The Awakening of the West: The Encounter of Buddhism and Western Culture

Contemporary Review, May, 1995 by Chris Arthur

Batchelor's wide-ranging, thoughtful and well-informed account demonstrates convincingly the truth of the Dalai Lama's observation. The reader is taken from the first encounters between ancient Greeks and Buddhist monks, through centuries of European ignorance, indifference and rejection, to the first scholarly studies in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the most recent and exciting phase of the story, starting only in the 1960s, when Buddhism began to be practised as a religion by increasing numbers of people in Europe and America. How many Western Buddhists are there? Recent assessments suggest anything between 10,000 and 100,000 in Britain and three to five million in America. Understandably, in view of the difficulty of arriving at an accurate figure, Batchelor himself does not give an estimate. However, it is clear from the numbers attending various meditation classes, retreats and so on which he does cite, that even in crude numerical terms Buddhism is fast becoming a force to be reckoned with.

This is an engaging book, written in an easy, accessible style, pleasingly unencumbered by technical vocabulary or distracting scholarly apparatus. (Dispensing with footnotes, Batchelor sources his wealth of quotations by a commendably unobtrusive method.) The author is deeply immersed in the story he is telling, yet despite his own active involvement with Buddhism, his account is by no means uncritical, nor does it gloss over those aspects of Buddhist history which show it in a less than favourable light. Alongside his account of key personalities, both ancient and modern, whose spiritual qualities are enormously impressive, he notes the excesses of some of those jet-setting lamas whose exploits have brought Buddhism into disrepute. It is sometimes suggested that part of Buddhism's appeal in the modern West stems from its unblemished record of eschewing persecution in order to aid conversion. This is a view strongly advanced by Walpola Rahula, for example, in an influential essay in Zen and the Taming of the Bull (1978). Batchelor's chapter on the experience of the Jesuits in Japan in the seventeenth century, and the involvement of Buddhists in the torture and killing which took place there (pp161-183), provides a useful counterweight to the historical naivety of such a view.

Such are the number of colourful characters involved, the geographical range covered and the author's skill at moving between the contemporary situation and ancient Buddhist history, that the book often reads with the pace of an adventure story. He manages to convey the sense of writing at a crucial point in the history of Buddhism, when it may be poised to develop into new forms specifically suited to its growing presence in the West. Batchelor is adamant that 'the survival of Buddhism today is dependent on its continuing ability to adapt' (p278). Properly aware of the enormous diversity within Buddhism and the dangers of trying to insist on any single normative type, he suggests a 'spectrum of adaptation' (p337) to identify the forms which Buddhism may come to take in the West. It might have been useful at this point to have had some reference to the work of Martin Willson and Deirdre Green, who have also suggested ways of charting possible varieties of Buddhism in the West. However, The Awakening of the West makes no pretence at being a comprehensive survey, so one cannot expect everything to be included.

Batchelor is particularly adept at creating eye-catching cameo scenes which offer fascinating snap-shots of Buddhism's Western presence and forcefully claim the reader's attention. For instance, it is intriguing to discover that by the late 1970s, such was the interest in Buddhism in Russia that 'only 3-4 months would elapse between publication of a Buddhist book in the West and its appearance in a Russian samizdat edition' (p299); or to find that Windhorse Trading, a Buddhist organization, was one of the 100 fastest growing companies in Britain in 1992 (p323); or to learn of the Dalai Lama's lighting a candle at the already crumbling Berlin Wall in 1989 and his meeting a few weeks later with Vaclav Havel, the first head of any European state in history to receive a Dalai Lama (xv); or to be given a glimpse of eleven thousand years of religious history in France, moving from Cro-Magnon man's cave paintings near Rouffignac to the Centre Bouddhique now flourishing there (p53).

Sensibly, in view of Rick Field's narrative history of Buddhism in America, How the Swans Came to the Lake (1986) and Paul Croucher's Buddhism in Australia 1848-1988, Batchelor confines himself to Buddhism's encounter with Europe. Different readers will no doubt have different ideas about the relative emphasis he should have given to the situation in Britain, France, Germany, Spain and so on, but as a single volume account of so multi-faceted a story, Batchelor's introduction is first rate. Given that this is a book likely to make readers want to read more, Robert Ellwood's excellent article on Buddhism in the West might have been specifically named, rather than just listing the 16 volume encyclopedia of religion in which it appears. By and large, though, bibliography and glossary are appropriate, well-judged and useful.