Re se a r ch Ar t icle
Jou r n a l of Globa l Bu ddh ism 1 0 ( 2 0 0 9 ) : 9 3 - 1 2 5
Border country dharma:
Buddhism, Ireland and peripherality
Laurence Cox and Maria Griffin
Department of Sociology
National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Copyr igh t N ot e s: D igit a l copie s of t his w or k m a y be m a de a n d
dist r ibu t e d pr ovide d n o ch a r ge is m a de a nd n o a lt e r a t ion is
m a de t o t he cont ent . Re pr oduct ion in a ny ot he r for m a t w it h t he
e x ce pt ion of a sin gle copy for pr iva t e st u dy r e qu ir e s t he w r it t e n
pe r m ission of t he a ut hor . All e nqur ie s t o:
http://www.globalbuddhism.org
Journal of Global Buddhism / 93
I SSN 1527- 6457
Article
Border
country
dharma:
Buddhism,
Ireland
and
peripherality.
[byline?]
Introduction
Buddhist tradition distinguishes a "central region" where
suitable
conditions
for
practice
–
notably
a
well-developed sangha – are to be found, from "border
regions" where there are fewer or no monks, nuns,
laymen or laywomen (1). If, in the last 150 years,
Buddhist Asia has acted as the "central region" to the
"border regions" of western Buddhism, Ireland is
arguably a border region to the border regions, a
second-hand recipient of developments in more powerful
societies.
These categories (relational as so many Buddhist
concepts) are similar to sociological discussions of core
and periphery within the global order. However, some of
the most influential accounts of the arrival of Buddhism
in the west (such as Almond 1988 and Tweed 2000) stress
rather
the
indigenous,
and
essentially
bounded,
development of Victorian Buddhism.
Their emphasis – that this Buddhism was above all else
British or American respectively, was a necessary
corrective
to
naïve
theories
of
unproblematic
transmission, but has its own difficulties, in assuming a
single national culture as an effective unit of analysis.
Both struggle to maintain their boundaries, not least with
Journal of Global Buddhism / 94
relation to Ireland: Almond in his use of Irish material
with no mention of the intense cultural and religious
conflicts that led to the breakup of the British state in
1922; Tweed in treating the Anglo-Irish Lafcadio Hearn
as another Victorian American. In other words, even
these powerful cultures are less homogenous, and more
contested, than such accounts imply.
More generally, when discussion of western Buddhism
has not simply meant Buddhism in the USA (Koné 2001:
155 fn1), it has typically retained this country-by-country
approach in a national-comparative strategy, most visibly
in the seminal work of Martin Baumann (eg 2002).
Within sociology, the identification of a society or culture
with a nation-state has long been problematised, initially
by dependency theory, which argued that individual
societies could only be understood in terms of their core
or peripheral position in the world order, and that
peripheral societies were characterised precisely by a lack
of internal boundedness, so that the bulk of their
economic and other linkages were external (Gunder
Frank 1971 etc.) Subsequently, world-systems theory has
argued that the effective unit of analysis needs to be
whatever global order (world-empire or world-economy,
such
as
capitalism)
actually
integrates
different
economic, political and cultural activities (Wallerstein
1988 etc.)
The case of "Buddhism and Ireland" illustrates the need
for such an approach. Firstly, a part of what was
nineteenth century "Ireland" has only become a separate
state within living memory, and one whose boundaries –
cultural and political – remain highly contested. In this it
shares a history with many, perhaps most contemporary
states. Secondly, by contrast with core or metropolitan
societies, a peripheral or internally-colonised society such
Journal of Global Buddhism / 95
as Ireland is in no position to make over Buddhism in its
"own" (intensely debated) image.
Thirdly, until the 1960s at least the Irish encounter with
Buddhism
has
been
mediated
via
international
institutions (the British Empire and Catholic missionary
activity); since that point, it has been institutionally
dominated by "blow-ins" from more powerful western
societies. Fourthly, and as a direct consequence, Irish
Buddhism – like Ireland more generally – has been
marked by a constant circle of emigration and
immigration; until very recently it has been rare for
Buddhists to be both Irish and in Ireland. Finally, the
languages spoken on the island have all also been spoken
elsewhere; and Ireland has shared a common publishing
and reading space at different times with Britain, France
and the US in particular.
If the Irish situation highlights the problematic nature of
single-country units of analysis, this is not to argue for
Irish exceptionalism, but rather to suggest that a history of
"Buddhism and Ireland" is inevitably a partial approach
to the global history of Buddhism, rather than a separate
national analysis. What is particularly visible for Ireland
is not less true for other countries, as Rocha's (2006)
account of Brazilian Zen makes clear, in its intertwining
of Brazilians' interest in Japan's economic and cultural
significance as non-western success story, of Japanese
labour migration and of the search for cosmopolitan
cultural capital.
The paths of first awareness
The difficulties of national categories
A summary of the first encounters of Ireland and
Buddhism highlights the insufficiency of purely national
Journal of Global Buddhism / 96
categories of analysis. The first knowledge of Buddhism
in Ireland came through Latin and the post-imperial
church, with the development of patristic scholarship in
the sixth and seventh centuries and consequent access to
the comments of Origen and Clement on Buddhism. The
first relevant Irish-language material (Dicuil's ninth
century geography, drawing on the records of Alexander's
journey to India and oral accounts of India and Ceylon)
was written in a French monastery.
Mediaeval Europe presents a methodological problem of
linking texts (and hence knowledge) to the location of
writers and readers: Old and Middle Irish, Old and
Middle English, Middle Welsh, Old Norse, Norman
French and Latin were all spoken in Ireland, while Irish
was a language of immigration in Scotland and Wales and
of monks much further afield. This was in no sense a
nationally-bounded world. If the Barlaam and Josaphat
legend, and Marco Polo's Travels, were translated into
Irish (as well as English, French and Norse), we do not
know where these translations were read, other than by
the provenance of surviving manuscripts.
In the early modern period, Irish people had access both
to the products of commercial printing (mostly in English
and French), such as Hakluyt's 16th century translation of
William of Rubruck and the various sixteenth and
seventeenth century collections of travel narratives, as
well as to the Jesuits' accounts of their work in the
Buddhist East (Offermans 2005) – depending on their
levels of literacy, financial means, and the languages they
could read (these in turn reflecting different positions
within the colonial process and the pan-European wars of
religion).
Thus when, in 1806, Ireland's first commercial woman
writer Sydney Owenson could describe (in a best-selling
Journal of Global Buddhism / 97
novel) a Catholic parish priest as being like "the dalai
lama of little Thibet" (cited in Lennon 2004: 146) she was
expressing both the level of knowledge available to some
Irish people, and the conflicted and opposing cultures
present
within
Ireland,
which
meant
that
an
English-speaking and Protestant culture found the (newly
decriminalised) Catholic church as alien and exotic as
Tibetan Buddhism. There was no unified Irish culture to
receive and remake Buddhism, but rather a conflict
between cultures, which in turn was not restricted to the
island of Ireland but part of a broader conflict within the
UK and indeed Europe.
International mechanisms of knowledge
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the
ethnographic knowledge of Jesuits or travellers was
largely replaced by new forms of textual and artefactual
knowledge (Lopez 1995), which Irish people in global
institutions were centrally involved in producing.
Most visibly, there was extensive Irish participation in the
British empire at all levels. Trinity College, Dublin (and
to a lesser extent Queen's College Belfast) played an
important role in training young Protestants for the
imperial administration; on retirement some civil servants
joined the ranks of academic orientalists (Mansoor 1944,
Lennon 2004). Other young Protestants, in what can only
be called an imperial service class, became military
officers (and brought back loot from the Burma
expeditions of the 1880s and the Younghusband
expedition to what is now the National Museum (Audrey
Whitty, pers. comm.) or missionaries, while smaller
categories of museum curator, art collector etc. rounded
out the picture.
The "other ranks" of the British army and navy recruited
Journal of Global Buddhism / 98
massively in Catholic Ireland and Irish Scotland (Bartlett
1997), while from the start of the twentieth century a
boom in vocations led to very large numbers of Irish
missionaries working in China in particular (Boland
2005), with the consequence that Buddhism became an
object of study for Irish religious institutions.
Said (2003) is thus right to see European knowledge
about Asia as part and parcel of processes of power. What
his account misses out in relation to Buddhism and other
Asian religions, as JJ Clarke (1997) has noted, is that such
knowledge was often drawn on strategically by European
dissidents to critique local sources of cultural power
(whether in c18th Enlightenment or c20th counter
culture). Lennon (2004) identifies a tradition of drawing
parallels
between
underlining
a
Ireland
similar
and
position
Asian
with
countries,
relation
to
metropolitan culture and empire.
Thus the first Irish Buddhists, members of the declining
Anglo-Irish who "went native" in Buddhist Asia, were far
from assimilating Buddhism within a self-confident
metropolitan culture. Rather, it is impossible to
understand
the
developing
relationship
between
Buddhism and Ireland outside of the structures of British
empire and Catholic "spiritual empire", and the warring
cultures represented by these two within Ireland: a
conflict which led to partial political independence, the
collapse of the Anglo-Irish as landed aristocracy and
imperial service class, and an ongoing sectarianism on
both sides of the new border which has remained
determining for what it means to be Buddhist, and Irish or
in Ireland (rarely both) until the start of the twenty first
century. Buddhism took its place in Ireland, not as
something operating within the "limits of dissent" (Tweed
2000), but as one element of a much wider-ranging
dissent – opposition to the world of empire, and
Journal of Global Buddhism / 99
increasingly to the world of local sectarianisms, and an
identification with something outside these terms.
The first Irish Buddhists
Irish Buddhist history is not short: the first (anonymous)
Irish Buddhist appeared in 1871, while the first named
sympathiser and adherent were found in Japan and
Ceylon respectively in 1890. The first talk by a Buddhist
in Ireland was in 1889, and the first explicitly Buddhist
event in 1929. The first visit by ordained Asian
Buddhists, meanwhile, happened in 1925.
These first Irish Buddhists appeared, above all, as
marginal. In chronological order we find an anonymous
statistic, a fictional character, an exile, an adventurer, a
transsexual, a fraud and a raconteur. This apparently
pejorative language underlines the marginality of these
exceptional individuals.
Up to now I have highlighted Ireland's peripherality and
involvement in world-systems processes. The reverse of
this coin is the intensive effort of boundary-creation,
identity formation and policing of difference that
increasingly defined ethnicity in this decisive period.
After the bloody suppression of the 1798 uprising and the
1800 Act of Union, a series of mass movements –
Catholic Emancipation, Home Rule, the Land War and
finally independence – marked an increasing rejection by
the Catholic peasants and middle classes of British rule
and the local Anglo-Irish ruling class; a resistance which
in turn led to frequent attempts at reasserting control, and
powerful counter-movements from Ulster Protestants in
particular. The revival of the Catholic church in the
post-Famine period, and simultaneous cultural nationalist
movements, were part and parcel of this process of
creating cultural and religious division.
Journal of Global Buddhism / 100
Rocha has argued (2006: 7) that "the adoption of
Buddhism in Catholic countries, such as France and Italy,
should be differentiated from its adoption in Protestant
ones". What stands out for the Irish case until the 1960s,
however, is this role of sectarianism in the reception of
Buddhism (2). As Lennon (2004) shows, even Catholic
nationalists working in solidarity with Indian ones could
not draw religious (as opposed to political or economic)
parallels. To go further and "jump ship" would have been
a betrayal of Catholic nationalism which not even
Marxists would contemplate.
It was therefore from the declining Anglo-Irish imperial
service class that it was possible for a handful of
individuals, mostly male and well-educated, and
(crucially) already very disconnected from their own
families and backgrounds, to defect from an identity in
the process of decomposition.
Seven Buddhists in search of a home
The first Irish Buddhist appeared as a County Dublin
statistic in the 1871 census – given the date, most
probably a university teacher or student; perhaps, indeed,
the anonymous author of the Dublin University
Magazine's largely sympathetic article (1873) on
"Buddhism and its founder". Irish universities being
strongly confessional, such an admission could not have
been made publicly without risking at a minimum loss of
employment or expulsion. From this point on, there were
between one and three Buddhists in Ireland in the 1881,
1891, 1901 and 1911 censuses, but identification is at
present impossible.
We are on equally shaky ground with the most widely
represented Irish Buddhist, Kipling's Kim (1900 – 1): the
Journal of Global Buddhism / 101
son of an Irish soldier and an Indian woman, brought up
to bazaar life. Kim is represented as torn between two
souls – a practical and cynical "English" one working for
the spymasters of the Raj, and a romantic and "Indian"
one whose guru is a moderately orthodox Tibetan
Gelugpa lama, inspired by western accounts of the then
Panchen lama (Franklin 2008, Kwon 2007).
Kim is of course a fictional character, but grounded in the
reality of imperial lives in India, where civil servants and
soldiers of all ranks took local wives, as did (less visibly)
missionaries. Whether such arrangements – and their
religious implications – were permanent or dissolved on
return home, most produced no records. Nevertheless,
this "going native" is the main possibility for attested Irish
Buddhists of this period (that is, those who published
their stories); Kim can stand for the unknown number of
those who did not.
Lafcadio Hearn, Buddhist sympathiser and interpreter of
"old Japan" to the west (and to its modernising, Meiji self)
was the son of an Anglo-Irish soldier who married a
Greek woman; he came to Ireland with his mother until
she returned home. Brought up by an aunt (who having
married a Catholic was kept at a distance by the rest of the
family), he was sent to boarding schools before being sent
to seek his fortune in the USA at 17; two decades later, he
travelled to Japan, where he lies buried at Jitoin Kobudera
temple in Tokyo (Ronan 1997).
Hearn's Buddhist sympathies are highlighted in Rexroth
(1977) and Tweed (2000); what I want to emphasise here
is the significance of this "going native" beyond the
empire for the son of an Anglo-Irish soldier, as well as the
fractured family life and sense of place caused precisely
by Ireland's place in international processes (the British
army in Greece) and by sectarianism (the division within
Journal of Global Buddhism / 102
the Hearn family).
A comparable "going native" can be seen in Hearn's
near-contemporary J. Bowles Daly, a journalist and
Theosophist who had written on Buddhist education in
Sri Lanka and joined Col. Olcott there in developing the
Buddhist Theosophical Society schools in the late 1880s
and early 1890s, becoming the first principal of Mahinda
College in Rajagiriya (Olcott 1889, Dharmadasa 1992).
Daly was a supporter of modernized Buddhist education,
provided by the laity with government subsidy, against
both the Christian mission schools and traditional
temple-based education; after falling out with Olcott he
remained active in the field and visited 1300 monasteries
as a commissioner for the laicisation of monastery
landholdings (Dennis 1897). Details are scanty, but he
was clearly a strongly "Buddhist" theosophist, if not a
Buddhist tout court.
Another Buddhist "going native" appears in Laura /
Michael Dillon, best known to history as the world's first
female-to-male
transsexual
by
plastic
surgery
(Hodgkinson 1989, Kennedy 2007). Dillon shared with
Hearn (and Kim) a fractured family background and with
Daly a prior interest in theosophy. Of Anglo-Irish
aristocratic family, he studied in Cambridge as a woman
before the second world war and returned to Ireland to
qualify in medicine as a man while undergoing
pioneering (and then-illegal) surgery in Britain. He
developed a deep interest in philosophical and spiritual
questions, writing among other things an early work on
transsexuality (Dillon 1946).
His connection with T. Lobsang Rampa, in the early
1950s, marks him as both the first Irish person to believe
they were being ordained a Buddhist monk as well as,
some years later, the first for whom this was actually true.
Journal of Global Buddhism / 103
While working as ship's doctor in 1958, he was "outed"
by the British tabloid press and fled to India, where he
made contact with Asian Buddhists. He was ordained first
as a Theravadin sramanera, then (when his sex change
prevented full ordination) as a Tibetan Buddhist novice,
attached to the (Gelugpa) Rizong monastery in Ladakh
and writing a series of Buddhist works (Jivaka 1962,
1994).
Lobzang Jivaka, as he became, demands respect not only
for his difficult personal life but also for his conscious
wish to tackle his own racism: he refused special
treatment in the monastery, subjecting himself to Tibetan
teenagers' monastic seniority and to food and living
conditions which probably contributed to his death at
forty-seven.
T. Lobsang Rampa, author of The Third Eye and other
works, is justly famous (see e.g. Lopez 1998) in the
history of western Buddhism as a commercially
successful fraud. After publication of the book but prior
to his "unmasking" as Cyril Hoskin, Scotland Yard had
requested a Tibetan passport or residence permit, leading
him to move to Ireland, where Dillon apparently bought
him a house.
Rampa, his wife and their friend Sheelagh Rouse lived
there for some years before moving to Canada: he
subsequently dedicated The Rampa Story to "his friends
in Howth… for the Irish people know persecution, and
they know how to judge Truth" (1960: 3). Despite
Rampa's inauthenticity, most observers judge him
personally sincere, and this house has a good claim to
being the first Buddhist community in Ireland; similarly,
the shamrock Buddhas that he sold from this address may
yet prove to be the first Buddhist practice in Ireland, at
least for a given value of "Buddhist" and "practice".
Journal of Global Buddhism / 104
Finally, we should mention Terence Gray, an Anglo-Irish
aristocrat who had a distinguished career in theatre at
Cambridge between the wars (in what is now the
Cambridge Buddhist Centre) and a colourful personal life
(marrying a Rimsky-Korsakov and later a Georgian
princess (Cornwell 2004)). In 1958, he retired to Monte
Carlo and became a regular correspondent of the London
Buddhist Society's Middle Way (Humphreys 1968) as
well as writing a series of Buddhist books as "Wei Wu
Wei", seven of which are still in print with Wisdom
Books. His Buddhism is a very literary "philosophy of
life" in some ways comparable to Alan Watts' and
combining Ch'an with Taoism.
Reflections
By the late 1950s, if it was possible to live a comfortable
Buddhist life in Monte Carlo rather than suffer the
pressures of a Hearn, a Daly or a Dillon, it was still
impossible, for Irish Buddhists at least, to do so in
Ireland. More generally, if the stories above appear those
of marginal characters, whose Irish or Buddhist
"authenticity" is often questionable, this is precisely the
point: by comparison with Almond's or Tweed's
Victorian Buddhism, minor and subordinate parts of their
own cultures, "Buddhism" and "Ireland" were almost
impossible to hold together. What we find instead are
defectors from the imperial service class, "going native"
in Japan, Ceylon or Ladakh and stepping outside both
their own local culture and imperial arrangements tout
court.
The
pressures
involved
are
underlined
by
two
counter-examples. Firstly, at least three Buddhist parties
visited Ireland in these years. In 1889, 1894 and
apparently 1896, the indefatigable Col. Olcott toured the
Journal of Global Buddhism / 105
country discussing both Theosophy and Buddhism,
exciting much controversy, but (as far as can be
ascertained) leaving no Buddhist organisations or
individuals. In 1929, the Unitarian minister and Buddhist
sympathiser Will Hayes, a friend of Christmas
Humphreys, gave a week-long lecture series in Dublin,
again with no visible effects. Finally, six "dancing lamas"
(Hansen 1996) were brought to Ireland in 1925 by the
partly-Irish team who had filmed The epic of Everest –
but as entertainment alone.
Secondly, Irish Theosophy, a key matrix for both British
and American Buddhism, was a flourishing force
throughout this period which involved among others WB
Yeats, AE (George Russell) and James Stephens.
However,
it
avoided
Buddhism
almost
entirely,
developing an interest in esoteric Christianity, Irish
folklore and Hinduism instead. For the largely
Anglo-Irish Theosophists, these choices made possible
continuing relevance and engagement in Irish politics in
the age of independence.
To be Buddhist, by contrast, was to step out of the conflict
(and the country) – and the only two Irish "Buddhist
Theosophists" did just that: Daly moving to Ceylon, and
William Quan Judge, co-founder of the Society
internationally and head of the American section, who
had emigrated at age twelve and whose magazine
followed a more "Buddhist" line.
Thus the key features of Irish Buddhism in this period are,
firstly, that it is caught between the two opposing cultures
of rising Catholic nationalism and the rearguard actions
of the Anglo-Irish imperial service class; and, secondly,
that it is played out on the global stage provided by the
institutions of the British empire in particular. It is
anything other than a debate within a unitary and bounded
national culture.
Journal of Global Buddhism / 106
A
new
beginning:
the
multiple
foundations
of
contemporary Buddhism in Ireland
If the previous period marks what linguists call a broken
tradition, the continuous tradition of Buddhism in Ireland
dates from the late 1960s and has its origins in the new
Catholic public-sector service class. On the nationalist
and Catholic side, the chains of transmission of
knowledge about Buddhism were typically those of
"spiritual empire" to use a phrase of the day.
Since the foundation of the Maynooth Mission to China
in 1918, over 1500 missionaries from the Columban order
alone went overseas (Boland 2005: 132), part of a much
broader wave of religious vocations and religious
emigration stretching back to the late nineteenth century.
The Mission's paper, The Far East, was sold by boys in
Cork as late as the 1950s (Bernard Murphy, pers. comm.)
This fits into the broader popularity of, for example, St
Francis Xavier, Jesuit missionary to Buddhists in India
and Japan, whose name adorns many youth centres.
Maynooth's library shows a continuing and sophisticated
interest in Buddhism in the country's central seminary as
well as in donations and bequests from priests around the
country. The key periods are between the 1920s and
1940s, no doubt reflecting the missionary effort, and from
the 1970s onwards, presumably reflecting a response to
new religious movements. In terms of popular culture, a
survey of the Irish media shows a continuing awareness
of Buddhism, whether as opponent in missionary efforts
or as an exotic feature of foreign parts.
By contrast with Brazil, where the Church's secularisation
has led to its losing ground among the poor (Rocha 2006:
104-5), the (highly conservative) Irish church lost its
"moral monopoly" (Inglis 1998) as a result of
Journal of Global Buddhism / 107
second-wave feminism, and the politics of memory as
large-scale institutional abuse of children has become the
subject of documentaries, court cases and national
tribunals. Thus the primary search for Irish ex-Catholics
has been for forms of religious expression which have not
been forms of religious control of bodies and emotions in
particular, and this shows up in responses to meditation
practice.
Historical trajectories
Nattier's (1998) three-way typology of Buddhism in the
west has been criticised for drawing overly sharp
distinctions (see Numrich 2003). For Ireland, it does
adequately describe three very different historical
trajectories. It may be a feature of the relative youth of the
Irish sangha that these boundaries have not yet broken
down in the way that they have done elsewhere.
An alternative reading is that in a peripheral context the
key linkages of Buddhism in Ireland are not internal ones.
Irish Buddhism, in this sense, is still "dependent": on
international Buddhist organisations, on the networks of
ethnic Buddhist diasporas, or on global distribution
chains of "Mind-body-spirit" literature and CDs. This
dependency undermines cross-Buddhist communication,
of which there has been very little. The sense of local
isolation and global connectedness brought about by this
peripherality has marked Irish Buddhism from the start:
"One person had put up a notice in what was called
the 'East West Centre' … saying that they were
interested in Buddhism and was there anyone else in
Dublin who was? And after that, I guess about ten or
fifteen people came together, and all of those people
at that time had thought that they were the only
Buddhists in Ireland" (interview A) (3).
Journal of Global Buddhism / 108
Nattier's categories, in other words, are useful precisely
because they are not national categories, but highlight
global relationships in the transmission of Buddhism
which remain determining for contemporary Irish
Buddhism.
Import Buddhism
In
the
late
1960s
Buddhist-sympathetic
and
early
counter-culture
1970s
a
developed
new
in
Dublin, including vegetarian and macrobiotic restaurants,
alternative bookshops and martial arts. For Catholic
participants who later became Buddhists, what showed
the way was personal reading, often at secondary school,
of literature published in the UK and US – despite the
orthodoxy of school or family. This fed into travel
abroad, bringing back literature unavailable in Ireland,
and into Buddhist retreats in the UK.
Indeed the oldest organisation, Kagyu Samye Dzong in
north Dublin, came out of the reflection that "we thought
maybe it would be cheaper to pay for one teacher to come
over than everybody going over somewhere else, so we
got together and we did organise many visits with monks
and nuns" (interview B). This group, founded in 1977,
organised between 100 and 150 visits by teachers in its
early years, starting with Tibetan lamas but also including
some western Theravadin-trained teachers (Ani Tsondru,
pers. comm.)
Insofar as there was ever an elite import Buddhism, of the
kind Nattier describes for the US, this was it. Rather than
being strongly committed to a single path, however, it
was "very certainly multidenominational, not even that,
but just a bunch of people who were meeting with an
interest in Buddhism" (interview A).
Journal of Global Buddhism / 109
A similar situation holds for the Zen Meditation Group
(now Insight Meditation Group); founded by Dominican
father Philip McShane, this always contained both
Buddhists and non-Buddhists. In its early years, it invited
Soto Zen teachers from Throssel Hole in the UK, while in
the 1980s it increasingly invited Theravadin teachers
from the Birmingham Buddhist Vihara and Amaravati
(Kelly 1990).
One key difference between this import Buddhism and
the kind that Nattier describes, of course, is that the
organizers of these groups did not themselves engage in
long-term training in Asia aiming at certification and
teaching at home – a situation which undoubtedly builds
commitment to a single approach. (As we shall see, such
people existed, but rarely returned to Ireland.) Rather,
these
were
practitioners,
groups
with
initially
dominated
considerable control
by
lay
over
the
invitation of teachers and the direction of their own
centres.
If imported knowledge, through UK and US publishing
circuits, long-distance travel, retreats abroad and now the
Internet, remains important in Ireland, it has rarely led to
new institutional foundations. What it has produced, as
Wendy Jermyn's (unfortunately unpublished) research
has shown, is a proliferation of informal, essentially
private, groups of practitioners: for example, a group who
meet to listen to CDs of Thich Nhat Hanh and meditate in
a private house.
At a rough estimate (based on the levels of activity of
publicly organised Buddhism and the numbers of
non-Asian Buddhists in Ireland), such informal groups,
along with more isolated or "night-stand" Buddhists
(Tweed 2002), account for at least a third, and perhaps as
Journal of Global Buddhism / 110
much as half, of all Irish Buddhists.
Such groups, like the earlier foundations, retain a greater
sense of independence vis-à-vis their sources of Buddhist
teaching and practice; my own impression, from 17 years
involvement, is that far from being the elite Nattier
predicts (1998: 189), these more recent groups (and
individual night-stand Buddhists) are less educated, more
dependent on commercial distribution sources, and more
likely to be women than Buddhists involved in the export
groups,
whose
stronger
organisational
hierarchies
(necessitated among other things by a relationship "back"
to organizations or lineages based close at hand in
Western Europe) and tighter approaches to doctrine and
practice give greater scope to a particular kind of
service-class careerism, and to men.
The major condition for these developments is the prior
arrival of Buddhism in more powerful (politically,
economically, culturally) countries, from which it can
now be diffused successfully in an Irish market which is
increasingly part of a global one.
Export Buddhism
Export Buddhism in Ireland, then, is different not only in
its historical origins (which are very recent – less than two
decades in most cases) but also its sources. Rather than
Asian missionaries, its typical carriers are westerners,
themselves often mainly or exclusively trained in the
west. In global terms, this is a second generation of
western
Buddhist
foundations,
with
their
own
characteristics.
The key feature of these is the central role of "blow-ins",
missionaries from other European countries. Thus Marjo
Oosterhoff from the Netherlands (Passaddhi Meditation
Centre, arrived 1990), Dharmachari Sanghapala from the
Journal of Global Buddhism / 111
UK FWBO (Dublin Meditation Centre, arrived 1991),
Alain Liebmann from France, trained by Taisen
Deshimaru (Galway Zen Centre, arrived 1991) and others
arrived to set up centres as offshoots or successors of
traditions already implanted elsewhere in Europe.
A borderline case is that of Peter and Harriet Cornish
(Cornish 2007), who moved to Ireland in the early 1970s,
initially practicing within Chögyam Trungpa's tradition.
The Cornishes offered what is now the Dzogchen Beara
centre to Sogyal Rimpoche when he visited in 1986.
(Another such planned centre, in Westport, failed to
materialise when the lamas in question were refused
permission to stay.)
The role of "blow-ins" in the Irish counter culture is well
known and extends to many fields, ranging from the New
Age (Kuhling 2004) to organic farming (Moore 2003).
Following the traditional definitions, Ireland remains
very clearly "border country": to the best of my
knowledge no ordinations, in any tradition, have taken
place in Ireland, for example.
More generally, it has taken a long time for Irish people to
take leadership or teaching positions in export groups, if
at all. Thus in Dzogchen Beara, senior Irish students act
as "presenters", leading groups and presenting videos, but
they "are not really teachers in their own right" (Matt
Padwick, pers. comm.). In the (FWBO) Dublin
Meditation Centre, the first Irish-born teacher, trained in
Britain, arrived in 1993; the first Irish-trained teacher,
ordained in 1998, left for Brazil; the first Irish-trained
teacher to stay and teach was as late as 2001. The
"import" Kagyu Samye Dzong, by contrast, had its first
two Irish teachers in the 1980s and 1990s respectively.
In terms of peripherality, this situation contrasts sharply
Journal of Global Buddhism / 112
with the large number of Irish-born Buddhists who
trained abroad and did not return. Thus Paul Haller, abbot
in 2007 of the San Francisco Zen Centre, comes from
west Belfast and was ordained in Thailand (Breen 2007);
Finian Airton from Dublin was ordained in Throssel Hole
around 1984; Ratnaghosa, chair of the London Buddhist
Centre between 1994 and 2003, grew up in Kildare
(Ratnaghosa n.d.) Most famously, Maura O'Halloran,
after studying in Trinity, received Dharma transmission
in Japan shortly before her death in 1982 (O'Halloran
1995). Examples could be multiplied.
The point is not that Irish teachers were excluded by
blow-ins, but rather that it remained, until the turn of the
twenty first century, extremely hard to be Irish, and
Buddhist, and in Ireland (in 1991, only 264 identified as
Buddhist in the Republic; by 2006 this number had
increased almost tenfold, to 2175).
As with other counter-cultural activities, to be foreign
meant being granted a certain leeway in one's lifestyle
which was not offered to Catholic-born Irish people. One
British-born Buddhist recounts
"When I still lived in Inchicore, an elderly lady came
up … on the street, you know 'are you a Protestant or
a Catholic?' – 'Well, actually, I'm a Buddhist'. And
she said 'ooh, it's alright dear, so long as you're a
Christian'." (interview A).
At the opposite end of the spectrum, in Northern Ireland,
where sectarian tensions have remained stronger, being
Buddhist "at home" has been particularly difficult until
very recent years. Even in the Republic, Irish Buddhists
still often have church weddings and funerals for family
reasons.
Journal of Global Buddhism / 113
The "export Buddhist" groups cover the whole spectrum
of Buddhism: of the fourteen most organised groups in
Ireland,
five
are
broadly
Theravadin
(including
vipassana), three Mayahana, five Tibetan and one western
(Dharmachari Akshobin, pers. comm.)
Nattier predicts correctly that these groups will be
evangelical in orientation (1998: 189), but is wrong (at
least for Ireland) to expect greater ethnic diversity (except
via these groups' international connections). Nor are they
more plebeian: the intellectual consistency involved in
acquiring a new ideology and defending its boundaries in
the "spiritual marketplace" requires a higher degree of
cultural capital than "shopping around".
Baggage Buddhism
In the censuses of the 1990s and 2000s, those identifying
as Buddhist in the Republic broke down more or less
evenly between those of Irish and other "western"
nationality, and Buddhists from Asian countries. Except
for mainland Chinese converts to Falun Gong, most Asian
Buddhists were presumably born into Buddhism.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Vietnamese "quota
refugees" arrived under UNHCR programmes. Of these,
some were Catholic, others Buddhist and others again
from the Vietnamese Chinese community (Maguire
2004). At some point, the Buddhists were able to sustain a
temple in a Dublin suburb.
The only other "ethnic Buddhist" group combining this
length of presence with a similar organisational capacity
is Soka Gakkai, which includes western and Japanese
adherents more successfully than most Buddhist groups.
This too was able for a time to sustain a temple in
suburban Dublin, but has now reverted to private practice
Journal of Global Buddhism / 114
(Wendy Cox, pers. comm.)
Special mention must be made of Chinese immigrants
from the PRC, Taiwan and the diaspora (especially
Malaysia), who comprise about half of the Asian
Buddhist population. While Chinese New Year has some
history in Ireland, the only visible organisation with any
claim to be Buddhist is the well-organised Falun Dafa /
Falun Gong. This is present in New Age circuits; its free
paper Epoch Times is available in Irish supermarkets; and
it holds regular public protests about the treatment of
Falun Gong practitioners in China.
Otherwise, a combination of very low immigration rates
until the late 1990s, small absolute numbers of most
Buddhist ethnicities (in the dozens or hundreds in most
cases) and global downturn make the development of
formal ethnic Buddhist institutions problematic. (In 2009,
however, the Thai community organised a public Wesak
celebration). The most likely route is affiliation to
existing, import or export, foundations. Anecdotal
evidence suggests that tentative moves are being made in
this direction.
Creolisation and not-just-Buddhists
Finally, we should mention, as Tweed (2002: 28 – 29)
observes, not only Buddhist sympathisers (as in earlier
periods),
but
also
"night-stand
Buddhists",
"Dharma-hoppers", "lukewarm Buddhists" and "non-just
Buddhists". Alternatively, following Rocha (2006), we
can speak of multiple affiliations and forms of
creolisation.
Where Irish people appropriate Buddhism for themselves,
within largely self-directed and informal organisations
(or as a purely private matter), their own cultural
orientations towards religion naturally play a key role. As
Journal of Global Buddhism / 115
one teacher observes, "we have Irish Catholic Buddhists,
Irish
Catholic
pagans,
Irish
Catholic
atheists…"
(Dharmachari Sanghapala, pers. comm.) who deploy the
vocabulary of Buddhism (etc.) within a largely Catholic
grammar.
Particular pressures are exerted by tribal affiliation.
Religious affiliation remains central to many aspects of
life in Ireland, formally and informally: schools and
hospitals have with few exceptions an explicitly religious
ethos; marriages and funerals are typically religious;
confirmation and first communion are major events; and
so on. Coulter (1993) documents, in relation to feminism,
how only those university-trained liberal feminists with
independent careers were able to set themselves openly
against and outside the church. For working-class
women's groups, the church was (and sometimes still
remains) a central part of family and community, and one
which they cannot do without. These pressures also
impact on Irish Buddhism.
As Catholicism's "moral monopoly" (Inglis 1998) slowly
loses its power, at least for those with the strength or
resources to stand outside it, what increasingly replaces it
as a pressure on "night-stand Buddhists" are the
interpretations offered through consumer culture, be it the
"mind-body-spirit" section of high street bookshops, the
sub-Buddhist material in "angel shops" or workshops
advertised in health food stores. To this extent, import
Buddhism could equally be described as a collection of
audience cults (Stark and Bainbridge 1985), at times
developing into client cults around teachers based abroad.
These experiences – of creolisation or multiple
affiliations – are not restricted to working-class women:
one long-standing and well-educated male Buddhist
writes
Journal of Global Buddhism / 116
"I have always been aware that my interest in
Buddhism may be rather superficial, and I am not a
good or committed practitioner! However, I remain a
sympathiser and an admirer, often reading Buddhist
literature. But I haven't attended Buddhist teachings
in recent years. Moreover, I retain a certain Christian
faith and practice, and have an interest in some of the
teachings of Islam".
As we have seen, the origins of this import Buddhism are
eclectic, both in the encounter between Christianity and
Buddhism, and in the counter culture of the 1960s and
1970s. For Britain, Cush suggests that the counter culture
was important for western Buddhists in the 1970s and
faded from view in the 1980s, while a counter-cultural
"New Age" revived in its relevance for Buddhists in the
1990s (Cush 1993: 195 - 6). Similarly, Vishvapani writes,
"the New Age is where people start looking when
they want an alternative to conventional society…
Buddhists might see the New Age as a kind of
contemporary ethnic religion which can co-exist with
Western Buddhism as tribal and national traditions
co-exist with Eastern Buddhism" (1994: 21).
Relationships with Catholicism show similar features: in
the 1970s and 1980s there developed a substantial
interest, particularly in Christian-Zen dialogue and the
adoption of Asian practices within Christian spirituality
(see Hughes 1997). This has declined under the watchful
eye of Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, but may
revive in future. The bulk of Irish Buddhists will, for the
foreseeable future, have been brought up Catholic, so that
Buddhist organisations in Ireland will continue to have to
engage with people's religious socialisation, and
individuals will still have to negotiate these identities for
Journal of Global Buddhism / 117
themselves. As with Rocha's Brazilian Zen practitioners,
"the vast majority of the people interviewed were
Catholics before they started to 'shop around' in the
religious marketplace and find Zen Buddhism."
(2006: 118).
Finally, a refusal to identify as Buddhist may also be a
conscious, thought-out Buddhist position:
"I had this debate with myself at one stage about
calling myself a Buddhist or not, because it's almost
unBuddhist to call yourself Buddhist, particularly
because they're labeling and they're categorizing"
(interview C).
Fieldwork in the 1990s counter culture identified as key
themes autonomy and reflexivity in all aspects of one's
life (Cox 1999); this refusal of categorisation is no doubt
related. As the long history of sectarianism in Ireland
finally wanes, there are more general reactions against
religious identification: the last thing many Irish people
want to do is to repeat their own experience of sectarian
upbringing, and interest in the idea of a Buddhist school,
for example, has been virtually zero. Statistics based on
practice rather than self-identification might thus show
rather more Irish people who are Buddhist, or
part-Buddhist (4).
Conclusion: the future of Irish Buddhism
Ireland's relationship with Buddhism has always been
determined by global processes, be these the circuits of
mediaeval Christian knowledge and the publishing of
early modern travellers' tales, the involvement of some
Irish people with running the British empire and of others
with the "Catholic spiritual empire", the role of UK and
Journal of Global Buddhism / 118
US publishing in making knowledge of Buddhism
available to secondary-school children in the 1960s and
1970s, "blow-ins" from the broader west European
counter culture, or immigration from Buddhist Asia.
I have argued that the most central feature of "Irish
culture" in relation to Buddhism is that there was not one,
but two warring cultures, in a sectarian conflict which
largely squeezed out alternative religious options, at least
at home (to be Irish and Buddhist abroad was always
more feasible).
As late as 1991, there were only 986 self-identified
Buddhists in the Republic, about 0.025% of the
population. By 2002 the figure was 3,894 (about 0.1
percent) and by 2006 it was 6,516 (about 0.15 percent),
making it the third-largest religion after Christianity and
Islam. These twenty first century figures are in line with
Baumann's (2001) European estimates for the late 1990s,
albeit on the low end of the spectrum. They are roughly
evenly divided between those of Irish and other western
nationality and those of Asian nationality – about 45
percent converts in 1991, 57 percent in 2002 and 50
percent in 2006. Thus along with a rise in immigration,
there is an equally significant rise in conversion
(paralleled by that to other non-established religions and
non-religious categories). Is this the "end of history"?
Global recession has several obvious effects. Firstly,
substantial numbers of recent immigrants have left the
country, although events in the PRC in particular may
offset this, and indeed lead to a growth in Falun Gong in
particular.
Secondly, religious and racial intolerance is rising,
whether in the recent referendum denying citizenship to
children of foreign parents born in Ireland, or proposed
legislation against blasphemy. How this will affect
Journal of Global Buddhism / 119
Buddhism is anyone's guess, but it seems likely that
"night-stand Buddhists" in particular will find it harder to
remain broad-minded if the situation worsens. Renewed
ethnic closure along religious grounds is by no means
impossible.
Thirdly, there may be a shift in reasons for interest in
Buddhism. The Dublin Buddhist Centre, one of the most
visible ports of call, reports a sharp drop in meditation
classes (perceived as an antidote to stressful work lives)
and rising numbers taking classes in Buddhism.
Finally, recession increases the number of potential
skilled volunteers but also makes emigration more
attractive for young, educated Buddhists.
Despite these local considerations, Buddhism in Ireland
remains, as it has always been, structurally dependent on
global relationships. Until Asian Buddhists in Ireland are
able to bridge the gap to English-language Buddhist
organisations (and vice versa) they are likely to remain
the poor relations of organisations in Britain or at home.
The
Irish
franchises
of
international
Buddhist
organisations will not cease to be so in the foreseeable
future, as training and ordination resources will remain
beyond the reach of all but the largest groups in Ireland.
And "import Buddhists" will remain dependent on the
various circuits of international publishing, touring
teachers, Internet ordering and so on.
To this extent, Ireland is likely to remain a "border
country" of the Dharma for a long time to come; but the
issues raised in this article are not Irish ones alone, even if
they are particularly visible in the Irish case. Nation-states
are important social facts, but as units of analysis they
provide at best a particular insight into what are
necessarily global relationships and processes, and at
Journal of Global Buddhism / 120
worst a sense of naturalness, boundedness and
self-sufficiency that can distract our attention from this
broader picture. Similar points, of course, were made by
Nagasena and Nagarjuna.
Notes
1. The Visuddhimagga, for example, identifies "remote
areas with no faith in the Dharma" and "border regions in
dispute" as unsuitable sites for building monasteries (Ray
1999: 38, fn 20). The relative lack of monks to perform
ordinations also leads to smaller quorums in these
contexts: see e.g. Findly 2000: 116 fn. 8, citing
Gombrich.
2. In a broader perspective, France and Italy are better
described as pillarised societies, in Lipset and Rokkan's
(1967) sense, with centuries-long conflicts between
Catholic, secular-liberal and socialist cultures. The
question of the adoption of Buddhism within the secular
and socialist subcultures of western Europe has yet to be
researched.
3. The three interviews cited in this section were carried
out in 2008 with people who have been involved in
Buddhism in Ireland since the 1970s.
4. Rocha notes (2006: 109) that Brazilians will often
identify as Catholic on census forms because they are
baptised. A similar situation applies in Ireland, although
here the key point is that "Protestant" and "Catholic" are
widely understood as ethnic categories.
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Thanks and acknowledgements
We are very thankful to Dharmachari Akshobin, Philip
Almond, Martin Baumann, Julian Campbell, Wendy Cox,
Paddy Dooher, Ian Foster, Brian Gurrin, James in the
Galway
Zen
Dojo,
Eugene
Kelly,
Dharmachari
Lalitavira, Joseph Lennon, Shane McCausland, Bernard
Journal of Global Buddhism / 126
Murphy, John Murphy, Sandra Noel, Thomas O'Connor,
John O'Neill, Marjo Oosterhoff, Matt Padwick, Hilary
Richardson, Cristina Rocha, Andrew Slibney, Rachel
Stanley, Ani Tsondru, Mike Tyldesley, Sandra Watkins,
Chris Whiteside and Audrey Whitty for all their
assistance with this research, which was made possible by
a grant from NUI Maynooth Dept of Sociology. Our
apologies to anyone we have inadvertently omitted.