Democratizing “Engaged Buddhism”
ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 30, 2023
Beyond Queen and King: Democratizing “Engaged Buddhism”
Donna Lynn Brown
University of Manitoba
What counts as Buddhist social engagement? Why, in Buddhist Studies, do certain forms of engagement and certain Buddhists often not count? This article argues that the limits that scholars Christopher S. Queen and Sallie B. King placed around Buddhist engagement in the 1990s—limits that produced a rough consensus in Buddhist Studies—should be democratized to include all Buddhists and their social engagement. For years, criticism of these limits and research that circumvents them have appeared without seriously undermining them. However, 2022 may mark a turning point. In that year, two publications, by Paul Fuller and Alexander Hsu, offered comprehensive and convincing arguments for considering all Buddhists’ socially oriented activities “engaged.” This article examines the consensus on the nature of Buddhist engagement, its origins in activism, research that dissents from it, and critiques it has faced. The article assesses dissent and critiques and considers why, until recently, they have had little effect. It then discusses why Fuller’s and Hsu’s publications represent a turning point and proposes new areas of research beyond those even these two scholars suggest.
February 17th, 2023 at 1:31 pm
The category of “engaged Buddhism” has often been subject to a great deal of conceptual confusion: is it a descriptive category or a normative one? If the latter, what are the grounds of that normativity: if we call the fourteenth Dalai Lama and not Wirathu an engaged Buddhist, what are our reasons for making that distinction beyond the fact that we agree with the former and not the latter? Donna Brown makes a helpful intervention into the discussion by taking a second-order survey of existing scholarship on engaged Buddhism and noting the historical changes in the field, pointing out that there has been a long “consensus” that “engaged Buddhism” needs to name something good, and that that consensus is breaking down. This article is a valuable review of the territory for anyone who takes “engaged Buddhism” as a category of analysis.
February 19th, 2023 at 7:31 am
I appreciate Dr. Lele underlining a core issue in the study of Buddhists’ social engagement: the potential conflict between normative and descriptive (and explanatory) approaches. I would like to further stress one aspect of that issue. The problem with the consensus is not purely that it is normative. Scholars are not barred from normative work. The problem is that, in order to sustain a normative narrative, the consensus excludes large numbers of Buddhists who run schools, clinics, services for elders, and so on–ordinary, helpful activities–implicitly or explicitly designating these Buddhists as either not Buddhist or not engaged. To maintain its narrative, it sacrifices inclusion and thus accuracy. If all Buddhists who undertook socially oriented activities to benefit others in material ways were included in analyses, a more complex and sophisticated picture of Buddhists’ social engagement would emerge. Indeed, it is already emerging because, as Dr. Lele notes, the consensus has already begun to break down.
February 19th, 2023 at 12:20 pm
As to step or point 3 and 7 at the end of the paper, perhaps movements such as described in Charismatic Monks of Lanna Buddhism (edited by Paul Cohen) and its bibliography could be a good challenge, since they defy easy categorization in terms of “engaged Buddhism.”
As for the critique of the choice of the term itself, in this article and others quoted, who thinks that the word “engaged Buddhism” needs to be defined through intrinsic identifiability?
More generally, I wonder, should terms that are subject to debate, polemics, oppositions, contradictions, revisions and so forth, be abandoned, wouldn’t academics soon be unemployed ? More seriously, could not this debate be led through the use of emic understandings of language and “definitions”? (Madhyamikas, Pramānavādins, etc.)
This is just my opinion, not being an academic, but the more I read recent contemporary authors on “Buddhism” (another term to be abandoned ? I would vote “yes,” but right there, I use it again), the more I find etic and emic perspectives entangled in … a tangle.