Brill Challenging Paradigms: Buddhism and Nativism: Framing Identity Discourse in Buddhist Environments

Buddhism is often portrayed as a universalising religion that transcends the local and directs attention toward a transcendent dharma. Yet, wherever Buddhism spreads, it also sparks local identity discourses that, directly or indirectly, root the dharma in native soil and history, and, in doing so, frame ‘the local’ in Buddhist discourse. Occasionally, notably in Japanese Shinto and Tibetan Bön, this localising variety of ‘framing of discourse’―here tentatively termed ‘nativism’―leads to the establishment of independent traditions that break free from Buddhism; yet, in other contexts, localising trends remain firmly embedded within Buddhism. In Challenging Paradigms: Buddhism and Nativism Teeuwen and Blezer offer a comparative study of localising responses to Buddhism in different Buddhist environments in Japan, Korea, Tibet, India and Bali. About the Author Mark Teeuwen, PhD (1996), in Japanese Studies, University of Leiden, is Professor at Oslo University. He has published extensively on the history of kami cults and Shinto. His latest book is A new history of Shinto (2010, co-authored with John Breen). Henk Blezer, PhD (Leiden 1997), has researched and published on Indian and Tibetan Buddhism and on Bön since the early nineties. He organised the 9th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Leiden 2000, and published the proceedings (Brill 2002). He has worked on Bön traditions for about twenty years and was Principal Investigator of the The Three Pillars of Bön research program (NWO Vidi), on the formation of Bön identity in Tibet, at the turn of the first millennium AD.