The American Encounter with Buddhism

The American Encounter with Buddhism The American Encounter with Buddhism Victorian Culture & the Limits of Dissent THOMAS. A. TWEED With a New Preface by the Author THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS Chapel Hill b London O 1992 Thomas A. Tweed Preface to the Paperback Edition O 2000 Thomas A. Tweed All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Originally published by Indiana University Press in 1992. Paperback edition published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2000. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tweed, Thomas A. The American encounter with Buddhism, 1844-1912: Victorian culture and the limits of dissent / Thomas A. Tweed; with a new preface by the author. p. cm. Originally published: Bloomington, Indiana University Press, ~1992. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8078-4906-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) I. Buddhism-United States-History. 2. Buddhism- Study and teaching-United States--History. 3. United States-Intellectual life-1865-1918. 4. United States-- Civilization-Buddhist influences. I. Title. Chapter 1 of this book is a revised and expanded version of my article, "'The Seeming Anomaly of Buddhist Negation': American Encounters with Buddhist Distinctiveness, 1858-1877," Haruard Theological Review 83 (January iggo): 65-92. Copyright 1990 by the President and Fellows of Haward College. Reprinted by permission. For My Wife, Margaret L. McNamee Contents Foreword by Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein, ix Preface to the Paperback Edition, xi Acknowledgments, xxiii A Note on Foreign Terms, xxvii Introduction, xxix ONE "The Seeming Anomaly of Buddhist Negation": The American Conversation about Buddhism, 1844-1877, and the Contours of Mid-Victorian Culture, I TWO "Shall We All Become Buddhists?": The Conversation and the Converts, 1879-1912,26 THREE Esoterics, Rationalists, and Romantics: A Typology of Euro-American Buddhist Sympathizers and Adherents, 1875--1912,48 FOUR "Walking in Fairyland": Buddhism's Appeal and Cultural Dissent, 78 F l V E Strolling Down Main Street: Cultural Consent and the Accessibility of Buddhism, 111 SIX Optimism and Activism: Responses to Buddhism, Victorian Religious Culture, and the Limits of Dissent, 133 POSTSCRIPT Buddhism in America after 1912,157 Tables, 163 Notes, 167 Selected Bibliography, 209 Index, 235 Foreword In this volume Thomas A. Tweed invites readers to enter a sophisticated universe of American discourse among later Victorians who criticized Buddhism, sympathized with it, or even converted to it. He explores with care and thoroughness a conversation which, if over now, is still of more than antiquarian interest. Tweed's American Buddhists and Buddhist sympathizers tell us significant things about the late Victorian culture they shared with mainline Protestants and others. For the Americans who turned to Buddhism make it clear that, even in the nineteenth century, turning east did not signal complete alienation. In a study that concentrates our attention on processes of cultural contact more than on complexities of the Buddhist tradition, Tweed's protagonists are Euro-American Buddhists and others attracted by this Asian religion. The chronological focus is the second half of the nineteenth century. There Tweed documents a case that illuminates the limits of religious dissent and the extent of cultural consent in American society. In doing so, he refines the argument of R. Laurence Moore (Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans) regarding outsiders and insiders in American religious and cultural history-giving us a picture of "outsiders" who are not really that at all. Tweed shows us people with a family quarrel about aspects of American culture. These people turn to an "exotic" Eastern religion only insofar as it affirms certain basic American values. Thus, by looking at the values these Buddhists and kindred spirits affirm-theism, individualism, optimism, activism-Tweed's study casts indirect light on the cultural mainstream. In fact, it thereby confirms what others have told us about American society in the Victorian era. Tweed's close analysis of one discourse community (to use his language), despite the small numbers in- volved in it, provides insights about the dominant concerns and assumptions of the time. More than that, Tweed improves our understanding of the contact process between Eastern and Western thought, demonstrating clearly that it was not simply New England intellectuals or romantics who were attracted to Buddhism in America. In his examination of the reception accorded this Asian religion by Americans, we encounter critics, scholars, travelers, and converts scattered throughout the United States and representing more than one class of people. Tweed makes creative use of diverse evidence to substantiate this fact, sifting through old journals to gain a sense of audience, reading Victorian Buddhist periodicals for names, and examining private correspondence. By these means he is able to establish the existence of a flourishing religiocultural network. To aid his analysis, Tweed constructs a typology of Buddhist adherents x Foreword and sympathizers that comprises three categories-esoterics, rationalists, and romantics. He shows the diverse ways in which these different groups of dissenting Victorians embodied American values and the prevailing assumptions of Anglo-Protestant Victorian culture. Some Americans, for example, were primarily impressed with what they saw as Buddhism's compatibility with science and with its relative tolerance as compared with Western faiths. Others expressed sympathy for the "intellectual land- scape" of the Eastern worldview, found meaningful parallels between the Buddha and Jesus, or pointed to the ethical dimensions in both Buddhism and Christianity. Still others recognized a "Protestant" quality to both faiths. These varying responses to and interpretations of Buddhism reveal the complexity of cultural contact; they suggest both why some Americans were attracted to Buddhism and why the actual adherents were so few in number. Among those drawn to Buddhism in the late nineteenth century were the spiritually disillusioned as well as the curious. Many adherents and sympathizers also explored other religious options available at the time, including Theosophy and Spiritualism. Although dissenters of various stripes, these Americans were unable to reject completely the dominant cultural beliefs and values. According to Tweed, the individuals who were part of this complex pattern of dissent and consent were able to give up more easily the ideas of a personal creator and of a substantial, immortal self than their commitments to individualism, optimism, and activism. Tweed's discovery of this significant fact challenges us to examine other dissenting American religious communities to see to what extent they, too, involve reciprocal relations with or mirror the values of the dominant culture. Catherine L. Albanese Stephen J. Stein Preface the Paperback Edition A reporter for Atlantic Monthly notes that "of the religions of the East, Bud- dhism is the best known and most popularly appreciated." A book reviewer observes that Buddhism has "numerous enthusiastic admirers" in the United States. A newspaper in New York reports swelling interest in the religion: "It is no uncommon thing to hear a New Yorker say he is a Buddhist nowadays." And another media story about Boston suggests that "the term 'American Buddhist' is not an uncommon one at date." At a time when Bud- dhism has never been more visible in American culture, when a 1997 cover story in Time celebrated "America's Fascination with Buddhism," all this media trumpeting of a Buddhist vogue might not seem noteworthy. Except that these observations about Buddhism's widespread appeal were written a century ago-in 1900, not 2000. And the nation's "fascination" with this Asian religion, I suggest in The American Encounter with Buddhism, has a long and intriguing history.' The vast majority of Buddhists in the United States have been Asian immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, and the first Asians to carry their inherited faith with them to American shores came from China. The Chinese started arriving in large numbers in the 1850s, and other Buddhist immigrants from East Asia-Japanese and Korean--docked in Hawaii and along the Pacific Coast during the 1890s. A series of racist laws-starting with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and culminating in the 1924 Immigra- tion Act-blocked entry to the nation's borders for most Asians, although tens of thousands of Asian American Buddhists who were already in the United States continued to practice their faith at home altars and public tem- ples during the first half of the twentieth century. And during World War 11, when President Roosevelt ordered Japanese Americans to internment camps, some U.S. Buddhists even worshiped behind barbed wire. In 1965, Congress abandoned the unfair national quota system when it passed the Hart-Celler Immigration Act, which allowed more Asians to gain admission to the United States. Since then, almost four of every ten migrants entering the country have come from Asia-Vietnam, China, Thailand, Laos, Kampuchea, Myanmar, or Sri Lanka. Asian Americans now number more than 10.5 mil- lion, and many of these newest Americans are cradle Buddhist~.~ But if most of the Buddhists

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