Contemporary Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017. xiv, 224 pp. (Illustrations.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-6598-6.
In the past century, Buddhists have created a wide array of amusement parks, museums, and other sites for their leisure around the world. They range from the solemn to the kitsch, but regardless of their aesthetic quality, the prevalence and scale of these sites should make them hard to ignore. For example, as the author notes, twenty-six of the world’s thirty tallest statues are Buddhist. However, despite their size and number, sites of Buddhist leisure have been overlooked in the field of Buddhist studies. Since its appearance, the academic study of Buddhism, in both Asia and the West, has emphasized philosophy and philology. There are many reasons for this, including the traditional privileging of the ascetic and the doctrinal within Buddhism itself, as well as the impact of Western colonialism on scholarship on Buddhism. Starting in the 1980s, the cultural turn that swept through the humanities and social sciences began to broaden the scope of Buddhist studies to include cultural, practical, and quotidian elements of the tradition, but until now there was no full study of the leisure activities that Buddhists engage in as Buddhists.
In some ways this book follows the direction of McDaniel’s first book, which examined lived Thai Buddhism, focusing on the central role that ghosts and magic play in the tradition. In this new, more globally focused book, he has once again sought to account for phenomena that are widespread within contemporary Buddhism, but which have otherwise been overlooked. Architects of Buddhist Leisure examines Buddhist leisure spaces around the world, describing how they are conceived, constructed, and repurposed. The author has visited many such sites, and although he focuses on sites in Nepal, Thailand, and Singapore, he also discusses ones in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and even Avery Island, Louisiana, home to the McIlhenny Company, the makers of Tabasco Sauce. McDaniel loosely classifies these sites as 1) monuments/memorials, 2) historical, educational, and amusement parks, or 3) museums. These three categories also serve as the basic structure for the book, which is composed of three main chapters sandwiched between the usual introduction and conclusion. Each chapter begins with a short vignette describing the author’s visit to a site of Buddhist leisure, before launching into a detailed study of another specific site, or related series of sites. Chapter 1 focuses on the development of a large pilgrimage area at the Buddha’s birthplace in Lumbini, Nepal, chapter 2 treats several sites of “Buddhist Spectacle Culture” constructed in Thailand by the wealthy Sino-Thai couple of Lek and Braphai Wiriyapan, and chapter 3 analyzes an ecumenical Buddhist museum created in Singapore by the Chinese monk Shi Fazhao. Each chapter balances moderately dense descriptions of the sites with discussions of their histories, creators, and designers, and the varied uses to which they are put by their visitors. McDaniel employs art and architectural history, anthropological theory, and narratives of the economic conditions at each site. The tone of his discussions, while always academic, can be quite lively as he provides readers with plenty of detail to keep them engaged.
In his analysis of these sites, McDaniel is particularly interested in the ways in which they serve to create a specific kind of “public.” He notes that studies of public space in the West have tended to exclude religious spaces, largely because churches and synagogues are usually private spaces requiring active participation by those who enter. Buddhist sites, however, do not necessarily require such active participation. As a result, spaces of Buddhist leisure have a different relationship to both Buddhism and the public. Although all of the sites discussed in the book are Buddhist in some way, they are often far removed from the formal doctrines and institutions of that tradition. Most of these sites contain no monasteries, and they house few or no clergy. Most of the sites were designed, created, and promoted by non-monastics with little doctrinal training in Buddhism, and as such they provide the location for a kind of Buddhist activity that is “non-teleological and nonformal,” as opposed to what occurs in and around monasteries (15–17). McDaniel expands on this observation in the book’s conclusion, noting that, as public sites of leisure, these places have few formal or ritual boundaries. They rarely aspire to any kind of authenticity vis-à-vis the Buddhist tradition. Rather, these sites promote a global Buddhist ecumenism that had never really existed in history. The imagined Buddhism presented at these sites is universal and timeless, and often lacks references to specific Buddhist traditions. In some ways, this renders these sites “non-places”; they resist categorization. The lack of specificity also reflects the fact that the creators of some of these sites did not even have the promotion of Buddhism as a goal in constructing them (169–172).
Apart from these observations, McDaniel is hesitant to make sweeping claims about what these sites mean for our understanding of Buddhism, which, though academically responsible, means that many of the book’s greatest assets lie in its descriptions. McDaniel’s repeated emphasis on the many ways in which these sites are not Buddhist (in the vision of their planners, the content of their imagery, or in the demographics of their visitors) can occasionally leave the reader wondering why they should be called Buddhist at all. This ambiguity is central to the book’s overall position, however, and is meant as a corrective to the idea that Buddhism is an otherworldly religion focused solely on lonely meditation and personal attainment, or that it is primarily a religion of ordered monastic life. Instead, what one encounters here is a Buddhism that is vibrant, pleasurable, democratic, and difficult to define. In short, it is a Buddhism that many Buddhists around the world would recognize.
Erik Hammerstrom
Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, USA
pp. 134-136