Discourse, authority, demand : the politics of early English publications on Buddhism

A defining feature of Buddhism in its modern Asian and Western transformations – indeed, its very name – is the centrality of the Buddha Sakyamuni and the assumption that he was the founder of the religion. Many of the key features of transnational, translated modern Buddhisms depend on it. It is the premise that enabled the nineteenth-century definition of “real” Buddhism as a rational, humanist philosophy. It justified the dismissal by early scholars of traditional ritual practices and the trappings of institutional religion, the stripping away of two thousand years of “cultural accretions” and “priestcraft”, to create Buddhism as a universal teaching that transcended cultural, geographic and chronological differences. The image of the Buddha seated in meditation beneath a tree provides the model for modern Buddhism’s disproportionate emphasis on meditation and the basis for a certain arrogance among some Western Buddhists who feel; that the Buddhism of their practice is closer to Sakyamuni’s teachings than that of traditional Asian practitioners