The Opportunities and Perils of Postmodern Dharma
American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity
by Ann Gleig
Yale University Press, 2019 376 pages; $35
DAVID MCMAHAN CONCLUDED his influential 2008 book, The Making of Buddhist Modernism, with a question: “Is there something like a postmodern Buddhism emerging from the strains of the Buddhist modernism I have been discussing?” While the categories of modernism and postmodernism remain disputed, Ann Gleig takes up the baton in her pivotal new work, American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity, guiding readers beyond Buddhist modernism into hitherto uncharted territory.
Drawing from her ethnographic work on sanghas across the continent and the work of scholars including McMahan, Donald Lopez Jr., and Joseph Cheah, Gleig shows us an American Buddhism filled with contradictions and a growing awareness of its own internal problems, as well as
