[Buddha-l] American Mahayana/British Theravada?

[Stefan Detrez]

I seem to have this strange intuition that the majority of British
buddhologists are mostly dealing with the Theravada, while American
buddhologists are more 'into' the Mahayana, and not to mention the
Vajrayana, which seems to be gefundenes Fressen for scholarship there.

Rupert Gethin, Peter Harvey, Richard Gombrich, K. Norman, Warder, Sue
Hamilton, Steven Collins and our very own listmember Lance Cousins, are, in
my opinion ,pretty representative for the UK when it comes to fine
buddhological scholarship, to name some examples that make (half) my point.

I think this has to do the legacy of the Horners and the British affinity
with empiricism which as a philosophical point of view can be conveniently
molded to show similarity with the Dharma (not to mention Kalupahana's
endeavours).
.
On the other hand, in America, there's the literary tradition of Whitmanian
and Emersonian pondering of the impressive 'grandeur' of the world and
everything in it. The transcendentalist naturalism or whatshamacallit with
its sporadic references to the Buddha of (particularly) the Mahayana seems
to echo in the American preference for the Mahayana. Excluding Richard
Salomon and Alex Wayman, I'm not familiar with American buddhologists
dealing solely with the Theravada...

Could it be that American buddhology was built on those early acquaintancies
with Buddhism, freshly imported by colonizing orientalists, while the
British built a legacy on the remains of their colonial past?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.swcp.com/mailman/private/buddha-l/attachments/20060117/48a47239/attachment.html