Voices from Asia and the Attic
by John Harding
In “Voices from the Attic,” William Westfall offers Canada and its border as a vantage point for Retelling U.S. Religious History. He alternately emphasizes how the border divides, with a useful critical distance wary of “shrill jingoism” (183) from American religion and politics, alongside how that same border joins the countries — and how “Canada offers to this project a parallel historical discourse” (187).
Westfall cites strategic instances of differentiation, such as the push by John Strachan, the archdeacon of York, to found what became the University of Toronto as a necessary alternative to “American institutions, where they would be taught little more than anarchy in politics and infidelity in religion” (185). Westfall links the national and religious histories with narratives of border crossings – including those moving away from a sense of being oppressed or marginalized by dominant forces on one side of the border and/or drawn by their vision of opportunity on the other side. These crossings connect nations and simultaneously reinforce the perception of difference that motivated the movement from one side of the border to the other.
This “Voices from the Attic” chapter advances one of the volume’s aims, to take into account more voices and different perspectives for a more complete and complex narrative, but Westfall also acknowledges the challenge of “conceptualiz[ing] difference within the writing of a national history [being] … susceptible to a seemingly infinite process of division and subdivision” (197-8). He asserts that structural differences have been central to formulating Canadian national histories, and that “by focusing directly on difference,” Canadian historians have been “able to identify how a nation of differences can in fact cohere” (199). Westfall links this attention to difference both to “a seemingly endless process of redefining the term Canadian,” and to an explanation of “why in Canada words such as nation and identity are so often used in the plural”; ultimately concluding that in “Canada the only truth we hold to be self-evident is that no truth is self-evident … [which] may explain why Canada can offer such an interesting and valuable counterpoint to America” (199).
I think that calls from “Voices from the Attic” for alternate perspectives, broader geographic scope, instructive comparisons, and attention to borders all still hold. Of course, comparison can be problematic, as can borders, as addressed in my colleague Sheila McManus’s Nov. 23, 2023 PUBlic Professor lecture entitled “Borders are Stupid.” McManus, as a borderlands historian, studies “the interconnected communities and spaces that straddle and resist borders and their categories” and asserts that borders “as we think of them today are very recent creations” that are neither natural nor harmless (McManus, “Borders are Stupid,” unpublished paper). Although largely “figments of our collective imaginations,” borders are consequential and provide insight into nations’ narratives “because it is at their edges that nation states need to work hardest to invent and enforce their national identities” (McManus).
McManus’ presentation reinforces Westfall’s call to be attentive to voices from the attic, but also connects with my collaborative efforts to record how Asian voices have influenced North American religious discourses. In the first year of that same PUBlic Professor lecture series, I surveyed “Buddha’s World Tour: Global Buddhism in the Modern Era” (Feb. 26, 2015). That talk included observations from my scholarship on how presentations by Japanese Buddhists at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago strategically shaped the reception of Buddhism in North America in ways still relevant today. I raise this to situate my fit with the panel — in part, representing a Canadian perspective having taught there for twenty years and having studied Buddhism in Canada working closely with Canadian scholars and communities. Like Westfall and others – among both this panel and contributors to Tweed’s volume from more than a quarter century ago, I think the transnational turn in American religious history continues to matter in order to more fully address complex, shifting, and re-circulating cross-cultural influences.
Thomas Tweed’s work has been very influential in this regard, including The American Encounter with Buddhism 1844-1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent (and later in the 1990s, Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History with Stephen Prothero). These works also engaged voices, traditions, and dynamics requisite for a fuller, richer sense of American religious history. I single out Tweed’s influence also because of his work theorizing the academic study of religion, as with Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion.
A decade ago, my colleague Hillary Rodrigues and I included Tweed’s chapter on “Who is a Buddhist? Nightstand Buddhists and Other Creatures” (from Prebish and Baumann’s 2002 volume, Westward Dharma: Buddhism beyond Asia) in our Study of Religion: A Reader. Later this month our second edition of Introduction to the Study of Religion will be published, and it references all three of these books by Tweed: the American Encounter with Buddhism, Crossing and Dwelling, and Retelling U.S. Religious History. I am admittedly more aware of the enduring legacy of these works, and others focused on Asian religious traditions, than of Westfall’s chapter. Nevertheless, I would like to end by answering Westfall’s call for “Voices from the Attic” by relaying two examples of transnational influence from my work in the distant north.
Dedication service for the new Buddhist Temple of Southern Alberta (BTSA), 2009
Across a 15-year collaborative project with Alexander Soucy (Saint Mary’s University) and Victor Sogen Hori (retired from McGill University), we studied Buddhism in Canada and gradually expanded our focus to Buddhism globally as we found the local histories incomplete without attention to the global flows that shaped them — and that they influenced as well. One of our early objectives sought to address what we perceived as an imbalance in representations of Buddhism in the West, characterizing it as primarily a product of a westernization process (aka Americanization) — a portrayal that diminished agency of Asian reformers and paid inadequate attention to what was happening in terms of modernization in Asia already shaping what would be presented and practiced in North America as Buddhism. Adaptations in North America were also important, but here too, much more could be explored regarding ongoing transnational influence and global recirculation.
Local histories on Buddhism in southern Alberta that I have researched similarly cannot be understood without paying attention to what was happening in British Columbia, the United States, and Japan. At the same time, the local informs the global. The small town of Raymond, Alberta, which had the first Buddhist temple in Canada east of the Rocky Mountains (established in 1929), became the center of Buddhism in Canada in the middle of the 20th century. Moreover, figures linked to that small town temple (known as the Raymond Buddhist Church at that time) were formative to aspects of Buddhism throughout North America including in the academy, with direct links to the earliest Buddhist studies graduate programs. The program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, was led by Richard Robinson, whose formative education in Buddhism was enriched by his road trips as a young man to visit with Rev. Yutetsu Kawamura, the second Jodo Shinshu Buddhist minister in Raymond. Harvard’s program was led by Masatoshi Nagatomi, whose father was Raymond’s first Buddhist minister. (Harding’s chapters in Wild Geese: Buddhism in Canada and in Flowers on the Rock: Global and Local Buddhisms in Canada)
These observations align with Tweed’s inclusion of Asian religions and voices in the retelling of North American religious history, as well as with William Westfall’s call to pay attention to what’s happening across borders and to seek additional vantage points for broader perspectives.
John S. Harding is a Professor in East Asian Religions at the University of Lethbridge, Canada. His primary areas of interest include Japanese Buddhism and the cross-cultural exchange between Asia and the West that has shaped the development of modern Buddhism worldwide in the past century and a half. He is the author of Mahayana Phoenix: Japan's Buddhists at the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions (Peter Lang, 2008), the editor of Studying Buddhism in Practice (Routledge, 2012), and the co-editor of Buddhism in the Global Eye: Beyond East and West (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).