Editors' introduction to the special issue of Contemporary Buddhism on pioneer Western Buddhists and Asian Buddhist networks. Single-country approaches to the study of Buddhism miss the
crucial significance of international networks in the making of modern
Buddhism, in a period when the material basis for such networks had been
transformed.
Southeast Asia in particular acted as a dynamic crossroads in
this period enabling the emergence of a ‘global Buddhism’ not controlled by
any single sect, while India and Japan both played unexpectedly significant
roles in this crossroads. A key element of this process was the encounter
between Asian Buddhist networks and western would-be Buddhists. Those
involved, however, were often marginal - ‘creative failures’ in many cases -
whose stories enable us to think this history in a more diverse way than is
often
done. In other cases as isolated figures they could pave the way for
the ‘mainstreaming’ of new forms of Buddhism by established actors in
later decades. This article introduces the special issue of Contemporary
Buddhism entitled ‘A Buddhist crossroads: pioneer European Buddhists and
globalizing Asian networks 1860–1960’. The research described in this issue
often raises other methodological questions of representativity and
significance, while posing important challenges around collaborative research
and the use of new technologies.