Abeyesekera 2019 Protestant Buddhism

Protestant Buddhism and “Influence”
The Temporality of a Concept
ananda abeysekara
For how is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a

game, and what no longer does? Can you say where the boundaries
are? No. You can draw some, for there aren’t any drawn yet. (But this
never bothered you before when you used the word “game.”)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §68
An encounter, not a communication, lies at the heart of authority.

Talal Asad, “Responses”
For almost three decades the concept of “Protestant Buddhism” has

been the object of critique in numerous scholarly works. These
works claim to tell a different story about the relation between reli-
gion and modernity (“Protestantism”) in South Asia. By extension,
the critiques also seek to reconstruct the temporal relation between
the past and the present, contesting the postcolonial conceptions of
history, time, and religious practice. Fundamentally, the critiques of
Protestant Buddhism claim to offer a novel narrative of the tempo-
rality of religion and the past vis-à-vis modernity. This narrative of
qui parle Vol. 28, No. 1, June 2019

doi 10.1215/10418385-7522565 © 2019 Editorial Board, Qui Parle
Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

by UNIV OF ALBERTA LIBRARY user
2 qui parle june 2019 vol. 28 no. 1
temporality is staked on the question of “influence,” which has a ge-

nealogy that includes not just colonial, missionary, liberal politics
but also contemporary legal-political questions about “foreign” in-
fluence on democracy and sovereignty. The relation between religion
and modernity is determined in terms of the question of modernity’s
influence on Buddhism (its history-past). Often the question of influ-
ence is settled with the positing of an arbitrary temporal demarca-
tion between Buddhism and modernity—that is, Protestantism or
colonialism is repeatedly said not to have “totally” or “directly”
influenced Buddhism. This claim not only creates an indiscriminately
expansive criterion, according to which an abstract totality of influ-
ence never obtains, since such totality cannot be discerned in the dis-
cursive spaces of Protestantism or colonialism. More important, the
notion of the totality of influence separates “form” from “life.” Influ-
ence is reduced to a mere “form” distinct from the “substance” of life.
In this article I argue that the preoccupation with the question of
influence, to determine what did or did not constitute influence, in-
scribes an a priori ontology that already separates the past from the
present. This makes it difficult to understand the relation between
temporality and a form of life in a discursive tradition, as the ques-
tion of influence grounds the ostensive plurality of “religions” in
some preexisting ontological difference. Once religion as such is un-
derstood as an object of influence, the temporality of the form, which
is encountered within power—that is, the formations of particular
sensibilities and dispositions within the coherence of a tradition—
is rendered marginal, if not irrelevant, to the embodied life of reli-
gion. My argument is that the temporality of religion cannot be eas-
ily understood without a consideration of the temporality of sensi-
bilities that constitute a form of life. The temporality of sensibilities
constitutes, in effect, the sensibilities of temporality; the sensibilities
are modes of encountering and inhabiting the present’s relation to
the past and the future. Such an encounter with time is an encounter
with power, that is, a specific ability to feel, sense, remember, and act
in particular ways authorized within a form of life. And the autho-
rization of sensibilities and dispositions cannot be considered mere
influences. What I want to emphasize is that such sensibilities consti-
tute a form of life within the limits of a coherent tradition. Discursive

Abeysekara: Protestant Buddhism 3
coherence, as we will see, operates in terms of a different kind of tem-

porality than that of influence.
Before I move on to the question of Protestant Buddhism, it will be
helpful to mention briefly how I understand the relation between a
form of life and the temporality of a tradition. As I discuss elsewhere
in some detail, a form of life constitutes a mode of practice that is
inseparable from life.1 There I have tried to think about how the re-
lation between a form of life and temporality works in premodern
and modern genealogies, with attention to the scholarship by think-
ers such as Martin Heidegger (his writings on Aristotle), Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Giorgio Agamben, Talal Asad, David Scott, and oth-
ers. In thinking about the question of the form of life in medieval
Christian practice, for example, I have found Agamben’s Highest
Poverty instructive; Agamben shows how the “form of the rule” (for-
ma regulae), that is, the practice of the “rule,” constituted the monas-
tic life (in terms of forma vivendi, forma vitae) in medieval Christian-
ity, marking an indistinction between life or rule/norm (vita vel
regula) or rule/norm and life (regula et vita), which he says moder-
nity cannot grasp. The very notion of a cenoby, from koinos bios, a
notion the Greeks did not have, constituted a form of life and not a
place of residence. But I have also found Asad’s work singularly in-
structive in trying to understand the connection between a form of
life and the limits of a discursive tradition. In his discussion of the
genealogies of medieval Christianity and Islamic practice, Asad
shows in detail how a form of life operates within the coherence of
a discursive-embodied tradition, a concept we do not find in Agam-
ben. For Asad, the medieval practice of Saint Benedict’s Rule, disci-
pline, confession, penance, obedience, labor, defining heresy, and the
Islamic practice of nasiha (the activity of giving advice to fellow
Muslims as a virtue and obligation) aim at forming particular pas-
sions, dispositions, and sensibilities, cultivated and embodied in the
organized resources of a community. The monastic cultivation of
specific dispositions and virtues such as confession, remorse, pen-
ance, humility, obedience, the ability to recognize proper sacraments
or replace unlawful desires with virtuous desires, and so on required
a disciplinary program, enforced through the daily schedule of dis-
ciplinary activities within binding relationships of power. Discipline

was not about merely disciplining bodies; discipline worked as an

“instrument” in forming virtuous passions and sensibilities. But
for Asad, this monastic life is part of a discursive tradition whose
(temporary) coherence is aspired to through authoritative discourses
and contentious disputes about what particular practices and apti-
tudes ought to define its proper form.2 Discursive coherence sup-
poses limits, not in the sense of merely restricting behavior but in
the sense of defining and enabling distinct modes of sensibility and
disposition.3 Thus sensibilities are temporal in that their formations
and cultivation in the genealogy of a tradition are made possible by
distinct modes of practice under institutional conditions. This stands
in contrast to modern notions of emotions marking cognitive states,
with distinctions between emotions and passions, and passions and
interests.4
In part, both Asad and Agamben develop the idea of the form of
life in relation to Wittgenstein, who associated the concept in Philo-
sophical Investigations with a “language game” that involves the
“activity” of speaking. As Wittgenstein writes in one instance,
“What is true or false is what human beings say; and it is in their
language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opin-
ions, but rather in form of life.”5 What Asad argues in particular is
that the changes in the use of concepts articulate changes in partic-
ular sensibilities and capacities. What follows from Asad’s argument
(in Genealogies of Religion, Formations of the Secular, and other
works) is the question of how we may think about the temporality
of such sensibilities within different forms of religious and secular
power, which authorize different notions of tradition, time, and co-
herence.6 As Asad has demonstrated in a critique of Martha Nuss-
baum, the sensibilities formed within the coherent limits of a reli-
gious tradition suppose distinct, and not “universal,” capabilities;
such capabilities authorized by religious power are not merely avail-
able for creating “auto-affection” (to use a Derridean term).7 As
Asad demonstrates in Formations of the Secular, the sensibilities
formed within the “secular,” which are conceptually prior to and
which support or undermine secularism as a doctrine, work in rela-
tion to modes of power different from those of religious power and
authority.8 Asad is not interested in defining what the secular is; he

wants to understand who defines it authoritatively and what (forms

of power, i.e., ability and practice) those definitions include and leave
out, and for what purpose.9
Given that (as in Asad’s epigraph to this essay) “an encounter, not
a communication, lies at the heart of authority,” the critiques of Prot-
estant Buddhism anchored in the question of influence miss the cru-
cial question about the encounter of temporality within the sensibil-
ities of a coherent form of life. In failing to understand the coherence
of the form, the critiques of Protestant Buddhism inscribe a notion
of an autonomous self, whose agency is to be determined through
the question of influence. This notion of influence, by presupposing
a subject already defined by its internal history, external to influence,
separates the past from the present. The temporality of a coherent
tradition and the form of life it makes possible cannot presuppose
such a distinction. The notion of influence does not become available
within the temporality of sensibilities encountered in a form of life in
the way it is determined by (scholars’) theory. In what follows I
would like to think about how such a notion of temporality is oc-
cluded by the question of influence that animates the ongoing cri-
tiques of the concept of Protestant Buddhism.
Rethinking the Temporality of the Critique of Protestant

Buddhism
In 1970 the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere introduced the
concept of Protestant Buddhism to describe something that tran-
spired in the wake of the politics of the “encounter” between Bud-
dhists and Christian missionaries in Sri Lanka in the latter half of
the nineteenth century.10 In noting the “origins” of the movement,
he and Richard Gombrich wrote, “the most important event in
Christian-Buddhist encounter proved to be a two-day debate held
at Panadura, south of Colombo, in 1873.”11 It was part of a series
of debates between Christians and Buddhists that had begun in
1865. Initially, the missionaries claimed that they were “disappoint-
ed by the Sangha’s [monks’] eirenic response, which they tended to
interpret as religious indifference.” Taking part in the popular de-
bates was the famous monk Mohottivatte Gunananda. Gunananda

“founded the Society for the Propagation of Buddhism in imitation

of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and on a press orig-
inally imported by the Church Missionary Society began to print re-
plies to Christian propaganda.”12 What was notable about this
encounter—apart from the “protest” against the politics of Chris-
tian missionaries and the West that later marked it—was the gradual
emergence of largely English-educated “urban” middle-class lay
Buddhists, who began to conceptualize particular kinds of individu-
al practice, at times independent of the institutions of Buddhist
monkhood on the island.13 Some of these lay Buddhists initially
worked with the American Henry Steel Olcott, who, with Helena
Blavatsky, had founded the theosophical movement. Olcott had an
impact on the “style” of Protestant Buddhist practice. Among other
things, he persuaded the colonial government to make Vesak a pub-
lic holiday commemorating the birth, enlightenment, and death of
the Buddha, and he “encouraged Buddhists to celebrate it with songs
modeled on Christmas carols—whence further developed the cus-
tom of sending Vesak cards on the analogy of Christmas cards.”14
Olcott also helped create the Young Men’s and Women’s Buddhist
Associations and, in every village, the Buddhist Sunday Schools,
each “headed by the incumbent of the village temple,” who often
left its “conduct to others, for instance to a local schoolteacher.”15
The textbooks of these Buddhist Sunday Schools were supplied by
the Young Men’s and Women’s Buddhist Associations, which con-
ducted “an all-island examination with certificates and prizes.” Paral-
leling the emergence of these styles of practice was that of a “pastoral”
role for the Buddhist monk, along with “the creation of Buddhist
chaplaincies—to prisons, hospitals, and military establishments—
and a Buddhist mission to seamen.”16
Gombrich and Obeyesekere’s story of these developments, among
others, emphasizes part of the career of Don David Hevavitarana,
one of the renowned lay Lankan figures they associate with Protes-
tant Buddhism. Hevavitarana, whose first language was Sinhalese
but who was fluent in English as well, and who was initially an as-
sistant to and a close ally of Olcott, sought to be initiated into the
Theosophical Society. But they parted company over a dispute about
the Sacred Relic of the Buddha in Kandy, which Olcott claimed was

an animal bone. Hevavitarana came to be widely known as Anagar-

ika Dharmapala (“the Homeless Protector of the Buddha’s Teach-
ings”), a designation he adopted defining the custody of a new reli-
gious role for himself. It was part of a new discourse about the
concept of the ascetic life, a kind of “worldly asceticism” that Dhar-
mapala wanted to practice, that would not be affiliated with any spe-
cific Buddhist monastic order in Sri Lanka. The designation sought
to articulate “an interstitial role that he created to stand between lay-
man and monk as traditionally conceived; he used it to mean a man
without home or family ties who nevertheless lived in the world, not
in the isolation of a monastery.”17 Dharmapala sometimes criticized
monks (especially village monks) as “indolent and ignorant of the
Paramattha Dhamma [Ultimate Truth].” The monks who “keep
up their position by a smattering of Pali grammar and Sanskrit pros-
ody,” he claimed, “exist only to fill their spittoons” and are con-
cerned solely with their “own welfare (ātmārthakāma), not with
working for the welfare of the world (lōkārtha dāyaka väḍa).”18
This kind of criticism, Gombrich and Obeyesekere note, “is still
the commonest Christian criticism of Buddhism[:] that it is selfish
to devote oneself to the quest for one’s own Enlightenment: a truly
religious man should dedicate his life entirely to the welfare of oth-
ers. For Dharmapala, as for the Christians, such dedication involves
far more than the traditional contact of the Buddhist monk with la-
ity, namely giving religious instruction: it involves social and politi-
cal activity.”19 Dharmapala also designed a code of conduct for men
and women—with two hundred rules—that proscribed peasant hab-
its, and his “social reform provided a value system to a new class, an
emerging bourgeoisie.”20 Dharmapala, who accepted the emerging
colonial distinction that Buddhism was not a religion but a philoso-
phy, was part of a time in which some thought of Buddhism as a mat-
ter of personal internalization. Though seen as one of the architects
of Sinhalese nationalism—he also founded the newspaper Sinhala
Bauddhaya (The Sinhalese Buddhist) and denigrated Muslims and
Tamils with racial slurs for their supposed economic exploitation
of the Sinhalese—Dharmapala traveled to many countries and cre-
ated the Mahabodhi Society. That organization—which gained con-
trol of the Bodh Gaya, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment in

India, and sponsored Buddhist delegations to the West—helped cre-

ate a “world Buddhist movement” in the twentieth century.
Aftermath of a Critique
I mention some of these aspects of Gombrich and Obeyesekere’s nar-
rative of Protestant Buddhism to help the reader contextualize the
argument of this article. Since the early 1990s scholarship has cri-
tiqued Protestant Buddhism as a mistaken concept in understanding
the history of Buddhism in modern Theravada societies. My aim is
not to defend the concept against these critiques. Rather, it is to dis-
cuss a set of theoretical problems common to these critiques and the
kinds of questions about tradition and the present that they have
foreclosed. Before I turn to these critiques, I wish to note what else
is remarkable about Gombrich and Obeyesekere’s story. Though
they at times speak of the discourses of Protestant Buddhism—
analogous to Max Weber’s notion of “inner-worldly asceticism”—
as examples of “true Protestantism,” they also point to the difficulty
of pinning the concept down, arguing that “Protestant Buddhism
has been a Protestantism virtually without a Bible.”21 Note that
the temporality suggested by Gombrich and Obeyesekere’s formula-
tion presupposes not merely a connection but also a simultaneous
disjunction between Protestant Buddhism and Protestantism. But
one can find other instances in which Gombrich and Obeyesekere
try to avoid reducing Protestant Buddhism to Protestantism. It is
also notable that they often speak of Protestant Buddhism in terms
of the “style of its practice.” The critics of Protestant Buddhism dis-
miss the notion of style as “form,” a feature or influence marginal to
the “substance” of Buddhism. But style is not extraneous to a prac-
tice that constitutes a form of life. Style constitutes a form insepara-
ble from the dispositions and sensibilities articulated by particular
relationships of power.22 The very notion of the “style of its practice”
has to do with the manner that constitutes the habitus of a practice
with particular sensibilities. Style is always and already a distinct dis-
position, an ability, that is necessarily temporal.23 As a cultivated
and embodied disposition, style is not universally recognizable and
identifiable apart from the specific forms of power that make possi-
ble the grammar of its intelligibility in a form of life.

The growing body of scholarship on Buddhism and modernity re-

mains animated by what has become a canonical critique of Protes-
tant Buddhism by the historian of Buddhism John Holt.24 The theo-
retical structure of Holt’s critique is governed by the problematic
notion of influence, along with the questionable notions of history
and time associated with influence. But it is no less problematic
that, for more than a quarter century, Holt’s critique has gone un-
challenged. It is inexplicable why so many scholars have been at-
tracted to Holt’s demonstrably faulty essay; in a network of citations
and mediations of Holt’s essay, scholars have either cited it or cited
other works that uncritically reproduced its argument from 1995 to
2017 as the model for new directions in the retelling of the story of
Buddhism and modernity.25 The theoretical problems of Holt’s essay
get reproduced every time its argument is repeated, replicating the
unexamined relation between temporality and life found in the per-
vasive claim that Buddhism is not influenced or totally influenced by
Protestantism or colonialism.26 So the history of citations and medi-
ations of Holt’s essay is a history of taking for granted a self-evident
relation between temporality and Buddhism. That history is there-
fore an indication of how it has become unavoidable for scholars
to tell the story of Buddhism and modernity without recourse to
the question of influence. Given its wide reception, the theoretical
problems of Holt’s critique deserve to be subjected to scrutiny, thus
opening up broader questions beyond the impasse that critique has
created. In the rest of this article I look at the structure of Holt’s cri-
tique and its conceptual purchase within the scholarship that tries
to reconstruct the relation between Buddhism, modernity, and time
by a number of critics like Charles Hallisey, Anne M. Blackburn,
Alicia Turner, Erik Braun, and others. In particular, I also examine
the logic of the distinction between Buddhism and modernity in the
anthropologist Steven Kemper’s recent major work Rescued from
the Nation, which once again tries to contest the idea of Protestant
Buddhism. Kemper’s is not an isolated monograph. It carries for-
ward a set of theoretical problems about temporality that are found
in the general critiques of Protestant Buddhism. The distinction
between Buddhism and modernity implies a separation of tradition
from the present insofar as modern forms of power (e.g., colonialism)

are assumed not to determine the identity of tradition. The problems

resulting from this distinction cannot be set aside by making a re-
verse claim about the intrinsic “connection” between religion and
modernity, a claim that now extends beyond the field of Buddhism.
My aim here is to suggest that both the distinction and the posited
connection between religion and modernity occlude thinking about
the coherence of a discursive tradition in which the sensibilities of
temporality—of encountering and inhabiting the present’s relation
to the past and the future—cannot be separated from the grammar
of a shared form of life. My attempt is hardly a quibble with a few
texts; rather, as I have already noted, the point is to tease out the no-
tion of temporality that is preempted by the question of influence
that governs the theorizations of religion and modernity.
Temporality of History’s “Reemergence”: Religious Difference

in Modernity
Holt’s critique of Protestant Buddhism, which has shaped successive

scholarly questions of Buddhism and modernity, is predicated on a
contradiction that undercuts the foundational claim of the essay—
the claim he continued to hold more than two decades after the essay
appeared.27 The claim is that Protestant Buddhism is a “misnomer”
and a “reification.” Holt takes the concept of Protestant Buddhism
to be a name that wrongly names something that it is not: Protes-
tantism. Holt then names what the misnomer Protestant Bud-
dhism should “accurately” name: “The basic thesis of this essay is
that ‘Protestant Buddhism’ is actually a misnomer for the revival and
modernization of missionary and militant Buddhism, adjectives more
accurately reflecting the type of religious ethos under discussion.”28
In calling Protestant Buddhism a “misnomer,” Holt takes both that
concept and Protestantism to be names; each name stands for the ac-
tual meaning that constitutes itself (through a logic of transhistorical
self-reference, if you will). Holt does not think that concepts are not
names; the concepts have historical uses, with competing definitions
and sensibilities in a genealogy.29
For Holt, the idea of “the revival and modernization of mission-
ary and militant Buddhism” self-evidently defines Buddhism in the

nineteenth-century colonial encounter. So the modernization of

Buddhism is not something new. Rather, it is an alleged “revival”
or “reemergence” of a missionary and militant Buddhism whose
possibility remains within Sinhalese Buddhist history. Without ever
questioning its self-evidence, Holt repeats the word militant ad nau-
seam to identify a uniform essence in Buddhist history across a spec-
trum of practices at various times. But this seemingly historical fact
about Buddhist militancy is indeed based on a conjecture that is re-
peated many times: “In reviewing these various analyses of religious
change in nineteenth[-] and twentieth-century Sri Lanka, the most
striking changes in the ethos of Buddhism would seem to be the re-
emergence of a militant and missionary spirit.”30 The history of mil-
itant Buddhism now becomes a history of “spirit.” The conjecture
about the reemergence of a militant spirit is explained in terms of
breaks in the movement of Sri Lanka’s Buddhist history. Holt writes
that “Buddhism has also been, at times, a very militant tradition.”
The qualification at times is used to explain violence as a historical
phenomenon. But the breaks in Buddhism’s history are not really
breaks, because the spirit of violence always reemerges. The spirit
remains “for long . . . latent” in history. Holt designates a particular
historical break in early modern times: the time of the seventeenth-
century “Dutch policy of intolerance,” in which “Protestant provo-
cation of Buddhist militancy begins.” Holt then asserts that such mil-
itancy stands in contrast to the “truly liberal attitude of the Sinhalese
towards other religions.”31 Holt takes this notion of religious liber-
ality or “free liberty” from Robert Knox (1681), an English sailor-
captive of King Rajasinha II. Knox used the idea of free liberty to
describe seventeenth-century Sinhalese attitudes: “Not bigoted in
their own religion, they care not what religion strangers that dwell
amongst them are of.” In Knox’s view, the Sinhalese attitude was a
universal example of how “all nations have a free liberty to use and
enjoy their own religion, with all or any manner of ceremonies there-
to belonging, without the least opposition or so much as ridicul-
ing.”32 Holt then imputes Knox’s modern notion of liberty—that
is, “Sinhala Buddhist toleration of other religions”—to the Sinhalese
history of “the assimilation of facets of other religious traditions”
into the “long historical tradition” of Buddhism.33 The instances
of such religious tolerance and liberality, Holt writes, are to be found

in the manner in which gods and bodhisattvas of Hindu and Ma-

hayana origins were accommodated in the traditional pantheon of
deities and worshipped within the same buildings containing im-
ages of the Buddha from the Gampola period (fourteenth century)
onward. But perhaps the best illustration of religious liberality
comes from the fact that during the battles between the Dutch and
the Portuguese, when the Kandyans were in collusion with the Dutch,
Roman Catholic Sinhalese were allowed to resettle in Kandyan areas
to protect them from Dutch religious intolerance. Religious liberality
superseded political expediency in this context.34
On this account, the Sinhalese in the fourteenth century already pos-

sessed a self-contained “religion” (in the modern senses of that
word), into which Hindu and Mahayana facets were assimilated
and “accommodated.”35 Proceeding from the assumption that the
Sinhalese who had this liberal religion protected the Catholics from
Dutch religious intolerance, Holt makes Knox’s notion of religious
liberty among the seventeenth-century Sinhalese the default state of
Buddhism in Sri Lanka.36 Yet the spirit of Buddhist militancy ree-
merges in its internal history, explained in terms of its “transition”
to the modern (1990s) intolerance toward other religions: “The tran-
sition from such truly liberal attitudes of the seventeenth century to
the fanaticism and militancy of a late nineteenth-century Anagarika
Dharmapala as well as the attitudes of Theravada champions even
today (who recently have sought to persuade President Premadasa,
as Minister of Buddha Sasana, to defrock a monk who had taken to
Mahayana) is truly spectacular.”37 But Holt does not pause to ask
why his alleged Hindu and Mahayana facets that were assimilated
into Buddhism in the past were not recognizable to Buddhists in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Hindu or Mahayana. For
Holt, modern violence is ultimately symptomatic of the internal his-
tory of Buddhist militancy. The spirit of violence manifests itself in
its transition from time to time. The spirit constitutes a historical
agency itself.
My point is not that Holt takes such liberties in these claims as to
anachronistically misname the pre-Dutch seventeenth-century peri-
od as an example of truly liberal attitudes, in contrast to the idea of

truly spectacular intolerance that reemerged in modern Sri Lanka,

nor is my point that Holt neglects to tell us whose version of the ge-
nealogy of liberal tolerance he is referring to here, thereby reifying
liberalism itself as a universal principle already present in precolo-
nial Sri Lankan history. Of course, the genealogy of secular liberal-
ism is not always marked by the practice of tolerance.38 My point is
that the idea of breaks in the movement of Sinhalese history helps
repeat the conjecture that governs Holt’s central theoretical claim:
the accurate name that explains the nineteenth-century colonial en-
counter is a revival or reemergence of the Buddhist militant spirit la-
tent in history. The notion of the reemergence of Buddhist militancy
does not make that militancy something peculiar to Sinhalese culture
and history. Rather, in an antihistorical move, Holt traces the con-
nection between the missionary and the militant spirit to the very
“time of the Buddha” himself in India, with a “legacy” of Sinhalese
“self-perception” to be found in historical texts such as Mahavamsa
and Culavamsa:
Since the time of the Buddha (and especially since Asoka) Bud-
dhism has often exhibited a vigorous missionary character. Its leg-
acy throughout the Asian world is a testimony to its periodic mis-
sionizing enterprise. Buddhism has also been, at times, a very
militant tradition. That this is a matter of Sinhala Buddhist self-
perception is also clearly reflected in the episodic Mahavamsa and
Culavamsa.39
Once again, the claim is predicated on a conjecture. It is this mission-

ary and violent spirit—or “two traits”—that “perhaps . . . the Chris-
tian missionaries helped to rekindle . . . within the very community
that they sought to convert.”40 Ironically, Holt does not seem to no-
tice that the notion of spirit he projects onto Buddhist history has a
modern Hegelian and colonial Christian genealogy, particularly in
the nineteenth-century liberal debates about the inheritance of “the
spirit and influence of the Reformation” in England and India.41 My
objection is not to a careless use of terminology. Rather, it is to the
supposed historical distinction between the history of Buddhist mil-
itancy and modernity that is central to the claim that Protestant Bud-
dhism is not “mainstream Protestantism.”42

Religion under the “Influence”

In what follows I want to show how this distinction between Bud-
dhism and modernity rests on the governing notion of influence and
to point out the enormous consequences of the theoretical problems
that that distinction produces. Holt claims that “it is necessary to
gauge the actual impact of this rekindled Buddhist missionary and
militant trend within the total scope of Sinhala Buddhism.”43 He
does so to suggest that, even though it is “dramatic, given the rising
militancy of political expediency in Sri Lanka,” the “spiritual influ-
ence” of “rekindled” Buddhist violence should not be “overesti-
mated” as “‘Protestant Buddhism’ has been overemphasized” in mo-
dernity. Here Holt not only makes a problematic distinction between
Buddhism and Protestantism, which he claims are “soteriologically”
and “categorically” different, but also makes a troubling distinction
of “substance” between the history of Buddhism and the history of
the modern West.44 This in turn becomes a distinction between Bud-
dhist violence and Christian violence in modernity: “We might con-
sider the actions and behavior of militant and missionary Buddhists
in the modern era as ‘mirror images’ of their Protestant rivals in
form, but not substance.”45 Without any theoretical justification,
“form” is “categorically” separated from the presumed “substance”
that defines the subjectivity of religious life.46 Even though Christian
missionaries may have helped “rekindle” violence in modern Bud-
dhists, that violence cannot be the “substance” of Protestantism. To
stress this distinction, Holt asserts that “all of this is not to deny that
there has been influence of Protestants on Buddhists (or vice versa,
for that matter). It is only to suggest that the influence was not very
substantive and was more in the nature of a stimulant for the reap-
pearance of some features of Buddhism that for long had remained
latent.”47 “Moreover,” Holt conjectures, “to characterize Buddhism
as ‘Protestant’ is to obscure the clarity of the obvious distinctions
that obtain between Protestant and Buddhist soteriologies. There
is, perhaps, no religion that is more antithetical soteriologically to
Theravada Buddhism than Protestantism. One is a religion of faith
while the other is one of self-effort.”48
The differences between Protestantism and Buddhism are natural-
ized in terms of propositions. The heritage of Protestantism in the

West versus that of Protestantism in the colonies is simply reduced to

the substance of “faith.” And Buddhism is reduced to the essence of
“self-effort,” an idea that forms part of the history of modern (liber-
al) conceptualizations of the “self.” I want to insist that I am not
making a moral judgment. Nor am I suggesting that there can be
no differences between “Buddhism” and “Protestantism.” My point
is that Holt preconceives such differences, given his assumption
about “the clarity of the obvious distinctions” between “form”
and “substance.” These distinctions remain essential to the theoriza-
tion of Buddhism and modernity in subsequent scholarship. Yet nei-
ther Holt nor that scholarship considers why these distinctions
depend on a demonstrably faulty logic that seeks to posit the differ-
ences between “religions” in terms of natural boundaries. For exam-
ple, Holt takes the “numerous” or “frequent” occasions of ritual in
Sinhalese Buddhism as further evidence of the boundary between
Buddhism and Protestantism: “Sinhala Buddhism remains, on the
whole, an extremely ritually oriented religious tradition, especially
in terms of its public ethos. Religious occasions celebrated in the
family, community, or in national contexts on daily, weekly, month-
ly, or annual occasions are far more numerous or frequent than in
the liturgical calendar of any Protestant community.”49 The idea
that the frequency of Buddhist rituals corresponds to a “distinction”
between Buddhism and Protestantism assumes that the frequency of
rituals carries the same meanings across time, always producing
the same dispositions and effects. This clearly ignores how power
produces dispositions in the uses and practices of ritual. But note
that the difference between Buddhism and Protestantism in terms
of the quantity of rituals is mapped onto a distinction of substances
with essential meanings. Hence the claim that even though “there
has been influence of Protestants on Buddhists (or vice versa, for
that matter), . . . the influence was not very substantive.”50 Influence
is judged to be merely a “stimulant” for the “spirit” of violence in
Buddhism. One may, of course, justifiably ask if the scholar’s de-
sire to identify such differences is part of the history of the colo-
nial and modern state’s attempts to distinguish “religious differ-
ences” in the politics of governance.51 The above conceptualization
of Buddhism and modernity in terms of “influence” is now part of

a well-established and still-growing archive of thinking about the

subject. Before I turn to the problem with this notion of “influence,”
I wish to note that the scholarship that has uncritically inherited
Holt’s critique has not sufficiently appreciated how “Buddhism”
and “Protestantism” themselves are discursive traditions in which
the genealogies of competing debates bring into being different no-
tions of temporality that do not presuppose self-evident distinctions.
The very concept of Protestantism is defined by such debates in shift-
ing moments of time. In Spiritual Despots J. Barton Scott analyzes in
detail the genealogy of the triangulation of three “technologies of the
self” that “circulated in the nineteenth century: liberalism, Protes-
tantism, and Hinduism.”52 “Protestantism” hardly remained an iden-
tifiable “substance” in this discursive conjuncture.53 The notion of
the “Protestant” was mediated through a complex network of differ-
ing citations that sought to articulate a new form of “ascetic” power.
In Scott’s words, “The very iterability of the ‘Protestant’ ensured that
each citation of the original would diverge from it, thereby calling
the unity of that original into question.”54 Put slightly differently,
what one can find in these “iterations” is a discursive tradition of
sensibilities as capacities to understand what specific styles of prac-
tice constitute a given object and subject of religious knowledge.55
The question of Protestant Buddhism has to be asked in terms of
how power authorizes what is and is not Protestant. And the ques-
tion of the influence of Protestantism on Buddhism is not something
that can be determined apart from power.
Holt claims that the Protestant “influence” merely provided “a
stimulant for the reappearance of some features of Buddhism that
for long had remained latent.” But one can talk about “latent” fea-
tures of Buddhist violence only in reference to the actual violence
that presumably follows it. When one does so, what is latent be-
comes superfluous; otherwise, one could posit an infinite number
of such potential latencies, which would be absurd. Given that laten-
cy is either superfluous or absurd, one must ask what purpose it
serves other than to locate violence in the very nature of the native
history-religion.56 Once violence is attributed to the agency of native
history, the responsibility for it lies with that history itself—a posi-
tion, as we shall see, that is common in the scholarship.

The naturalization of violence as latent in history then reduces the

notion of influence to an essence that must correspond to a given
object of knowledge: “Protestantism.”57 But then Buddhism itself
is given; that is, the Protestant influence was “not very substantive.”
Again, this view is hardly limited to Holt. Other scholars who have
followed Holt’s logic assume that the essence of influence is a verifi-
able object of knowledge.58 Anne M. Blackburn—whose work has
been attractive to recent scholars of Buddhism who seek to craft his-
tories of native agency and freedom unaffected by colonial power—
begins her second book by attempting to contest the “influential per-
spectives” on Buddhism in colonized South Asia.59 Blackburn claims
that the colonized retained a “degree of independence in the face of
French and British imperial designs,” which “affected” them “in dif-
ferent ways, and to very different degrees, depending on their cir-
cumstances and inclinations.”60 This story of “inclinations” is a
story of how natives “choose” to act independently of colonial influ-
ences. As I argue elsewhere, this talk of a “degree of independence”
that rested on native “inclinations” and choices suggests that colo-
nialism did not “wholly” or totally affect or displace the native cul-
ture, as the former was never a “totalizing power”—a claim that we
find uncritically repeated in many other works as well.61 Following
this logic, one could say this about almost any form of (colonial)
“power” whose “degree” of effect and influence is assumed to be de-
terminable, as if colonialism always contained visible borders of in-
fluence. What this logic also ignores is that colonialism is a power
that made possible the conditions for degrees of independence and
even freedom.62 In Saving Buddhism Alicia Turner, who draws on
Blackburn, foregrounds a similar story of native agency in the colo-
nial context of “diversity [that] offered a wide variety of influences
on the Burmese Buddhists in the last decade of the nineteenth centu-
ry. The technologies of travel and communication helped to create
cosmopolitan and hybrid identities.”63 In other words, Buddhists
“combined technologies of imagining from European social reform
and Buddhist thought to create new blends.” Turner’s is a story of
Buddhists’ resistance in that “they were happy to ‘adopt but adapt’
colonial ideas, desires, and projects, but they rarely made colonial
goals their own.”64 Turner’s typical story is also predicated on the

assumption that colonial power was not “absolute.”65 Thus she re-
jects the “idea of a Protestant Buddhism,” because it “too often
implies . . . total cultural impact.”66 Similarly, in a lengthy study
the anthropologist Steven Kemper labors to discern the real influence
on the figure of Dharmapala amid various influences making up his
“hybrid character” in the nineteenth century: “Dharmapala’s life
was more influenced by the exposed hand of Theosophy than [by]
the hidden hand of Protestantism.”67 Kemper goes on to claim that
he sees “no evidence of Olcott’s direct influence” on Dharmapala.68
As some readers of the present article who are sympathetic to
Turner and Kemper claim, Turner is not denying but acknowledging
that Buddhists were indeed influenced by colonial politics, and when
Kemper says that there was “no direct influence,” he means just that!
Both claims miss my basic point. My point is that scholars should
cease to try to decide on influence either way. The scholar’s decision
on the limits of influence tells us nothing about this question: How
does power authorize what constitutes influence for whom? Rather,
the scholar’s decision is an arbitrary exercise to determine the real in-
fluence of modernity on Buddhism, that is, to determine the totality of
influence. But this exercise is based on some questionable assump-
tions whereby influence is (or is determinable as affecting) a mental
state, an essence reducible to an interior experience of one’s innate
agency. On that account, influence is something that lies outside
one’s own agency.69 That is, agency is prior to influence, a notion that
has a complex modern genealogy in colonialism and liberalism.70
Scholars’ uncritical attempts to determine the boundary between
what is proper influence and what is not foreclose the possibility of
understanding the relation between form and life; in a form of life
influence is not identifiable independent of power.71 Consider these
examples in disparate circumstances: one looks at a line and draws a
copy next to it, letting oneself be guided by it; one walks along a
track in a field, letting oneself be guided by it; “someone leads you
along a footpath; you’re having a conversation; you go wherever he
goes.”72 Or consider this: a white man from Iowa goes to the local
Barnes and Noble and reads a book on mindfulness in everyday life;
he then finds out that it has something to do with Buddhism in Sri

Lanka, so he goes there and becomes certified as a teacher of Goen-

ka’s vipassana method. My question is this: Can one describe each of
these forms of activity, attitude, and capacity as characteristic of a
“particular experience” of influence? Yes, but one can do so only ret-
roactively. The “idea of that ethereal, intangible influence” as an ob-
ject of thought can arise only when we tell ourselves, “I was being
guided.”73 We would have to try to separate the seeming influence
from the circumstances of the activities, thereby creating the endless
problem of determining the essence of influence as a particular expe-
rience. In so doing, “you’re now thinking about it as a particular ex-
perience.”74 In the case of the white man, one may try to discern mul-
tiple influences, none of which is present in the mind of the white
man, who is not thinking about them, but all of which can be present
only in the mind of the analyst.75 In other words, what we see in each
of the man’s activities is an ability to do something, not a mental
state. Reflecting on an experience is not remembering it. In reflecting
on it as an experience, one looks at it through the “medium of the
concept . . . ‘influence’ or ‘cause’ or ‘connection.’”76 Rather, under-
stood as an ability, sensibility is a cultivated disposition inseparable
from a form of life.77 The sensibilities cannot be understood as a
“stimulant” to something “latent”; they constitute abilities to do cer-
tain things in relation to power, by which one is enabled to act in
particular circumstances in particular ways and not in others. Think-
ing this way about the temporality of sensibilities and abilities in re-
ligious life generates questions about what forms of distinct legal,
social, and political relationships make possible the cultivation, rep-
etition, memory, and even obstruction of sensibilities. As Asad and
others amply demonstrate, paying attention to such sensibilities is
important to thinking about temporality because it is “a matter of
showing how contingencies relate to changes in the grammar of
concepts—that is, how the changes in concepts articulate changes
in practices.”78 This is why Asad argues that shifts in a concept
like “secular” make possible shifts in the ways in which one knows,
senses, and acts in the world.
The separation of form (influence) from life allows Holt and other
scholars to naturalize the definition of the essential differences be-
tween Buddhism and Protestantism. Note Holt’s claim that Protes-
tant Buddhism is a reification because it is marginal to the urban

middle class in cities like Colombo and is “singularly unrepresenta-

tive of the traditional Sinhala Buddhist religiosity in general.”79
Again, whereas Gombrich and Obeyesekere speak of Protestant in-
fluences, styles, features, and even “echoes” found within the emerg-
ing nexus of the discourses and practices of the nineteenth-century
encounter, for Holt they are (in rather amorphous terms) “hardly
typical of mainstream Protestantism.”80 What is ignored is that, in
speaking of the styles of discourse and practice, Gombrich and
Obeyesekere do not merely presuppose that “Protestant” Buddhists
can be counted as separate from regular Buddhists. After all, how
precisely could one delimit the sensibilities in the web of colonial
discourses—mediated through new forms of capillary power and
made possible not just by particular legal reforms of “governmental-
ity”81 but also by the particular social spaces of thinking and reason-
ing marked by public debates between the Buddhists and the mis-
sionaries, by the creation of Buddhist Sunday schools in villages,
and by the complex of newspapers and journals as well as other me-
dia? And how could one determine the relation between these dis-
courses and dispositional attitudes that depend on the structures
of the senses—hearing, feeling, remembering, speaking, and arguing
about such discourses—during and after the colonial encounter?
Such sensibilities are not merely representable influences. Yet Holt’s
grand abstractions ignore how these forms of power work in a form
of life as distinct abilities in varying moments of time. He presup-
poses that “Protestant” Buddhists, in contrast to regular Buddhists,
are confined to select geographic spaces. Even though Holt criticizes
Gombrich and Obeyesekere for reifying Protestant Buddhism, it is
Holt who maintains a desire to count and sort Buddhists like nuts
and bolts in a drawer.82 Surely we would not want to reduce a
form of life to the ontological commitments of hardware stockers.
A form of life constituted by the cultivation of distinct aptitudes
and sensibilities grants the possibility of their variability in given his-
torical moments. Such forms of sensibility cannot be judged by a
codified set of “rules.”83 Following Wittgenstein, one can say that
prior knowledge of the rules of the game of chess does not guarantee
how one will make “moves” when one is engaged in the “activity” of
it—in the “circumstances we call ‘playing a game of chess,’ ‘solving a

chess problem,’ and the like.” For “making a move in chess does not
consist only in pushing a piece from here to there on the board—nor
yet in the thoughts and feelings that accompany the move.”84
The notion of influence is central to Holt’s understanding of the
temporality of Buddhism in terms of the “reemergence” of history.
He does not consider that the notion of reemergence is not some-
thing natural but has its possibility in “retroactive” power.85 Take
the nineteenth-century Zionist call for the “return” of the Jewish
people to Palestine. That call was predicated on the proposition
that nineteenth-century Palestine belonged to the “Jewish people”
of sixth-century BCE Palestine. Yet the concept of the “return” of
the “Jewish people” included new converts to Judaism. That is, the
return was predicated on the claim that even the newly converted
were the same ancient people. I am suggesting not that this claim was
wrong but rather that it was the grammar of the claim that rendered
it intelligible and persuasive to particular persons in historical times.
As we know, the intelligibility of the grammar that made the return
to Palestine possible in the twentieth century (marked by the Law of
Return) was part of particular discourses authorizing the sensibilities
of the memory that persons had of themselves as a Jewish people,
none of whom as individuals could have met in history. Surely it is
a mistake to assume that the idea of return had readily formed sen-
sibilities outside the retroactive spaces of power. One may find refer-
ence to such a notion in a given historical text, but the notion is not
self-evidently available without the specific discursive spaces where
someone has to make it clear authoritatively what it means. If it re-
mained self-evident, one would not need to talk about and debate it.
Holt’s flawed critique, with its troubling idea of history, has been
crucial to a large body of scholarship on Buddhism. For more than
two decades, from 1995 to 2017, the scholarship has remained as-
tonishingly oblivious to all its theoretical and empirical problems
and has uncritically cited it as the model critique of Protestant Bud-
dhism.86 The uncritical citations of Holt’s work necessarily implicate
them in the troubling notion of history that Holt constructs in that
the dominant claim of the scholarship is that “Buddhism” or Bud-
dhist agency is not influenced or totally influenced by Protestant-
ism and colonialism in general. Holt’s critique and its notion of

“reemergence” are founded on assumptions about some Buddhist

history with its time internal to itself, that is, possessing its own agen-
cy.87 Thus it is no accident that the governing aim of the scholarship
filial to Holt’s critique has been to recover local Buddhist history (or
“internal dynamics”) animated by its own agency. In their attempt to
understand such local “Buddhist dynamics,” scholars mistakenly
speak of multiple “Buddhisms,”88 just as humanities theorists inter-
ested in “drawing attention to the heterogeneous, local, and regional
developments” call for “multiple modernities” and “secularisms.”89
The story of Buddhist agency becomes a story of how local history
has the capacity to reinvent itself.90 Scholars may not have endorsed
all of Holt’s problematic claims about the reemergence of Buddhist
history, yet they have failed to notice the conceptual problems that
animate the notion of reemergence, which cannot be disconnected
from Holt’s understanding of the default state of Buddhism as one
of violence or peace. Holt’s notion of reemergence and his follow-
ers’ idea of the internal agency of Buddhist history animate each
other. This emphasis on agency has prevented scholars from think-
ing about the temporality of tradition beyond the idea of “change”
as internal to Buddhist history without an original essence.91 On this
view, the question of tradition is reduced to a notion of internal time
that necessarily produces a temporal outside. This problem is hardly
obviated by the scholars’ assertions about “the constant interplay
between . . . local and global forces in history.”92
I cannot, of course, detail here all the works making such argu-
ments about dynamism. But a few examples show how this idea in-
scribes a problematic relation between agency and “responsibility.”
Blackburn, who draws on Holt and whose work has been instru-
mental to much of the scholarship, argues that “the long, internally
dynamic, and contentious history of Lankan Buddhism of the preco-
lonial period,” which produces its own change, is to be contrasted
with the external “force” of colonial power (modernity), which does
not wholly affect or is resisted by local Buddhist agency—that is, by
“the local social logic and intellectual creativity of lives fashioned in
the context of colonialism.”93 Similarly, Turner’s Saving Buddhism
tells a story of modern Burmese Buddhism in terms of the “logic”
of the “internal dynamics” of history. Turner tells us that the agency

of Buddhists “who collectively constituted themselves and their

world” cannot be ceded to “a singular and external force of colonial-
ism or modernity.”94 With recourse to Jean Comaroff and John L.
Comaroff’s problematic notion of the relation between colonialism
and native “consciousness” as a “symbolic struggle,” Turner claims
that “colonialism or modernity” did not “exert singular or absolute
agency,”95 since
for all the constraints, Burmese Buddhists challenged the catego-

ries Europeans proposed. They questioned and rejected some of
the cultural products and the ways in which the construction of
religion and the definition of its capacities constrained their imag-
ination and vision of their communal future. Definitions of reli-
gion were more contested and more malleable than either our
academic analysis or colonial officials were comfortable with.
Religion proved to be, if less fluid than sāsana [“dispensation”]
and identity, still a place of active dispute, invention, and redefini-
tion. Buddhists in colonial Burma worked these things out
pragmatically—with their shoes off.96
Thus resistance (“Burmese Buddhists challenged the categories Eu-

ropeans proposed” or “as much as the efforts of the . . . Buddhists’
means of understanding themselves were shaped by their colonial
conditions, they also resisted the pull of colonial forces”) is turned
into evidence about agency, as resistance is assumed to be the oppo-
site of passive reception.97 This notion of agency presupposes the
consciousness of a subject whose choices are free of force.98 First,
this assumption fails to understand the relation between power and
freedom in general and in colonialism in particular. Colonial power,
of course, made possible the very debates about “religion” within
the spaces it organized for their conduct; that is, such debates always
assume a power relationship in which the language of argument
depends on certain horizons of intelligibility where only particular
options are available.99 The conditions of power that inform such
debates cannot be separated from what R. G. Collingwood calls
“a logic of question and answer.”100 The debates in colonial Burma
have to be seen as specific answers to specific questions invoked by
a situation. Or, as Asad puts it in terms of an extreme example, it is

like a game of chess where the moves one side makes are a response
to the moves made on the opposing side, which sometimes leaves one
with fewer options.101 To see the circumstantial choices that an in-
dividual makes as the unilateral work of a conscious agent is to mis-
take the retroactive identification of agency as a transcendental ca-
pacity. Second, the relation between agency and resistance is
founded on a problematic relation between agency/subjectivity
and responsibility. What this also fails to take into account is, for ex-
ample, how certain embodied forms of pain, including the medical
valorization of the endurance of pain at particular times in moderni-
ty or practices of penance and obedience in a religious tradition like
medieval Christianity, are distinct abilities acquired in relationships
of power and authority, which can hardly be reduced to an agent
whose life, as defined by some dominant secular discourses, is op-
posed to that of the patient.102 But, like Blackburn, McDaniel, and
many other scholars of Buddhism, Turner wants to demarcate un-
mistakably the agency of Burmese Buddhists and their “moral com-
munity” vis-à-vis colonialism. “Membership in the moral communi-
ty responsible for the Buddha’s sāsana under colonialism gave
individual laypeople a new sense of moral agency. They now held
in themselves both the responsibility and the power to shape their
world.”103 Ironically, the Buddhists are now uncritically assigned
a liberal notion of “responsibility . . . to shape their world” even
as they are said to embody some agency internal to their own “Bud-
dhist worldview” and history. As Turner emphasizes, “This growing
sense of identity . . . [is] imagined not through the idea of [colonial]
nation but through a Buddhist worldview.” And this identity and
agency, Turner says, “offered individual Buddhists . . . the moral
choices of their everyday lives.”104 Choices now cast as agency are
rendered transcendental, outside the situation that made them pos-
sible. Erik Braun, another historian of Buddhism, casts the difference
between native Buddhist agency and colonial power in a similar
vein. He repeats the familiar flawed claim that colonialism was not
a “totalizing power” and “did not negate the power of precolonial
Burmese history. . . . Tradition in this perspective contains reason
and freedom within it. It is this conscious agency to choose to

preserve thought and practice that signals the use of the past as a ra-
tional choice in response to present circumstances.”105
Astoundingly, Braun carelessly maps the Buddhist world of prac-
tice and tradition onto modern categories of “reason and freedom,”
“conscious agency,” and “rational choice.” Note in particular that,
like Turner, Braun takes the relation between consciousness and
agency as simply axiomatic. Tethered to agency, consciousness is
made to be transcendental, able to withstand the onslaught of the
social conditions and the changes that constitute them. Braun seems
oblivious to the critiques of such problematic concepts, through
which modern forms of subjectivity have been imagined within con-
tested genealogies. Once again, the irony is that Braun and company,
who claim to describe native Buddhists in their own terms, end up
representing them through universalist norms.106 The categories are
not flawed in themselves, but the universalist sense with which they
are overlaid onto Buddhist lives ignores the genealogies of their use
with competing ideological definitions (both European and Bur-
mese) that include and exclude particular modes of practice and sen-
sibility.107 Braun, like so many scholars of Buddhism, is confusing
reason with practices of reasoning (and what Wittgenstein calls “giv-
ing reasons”). The practice of reasoning is not about reason with
some transcendental and essential logic but is part of a language
game, that is, the practice of language as embedded in a relationship
of power. For example, in an answer to a question, to give a reason is
to give a reason for something specific to a context. Reasoning is not
a way to merely account for an action but is in response to a specific
demand by specific persons for an appropriate action for a particular
purpose in a given situation. Thus asking for and giving reasons are
part of a conversation and not simply a set of entailments of a free-
floating proposition, where it is not certain that a given reason will
always work in every situation. This is why giving reasons is always
part of a conversation, where reasons go only so far, requiring per-
suasion.108 But the way Braun privileges reason to be coterminous
with free choice and agency equates reasoning with what one does
because of preexisting reason. Reason simply determines reasoning.
Confusing reason with reasoning, putting reason before a language
game, is like putting the cart before the horse!

This universalist notion of agency is reminiscent of the anthropo-

logical claims (advanced by anthropologists like Marshall Sahlins
and Sherry Ortner) that native subjects are “making their own his-
tory,” even in the face of a “force” like capitalism or colonialism. As
Asad argues, however, “Even the inmates of a concentration camp
are able, in this sense, to live by their own cultural logic. But one
may be forgiven for doubting that they are therefore ‘making their
own history.’”109 Part of the problem with these theories of Buddhist
agency and freedom is that power is taken to be a negative concept;
that is, (colonial-external) power is simply opposed to (local) free-
dom. It is not appreciated how power as “capability” does not ne-
gate but rather authorizes and enables distinct modes of “freedom”
in binding social relations.110 And scholars have failed to consider
that to assign agency independent of power to a given historical sub-
ject is to assign to her distinct moral, political, and judicial notions of
responsibility that carry distinct senses of “possibilities and limits.”
As Asad argues, “‘Agency’ operates through a particular network of
concepts within which the historical possibilities and limits of re-
sponsibility are defined.” But the kinds of questions that are often
not asked in narratives of agency are: “What are the culturally spe-
cific properties that define agency? How much agency do particular
categories of person possess? For what and to whom are agents re-
sponsible? When and where can attributions of agency be successful-
ly disowned?”111
The concept of internal historical time marked by its agency and
freedom is tied to the scholarly understanding of the relation be-
tween Buddhism and modernity as a question of influence. Under-
stood as a transcendent “force,” influence must always be identified
as such within and in contrast to the “internal dynamics” of Bud-
dhist history and time. Hence the repeated claims that colonialism
was not a totalizing power or force. Paradoxically, the scholarly calls
for not overestimating the force of colonial influence on Buddhist
agency is often couched as a moral critique of colonialism itself. Con-
sider how in a canonical essay that has had remarkable traction with-
in and beyond Buddhist studies, a prominent scholar of Theravada
Buddhism, Charles Hallisey, counsels other scholars: “We should
avoid attributing too much force to the ‘West’ (or Christianity, or

Protestant assumptions, or Orientalism) in the changes to Theravāda

Buddhism which occurred in the nineteenth century,” as “it has the
unintended consequence of once again hypostasizing and reifying
an absolute divide between ‘the West’ and ‘the Orient’” and the
“ironic effect of once more denying any voice to ‘Orientals.’”112
Hallisey seeks to undermine the story of colonial influence on Bud-
dhism in part by way of an awkward appeal to an a priori sense of
what “Theravada” is that is—for the most part—obvious only to the
scholar. This a priori sense is then presented to us as a natural stan-
dard by which to judge changes in Theravada in colonial and other
times. With a sudden, curious, and unjustifiable move to compare
the question of Sri Lankan Buddhism to that of Thai Buddhism, Hal-
lisey writes that the “explanation [of the emergence of Protestant
Buddhism], rooted as it is in the circumstances of modern Sri Lankan
history, seems incomplete when viewed from the perspective of events
in Thailand. Developments quite similar to those which shaped
modern Sinhala Buddhism also transformed Thai Buddhism, but
without the element of colonial domination or a sharp confrontation
between Buddhists and Christian missionaries so visible in Sri Lan-
ka.”113 First, the assumption that the explanation of Sri Lankan Prot-
estant Buddhism can be complete only through a comparison with
another country like Thailand creates an unwarranted and impossi-
ble criterion of time where the identity of Theravada is to be judged
by a given set of events in the countries that seem to unite into a com-
plete totality at a given moment. But the teleological abstractness of
this totality makes it always possible to doubt that a given set of
events constituting a finality has reached the threshold of comple-
tion at any moment of time. Second, let us be clear: the claim that
developments in Sri Lanka and Thailand seem “quite similar” de-
spite the different social conditions does not reflect “the perspective
of events.” Hallisey has a number of references to perception here
(e.g., “seems,” “when viewed,” and “from the perspective”) and
yet assiduously avoids letting us in on who is doing the perceiving
(i.e., seems to whom? When viewed by whom?). Surely no number
of “events” in Thailand or anywhere else can be said to have a “per-
spective.” So who is it for whom this “seems”? Whose imperious
“perspective” is it? Whose vantage affords them a wide enough

gaze to be able to judge “similarity” or “difference” between Orien-

tals and colonialists? We are left to assume that it is Hallisey who
places himself in this position and sitteth on the right hand of Rhys
Davids to judge between the Buddhist and the colonial influences. It
is Hallisey who projects his perspective as a natural basis for viewing
Sri Lanka from the “perspective” of Thai events. To do this, Hallisey
expects us to take both countries to be self-evidently “Theravada.”
What is absent in Theravada Thailand (colonialism) is taken to con-
firm what seems to Hallisey the self-evident identity of Theravada in
both countries (“developments quite similar”). The geopolitical dif-
ferences in both countries are simply filtered through the self-evident
Theravada so that Hallisey can claim as a fact that “the representa-
tions of Buddhism articulated by Rama I and Mongkut are in many
remarkable ways identical to the representation of early Buddhism
constructed by Rhys Davids, especially with respect to their common
neglect of cosmology and ritual in favor of individual rationality and
morality.”114 All the while, the issue of for whom they are “identical”
is never questioned and is instead made to be justified by an appeal to
a nebulous theoretical entity called “elective affinity” or “intercul-
tural mimesis” whose parameters are so broad that any given repre-
sentation by the natives and colonizers could be compared to be
“similar.” It is with this sleight of hand that Hallisey can claim,
“We should also keep in mind that Theravāda Buddhists them-
selves subscribed, at least at times, to a similar ‘metaphysics of ori-
gins’” like the “positivist historiography which consistently privi-
leged earlier texts” by Western scholars. Hallisey goes on to say,
“This conception of tradition, historicist in its own way, provided
the ideological context for the most common genres in the Theravā-
din literature.”115
Part of the problem is that the postcolonial scholarship has ig-
nored the existing literature on why the idea of Buddhism as a “dis-
cursive tradition” is not founded on a natural division between a
temporal “inside” and a temporal “outside,” a division also pre-
sented in terms of the “local” and the “colonial,” which, in Hallisey’s
and others’ formulations, are said to interact or “resonate.”116 A dis-
cursive tradition is an embodied tradition requiring coherence. The
intelligibility of which rival concepts, practices, persons, memories,

and sensibilities can come to count as, and be embodied within, such
a tradition is authorized by processes of power. 117 The shifting con-
figurations of power authorizing particular kinds of ability in a
discursive tradition make irrelevant, if not impossible, the scholars’
attempts to categorize and compare them as ready-to-hand signs in-
telligible across time. As mentioned earlier, Asad has argued that the
embodied “discipline” constituted the “form of life” in the monastic
community. Discursiveness and embodiment are coconstitutive, and
the coherence of the tradition depends on that coconstitution. The
coherence of a tradition is neither stable nor always achieved, yet tra-
dition’s aspiration to coherence through contentious debates is es-
sential to a shared form of life lived within the resources of a com-
munity.118 In thinking about Islam in relation to political demands
for Muslims to “assimilate” to an allegedly fixed culture of modern
Europe, where they can be statistically represented as “minorities,”
Asad seeks to redirect attention away from questions about “how
identities are negotiated and recognized (for example, through ex-
ploratory and constructive dialogue, as Charles Taylor has advocat-
ed). Rather, the focus should be on what it takes to live particular
ways of life continuously, co-operatively, and unselfconsciously.”119
It is tradition’s aspiration to a coherent way of life in the present that
makes the past and the future inseparable from the present:120 “The
past would continue to be necessary to a coherent form of life, or to a
life aspiring to coherence. The familiar claim that ‘tradition is a mod-
el of the past . . . in the present’ tends not only to separate the past
unthinkingly from the present; it also renders tradition as a represen-
tation of time sited in a circumscribed reality (‘the present’).”121 The
question of influence—which has attracted scholars’ theorization of
the distinction between Buddhism and modernity, the past and the
present—has preempted inquiries into how time is encountered
and lived in a form of life. That question of influence already treats
tradition as “a model of the past . . . in the present.” Time becomes
an object of the present’s representation by way of scholars’ labor to
identify and separate influences from the form of life in the present.
In this view, time becomes synonymous with an experience of the
cognitive, a “phenomenon” that must “be called to mind.”122 The

time of the past that is not an object of representation, one that is not
called to mind, is encountered and lived in a coherent form of life in
the present. Investigating how power authorizes distinct sensibilities
of temporality, of inhabiting different kinds of time in a discursive
tradition, can help us understand that the notion of “modern histo-
ry” that “links time past to time present, and reorients its narrative
to the future” is only one kind of time that “people imagine, respond
to, and use.”123
Temporality Entailed in the Separation between Religion

and Modernity
In what follows I examine precisely how this notion of the temporal-
ity of tradition is obscured by the separation of religion and moder-
nity in the latest major work by the anthropologist Steven Kemper,
Rescued from the Nation, where, once again, the idea of Protestant
Buddhism is contested, determining modernity’s influence on the
Buddhist tradition through a detailed examination of the ascetic life
of Anagarika Dharmapala. I want to discuss specifically why Kem-
per’s narrative obscures how the sensibilities of temporality—of in-
habiting the relation between the past, the present, and the future—
work in the shared life of a tradition like Buddhism. At stake in Kem-
per’s story is the place of time, history, and memory in tradition. But
the notion of history that plays an organizing role in the story of
Dharmapala and Buddhism makes it difficult to understand the re-
lation between temporality and tradition in the present. The ways
temporality is encountered in the grammar of the present’s sensibil-
ities are very different from the way Kemper’s history of Dharmapala
seeks to memorialize the past.124
Based on the study of Dharmapala’s diaries and notebooks (he
learned the habit of keeping diaries from Olcott), Kemper’s mono-
graph is an all-out labor to rescue the modern Buddhist reformer
not only from the notion of Protestant Buddhism but also from
the nation. Dharmapala, who spent most of his adult life abroad—
largely in Calcutta and London, Kemper says—was a “world re-
nouncer” following the “Buddhist tradition.” Kemper writes:

Paying attention to his sense of himself as a world renouncer

avoids using him for the sake of either the nation or Protestant
Buddhism. It avoids dividing his life into irreconcilable parts, na-
tionalist at home and universalist abroad. It avoids teleology.
What allowed him to move easily and often between contexts
was that he was a world renouncer at home and abroad, keeping
distance from the roles he embodied in both places. His thinking
of himself as such made it easy for him to imagine being born in
India, Japan, Switzerland, or England.125
It is not hard to see that Kemper’s labor is to sort through the “hybrid
character” and excavate the real meaning of Dharmapala on the ba-
sis of “his sense of himself as a world renouncer,” the self that was
“overcoded and overdetermined . . . by Theosophical and Buddhist
meanings.”126 Many of Dharmapala’s activities abroad, Kemper says,
were not “political” or “activist.” Both in Sri Lanka and abroad,
Dharmapala preached “several Buddhisms,” but “the central Bud-
dhism” he learned from texts written in English by Westerners and
practiced was “his own,” and it centered on meditation, celibacy, as-
ceticism, and self-discipline; that central Buddhism “differed sub-
stantially from what might be called the regional Buddhisms of In-
dia, England, and Sri Lanka.”127 Moreover, Dharmapala’s “struggle
at Bodh Gaya—which continued for four decades . . . —had no mo-
tivation of a nationalist kind. His struggle for Bodh Gaya was pan-
Asian; at moments, it reached beyond Asia. He called that campaign
simply Buddhist.”128
Throughout his biography Kemper is at pains to define what con-
stitutes “political,” “nationalist,” “spiritual,” “personal,” and “col-
lective,” as they all appear to him to be self-evident. “The fact was,”
he writes, “that Dharmapala did not call monks to political action;
he urged them to be more engaged in the spiritual life, more learned,
and committed to a new task with little nationalist content, carrying
the Dhamma overseas to non-Buddhist places.” He urged monks to
“direct . . . energy at reconstructing Sinhala society, not toward play-
ing a political role of any kind.” Kemper argues that “it is fair
enough to call him [Dharmapala] an ‘anti-imperialist’ if imperial-
ism refers to the cultural and economic domination of colonized

countries. As for his interest in fighting for freedom, when he spoke

of freedom, he thought of it as personal and spiritual, not collective
and political.”129 Dharmapala’s “goal was not rationalization on the
Protestant model; the goal was showing Sinhalas how to be more
civilized (so that in ‘forty years’ they could win the benefits of self-
rule in both senses of the word).”130 This was, of course, the same
“British subject” whose own mother advised him in 1900 not to re-
turn to the island because of “British suspicions about his loyalty.”131
In Kemper’s biography Dharmapala is always the author of his
own life.
My aim here is not to question the claims Kemper makes to criti-
cize the connection between Dharmapala and Protestant Buddhism—
that is, between Buddhism and modernity—which resonate with the
scholarship discussed earlier. My concern, rather, is with the notion
of tradition that Kemper uses loosely to rescue the “personal” renun-
ciant life of Dharmapala from the modernity of nationalism (and
Protestant Buddhism). Kemper’s notion of tradition presupposes
an intrinsic distinction between the past’s historicity and the tempo-
rality of the present. To rescue Dharmapala from the temporality of
the present is to excavate the past—and its historicity. The temporal-
ity of the present is that of modern “nationalism,” which has covered
up the past (buried in the accounts of Dharmapala’s diaries). The dis-
tinction that Kemper wants to canonize between his history of Dhar-
mapala and the temporality of the nation or nationalism is, then, a
certain distinction between Buddhism and modernity.
So I ask: Is this a theoretically convincing account of the tempo-
rality of Buddhism and modernity? The problem with the attempt to
rescue the canonized biography of Dharmapala from the nation is
that it naturalizes a distinction between the past and the temporality
of the present. As a biography, the text already produces for the read-
er a horizon of expectations, inherent in the genre of biographical
writing, against which the excavated and memorialized life of Dhar-
mapala is to be read.132 The reader is expected to enter the biography
of Dharmapala already expecting the privateness of his life. Contra
Kemper’s claim, however, the account ultimately produces a teleol-
ogy of Dharmapala’s life through which the present questions about

his past are to be posed. That account, then, is not a mere description
of the past but a normative explanation of the present that has “mis-
used” the past.
Kemper contrasts his history of Dharmapala with the latter’s
“mythologized status in the Sinhala public sphere,” which is said
to have begun forming even before his death. For Kemper, this “my-
thologized” status simply points to the misuse of Dharmapala in the
present. He identifies a development that contributed to the misuse
of Dharmapala: the state’s publication of selective parts of his diaries
in 1962. This state publication had less impact on the public than on
the modern scholars who wrote about Dharmapala. So Kemper
charges that scholars “have misused him as much as the national-
ists.”133 My objection to Kemper’s account arises not just because
the idea of the “misuse” of a historical subject always presupposes
a proper use of her,134 or because it presupposes that such a subject is
always the author of her own life, but also because it ignores that the
uses of a historical subject are products of the shifting grammar of
shared sensibilities—sensibilities about what the memory of a histor-
ical subject means to whom and how that memory enables particular
modes of activity and attitude in different circumstances. The use of
the past in a discursive tradition cannot simply be a question about
the proper use of it, unless one already assumes, as a scholar may,
that history is always a question of subjective knowledge and mem-
ory. That assumption treats the knowledge of history as a corrective
to the present “misuse” of the past (e.g., nationalism). And it is pre-
cisely that assumption which governs Kemper’s account of Dharma-
pala and his relation to Buddhism. Canonized as an object of knowl-
edge, Kemper’s biography produces a memory of Dharmapala. As
such, that memory is expected to do the work of invoking in the in-
dividual reader the same dispositions toward Dharmapala, no mat-
ter the circumstances that may give rise to varying questions about
his life. But memory, of course, is not an unmediated capability with-
in an internalized state, always present in the mind of an individual.
The question of how one remembers the past is a question of how
one encounters temporality within the sensibilities of the present.
That encounter of temporality is not merely a subjective experience
of history; it is an encounter with the conditions of power.

The idea of the “mythologized status in the Sinhala public sphere,”

which Kemper understands as a misuse, grants the existence of some
public or collective knowledge of Dharmapala. Kemper views the
“mythologized status” as having resulted from “the popular appro-
priation” of Dharmapala, but the shared sensibilities making pos-
sible a form of life are more than a “popular appropriation” of a
historical memory. The shared sensibilities of memory depend on
dispositions made possible by the circumstances of the present,
which are not merely available to be appropriated within the realm
of the “popular.” Kemper hardly clarifies the idea of the “popular,”
the shifting forms of power that constitute it, as he takes it for
granted that the popular can be identified to exist out there as an ap-
parent sign of reality. The present is not a “homogenous time” with-
in which the past, as an unchanging substance, can be inherited.135
The present is constituted by the altering conditions of sensibilities
and dispositions—conditions that create particular modes of recep-
tiveness, which may produce particular forms of sensibility. Sensibil-
ities of temporality, of inhabiting different kinds of time—say, the
memory of Dharmapala—in the shared life of a tradition are not
quite like a “popular” fashion that one may easily appropriate.136
The question, then, is how such sensibilities of temporality form a
tradition, where one cannot take for granted that the memory of the
past is always freely available as a subjective experience. Let us look
at this question through a simple example Kemper mentions. In not-
ing how “Dharmapala’s status has grown over the years” in Sri Lan-
ka’s nationalism, Kemper writes: “His birthday is remembered with
celebrations across the island. . . . By 1979 the island had twelve stat-
ues of Dharmapala; and nowadays there are several streets named
after him in Colombo and others in Anuradhapura, Galle, Matara,
and Kandy. Speeches given at Dharmapala’s birthday celebration at
Mahabodhi Society headquarters—the organization he founded in
1891—suggest why people take him seriously.”137 My question is
this: Even if since 1979 more streets have been named after him,
more statues made of him, speeches given at his annual birthday cel-
ebration, and so on, would they constitute signs that signify the
growing status of Dharmapala in Sinhalese “nationalism”? If so,
for whom would they constitute such signs? How would these signs

work within an ongoing discursive tradition of Dharmapala, if there

is such a tradition? Kemper does not consider these questions be-
cause, as a scholar, he already thinks of those signs as containing a
distinct code of meanings, which he evaluates in relation to his me-
morialized archive of Dharmapala. Kemper does not think about the
conditions of the present, where Buddhists would have to encounter
those signs in social conditions different from those of past sensibil-
ities about Dharmapala in Sri Lankan nationalism, and how author-
ity works in those conditions in different ways. Kemper mistakes the
“popular” for the kinds of sensibilities that must be authorized by
power whereby one can understand Dharmapala’s importance to a
given present time. For Kemper, in other words, the popular becomes
a sign that is always readable independent of power.
Again, the question not asked is how the conditions of encounter-
ing these signs work within a particular discursive tradition of mem-
ory about Dharmapala.138 One may, of course, utter, hear, or see the
name Dharmapala in one’s daily conversations or surroundings. For
instance, in giving directions to someone in Sri Lanka, one might say
to go past Dharmapala Street or the Dharmapala statue to reach a
place. In such instances, one does not think about Dharmapala in
relation to a code of meanings that always invoke a transcendental
memory. (Likewise, when one hears the words Memorial Day, one
does not necessarily think about the war dead and about the sensi-
bilities that that thought invokes in oneself and others. On hearing
Memorial Day, one may instead think of “holiday,” “picnic,” or
“hot dogs.”) My point is that what Dharmapala means to whom
must be found in differing encounters of social conditions of power
that seek to produce coherent thinking and understanding of Dhar-
mapala, with passionate dispositions, to advance different sociopo-
litical projects. And these social conditions and the sensibilities they
mark cannot be lumped into a generic story of the semiotics of the
growth of Dharmapala’s status in popular nationalism. Surely, the
conditions of present sensibilities about Dharmapala cannot be the
same as the conditions of the past, unless one thinks that the past
grammar of Dharmapala’s life is always accessible in relation to
the sign Dharmapala. The problem is that Kemper is using a prop-
osition to bear on the relations of power.139 The relations of power

cannot simply be reduced to a misuse of the history of the past. This

brings up an important question about history and the present that I
can only touch on here.
I write this article amid a raging debate about the “rise” of racism
and anti-Semitism in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election
in the United States. Surely, one cannot assume that a historical ex-
posé correcting the inaccurate representations of past race relations
in America will correct the contemporary problem of racism. Rather,
one has to ask how contemporary dispositions toward racism de-
pend on particular forms of social persuasion in the present.140 I
do not, of course, discount the importance of works of history and
genealogy, but I do argue that one has to be clear about what one is
trying to say about history and its relation to the present.141 After all,
Kemper’s work is not just a history; it is also a historical reassessment
of the present. I have tried to suggest that thinking about the tempo-
rality of the present requires attention to how time is encountered in
dispositions constituting a coherent form of life in a tradition. That
question of the present encounter of time in a tradition is crucial to
understanding the temporal relation between Buddhism and moder-
nity. But the distinction between Buddhism and modernity, which
produces a teleology of the textualized memory of the past, hinders
thinking about the temporality of tradition and the present.
Can the Opposite Argument Work? Concluding Remarks

So far I have argued in this article that the scholarly distinction be-
tween Buddhism and modernity, often made through the study of
modernity’s influence on Buddhism, precludes our understanding
the relation between a coherent form of life and the temporality of
a discursive tradition. I wish to conclude by reflecting briefly on a
question that some may ask: What about the reverse argument, ad-
vanced by some beyond the field of Buddhist studies, that religion
and modernity are connected? Sometimes the argument is cast in
broader terms to include a posited connection between religion
and secularism or even religion and democracy, a presumption
that has now come under criticism.142 A similar argument about re-
ligion and modernity can be found in J. Barton Scott’s sophisticated

and learned work Spiritual Despots. I cannot engage the book in

detail here, but I wish to make some brief remarks on why Scott’s
argument about the connection between religion and modernity
takes for granted some assumptions about temporality and tradi-
tion. Scott’s basic argument is that the kinds of new programs of as-
cetic discipline that nineteenth-century reformers (such as Keshub
Chunder Sen, Karsandas Mulji, and Dayananda Saraswati) advocat-
ed to define a “religious modernity” against what they called the
“priestcraft” of the gurus cannot be understood merely as practices
of (secular) freedom. Those programs of discipline presuppose that
“the subject of self-rule is always necessarily open to incorporation
into networks of guidance that exceed and constrain her.”143 That
modern subject, Scott argues, is a “split ascetic self”—that is, a
self split between autonomy and heteronomy. The split ascetic is sub-
ject to obedience, inhabiting “a norm or rule that by definition pre-
cedes him.”144 So Scott claims that “religious and secular asceticisms
are not as different as one might think.”145
This is an attractive argument, but the problem is that Scott’s
claim is a theory that does not describe a form of life. It is a theory
because it is based on the “model of the worldly ascetic” that he ar-
bitrarily decides to find in a story of the epic Mahabharata. The story
is about a man named Ekalavya who practices archery with “rigid
regularity” and finally masters it by worshipping a clay figure he
makes of the archery teacher Drona, who refused to teach him the
art. Later Drona, having been confronted by his jealous student Ar-
juna, asks the devoted Ekalavya to cut off his right thumb as com-
pensation for the teacher’s services. For Scott, the story is about how
one, the teacher or the student, is never “equivalent” to oneself. No-
where are we told why this story constitutes a model in Hinduism.
The problem with Scott’s model is that no nineteenth-century re-
former ever referred to this story in that discursive terrain. Scott’s
model creates an arbitrary connection between the past and the tem-
porality of the present, which flies in the face of Scott’s own claim
that tradition is not ahistorical. As he notes, the story of Ekalavya
has a tradition of “subsequent retellings,” yet that is something
he does not consider. The model of the split ascetic self prevents us
from understanding the temporality of the discursive tradition of

Hinduism where such stories are put to use—how such stories define
what kinds of religious subjectivity and distinction for whom and
what those definitions do in terms of a coherent form of life.
This general model of the self, which is essential to Scott’s argu-
ment that religious and secular asceticisms are not that different, ig-
nores how shifting grammar makes possible distinctions between
what is modern and what is religious. Such grammar is not reducible
to a model story from the past, and it cannot simply be imposed on
the present independent of that tradition and the specific social dis-
positions and sensibilities that constitute its genealogy. What partic-
ular notions of the past are invoked by whom to authorize what
modes of thinking and acting in the present are a product of power
connected to particular institutional-social debates.146 Scott’s claim
that the secular and the religious (asceticisms) are not so different
can be asserted only by bypassing the tradition of debates where
the concept of the past has use in the present. More generally, in
our thinking about religion and modernity, what is needed is not a
continuing story of how the secular is not separate from the reli-
gious. That story does not help us understand which persons and de-
bates get to define what is “secular” and what those particular def-
initions do. “Grammar,” as Asad argues, “tells us that there is no
scientific answer to the question: What is ‘a secular body’? There
are only conventional rules (connected to particular ways of life)
that tell us when a particular usage of the term can be regarded as
correct or incorrect. It does not follow from this, of course, that
grammar commits us irrevocably to present usage.”147 The story that
the secular is not so different from the religious, then, treats both
concepts to be self-evident, now all morphed into an entangled con-
nection, an “assemblage.” The nineteenth-century “reform affini-
ties,” we are told, “operated according to principles of connection,
heterogeneity, and multiplicity.”148 Scott’s notion of heterogeneity
(“affinity”), he says, owes not to Weber but to Charlotte, the heroine
in Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities. For Scott, affinity means “a
principle of connection that disrupts linear family relations in favor
of a different kind of kinship—one that, during the nineteenth cen-
tury, was often associated with spirit or soul.”149 In effect, Scott pres-
ents the notion of heterogeneity as a corrective to other scholars’ use

of Weber’s notion of elective affinity to deemphasize the idea of

“Protestant influence per se” in nineteenth-century Bengal.150 Thus
for Scott, the connection between religion and the secular marks a
reform assemblage that is “‘not a well-bounded, discrete, tidy forma-
tion’ . . . but an open-ended network of unstable elements.”151
But the notion of heterogeneity fails to take into account how au-
thoritative discourses do indeed categorically define the borders be-
tween secularism and religion. And it is in those shifting definitions
that the concepts become recognizable to specific persons as such.
Such authoritative definitions of religion and the secular do not
merely take some preexisting mélange of ideas out there to be clas-
sified as secular or religious. My point is that the notion of hetero-
geneity does not help us understand the temporality of coherence
that the authoritative discourses seek to produce.152 Rather, the very
idea of a multiplicity already presupposes coherence. This coherence
does not refer to some objective continuity or stability but is a dis-
cursively authorized notion. For example, in the medieval classifica-
tions of heresy, every time a new rule is established by the church,
“the forms and consequences of transgression are multiplied.”153
Thus the multiplicity is a historical effect of power. What is central
to my argument is that the relation between temporality and coher-
ence should be found in a form of life. And that relation has to be
thought in terms of the sensibilities that constitute a form of life
whose grammar of intelligibility and effect is neither universal nor
heterogeneous. The authorizations of the sensibilities require coher-
ence, given that the grammar of intelligibility, within the discipline of
a religious tradition, is not simply universally available.
In this article I have argued that the dominant theories about
the distinction between Buddhism and modernity foreclose any un-
derstanding of the temporality of tradition. For almost three de-
cades the distinction between Buddhism and modernity has often
been made in terms of modernity’s influence on Buddhism in tandem
with a critique of the concept of Protestant Buddhism. The language
of influence inadvertently commits the scholar to a particular ontol-
ogy that distinguishes the past from the present, just as it grounds the
ostensive plurality of religions in ontological difference. The prob-
lems resulting from such assumptions cannot be set aside by making
a reverse claim about the ontological connection between religion

and modernity, a claim that now extends beyond the field of Bud-
dhism. I have argued that both the distinction and the posited con-
nection between religion and modernity occlude the relation be-
tween the sensibilities of temporality and a coherent form of life.
......................................................
ananda abeysekara teaches in the Department of Religion and
Culture at Virginia Tech.
Acknowledgments
I thank Joseph Walser, SherAli Tareen, Basit Kareem Iqbal, Arvind-Pal
Mandair, and Rupa Viswanath for their comments on a draft of the article.
H. L. Seneviratne, Gananath Obeyesekere, Quentin Skinner, Thomas Shee-
han, and Robert Launay kindly answered my email inquiries. I also thank
the readers of the journal for their helpful feedback.
Notes
1. Abeysekara, “Religious Studies’ Mishandling of Origin and Change.”
2. In Colors of the Robe I argue that the question of Buddhism in
modern Sri Lanka can be better understood in terms of a tradition of
competing discourses and disputes, emerging within binding rela-
tionships of power that seek to authorize differing boundaries be-
tween religion and politics.
3. In this regard, I can only briefly note Heidegger’s discussion of Aris-
totle’s concept of “limit” (peras), whose connection to temporality is
instructive to think about. Aristotle understands the notion in con-
trast to Sophists like Antiphon, who say that phusis—“the elemental”
such as earth, water, fire, or air—is “being” proper, that is, the
“stable,” “what properly is.” They are different from “beings,” which
are regarded as “modifications” (affections; pathe), “states of what
properly is” (hexeis), or “that into which a being is divided” (dispo-
sitions; diatheseis). This is in part the distinction between hule and
morphe, which, Heidegger says, Kant translated as “matter” and
“form.” Aristotle says that the Sophists understand proper beings to
be “the primarily-present unformed” and “eternal,” which do not
accrue change, “whereas all rhuthmos, as change, is temporal”
(Heidegger, “On the Essence and Concept of Φύσις,” 204–5). Hei-
degger says that this distinction comes to us “distorted” as “eternal”

and “temporal,” with “Hellenistic,” “Christian,” and “modern” his-

tories of interpretation. But given the Greek notions of aidion and
ginomenon apeirakis, the distinction “cannot refer to what limitlessly
endures as opposed to what is limited.” Indeed, “what is opposed to
aidion, the ‘eternal’ as supposedly ‘limitless,’ is also something lim-
itless: apeiron (cf. peras)” (205). “The so-called eternal is in Greek
aidion—aeidion; and aei means not just ‘all the time’ and ‘incessant.’
It also means ‘at any given time’ as in ‘the one who is ruler at the
time—not the ‘eternal’ ruler” (204–5). So aei has the sense of
“‘staying for a while,’ specifically in the sense of presencing. The ai-
dion is something present of and by itself without other assistance,
and for this reason perhaps something constantly present. Here we
are thinking not with regard to ‘duration’ but with presencing. This is
the clue for interpreting correctly the opposing concept, ginomenon
apeirakis” (206). I want to emphasize what Heidegger says in the
following: “In Greek thought, what comes to be and passes away is
what is sometimes present, sometimes absent—without limit. But
peras in Greek philosophy is not ‘limit’ in the sense of the outer
boundary, the point where something ends. The limit is always what
limits, defines, gives footing and stability, that by which and in which
something begins and is. Whatever becomes present and absent
without limit has of and by itself no presencing, and it develops into
instability” (206). For my discussion of Heidegger’s reading of Aris-
totle’s hule and morphe, its connection to dunamis (capacity), with
attention to the temporality of the relation between a mode (hexis)
and a mood (pathos), see Abeysekara, “Religious Studies’ Mishan-
dling of Origin and Change.” Note also the connection between peras
and horismos (limitation), a definition of a matter, the “speaking about
something” (logos) that makes possible the “bringing the matter to
sight.” Peras means not just eidos (look) but also telos (completion)
for Aristotle. Heidegger contrasts the notion of horismos to Kant’s
notion of the “concept” and the notion of “definition” in the Middle
Ages, where the “penultimate type or genus of an object, with specific
differences” becomes the concern (Basic Concepts of Aristotelian
Philosophy, 9–17, 28–29).
4. See Asad, Genealogies of Religion, esp. chaps. 2 and 4. See also
Hirschman, Passions and the Interests; and James, Passion and Action.
5. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §241. Agamben provides
a brief discussion of the few instances of the phrase form of life in
Philosophical Investigations (Use of Bodies, 240).

6. On the emerging interest in the use of the senses in religious practice,

see also Promey, Sensational Religion.
7. For a critique of the notion of universal capabilities, as used by
Nussbaum, see Asad, Formations of the Secular; for further discus-
sion of why religious sensibilities do not produce auto-affection, as
they require distinct sets of practice in traditions like Sikhism, see
Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West. Mandair argues that,
in contrast to the ways in which the emotions are evoked in the
musical performance of the text Adi Granth in the Sikh community,
where “unlike reflective thought, feeling cannot merely return to itself
and thereby affect itself,” the colonial regime sought a direct con-
nection between mind (the individual) and God (the divine words in
the Adi Granth). For a sample of how modern notions of (religious)
“sentiments” were authorized in colonial legal practices, see Viswa-
nath, Pariah Problem; see also Festa, “Sentimental Visions of Em-
pire.”
8. For an account of how discipline worked in reformist programs in
modern Hinduism, see Scott, Spiritual Despots. Even though the texts
by the reformers critiquing the authority of the “priest” claimed not
to be grounded in any source of authority, they sought to authorize
particular practices of self-discipline and conduct. I comment on
Spiritual Despots in the concluding remarks.
9. See Asad, “Thinking about the Secular Body.” See also Asad,
“Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics”; and Hirschkind, “Is
There a Secular Body?”
10. Obeyesekere, “Religious Symbolism and Political Change in Cey-
lon”; see also Gombrich and Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed,
202.
11. Gombrich and Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed, 203–4.
12. Gombrich and Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed, 203.
13. The rise of “meditation centers”—bhavana Madhyasthana (“a term
being translated from English into highly Sanskritized Sinhala”)—
where meditation is conducted by laypeople, is noted as one of the
later developments of Protestant Buddhism in the twentieth century
(Gombrich and Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed, 223).
16. Gombrich and Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed, 235, 227.

18. Quoted in Gombrich and Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed, 226.

21. Gombrich and Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed, 231–32, 208;
emphasis added.
22. The variety of Sinhalese glosses for the English word style in the
Malalasekera English-Sinhala Dictionary—including ratava, most-
taraya, vilasaya, and vilasitava—points to the temporality of trained
dispositions for sensing what practices constitute them in given cir-
cumstances. Something of the temporality of these sensibilities can be
found in how other glosses for the word style, like kalakramaya (art of
doing), were revised or omitted to reflect Sinhalese usage and se-
mantic change over the years of the dictionary’s revision since 1948.
I thank Sandagomi Coperhewa for checking on the history of these
changes.
23. In thinking about how style constitutes a disposition, I am not ap-
pealing to a particular philosophical notion about style. But for a
debate about the question of style, specifically in Nietzsche, see Der-
rida, Spurs. As is well known, Derrida argues that Nietzsche’s styles
render the logocentric distinction between thought and style unde-
cidable. Derrida critiques Heidegger (“Grand Style”) for reading
Nietzsche’s style as a kind of aesthetics and thus disregarding the
complexity of how that style operates in Nietzsche’s works. One may
argue that Derrida’s critique intimates that understanding the oper-
ation of styles in Nietzsche demands particular dispositions. For
evaluations of Derrida’s critique, see Wood, “Style and Strategy at the
Limits of Philosophy”; and Shapiro, “Styling Nietzsche.”
24. Holt, “Protestant Buddhism?”
25. Here is a sample of the network of citations and mediations of Holt’s
critique of Protestant Buddhism: Hallisey, “Roads Taken and Not
Taken”; Queen, “Introduction”; Bastin, “Authentic Inner Life”; Col-
lins, Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities; Blackburn, Buddhist
Learning and Textual Practice; Mrozik, Review of Anne M. Black-
burn’s Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice; Anderson, “‘For Those
Who Are Ignorant’”; Doyle, “‘Liberate the Mahabodhi Temple!’”;
Johnson, “Buddha and the Puritan”; Monius, “Fighting Words on
‘World Religions’”; Hansen, How to Behave; McDaniel, Gathering
Leaves and Lifting Words; Collins and McDaniel, “Buddhist
‘Nuns’”; Semmens, “Ten-Precept Mothers”; Harris, Review of Anne

M. Blackburn’s Locations of Buddhism; Bretfeld, “Resonant Para-

digms”; Berkwitz, Buddhist Poetry and Colonialism; Braun, Birth of
Insight; Braun, “Local and Translocal”; Turner, Saving Buddhism;
Kemper, Rescued from the Nation; Kaloyanides, “Escaping Colo-
nialism, Rescuing Religion”; Charney, Review of Alicia Turner’s
Saving Buddhism; Saha, Review of Alicia Turner’s Saving Buddhism;
Foxeus, “Contemporary Burmese Buddhism.” To my knowledge, the
only exception to the tendency to cite Holt uncritically is David Scott,
who notes, “It should be evident from what follows that Holt has
largely missed what is theoretically germane about the concept of
‘Protestant Buddhism’” (“Religion in Colonial Civil Society,” 62n21).
Scott’s argument is that the modern concept of Buddhism in the
nineteenth century made possible distinct dispositions, which were
not, as some scholars have claimed, the result of the collapse or
“disestablishment” of traditional monastic-royal relations in the
Kandyan kingdom or of “secularization” following the colonial rule.
These dispositions marked the emergence of new social grids and
modes of power in the context of the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms.
Scott’s thinking about power in “Colonial Governmentality” is in-
formed by what R. G. Collingwood calls “a logic of question and
answer” (“Question and Answer”). But these scholars have ignored
or misread Scott’s argument, as they have been diverted by the desire
to recover some local agency in Buddhist history—an idea found in
Holt’s conceptualization of history.
26. Schober and Collins’s edited volume is the latest account that aims
to “start a new phase in the consideration of Theravāda (given, in-
deed, the limitations of this term in doing civilizational history) and
modernity, one which goes beyond the kind of simplistic views and
terminology as, for instance, ‘Protestant Buddhism’ that glosses this
encounter as a uniform and uni-directional set of developments”
(Theravāda Buddhist Encounters with Modernity, 15). The volume
includes an essay by Holt himself. Note the curious claim about the
inadequacy of the term Protestant Buddhism and even Theravada
because of the multiplicity of their uses in history. This, of course,
betrays an inadequate understanding of the relationship between
discourse, authority, and coherence. For a critique of the essays in
Schober and Collins’s volume, see Abeysekara, “Review Essay of
Theravāda Buddhist Encounters with Modernity.” As David Scott
argued long ago, the failure of scholars to ask for whom a given
concept constitutes an authoritative definition producing distinctive

dispositions presupposes an unquestioned theoretical position from

which they try to represent Buddhism as having no “essence” (For-
mations of Ritual, xvii–xix). Hence efforts to speak of Buddhism in
modernity as a hybrid tradition are ongoing (see below, particularly n.
63).
27. In a 2012 exchange with Obeyesekere, Holt repeated the same claim:
“The phenomena [Protestant Buddhism] he described in 19th and
20th c. Sri Lankan religious culture scarcely resembled in theological
substance what Protestantism (Christianity) meant or emphasized for
the religious in Europe or America” (“John Holt Responds to Ga-
nanath Obeyesek[e]re”).
28. Holt, “Protestant Buddhism?,” 307; emphasis added.
29. The author of this deep point is, of course, Nietzsche, who argues that
concepts that have histories are “entirely undefinable”: “The concepts
in which an entire process summarizes itself semiotically elude defi-
nition.” Once a concept has “come into being,” its meaning can be
“interpreted for new views, newly appropriated, transformed, and
reorganized for a new purpose by a superior power . . . a contriving in
which the previous ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ must necessarily be ob-
scured or entirely extinguished” (On the Genealogy of Morality, 265–
68). I am not following Nietzsche religiously.
31. Holt, “Protestant Buddhism?,” 310. Holt is uncritically quoting the
historian K. W. Goonewardena’s claims about van Spilbergen, who
was among “the very first Dutchmen who visited the island around
1600 [and] were astounded by the truly liberal attitude of the Sin-
halese towards other religions.”
32. Quoted in Holt, “Protestant Buddhism?,” 310.
33. Holt, “Protestant Buddhism?,” 310.
35. For a critique of how the idea of “accommodation” has been used to
understand the relation not only between colonialism and subjectivity
but also between religion, secularism, and law, see Scott, Conscripts
of Modernity; and Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age.
36. In “Religion in Colonial Civil Society,” Scott refutes this story of the
anachronistic notion of tolerance having been the condition for pre-
colonial Buddhist attitudes toward other religions, which is part of
the story of the secularization of religion. Rather, the new Buddhist
attitudes had to do with new configurations of the discursive terrain in

which the concept of Buddhism (“religion”) as an object of propo-

sitional knowledge was deployed in relation to the concept of
Christianity in the eighteenth century. It is this sort of modern notion
of religion that Knox says the seventeenth-century Sinhalese did not
“care” about. As Mahmood argues, far from a neutral mode of tol-
erance without political expediency, the notion of religious liberty
works as a “principle of state sovereignty,” authorizing religious dif-
ferences in historically distinct politics of minority rights in modernity
(“Minority Rights and Religious Liberty,” 33).
38. For such a genealogy of liberalism, with attention to the politics of
tolerance and their relation to the colonial empire, see Mehta, Lib-
eralism and Empire.
39. Holt, “Protestant Buddhism?,” 310; emphasis added. Holt again does
not pause to ask if the (modern) Christian terminology (e.g., “mis-
sionary spirit”) is an anachronistic description of pre-Christian
practices traced to the time of the Buddha himself.
41. I am alluding to part of the title of Charles de Villers’s Essay on the
Spirit and Influence of the Reformation of Luther (1804), translated
by none other than James Mill. For a discussion of how Villers’s (and
Mill’s) sense of the “spirit” dehistoricizes and generalizes “the par-
ticular Luther” against the backdrop of the nineteenth-century poli-
tics of looking for “the Luther of India,” see Scott, Spiritual Despots.
46. Holt, “Protestant Buddhism?,” 310. Obeyesekere described Protes-
tant Buddhism as constituting “norms and organizational forms
[that] are historical derivations from Protestant Christianity” (“Re-
ligious Symbolism and Political Change in Ceylon,” 46–47). Holt
wants to dissever precisely the forms from the substance of norms.
47. Holt, “Protestant Buddhism?,” 310; emphasis added. Holt’s decision,
based on conjectures about “reemergence,” turns into an indecision.
Here is his finest touch on such hedging: “Increased emphasis upon
sila and bhavana, rather than representing a Protestant influence, may
merely reflect the attempt by some Buddhists to maintain or regain the
relevance of the Buddha’s path in the modern context. Again, the issue

of reform/revitalization or transformation surfaces” (309; emphasis

added). What was termed “reemergence” is now conjectured to be
“transformation.”
48. Holt, “Protestant Buddhism?,” 309. Johnson—who, like many other
scholars of Buddhism, wants to foreground the idea of “local agentive
creativity”—naively quotes this exact statement by Holt without no-
ticing the slightest problem with the propositions to which religions
are reduced (“Buddha and the Puritan,” 61, 93). On the notion of
belief in religion, see Asad, “Thinking about Religion, Belief, and
Politics.”
51. See Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age.
52. Scott, Spiritual Despots, 3.
53. Cf. Prothero’s problematic idea of a “syncretic tradition” of Protes-
tantism (“Henry Steel Olcott and ‘Protestant Buddhism,’” 283).
55. Holt then reduces all this again to a propositional truth about “the
heart of Protestant religious expression” vis-à-vis “secondary consid-
erations”: “Historically, Protestant sects became denominated fun-
damentally over matters of belief, faith, and doctrine. Religious ideas
count significantly in Protestantism and usually serve as the distinc-
tive criteria that determine one sect’s identity in relation to others.
Therefore, theological distinctions are of crucial determinative im-
portance in the study of the Protestant Reformation. For theology is
understood as a primary expression of religious faith to which creedal
assent (a religious act) is given. This is nowhere more clearly stated
than in Luther’s view that Protestant soteriology is a matter of ‘jus-
tification by faith through grace.’ At the heart of Protestant religious
expression one finds this very issue. Thus my argument is: not to
recognize this religious fact when invoking the term ‘Protestant’ is to
miss its central religious significance and to appeal to secondary
considerations” (“Protestant Buddhism?,” 311n1). If this is Holt’s
litmus test for Protestantism, one has to ask how many Protestants, by
his own logic, would really be Protestant.
56. On how colonialists saw violence as intrinsic to South Asian history
and religion, see Pandey, Construction of Communalism. For a cri-
tique of how modern anthropology constructs violence as an object of
knowledge in Sri Lankan history and Buddhism, see Jeganathan,

“‘Violence’ as an Analytical Problem”; and Scott, “Demonology of

Nationalism.”
57. Holt still maintains that the fact that “almost every predominantly
Sinhala village” he has visited has some sort of shrine dedicated to a
village or regional deity is proof that such communities have “not
been whitewashed by Christianity or become overly affected by ‘Bud-
dhist modernism’ . . . or so-called Protestant Buddhism” (Theravada
Traditions, 18; emphasis added). The presence of a shrine to a re-
gional deity in a Buddhist village is turned into a proposition.
58. E.g., Blackburn, Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice; Blackburn,
Locations of Buddhism; Turner, Saving Buddhism; Kemper, Rescued
from the Nation.
59. Blackburn, Locations of Buddhism, xii.
60. Blackburn, Locations of Buddhism, xiv, 143.
61. For a sample of these works, see Blackburn, Locations of Buddhism,
196, 215; McDaniel, Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words, 18; Braun,
Birth of Insight, 155; Turner, Saving Buddhism, 195; Saha, Review of
Alicia Turner’s Saving Buddhism, 533; Holt, Theravada Traditions,
18; and Thompson, “Portrait of the Artist as a Buddhist Man,” 121.
For my argument concerning the kinds of claims advanced in these
works, see Abeysekara, “Religious Studies’ Mishandling of Origin
and Change.”
62. Cf. Asad, “Conscripts of Western Civilization”; Scott, Conscripts of
Modernity; and Scott, “Colonialism.”
63. Turner, Saving Buddhism, 17. To talk about multiple influences is to
talk about the “hybridity” of modern Buddhism, a notion that results
from careless thinking. Those who espouse this notion, besides
Turner, are Prothero, “Henry Steel Olcott and ‘Protestant Bud-
dhism,’” 283; Prothero, White Buddhist; McMahan, Making of
Buddhist Modernism; and Kemper, Rescued from the Nation. Both
Turner and McMahan specifically refer to Prothero, who sees modern
Buddhism as a “creolized” hybrid tradition. For a critique of Pro-
thero, see Obeyesekere, Review of Stephen Prothero’s The White
Buddhist. Asad argues that the notion of hybridity presupposes a
notion of “totalizing” culture, connected with the historical concept
of observable culture as “a whole form of our common life”—a no-
tion that emerged in the nineteenth century (see also Williams, Cul-
ture and Society; and Williams, Keywords). This notion marked a
shift from the previous sense of culture as “spiritual and aesthetic

development” or an “inherited way of life” (Asad, Genealogies of

Religion, 248–53). Culture as a hybrid notion has its uses in disputes
about “multiculturalism” that are sustained by legalized ethno-
religious differences in modern England. These disputes are founded
on assumptions about a pure “origin” of culture, which is seen as
something to set aside or preserve. The concept of discursive tradi-
tion, Asad argues in a critique of figures like Homi Bhabha, presup-
poses neither a pure origin nor some “hybridity,” since tradition re-
quires “coherence,” which is to be argued in a shared form of life.
64. Turner, Saving Buddhism, 137.
66. Turner, Saving Buddhism, 195n17.
67. Kemper, Rescued from the Nation, 58.
68. Kemper, Rescued from the Nation, 343n76.
69. Walters tries to question the notions of influence, syncretism, and
interaction, which he sees in the concept of Protestant Buddhism and
in the general study of South Asian religions. Unfortunately, Walters’s
alternative story of the “‘coming together’ of Hinduism and Bud-
dhism” is told only to “restore agency to the human actors who ac-
tually constitute each religious tradition” (“Multireligion on the
Bus,” 31). This notion of agency is what makes possible the question
of influence.
70. Such views can be found in the contexts of the seventeenth-century
missionary-apologist attacks on the “despotic” priestly “influences”
of religion in India (Scott, Spiritual Despots); the eighteenth-century
liberal debates about why the secret ballot should safeguard “free
agency” and “conscience” against sociopolitical “influence” (Gilmar-
tin, “Towards a Global History of Voting”); and the colonial Protes-
tant debates about why the “authentic conversion” of the South Asian
“Pariah” laborers cannot be a product of “external influences” on
their agency (i.e., mind). In the latter case, the Indian landlords
complained that without the “external influences” of the mission-
aries, the Pariahs would have been “content in their servitude.” The
Protestant missionaries in turn sought to avoid such “influence” in
their “alliances” with the Pariahs. As Viswanath argues, those debates
not only helped sustain the Pariahs’ bondage to the local landlords
but also allowed the Protestant missionaries (who were interested in
converting primarily the members of high castes) not to be seen as
intervening in the “social” domain (Pariah Problem). On how the

notion of influence became integral to eighteenth- and nineteenth-

century debates about demonic possession and insanity, see Ossa-
Richardson, “Possession or Insanity?”
71. When Kant notably defined Enlightenment as the ability “to use one’s
understanding without guidance from another,” he, of course, set a
modern standard for the formation of the self.
72. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §172.
73. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§170–76. But this is
what the attempts to identify the hybridity of modern Western Bud-
dhism in terms of “the most important influences” miss. “What many
Americans and Europeans often understand by the term ‘Buddhism,’”
McMahan writes, “is actually a modern hybrid tradition with roots in
the European Enlightenment no less than the Buddha’s enlighten-
ment, in Romanticism and transcendentalism as much as the Pali
canon, and in the clash of Asian cultures as much as in mindfulness
and meditation” (Making of Buddhist Modernism, 5, 11; emphasis
added). Not only does this slipshod notion of “hybrid tradition”
cover over the fact that it appeals to some undisclosed standard of a
nonhybrid tradition in order to judge hybridity, but it also fails to
grasp how a living tradition requires precisely a form of life as au-
thoritative discourses seek to preempt the space of rival ones to sus-
tain coherence.
74. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §173. For other critiques
of the notion of influence, see Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge;
and Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.”
For a genealogy of the concept in literary studies, see Clayton and
Rothstein, “Figures in the Corpus.”
75. See also n. 63. In scholarly notions, influence becomes a question of
individual consciousness; for example, “Influences on modern Sin-
halese Buddhism may well have varied not only from place to place
and time to time but also from person to person” (Prothero, “Henry
Steel Olcott and ‘Protestant Buddhism,’” 299). All this talk of mul-
tiple influences also runs the risk of reproducing the problem of
“sincerity” and agency connected to belief that is part of the colo-
nial politics of Protestant Christianity and “conversion.” See Keane,
“Sincerity, ‘Modernity,’ and the Protestants”; see also Viswanath,
Pariah Problem; and Asad, “Comments on Conversion.” On sincerity
and modern subjectivity, see Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity.
76. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§176–77. Think of how
a modern law regarding being “under the influence” delimits the

notion of influence. Also think of the debates among lawyers, poli-

ticians, and journalists about whether the Russian attempts to influ-
ence the 2016 US presidential election are a “legal” or a “political”
question. As Paul Callan, a lawyer on CNN, cynically put it, elections
are always “influenced” by lobbyists.
77. For more on the relation between a form of life and affect, see
Agamben, Use of Bodies. Some liberal critics find it difficult to un-
derstand why a form of life, a “living relationship,” constituted by
specific sensibilities, passions, and abilities (power), enables individ-
uals to act in particular ways and not in others. For example, consider
those who criticize Asad and Mahmood’s argument regarding Mus-
lim responses to the publication of cartoons—widely denounced as
blasphemous—of the Prophet Muhammad in the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten in September 2005. Asad and Mahmood argue that
these responses have to do not with ideas about the “‘freedom of
speech’ nor the challenge of a new truth but [with] something that
seeks to disrupt a living relationship” (Asad, “Free Speech, Blas-
phemy, and Secular Criticism,” 46; see also Mahmood, “Religious
Reason and Secular Affect”). The political scientist Andrew F. March,
however, turns this question about a living relationship into a ques-
tion about truth with a remarkable verdict: “The fact that people
claim to have ‘no choice’ but to act or respond in a certain way does
not make this true.” As Nietzsche would say, a “conviction is [simply
turned into] a criterion of truth” (Antichrist, 12). For March, the
subject is always qualified by an attribute called freedom of choice.
Thus one can always qualify every form of relationship in any situ-
ation with this propositional statement: “The fact that people claim to
have ‘no choice’ . . . does not make this true.” March’s claim is based
on a concept of a free-floating, transcendental self that can always
stand back from its “constitutive beliefs”: “People often do experi-
ence a certain distance between their selves and some of their con-
stitutive beliefs or practices; the latter change, are debated, and are
replaced” (“Speaking about Muhammad, Speaking for Muslims,”
816). March does not connect the change in constituent beliefs to this
idea of truth that supposedly anchors the change. His claims speak to
how a Rawlsian liberal defines “life,” and it does not reflect how a
form of life works.
78. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 25. See also Agrama, Questioning
Secularism; and Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape.


81. David Scott’s fascinating discussion of the Colebrooke-Cameron re-
forms demonstrates how colonial power did not simply set in place a
colonial “difference,” as postcolonial scholars assume: “This [colo-
nial difference] seems . . . less significant than the fact that what the
rationality of colonial power is doing is inscribing a new authoritative
game of justice into the colonized space, one which the colonized
could accept or resist, but to whose rules they would have to respond”
(“Colonial Governmentality,” 50; see also n. 109). Again, the scholars
of Buddhism who (following in particular Blackburn) seek to recover
native agency in the face of colonial “influence” miss the complexity
of power, which is not captured, as Asad argues, in terms of “passive
reception by subjects or active resistance by agents” (“Comments on
Conversion,” 265). The register of colonial power cannot be simply
understood in terms of interaction between colonial and native dis-
courses (e.g., see McGovern, Review of Anne M. Blackburn’s Loca-
tions of Buddhism). For a critique of the notion of “interaction” and
its connection to the problem of “communication” and “dialogue” in
the colonial asymmetry of language, see Mandair, Religion and the
Specter of the West.
82. Gombrich and Obeyesekere note that the “urban” conditions of
Buddhism they describe include not just middle- and working-class
people in “towns and cities” but also those who “may be physically
located in what people call a ‘village’” (Buddhism Transformed, 4).
83. Modes of bodily comportment, speech, attire, education, and so forth
are subjects of debate among both monks and nuns within the history
of Buddhism in Sri Lanka. In monastic life the habitus of training
one receives does not guarantee that one can always know how to
properly comport oneself or spot defects in modes of practice in dif-
ferent social circumstances, which are not always predictable. So the
training constitutes an ongoing habituation within the lived life of a
community. For such debates in Buddhism, as well as Islam and
medieval Christianity, in relation to the concepts of “rule,” “law,” and
“ritual,” see Abeysekara, Colors of the Robe; Salgado, “Tradition,
Power, and Community”; Scott, “Ends and Strategy of Yaktovil”;
Agrama, Questioning Secularism; Asad, Genealogies of Religion; and
Agamben, Highest Poverty. More generally, on how the Aristotelian
notion of habit is not “being-in-act of some habit,” as understood by

the Scholastic tradition, see Agamben, Use of Bodies, 58. Aristotle

says that “it is impossible to have a habit” (quoted in Agamben, Use
of Bodies, 61).
84. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §33.
85. I am alluding to Nietzsche’s argument: “Historia Abscondita.—Every
great human being exerts a retroactive force: for his sake, all of his-
tory is put on the scale again, and a thousand secrets of the past crawl
out of their hiding places—into his sunshine. There is no telling what
may yet become a part of history. Maybe the past is still essentially
undiscovered! So many retroactive forces are still needed!” (Gay
Science, §34).
86. See n. 25.
87. Elsewhere Holt understands the tradition of Avalokitesvara in Sri
Lanka with a similar notion of the “continuation” of Buddhist history
(Buddha in the Crown). For a critique of it, see Obeyesekere, “Ava-
lokiteśvara’s Aliases and Guises.”
88. Ironically, in his edited volume that claims to think about the “dy-
namics” of premodern Buddhist history beyond “secular” categories,
including the idea of “chimerical national, sub-national, or regional
identity,” the historian of Burmese Buddhism D. Christian Lammerts
reduces the past to peculiarly modern binaries. Lammerts careless-
ly replicates the claim of one Keith Taylor to frame “dynamics” in
terms of “the ideas, products, and practices of Buddhists in historical
southeast Asia [that] are inextricably grounded in the ‘particular
times and terrains where they dwelled and in the material and cultural
exchanges available in those times and terrains’” (Introduction, 2–3).
It does not occur to Lammerts to think that “cultural exchange,” with
echoes of a market metaphor, reproduces a distinctly modern notion
of culture (see n. 63). More important, it conceals precisely the dy-
namics of power relationships in which what takes place is not an
exchange of two things that can individually be labeled a “culture”
(whatever that would mean) but the acquisition of distinct abilities,
dispositions, and sensibilities in an encounter of authority. Consider
the Thai monks who were reordained in fifteenth-century Sri Lanka
and who, on their arrival in Thailand, reordained their colleagues
according to the “grammatical grounds” established by the Sri Lan-
kan teachers. It is a mistake to assume that forms of power stand
as self-evident and propositional indexes of sectarian identity. That
is, the mistaken claim, as advanced by Lammerts’s own teacher,

Blackburn, that the reordained monks who returned to Thailand were

concerned not specifically with affiliation to a Sri Lankan Theravada
lineage—though they spoke of bringing something called sasana (in-
struction) or Sihala pakkha (Sinhala company) from the island—but
with local practices of ritual purity and efficacy (“Sihala Sangha and
Lanka”; for a critique of this sort of question about sectarian identity
and Buddhism, see Abeysekara, “Review Essay of Theravāda Bud-
dhist Encounters with Modernity”). Even in modern times, Thai
monks who receive education and higher ordination in Sri Lanka do
not necessarily make declarative statements about belonging to a Sri
Lankan Theravada lineage, any more than Christian groups in South
Sudan would necessarily feel compelled to spell out their denomina-
tions to those who wish to convert. Such questions about religious
affiliation need not necessarily be spelled out in a power relationship
that presupposes the intelligibility of the terms of language and debate
at stake in a given discursive space; any historical text presupposes
competency in the sociolect. Distinctions do matter, but the mattering
is never free-floating. This was the case with the disputes between
contending factions in fifteenth-century Thailand, where one group
of monks, Wat Pa Dang, accused the other, Wat Suon Dok, of not
knowing the proper monastic modes of grammar and recitation
taught by Sinhala monks. To regard the absence of evidence (i.e., the
missing reference to a Theravada affiliation) as evidence of absence (i.
e., proof of its insignificance as a marker of “status”) is to disregard
that the use of language depends on power. This use cannot be sub-
sumed under Blackburn’s semiotics of Theravada or, for that matter,
of “local history” (“Sihala Sangha and Lanka,” 318). Like Blackburn,
Lammerts, with his heavy-handed insistence on the “local and ver-
nacular expressions of Buddhist culture” and his assertion that “the
Buddhist cultures of historical Southeast Asia are best understood as
multivocal, marked by a dynamism and difference that varies across
geography and time,” misguidedly suggests that “it is therefore more
appropriate to speak of Southeast Asian Buddhism in the plural—of
Buddhisms rather than a Buddhism” (Introduction, 1–2). This stan-
dard of “plurality,” which calls for identifying multiple Buddhisms
even within one geographic space, makes it virtually impossible to
understand how the coherence of tradition works within a genealogy.
Here we are back to the flawed notion of a hybrid tradition.
89. Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age is a powerful cri-
tique of them. For other critiques of the concepts, see Abeysekara,

“Review Essay of Theravāda Buddhist Encounters with Modernity”;

and Scott, Conscripts of Modernity. For a further critique of the no-
tion of the “local,” which entails the question of power to identify it,
see Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 2–9.
90. Cf. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity.
91. For a discussion of this problem, see Abeysekara, “Religious Studies’
Mishandling of Origin and Change.”
92. Lammerts, Introduction, 3. It is with the notions of “interplay” and
“exchange” that Lammerts can speak of multiple Buddhisms.
93. Blackburn, Locations of Buddhism, 211, xiv.
94. Turner, Saving Buddhism, 4–5; emphasis added.
96. Turner, Saving Buddhism, 151. Turner here is misreading Asad
to claim that “Asad is correct that categories—broad frameworks
for understanding the world, such as ‘religious’ and ‘secular’—orient
thought and practice in specific and unseen ways, and limit questions
and interventions. However, the practice of definition was never sim-
ple or straightforward” (151). A less careless reading of Asad’s work
would have shown the exact opposite: his basic argument is that
religion or the secular is all about a genealogy of competing defini-
tions in varying historical conditions of power that can hardly be
subsumed into a uniform, transhistorical narrative of category but
must be found in particular spaces of authority. This, after all, is the
point about Nietzsche’s genealogy.
98. On the problem of the relation between agency and consciousness, see
Asad, “Modern Power and the Reconfiguration of Religious Tradi-
tions”; and Asad, “Comments on Conversion.” The latter essay is in
part a critique of Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff’s work on
colonialism. Asking “how well does it [conversion] grasp the highly
variable, usually gradual, often implicit, and demonstrably ‘syncretic’
manner in which social identities, cultural styles, and ritual practices
of African peoples were transformed by the evangelical encounter,”
and “how well does it capture the complex dialectic of invasion and
riposte, of challenge and resistance,” the Comaroffs argue that what
was as stake “was a politics of consciousness in which the very nature
of consciousness was itself the object of struggle” (Of Revelation and
Revolution, 250). It is precisely this logic that informs the Buddhist
studies’ approach to colonialism and modernity. Thus it is no wonder

that Turner overlays the Comaroffs’ same problematic idea of a

“symbolic struggle” and the connected notion of consciousness onto
the politics of Burmese colonialism. The Comaroffs define the sym-
bolic struggle in this way: “Between the conscious and the uncon-
scious lies the most critical domain of all for historical anthropology
and especially for the analysis of colonialism and resistance. It is the
realm of partial recognition, of inchoate awareness. . . . It is from this
realm, we suggest, that silent signifiers and unmarked practices may
rise to the level of explicit consciousness, of ideological assertion, and
become the subject of overt political and social contestation—or from
which they may recede into the hegemonic, to languish there unre-
marked for the time being” (29). These myriad conceptual prob-
lems with Turner’s text are hardly noticed by scholars like Carbine,
Review of Alicia Turner’s Saving Buddhism; and Frasch, Review of
Alicia Turner’s Saving Buddhism. Also see Roberts, “Is Conversion a
‘Colonization of Consciousness’?” for a further critique of the Co-
maroffs’ idea along with the notion of resistance home to many an-
thropological theories.
99. Scott, “Colonial Governmentality”; Mahmood, Religious Difference
in a Secular Age. For an account that rethinks the assumptions about
the relation between colonial encounter and resistance by questioning
the conventional narratives about colonial law preceding and merely
being assimilated into the colonial project, see Anghie, Imperialism,
Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law.
100. Collingwood, “Question and Answer.”
101. Asad, “Modern Power and the Reconfiguration of Religious Tradi-
tions.”
102. For samples, see Asad, “Comments on Conversion”; Asad, “Think-
ing about Agency and Pain”; Bourke, Story of Pain; Asad, “Pain and
Truth”; and Asad, “Discipline and Humility.”
105. Braun, Birth of Insight, 155; emphasis added. Like Turner, Braun is
following Blackburn, who in turn draws on Hallisey as well as Holt.
106. It puzzles me no end why scholars of Buddhism have become so en-
amored of the sounds of these terms, reverberating through the echo
chamber of Buddhist studies. They continue to repeat these terms,
rarely even attempting to justify them when identifying Buddhist
practice. In so doing, they ignore the literature discussing the legion

of problems with precisely these terms. Simply repeating the same

scholarly formulas does not make them any truer than they were the
first time. For my own critique of the notion of agency and freedom
vis-à-vis the context of colonialism, see Abeysekara, “Buddhism,
Power, Modernity”; and Abeysekara, “Sri Lanka, Postcolonial ‘Lo-
cations of Buddhism,’ Secular Peace.”
107. On a genealogy of the concepts of liberty and freedom—as defined
by Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Mill, Berlin, and others—see Skinner,
Hobbes and Republican Liberty; Skinner, “Third Concept of Lib-
erty”; and Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism. Skinner’s Nietzschean
argument is that the rival definitions of the concept of liberty that do
battle are coherent on their own, but they cannot be combined, as
they do not fit together. For a version of this compelling argument, see
also Skinner, “Genealogy of the Modern State.” I would also add, as
Skinner probably would agree, that they cannot be combined because
each is embedded in distinct social-political moments of sensibility,
affect, aspiration, and so on, which cannot easily be reproduced in
differing conditions.
108. For a discussion of how, for Wittgenstein, the concept of a reason is
connected to the concept of reasoning, see Queloz, “Wittgenstein on
the Chain of Reasons.” As Queloz writes, “If giving and asking for
reasons are activities which can only exist within a language game,
then any reason one may give depends, in order to be accessible to the
addressee as a reason, on there being some common ground, a shared
complex of activities, purposes and language-use in which there is
minimal agreement on what counts as a reason for what. Reasons go,
as Wittgenstein intimates, only so far. Absent this requirement, it is
not the reasons that must be altered, but the conditions under which
they are recognized as such—something that is done not by providing
more reasons, but through persuasion or conversion” (112).
109. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 2–5. But the questionable claims
about how the colonial “transformation was partial” and “strongly
resisted by local Buddhist communities” continue to be echoed. “The
incomplete territorial control was emphasized by the 1818 and 1848
‘rebellions’ in Ceylon, inspired by a Buddhist consciousness, which
sought to restore Sinhalese Buddhist kingship as a counter to an ex-
panding colonial State. These occurrences of local resistance dem-
onstrate that the ‘colonial governmentality project’ remained in ar-
ticulation with a Buddhist imaginary, well into the first half of the

nineteenth century” (Casinader, De Silva Wijeyaratne, and Godden,

“From Sovereignty to Modernity,” 38; emphasis added). Here colo-
nialism (British rule and law) and the native subject (“Buddhist
consciousness”) are juxtaposed as if the contrast were self-evident;
“local resistance” by a “Buddhist consciousness” is merely posited as
a transparent manifestation of the finitude of colonial power (“the
incomplete territorial control was emphasized by the 1818 and 1848
‘rebellions’”). Thus the very notion of time (in relation to colonial
power) is assumed to be something that must always constitute a
teleological totality as a marker of its own fulfillment. This sense of
teleological totality creates such an abstract and expansive definition
of what it means for (colonial) time and power to constitute com-
pletion that it can hardly ever exist at any given time. The historian
Nira Wickramasinghe rehearses similar flawed claims about time, the
incompleteness of colonial power, and local resistance. She claims
that the idea that “colonial governmentality is endowed with some
kind of agency . . . occludes other factors that generated change by
assuming that colonial rule had a complete political and cultural
authority over those it ruled” (“Colonial Governmentality and the
Political Thinking,” 110; emphasis added). Unfortunately, Wickra-
masinghe’s claim depends on taking the distinction between ordinary
life and unordinary life to be clear-cut, as she claims that colonial
policies “did not leave much of an imprint on ordinary people’s lives”
(111). This is because, Wickramasinghe claims, often colonial re-
forms were mere “initiatives” (103); “it makes little sense to say that
the sum of such efforts produced a ‘colonial modernity’ or that co-
lonial administrators intended them to do so” (103); or “most of them
did not have the faintest idea what they were doing” (104); or “the
form of political action—the petition—adopted by the other ninety-
five percent [who were supposedly not ‘admitted to the enchanted
realm of the colonial public sphere’ (104) following the universal
franchise on the Island] had existed during Dutch colonialism in the
eighteenth century. Then, typically, if petitioners did not succeed in
obtaining their demands, they rebelled. They acted, in either case,
outside the field of governmentality and remained there well into the
twentieth century. The petition constituted the domain of those who
were not yet ready for a ‘civilized government.’ . . . Since they had no
civic rights they used the petition to express their demands and sen-
timents. The petition, then, reveals the presence of a dense and

heterogeneous time in the colony” (105). There are innumerable

problems with this reading, which basically fails to understand that
the very possibility of demands/rebellions against the colonial state
was already within what Scott calls a “game of politics,” that is, “a
new authoritative game of justice” (“Colonial Governmentality,” 50).
By contrast, according to Wickramasinghe’s understanding of colo-
nial power, time, and political action, if the colonial regime’s exten-
sion of its juridical and political power were likened to a game of
chess, then we should read the people who make demands and rebel
against the colonial state as a mob attempting to play cricket with the
chess pieces. I submit that both the colonial administrators and
the petitioners knew that they were playing the same game. For fur-
ther contestations of this view of time and colonialism, see Anghie,
Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law;
Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age; Abeysekara,
“Buddhism, Power, Modernity”; Abeysekara, “Religious Studies
Mishandling of Origin and Change”; Abeysekara, “Review Essay of
Theravāda Buddhist Encounters with Modernity”; and Agrama,
Questioning Secularism.
110. In a memorable response to his critics about power and authority in a
religious tradition, Asad urges us to think of power not just as
“struggle,” which is part of it, but as “capability.” Capability is not
the realization of internal potentiality clashing with external forces
but is something embedded in a network of authoritatively binding
and living relationships of persons, discourses, and things, where one
can act in certain ways. Where power authorizes such capability,
beyond the “language of command,” “an encounter, not a commu-
nication, lies at the heart of authority.” In such an encounter, one does
not merely interpret a compelling truth made obvious to one through
some signs but “connects to the ‘truth’ of it” and transforms oneself in
“that moment . . . that subjects her to its authority.” That moment
marks a “beginning,” where one is “struck” by what one did not
notice before. “Like someone love-struck, she lives in a compelling
truth, she inhabits a relationship with someone who is at once internal
and external” (“Responses,” 212–13). On the relationship between
power and “avowal,” where one “binds” to the truth of what one is
obliged to affirm about oneself and so transforms oneself, see Fou-
cault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling.
111. Asad, “Comments on Conversion,” 271–72.
112. Hallisey, “Roads Taken and Not Taken,” 48–49, 32.

113. Hallisey, “Roads Taken and Not Taken,” 48; emphasis added.
114. Hallisey, “Roads Taken and Not Taken,” 48; emphasis added.
115. Hallisey, “Roads Taken and Not Taken,” 42–43.
116. Following Hallisey, Blackburn, McMahan, and others, scholars never
tire of carelessly repeating the problematic notion of “Asian agency”
to claim that colonialism did not invent Buddhism even if the power
relation between the natives and the colonizers was asymmetrical,
since “‘Orientals’ . . . [were not] mere passive recipients of ‘Western’
Orientalist projections” (Bretfeld, “Resonant Paradigms,” 277). In a
deeply flawed essay, Bretfeld writes: “The ‘making of modern Bud-
dhism’ is neither a mere imitation of ‘Western Modernity,’ nor can it
be reduced to the asymmetric power-relation between the colonizer
and the colonized” (277). For Bretfeld, Western projections of Bud-
dhism, “the ‘isms’ of Religious and Buddhist Studies[,] resonate re-
ificated [sic] conceptualizations of the Teaching of the Buddha that
have already been used for centuries in Sri Lankan differentiations”
(278). In one fell swoop, vast temporal distances, the modern aca-
demic studies of religion and the Buddha’s teachings “that have al-
ready been used for centuries” are imperiously judged under Bret-
feld’s sovereign gaze to “resonate.” Without grasping why Buddhist
definitions of concepts authorized by power are not the same as the
academic definitions of Buddhism, Bretfeld, like Hallisey, can only see
similarity between historical Buddhists and modern colonialists:
“Defining an essence of the teaching and thereby using certain se-
lections from authoritative scriptures [of Buddhism] is, thus, hardly
anything unheard of in Buddhist countries before the advent of Ori-
entalist researchers. Systematizing the teaching by distinguishing the
ultimate and the relative in the Buddha’s message, even the applica-
tion of source-critical methods, were [sic] practiced by Buddhist ex-
egetes throughout Buddhist history” (282). Bretfeld’s “resonance,”
which runs the risk of drawing not just a temporal but a political
equivalence between Buddhist and colonial-orientalist practices, does
not constitute some actual reality and, like a phantom or a disem-
bodied voice, is apparently something that only a scholar like Bretfeld
can perceive. Imaginary constructs can be helpful (such as imaginary
numbers in mathematics), but in general, Buddhist studies would do
better to maintain parsimony and to avoid inventing more imaginary
entities than necessary, especially when they, like this “resonance,” do
no theoretical work to clarify matters. Bretfeld’s “resonance” here

does not help us in any noticeable way. It is like the word related,
which most of us see used and abused in student papers adorning
sentences such as “Buddhism and Hinduism are extremely related.”
It does not even begin to ask how power organizes temporalities,
which cannot be seen through the academic theory of resonance be-
cause questions about them are part of discursive spaces from which
they cannot be easily abstracted as universally identifiable examples
“throughout Buddhist history.”
117. Asad, “Thinking about Tradition, Religion, and Politics”; Asad,
Genealogies of Religion; Scott, “Historicizing Tradition”; Abeyse-
kara, Colors of the Robe; Agrama, Questioning Secularism.
118. Asad, Genealogies of Religion; Asad, Formations of the Secular;
Asad, “Thinking about Tradition, Religion, and Politics.” Asad goes
on to argue: “Whatever coherent sense the idea of ‘sustained unity’
has, it comes not from common sentiment but from the shared life of
a tradition—and even that does not preclude bitter disagreement
among those who follow the same tradition, and mutual accusations
of taking what is contingent for what is essential and worth defend-
ing to the last. The disputes themselves make for a kind of unity”
(“Thinking about Tradition, Religion, and Politics,” 195). Asad then
contrasts this to the modern sovereign state. Think also about how the
coherence of tradition worked in the ecclesiastical “classification and
treatment of heretics” in terms of “authority to judge the Truth” and
about the new disciplinary strategies used to secure that authority in
the medieval church. “Every time a Christian suspect is tried by the
inquisitorial process, and sentenced, or cleared (for most suspects
were cleared), the authority of the Church is affirmed. Every time
heretical beliefs and practices are defined or identified as error, the
single Truth is maintained. Every time the Church establishes a new
rule, elaborates an existing doctrine or allocates a fresh responsibility,
the forms and consequences of transgression are multiplied. Every
time a transgression is properly dealt with, a danger is successfully
overcome and the authority of the Church confirmed” (“Medieval
Heresy,” 355, 357).
119. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 178.
120. Asad is critiquing Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of a rational justifi-
cation of tradition (“Thinking about Tradition, Religion, and Poli-
tics,” 172n12). How power seeks to authorize coherence as essential
to a form of life in an embodied tradition is insufficiently thought

in Buddhist studies. For example, McDaniel recently wrote, “I am

fascinated and frustrated that such a diverse, old and widespread
religion like Buddhism can be understood as a coherent religion”
(“Response,” 21). The notion of coherence can also set aside attempts
to understand the historical relations between Buddhism and
Hinduism—that is, how “self-identified Hindus make offerings at
the shrines in Buddhist temples just as many self-identified Buddhists
make offerings at Hindu shrines”—in terms of practices of “tolera-
tions” (Schonthal, “Tolerations of Theravada Buddhism,” 192). What
scholars fail to grasp is that the dispositions to a given practice in a
form of life render questions about tolerating that practice as “Bud-
dhist” or “Hindu” irrelevant. The notion of coherence vis-à-vis a
form of life escapes scholars, who want to inform us how concepts
like “Theravada” suffer from an “impoverishing function” because
there is no “unified Theravada block” (Emmrich, “What Theravāda
Does,” 89–90). This ostensive attempt to work against the essential-
ism of Theravada by arguing for a diversity of its “usages” is mis-
guided. It is like saying that Wittgenstein wants us to stop using the
word game because it has no consistent meaning. Wittgenstein’s point
is exactly the opposite. He wants us to see that just because a word has
a range of usages with no single unifying thread, that does not im-
poverish the meaning of the word. The meaning lies in the use, not in
the transcendent category of the analyst. Theravadins know what
they mean by the word Theravada when they use it. And when it is
used, they are not saddened by any sense of its “impoverishment.”
The term is impoverished only to the scholar who stands above a
multiplicity of uses, synchronic and diachronic. But isn’t the tran-
scendent, a priori “Theravada” by which the scholar judges actual
usages of the term Theravada the only thing here that is artificial and
impoverished? For more on how scholars mistake coherence for ob-
jective continuity and stability, see Abeysekara, “Review Essay of
Theravāda Buddhist Encounters with Modernity.” Part of the general
problem is that the concept of a discursive tradition and its tempo-
rality does not factor into the learned Buddhist studies scholars’ at-
tempts to grasp the relation between change and history; unfortu-
nately, some even explain the social changes in Buddhist history as
tokens of specifically “Buddhist” phenomena within an overarching
scheme of some essential doctrinal logic inherent in Buddhism. Thus,
even as he warns against essentializing Theravada, Peter Skilling

writes: “The prominence given to an essentialized and ahistorical

Theravāda inhibits the study of the history of ideas and the history of
social expressions of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism. Ther-
avāda is not an unchanging entity: to assume so would contradict the
law of impermanence” (“Theravāda in History,” 72).
121. Asad, “Thinking about Tradition, Religion, and Politics,” 213.
122. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §89. Wittgenstein is cri-
tiquing Augustine, who writes: “What, then, is time? I know well
enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked
what it is and try to explain, I am baffled” (Confessions, bk. 11, §14).
The problem with what Augustine says, Wittgenstein argues, is that
“something that one knows when nobody asks one, but no longer
knows when one is asked to explain it, is something that has to be
called to mind. (And it is obviously something which, for some rea-
son, it is difficult to call to mind)” (Philosophical Investigations, §89).
As Wittgenstein goes on to point out, one does not call to mind
phenomena. Rather, one can describe statements about the “‘possi-
bilities’ of phenomena” (§90).
124. For a remarkable attempt to think about the question of temporality
in relation to Agamben’s “History and Time,” which are connected
but not “identical,” see Scott, Omens of Adversity.
126. Kemper, Rescued from the Nation, 430; see also the previous remarks
on the notion of hybridity.
128. Kemper, Rescued from the Nation, 35–36.
129. Kemper, Rescued from the Nation, 305–6.
132. On how genres of religion produce horizons of expectations, see
Walser, “Classification of Religions and Religious Classifications.”
133. Kemper, Rescued from the Nation, 4, 39.
134. Cf. Agamben, Use of Bodies; and Agamben, Highest Poverty.
136. Fashion too, one may claim, can be a distinct (yet ephemeral) sensi-
bility, mediated by a vast network of advertisements, designed to en-
able modes of consumption within new spaces, brought about by the
fluctuations of the market. But fashion sensibilities are not acquired

in the ways the disciplines of religious traditions (like medieval

Christianity, Islam, or even Buddhism) seek to form particular dis-
positions as virtues. For a discussion of how “the embodied discipline
of tradition” differs from the logic of the “market-time,” see Asad,
“Thinking about Tradition, Religion, and Politics.” For an interesting
commentary on Walter Benjamin’s understanding of fashion’s con-
nection to the time of the “really new,” which sits in tension with the
past, see A. Benjamin, “Time of Fashion.” As Walter Benjamin says,
“Why does everyone share [teilt] the newest thing with everyone else?
Presumably, in order to triumph over the dead. This only when there
is really nothing new” (quoted in A. Benjamin, “Time of Fashion,”
28). Agamben writes: “Fashion can be defined as the introduction
into time of a peculiar discontinuity that divides it according to its
relevance or irrelevance, its being-in-fashion or no-longer-being-in-
fashion. This caesura, as subtle as it may be, is remarkable in the sense
that those who need to make note of it do so infallibly; and in so doing
they attest to their own being in fashion. But if we try to objectify and
fix this caesura within chronological time, it reveals itself as un-
graspable. In the first place, the ‘now’ of fashion, the instant in which it
comes into being, is not identifiable via any kind of chronometer. . . .
The time of fashion, therefore, constitutively anticipates itself and
consequently is also always too late” (“What Is the Contemporary?,”
47–48).
138. On how signs are interpreted via a tradition, see Asad, Genealogies of
Religion; and Asad, Secular Translations.
139. Of course, power relations do produce “propositions,” but they are
part of a “move in an argument,” which cannot be taken to be a
universal claim. See Skinner, “Reply to My Critics,” 274. Skinner is
thinking with Austin, Collingwood, and Wittgenstein about what a
form of language or utterance does in saying what it says in contexts
of its use. In a remarkable vein, Foucault says in his final lectures that
what is important is to know “not under what conditions a statement
is true” but what it does (Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, 20).
140. Contemporary questions about the rise of racism and anti-Semitism
in the United States and Europe are haunted by the problem of origin.
Discussions among historians, journalists, cable news show com-
mentators, and pundits—and some of my own colleagues—about the
present forms of anti-Semitism are followed by qualifications to this

effect: “What is happening now is not the same as Nazi Germany.”

While the instinct to avoid easy comparisons of the present to the past
is laudable in a certain sense, this denial is often not well thought out
and can turn into a troubling and paralyzing universal dictum that
something is never the same as something else. What is often missed is
that the past (i.e., Nazi Germany) is not an event, with a seamless set
of narratives and activities, constituting an essential whole. Here the
problem of causation already writes itself into the notion of an event,
making possible questions about which act produced which cause.
The point is that who gets to decide which form of the present (racist
discourse or act) can be compared to the past, and what forms of
persuasion and sensibility are made possible by such comparisons, is
the work of power.
141. On some aspects of the problematic interventions to think about the
politics of the present through the historicist reconstruction of the
past, see Scott, “Dehistoricizing History.”
142. Asad, “Thinking about the Secular Body, Pain, and Liberal Politics”;
Agrama, Questioning Secularism.
146. On the temporality of remembering the past by successive generations
devoid of the “affective demands” of the previous ones, see Scott,
“Generations of Memory.”
147. Asad, “Thinking about the Secular Body, Pain, and Liberal Politics,”
673; see also Asad, Secular Translations.
152. In a regrettable misreading of Asad’s idea of a discursive tradition,
Taneja asks: “What do we do with a tradition that is encountered not
as authoritative discourse but, as it were, out of the corner of one’s
eye, in dreams and waking visions, in stories told by neighbors and
strangers, in snatches of song playing on the radio? As Veena Das
observes, ‘The heterogeneity of everyday life invites us to think of
networks of encounter and exchange instead of bounded civilizational
histories of Hinduism, Islam, or Christianity’” (Jinnealogy, 85). This
emphasis on the heterogeneity of life fundamentally misunderstands

the very idea of an encounter within a tradition. Where there is an

encounter, one always finds oneself in a relationship of power that
indeed authorizes distinct forms of capacity and sensibility. Contrary
to Veena Das, an encounter is always bounded within power. An
encounter, as a moment in power, forms its own horizon of sensibility
and intelligibility. One may, of course, have dreams and visions on
one’s own, but when one puts them to use, talks about them to others,
one already enters the bounds of language and its horizon of coherent
intelligibility that renders possible specific sensibilities. This encoun-
ter already presupposes one’s ability to narrate such dreams to others
as much as the other’s ability to understand or even question them.
153. On how, for example, the idea of stabilitas worked in medieval prac-
tices of defining heresy, see Asad, “Medieval Heresy”; see also n. 118.
References
Abeysekara, Ananda. “Buddhism, Power, Modernity: A Review Essay.”
Culture and Religion 12, no. 4 (2011): 489–97.
Abeysekara, Ananda. Colors of the Robe: Religion, Identity, and Differ-
ence. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002.
Abeysekara, Ananda. “Religious Studies’ Mishandling of Origin and
Change: Time, Tradition, and Form of Life in Buddhism.” Cultural
Critique, no. 89 (2018): 22–71.
Abeysekara, Ananda. “A Review Essay of Theravāda Buddhist Encounters
with Modernity.” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 25 (2018): 333–71.
Abeysekara, Ananda. “Sri Lanka, Postcolonial ‘Locations of Buddhism,’
Secular Peace: Sovereignty of Decision and Distinction.” Culture and
Religion 14, no. 2 (2012): 211–37.
Agamben, Giorgio. The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-
Life, translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2013.
Agamben, Giorgio. “History and Time: Critique of the Instant and the
Continuum.” In Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience,
translated by Liz Heron, 89–105. New York: Verso, 1993.
Agamben, Giorgio. The Use of Bodies, translated by Adam Kotsko. Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.
Agamben, Giorgio. “What Is the Contemporary?” In What Is an Appara-
tus?, translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, 39–54. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Agrama, Hussein Ali. Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the

Rule of Law in Modern Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2012.
Anderson, Carol S. “‘For Those Who Are Ignorant’: A Study of the Baud-
dha Adahilla.” In Constituting Communities: Theravāda Buddhism
and the Religious Cultures of South and Southeast Asia, edited by
John Clifford Holt, Jacob N. Kinnard, and Jonathan Walters, 171–
88. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.
Anghie, Antony. Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International
Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Asad, Talal. “Comments on Conversion.” In Conversion to Modernities,
edited by Peter van der Veer, 263–73. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Asad, Talal. “Conscripts of Western Civilization.” In Dialectical Anthro-
pology: Essays in Honor of Stanley Diamond, edited by Christine Gai-
ley, 333–51. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1992.
Asad, Talal. “Discipline and Humility in Medieval Christian Monasti-
cism.” In Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power
in Christianity and Islam, 125–67. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993.
Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Asad, Talal. “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism.” In Is Cri-
tique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, edited by Talal
Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, 20–63. Ber-
keley: University of California Press, 2009.
Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in
Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1993.
Asad, Talal. “Medieval Heresy: An Anthropological View.” Social History
11, no. 3 (1986): 345–62.
Asad, Talal. “Modern Power and the Reconfiguration of Religious Tradi-
tions: An Interview with Saba Mahmood.” Stanford Electronic Hu-
manities Review 5, no. 1 (1996). web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/5-1
/text/asad.html.
Asad, Talal. “Pain and Truth in Medieval Christian Ritual.” In Genealogies
of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam,
83–124. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Asad, Talal. “Responses.” In Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and
His Interlocutors, edited by David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, 206–
41. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

Asad, Talal. Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calcula-

tive Reason. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
Asad, Talal. “Thinking about Agency and Pain.” In Formations of the Sec-
ular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, 67–99. Stanford, CA: Stanford
Asad, Talal. “Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics.” In The Cam-
bridge Companion to Religious Studies, edited by Robert A. Orsi, 36–
57. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Asad, Talal. “Thinking about the Secular Body, Pain, and Liberal Politics.”
Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2011): 657–75.
Asad, Talal. “Thinking about Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt To-
day.” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2015): 166–214.
Augustine, Saint. Confessions, translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin. Harmonds-
worth: Penguin, 1961.
Bastin, Rohan. “The Authentic Inner Life: Complicity and Resistance in the
Tamil Hindu Revival.” In vol. 1 of Sri Lanka: Collective Identities Re-
visited, edited by Michael Roberts, 385–438. Colombo: Marga Insti-
tute, 1997.
Benjamin, Andrew. “The Time of Fashion: A Commentary on Thesis XIV in
Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History.’” In Style and Time: Es-
says on the Politics of Appearance, 25–38. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
Berkwitz, Stephen C. Buddhist Poetry and Colonialism: Alagiyavanna and
the Portuguese in Sri Lanka. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Blackburn, Anne M. Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-
Century Lankan Monastic Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2001.
Blackburn, Anne M. Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity
in Sri Lanka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Blackburn, Anne M. “Sihala Sangha and Lanka in Later Premodern South-
east Asia.” In Buddhist Dynamics in Premodern and Early Modern
Southeast Asia, edited by D. Christian Lammerts, 307–32. Singapore:
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2015.
Bourke, Joanna. The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2014.
Braun, Erik. The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the
Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2013.
Braun, Erik. “Local and Translocal in the Study of Theravada Buddhism
and Modernity.” Religion Compass 3, no. 6 (2009): 935–50.

Bretfeld, Sven. 2012. “Resonant Paradigms in the Study of Religions and

the Emergence of Theravāda Buddhism.” Religion 42, no. 2 (2012):
273–97.
Carbine, Jason A. Review of Alicia Turner’s Saving Buddhism: The Imper-
manence of Religion in Colonial Burma. History of Religions 56, no. 4
(2017): 449–51.
Casinader, Niranjan, Roshan De Silva Wijeyaratne, and Lee Godden.
“From Sovereignty to Modernity: Revisiting the Colebrooke-Cameron
Reforms—Transforming the Buddhist and Colonial Imaginary in
Nineteenth-Century Ceylon.” Comparative Legal History 6, no. 1
(2018): 34–64.
Charney, Mike. Review of Alicia Turner’s Saving Buddhism: The Imperma-
nence of Religion in Colonial Burma. H-Buddhism, April 2016.
networks.h-net.org/node/6060/reviews/119785/charney-turner-saving
-buddhism-impermanence-religion-colonial-burma.
Clayton, Jay, and Eric Rothstein. “Figures in the Corpus: Theories of Influ-
ence and Intertextuality.” In Influence and Intertextuality in Literary
History, edited by Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, 3–36. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
Collingwood, R. G. “Question and Answer.” In An Autobiography, 29–43.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939.
Collins, Steven. Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pali
Imaginaire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Collins, Steven, and Justin Thomas McDaniel. “Buddhist ‘Nuns’ (Mae Chi)
and the Teaching of Pali in Contemporary Thailand.” Modern Asian
Studies 44, no. 6 (2010): 1373–1408.
Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. Of Revelation and Revolution:
Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Chica-
go: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Derrida, Jacques. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, translated by Barbara Harlow.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
Doyle, Tara. “‘Liberate the Mahabodhi Temple!’: Socially Engaged Bud-
dhism, Dalit-Style.” In Buddhism in the Modern World: Adaptations
of an Ancient Tradition, edited by Steven Heine and Charles S. Prebish,
249–80. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Emmrich, Christoph. “What Theravāda Does: Thoughts on a Term from
the Perspective of the Study of Post-colonial Nepal.” In Theravāda
Buddhist Encounters with Modernity, edited by Juliane Schober and
Steven Collins, 78–100. London: Routledge, 2017.

Festa, Lynn. “Sentimental Visions of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Stud-

ies.” Literature Compass 6, no. 1 (2009): 23–55.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A. M.
Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage, 1982.
Foucault, Michel. Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in
Justice, translated by Stephen W. Sawyer. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2014.
Foxeus, Niklas. “Contemporary Burmese Buddhism.” In The Oxford
Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism, edited by Michael Jerryson,
212–35. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Frasch, Tilman. Review of Alicia Turner’s Saving Buddhism: The Imperma-
nence of Religion in Colonial Burma. Bulletin of the School of Oriental
and African Studies 79, no. 2 (2016): 466–68.
Gilmartin, David. “Towards a Global History of Voting: Sovereignty, the
Diffusion of Ideas, and the Enchanted Individual.” Religions 3, no. 2
(2012): 407–23.
Gombrich, Richard, and Gananath Obeyesekere. Buddhism Transformed:
Religious Change in Sri Lanka. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1988.
Hallisey, Charles. “Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravāda
Buddhism.” In Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under
Colonialism, edited by Donald S. Lopez Jr., 31–61. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1995.
Hansen, Ann Ruth. How to Behave: Buddhism and Modernity in Colo-
nial Cambodia, 1860–1930. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press,
2007.
Harris, Elizabeth J. Review of Anne M. Blackburn’s Locations of Bud-
dhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka. Journal of the Amer-
ican Academy of Religion 79, no. 2 (2011): 529–32.
Heidegger, Martin. Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, translated
by Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer. Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 2009.
Heidegger, Martin. “The Grand Style.” In vol. 1 of Nietzsche, translated by
David Farrell Krell, 124–37. New York: Harper and Row, 1979.
Heidegger, Martin. “On the Essence and Concept of Φύσις in Aristotle’s
Physics B, 1.” In Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill, translated by
Thomas Sheehan, 183–230. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998.
Hirschkind, Charles. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islam-
ic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

Hirschkind, Charles. “Is There a Secular Body?” Cultural Anthropology

26, no. 4 (2011): 633–47.
Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments
for Capitalism before Its Triumph. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1971.
Holt, John Clifford. Buddha in the Crown: Avalokiteśvara in the Buddhist
Traditions of Sri Lanka. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Holt, John Clifford. “John Holt Responds to Gananath Obeyesek[e]re
about The Sri Lanka Reader.” Ilankai Tamil Sangam, February 16,
2012. sangam.org/2012/02/Holt_Responds.php?uid=4610.
Holt, John Clifford. “Protestant Buddhism?” Religious Studies Review 17,
no. 4 (1991): 307–12.
Holt, John Clifford. Theravada Traditions: Buddhist Ritual Cultures in
Contemporary Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. Honolulu: University
of Hawaiʻi Press, 2017.
James, Susan. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century
Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Jeganathan, Pradeep. “‘Violence’ as an Analytical Problem: Sri Lankanist
Anthropology after July ’83.” Nethra 2, no. 4 (1998): 9–47.
Johnson, Irving C. “The Buddha and the Puritan: Weberian Reflections on
‘Protestant Buddhism.’” Sri Lanka Journal of Social Sciences 27, nos.
1–2 (2004): 61–105.
Kaloyanides, Alexandra. “Escaping Colonialism, Rescuing Religion: A Re-
view of Alicia Turner’s Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Reli-
gion in Colonial Burma.” Marginalia, June 23, 2015.
Keane, Webb. “Sincerity, ‘Modernity,’ and the Protestants.” Cultural
Anthropology 17, no. 1 (2002): 65–92.
Kemper, Steven. Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the
Buddhist World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Lammerts, D. Christian. Introduction to Buddhist Dynamics in Premodern
and Early Modern Southeast Asia, edited by D. Christian Lammerts, 1–
17. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2015.
Mahmood, Saba. “Minority Rights and Religious Liberty: Itineraries of
Conversion.” In Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Re-
port, 31–65. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Mahmood, Saba. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Mahmood, Saba. “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensu-
rable Divide?” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 4 (2009): 836–62.

Mandair, Arvind-Pal S. Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, In-
dia, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation. New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 2009.
March, Andrew F. “Speaking about Muhammad, Speaking for Muslims.”
Critical Inquiry 37, no. 4 (2011): 806–21.
McDaniel, Justin Thomas. Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words: Histories
of Buddhist Monastic Education in Laos and Thailand. Seattle: Univer-
sity of Washington Press, 2008.
McDaniel, Justin Thomas. “Response: Architects of Buddhist Leisure.”
Heidelberg Ethnology, Occasional Papers, no. 5 (2017): 17–22.
McGovern, Nathan. Review of Anne M. Blackburn’s Locations of Bud-
dhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka. Journal of Buddhist
Ethics 20 (2013): 194–203.
McMahan, David L. The Making of Buddhist Modernism. New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 2008.
Mehta, Uday Singh. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-
Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999.
Monius, Anne. “Fighting Words on ‘World Religions.’” Harvard Divinity
Bulletin 34, no. 1 (2006): 84–86.
Mrozik, Susanne. Review of Anne M. Blackburn’s Buddhist Learning and
Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century Lankan Monastic Culture. H-
Buddhism, July 2002. networks.h-net.org/node/6060/reviews/15965
/mrozik-blackburn-buddhist-learning-and-textual-practice-eighteenth.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Antichrist. In The Portable Nietzsche, edited and
translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin, 1976.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, edited by Bernard Williams, trans-
lated by Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. In vol. 8 of The Com-
plete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Adrian Del Caro.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014.
Obeyesekere, Gananath. “Avalokiteśvara’s Aliases and Guises.” History of
Religions 32, no. 4 (1993): 368–73.
Obeyesekere, Gananath. “Religious Symbolism and Political Change in
Ceylon.” Modern Ceylon Studies 1, no. 1 (1970): 43–63.
Obeyesekere, Gananath. Review of Stephen Prothero’s The White Bud-
dhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott. Journal of Buddhist
Ethics 4 (1997): 330–35.

Ossa-Richardson, Anthony. “Possession or Insanity? Two Views from the

Victorian Lunatic Asylum.” Journal of the History of Ideas 24, no. 4
(2013): 553–75.
Pandey, Gyanendra. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North
India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Promey, Sally M., ed. Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material
Practice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.
Prothero, Stephen R. “Henry Steel Olcott and ‘Protestant Buddhism.’”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63, no. 2 (1995): 281–
302.
Prothero, Stephen R. The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry
Steel Olcott. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.
Queen, Christopher S. “Introduction: The Shapes and Sources of Engaged
Buddhism.” In Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in
Asia, edited by Christopher S. Queen and Sallie B. King, 1–44. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1996.
Queloz, Matthieu. “Wittgenstein on the Chain of Reasons.” Wittgenstein-
Studien 7, no. 1 (2016): 105–30.
Roberts, Nathaniel. “Is Conversion a ‘Colonization of Consciousness’?”
Anthropological Theory 12, no. 3 (2012): 271–94.
Saha, Jonathan. Review of Alicia Turner’s Saving Buddhism: The Imper-
manence of Religion in Colonial Burma. South East Asia Research
24, no. 4 (2016): 532–35.
Salgado, Nirmala. “Tradition, Power, and Community among Sri Lanka
Buddhist Nuns.” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 24 (2017): 369–99.
Schober, Juliane, and Steven Collins, eds. Theravāda Buddhist Encounters
with Modernity. London: Routledge, 2017.
Schonthal, Benjamin. “The Tolerations of Theravada Buddhism.” In Toler-
ation in Comparative Perspective, edited by Vicki A. Spencer, 179–96.
Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2017.
Scott, David. “Colonial Governmentality.” In Refashioning Futures:
Criticism after Postcoloniality, 23–52. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1999.
Scott, David. “Colonialism.” International Social Science Journal, no. 154
(1997): 517–26.
Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlighten-
ment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
Scott, David. “Dehistoricizing History.” In Refashioning Futures: Criticism
after Postcoloniality, 93–105. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1999.

Scott, David. “The Demonology of Nationalism: On the Anthropology of

Ethnicity and Violence in Sri Lanka.” Economy and Society 19, no. 4
(1990): 492–510.
Scott, David. “The Ends and Strategy of Yaktovil.” In Formations of Ritual:
Colonial and Anthropological Discourses on the Sinhala Yaktovil,
204–40. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Scott, David. Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropological Dis-
courses on the Sinhala Yaktovil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994.
Scott, David. “Generations of Memory: The Work of Mourning.” In
Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice, 99–126. Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
Scott, David. “Historicizing Tradition: Buddhism and the Discourse of
Yakku.” In Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropological Dis-
courses on the Sinhala Yaktovil, 173–203. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Scott, David. Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice. Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
Scott, David. “Religion in Colonial Civil Society.” In Refashioning Futures:
Criticism after Postcoloniality, 53–69. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1999.
Scott, J. Barton. Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies
of Self-Rule. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Semmens, Justine. “Ten-Precept Mothers in the Buddhist Revival in Sri Lan-
ka.” In The Sri Lanka Reader: History, Culture, Politics, edited by John
Clifford Holt, 364–75. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Shapiro, Gary. “Styling Nietzsche: A Review Essay of Jacques Derrida’s
Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles.” Man and the World 14 (1981): 228–37.
Skilling, Peter. “Theravāda in History.” Pacific World 11 (2009): 61–93.
Skinner, Quentin. “A Genealogy of the Modern State.” Proceedings of the
British Academy 162 (2009): 325–70.
Skinner, Quentin. Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Cambridge: Cambridge
Skinner, Quentin. Liberty before Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
Skinner, Quentin. “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.”
History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 3–53.
Skinner, Quentin. “A Reply to My Critics.” In Meaning and Context: Quen-
tin Skinner and His Critics, edited by James Tully, 231–88. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Skinner, Quentin. “A Third Concept of Liberty.” Proceedings of the British

Academy 117 (2002): 237–68.
Taneja, Anand Vivek. Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in
the Medieval Ruins of Delhi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2017.
Thompson, Ashley. “The Portrait of the Artist as a Buddhist Man.” In Ther-
avāda Buddhist Encounters with Modernity, edited by Juliane Schober
and Steven Collins, 118–36. London: Routledge, 2017.
Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
Turner, Alicia. Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in Colo-
nial Burma. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014.
Viswanath, Rupa. The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in
Modern India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Walser, Joseph. “The Classification of Religions and Religious Classifica-
tions: A Genre Approach to the Origin of Religions.” Culture and Re-
ligion 16, no. 4 (2015): 345–71.
Walters, Jonathan. “Multireligion on the Bus: Beyond ‘Influence’ and ‘Syn-
cretism’ in the Study of Religious Meetings.” In Unmaking the Nation:
The Politics of Identity and History in Modern Sri Lanka, edited by
Pradeep Jeganathan and Qadri Ismail, 25–54. Colombo: Social Scien-
tists’ Association, 1995.
Wickramasinghe, Nira. “Colonial Governmentality and the Political
Thinking through ‘1931’ in the Crown Colony of Ceylon/Sri Lanka.”
Socio 5 (2015): 99–114. journals.openedition.org/socio/1921?lang=fr.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1961.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev.
ed. Glasgow: Fontana, 1983.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M.
Anscombe, P. M. S, Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. 4th ed. Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
Wood, David. “Style and Strategy at the Limits of Philosophy: Heidegger
and Derrida.” Monist 63, no. 4 (1980): 494–511.


Abeyesekera 2019 Protestant Buddhism

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Abeyesekera 2019 Protestant Buddhism

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Protestant Buddhism and “Inﬂuence”

The Temporality of a Concept

For how is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a

An encounter, not a communication, lies at the heart of authority.

For almost three decades the concept of “Protestant Buddhism” has

qui parle Vol. 28, No. 1, June 2019

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

temporality is staked on the question of “inﬂuence,” which has a ge-

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

coherence, as we will see, operates in terms of a different kind of tem-

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

was not about merely disciplining bodies; discipline worked as an

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

wants to understand who deﬁnes it authoritatively and what (forms

Rethinking the Temporality of the Critique of Protestant

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

“founded the Society for the Propagation of Buddhism in imitation

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

an animal bone. Hevavitarana came to be widely known as Anagar-

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

India, and sponsored Buddhist delegations to the West—helped cre-

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

The growing body of scholarship on Buddhism and modernity re-

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

are assumed not to determine the identity of tradition. The problems

Temporality of History’s “Reemergence”: Religious Difference

Holt’s critique of Protestant Buddhism, which has shaped successive

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

nineteenth-century colonial encounter. So the modernization of

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

in the manner in which gods and bodhisattvas of Hindu and Ma-

On this account, the Sinhalese in the fourteenth century already pos-

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

truly spectacular intolerance that reemerged in modern Sri Lanka,

Once again, the claim is predicated on a conjecture. It is this mission-

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

Religion under the “Inﬂuence”

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

West versus that of Protestantism in the colonies is simply reduced to

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

a well-established and still-growing archive of thinking about the

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

The naturalization of violence as latent in history then reduces the

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

Lanka, so he goes there and becomes certiﬁed as a teacher of Goen-

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

middle class in cities like Colombo and is “singularly unrepresenta-

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

“reemergence” are founded on assumptions about some Buddhist

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

of Buddhists “who collectively constituted themselves and their

for all the constraints, Burmese Buddhists challenged the catego-

Thus resistance (“Burmese Buddhists challenged the categories Eu-

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

This universalist notion of agency is reminiscent of the anthropo-

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

Protestant assumptions, or Orientalism) in the changes to Theravāda

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf

gaze to be able to judge “similarity” or “difference” between Orien-

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/qui-parle/article-pdf/28/1/1/575668/1abeysekara.pdf