Zen(2003); and Jan Nattier, who engages in the kind of research in Inner
Asian Buddhism that one used to associate with Friedrich Weller and, more
recently, with Paul Zieme and Werner Sundermann. Special mention must be
made of Gregory Schopen, who in a number of articles, now collected in three
volumes—Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks(1997), Buddhist Monks and
Business Matters(2004), Figments and Fragments of MahÇyÇna Buddhism in
India(2005)—has approached Buddhism from the ground up, making use of
traditional texts, but also of epigraphy and archaeological research in order
to study how actual Buddhists, especially monks, have lived and died. Other
important contributors have been Luis Gómez, who ranges over the whole
field of Buddhist studies, and Donald Lopez, as much in his own work, which
encompasses textual exegesis and ideological analysis, as in his indefatigable
editorial activities, a recent example of which is Critical Terms for the Study
of Buddhism(2005).
Before moving away from the study of Buddhism, reference must be made
to two trends that are sometimes regarded as antithetical. One of them is the
frequently thankless task of editing and translating texts, which is once again
receiving the support it deserves. The other involves exercises in reflexivity. In
regard to the first, it must be said that even while being aware of the need to
move beyond the fetishization of the text, one must recognize that without
access to written documents as well as to translations it is impossible to
develop one’s theories or even to engage in the denunciation of ‘Orientalist’
misdeeds. Therefore, one must be thankful for the many previously untranslated
texts found in the ‘Princeton Readings in Religion’, published under the general
editorship of Donald Lopez, and for the Treasury of the Buddhist Sciences
series of translations, edited by Robert Thurman and published by Columbia
University Press. In regard to the second task, one must welcome, despite the
unavoidable exaggerations, the exercises in reflexivity in which scholars of
various Asian traditions are currently engaging, as well as their overturning
of myths about the peaceful nature of Asian ‘spirituality’. In the case of
Buddhism, attention should be drawn to the already mentioned Curators of
the Buddha; to Brian Victoria’s Zen at War(1997/2006), and to a number of
articles by William Bodiford, Nam-lin Hur, and Christopher Ives, on the
legitimizing functions of Buddhism and Shinto, published in the Japanese
Journal of Religious Studies. Yet, indispensable as it is, reflexivity may become
merely a reflex: one more commodity demanded by the academic market. One
would be tempted to understand from this perspective some of the English-
language work produced by Bernard Faure in the early 1990s, were it not for
the fact that the overabundance of theorists’ names in The Rhetoric of
Immediacy(1991) and in Chan Insights and Oversights(1993), contrasts with
their complete absence in the books the same author wrote in French just a
few years earlier, such as La volonté d’orthodoxie dans le bouddhisme chinois
(1987) and Le bouddhisme Ch’an en mal d’histoire(1989). Similarly, the verbal
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