authority of a text, they give primacy to the texts of Buddhism, even to the extent of
compiling for Buddhism a ‘Buddhist Bible.’ As a textualized tradition, mastery of
Buddhism became mastery of the texts which were relocated from Asia to Europe
and treated as authoritative sources of doctrine (Trainor 1997:9–11; Lopez
1995:283). And third, I feel very strongly that understanding the variety of religious
cultures within which Buddhism has existed—India and the other cultures of South
and South-east Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, and other Central Asian cultures, and in East
Asia the religious cultures of China, Korea, and Japan—is essential to understanding
the teachings and practices of Buddhism. A meditative practice such as visualizing
the syllable ‘A’ taught in the Shingon tradition of esoteric Buddhism in Japan only
makes sense when understood in the context of Indic conceptions regarding the nature
of Sanskrit (Payne 1998).
From my own perspective then to assert without qualification that ‘Buddhism is
psychology’ would simply be anachronistic. This is even true of the school within
Buddhism that was most explicitly concerned with developing theories of how the
mind works, the Yogacara school. What the Yogacarins were doing is only analogous
to what we call psychology. Psychology is our category, not theirs. Given the centrality
of understanding how the mind works for the entire Buddhist tradition, there is a
significant conceptual overlap between Buddhism and psychology. Thus, it may look
to us like it is psychology, but it is important to remember that the similarity arises
from the way in which elements are selectively highlighted for comparison. Such
selective highlighting necessarily throws the balance of the tradition into shadow,
obscuring aspects which may not be conducive to the cozy sense of familiarity created
by fitting Buddhism into our own psychological world view.
The inescapable importance of understanding social, cultural, and historical
location is clearly exemplified in the terminology used to describe various forms of
Buddhism to Western audiences. As is commonly the case for most Americans, I grew
up thinking in terms of meditation and ritual as two completely separate categories
of activity. The fundamentally Protestant religious culture of America generally
dismisses ritual as empty and meaningless. Meditation, however, is positively valued,
being found in various contemplative practices of Protestantism. This dichotomy in
American religious culture between meditation and ritual, together with the relative
valuation of each, goes back to the conflicts of the Reformation, when Protestants
called into question the sacramental practices of Catholicism. As such, it is a deep
and pervasive assumption in American society, even among those who are not
particularly religious. It also explains, at least in part, why Zen, which is described in
the West almost exclusively in terms of meditation, has been one of the most successful
forms of Buddhism in the West.
That the dichotomy between and the relative values placed on meditation and
ritual is a cultural assumption, rather than a universally applicable set of categories,
was made clear to me in my work in Japan. In the early 1980s I went to Mount Koya,
the main center of study and practice of the Shingon tradition of Vajrayana, or tantric
Buddhism. While there I both completed the training and received dharma
transmission as a Shingon priest (Japanese: ajari; Sanskrit: acarya), and conducted
170 LOCATING BUDDHISM, LOCATING PSYCHOLOGY