Scholarship on modern Buddhism often speaks of “two Buddhisms,” with collectivist, “cultural” Asian American immigrant Buddhism being overshadowed by individualist, “textual” Euro-American convert Buddhism. Accordingly, most studies focus on either convert or immigrant Buddhism and overlook interactions between the two. As a result, contemporary Buddhist writing as a multilingual and multicultural phenomenon is still significantly under-theorized and under-studied. This panel, “Translating Buddhism,” steps in to explore emerging directions in studies of modern Buddhist literature, in keeping with this year’s presidential theme of multilingualism. We explore, in four twelve-minute presentations, how writers have “translated” Buddhism both literally between languages and figuratively between cultures, in ways that complicate established debates over appropriation, erasure, and minority agency.

First, Kurt Spellmeyer challenges several apparent dualities in “Two Buddhisms, Two Asias, and Two Americas.” He argues that Americanists can trace a literary counterhistory in which the divide between individualism and collectivism exists not only between immigrant and covert Buddhism, but within both immigrant and convert Buddhist writing going back to Transcendentalism. Kurt traces this dynamic through a series of pairings between contemporaneous “individualist” and “collectivist” thinkers within and across Asian and Euro-American identities. These include, respectively, John Kabat-Zinn and Thich Nhat Hanh, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, D.T. Suzuki and Anagarika Dharmapala, and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. By considering the resonances between and within the “two Buddhisms,” we can pursue a fuller reckoning with the possibilities of cross-cultural adaptations.

The more agile framework Spellmeyer sets up allows us to better understand a particularly pivotal case: the American Zen boom of the 1950s, which Sara Wilson investigates in “Midcentury Translations of Buddhisms from a Transpacific Perspective.” Although Euro-American Zen poets interacted with immigrant Buddhists, work on this period rarely mentions the literary activity of these Asian American communities. Because their own diasporic “translations” were carefully crafted for mainstream acceptability, Alan Watts and other white countercultural figures mistook these apparently individualist, “Protestantized” Buddhist formations as “uninteresting.” This presentation shows how these misattributions partly arose because white poets of the period viewed all East Asian cultural material—including their friendships with Asian American persons—as tools of poetics. By underscoring the unique translations of Asian American figures, we can expand our understanding of American Buddhist poetry beyond the work of white cultural producers.

The erstwhile-overlooked connections between midcentury Asian and American iterations of Zen have paved the way for more visible and multifaceted cross-cultural engagements in recent fiction. Exploring a dazzling recent example, Owen Harry argues for greater attention to Buddhist thought in critical theory by examining “The Relational Non-Self in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013).” Harry shows that the novel “translates” Zen across cultural and disciplinary domains to dramatize the relationship between suffering across many scales and contemporary theories of posthuman self-making. The novel further expresses a crisis of the humanist subject, epitomizing the posthuman context described by Rosi Braidotti and refashioned by her into the basis for an affirmative conceptualization of interconnected subjectivity. The novel’s plot raises parallels between Dōgen’s Zen emptiness and quantum physics; Buddhist non-self and Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanist subjectivity; and Buddhist interdependence and new materialist theories of “intra-action.” Ozeki indicates the value of transpacific translation, as well as a transdisciplinary approach, in affirming the generative potential of Buddhist concepts for environmental, posthuman, and materialist thinking.

Whereas Buddhism’s profile as Buddhism is rising in the U.S., there are surprising ways that Buddhism recirculates in more secular manifestations even in traditionally Buddhist cultures of East Asia. Yuemin He explores an intriguing case study in “Personal Items: Peeking into the Chinese Religious Consciousness through Chi Li’s Poetry.” By studying Chi’s extensive use of Buddhist references to tap into issues dear to her, we see ways in which Chinese readers are receptive to Buddhist ideas more as philosophies, principles, and moral codes than as explicit religion, even though Buddhism has a 2,000-year history in China. Furthermore, this coded receptiveness has helped to translate Chi’s personal musings into dialogues addressing social injustice. He brings portions of this poetry from a leading Chinese author into English for the first time.

He’s presentation brings the panel full circle by exploring how Buddhism reappears in unexpected forms in one of its historical homelands, thus further blurring the lines between the “two Buddhisms” that Spellmeyer questions. By treating modern Buddhist literature as a thoroughly multilingual, transnational phenomenon, we hope to inspire further scholarship on transcultural literatures that can help understand our world and envision new, reparative ways of being.