The Construction of Japanese Buddhist Identities in their Entanglement with Sri Lanka, 1882 - 1893

• Applicant: Stephan Licha, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Asian Studies ; Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
• Term: from 2020 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 438846596

This project aims to elucidate the globally entangled formation of modern Buddhist identities in Asia, focusing on the activities of Japanese Buddhists in Sri Lanka and their reception and influence in Japan itself. Previous scholarship has maintained that the “world religion Buddhism“ is but a Western construct born from an orientalist project that privileged textual sources and consequently estranged from the living experience of indigenous Asian subjectivities. In contrast, the project argues that the understanding of Japanese Buddhist of themselves as the foremost representative of an Asian world religion, which developed in the second half of the 19th century, was based on at least three factors. These were, first, the encounter of Asian scholastic with Western scholarly taxonomies of Buddhism; second, the Japanese encounter with the Pāli tradition of Sri Lanka as a “Buddhism” and the subsequent discovery of this Sri Lankan Buddhism as a “Small Vehicle” (hīnayāna) contrasted with, and inferior to, the Japanese “Great Vehicle” (mahāyāna); and, finally, the nationalist and colonial context within which these encounters took place. Building on recent work in the study of religions, which develops a post-colonial critique of attempts to ground a modern understanding of religion in an Eurocentric manner, the project demonstrates that Asian protagonists actively contributed to the modern, global understanding of “Buddhism” and even “religion” from as early as the second half of the 19th century, a full half decade earlier than hitherto assumed. Furthermore, the project shows that while Orientalism and colonialism might have provided the stage for this contribution, they were not determining it. In order to recover the importance of Asian agency and indigenous forms of knowledge, the project employs a translocal methodology, which rather than dissolving the interconnectedness of the discursive, institutional and social processes arising from the encounter of Japanese Buddhists with their Sinhalese counterparts in a global discourse instead seeks to locate it in concrete, personal and institutional networks. The project thus contributes not only to an intellectual history of the concepts “Buddhism” or “religion” but offers a more nuanced historical account of the factors that enabled the emergence of Asian national identities at the dawn of the 20th century.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants