The Western Reception of Buddhism: Celebrity and ...

ARSR 24.3 (2011): 297-316 doi: 10.1558/arsr.v24i3.297

ARSR (print) ISSN 1031-2943 ARSR (online) ISSN 1744-9014

The Western Reception of Buddhism: Celebrity and Popular Cultural Media as Agents of Familiarisation Carole M. Cusack University of Sydney

Abstract This article argues that the West’s positive reception of Buddhism from the late nineteenth century to the present has been informed by the continuing influence of three factors: first, popular cultural transmission of information about the religion; second, celebrity patronage and Buddhist celebrities; and third, the manipulation of the image of Buddhism to fit the pressing intellectual and social issues of the time. This has resulted in a distinctively modern form of Buddhism that is deeply imbued with the key cultural and religio-spiritual discourses of secularisation, individualism and consumer capitalism that have resulted in the transformation of Western religion since the late nineteenth century (McMahan 2008: 27-59). Recent scholarship has emphasised that the encounter of Buddhism and the West, mediated in the nineteenth century by popular cultural phenomena including Edwin Arnold’s poetic biography The Light of Asia (1879) and the World’s Parliament of Religions (held in Chicago in 1893 in conjunction with Columbian Exposition, a celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the New World), was a mutual affair in which certain Buddhists engaged with Western discourses in order to exhibit the congruence of Buddhism with modernity and science, and Western Buddhists and sympathisers attempted to incorporate Buddhism into the framework of Western philosophy and the emergent discipline of psychology (Snodgrass 2003: 115-22, 227-30). Central to this was the rhetorical construction of Buddhism as a religion that rivalled Christianity in ethical excellence and outshone it in compatibility with science and thus modernity (Prebish 1999: 6). This articles concentrates on the influence of celebrity and popular cultural forms in the familiarisation of Buddhism in the West to build on and reinforce the intellectualist scholarship of Prebish, Snodgrass and McMahan (among others), because until very recently these factors were rarely admitted to be of significance in matters of religion.

Keywords Celebrity, Buddhism, Popular Culture, Media

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Introducing the Buddha to the West The history of Western interactions with Buddhists and Buddhism dates back as far as Chandragupta Maurya’s encounter with Alexander the Great, c. 326 BCE (Batchelor 1994: 5-7). Yet general knowledge of Buddhism among Westerners began to manifest only in the nineteenth century, initially through the publications of a small number of scholars, including Eugene Burnouf (1801–1852) and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). The American Transcendentalist writers Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) and Walt Whitman (1819–1892) promoted a fusion of Hindu and Buddhist concepts, and they constituted the first wave of popular cultural transmission of Buddhism. As early as the publication of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1855 this was recognised; Whitman was called ‘an American Buddh’ by one reviewer and Thoreau was similarly described as ‘like a priest of Buddh’ (Fields 1981: 64-65). Fields argues that the popularity of their writings made Buddhism ‘a household word’ forty years before the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions (1981: 69). The success of the 1879 publication of Edwin Arnold’s (1832–1904) verse life of the Buddha, The Light of Asia (which was constantly in print and sold between half a million and a million copies), reinforced this trend. Since the late nineteenth century Buddhism has been presented to the West via popular cultural media. This is logical, in that modern media were also profoundly changed in that era; newspapers and radio took on the lineaments of their twentieth-century forms, and film, the ancestor of television, was developed by Louis and Auguste Lumiere in 1895 (Barnouw 1993: 7). The late nineteenth century was also crucial for the rapid promulgation of information about Eastern religions; the foundation of the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875 by the Russian medium Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the American Civil War veteran Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, both celebrities of the era, signalled that those Westerners disillusioned with Christianity could choose to adopt an Eastern (or Eastern-influenced, in the case of Theosophy) religion. Moreover, Theosophy offered a synthesis of Eastern and Western religion, which Blavatsky asserted was compatible with science. This was a key issue of the day as scientific advances such as Darwin’s theory of evolution and Charles Lyell’s geological calculation of the age of the earth had challenged the biblical account of creation since the mid-nineteenth century (Jay 1986: 107; Irvine 1967 [1959]: 3-8). Blavatsky and Olcott subsequently ‘took refuge’ in the Three Jewels of Buddhism on 25 May 1880 in the southern port of Galle, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) becoming the first ‘white champions’ of Buddhism (Snodgrass 2003: 159). Edwin Arnold, © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.

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author of The Light of Asia, was an accomplished linguist in Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic, and was widely travelled, having been the Principal of Deccan College in Poona (Sangharakshita 1998 [1879]: 4). Most importantly, like Blavatsky and Olcott, he was a professional journalist, who had for eighteen years been the editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph. He therefore possessed a deep understanding of emergent popular media. The popularity of The Light of Asia worked to familiarise Europeans and Americans with Buddhism, thus assisting in rendering explicable the ‘conversion’ of Blavatsky and Olcott. Arnold’s portrayal neutralised the ‘otherness’ of Siddhartha Gautama for Western readers by casting him as ‘the Hindu Luther’, a liberating reformer who is sharply contrasted with idolatrous Hindu ‘Catholicism’ (Batchelor 1994: 262). Nineteenth-century readers were invited to admire the Buddha as the instigator of individualistic and scriptural faith that gave deliverance from priestly intermediaries. Poets as distinguished as T.S. Eliot attested to the power of Arnold’s verse, when he reminisced about reading The Light of Asia as a boy, more than once. The adult Eliot, a distinguished poet himself, continued to categorise The Light of Asia as ‘a good poem’ (Sangharakshita 1998 [1879]: 4). Poetry has fallen from favour with the reading public, but in the nineteenth century it was an extremely popular, as well as an affective and powerful, literary form. Celebrity and Modern Western Religion Historically, fame has been a property of prominent people, including royalty, saints and heroes. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘celebrity’ as both ‘a well-known person’ and ‘fame’, derived from the Latin celeber-bris, ‘frequented, honoured’ (Thompson 1995: 210). The celebrity is a peculiarly modern phenomenon, largely dependent on the mass media. The media, which traditionally disseminated information of a political, economic and social nature, has in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries become the vehicle of entertainment and diversion (Turner, Bonner and Marshall 2000: 1). This shift reflects the social significance of celebrities (actors, models, rock musicians, and reality television ‘stars’) in the contemporary West. Daniel Boorstin (2006: 73) has argued that, through the media, ‘especially since 1900, we seem to have discovered the processes by which fame is manufactured’. This article contends that celebrities have taken on certain functions and significances that traditionally belong to religious figures, which makes celebrity an effective way to promote and normalise an alien religion such as Buddhism in the West. Since the late nineteenth century © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.

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religion in the West has radically changed. Secularisation, defined by Berger as ‘the process whereby sectors of society and culture are removed from the dominance of religious institutions and symbols’ (Berger 1967: 107), has resulted in a diminished institutional Christianity, and religion in the West has been transformed by immigrant religions (for example, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam) and new religions (for example, Wicca, Scientology and the Unification Church). Scholars posit that three shifts, the individual as the locus of authority, personal choice as the main medium of identity construction, and the consequent prevalence of consumerism capitalism, have resulted in traditional religion becoming only one possible source of the ‘sacred’, which now manifests in a multitude of phenomena previously regarded as ‘profane’ (Demerath 2000: 4). The Enlightenment project and the secularisation thesis endorsed the disenchantment of nature and privileged rational, scientific discourse. However, scholars have, since the mid-twentieth century, developed a reenchantment thesis. Campbell argues that this re-enchantment is a legacy of Romanticism, which valorised marriage for love, the beauties of nature and the authority of personal experience. This was the affective and imaginative ‘other’ to the rationality espoused by the Enlightenment thinkers. The Transcendentalists’ advocacy of sensuality, Eastern religions and the natural life fits this model of Romanticism. Campbell (2005 [1987]: 95) contends that fantasy is crucial in the creation of modern individualism and consumerism, in that it aids ‘imaginative speculation about the gratification novel products might bring’ and encourages unlimited desires. The religious power of the celebrity intersects with these trends, in that celebrities now function as role models and as a source for fantasies of the perfected life for contemporary Western materialists. In the past Christian saints were role models; they exhibited piety, self-denial and other virtues that made them worthy of emulation. Christians sought to emulate saints because Christianity (both Catholic and Protestant) espoused poverty, chastity, asceticism and devotion to God as worthy and desirable. In the modern era these values ceased to be attractive to both the Romantic, seeking personal fulfilment, and the Enlightenment rationalist, seeking reasoned justification for life choices. Academic commentators are generally agreed that the roots of celebrity culture are Christian (in that celebrity is an integral part of Western modernity and is thus also a secular development of the earlier Western religious worldview), and that celebrities function as the saints, idols and demi-gods of the post-Christian world. Chris Rojek (2001: 9) has argued that ‘celebrity actually derives from the fall of the gods, and the rise of democratic governments and secular societies’. This article considers celebrity as a facilitator of Buddhism, a non-Western religion, but the © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.


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relevance is that the type of Buddhism herein analysed is specifically modern and Western. The contribution of celebrity to the construction of personal identity in the West is one important issue that exemplifies the shift from traditional understandings to eclectic self-constructions. Personal identity formerly derived from family, religion and community, and the individual was understood interdependently, with obligations to each level of society. The contemporary West is radically de-traditionalised, and isolated individuals draw upon secular, consumerist and mediadriven sources to construct their identities (Bauman 1995). Further, consumerism diverts attention from character to personality (Boorstin 2006: 83), from inner virtue to external image. Thus identity, which was formerly relatively stable, has become fluid and changeable, as people draw on different ‘sources of the self’ (Taylor 1989). For example, Charles Taylor’s focus in The Sources of the Self is threefold; ‘first, modern inwardness, the sense of ourselves as beings with inner depths, and the connected notion that we are “selves”; second, the affirmation of ordinary life which develops from the early modern period; third, the expressivist notion of nature as an inner moral source’ (Taylor 1989: x). These are broadly compatible with Campbell’s focus on the individualist and consumerist legacy of Romanticism. Ellis Cashmore (2006: 83) has argued that those influenced by the phenomenon of celebrity may develop three types of relationships to celebrities that contribute to identity-formation and which often result in personal and social transformation. These relationships are: an extraordinary psychological relationship; regarding the celebrity as a role model; and, most powerfully, the adoption of the perceived attributes of the celebrity (both their values and behaviour). With regard to Buddhism, it is here argued that these phenomena manifested from the late nineteenth century through: celebrity Western converts to Buddhism including Colonel Olcott and Madame Blavatsky; celebrity Asian Buddhist emissaries to the West, most prominently the Sri Lankan layman Anagarika Dharmapala at the World’s Parliament of Religions and after; and also figures as diverse as the Japanese Zen monk Soen Shaku, the Japanese academic Daisetz T. Suzuki and the Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa (Batchelor 1994). For every Westerner who converted to Buddhism (which is evidence of the influence of prominent role models and the adoption of their behaviours) there were many more who sympathised with Buddhism and respected certain spiritual teachers, often attending lectures and integrating meditation into their daily lives, without making a formal commitment to the religion. Further, Buddhism itself could be argued to have taken on the attributes of celebrity, through its exotic appeal as the ‘other’ of Western Christianity, and through its positive © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.

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portrayal in media discourses. Colin Campbell’s ‘Easternization of the West’ thesis (1999) argues precisely that; that the micro-level attitudes and behaviours of certain Western individuals in fantasising and consuming exotic images as sources for their selves is exactly replicated at the macro-level by Western culture, which has gradually rejected core Western ideas and values (monotheism, divine transcendence, one earthly life-time and so on) due to emulative fantasies about ‘the East’. Throughout the twentieth century, as institutional religion declined, the phenomena of secularisation, individualism and consumer religion intensified. Western Buddhist sympathisers hold a range of attitudes and behaviours. David McMahan describes ‘Sara’ as a member of a nondenominational Buddhist group who meditates daily, who reads popular books on Buddhism (though generally not canonical texts), who understands meditation as conducive to psychological health and Buddhism to ethical self-cultivation, and who feels free to pick and choose which elements of Buddhism she adopts. The popular literature on Buddhism encourages such eclectic approaches. Notions reproduced within popular books include: the idea that the dharma is merely a raft useful for crossing a river but of no further use once it is crossed; that all truths are relative except for the one universal Truth beyond all language and concepts; that Buddhism does not accept assertions that are contradicted by science; that all teachings, even Buddhist ones, must be verified by personal experience (McMahan 2008: 29).

Scholars of contemporary Western religious trends are divided as to whether modern individualistic, consumerist approaches to religion, such as that exemplified by ‘Sara’, are to be interpreted positively or negatively. Some believe such religious conceptions to be trivial, shallow and ultimately valueless, and disapprove of those elements of contemporary culture (materialism, individualism, preoccupation with image and constant change) that facilitate such religio-spiritual experimentation (Lasch 1980). Others argue that celebrity, consumerism and the collapse of the ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture divide result in spiritual, political and social issues no longer being determined by elites. Rather, they are democratically constructed through popular media, including the Internet and talk shows (Shattuc 1997). Whichever is the case the emulative longings of the West are now focused on celebrity role models, whether they are crassly materialistic and secular (like heiress Paris Hilton) or morally impressive and spiritual (like His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama) (Repp 2008: 103-25).

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Buddhism at the World’s Parliament of Religions, Chicago 1893 The Chicago Exposition of 1893 (also known as the Chicago World’s Fair and the Columbian Exposition) was held to honour the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the American continent in 1492. On a 2.5 square kilometre site in Jackson Park and on the Midway Plaisance on Chicago’s South Side, approximately 200 buildings, mostly in the classical style, were erected to showcase the cultures of the world. The Exposition was also a stage on which America simultaneously declared its maturity to the world and mounted a challenge to European cultural hegemony. The organisers explicitly aimed to outdo the brilliant Paris Exhibition of 1889. For example, the fairground was far larger and more expensive than that of Paris; as David F. Burg wryly noted, ‘the country of P.T. Barnum was not to be outdone by France’ (quoted in Snodgrass 2003: 25). The Exposition asserted America’s superior technological achievements (buildings in the ‘White City’ area were named after and exhibited on electricity, machinery and mines and mining, among other evidences of modernity), and also its intellectual and cultural credentials through the Auxiliary Congresses, conferences on matters of intellectual and cultural importance. It opened on 1 May 1893, and attracted just over 27 million visitors before its closure on October 30 1893. The spectacular nature of the Columbian Exposition created economic growth and new markets through its skilful commodification of technology and culture, and its seductive use of pleasure (Adams 1995). Further, it was a stage on which celebrities were made and a rich source of imaginative emulative fantasies for the viewing public. The World’s Parliament of Religions, which ran from 11–27 September, partook of the conflicting trends inherent in the Chicago Exposition. A vast range of the world’s cultures was showcased at the Fair, but tensions emerged as a result of the differential treatment of the participating nations, particularly between the positive reception accorded to the Japanese delegation and the negative reception meted out to the Chinese delegation. Robert Rydell notes that this was because Japan had adopted American-style modernisation after the Meiji Restoration, whereas ‘as a race, the timid but cunning, immoral and uncivilised Chinese were considered to be closer to the lower orders of mankind than to the wave of future possibilities and perfection’ (Rydell 1978: 263). Likewise, the World’s Parliament of Religions, which is now viewed retrospectively as the first instance of interfaith dialogue and religious pluralism, was overwhelmingly a Christian event, and some religions were simply excluded (e.g., Mormons, Native Americans and Sikhs, among others). Yet the © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.

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Chairman of the Parliament, Reverend Doctor John Henry Barrows, had secured strong representation from Judaism, Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, new religions including Theosophy and Christian Science, Hinduism (including P.C. Majumdar of the Brahmo Samaj, and Vivekananda, later the founder of the Ramakrishna Math, a revitalisation movement) and Buddhism (Seager 1993: 6). Minor delegations from Islam, Shinto, Daoism, Confucianism and Jainism also participated (Ziolkowski 1993: 43). The Buddhist delegation at the Parliament emerged (along with Vivekananda) as one of the more influential participating groups, chiefly due to the enthusiastic reception given to the charismatic Sri Lankan preacher Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933). In the opening ceremonies, Dharmapala gave the concluding speech, and he threw down the gauntlet to the organisers by arguing that the Parliament ‘was simply the re-echo of a great consummation which the Indian Buddhists had accomplished twenty four centuries ago’ (quoted in Prebish 1999: 6). This was a reference to the great congress summoned by the Buddhist emperor Ashoka in Paliputra in 242 BCE. Dharmapala was born Don David Hewivitarne into a Buddhist family in Colombo, educated in Christian schools, and renewed his commitment to Buddhism through the outreach of Colonel Olcott, who founded around 300 Buddhist schools after taking refuge with Madame Blavatsky in 1880, discussed above. Anagarika (‘homeless one’) Dharmapala (‘protector of the dharma’), though celibate, was not ordained as a monk until the year of his death. In a striking illustration of the argument of this article, Dharmapala was inspired to make a pilgrimage to the Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya, after learning that Edwin Arnold had travelled there. He admired The Light of Asia and emulated the behaviour of its distinguished author. There he was shocked to discover the statue of the Buddha treated as a Hindu deity and Brahmin priests in charge of the temple (Amunugama 1985: 709-11). In order to restore Buddhist sites to Buddhist control, that year Dharmapala and Colonel Olcott founded the Maha Bodhi Society, an international organisation devoted to the revitalisation of the sacred spaces of Buddhism in Ceylon and India (Prothero 1995: 285). The Society used high-profile methods to further its aims. Dharmapala instigated a lawsuit against the Brahmins for control of the Mahabodhi Temple, which in 1949 resulted in partial control of the site being granted to the Maha Bodhi Society. Dharmapala was a tireless advocate of the Buddhist revival in the modern world, travelling the world and establishing Buddhist schools, hospitals and monasteries (viharas). Local branches of the Maha Bodhi Society raised the profile of Buddhism in India. At the time of his © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.


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appearance at the World’s Parliament of Religions he was a global figure, exotic and famous. Other Buddhists at the Parliament were also well received; Prebish notes that by the third day ‘nearly all of the Japanese delegation had been introduced, including members of the Jodo Shinshu, Nichiren, Tendai, Shingon, and Zen traditions…in this latter group was Shaku Soen, a disciple of Imakita Kosen of [the] Engaku Temple’ (Prebish 1999: 6). Anagarika Dharmapala, Shaku Soen and Swami Vivekananda were all very positively received at the World’s Parliament, which created anxiety for its Christian organisers, who regarded religions other than Christianity as marginal and unimportant. Reverend Barrows thought that there were three ‘circles’ of religion; the centre being Christian, the middle being monotheism (including Judaism), and the outer being the world religions. Barrows and his fellow Christians were alarmed by Vivekananda’s call for religious unity, ‘which had attracted so much popular attention… Barrows’ theory that all other religions would be “fulfilled” in Christianity backfired; as Kitagawa points out, Vivekananda, Dharmapala, and Shaku Soyen promptly appropriated this formula for themselves and reversed the Christian claim, developing “fulfillment” theories from their own faith perspectives’ (Ziolkowski 1993: 58). Judith Snodgrass (2003) has carefully established the ways in which the Buddhists, particularly the Japanese delegation, argued that Buddhism was the ‘other’ of Christianity, offering an ethically excellent faith that was also highly compatible with science. For the purpose of this article, it is sufficient to note that even in the relatively liberal environment of the Chicago World’s Parliament of Religion, celebrity (in the sense of famous and media-savvy) Buddhists were an unexpected (at least to the organisers) success, building on the popular cultural transmission of Buddhism in the nineteenth century, and linking Buddhism to the crucial issue of the day, which was the compatibility of the various religions with science and technological modernity. The publication of a selection of the papers given at the Parliament meant that its influence reached those who did not attend (Seager 1993). As a result of the positive reception of the Buddhist delegation, Buddhist sympathisers like the German American Paul Carus (editor of the Monist magazine and owner of Open Court Publishing) initiated programmes to disseminate Buddhism among Westerners, through personal relationships with both the high-profile Dharmapala, and especially Soen (Prebish 1999: 6). Shaku Soen refused Paul Carus’ request that he remain in the United States after the Parliament to assist with Open Court’s new series of Asian publications (Prebish 1999: 6). However he recommended his disciple and English translator Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (1870–1966) for the role. In


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1895 Suzuki wrote to Carus, introducing himself as the translator of Carus’ bestseller The Gospel of Buddhism. In 1897 Suzuki arrived in the United States, where he stayed until 1909. In Japan he maintained contacts with the West, marrying Theosophist Beatrice Lane in 1911, and teaching at Columbia University from 1955 to 1957. From the 1890s to his death in 1966, Daisetz T. Suzuki exercised a great influence on American Buddhism through his translations of important texts, his original writings and his lectures. Those he influenced include ‘Alan Watts, Erich Fromm, Philip Kapleau, John Cage, Thomas Merton, Carl Jung, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, to name just a few’ (Goldberg 1999: 346). Suzuki gained fame as a teacher of Zen Buddhism and his students became prominent in a range of professions (psychology, literature, popular and classical music, among others), extending the popular American understanding of Buddhism and furthering the process of familiarisation of this ‘alien’ religion. Suzuki, too, was concerned to link Buddhism to contemporary issues. Sharf states that ‘Suzuki's exegetical agenda…was influenced as much by the Western currents of thought to which he was exposed as a philosophy student in Tokyo and as assistant to Carus, as it was by his necessarily limited involvement in Zen training as a lay practitioner at Engakuji’ (quoted in Goldberg 1999: 346). The 1950s and 1960s: Beat Zen and the Counter-Culture The 1950s incubated religious and spiritual trends that later bore fruit in the counter-culture of the 1960s. Suzuki’s version of Zen Buddhism was heavily influenced by his readings in the canon of Romanticism and Transcendentalism. He emphasised nature, mysticism and spontaneity, and used the Zen koan system of education to critique the Enlightenment. McMahan (2008: 125-26) argues that Suzuki used the Western Romantic metaphysic to ‘bring Zen into the conversations of modernity… Suzuki placed Zen firmly within modernity’s constitutive tensions between rationalism and Romanticism, aligning it with Romanticism but also implicitly claiming to supersede it’. This critique of rationality resonated with the disaffected in the 1950s, a broadly conservative decade still wracked by the trauma of World War II. In the late 1940s members of the ‘Beat Generation’, a name that was coined by Jack Kerouac in 1948, originally meaning ‘beaten down’ but later meaning ‘beatific’ in the spiritual sense (Prothero 1991: 206), became interested in Buddhism, initially through reading the Transcendentalists. Through the 1950s the Beats (chiefly Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs) carved out a path involving sexual adventure, literary experimentation, drugs, alternative religion and the outright rejection of the conservative, materialistic society of post-war America. As Edington © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.


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(2005: 3) notes, this was a risky lifestyle choice in the late 1940s and 1950s, when ‘to disavow or ignore traditional religion, as it was conventionally understood then, was to place oneself under suspicion of not quite being a real and true American’. The Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg met at Columbia in the 1950s (where they met and became friends with Suzuki), and they and other Beats embraced Buddhism to varying degrees, providing an effective channel for the popularisation of Buddhism in the counter-cultural 1960s. In 1958, the publication of Kerouac’s groundbreaking novel The Dharma Bums and an issue of the Chicago Review, an influential journal, devoted to Zen Buddhism, alerted America to a heightened interest in Asian religions. Chicago Review featured contributions from Kerouac (‘Meditation in the Woods’), from another of Shaku Soen’s students, Nyogen Senzaki (‘Mentorgarten Dialogue’), Gary Snyder (‘Spring Sesshin at Shokoku-ji’), Alan Watts (‘Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen’) and Watts’ socialite mother-in-law Ruth Fuller Sasaki, the widow of another Zen roshi of Soen’s lineage, Sokei-an (‘Chia-shan Receives the Transmission’) (Jackson 1988: 54). Alan Watts (1915–1973) had been taught by Sokeian, and published his first book, The Spirit of Zen, in 1936 when he was just twenty-one (Batchelor 1994: 317). He became Zen’s greatest populariser through his voluminous writings, as well as exemplifying in his own life the spiritual eclecticism of the mid-twentieth century (as well as an advocate of Zen he was a liberal Episcopalian priest for five years, and dabbled in psychedelic drugs, the human potential movement and Vedanta). He also presented a long-running weekly radio programme on KFPA Berkeley, which brought Eastern spirituality to a mass audience (Watts 2000: xi). With the publication of the Chicago Review and The Dharma Bums, the Beats became an overnight sensation, and despite the fact that as a literary movement it was defunct by the mid-1960s its effect, in terms of celebrity, popular transmission and the linking of Buddhism to issues of disillusionment with Christianity, rebellion against social norms and environmental mysticism, was profound. In the 1960s and 1970s America’s evolving love affair with Eastern spiritualities was fuelled by the arrival of a multitude of teachers from Asia, including the neo-Hindu gurus Srila Prabhupada and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and the controversial Tibetan lama Chogyam Trungpa (1939–1987). In 1959 after the Chinese invasion Trungpa left Tibet with the Dalai Lama and went to England where he studied at Oxford. In 1968, with Akong Rinpoche, he founded ‘Samye Ling, the first Tibetan Buddhist Centre in Europe, in…Dumfriesshire, Scotland’ (Batchelor 1994: 104). Trungpa was aware of the power of celebrity: in Scotland he taught rock musician David Bowie meditation, and after moving to the United States in 1970 with his aristocratic English wife Diana Pybus, he became © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.

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Allen Ginsberg’s teacher (Prebish 1999: 45). His ‘crazy wisdom’ style, which involved heavy drinking and sex with students, matched the experimental mood of America at the time. His teaching style was similarly congruent with contemporary issues; in speaking of the realms of rebirth Trungpa interpreted them as psychological states. McMahan notes that for Trungpa: the God realm is a symbol of self-absorption; the realm of jealous gods corresponds to paranoia; the human realm corresponds to passion; the animal realm corresponds to stupidity; the hungry ghost realm corresponds to a feeling of poverty; and the hell realm corresponds to anger (2008: 476).

Although this is not a uniquely modern interpretation, it mirrors the rise of psychoanalysis and therapeutic culture in the West, and parallels the demythologisation of scripture that had already taken place within academic and liberal Christianity, in which those elements that are incompatible with science are declared to be myth (Brown 1988). The 1960s and 1970s were decades in which the influence of institutional Christianity declined rapidly and new religious movements, many of which were of Eastern origin, became established in Western countries. People turned to ‘alternative’ faiths, lifestyles and political orientations and mass campaigns were mounted for equal rights for women, blacks, gays and lesbians. Buddhism, along with a range of previously fringe phenomena, experienced a mainstreaming in the 1960s, and Colin Campbell (1999) has argued that there has been gradual ‘Easternization of the West’, a process in which the West has moved away from its traditional values (monotheism, human lordship over the natural environment and a belief in one lifetime) and adopted an Eastern paradigm (pantheism and deep ecology, the human potential movement, and reincarnation. The other significant adaptation that Buddhism underwent in the 1960s and 1970s was a democratisation, as monastic forms from Asia were laicised in the West. Traditional attitudes to women, and hierarchical relationships between teachers and students, were eroded to render Buddhism congruent with popular, topical Western values such as democracy and gender equality (McMahan 2008: 31-33). The prominence of sexual imagery in the West, and the popular notion of fulfilment through sexual relationships, as well as the Western normalisation of drugs and alcohol, profoundly influenced the career and teachings of Chogyen Trungpa, and a number of other monastics who laicised in order to marry or otherwise experience their sexuality (Redmond 2004). This democratisation of Buddhism was part of the transformation of Buddhism to fit the pressing social issues of the time, and made Buddhism more attractive to Western individualists. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.


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Hollywood and Buddhism: Celebrity Buddhists and Buddhism on Film Finally, Hollywood has contributed to the familiarisation of Buddhism in the West. Since the first decade of the twentieth century, cinema had spearheaded an emergent mass popular culture. Early films dealing with Buddhism and non-Christian Asian cultures employed the structures of melodrama, and were variations on the forbidden romance of Asian men and white Christian women. Gina Marchetti has noted that this style of film exhibits what Edward Said has termed ‘Orientalism’, a mode of Western dominance that nevertheless recognises the exotic attraction of the East (Marchetti 1993: 6). These films include D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919) and Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933). In Broken Blossoms, Cheng Huang, a Chinese merchant and failed missionary of Buddhism to Christians, loves Lucy, the East End girl who dies a victim of her brutal father. When he finds her body he lights incense for her, prays and commits suicide. In Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Megan Davis (Barbara Stanwyck), an American missionary, is taken prisoner by a Chinese warlord, Yen (Nils Asther). Unexpectedly, this captivity is presented as ‘one of the great Hollywood love stories of the 1930s: subtle, delicate, moody, mystical, and passionate’ (Schneider 2003: 116). In a sexual parallel to the West’s willing seduction by Eastern religions, when Megan realises at the film’s conclusion that the General has been betrayed, she offers herself to him as he prepares to drink bitter (poisoned) tea. For the purpose of the argument regarding the role of celebrity and popular media discourse in the reception of Buddhism by the West, Buddhism became familiarised for cinema audiences, and acquired positive characteristics through the portrayal of Buddhist characters by famous actors and actresses. In the 1990s three significant films about Buddhism were made in Hollywood. The earliest of these, Little Buddha (Miramax Films, 1994), was directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and features a soundtrack by Japanese composer Ryuchi Sakamoto. The plot involves a Tibetan monk, Lama Norbu (Ying Ruocheng), of Paro Monastery, Bhutan, searching for a child who is the reincarnation of his teacher, Lama Dorje (Lama Thunderbolt), who died nine years earlier. Dean Conrad (Chris Isaak) and his wife Lisa (Bridget Fonda) are disturbed when Lama Norbu and a companion inform them that their son Jesse may be Lama Dorje’s reincarnation. The lamas give Jesse an illustrated life of the Buddha, and within the film Siddhartha Gautama’s (Keanu Reeves) life is told as a parallel story. Thus this film explicitly functions to educate Western audiences about Buddhism through a familiar story of a ‘white, upper


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middle-class, nuclear family’ that is enhanced but not destabilised by its encounter with Buddhism. In Nepal, Jesse (along with the other two child candidates, Raju and Gita) turns out to be Lama Dorje, and the climax of the Buddha’s story, his enlightenment at Bodh Gaya, is dramatically played out. After Lama Norbu’s death Jesse returns to America with his father. Eve Mullen (1998: n.p.) argues that the film reinforces Western values and subordinates Buddhism to those values: ‘the idea of a ShangriLa…can provide a space where reincarnations and magical events, such as those of the Buddha’s life story, can exist… It is nice to visit a nonmaterialist culture of selflessness, but it is nicer to return home to our comfortable luxuries and familiar individualism’. The other two films deal with the life of Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and the premier Buddhist celebrity of the contemporary era. Seven Years in Tibet (1997) directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, with a soundtrack by John Williams, is a film adaptation of Heinrich Harrer’s bestselling memoir. Harrer (Brad Pitt) was a mountaineer who left Austria in 1939 to climb in the Himalayas. During World War II he, and his fellow climber Peter Aufschnaiter (played by David Thewlis) were in Lhasa, where Harrer met and became a confidant of the young Dalai Lama. Mullen (1998: n.p.) argues that this film, while also educational for Western viewers, patronises the Tibetans and positions Harrer as the gateway to the wider world for the Dalai Lama; ‘for short periods of time, he rescues the Dalai Lama from the confines of the Lhasa Potala and the primitive religion that has imprisoned him there. And, yes, Harrer even builds him a movie theatre’. Martin Scorsese’s epic treatment of the Dalai Lama’s early life up to his departure from Tibet in 1959, Kundun (1997), is a more effective vehicle of popularisation, in that it is a film of spectacular beauty, with a profoundly emotive soundtrack by Philip Glass, with the added authenticity that the West identifies profoundly with the struggle of the Tibetan people against Maoist China (Possamai 2009: 125-26). The power of Tibet’s passive resistance of the military might of China is dramatised by Scorsese in a myriad ways, but most poignantly through the silence of the Dalai Lama in a meeting with Mao Zedong, who dismisses religion in Tibet as ‘poison’. Apropos this scene, Paul Coates argues that this silence is that of: the otherworldly confronting the powerful of this world, of Jesus before the Grand Inquisitor in Ivan Karamazov’s parable. Non-violence—which, as he says, ‘takes a long time’, does not yield immediate results—becomes a silence (2003: 201).

The emotive power of Kundun is profound and is deeply bound up with the Western perception of Tenzin Gyatso as a figure of global significance. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.


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The Dalai Lama began his life as the divine ruler of a remote, feudal religious state. When China invaded Tibet he began the life of an exile, constantly touring the globe campaigning for Tibetan autonomy and preaching non-violence. As Possamai notes, because of the Dalai Lama’s great spiritual authority, humility and status as the leader of a country under military occupation, where Buddhist monks have been tortured and killed for their faith, ‘there is a strong concern from Westerners about this little piece of a far away land’ (Possamai 2009: 125). In addition to films that are explicitly about Buddhism, Hollywood contributes to the familiarisation of Buddhism for Western audiences in two other ways. The first is by making films that employ Buddhist tropes, such as the illusoriness of the physical world or the karmic nature of human life (three very different blockbusters released in 1999, Fight Club, American Beauty and The Matrix, all exhibit these characteristics). The second is through actors and celebrities who themselves profess Buddhism. These include Richard Gere, who has been a student of the Dalai Lama since the early 1980s, visits India two or three times per year and represents the respectable face of celebrity Buddhism (Goldberg 1999: 352). Rather less respectable, and indeed a cause for embarrassment for some Buddhists, is Steven Seagal, the action film star. Seagal had been a Buddhist for some years when his teacher, His Holiness Penor Rinpoche, recognised him as a tulku (reincarnation) of the seventeenth-century hidden treasure-revealer of Palyul Monastery, Chungdrag Dorje. This remarkable state of affairs has been attributed to Seagal’s financial support of Penor Rinpoche. Penor Rinpoche himself was compelled to make a statement justifying his choice of Seagal, and explaining that although he had been recognised as a tulku, he had not been enthroned and thus had no spiritual responsibilities within Tibetan Buddhism. He concluded, somewhat defensively, that some people think that because Steven Seagal is always acting in violent movies, how can he be a true Buddhist? Such movies are for temporary entertainment and do not relate to what is real and important. It is the view of the Great Vehicle of Buddhism that compassionate beings take rebirth in all walks of life to help others. Any life condition can be used to serve beings and thus, from this point of view, it is possible to be both a popular movie star and a tulku. There is no inherent contradiction in this possibility (Rinpoche n.d.).

Buddhism is espoused by many celebrities apart from film stars, including popular musicians Leonard Cohen, Herbie Hancock and Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, and sports stars such as the coach of the Chicago Bulls, Phil Jackson (Van Biema, McDowell and Ostling 1997). Many celebrity Buddhists promote Buddhism as a spiritual practice, not a religion. This fits the religious climate of the late capitalist era, in which an © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.

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increasing number of Western people are more comfortable with the designation ‘spiritual’, rather than ‘religious’. This tends to manifest in disinclination to participate in institutional religion, adherence to eclectic personal spiritualities and attraction to experiential affective practice (such as meditation). The power of the Buddhist celebrity as a role model and his/her effectiveness as a promoter of the religion and stimulus to conversion among ordinary people has been recognised. Jeffrey Paine, the author of Reenchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West (2004), concludes that ‘a few matinee idols and film directors have done more than a thousand monks could have to chant Tibetan Buddhism into general awareness in the American culture’ (quoted in Scrivener 2004). Thus, the familiarisation of Buddhism, and its positive reception in the West, has been effected by and through popular culture, celebrity and perceived relevance to contemporary cultural concerns. Conclusion This article has argued that the West’s (and particularly America’s) reception of Buddhism from the late nineteenth century to the present has been greatly facilitated by the popular cultural discourses of celebrity, perceived topical relevance and the media. From the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893 the power of public events, celebrity speakers and media coverage to generate interest in what was an alien religion, Buddhism, has been extraordinary. The Beat Generation used popular literary forms to spread their admittedly idiosyncratic version of Buddhism, and their personal fame furthered Eastern religion’s penetration into the American psyche. The influx of Tibetan Buddhist teachers into Western countries after the Chinese invasion of 1959 and the gradual growth in the personal reputation of the Dalai Lama met the spiritual needs of those Westerners who were disillusioned with Christianity and looked east for a new spiritual inspiration, Finally, the medium of film, one of the most pervasive sites of popular cultural transmission since its inception in 1895, was brought into the mix by the emergence in the late 1990s of a number of films that treated Buddhist subjects (most prominently the life of the Dalai Lama) and employed Buddhist motifs. These discourses operate at a remove from the scholarly promotion of Buddhism in the West, and fuel a different kind of interest, attracting a non-academic audience. This popular transmission and reception, however, has played a profoundly significant role in the familiarisation process of Buddhism to Westerners, whether or not they can be classified as sympathisers or adherents.



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