antinomianism and the fashionable claim that his is ‘no more than a story, as
opposed to a history’ (1991: 364), are more than made up for by the author’s
old-fashioned erudition as well as by his no less old-fashioned recognition—
however wordy and double-tongued—that there is an ‘object’ somewhere:Although it is true [sic] that scholars tend to project surreptitiously their
own thought categories on their object of study, one can also hope that,
par la force des choses, the resilient object—here the Chan tradition—in
turn projects its structures onto the theoretical approach.
(1993: 151)In any event, as one moves from the volumes published in 1991 and 1993 to
the already mentioned The Red Threadand then to The Power of Denial, the
rhetoric of undecidability, while not absent, diminishes considerably.
In the case of Japanese Buddhism, for many years the focus of scholarly
attention was Zen. This is understandable, since, contrary to some current
hypercritical views, Western scholars who study religions other than Chris-
tianity tend to look for religious phenomena that least resemble those found
in the normative versions of the tradition in which they grew up. This under-
standable tendency is intensified when, for political and other reasons, members
of the scholar’s culture seek to express their dissatisfaction by making use of
the spiritual resources that exotic cultures seem to offer. Much as Zen fulfilled
those needs, the fulfillment of Western needs led to the disregard on the part
of Western scholars of the forms of religion that were actually popular in Japan.
In Interpreting Amida (1997), Galen Amstutz has chronicled the process
whereby, without forgetting work by Alfred Bloom and James Dobbins, Pure
Land Buddhism became neglected by Western scholars.
Older than Buddhism, Jainism never became a world religion, nor has it
become the subject of widespread scholarly interest. Studied for many years
as a purely textual entity, Jainism has been approached more recently in a
manner that does justice to the actual lives of its members. Among the works
devoted to Jainism reference should be made to Padmanabh Jaini’s The Jaina
Path of Purification(1979), to John Cort’s Jains in the World(2001), and to
‘Candabala’s Tears’, a recent essay in which Whitney Kelting studies the role
played by emotion in this tradition, emotion having been usually assumed to
be antithetical to Jainism.
Chinese religion.As is also the case with Buddhism, Jainism, Indian religions
in general and, as we shall see, even Christianity, Chinese ‘lived’, ‘popular’,
‘local’, ‘folk, ‘common’ religion is now increasingly the focus of scholarly
research. We can refer to work by Daniel Overmyer and David Jordan (the
latter on Taiwan), Stephen Teiser, Robert Weller, P. Steven Sangren, Edward
Davis, and Robert Hymes. Valuable if read by themselves, some of the essays
found in Unruly Gods, edited by Meir Shahar and Robert Weller (1996), acquire262
GUSTAVO BENAVIDES