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" Socially engaged Buddhism in the UK : "
Henry, Philip Michael
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Latin Dissertation
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| Record Number
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1097227
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TLets504227
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| Main Entry
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Henry, Philip Michael
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| Title & Author
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Socially engaged Buddhism in the UK :\ Henry, Philip Michael
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| College
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University of Liverpool
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| Date
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2008
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| student score
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2008
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Abstract
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Socially Engaged Buddhism (SEB) in the UK forms part of a diverse and complexBuddhist picture. Concerned with developing Buddhist solutions to social, political andecological problems it had its genesis in the movements against nuclear weapons and theVietnam War in the 1960s. It holds with the notion of engagement in caring and service,in social and environmental protest and analysis, in non-violence as a creative way ofovercoming conflicts, and in `right livelihood' and other initiatives which prefigure asociety of the future. Engaged Buddhism has transformed the soteriological emphasis ofmore traditional forms of Buddhist thought to programs of social, political, and economictransformation. The spiritual emphasis on Buddhist practices such as meditationcontinues to be at the heart of many forms of engaged Buddhism, but, to apply a termEvelyn Underhill coined many years ago in her study of mysticism, it is a "practicalspirituality, " one in which the transformation of society takes equal precedence with thetransformation of the individual.Both textual and anthropological studies of Buddhism, have often presented it asstereotypically 'other-worldly' (Weber 1958/62), lacking in social engagement. Thisstudy adopts an inductive investigation that will test empirically the `this-worldly',`other-worldly' dichotomy, through the relationship of Buddhists to their social settings.This implies a continuity versus discontinuity debate at stake in this discussion,suggesting the possibility of a continuous (traditional) view, which asserts `all Buddhismis engaged' (Nhat Hanh 1987), or that SEB is in some sense `a new phenomenon'(Queen, 2000: 1) and thereby is a break with tradition. The lack of empirical scholarlyresearch, however,h as left only the voices of academics talking to each other within theframework of the debate. This study sets out to remedy that situation, by presenting anempirically based extensive case study analysis and survey of five New Buddhistorganisations, who are socially engaged in a variety of ways. This thesis aims to locateSocially Engaged Buddhism in the UK and place it within an emerging `WesternBuddhism' examining its adaptation and development and discerning the significance andimpact of SEB on the British Buddhist landscape in order to characterise the phenomenonand its relationships to the wider British Buddhist world, and academic discourse
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University of Liverpool
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