Royal, ‘Buddhism and the Production of American Cool’ (2010)

* Royal, James F. Buddhism and the Production of American Cool. PhD Dissertation, University of Florida, May 2010. [PDF]

Today there is no shortage of people in the Western hemisphere who identify as Buddhist. At the same time, there is a remarkable absence of the Buddhist mainstream transmitted in Sanskritic texts and institutions in the West. Have you ever wondered why it is so hard to find anything like the pan-Indian tradition in your neck of the woods? More to the point, just how Buddhist are the icons of Buddhism which have sprung up in North America and elsewhere?

Such questions rarely receive the attention they deserve in the literature on self-styled Western Buddhism. Now, I am pleased to say, a new dissertation by James F. Royal* sheds light of unprecedented brilliance upon the Western milieu.

One of Royal’s main claims is that much of the Buddhist presence in the West is less about putting Buddhism into practice in a new context than about neutering and undermining it. Buddhism is made to align with the notion of cool, which Royal defines as:

a key guiding motif in the marketing of postwar and then post-Cold War consumer culture for middle-class America.

An ideology of renunciation becomes a quest for personal aggrandisement; ego-denial becomes ego-affirmation. This redefinition of Buddhism is enacted and encouraged by a number of high-profile media players:

American films and advertisements of the last 20 years have taken the religion as a sign of Otherness that itself seems to promote consumption and America’s technological lineage of control.

In his dissertation, Royal examines not only the teachings but the motives of such figures as:

…Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose use of Buddhism for capitalist-imperialist ends set the stage for the work of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. […] later uses of the religion, in 1990s film and 2000s advertisement, show a Buddhism that is more overtly procapitalist, a move that reflects America’s identity crisis in the post-Cold War, especially in its relationship with China, but also Asia generally.

While Royal also examines self-styled Buddhists who “ostensibly provided a critique of capitalism”, his overriding concern is to show how

the discourse of cool has tried to appropriate seemingly subversive elements back into the capitalist fold.

Although I have not yet seen Dr. Royal’s dissertation in full—an extract was kindly provided—I expect that it could become a landmark in our understanding of how Buddhism is made to appear in the West, and more generally, how it is subverted to carry out the ends of modern consumerism.

Abstract (part): One of the most remarkable facets of capitalism is its ability to incorporate disparate, even antithetical, systems into its ever-enlarging sphere of influence, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries as technology makes the world interconnected. To make such a transformation, consumer capitalism has employed a discourse of ‘cool’ to rein in potentially threatening figures and ideologies and bring them back into the circuits of consumption. Especially ripe for analysis is the incorporation of Buddhism, since the creed is the fastest-growing of the world religions in the U.S. The key moment for its mobilization, the 1950s, occurred during a period of escalating tensions with communism, in which a flourishing consumer capitalism was touted as the way to defeat the U.S.S.R. During this period, representations of Buddhism entered pop culture as a challenge to mainstream consumerism. Yet, now representations of Buddhism support consumer capitalism, for instance, in ads and films. Thus, this dissertation seeks to understand how seemingly antithetical discourses can promote the proliferation of capitalism, and how political and capitalist imperatives can motivate representations of a foreign religion. This dissertation examines postwar figures who have used Buddhism in their cultural productions, although it highlights writers from earlier periods who framed Buddhism for later adoption.