Metcalf, Franz

H-Buddhism Metcalf, Franz

Page published by A. Charles Muller on Tuesday, January 15, 2019 HOW I ENDED UP HERE AND, UM, WHERE AM I, ANYWAY? Franz Metcalf

In casting about for content or structure or any way at all to begin this contribution, I looked to my website. That’s where we have our true existence now, right? I did find a brief biography and I reckoned that was a good foundation for this document of my career. Here’s the web version:

Franz’s background and varied professional achievements combine the spiritual and the scholarly, religious feeling and critical thinking. He began his graduate studies almost 30 years ago (yes, he’s getting a bit long in the tooth), at the Graduate Theological Union, earning his Master’s degree through comparing Buddhist and Catholic spiritual retreats. He earned a doctoral fellowship to the University of Chicago and pursued his abiding personal interest in Zen by writing his dissertation on the question, “Why do Americans practice Zen Buddhism?” He was awarded distinction on both his doctoral exams and his dissertation, receiving his PhD in 1997. In the ivory tower, Franz is Past President of the American Academy of Religion, Western Region, and has participated in numerous scholarly meetings in addition to organizing one (which is way harder). He has published various articles and chapters on contemporary Buddhism and Buddhism and the family, and is founding book review editor of the Journal of Global Buddhism. Franz has taught religious studies at California State University, Los Angeles, for longer than he cares to reflect on. Down from the tower, Franz is a founding member and current director of the Forge Institute for Spirituality and Social Change. He is also author of five books, including What Would Buddha Do?, a best seller published in over a dozen languages. His latest is Being Buddha at Work. He continues to inquire into Buddhism and psychology, both academically and personally. His most beloved project (though he’s losing control over it) is his daughter, Pearl Miroku, who’s named after either an old car or the coming Buddha. Oh, and he’s working on a historical-spiritual-detective novel, set in and around the sangha during the life of the Buddha. Prayers might be in order. In providing some detail to flesh all that out, we are going to have to start with that

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Metcalf, Franz. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571744/metcalf-franz Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Buddhism rather self-congratulatory first sentence.Let’s separate background from achievements, as background is something dear to my heart as a person intimately concerned with developmental psychology. My father was a child psychiatrist and clinical professor of psychiatry, my mother a pioneer in the field of educational therapy. It was perhaps inevitable that my approach to Buddhist studies would focus more on lived experience than on written texts. From my first year in graduate school, I was focused on spiritual experience, including my own (modest as it was and continues to be). My religious background is practically nil. My parents were both Sunday school teachers in their teens but had long given up religious affiliation by the time I was born. My sister and I were baptized Presbyterian to please our great-grandmother, but, as far as I know, we did not attend church even one more time during our childhoods. My father was an unabashed atheist and, though my mother may have continued to harbor transcendental suspicions, she had no involvement with any organized religion or spiritual practice until I taught her some simple meditation practices. My father being a child psychiatrist, most of our family friends were Jewish, but almost none were observant. Further, Christianity in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s was largely effaced by the counter-culture which certainly had a greater influence on me. Buddhism, on the other hand, was cool, was embraced by the counter-culture, and was present in both traditional and modernist forms in my hometown. Chinatown was my favorite place to go wandering as a child, partly because it offered the spectacle of traditional forms of Buddhism. And I remember how much I loved the Asian Art Museum in Golden Gate Park and the way its windows looked out into the Japanese Tea Garden. That garden’s esthetic has never lost its hold on me. Meanwhile, Shunyru Suzuki Roshi was a participant in at least one Be-In nearby in the park. So Buddhism in Mahayana forms was a part of my childhood: not a practiced path, but also not foreign to my experience of Americanness. In high school, my best friend and my first serious girlfriend were Chinese American. They were hardly more Buddhist than I was, but the simple presence of Chinese and Japanese contributions to my San Franciscan life made Buddhism part of my normal life. I wrote in the introduction to my dissertation, “I find it impossible to say when I first became interested in Zen Buddhism. I have no recollection of my first learning of it, or when I first decided I liked it; I only recall that by college I was already remembering liking Zen.” While attending Berkeley, I began to explore Zen ideas through the then-popular gateway drugs of Paul Reps’ Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Philip Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen, and the like. I was also strongly attracted to and influenced by Chang Chung-yuan’s Creativity and Taoism. It’s interesting that I did

After years of interest in this Zen tradition, I began to consider (but never actually succeeded in) taking up Zen practice (although I did end up meditating regularly in a martial arts class). In 1984 I went to Asia for eight months, spending three of them in Japan (I spoke some Japanese at that time). I went to see the holy places, to meditate, to find my spiritual center, to eat a lot of sushi. It was, consciously, a sort of pilgrimage. I now believe it was unconsciously more a test or a kind of shock therapy for a wayward youth. I did consider myself a “Buddhist” at the time, though I had no particular teaching to follow, no temple to attend, no priest to guide me. I observed the precepts (not to harm, steal, lie, or abuse drugs or sex), and I took them seriously: I would neither eat meat nor wear leather, I was ruthlessly honest with myself and others, etc. Of course I was bound to land from this flight. By the time I came home (lighter in weight, heavier in thought), I had decided I was an American, after all, and wanted to investigate more “American” sources of spirituality. During my time in Asia, particularly India, it became increasingly clear to me no form of Asian Buddhism was right for me. (By now it seems that no form of American Buddhism is right for me, either, but that’s getting ahead of myself.) Nevertheless, I was confident that I wanted to explore religion in general and Buddhism in particular, more carefully. Returning to Berkeley, it occurred to me that the Graduate Theological Union offered me a nearly ideal place to do this. I figured I could push my way through a two year Master of Arts in religion, even if I didn’t find it enthralling. Of course I did find it enthralling. I had no background in religious studies, having focused on acting as an undergraduate and having chosen a “field major in the humanities” as it was the nearest thing at Cal to no major at all. But, as it turns out, a critical mind and a good GPA are the only real requirements for admission to an MA program in religion. The GTU required all students to affiliate with one of its eight schools; I chose the Jesuit School of Theology because of their excellent course offerings, not because I had any particularly Catholic leanings. The Institute of Buddhist Studies was not an option as a host school for the MA, but I did take multiple courses there, getting the rudiments of an education in Mahayana (from Ken Tanaka, Alfred Bloom, and guest teachers including Abe Masao) and in Theravada (from Bhante Seelawimala). I

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Metcalf, Franz. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571744/metcalf-franz Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-Buddhism wrote an extensive paper on Zen practice, based on a series of interviews and participant-observations at Berkeley Zen Center, and became confident I wanted to write my thesis on conversion and Zen practice. Someone at IBS recommended I contact Carl Bielefeldt at Stanford, as he was the nearest Zen scholar to the GTU at that time. I visited Professor Bielefeldt and he was kind enough to take me on, despite my still naïve attitude toward Zen history and the fact that I was not even a student at Stanford. For this kindness, I will always be grateful. It was Professor Bielefeldt who also suggested to me that few persons were studying Zen in America and that it might be a good subfield of Buddhist Studies to consider. How one’s life can turn on a word! Carl was also the first of my teachers to question the mythologized version of Zen I had encountered up to that time, encouraging me to read, for example, Kenneth Kraft’s dissertation “Zen Master Daito” which was invaluable both as a source for my parallel examination of Rinzaisesshin and the Jesuit “Spiritual Exercises,” and also as window into cutting edge Zen scholarship (this was only three years after Kraft finished the dissertation). Again, my gratitude goes to Carl, my first mentor in Buddhist studies. I was intimidated to apply for and accept admission to the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, as it had a reputation for being exceptionally challenging and methodologically focused and I was quite unsure of my own suitability for such an education. Nevertheless, there was a certain romance to attempting something so grand. I also applied to UC Santa Barbara where I had declined admission to the MA program. I received their letter of rejection the day after receiving Chicago’s offer of a fellowship including a stipend. I also applied to Temple University which only responded with a phone call, offering me a fellowship,after the nationwide acceptance deadline had passed and I had said yes to Chicago. That was not a good sign from Temple. It was clear Chicago would have to be the place for me. As things turned out, I felt immediately supported by both Don Browning and Peter Homans in my home area of religion and the human sciences, and by Frank Reynolds in the area of comparative religions in general and Buddhist studies in particular. But perhaps even more important was the wonderful cohort of students in the program. Admitted just in my particular year were at least three or four students who have gone on to careers in Buddhist studies proper. In addition, in religion and the human sciences, were Dan Meckel, who has applied Jungian and other psychologies and ethnography to Hindu experience, and Dan Capper, who has applied Kohutian psychology to Tibetan Buddhist experience. As I quickly learned I wanted to apply Winnicottian psychology to Zen experience, Dan Capper and I rapidly became complementary forces moving Professor Reynolds toward a deeper

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Metcalf, Franz. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571744/metcalf-franz Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 4 H-Buddhism appreciation of psychological dynamics in Buddhist practice. Luckily, the ground for this had been prepared previously by doctoral students Dan Brown and Jack Engler, who had explored Tibetan and Theravadan meditational practices from depth psychological perspectives the previous decade. I do not believe any other doctoral program in the United States, probably the world, could have been better suited to my cohort of colleagues. I eventually assembled a dissertation committee consisting of Homans as my advisor with Reynolds as my Buddhist reader and Gilbert Herdt as my ethnographic reader. Why did I need an ethnographic reader? Because I decided I wanted my dissertation research to be an on-the-ground, participant-observer ethnography as well as based in more theoretic and textual work in Zen history and psychological theory. It turns out I was ahead of my time and have been extremely gratified by the increasingly careful and sophisticated integration of human science research modes and analytical perspectives into Buddhist studies over these last two decades. I will reflect more on that, below. I decided on an ambitious dissertation project that needed an unpretentious title (no damn colon for me). As it asked the question, why do American practice Zen Buddhism, I thought to call it...wait for it, it’s going to be amazing...”Why Do Americans Practice Zen Buddhism?” As I wrote there, The subject of American Zen excites me because it has become truly American Zen, not merely Asian Zen practiced in a new setting. This new social and religious phenomenon deserves, as I say, the widest and closest examination. American Zen is an anomaly: an Asian religion grafted onto a Judeo-Christian society, a contemplative and monastic tradition trying to establish itself as a lay-centered movement in an aggressively modern country. We cannot understand American Zen’s outlandish practices, and the outlandish people who practice them, without coming to terms with the social place they occupy in our society. In Zen’s coming to the West we see the creation of a new religious tradition, a break with the past comparable in its depth to the break we call the Reformation. But this break also breaches the ancient cultural boundaries of West and East, thus enriching Buddhism with American practices and values, and enriching America with Asian practices and values. A new religious tradition is forming and as it does it also forms the culture and especially the persons creating it. How is one to study this new religious tradition? One might attempt an analysis in doctrinal terms, or one might contrast the aesthetics of Zen centers, East and West. But this sort of approach is experience-distant; if we want to focus more closely on experience we must find a method of study which shares that focus. So, to understand American religious experience we should look to the human sciences as our best tools. Only through combining attention to individual and to group Zen

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Metcalf, Franz. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571744/metcalf-franz Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 5 H-Buddhism experience, can we hope to do justice to all the levels of Zen in America. And this further requires attention to American experience in general, to the general languages Americans use to structure and interpret their symbolic objects, their culture. When I read these lines, I can’t help but be a little bit proud of how they presage the state of the field of Buddhist studies now—and not just of Buddhism in America but all over the world. It may be that I could actually get my dissertation published, had it been written recently. As it was twenty years ago, only a few publishers seemed interested in it. Actually, one publisher was very interested: Indiana University Press, for their series on American religion edited by Catherine Albanese. There was just one catch: they wanted me to cut all the psychology. Okay, to be exact, they wrote, The editors of our Religion in North America series do point out that, for the project to fit comfortably in the series, it would need to be rewritten to put the American context in the center and to relegate the theory and the psychology to the notes...Let me know if you would be willing. Um, no, I’m not willing! I thought the theory and psychology were the heart of the project. Interesting to think, though, how my career might have developedhad I been willing. Such a refocusing would have put me in the company of more sociological observers of Buddhism in America, scholars like Paul Numrich and Thomas Tweed. Reflecting on my modest career and contributions to Buddhist studies, I can’t help but feel I might have been a more valuable contributor had I moved in that sociological direction. As it was, though, I was truly a product of the UofC: I clung to my methodological focus. This despite Albanese warning me “No one will want that; it’s the hallmark of a dissertation, especially a Chicago dissertation.” So, I did not turn my dissertation into a book. I am, however, pleased to say that Dan Capper’s dissertation, not coincidentally titled “Why do Americans Practice Tibetan Buddhism?”, did get published and is just the first of Dan’s books. I did do something else, though. I wrote a spiritual best-seller. It was 1998 and WWJD? (What Would Jesus Do?) was still a major phenomenon with tens of millions of WWJD? bracelets being worn across America (and, of course, rather fewer persons actually doing what Jesus would have done). A publisher acquaintance of mine floated the idea of WWBD? at a party. I took it seriously and we talked extensively. As we left the party, my wife said to me “They want you to write the book.” The idea had absolutely not occurred to me. The next day I received an email asking me to consider writing a book proposal. In the fall of 1998 I had begun teaching part time at CSULA in the history department where religious studies lived (and still does live) as a minor. I had

What would Buddha do? He was, after all, a person like us. He struggled with life just as we do, and he discovered life’s deepest secrets. What better role model could we desire? Picture yourself facing a personal conflict or moral dilemma; ask yourself, what would Buddha do if he were in my shoes? “What would Buddha do?” is a great question, helpful and reassuring. But how do we answer this question—not only once, but in the trials of life? The endless richness of the Buddhist tradition provides so many answers, so many models—how do we locate them and choose those that might help? This question, “What would Buddha do?” has recently been made more powerful by the “What Would Jesus Do?” phenomenon, a nationwide movement that encourages individuals, when facing a personal conflict or moral dilemma, to ask themselves, “What would Jesus do?” It’s a powerful question, one that can change lives.

To ask such a question is to give yourself the moment of reflection it takes to find an answer. Buddhists have been doing this for 2500 years. In discovering what Buddha would do, they have plumbed a deep reservoir of practices, texts, rituals and myths. I have drawn from this same well of Buddhist wisdom to answer the central question of what Buddha would do when faced with the many trials of our contemporary life. This book looks to the whole current of Buddhist tradition for that help, from the earliest stories of Buddha’s life to the insights of awakened masters who continue the tradition today. In particular, I would highlight the question: “The endless richness of the Buddhist tradition provides so many answers, so many models—how do we locate them and choose those that might help?” That is a real challenge for both Buddhists and non- Buddhists (or those whom Tweed called “nightstand Buddhists”). The Buddhist tradition (now I’d write traditions) is indeed vast; from its vastness, how are we to pluck out the teachings and practices we need on a moment-to-moment basis? Serious Buddhists rely on teachers. That is very well, but, even with good access to a teacher, practically all Buddhists rely on teachings and practices from just one current within the ocean of Buddhisms. I realized that—precisely because I was not a recognized teacher in a Buddhist tradition—I could draw on a larger variety of traditions and practices. I further realized that, due to the breadth of my Buddhist studies at the IBS, the UofC, and Zen centers, I really did have a large variety to draw on. While I doubted I was the best person to write the first book and the rest them, I came to realize I was the best person who was actually going to do it. Looking back on the books, particularly the first, I note a strongtathāgatagarbha sensibility in them, but one channeled particularly though Dōgen Zenji. Dōgen’s immediacy, I continue to feel, undercuts the dangers of positing an essentialist prabhasvara citta or busshō. Nevertheless, I could well be wrong and I strove in the books to balance my own Mahayana tendencies with attention to Theravadan teachings. In the end, the Dhammapada, Śāntideva, and Dōgen are probably the three central pillars of my advice books. I claim those are strong pillars, indeed. I have to hope the books proceed from a strong base and skillfully apply the Buddhism I have learned, because those books have had hundreds of thousands of readers. They have instructed and influenced vastly more persons than I ever could have through scholarship per se. Really, in answering Chuck’s call to contribute to this collection of career reflections, I have no choice but to consider these books the main substance of my career, despite their not being scholarly works. They are certainly not-two from my scholarship. How could they be? I want to take that question further. In fact, in a commencement address I gave at IBS, I took Tweed respectfully to task for drawing too clear of a line between the

With regard to religion,...our work must examine traditions not only to inform the larger public, but also to guide those traditions, illuminating them for and with their practitioners. If our work is not revelatory, we have failed and our failure further erodes any chance that future work will be revelatory or even relevant. This is precisely Tweed’s “transfluence of fact and value and the mutual intercausality of all things—including our own scholarship” (the Tweed quote is from Tweed 2001, 28). So it is naturally my intention that my popular press books blur any strict distinction between scholarship and leadership. Though they may contain little of either, what they do contain partakes of both. When, in a book, I quote Richard Hayes on the Mulamadhyamakakarika, surely that is scholarship in the form of self-help. And when I use my brief biography of Siddhartha Gautama fromBuddha in Your Backpack in a class on gender and sexuality, surely that is self-help in the form of scholarship. To echo the MMK and the Heart Sutra: “self-help is scholarship, scholarship self-help.” The self-help books, in turn, led to another turn in my career: my involvement with the Forge Institute for Spirituality and Social Change and its chief focus, the Forge Guild of Spiritual Leaders and Teachers. I’ve participated deeply in Forge work for twenty years now and consider my peers in the guild my closest spiritual community. They are fellow travelers on spiritual paths that we mutually acknowledge have much more in common than most religions and religious followers acknowledge. Our experience of each other not only helps us each be better Buddhists (and Jews and Christians and Daoists and so on), but it allows us to help each other be better. In that sense, we are attempting to go beyond dialogue: we are transforming each other across religious divides. I am among the most scholarly, least spiritual, members of the guild, but this is appropriate as it is a guild of teachers and leaders. Their presence in my life, mostly through monthly three hour meetings over two decades, has provoked and deepened me. All this does not mean I have abandoned my more self-consciously scholarly work—though still not divorced from the great matter of birth and death. Here is the introduction to my chapter in Chuck Prebish’s Festschrift (Keown 2005). It indicates that, ten years and several books after my dissertation, Zen and Winnicott were still my central concerns:

I’m alive and in good health. In this desperate condition I’ve turned in two directions for a deeper sense of happiness and meaning in this life. First, to Zen Buddhism.

Second, to the object relations psychology of D. W. Winnicott. Over the years I have found myself increasingly drawn to integrating insights from both into a synthetic view of human experience. That is my life’s work, as a scholar and a person. I begin this chapter with these statements because an awareness of my personal stakes adds to the reader’s ability to judge and incorporate my work. Scholarly work is inevitably biased and personal, no matter the disclaimers attached. I am simply being more honest than most, openly marking myself as a “practitioner-scholar” to use our honoree’s important characterization (Prebish 1999, 199). My synthesis of Zen and Winnicott, rooted in my ethnographic research, has been published in that chapter and another. I wish they were more widely read. Winnicott said “it is perhaps the greatest compliment we may receive if we are both found and used” (Winnicott 1989c, 233). He meant that we find our offerings (whether we are mothers playing with infants or scholars playing with theories) taken up by others who carry them forward in the potential space where true living takes place. When this happens, we participate in something that transcends the self. This is the apotheosis of scholarship: when our horizons are fused, as Hans Georg Gadamer would say, with those of others and acquire a power and permanence they lack in themselves and we inevitably lack as persons. Well, we can always hope. In the meantime, I have my teaching and mentoring. What my teaching lacks in depth (I seldom teach students for more than one course) perhaps it makes up for in sheer numbers. I estimate that I have taught roughly 5000 students in my career. I have attempted to take every one of those students on a journey of not merely religious discovery, but self-discovery: a genuine exploration of spirituality and psychological development. Naturally, most have not gone far on that journey, but some hundreds have. This is a nourishing thought. Speaking of publishing, I am happy to acknowledge Paul Swanson who, as the editor doing the grunt work of Buddhist Spirituality: Later China, Korea, Japan, and the Modern World, took a chance on me as author of the chapter “Zen in the West,” based on little more than my internet postings. I actually am pleased with how that chapter, my first scholarly publication (aside from reviews), has aged and I hope Paul was satisfied. It certainly made my parents proud to see my name alongside those of the book’s far more illustrious contributors. An aside: writing my chapter required me to ask a question of Robert Buswell, another contributor to the volume. I was a bit awed by him and his work, he being a professor and having published Tracing Back the Radiance and The Zen Monastic Experience. My nervousness quickly abated as soon as I mentioned the volume title and Buswell broke into laughter. It turns out that he was still a lowly grad student years and years earlier when he wrote his chapter for the same book! I bow to Paul’s

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Metcalf, Franz. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571744/metcalf-franz Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 10 H-Buddhism efforts and the efforts of anyone trying to produce an edited collection. Paul, Chuck Prebish and Martin Baumann, Mark Unno, Damien Keown, Michael Zimmermann, and Scott Mitchell: I hope I have not been too much of a burden to you. I have also, in a small way been able to mentor other scholars. Through being chair of the Person, Culture, and Religion Group at the American Academy of Religion, and later through being president of the AAR’s Western Region, I have been able to help many young scholars get their first exposure in scholarly circles. Through being founding book review editor at the Journal of Global Buddhism, I have been able to promote the work of many young scholars to an audience that—a motif in my life—bridges Buddhist scholarly and practice communities. Finally, I have been able to both critique and support scholars, particularly junior scholars, though being outside reviewer for books at multiple academic presses. In this context I single out Ann Gleig, whose work I have had the pleasure of commenting on for both the JGB and for Yale University Press. Even in the modest ways in which one can assist a scholar as bright as Ann, there’s a real sense of being found and used. I hope that sense carries forward. One more enterprise that has lasted almost the entire length of my career is H- Buddhism. In fact, my role in H-Buddhism goes all the way back to its origins in budhschol, the first really scholarly listserv devoted to Buddhist studies. Though buddha-l preceded budschol, and though I enjoy and continue to participate in buddha-l, its nature has always reflected the character of its creator, Richard Hayes, and that character has (as he would be, I hope, proud to read) an iconoclastic streak not entirely compatible with scholarly focus. (I add that I hope Richard himself contributes to this collection; his musings on Buddhist studies would be most welcomed by this reader and many others.) Thus budschol was founded by Charles Muller in 1999 with the intent of fostering scholarly communication in the field, not of being another place for Buddhist discussion, let alone dharma combat. I signed on as moderator when membership expanded over the list’s first months and Chuck realized he needed assistance. That was nineteen years ago and Chuck and I are still taking turns at the helm, along with a strong team of younger scholars able to take H-Buddhism in new directions. With over 2000 subscribers now, H-Buddhism is a force within H-Net and indisputably the nexus of international communication within Buddhist studies. Its future will evolve without me but I’m proud to have been a part of the way it has brought Buddhist studies into the digital era. Earlier, I promised more reflection on the shape of Buddhist studies. Having just described its movement into the Web 2.0, now is the time for that reflection. Buddhist studies has changed in several important ways over the thirty years I’ve

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Metcalf, Franz. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571744/metcalf-franz Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 11 H-Buddhism followed it. I’m glad to say those changes have generally been for the better. Chief among them, and the one I want to highlight, is the movement away from a focus on texts and toward a deeper appreciation and examination of Buddhism as it is lived. I am tempted to say, as it really exists. This movement expresses a larger change in culture: the movement from racism to race awareness. To put it bluntly, Buddhist studies’ emphasis on texts, specifically on canons, reinscribes and extends the racist, Eurocentric triumphalism of the 19th century. It is, in effect, a white elite’s appropriation of the authority to define what Buddhism is. It is thus also the theft of Buddhism itself from its Asian creators. The gradual shift of focus from texts to persons naturally undercuts that appropriation and the racism beneath it because the persons practicing Buddhism these last 2500 years have been overwhelmingly persons of color. Attending to their experience, their creativity, their brilliance, has begun to change the way even white scholars see the tradition. One might argue that, as persons of color wrote those Buddhist texts, study of them is not racist. This is true as far as it goes, but it willfully ignores the social context of that study. The fact is that historically, and even now, it is white people, usually men, doing that studying and arrogating to themselves the authority to define Buddhism. And they have defined it largely as a mirror and a support for their own privileged worldviews. What they have embraced, they have labeled “authentic” or “essential” (=universal and thus white). What they have rejected, they have labeled “cultural” (=colored). Ending the fetishization of Buddhist texts and the hunt for some pure original Buddhism, ends the marginalization and even active disparaging of Asian experience and cultural production. It has taken too long, but its time is now. Thus I am proud to boast of being part of the field’s refocusing on actual Buddhist experience. There’s just one problem: I focused on convert/elite/modernist American Zen experience. While vaguely conscious this focus was narcissistic, I nevertheless continued it. I remained part of the problem. Although ZCLA membership is racially mixed, and although it has been led by persons of color in all but one year of its history, it embodies a form of practice dominated by whiteness and appealing primarily to whites. The fact that this was largely invisible to me for the first two decades I studied it testifies to the endemic racism of American culture in general and this American in particular. There is no excuse for this failure by our discipline or by we individual scholars. But we don’t need to make excuses. The way forward is not to be guilty, but to be responsible. It is to participate in a richer, more reflexive, more multicultural disciplinary future. The way beyond racism is positive; it is a choice we make to be

Citation: A. Charles Muller. Metcalf, Franz. H-Buddhism. 01-15-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571744/metcalf-franz Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 12 H-Buddhism aware and to act on that awareness. It is also Buddhist. It is no coincidence that “woke” is the current adjective for this awareness as well as an excellent translation of bodhi. Though I am too old to lead the field, I am excited to follow it as it opens itself up to an ever fuller exploration and appreciation of the richness of Buddhist traditions. After that excoriation and aware of nearing the end of this contribution, I’m relieved to change my tone radically and express my gratitude to Chuck Prebish. My career in Buddhist studies would have been inconceivable without him. He was, from our first meeting on Buddha-L in 1995, generously and consistently supportive of my interest in Zen in America. You can imagine how much I as a grad student appreciated that kind of attention from the scholar who, more than any other, created my field. And it was surely Chuck who, when envisioning the JGB in 1999, convinced Martin Baumann, who didn’t know me, they should take me on as review editor. Oh and there was my chapter inWestward Dharma which they edited. I continue to work with Martin at the JGB since Chuck’s retirement from it and I very much enjoy working with him and David McMahan and Cristina Rocha and Jovan Maud; they are a wonderfully collegial team. Still, I know it was Chuck who brought me into the journal in the first place. I’m pleased that, in offering these reflections for this collection, I’m able to offer them to my chief mentor. And now, looking to my personal future, I need to explain one more extension of my career: this novel I’m writing. As my self-help books carried my scholarship into new channels, so I find the novel does. Many of its principal characters are figures from Buddhist history (or, rather, mythology): the Buddha, Devadatta, Sāriputta and Mogallāna, Ānanda, Rāhula and Yasodharā, Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī, the usual suspects. And my protagonist is Channa, the Buddha’s charioteer and the outspoken bhikkhu. I find that, as I reimagine these figures and their complicated relationships, I recreate the landscape of 5th century BCE India, the nascent Buddhist sangha, and their relationship as well. I am aware of the differences between ancient India and ancient Indians and my own culture and self. I realize the attempt to bring my characters and their culture to life must not be an attempt to appropriate them. I struggle to see, respect, and express those persons as themselves. And I discover that all this creative imagining is rooted in my and others’ work on Buddhist sanghas, past and present. That first Buddhist community had to be similar, in many respects, to Buddhist communities today, struggling to find their place in wider societies. And those first Buddhists had to be similar, in many respects, to Buddhists today, struggling to find their truths in their own societies. Thus I find that the novelist is not separate from the scholar. Writing the novel is an act of imagining Buddhists and Buddhist communities not fundamentally different from the scholarly

Citations

Keown, Damien. 2005. Buddhist Studies from India to America: Essays in Honor of Charles S. Prebish. Routledge: Oxford and New York.

Prebish, Charles S. 1999. Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press

Tweed, Thomas A. 2011 “Theory and Method in the Study of Buddhism: Toward ‘Translocative’ Analysis,” Journal of Global Buddhism 12 (2011), 17-32.

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