Buddhism in the Afro-Eurasian World System: Dissent, Gender, and World-Making

Publication Date

1-1-2025

Document Type

Contribution to a Book

Publication Title

Dynamics of Deep Time and Deep Place Decolonial Reconstellations Volume One

Volume

1

DOI

10.4324/9781003517511-4

First Page

93

Last Page

147

Abstract

This triptych of essays seeks to recover the political potentialities, epistemological possibilities, and imaginative energies latent in Buddhism’s heterogenous historical legacies. Focusing on early Buddhism as it emerged on the Indian subcontinent and spread beyond, Revathi Krishnaswamy’s opening section argues that the Buddhist enlightenment was, in effect, not only a spiritual path to personal salvation but also a medium of economic, political, and sociocultural modernization. Dorothy Wong’s section offers another perspective on the dynamics by which Buddhism shaped inter-regional encounters that engendered new alignments, including state formations and kingship as these involved powerful women in the Tang dynasty (618–907) and neighboring Japan. This emergent Buddhist state formation enabled marginalized actors, including women and foreigners, to gain power within the new empires. Ben Tran’s section examines how Vietnamese intellectuals in the late French colonial period (1932–1945) turned to Buddhist ideas of fictionality to resist French imperialism and to modernize Vietnamese society. The deployment of Buddhist concepts in early twentieth-century Vietnamese literature breached the very categories and conceptions of religion and fictionality that constituted European forms of knowledge and dominance. Gender, Tran argues, was the pivotal category of negotiation and subversiveness in the leveraging of Buddhist-inflected literature for societal transformation.

Department

English and Comparative Literature

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