Buddhist Meditation as Strategic Embodiment: An Optative Reflection
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Chapter 15 seriously scrutinizes the relationship of Buddhism, “one of America’s racialized other religious darlings,” to Asian American studies, which has yet to consistently recognize religion as a legitimate site upon which to map race, gender, and sexuality. Suh argues that “the common Buddhist units of measure and authenticity” —for instance, Orientalized monks and Eastern meditation— “are uncritically reproduced in larger Asian American discourses that continue to overlook the non-devotional and non-meditative practices of Buddhist laity.” Suh’s essay counters those discourses by engendering a new way of seeing meditation politics as a means of ameliorating bodily alienation and internalized white supremacy.