Oakland, CA; it is certainly within scholarly prerogative to identify them all as sharing in the same Engaged Buddhism, but it would be interesting to collect participants’ accounts of their identifications with one another. I would read Gleig and Artinger (2021) as a case study of the politicization of “engagement,” detailing a set of position-takings that seem to have resulted in the localized naturalization of “Engaged” and “Alt-right Buddhist” identity categories along antiracist, LGBTQ+ activist versus anti-DEI lines in American convert Buddhism since 2014. The authors identify these as representing “progressive” and “ethnocentric” species of Engaged Buddhism, following the lead of Fuller (2021: 23). Here there is an unsettling mismatch between scholarly and practitioner categories, with scholars identifying activist “progressive” and “Alt-right” Buddhists as equally “engaged,” and the “Alt-right” Buddhists identifying the label solely with their political opponents—likely including the ethnographers themselves. Scholarly acts of denomination—even the act of writing an encyclopedia article—can have powerful looping effects.

I also desire careful scholarly attention to how transnational activist groups engage with the English-language label, its translations, and “local” and “global” actors. How do members and staff of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists, for instance, carry Sivaraksa’s projects (and Nhat Hanh’s label) forward? How do they navigate rhetorical strategies between an Anglophone language of legitimacy on the global stage (interfaith, human rights, development, justice) and vernacular languages of power at regional or national or local levels? How and for which audiences do they cite Anglophone Buddhist discourses, confessional and/or scholarly?³⁰ If one is comfortable with wearing the hat, what is it like to be an Engaged Buddhist or to practice a form of Engaged Buddhism today? If our partner informants are not comfortable wearing the hat, why not, what are they labeling themselves instead, and should we as responsible scholars follow their lead? How do they do and think the various activities we in the Anglosphere file under the labels of “engagement” or “activism”: social service, disaster relief, development work, peace-brokering, consciousness-raising, policy-writing, lobbying, protesting, electioneering? What do we, and they, lose and gain when we collapse these activities into the singular frame of “Engaged Buddhism”?

I recommend scholars may better build upon the work of Sallie King and others by acknowledging a complex variety of Engaged Buddhisms, each with its own history, discursive community, and political positioning on definitional questions and its own niche amidst other Buddhisms.³¹ This recommended pluralization is not intended either to denigrate scholarly enthusiasm for or practitioner identification with the term, nor do I want to deny the work of Engaged Buddhists around the world in recognizing their shared and separate political projects through one another. Rather, it is necessary for taking stock of the diversity of communities who share investment in and curatorship over the term, including our own specially situated English-speaking community of scholars. At any rate, I would certainly appreciate further scholarship attending to the movement of the label (or failure to move) between English and other languages, as well as between the interdependent worlds of academia and activism, as a generation of mid-century scholar-activists pass the project down to future scholars, activists, and scholar-activists. Whatever kinds of thing Engaged Buddhism may have been or still is, scholars should be able to account for their own individual roles in its continued arising and ceasing to be.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Joy Brennan, Kevin Buckelew, Jennifer Eichman, Kate Hartmann, Nate Lovdahl, Tom Newhall, Sara Ann Swenson, Jason Protass, Paride Stortini, Xingyi Wang, Bruce Winkelman, Nick Witkowski, Jessica Zu, and two anonymous readers for helping me finesse my argument. Thank you as well to Michel Hockx, Mahan Mirza, and Thomas A. Tweed at the University of Notre Dame and the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion for supporting this research. Greatest thanks of all to Ann Gleig, a paragon of engaged and friendly scholarship, who encouraged me to bring my thoughts to greater maturity by publishing with Journal of Global Buddhism.

Author details

Alexander Hsu serves as adjunct assistant teaching professor for the Ansari Institute and the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on early Buddhist scriptures in medieval China and employs perspectives from manuscript studies, genre theory, and cultural history in order to examine how the use of texts reflects transformations in religious reading practices. Hsu’s current book project examines why and how medieval Chinese Buddhists used anthologies to “economize” their gigantic scriptural canon.

References