a source for news on Canadian Buddhist Studies
By Rutika Gandhi Recently, I have been in contact with the manager of the Canadian Journal of Buddhist Studies. Since I was about to attend the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2017 meeting for the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion at Ryerson University in Toronto, from May 27th – 30th, I … Continue reading [Blog] 2017 Canadian Society for the Study of Religion Conference Reflection
Recently I have twice explicitly encountered a rhetoric that claims that it does not make sense to think about the “Westernization” of Buddhism, since it is being globalized anyway. The effect of this rhetoric, however, is to naturalize Euro-American culture—its values and preconceptions—as unproblematically universal.
One instance is in the introduction to the forum on mindfulness published on Lion’s Roar in which we find the rhetoric employed parenthetically, as if it is so obvious that it does not require consideration:
We are still in the very early phase of the establishment of a “Western” Buddhism—if the term even has any meaning in this age of globalization—
Jon Kabat-Zinn made almost exactly the same claim in the course of his interview on the Mindfulness Summit, when he appeared on the Summit’s final day.
I’m sure that there are a lot of other examples of this rhetoric being deployed, such the changes…
View original post 340 more words
