Buddhism and Ireland

Etudes Irlandaises 39, 2014

This article uses a world-systems perspective to analyse the development of Buddhism in Ireland, in particular the post-1990 period which saw a tenfold increase in those formally identifying as Buddhist. This shift is a result both of Ireland’s new positioning in global economic and migrant flows, and of the changed ethno-political meaning of religion in Irish society. More broadly, Buddhism has moved from an exotic or counter-cultural positioning to a partial respectability. Nonetheless many practical problems remain in negotiating a Buddhist identity in Ireland.

The Study of Religions in Ireland: Past, Present and Future, 2022

An "Irish Buddhist" was often presented in old newspapers as an oxymoron, but our research (with Alicia Turner, Yoshinaga Shin'ichi and others) on the unexpectedly long history of Buddhism and Ireland has unearthed some fascinating dimensions in the broader study of religions and Ireland. Stepping beyond traditional discourses, we have found Irish Buddhists involved in Asian religious change, migrants bringing new religions to Ireland and people in Ireland rejecting the Catholic/Protestant binary. We have also found the first (1889) Buddhist mission to Europe (London) and a forgotten early 1900s Irish Buddhist challenge to colonial missionary Christianity in South & Southeast Asia. Our research has driven us to explore new methodsin particular using digital humanities to reconstruct forgotten figures and fostering developing scholarly networks to study translocal lives. This chapter situates our own discoveries among expanding new research initiatives on Ireland and religions, and highlights the significance of these research projects for the academic study of religions throughout the island of Ireland and beyond.

Ireland lies on the margins of the Buddhist world, far from its homeland in northern India and Nepal and the traditionally Buddhist parts of Asia. It is also in various ways "peripheral" to core capitalist societies, and Irish encounters with Buddhism are structured by both facts. Buddhism, for its part, has been a central feature of major Eurasian societies for over two millennia. During this period, Irish people and Asian Buddhists have repeatedly encountered or heard about each other, in ways structured by many different kinds of global relations – from the Roman Empire and the medieval church via capitalist exploration, imperial expansion and finally contemporary capitalism. These different relationships have conditioned different kinds of encounters and outcomes. At the same time, as succeeding tides of empire, trade and knowledge have crossed Eurasia, each tide has left its traces. In 1859, Fermanagh-born James Tennent's best-selling History of Ceylon could devote four chapters to what was already known about the island in ancient and medieval times – by Greeks and Romans, by "Moors, Genoese and Venetians", by Indian, Arabic and Persian authors and in China. Similarly, the Catholic missionary D Nugent, speaking in Dublin's Mansion House in 1924, could discuss encounters with China from 1291 via the Jesuits to the present. The Ireland that was connected with the Buddhist world was not, of course, a separate and coherent entity. Like many or most contemporary states, the majority of what was nineteenth-century "Ireland" has only become a separate state within living memory, and one whose cultural and political boundaries remain contested. If authors discussing the arrival of Buddhism in Britain or America (Almond 1988, Tweed 2000) have written as though Victorian Buddhism there was largely an outgrowth of American or British culture, peripheral societies like Ireland have been in no position to remake Buddhism in their "own" (intensely debated) image. For most of the last five hundred years, Irish encounters with Buddhism have been mediated through competing international affiliations – most powerfully, the British empire and the Catholic church – through shared Anglophone or European publishing spaces, and (going further back) through languages spoken both here and elsewhere. More recently, they have 1 This paper reworks material previously published in the Journal of Global Buddhism (Cox and Griffin 2009, Cox 2009), which contains a full acknowledgements list. Thanks are due to Cristina Rocha and the Journal for permission to reuse this material. 2 been structured by Ireland's constant cycle of emigration and immigration: until recently it has been rare for Buddhists to be both Irish and in Ireland. Thus the history of "Buddhism and Ireland" is not a separate national analysis but a window into global histories (comparable to Rocha's 2006 account of Brazilian Zen), where the effective unit of analysis is whatever "world system" (Wallerstein 1988) connects economic, political and cultural activities, from the Roman empire to global capitalism.

Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2014

B o o k R e v i e w Buddhism and Ireland: from the Celts to the Counter-Culture and Beyond.

This article summarises the history of the encounter between Buddhism and Ireland.

2009

Ireland lies on the margins of the Buddhist world, far from its homeland in northern India and Nepal and the traditionally Buddhist parts of Asia. It is also in various ways "peripheral" to core capitalist societies, and Irish encounters with Buddhism are structured by both facts. Buddhism, for its part, has been a central feature of major Eurasian societies for over two millennia. During this period, Irish people and Asian Buddhists have repeatedly encountered or heard about each other, in ways structured by many different kinds of global relations – from the Roman Empire and the medieval church via capitalist exploration, imperial expansion and finally contemporary capitalism. These different relationships have conditioned different kinds of encounters and outcomes. At the same time, as succeeding tides of empire, trade and knowledge have crossed Eurasia, each tide has left its traces. In 1859, Fermanagh-born James Tennent's best-selling History of Ceylon could devot...

Journal of Religion in Japan, 2021

This article argues that there is no single relationship between Japanese Buddhism and Ireland. Rather, there is a series of changing relationships mediated by different world-system contexts between one island and another (peripheral and post-colonial) one: as ethnographic information, as cultural influence and as religious practice. The process of building such relationships has a long history, stretching back to the Irish reception of both Jesuit and traveller’s accounts of Japan, later made concrete by early intermediaries like Lafcadio Hearn / Koizumi Yakumo and Charles Pfoundes. W.B. Yeats in particular helped to give Japanese Buddhism a significant place in Irish culture, notably in poetry. From the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese Buddhists started to settle in Ireland and Japanese Buddhism began to be practiced; both are now an established part of the Irish religious landscape. The article sketches this history, culminating in the present situation of Japanese Buddhism in Ireland.

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2015

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