Any living religion or vital social movement changes constantly. Today, the Dalai Lama is widely regarded as the quintessence of engaged Buddhism, while a figure such as Jon Kabat-Zinn, who uses meditation techniques in pain-relief therapy, seems to occupy a more marginal position. Yet one can also imagine the reverse, say twenty years from now: the movement for Tibetan autonomy fails, the succession of Dalai Lamas is disrupted, and Buddhism becomes a force in Western culture through its impact on psychology and medicine. However serviceable, designations such as “engaged Buddhism” or “Buddhism” are constructions, limited and ultimately insubstantial. Even the most apparently detached and descriptive forms of historical research and writing are actually acts of dividing and shaping reality, a process that is considerably more creative than one might assume. As efforts to define engaged Buddhism continue, the indeterminate and contested aspects of the subject can function fruitfully as stimuli rather than impediments.

Buddhist Studies in Transition

Engaged Buddhist studies has arisen through the confluence of two factors: the vitality of engaged Buddhism itself and the increasing maturity and openness of mainstream Buddhist studies. For generations, Buddhist studies has been grounded in an empirical approach that emphasizes the mastery of Asian Buddhist languages and the critical, philological study of Buddhist texts. Ph.D. candidates typically demonstrate their competence by translating canonical works. The text is the authority; the translator has little standing. One contemporary scholar recalls his graduate-school training as follows:

To seek to use the understanding gained from this [Buddhist] lineage as a foundation for one's own evaluation and critique was considered presumptuous and somehow unseemly. It would be impossible for us to ever surpass their understanding; our task was to represent it accurately in English.(5)

While the rigorous scrutiny of texts still prevails in European and Japanese Buddhology, Buddhist studies in North America has become a broader enterprise, embracing a range of multidisciplinary and comparative methods. Often situated within departments of religion or Asian studies programs, American Buddhist scholars are likely to look beyond texts to contexts, treating rituals, gender-related matters, and other aspects of lived tradition as suitable objects of study.(6) Confidence in “value-free” empiricism has waned, and texts are no longer seen as stable artifacts. Bernard Faure, a Buddhist scholar equally versed in textual analysis and postmodern thought, observes, “All this makes it rather difficult to know where the tradition (here the Chan/Zen tradition) ends and where scholarship begins—let alone where scholarship ends and I begin.”(7)

Topics that were formerly out-of-bounds are taken up by senior scholars, and forms of discourse once shunned—normative, prescriptive, pastoral, confessional—are increasingly tolerated.(8) Richard Hayes, a scholar of systematic Buddhist philosophy, has written Land of No Buddha: Reflections of a Sceptical Buddhist (maintaining that it is “not intended to be a ‘professional’ monograph”).(9) A similarly subtitled book by Tibetan Buddhist scholar Jeffrey Hopkins, The Tantric Distinction: A Buddhist's Reflections on Compassion and Emptiness, is advertised as his “personal, individual experience with Buddhism.”(10)

Until recently it was taken for granted that the study of Buddhism was the study of other cultures. “Buddhist Studies continues to be a Western enterprise about a non-Western cultural product,” wrote Luis Gomez in 1995.(11) Suddenly there are demands from scholars and students that the study of American Buddhism be given greater weight. “I have the feeling that—at long last—Buddhist studies has awakened to the reality of the historic transmission and transformation of Buddhism going on right before its eyes,” Franz Aubrey Metcalf contends.(12) Using phrases such as “the American Buddhist movement” and “the American Buddhist tradition,” Charles Prebish and others go so far as to argue that a doctoral degree in Buddhist studies should now include “proper attention” to American Buddhism.(13) If American Buddhist studies and engaged Buddhist studies continue to develop, the two fields will have areas that overlap. However, engaged Buddhism is not just American, and American Buddhism is not always engaged, so the two disciplines will also differ.

A Variety of Voices

The term “engaged Buddhist studies” contains a potential ambiguity, but perhaps it is a welcome one. As engaged Buddhist studies, it refers to the study of engaged Buddhism. This primary meaning is sufficient in most instances. As engaged Buddhist studies, the term suggests approaches that incorporate personal religious beliefs, political commitments, or other forms of involvement. Though secondary, this meaning is also pertinent at times. A defense of engaged Buddhist studies (a task beyond our present scope) would bring into view an abiding tension in modern religious studies: the study versus the practice of religion.