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Scott A. Mitchell, "The Making of American Buddhism" (Oxford UP, 2023)
00:58:52
An interview with Scott A. Mitchell
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Tori Montrose
With Venmo Stash.
- [00:01]
Dr. Scott Mitchell
A taco in one hand and ordering.
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Tori Montrose
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Dr. Scott Mitchell
See terms at Venmo Me Stash Terms.
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Marshall Poe R
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Poe R, the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a survey service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:37]
Tori Montrose
Welcome to the New Books in Buddhist Studies podcast. I'm Tori Montrose, one of the hosts of the channel. My guest today is Dr. Scott Mitchell, the Reverend Yoshitaka Tamai, professor of Jodo Shinshu Buddhist Studies and Dean of Students and Faculty affairs at the Institute of Buddhist Studies. Welcome, Scott.
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Dr. Scott Mitchell
Thanks so much for having me.
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Tori Montrose
I'll have you start by just sharing a little bit about your personal background, your bio, where you grew up, and how you came to Buddhist Studies in the first place.
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Dr. Scott Mitchell
Sure. So I grew up mostly in the Los Angeles area and the suburban wasteland, so to speak, and sort of grew up in a. A religious household. But my mom really encouraged us to sort of ask questions and do our Own sort of seeking. And so as a result, I think I became one of those pretentious teenagers who was always thinking about philosophical things. And that led me to get an undergraduate degree in philosophy and religion. And I think that I was always interested more in the religious questions about how to live a good life and all those sorts of things which led me more and more toward the sort of Buddhist end of things. I was also really interested in sort of making connections between different religious traditions and inter religious dialogue and comparative studies and that sort of thing which I think sort of naturally led to the Graduate Theological Union here in Berkeley, which is where I did my graduate work. But interestingly enough, as soon as I arrived at the gtu, I discovered Jodo Shinshi Buddhism and the Institute of Buddhist Studies and became much more interested in the history of Buddhism in the United States and outside Asia and completely lost all interest in sort of the inter religious side of things. And that's sort of how I ended up being interested in this topic.
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Tori Montrose
Great. So then your first experience in Berkeley was coming for the purposes of studying at the Graduate Theological Union?
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Dr. Scott Mitchell
Yeah.
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Tori Montrose
Oh great. Okay, that's interesting. I didn't know that about you. So can you say more about how you came to this particular project, how your scholarship has sort of developed throughout your career to lead you to this, to this work?
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Dr. Scott Mitchell
Yeah, a lot of my graduate work was actually on the Japanese American experience. I didn't, you know, and in particular the Berkeley Buddhist Temple, which is sort of at the heart of the book. So a lot of the historical work, a lot of the theoretical work around the history of Japanese immigration to the United States, you know, the long history, including internment and the post war years. All of that stuff sort of featured in my, in my graduate work for a long. But I think that I was more interested in more contemporary issues for a long time. But then the, the sort of. The real impetus for this book is actually the result of an experience I had with David Matsumoto. David Matsumoto is a teacher here at the ibs. He's also currently the president of the ibs. But this experience we had was, gosh, I don't know, 10, 12 years ago before I was dean and he was president. We were both just members of the faculty and we had this opportunity to co teach a class on Jodo Shinshu and Buddhist modernity. And he sort of focused more on the Japan side, I focused more on the American side. And it was a really interesting, really fun class. And I can't remember if he was still the Resident minister at the Berkeley Temple. But he at one point was. And so he has this pretty deep connection to the Berkeley Temple. And toward the end of the semester, he took us on a tour of the temple and, you know, showed us around and told us all these stories about how the. The new building was built. And a lot of this history I had already. I already known through my. My graduate work and early, early scholarship. But at the end of that tour, he took us into the social hall where he had laid out a near complete collection of the Berkeley bosse on these long tables. And prior to that moment, I was aware of the busset. I knew, I knew a lot of this history, but I think that was probably the first time that I had encountered a physical copy of this magazine. And as I'm sure you know, coming into contact with a historical artifact with an actual physical object is a really interesting experience. It's much different than just reading about history. When you come into even, you know, something as mundane as a. As a magazine, you know, I remember, you know, you can tell that the magazine was like mimeographed or, you know, you know, had an address label on it for one of the temple members. And the staples were getting rusty, that kind of thing. So there's this, like, physicality to this object that was. That was really sort of powerful. And that, that sort of initially sparked my interest. And over the next couple of years, David and I ended up working closely together on a lot of institutional stuff. But he had also come into. He had. He had received a collection of materials from the imamoras. And he kept saying, somebody should do work on this project. Somebody should do work on this project. You should do work on this project. Took me a while, but eventually I realized that, you know, he was sort of entrusting a lot of this material with me. And I felt like this is. This is the. This is the direction I should take my research in.
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Tori Montrose
Great. And how fitting too, I noticed that you dedicate the book to him in the spirit that you are calling for in this book about kind of the co. Generative process of scholarship or the hope of moving more in that direction. That was nice to see. I wonder too, did you have any previous love for magazines like growing Up? Is that something that had a. Like a broader interest or was it something kind of special about. About just the, you know, the timing and the presentation of it all that struck you?
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Dr. Scott Mitchell
That's a really interesting question. You know, yeah, probably. I mean, I'm a. I'm a Gen X kid, right?
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Tori Montrose
That's what I was wondering. Like, these days, I don't know how many people are encountering them, but I.
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Dr. Scott Mitchell
Remember magazines growing up. I don't know if I would say I was particularly interested in them. That also sparks a memory of Thomas Tweed's work and American Encounters with Buddhism, where he talks about how important magazines were for culture in general in 19th and early 20th century. But, yeah, I think it was probably the confluence of coming into contact with the magazine itself and then also the influence from David that sort of solidified my interest. Plus, the collection is, you know, it's not a huge collection, but there's a lot of material in there. And I could, you know, over the first couple years of doing research on it, I could see this project going in a dozen different directions, that there's just so much in there that could be relevant for a lot of different fields of study.
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Tori Montrose
Yeah, I want to kind of build off of that because in your introduction, you talk about your decision to structure the book and the narrative that you're telling in a kind of unconventional way. You don't want to move in a linear fashion. You move back and backward and forward through time and across different geographies as you move around the Pacific. And also this idea of looking at the same pieces through different disciplinary perspectives. So I wonder if you can share more about your thoughts on how you structured the narrative of this book and why that was important to you to do.
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Dr. Scott Mitchell
Yeah, sort of. Once I decided this is the research I wanted to do, I did that thing where every time I had an opportunity to present my work at a conference or an invited lecture, this is the topic that I chose, even if it didn't quite make sense to talk about it, which meant that I kept going back to the busset over and over again. And pretty early on I could tell there's some obvious things in the material. There's a lot of rhetoric around Buddhist modernism, which is pretty. Pretty front center. Obviously, it's a magazine produced by a Japanese American community, so there's that angle as well. Then you find these beat poets in there. Alan Watts, Gary Snyder. There's that angle. So you can be. As you go deeper into the material, you can see lots of different ways to approach it. And because of that, I remember giving a presentation in Kyoto actually, early on in my research, where I tried to create a chronology of the busset and say, you know, there's this period and then it sort of develops into this period and then it sort of changes into this period, and that's. That's sort of true, but over time I just found that that was not a particularly useful way of conceptualizing the material. Especially the more connections I found and the more both. Both connections across different volumes, but connections to other networks and other persons and things that aren't in that are sort of vaguely referenced in the busset but aren't actually in the buse. Right. So DT Suzuki, for example, is referenced quite frequently in the Bus A. But he doesn't have any published writings in the busai. And so that's, you know, there's obviously a connection between him and the community. What is that connection? So then I end up sort of going beyond the magazine itself and looking at other, other, other archives, other histories to try to get a sense of what that means. And so when I was dealing with all of this material and trying to put together a historical narrative, yeah, it was really difficult to think through how to, you know, do I just do a straight, you know, you know, first this happened, then that happened, so on and so forth. And over time that just made less and less sense to me. And you know, I think I rearranged the chapter several times until I realized, oh, the reason I'm struggling with this is because I'm trying to force these ideas that I have into a sort of conventional historical narrative. And letting go of that sort of gave me that opportunity to be a bit more free and creative, I guess.
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Tori Montrose
Absolutely, yeah. That's helpful to know about sort of how this evolved through various presentations. And I was wondering, I was curious about one of your core ideas. It's in the title of your book, the Making of American Buddhism. Was this intended as a provocative title? And why do you think this term American Buddhism, is such a difficult one for scholars to reckon with?
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Dr. Scott Mitchell
Well, I'll be honest that the original title for this book was going to be Mid Century Modern Buddhism, which I thought was really clever.
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Tori Montrose
It is. I love that one too. That can be the sequel.
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Dr. Scott Mitchell
But my, my editors at Oxford Press said if I titled the book that nobody would ever find it because they were looking for the mid century modern architectural movement and so on and so forth. And they're very clear about keywords and all that kind of stuff. So we had a lengthy email exchange with lots of different ideas for titles and subtitles and so on and so forth. And as you, as, you know, a lot of times academic books have, you know, a catchy title and then, you know, a word salad subtitle of all the keywords that you're trying to throw at it and eventually they said, you know, you don't need a subtitle. And I can't remember exactly who, who came up with the title, if it was the editor or me or sort of a joint, a joint process. But immediately I was like, oh, yes, that's, that's, that's the title. And yes, in some ways it is provocative. You know, I think it's really interesting that it plays off of David McMahon's really well known book, the Making of Buddhist Modern. And I want, I liked both the invocation of making and American Buddhism. Right. So the making part to me evokes the actual building of these networks, the actual building of these communities, the actual making of stuff, which I feel like isn't really highlighted in a lot of Buddha studies scholarship. A lot of Buddhist studies scholarship focuses on the text or on rituals, on straight histories and the idea of actually building things and the significance of that is, I think, worth our attention. And then the second part, you know, American Buddhism. Yeah. You know, a lot of scholars don't really know what to do with American Buddhism or how to define it or, you know, what its boundaries are, so to speak. But to go back to the subject of the book, the Nisei Buddhists, you know, they're very clear and very explicit about claiming to be American Buddhists. To sort of foreground that perspective and that rhetoric, I think is really important. Academics and scholars can argue and debate all they want about these terms, but here's this community 70 years ago who very clearly said, we are American Buddhists, and what are the implications of that if we take that seriously for the larger history of the tradition?
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Tori Montrose
Yeah, thanks for sharing that. It's helpful to hear it put that way. Yeah, I read especially there were, you know, certain sections throughout the book where you're engaging with these, you know, these, the challenges that scholars have created and grappled with around what to categorize as American Buddhism. And so I wondered if there was a kind of effort to make some scholars do a double take about, you know, what this book might be about and what it might contain and the way in which, you know, you're very clearly advocating for a corrective to the scholarship in its previous exclusion of Japanese Americans and Jodo Shinshu Buddhism. So about this question of the subject. So you mentioned the subject of your book or the Nisei Buddhists, just for the, you know, this is a broader Buddha Studies podcast, so if you can just explain that term. And then I wanted to also ask you about your decision to focus a lot on the Imamuras Kanmo and Jane Imamura. And so I wonder if you could speak to your selection of both the couple that you argue in your first chapter that their partnership and time in Berkeley would prove invaluable for the development of American Buddhism and that the Berkeley Bussey this magazine played a crucial role. So I wonder if you could both explain what we mean by Nisei and then how these kind of paradigmatic figures factor into that.
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Dr. Scott Mitchell
Yeah. So in sort of standard genealogical terms, the Japanese population of the US is usually divided into or, you know, periodized, I guess you could say. Issei are first generation immigrants. Those are the folks who first arrived from Japan. They were born in Japan and emigrated to the United States. The Nisei then are their children. And then this is just counting Issei as first generation, Nisei is second generation, Sansei as third generation, and so on. The Nisei generation itself is a little bit, a little bit hard to capture, I think, but it's also a really pivotal generation. If you look at sort of American immigration history more generally, there's a generally accepted assumption that immigrants come, you know, they're, they're marginalized in different ways. Their children become American born citizens. And there's a tendency for the second generation to, you know, try to be as American as possible. Later generations sometimes have a sort of return to the country of their ancestral homeland, so to speak. But for the Japanese American population, the Nisei are also the ones who are incarcerated during World War II. So in addition to all of the usual marginalization and institutionalized racism that we see around immigrant populations, you also have this big traumatic event right in the middle of their sort of coming of age. The further complication for the Nisei generation is a lot of folks will say that a Nisei is somebody who has just one parent who's a Nisei. And the Issei began immigrating to the United States in the late 1800s and continued until, you know, 1920 or something. So it's a pretty big chunk of time. And as a result, a lot of the Nisei cover a large age, large age group. There were a lot of Nisei who were incarcerated during World War II who were already in their 20s. Many of them also served in the U.S. armed forces. But there are also Nisei who were born in the camps. So that's a pretty big, you know, a pretty big group of people, which necessarily means you're going to have a lot of internal diversity. Right. A lot of different experiences, a lot of different perspectives on things, which is part of the interesting thing as a historian is to look at a population or a subject and say, wow, there's. There's actually a lot going on here. And how do we. How do we. How do we try to grapple with it and understand it, you know, as a. As a historian or as an outsider? So the imamoras play a pretty important role here as well. Jane was born in. Here in California, in central. Central California farming town. Conmo is a little bit older than she was, and he was actually born in Hawaii. And he was. Not only did he grow up in Hawaii, but he also spent some time in his younger years in Japan with his family's ancestral temple. And so he already has sort of. And I think rather importantly, Kanmo's father is Yemyo Imamura, who was one of the first sort of bishops or overseers of the Jodo Shinshu community in the Hawaiian islands. Yemyo Imamura was a very interesting person, very charismatic, very interested in both supporting the Japanese population on the. On the island, on the islands, but also being what he called a cosmopolitan, being somebody who wanted to, you know, share Buddhism with everybody, wanted to bring people in. He was well known for bringing in non Japanese to the community and that sort of thing. So I think a lot of that, that attitude was passed on to his son Konmo, who. Who was assigned to the Berkeley Temple in 1941, right before Pearl Harbor. And, you know, almost immediately he and Jane are incarcerated. And then after the war, they come back and they just, you know, devote themselves to this community and do an enormous amount of labor to build up this community in a lot of different ways. So that passage you read where I said, you know, their work is really invaluable. You know, these are these. These are these characters that we don't hear about very much, but once you discover them, it's hard to miss them. You know, in the book, I talk about this other book that was written back in the 80s called how the Swans Came to the Lake, the Imamora, you know, Reverend Imamora shows up in that book which is, you know, not about Japanese Americans at all. So, you know, and so, so. And the imamora's got very, very well, conn of different people during their sort of heyday. Eventually they move to Hawaii. Imam Mora becomes the bishop out in Hawaii for a long time. He moved back to California. So they're traveling around a lot in these networks at mid century. So they just become these really important figures that, you know, like I said, once you. Once you notice them, it's like, oh, they're sort of everywhere. And yet, you know, we don't. We don't talk about that, that kind of contribution in the same way that we talk about Suzuki's contributions, for example, or other figures at the same time.
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Tori Montrose
Sure, yeah. Since we're talking about Nisei just a little bit ago, I want to continue on with that a little bit about what you frame in chapter three as the Nisei problem or. I mean, I don't think that's your original rendering. I think that's something that was talked about openly at the time. But you treat it in chapter three and you talk about, you know, your desire to locate Buddhism within this racial project of constructing a Japanese identity, Japanese American identity. You say, quote, both in response to and as a balm for the effects of racial trauma. And you use these, use the metaphor of a bridge. But also this idea of contributions. I wonder if you could, if you could talk a little bit about. About that, the way you were thinking about that. Because I think one of the ways this book is really unique is it treats race very explicitly. And this is a topic that a lot of Buddhist studies doesn't go anywhere near. And so I think one of the larger contributions of this project is to try to understand where Buddhism can factor into, as you say, this racial project of constructing a Japanese American identity. So I wonder if you could speak to that process for you.
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Dr. Scott Mitchell
Yeah. As I was saying before, as I was doing the research on the Busai, I could see how you could approach it from a lot of different angles from the Buddhist modernism perspective and so on, and in particular in the pre war volume. So the Buse got started in 1939, and it was a biannual publication at that point, and they published it up until 1942, right before the community was incarcerated. But in particularly in those volumes, there's a lot of really clear, very explicit conversations around what is often called the Nisei problem. And in doing some more secondary research, Ichihiro Ama Azuma, pardon me, has a book called Between Two Empires, which focuses more on the Issei generation. And he talks about how the Issei also were worried about the Nisei problem. And this goes back to, again, this sort of intergenerational dynamics where, you know, when the. The first generation came, you know, they're coming out of a sort of late Meiji sort of rising imperialistic Japanese sort of context. There's a lot of Japanese nationalism going on and there's, you know, some of this is being transferred onto, you know, the, the way they're raising their children up until, you know, the, the exclusion acts, where it's pretty clear, oh, our children are going to be Americans, so we need to raise good children. And the problem from the point of view of the Issei is we don't want our children to behave badly because that's going to reflect poorly on the community as a whole and we're under threat from institutionalized racist systems. So to see that same sort of rhetoric show up in the Busai, but being expressed by the children, by the Nisei, was really interesting to me. And what I find even more interesting is the way in which Buddhism then becomes part of that equation, where it's not just a sort of discourse about racism and discrimination, but it's also a discourse about how do we solve this problem, right? How do we become good Americans, how do we overcome diversity, discrimination, how do we overcome, you know, the, these problems that we're having. And Buddhism factors into that in a, in a, in a couple of different ways. On the one hand, in the pre war period, you know, there's, there's a, a sense almost of, of like defeatism, right, where the Nisei are like, we're being discriminated against, but everybody gets discriminated against. There's nothing we can do about it. Which, you know, sort of heartbreaking, right?
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Tori Montrose
Yeah.
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Dr. Scott Mitchell
But there's these essays where they'll then say, you know, in spite of that, what we need to do is we need to find community. And the best place to find community is in the Buddhist church. Right. So Buddhism then becomes this way to sort of create solidarity, becomes this way to sort of, you know, make. Make this difficult situation a little bit more livable, which is really an interesting take on things. Right. In the post war buse, there's a pretty big shift where they stopped talking about the Nisei problem as such, but they continue to talk about the importance of Buddhism. And I don't really talk about this much in the book, but I would speculate that I think a lot of this has to do with the experience of incarceration and the experience of service in the US Military where, you know, Nisei are having this. Really, the generation as a whole is having this really interesting experience. Interesting. That's a poor choice of words. This really bizarre experience, I guess you could say, of being accepted as Americans, of being asked to be of service to the US Military project, you know, doing all of these things in service of their country and at the same time their families are locked up and incarcerated because they're Japanese. Right. So there's that, that really weird disconnect that's going on. And within that context, Nisei started expressing this way of saying, you know, we are Americans, but we're not just like everybody else. And one of the ways that we're not like everybody else is because we're Buddhists. So let's double down on that. Let's really just be proud of the fact that we're Buddhists and also recognize that we can, we can give Buddhism to, to America, which, you know, which I find really interesting because the implication there is that, you know, Buddhism is something America needs and if Buddhism, if America needs something, that America must have a problem.
- [29:14]
Tori Montrose
Right, Right.
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Dr. Scott Mitchell
So very subtly, I think there's a critique there coming out of that place of being on the receiving end of discrimination, of saying, you know, America is not perfect and we have the solution, you know, it is, we're good Americans, we can give it to you.
- [29:31]
Tori Montrose
And I think you talk about it as of like holding them account, holding America accountable to its own ideals of religious pluralism. Right. And doing that by doubling down, as you say, on their Buddhist identity. And that's I, you know, you reference Duncan Williams work American Sutra and they're such a nice pairing because of the ways in which this narrative that you trace in the Berkeley bussay and in this community, like you say about.
- [30:02]
Dr. Scott Mitchell
Thinking.
- [30:03]
Tori Montrose
About ways to use Buddhism as a tool of resilience. And you can see that, how that feeds into the incarceration experience that's detailed really meaningfully in Williams's work. And I think what's, you know, what was so interesting to read, you know, as the kind of the second chapter of Berkeley Boussay's life of its publication life. To see sort of the ways in which that gets gets transformed after the incarceration experience was really made for good reading. So good, so good, so good.
- [30:38]
Dr. Scott Mitchell
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- [30:49]
Tori Montrose
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- [30:51]
Dr. Scott Mitchell
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- [31:29]
Tori Montrose
Also in that section, you introduce this idea of kind of the gendered labor factor in all of this. And the ways in which, even when we do tend to look at some of these efforts by, you know, various Buddhist communities in America, we tend to ignore gendered labor and the role that that plays in the creation of what you refer to as religious infrastructure. You say, quote, the very possibility of American Buddhism is contingent upon the domestic, upon acts of hospitality, in short, upon the labor of women. So could you say more about how this idea of gendered labor has influenced your thinking about this project?
- [32:20]
Dr. Scott Mitchell
Yeah, and really, I owe all of this to Jessica Starling's work in Guardians of the Buddha's Home. So to go back to the Nisei problem, it was pretty obvious to me as I was doing the research that the Nisei problem was always gendered masculine, right? The Nisei would say the problem is that Nisei can't get jobs and they can't get wives. And it's like, well, Nisei aren't all men. So, you know. And so part of my research was just sort of trying to figure out what are the women doing, what's their experience, what's their perspective? And fortunately, we have memoirs by Jane Imamora and her mother, which are really good, really good sources of information for what's going on at the temple, within the community more broadly. And Jane, in her memoir, she takes on the label of beaumori, which is what is usually referred to as the temple, the priest's wife at a temple in Japan. And Jessica Starling's book makes it clear that the word balmori does not translate temple, wife. It's the guardian of the Buddha's home. Which is an important thing to keep in mind because what happens within a Japanese temple community is that the priest usually does the house calls, right? The priest is usually out there, not at the temple every day. But then people will come to the temple and the spouse is there to sort of take care of things and welcome visitors and sort of run the business of a religious community. Right? And so Jane Imamora in her memoir has a section where she talks about being a Beaumore and she lists all of the things that she has to do. And it's like, that's like two full time jobs, if not three, you know, in addition to being the mother of four children. And so it's hard to, you know, to read that and not think, you know, what's going on there, right? What's going on there in terms of the amount of work that she's doing and how is that contributing to this, the maintenance of this temple? And this actually became one of the more exciting research topics for me because I really wanted to think carefully and deeply about this question of labor and what we value and what we don't value, which has been one of those things as an academic that's always been sort of in the back of my mind. But I didn't quite have the right academic language for it. And fortunately, I was invited into a reading group with Jessica Starling and Paula Colata and Gwendolyn Gilson, who really gave me just so many resources. And our conversations were so generative in terms of thinking through these issues. And that's eventually where I settled this idea of there's the sort of affective, emotional labor component that is really important to making anything possible that we don't usually value. We value other kinds of labor. And then from there we just go down that rabbit hole of, well, there's all kinds of labor, and a lot of it is gendered, and a lot of it is explicitly in service to the temple and the community. And without it, you know, what. What doesn't happen. And I think that, you know, I think this is. This. This is, again, one of those things that once you see it, it becomes really obvious, right? I've seen it in my own experience, just, you know, in Buddhist communities, in my own life. You know, it's like, you know, know, there's the people in the kitchen who are doing all the cooking and the cleaning and, you know, and then there's the big and quote, unquote, important people who are giving the lectures and talks and at the front of the temple. And it's like, well, without those people that we don't see, that other component doesn't happen. And I think the same becomes obvious in our academic lives, too, right? There's all kinds of people that make the university function that we don't usually see. And so I really wanted to bring our attention back to that, to not. Not just talk about the magazine itself or the names on the bylines, but what's going on behind the scenes? What else is happening that's making this possible? And part of this, too, was definitely gendered, but also gendered masculine, right? So in some of the archival material I worked with, Reverend Conlora kept letters, and it's really clear that he did an enormous amount of fundraising raising. He would write letters to, you know, the. The Rockefeller foundation and to, you know, all these These major donors, and he would send them copies of the buse and say, look at this amazing stuff that we're doing in Berkeley. Can you help support, you know, the spread of Buddhism and religion and philosophy and art in America? You know, that's just as important as writing the essays and everything else, because if you don't have the money, then nothing else happens. So, you know, finding those kinds of things bec became really exciting for me.
- [37:44]
Tori Montrose
Yeah. And I think this idea about religious infrastructure that you engage with both in chapter three, but then more in chapter four, talking about all the ways that religions, and to which American Buddhism is no exception, survive and thrive, is in this infrastructure that takes so many components and so little of which gets the attention of scholars. So I'm almost pained to bring up DT Suzuki because he always manages to get into every conversation that he's even remotely a part of. But in your section in chapter 4 on DT Suzuki, you point out the ways in which his connections to American Jodo Shin Buddhism is often overlooked. I had this experience, a minor version of this experience, when I was studying Japanese language in Japan. And part of the language course, we had to give a little five minute Japanese speech. And so I wrote mine about how Suzuki actually has these Pure Land connections. And the audience was like, Japanese retirees just, I don't know why they wanted to come and hear us practice our Japanese. But afterwards they actually. A gentleman came up to me and said, I'm so confused by your talk. Is this like a language issue? Suzuki was Zen, you know, just like so, just unequivocally. And I had to. I didn't, I didn't know how, you know, in our brief interaction to bring, you know, bring in all the things that I was uncovering. But so anyway, if you could speak to, you know, this question of that you raised about what if the Okamuras and Imamuras had not been a part of DT Suzuki's story, Where would he be be if you could speak on that a little bit?
- [39:39]
Dr. Scott Mitchell
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I. I agree. Like, you know, I had to talk about Suzuki. He's. He's a part of the story and, and actually a really important part of the story because he does. If, if we, if we're approaching his life story rather than from his intellectual work, but approaching his life story as just a person, then these other, these other things become revealed. Right, right. You know, so in, in Janie Memora's memoir, for example, she mentions how, pardon me, she picked up Suzuki from the airport and, you know, has this comment about how this is pre freeway days and you know, imagine how it's difficult to get to the airport now. But that, that also reminded me of my, my first experience going to Japan, you know, where I found it actually really not that difficult to navigate, you know, train stations and airports because everything is in, you know, many different languages and so on and so forth. And then I flew back home to San Francisco and was overwhelmed by how horribly difficult it must be. You know, everything's in English occasionally, signs are in Chinese, but not often. Where's the BART station? Right. Like coming into sfo, which is a major international airport on the Pacific Rim, him is actually really disorienting and really difficult. And I can only imagine how much more difficult it would have been in the 1950s for a Japanese man who by all accounts, you know, his English was. Was okay. Right. And so this reminds me of something that another scholar, an Asian American scholar named Rudiger Busto, wrote about. Senzaki, who was also a student of shaku so in and also came to the United States early in the 20th century and had a much different experience than Suzuki did as sort of a Japanese immigrant, you know, having to work odd jobs to make a living. He was also incarcerated during the war, unlike Suzuki, who was back in Japan. And so sort of putting those two historical figures into conversation. And yeah, there was just sort of a intellectual playfulness that I, that I got onto of just sort of wondering, yeah, what would have happened to Suzuki if he didn't have this community that was already here to help support him? Which is a much different experience than Shinzaki had in the early part of the 20th century when the community wasn't quite as developed and was still brand new and so on. You know, here's this, you know, network of dozens of temples, you know, across the country and lots of, you know, big and small communities and people who are willing to, you know, pick him up from the airport and, you know, take him around and manage his money and all these kinds of things. You know, Suzuki in the post war period is already a pretty well known, well established scholar. So I'm sure he would have had some sort of impact on the development of, of modern Buddhism. But it would have been different, right? It would have been a different experience. It would have been a different history. And I think when, as researchers, when we can sort of enter into that speculative space, that's when we can start thinking, oh, who did pick him up from the airport? How did he get around? And again, this is where Jane, IWAMORA her scholarship in virtual Orientalism comes was really important to me, you know, because she talks about Okamura and how Okamura was such an important figure and really marginalized in sort of the media representations of Suzuki's life at the time. And so to find those little bits of history and lift them up and sort of play with them, with that what if question became really important to me.
- [43:38]
Tori Montrose
Great, great. In chapter five, you really dive into this idea of genre as an idea to continue to challenge the ideas of what counts as Buddhist, quote unquote, in art and literature, and the results of which change who gets canonized and who gets excluded. You put this emphasis on the who rather than the what and how that in turn affects the discipline of Buddhist studies. And then earlier in chapter two, you're also looking at this question in a slightly different way when you're looking at Buddhist Modernism and the scholarly exclusion of Jodo Shinshu in the conversation of Buddhist Modernism and in the scholarship. So I wonder if you could elaborate on either one of those pieces or the chapters together. To me, they seem to be maybe when you were rearranging the chapters, as you said in the beginning, maybe they at one point were next to each other. But they have a resonance to me, I think, the results of which have these really profound impacts on our field. So if you could elaborate on that.
- [44:49]
Dr. Scott Mitchell
Yeah. I'll start by saying that in some ways, this is the direct result of COVID One of the things that I hoped to do in my research was to visit more locations and more archives, but Covid made that impossible, which forced me to do a bit more theorizing than I think originally. I was gonna do what probably would have been a much more boring book, just sort of listing names and connections and that sort of thing. But without access to certain archives, I went into this other sort of more theoretical perspective and. And in previous scholarship I've done on Buddhism and media, this question of genre comes up quite frequently. You know, what is a genre for literature or art? And I wanted to use that sort of as a metaphor for the way in which disciplinary boundaries get codified as well. Right. You know, what is it that historians do? What is it that Buddha studies scholars do? What are the subjects of our work? What are the boundaries, you know, what you know, and how are those things sort of determined? So to be able to sort of play with those ideas in a sort of more theoretical sense while being rooted within this particular case study was pretty fun, actually. And, yeah, I think that there's definitely connections between chapters two and five, in terms of the way in which.
- [46:25]
Tori Montrose
Just.
- [46:26]
Dr. Scott Mitchell
Through time and repetition and, you know, repeated references to certain people, we tend to assume that, you know, Buddhism looks a certain way or that religion looks a certain way or that, you know, these are sort of the boundaries of American religion versus, you know, Asian religion, the west, the east, and all of these other kinds of dichotomies or binaries that, you know, sort of purpose in our academic work. Absolutely. But they're also arbitrary. Right. They're also things that we sort of make up in order to make sense of the world. And when we do that, that, to me raises the question of what are we. What are we seeing and what are we not seeing? And so to go back to gendered labor, for example, you know, Jesse Starling in her book has this great line about how the focus in Buddhist studies is always on the text. And even when you're talking about a ritual, you're thinking about the text that's being recited, right? The text that's being invoked in that ritual. And what if we, instead of looking at the text, looked at something else. And then, you know, that's. That's sort of her entree into talking about a different kind of religious experience or the experience of religion, I guess I should say. And so, yeah, you know, I think that, you know, and. And again, to go back to the beginning of this conversation, you know, the part of the. The challenge of this work was to. To recognize that there's a lot going on in the busset and approaching it from these different disciplinary angles. You know, critical race theory, Asian American studies, American religion, Buddha studies, so on and so forth. Each one of those different disciplines or methodologies raises different questions. And ultimately, if you do a project like this and you're asking different questions of the same material, eventually you do that sort of meta analysis of, well, do these disciplines even make sense? And then we can sort of start to think more deeply about how it is that we do what we do as scholars and why we try to sort of stay in our lanes or why we try to police the border, so to speak, of our. Of our disciplines, which. Maybe that's the next project. But.
- [48:49]
Tori Montrose
I wanted to. Let's see, in the conclusion, you talk about how in Buddhist studies, the metaphor of the lineage is privileged over the equally Buddhist metaphor of a web or a network. So I think in your saying, maybe that's the next project, I'm wondering if you could say more about your hope, hopes for the future of Buddhist studies and how you feel that this book could serve as kind of a guidepost for that.
- [49:20]
Dr. Scott Mitchell
Yeah, I think that it's. I talk a little bit about this in the epilogue to the book, about writing a book during a pandemic. And the last few years of our collective lives have been interesting, to say the least. But. And I think that's important for a number of reasons. For now, what I'll say is, you know, I've seen a lot of really interesting conversations happening within Buddhist studies as a, as a field or as a discipline over the last few years. A lot of shifts, I think that are happening in part because of the pandemic or because of political issues that are happening, particularly in the United States States. But I think also that there's just a deeper awareness or willingness on the part of scholars to approach the material from different perspectives and to really sort of question our sort of shared received history in terms of how the discipline was formed and where it's going. I hope that my book contributes to that conversation. In some ways, your reference to the lineage versus Webb's, I think, is a good case in point. I, you know, to use a metaphor, any kind of metaphor that we're going to use in our scholarship is always going to be limited. And I, in, in the abstract, I don't think that there's anything wrong with a lineage per se, but I think we also have to acknowledge that a lineage necessarily includes and excludes. That's what a lineage is for. Right. It's to authorize or authenticate tradition. And, and is, as a, as a scholarly project, is that the best, the best metaphor that we can come up with, or can we come up with some other metaphors? And I feel as though I was heading in that direction, but I haven't settled on a better metaphor. A web, I think, makes sense. I think that I've had interesting conversations with colleagues about the different people who play into forming us as scholars. I can say I studied under Richard Payne and he studied under Lou Lancaster. And so I'm sort of in that lineage. But I also studied with Judith Burling, who's a, you know, inter religious China scholar. I studied with Duncan Williams. You know, I've, you know, I've learned from so many different people in, in so many different ways. And those are just the scholars. Right. We're not even talking about the, the labor of my, my family or my friends that, you know, certainly goes into it. And so, yeah, that's, that's the question. What other kinds of metaphors might we come up with? Drawing on our own experiences in order to help us better understand our subjects, which, you know, to go back to Suzuki, you know, he's also a person. He's, you know, this great intellectual figure, and we can debate, you know, all of that stuff, but he's also a human being. And what kind of metaphors might we come up with that might help. Help us better understand his experience as a person in addition to an academic or a scholar or whatever the case might be?
- [52:33]
Tori Montrose
Yeah, I'm glad you brought in the epilogue. I almost wanted to start with my question about the epilogue at the beginning, because you really provide meaningful personal and historical context for the writing of this book. And to an extent, I wish that every book included a section that talked about the authority process of creating the book as a way of humanizing the process, as you're saying, like, we're humans, we're not just scholars. But also in this section, you weave in this idea of utopian thinking, in part because of the personal and historical context that you write about in the epilogue. And then this exercise of asking, what if? Is a through line throughout. Right. I think you've already answered this question, but maybe I can just get you to say why you were inspired to conclude the book in this way. Maybe you can say it for us again or just share some other thoughts on it, because it's a really interesting part of the book.
- [53:32]
Dr. Scott Mitchell
Thanks. I'm really glad you're asking about that. I wanted to start the book with Kashiwagi's narrative, and early in the process of writing it, I wanted the book to have some sort of feel of the time period that I'm talking about, 1950s, you know, beat counterculture kind of stuff. And for a long time, I was thinking that I would then end with an epilogue that would. That would invoke some more of that. Of that feeling. But I wasn't sure what that would be. I was inspired in part by Julian Thomas's book Faking Liberties. He has an epilogue in his book which is really powerful. And. And so that sort of. I felt like that gave me permission to think more creatively about how I could end the book. And then, of course, writing it during a pretty tumultuous time, both globally and personally, was really interesting and difficult. It was a challenge, absolutely. But then the final piece of this was, you know, there's that cliche of those who don't learn from history, repeat it. Right. And for years, you know, ever since I became aware of this particular moment in history, I've always been sort of in the back of my mind, sort of amazed that this even happened, that, you know, you have people with really different ideas about Buddhism in the same place together, right at the same time. Alan Watts's essays in the Bussey are sometimes really, really insulting to the people who are hosting him. And yet they keep bringing him back. Somehow they become friends. And I kept sort of thinking about how there's this really interesting community with lots of different perspectives and they somehow. Okay. And how difficult, it seems like, it seems like impossible for us to recreate that in the present, right. In our present political climate, when everybody hates each other. So what can we learn from this history and apply into our present moment? And I don't know if I have a clear answer on that, but Melissa Curley's work on utopian thinking has always been particularly really interesting. And to go back to this idea of labor, I feel like a lot of times when we're sort of overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems that we are facing in the world right now, there's this belief, or this not belief, but this tendency to just sort of externalize it and be like, oh, I have no control over it and I can't make it perfect, so I'm just going to give up. But. But each of us in our own little tiny world has a lot of control and power that we probably don't realize. And if we were able to sort of shift our thinking a little bit, could we create, you know, not a perfect utopia, but at least a little bit better of a world? And maybe that was the. Maybe that's just the lesson that I was hoping to draw from this history and then apply it into our present moment. Moment. And I wanted to end the book on that note, I guess.
- [57:04]
Tori Montrose
Great. Well, let's hope that Jolian and you have started a trend now. There's at least two. I'm sure there's more, but two that we can talk about now. Hopefully this begins a trend because I think it helps speak directly to the audience. So I've taken up a lot of your time, and I want to end with the final question, which is where are you going next? What. What ideas are you having? What are you. If you're working on something now, if you could share a little bit about that or what you plan to work on next.
- [57:35]
Dr. Scott Mitchell
You know, I'll be completely honest, I'm not working on anything right now, actually sort of taking. Taking a breather. The. This book was a lot of work and the last few years have been really a challenge. I'M in a place professionally where I don't have to jump to the next thing thing. But having these conversations has been really exciting and generative. And I'm thinking about writing more of this, of the epilogue kind of stuff, stuff that can more approachable for a wider audience and have more applicability to what's happening in the world.
- [58:15]
Tori Montrose
Great. Well, Scott, thank you so much. It was great talking with you. You.
- [58:19]
Dr. Scott Mitchell
Thanks so much.
- [58:20]
Tori Montrose
Bye.