(Page number citations are from the introduction to the 5th edition)
"Buddhism- as a term to denote the vast array of social and cultural phenomena that have clustered around the teachings of a figure called the Buddha, the Awakened One- is a recent invention. It comes from the thinkers of the eighteenth century European Enlightenment and their quest to subsume religions under comparative sociology and secular history. Only recently have Asian Buddhists come to adopt the term and the concept behind it." (xix)
"The serious study of Buddhism in the West began in 1844, when the French philologist Eugene Burnouf came to the conclusion that certain religions encountered by European explorers and traders in East Asia, Tibet, India, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia were in fact branches of a single tradition whose home was in India. Burnouf's discovery of the connecting thread among these Buddhist traditions was such a major intellectual feat that it has continued to shape perceptions about those traditions: that despite their superficial differences, they share a common core. Thus the West has perceived Buddhism as a single religion, much like Christianity or Islam, with the differences among its various permutations analogous to the differences among Protestants, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox Christians. For more than a century after Burnouf's discovery, Buddhologists-- scholars of the Buddhist tradition- tried to delineate the essential characteristics of that common core, but the data refused to fit into any clearly discernible mold." (xx)
"To deal with tis great variety, scholars tried to define an "ideal Buddhism," against which the actual forms of Buddhism could be measured to see how well they managed to embody the ideal. The arbitrary nature of this process was best revealed by the lack of agreement on how the ideal could be found." (xx)
"In either case, it ultimately became obvious that the definition of an ideal Buddhism was less a useful rubric for organizing knowledge than a means for passing judgment on what one did or didn't like about Buddhist traditions." (xx)
"To avoid this error, it seems better to regard the term Buddhism as describing a family of religions, each with its own integrity, much as monotheism covers a family of religions that are related but so inherently different that they cannot be reduced to a common core." (xxi)
Criteria for judging traditions as separate religions, paraphrased from (xxi):
- Institutionally separate.
- They regard different sources as providing the ultimate authority on their teachings. May share common sources with other traditions, but the shared sources are explicitly identified as being incomplete by at least one of the traditions involved in the sharing.
- Differing views of the nature and qualities of the object of their veneration or ultimate authority- i.e, differing ideas about who or what god or the Buddha (or Dharma) is.
- Different goals, and different methods to attain that goal. May share goals and methods with other traditions, but as with 2) above the shared goals or teachings are required as insufficient or incomplete on their own.
"When these criteria are applied to the living Buddhist traditions of the modern world, i becomes clear that at least three separate Buddhist religions can be delineated: the Theravada tradition centered on the Pali Canon; the East Asian tradition, centered on the Chinese Canon; and the Tibetan tradition, centered on the Tibetan Canon." (xxi)
"Each of these three religions is derived from one of the three "courses" or "vehicles"... that developed in India. However, it would be a mistake simply to equate each of these religions with its dominant course, for each contains elements of all three courses." (xx)
"Thus, even though they derive from common sources, the structural differences in the way they interpret those sources make them separate." (xxi)