Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbian Exposition (Hardcover)

by Judith Snodgrass (Author) "For the United States of America, the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's journey to the New World marked the emergence of the modern nation as..." (more)
Key Phrases: katsuron joron, extraterritoriality clause, shin bukkyo, Eastern Buddhism, Japanese Buddhism, Rhys Davids (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Snodgrass's story is fascinating on several levels. . . . Essential reading." -- Australian Book Review

Product Description
Snodgrass challenges the predominant view that Asian cultures are objectified and understood strictly through Western ideas. Based on a detailed examination of presentations by Japanese Buddhists at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, Snodgrass argues that Buddhists themselves helped reformulate Buddhism into a modern world religion.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press (June 30, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807827851
• ISBN-13: 978-0807827857
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,027,846 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Disorienting Meeting of East and Midwest, May 3, 2006

By	Crazy Fox (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbian Exposition (Paperback)

This is really an excellent book. Using the World's Parliament of Religions in 1893 as a focal point, Snodgrass explores the various issues, conflicting interests and uneasy alliances, and mutual perceptions and misperceptions coming together in and branching out from this seminal event in religious history. Snodgrass has a historian's knack for critical scholarship and turns a keen eye towards the political dimensions of all of this without being reductive...one still gets a clear sense of the various deeply felt religious beliefs and spiritual convictions held by the different people who appear in the book. The Buddhist reform movements of the Meiji period and their formulation of a modern Buddhism (formulations that have become "common sense" in both Japan and America today) are covered in great, illuminating detail and with careful analysis. American assumptions of Buddhism are also dissected, and the author's critique of Paul Carus' "Gospel of Buddha"--a popular work that introduced (in a highly distorted fashion, as she shows) many Americans to the "other world religion" (besides Christianity)--is quite to the point.

"Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West" is scholarly and sophisticated yet written in a clear, engaging prose style. It should be of particular interest especially to anyone interested in modern Japanese Buddhism and modern American religion, in colonial and post-colonial studies, or in the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago.

5.0 out of 5 stars There you go go go...., May 2, 2006

By	Woderlust "I don't like Green Eggs and Ham I ... (Somolian Islands) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbian Exposition (Paperback)

This is from the book: There are predominant view that Asian cultures are objectified and understood strictly through Western ideas. Based on a detailed examination of presentations by Japanese Buddhists at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, Snodgrass argues that Buddhists themselves helped reformulate Buddhism into a modern world religion.