In other words, according to this critique, early European Buddhologists who saw Buddhism as a “philosophy” (as opposed to, for example, a “religion”) unwittingly projected their form of philosophical Buddhism by means of the “historical” lenses and filters that they employed. In particular, as the above passages show, they accomplished their historical reconstruction by:

(1) prejudicing texts over other types of historical evidence;

(2) prejudicing a specific, narrow spectrum of texts over other types of texts;

(3) prejudicing the past (fixed texts) over the present (living oral interpretations) by disregarding contemporary Asian Buddhists’ own understandings of their texts (let alone their overall tradition)(18); and

(4) prejudicing the philosophical uses of those texts by disregarding any of their non-philosophical (for example, ritual) uses.

Thus, the early European Orientalists can be criticized for having constructed Buddhism as a “pure philosophy” through their having studied it as “a thing apart from the rest of the intellectual and cultural history of [Asia].” Or more accurately perhaps, they should be criticized not for having adopted a philosophical focus that ignored, for example, the “ritual” uses of Buddhist texts, but for having constructed a dubious, dualistic “philosophical/ritual” split in the first place.(19) According to such a critique, one can charge that the Orientalists first created such a dualistic philosophical/ritual split, then isolated the philosophical side of this split as “pure, classical Buddhism” (having dismissed any ritual elements as later, degenerate, superstitious folk accretions), and finally identified medieval and modern Asian Buddhists as having corrupted the “pure essence” of their own tradition precisely by mixing these philosophical and ritual dimensions. Through such dualistic constructions and strategies, the Orientalists thus inappropriately wrested from Asian Buddhists the authority to interpret their own tradition.(20)

Now, if we substitute “socio-political activities” for “ritual functions” in the above discussion, we can derive a critique that I will argue is as appropriate to contemporary modernist engaged Buddhists as it was to early European Orientalists generations ago. For example, if we make such substitutions in Lopez’s final sentence above, we get:

With rare exception, among modernist engaged Buddhists there has been little interest in the ways in which texts have been understood by the contemporary Buddhists of Asia, less interest in the ways in which such texts have been put to use in the service of socio-political activities.

In other words, I believe it can be argued that modernist engaged Buddhists who see Buddhism as having been historically “disengaged” may have unwittingly projected their form of “disengaged” Buddhism by means of the “historical” lenses and filters that they have employed. In such a case, paralleling the early European Orientalists, they can be criticized for having constructed Buddhism as socially disengaged through their having studied it as “a thing apart from the rest of the intellectual and cultural [and socio-political] history of [Asia].” Or, again more accurately perhaps, they should be criticized not for having critiqued Buddhism’s soteriological drive—assumed to be directed at other-worldly concerns, and thus socially disengaged—but rather for having constructed a dubious, dualistic “soteriological (disengaged)/social (engaged)” split in the first place.(21) In particular, modernists might be said to have created such a split when they charge that living traditionist Asian Buddhists (Rahula, Sivaraksa, Macy’s Sri Lankan monks, H. H. The Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, and so forth)—who claim that their texts (and practices) have always had direct social significance, utility, and impact—are naïvely reconstructing their own history, and when they conclude that these traditionists are to be dismissed as having “read” contemporary ideas “into” the past and as having over-idealized the “not-so-engaged legacy” of their tradition.(22) I would thus caution that the modernists themselves may have constructed a disengaged history for Buddhism in order to appropriate for themselves the title of inventor of engaged Buddhism. Such a modernist appropriation of interpretive power would indeed be reminiscent of the Orientalists generations ago, and such a neo-Orientalist bias must be seen to be ironic, of course, given that it is the modernists who routinely accuse the traditionists of historical reconstruction.

The unavowed colonial stance: Recognition, appropriation, and distancing

The other pertinent essay from Curators of the Buddha is “Oriental Wisdom and the Cure of Souls: Jung and the Indian East” by Luis O. Gómez. In this essay, Gómez brings into sharp focus many observations regarding the biases evident in Carl G. Jung’s theories and writings. Though Gómez’s essay accords appropriate respect to Jung for making many valuable contributions to psychology and for engendering a powerful interest in “the East,” it nevertheless lays bare many of Jung’s Orientalist biases and unacknowledged neocolonial agenda. In particular, Gómez clearly demonstrates how Jung himself misread Asian texts in such a way as to construct an Eastern “Other” to serve as a foil to an (equally constructed) Western “Self.” Thus, Jung wrote of the “Eastern mind” (with its “psychic aspect” and its tendency toward an “inordinate amount of abstraction”) as opposed to the “Western mind” (with its penchant for “scrupulously accurate observation”) (1996: 208), and he constructed many of his psychological theories on the basis of such manufactured polar dichotomies.