Orientalism and Religion by Richard King

Author:Richard King [King, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134632343
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-04-02T18:30:00+00:00

However, by the late nineteenth century the characterization of the Buddha as a social reformer became much less prevalent. One reason for this, Almond suggests, was the fear that the apparent atheism of the Buddha might be perceived as early evidence of precisely those forms of socialism that were seen by many as a threat to the structure of English society from the 1880s onwards.14 Again, we see the sense in which representations of Eastern religions remain implicated in the vagaries of Western political concerns at home.

Perhaps the most significant feature in the Western construction of ‘Buddhism’ (as with Hinduism) was the tendency for Orientalists to reify the object of their discourses and to locate that reified ‘essence’ (now labelled ‘Buddhism’) firmly within a clearly defined body of classical texts. There are, of course, a number of factors involved here that we have already had cause to mention, namely the post-Reformation location of religion in the printed word, the literary and philological roots of Orientalist scholarship, and Christian assumptions about the nature of religion and the importance of a canon of authoritative works.

Buddha-Dharma first became Buddhism, and then Buddhism became a world religion. By the beginning of the twentieth century it had its own Bible, commandments, fundamental principles agreed to by all ‘Buddhist’ sects, and its international conferences. Concerned Westerners played a major part in initiating all of this activity. There is a marked difference between a religion that is imagined as being culturally and geographically localized, such as that of Australian Aborigines, and one imagined as being a world religion, such as Buddhism, Islam or Christianity … Since the nineteenth century, Westerners have continually sought to grasp some essence of Buddhism, to systematize it, and to encode it.15

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