Rendering visible monks in the shadow of power: A review essay on The Irish Buddhist and Monks in Motion

Abstract

A few years ago, while teaching an intermediate level course, I asked my students to do a research report on a pre-twentieth century ‘Buddhist’ figure. I teach at a medium-sized public university that has a respectable library, but not particularly rich archives from Asia, and my students rarely have a command of Asian languages anyway. They struggled to find people that they were both interested in writing about and fulfilled the goal of being visibly Buddhist and pre-twentieth century. They mainly ended up with royalty of various places as well as monks or nuns who showed up in biographies of eminent monastics from East Asia. One of the (only partially intentional) object lessons that my students got from this is that most Buddhists who have lived are invisible to us. This is true not just of the people who lived prior to the twentieth century, but is also true—surprising to my students—of people late into the twentieth century. There are several reasons for this, some of which involve the current information age of the Internet, and some of which are obvious but worth repeating. Wide knowledge of the lives of Buddhists is limited by records that have been kept (or not), and the availability of the records. Knowledge is also limited by the languages of these records, what other languages they are translated into, and the status or prominence of the archives where they are housed. It is also limited by the types of stories that scholars—historians, anthropologists, political scientists,