Undoing Whiteness in American Buddhist Modernism: Critical, Contextual, and Collective Turns

What is “whiteness” and how has it shaped, functioned and hindered American convert Buddhist modernism? Drawing on ethnography and textual analysis, this paper considers initiatives by Buddhists of Color, and their white allies, to expose and disrupt whiteness in American Buddhism including a detailed examination of the work of Zenju Earthlyn Manuel from the Soto Zen lineage and Larry Yang from the Insight Community to forge alternative Buddhist hermeneutics of embodied difference and multiculturalism. In conclusion, it situates racial justice work as reflecting critical, collective, and contextual turns in North American Buddhism that signify a wider shift from Buddhist modernism to Buddhism in a postmodern and postcolonial climate.