Jin Y. Park, ed. Makers of Modern Korean Buddhism. Albany State University of New York Press, 2009. ix + 382 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978−1−4384−2921−2; $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978−1−4384−2922−9.
Reviewed by Richard McBride (BYU-Hawaii)
Published on H-Buddhism (July, 2011)
Commissioned by A. Charles Muller
Modern Korean Buddhism
Makers of Modern Korean Buddhism brings together thirteen wide-ranging essays on individuals and topics associated with the development and experience of Buddhism in modern Korea. Jin Y. Park organizes this collection of essays in a roughly chronological manner after separating the articles under the three general subheadings of (1) “Modernity, Colonialism, and Buddhist Reform,” (2) “Revival of Zen Buddhism in Modern Korea,” and (3) “Religion, History, and Politics.” Although six of the essays were published previously, all have been revised by the authors. Taken together, the essays provide multiple windows through which to view Korean Buddhism’s complex and multifaceted encounter with modernity, as well as demonstrating the changing norms of intellectual discourse.
Scholars of Korean Buddhism trained in Korea assess the history of Korean Buddhism from the opening of Korea to foreign influences in the late Chosŏn (ca. 1876 – 1910)through the Japanese colonial period (1910−45) with a different set of assumptions and intellectual agendas than scholars of Korean Buddhism trained in the West. Thus, the wide variety of scholarly approaches found in the book should be both challenging and stimulating to readers interested in questions of the emergence of modernity and the evolution of Buddhist doctrine and practice, as well as issues of Korean nationalism. Jin Y. Park’s introduction does an admirable job in contextualizing the main themes covered in the book: Buddhist reform movements, the revival of Sŏn/Zen Buddhism, the Buddhist encounter with modern intellectual ideas and views, and the reconsideration of Buddhism and modernity in Korea.
This collection of essays should cause students of Korean Buddhism trained in the West to rethink the received academic understanding of the significance and history of Korean Buddhism during the late Chosŏn and Japanese colonial periods. Hitherto, scholarship on this period of Korean history has centered on the seminal issues of the reform and development of Korean Buddhism, and nationalism. In other words, the people who have been studied primarily are those Buddhist monks who published essays describing how the Buddhist church in Korea should reform and modernize, regardless of their actual influence. Also, the issue of nationalism has been paramount. Buddhists, both monks and lay people, who played significant roles in policymaking, scholarship, or practice, have been labeled either as collaborators with the Japanese or as nationalistic patriots, neither of which labels comprise a fruitful approach to truly understanding who the most influential Buddhists were during this troubled time period.
Terrifying Muslims highlights how transnational working classes from Pakistan are produced, constructed, and represented in the context of American empire and the recent global War on Terror. Drawing on ethnographic research that compares Pakistan, the Middle East, and the United States before and after 9/11, Junaid Rana combines cultural and material analyses to chronicle the worldviews of Pakistani labor migrants as they become part of a larger global racial system. At the same time, he explains how these migrants’ mobility and opportunities are limited by colonial, postcolonial, and new imperial structures of control and domination. He argues that the contemporary South Asian labor diaspora builds on and replicates the global racial system consolidated during the period of colonial indenture. Rana maintains that a negative moral judgment attaches to migrants who enter the global labor pool through the informal economy. This taint of the illicit intensifies the post-9/11 Islamophobia that collapses varied religions, nationalities, and ethnicities into the threatening racial figure of “the Muslim.” It is in this context that the racialized Muslim is controlled by a process that beckons workers to enter the global economy, and stipulates when, where, and how laborers can migrate. The demonization of Muslim migrants in times of crisis, such as the War on Terror, is then used to justify arbitrary policing, deportation, and criminalization.
