abstract: Buddhism is thriving in US-America, attracting many converts with college and post-graduate degrees as well as selling all forms of popular culture. Yet little is known about the communication dynamics behind the diffusion of Buddhist religious/spiritual traditions into the United States. Religion is an underexplored area of intercultural communication studies (Nakayama & Halualani, 2010) and this study meets the lacuna in critical intercultural communication scholarship by investigating the communication practices of US-Americans adopting Asian Buddhist religious/spiritual traditions. Ethnographic observations were conducted at events where US-Americans gathered to learn about and practice Buddhist religious/spiritual traditions. In addition, interviews were conducted with US-Americans who were both learning and teaching Buddhism. The grounded theory method was used for data analysis. The findings of this study describe an emerging theory of the paracultural imaginary -- the space of imagining that one could be better than who one was today by taking on the cultural vestments of (an)Other. The embodied communication dynamics of intercultural exchange that take place when individuals adopt the rituals and philosophies of a foreign culture are described. In addition, a self-reflexive narrative of my struggle with the silence of witnessing the paracultural imaginary is weaved into the analysis. The findings from this study extend critical theorizing on cultural identity, performativity, and cultural appropriation in the diffusion of traditions between cultural groups. In addition, the study addresses the complexity of speaking out against the subtle prejudices in encountered in intercultural communication. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Communication 2013

This thesis presents a study of the role of western lamas within Tibetan Buddhism in America, arguing that the role of the lama is as an influential and central aspect in the development and transformation of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition in the west. This thesis argues how western lamas holding a position of authority act as a catalyst of change within their group and in the overall process of change and adaptation of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition in America, creating what may become ‘American Tibetan Buddhism.’ Three relevant areas regarding the role of the lama within the transforming tradition are identified: 1) the basis of authority of the lama, or how authority is obtained; 2) the use of such authority as a tool for change; and 3) transmission of the teachings and lineage.

Twentieth-century environmentalist discourse often laid the blame for environmental degradation on Western civilization, and presented the religious traditions of the East as offering an ecocentric antidote to Western dualism and anthropocentrism. Gary Snyder has looked to Chinese and Japanese Buddhism to inform his environmentalist poetry and prose. While Snyder often writes in terms of a dualism of East and West, he synthesizes traditional forms of Buddhism with various Western traditions, and his green Buddhism ultimately undermines more simplistic oppositions of East and West. The first chapter reads Snyder's writing of the mid-1950s alongside several of his West Coast contemporaries - Kenneth Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac - showing that these writers evoked the natural world together with Buddhist themes before the advent of the modern environmental movement in order to mount a critique of Cold War American culture. Snyder's early interest in Buddhism was motivated largely by translations of Chinese poetry and Chapter Two examines his own translations of the Tang Dynasty poet Hanshan. In Snyder's translations and contemporaneous original poetry, Buddhist poetics mingle with American conceptions of wilderness. Chapter Three shows how Snyder's Buddhism was influenced by Anglophone writers such as D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts, and argues that from the late 1960s Snyder aimed to Americanize Buddhism as ideas of localism became more central to his environmentalism. Chapter Four examines Snyder's synthesis of Hua-yen Buddhism and Western scientific ecology in the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter Five examines 'The Hokkaido Book,' an unfinished prose work on environmental attitudes in the Far East in which Snyder considers the relationship between the civilized and the primitive. Chapter Six examines the influence of Chinese landscape painting and Japanese No drama, two forms steeped in Buddhist ideas, on the poems of 'Mountains' and 'Rivers Without End'.

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This dissertation analyzes Jewish religious views of Buddhism in a broad historical perspective, from the end of 18th century down to the present. Through an analysis of Jewish religious texts, it shows the ways Buddhism has been contextualized and tries to uncover Buddhism's role in modern Judaism. From these texts Buddhism emerges as 1) a tool of polemics and self-definition, 2) a form of spirituality fully compatible with Judaism, and 3) a competitor of Judaism, endangering its social and ideological integrity. While Jewish religious views of Christianity and Islam have been dealt with extensively in the academic literature, the role of Buddhism in various forms of modern Judaism has been either completely overlooked or at best reduced to the JUBU phenomenon. This dissertation aims to help fill this gap.