In Search of a Generative Problem Space for Buddhist Studies

While the Buddhism in the West Unit of the AAR may at this juncture be tempted to re-brand as a Global Buddhism(s) Unit, fittingly inspired by the capacious intellectual space created by the esteemed *Journal of Global Buddhism*, there is a risk of glossing over important fault lines and subsuming our usual “problem space” (to borrow from the anthropologist David Scott) into the same framework, simply enlarged. There are indeed dynamic delineations in the Buddhist world that are worth thinking through, such as majority/minority religion and caste/casteless/subaltern Buddhism, all of which intersect in creative ways with socio-economic status, issues of inter-generational transmission or lack thereof, and, of course, geographical contexts saturated with history. Building on prior scholarship, I draw out the distinctively subaltern modernism of Black Buddhists in the U.S. and the U.K., and suggest that India is in fact the site of a paradoxical “Wild West” of contemporary Buddhism.