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Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 7.1 (2024): 331–335; https://dx.doi.org/10.15239/hijbs.07.01.10
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Buddhism and Science, Transmission of Buddhism: Locality and Globality)
Duncan Ryūken Williams. American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. 384 pp.
Sara LAWS
Virginia Commonwealth University
The history of Buddhisms in the U.S. may seem a well-trodden area of study, but until Duncan Ryūken Williams’ American Sutra, much of the history of Buddhism during the period of the internment of Japanese Americans has remained obscure (for a series of reasons). This monograph shows that American Buddhism has been generated from displacement, migration, re-envisioning, and adaptation. The book draws from a remarkable amount of archival and primary source material, packing it into an accessible narrative of how issei and nisei (first and second generation) Buddhists of many sects transformed their religions during, and because of, the Second World War. The narrative focuses on the broad heterogeneity of Buddhists before, during, and after wartime, though it is also about ‘faith’ more broadly: Christianity/ies, Shinto, and ‘state Shinto’ are also part of the story. The book’s argument, seen in the title’s phrase ‘American Sutra’, is that this traumatic chapter of American history is about more than constitutional rights, human rights, and religious freedoms (which were, as the book shows, even more violently curtailed for those who were Buddhist or Shinto than for those who were Christian); it stands as a crucial chapter in the development of a distinctly American Buddhism. This is to say that the many primary accounts, anecdotes, quotes, poems, and songs translated and brought into the book’s narrative—these records of how issei and nisei practiced and adapted their faith before, during, and after wartime—is the sūtra. If a sūtra is a canonical scripture generally taken to be the record of the oral teachings of the Buddha, the book essentially holds forth its many primary texts as a sūtra in and of itself.
The book makes three major interventions: first, framed and guided by Williams’ interests in religion, the cataloguing and packaging of extensive primary source material into a narrative are remarkable and thorough. These accounts fill a gap that is not just scholarly, but one that partly exists because internment survivors found it very difficult to pass on their histories and experiences. Many of the book’s personal narratives have slumbered untranslated in personal archives or in desk drawers for years. The book’s major offering is therefore its thick account, the sheer amount of new information about issei and nisei religion during wartime. Second, the book strikingly reveals how Buddhist and Shinto practitioners of many differing sects were perceived as ‘more’, or irreversibly, and innately, ‘Japanese’. As religion became a racialized marker of foreignness and disloyalty, Christian Japanese Americans were perceived as assimilable, closer to whiteness—and were provided many more resources before, during, and after the war, including income while they were interned. This is therefore a crucial chapter in scholars’ and readers’ ongoing understanding of race in the U.S.; the book shows how one might understand the period’s human rights violations at an intersection of race, religion, and culture and as stemming from more than just a targeting of people of Japanese heritage. It therefore demonstrates that much of the ‘Americanness’ of American Buddhism must be traced back to this series of events.
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About the Author: Sara Laws is a scholar of poetry. She earned her Ph.D. in English at the University of Oklahoma and has authored articles in Criticism, in the book collection Poet in Place and Time, and in the Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies. Laws has lectured on American poetry and American Buddhisms at Mongolia International University, Beijing Normal University, and American University. Currently, she teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University.
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
