Storhoff, Gary, and John Whalen-Bridge, Eds. American Buddhism As a Way of Life

Book Reviews / Religion and the Arts 17 (2013) 607–632 623

Storhoff, Gary, and John Whalen-Bridge, eds. American Buddhism as a Way of Life. Buddhism and American Culture Series, eds. John Whalen-Bridge and Gary Storhoff. Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 217. $75.00 cloth. $24.95 paper.

his volume is one of three recently published by SUNY Press and edited by Gary Storhoff and John Whalen-Bridge; the other studies, Writing as TEnlightenment: American Buddhism in the Twenty-First Century (2011), and The Emergence of Buddhist-American Literature (2009) were reviewed in recent issues of this journal. Of the three, this volume, with its more general title, is certainly the most substantial. The essays grapple with two concerns: ambivalence about two founding mentors of Buddhism in the West; and Buddhist ethics in the real world, with essays on end-of-life concerns, abortion, and social engagement. Both David L. Smith and Carl T. Jackson defend the respective subjects of their essays, Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki. Both Watts and Suzuki can certainly be called “popularizers” of Zen Buddhism, though Suzuki was a true scholar, and both tried to make the concepts and the aesthetics of Buddhism accessible to Western readers. Indeed, their publications were far more readily available in public libraries and bookstores through the seventies and early eighties than other significant introductory works like Shunryu Suzuki’s (no relation to D. T. Suzuki) Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Waterhill, 1970) or Seung Sahn’s Dropping Ashes on the Buddha (Grove Press, 1976). Watts was one of the spiritual gurus of the sixties, with all that implies. As Smith notes, “if what Watts has any place at all in the field of religious studies today, it is in what might be called its negative canon.” His books, from The Way of Zen (Pantheon, 1957), to Beyond Theology (Pantheon, 1964), to The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (Pantheon, 1966), emphasize freedom of mind and access to Zen concepts without meditation training. Many Buddhist teachers have disdained Watts’s watering-down of the Dharma, though David Chadwick notes that Shunryu Suzuki defended him. Watts’s thorny personal life—including his probable death from alcoholism—complicates matters further. Smith attempts to defend Watts’s eclectic stance: the effort is valiant, but finally even Smith has to admit that Watts’s work is merely “authentic,” rather than authentically Buddhist, and that it had a grateful readership, some of whom went on to actual Buddhist training. Carl T. Jackson has an easier task in coming to terms with D. T. Suzuki; he draws a convincing portrait of the development of Suzuki’s life, intellect,

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15685292-12341311 624 Book Reviews / Religion and the Arts 17 (2013) 607–632 and writing. While Suzuki has been accused both of collaboration with the Japanese role in World War II and a creeping Orientalism, Jackson is able to take on and mitigate these criticisms of him. A further source on Suzuki, Ellen Pearlman’s brief essay “My Lunch with Mihoko,” is really too slight to have been included here, as its author gives a somewhat starry-eyed account of her lunch with Suzuki’s secretary, Mihoko Okamura, now recently retired from Otani University. Okamura has some important things to say, particu- larly in light of Jackson’s essay, about Suzuki’s war years and later relation- ship with Pure Land Buddhism. The genre of the travelogue weakens this material—could not Okamura have been asked to contribute herself, or be interviewed? Most of the essays in the second section will be interesting not just to scholars, but laypeople of any tradition with an interest in ethics. Michael C. Brannigan brings the Buddhist concept of “no-self ” to bear on what he calls “medical futility”—our ability to extend life, without any quality of life, through medical interventions. Brannigan has a firm grasp on Buddhist terminology surrounding the idea of no-self, the history of medical treat- ment, patients’ rights, and on the ways American individualism conflicts with Buddhism’s literal denial of the self. Buddhism’s doctrine of no-self is related to the Buddhist concept of pratityasamutpada, the idea that “all of existence is so intertwined that no one thing, person or event is indepen- dent, disparate, solitary, and void of any impact or effect.” The recognition of pratityasamutpada, Brannigan argues, counteracts American individualism and its concomitant discomfort with death: it enables a “more coherent approach to life stages” than the American avoidance of death. Rita M. Gross tries to create a Buddhist approach to a pro-choice ethic on abortion: while her essay has some virtues, especially in establishing thoughtful posi- tions outside the entrenched ones the debate has taken in the United States, her work is complicated by the way in which Buddhism lacks a coherent position on abortion, in theory or practice. Though Buddhist texts have lots to say about monastic sexual behavior, they say little about the behavior of laypeople. But Gross is starting a conversation, and says about all one can say about the subject in an essay rather than several volumes. John Kitterman reads Buddhist practice in part through Jacques Lacan and find surprising similarities: his account of the work of Lacan is refreshingly accessible and surprisingly convincing, though his assumption (that we are living in a permanent and unprecedented reign of the simulacrum, against which we are powerless) is undeniably alarmist. If you have not seen or do not care about The Matrix (1999) have no smartphone or tend to leave yours