Estudiante

Chapter 3 – Globalization and Buddhism in Chile

While the concept of globalization – the process of international amalgamation - has been around for centuries, the rapid growth of a technological globalization that has almost universally referred to the worldwide spread of economic and capitalistic tendencies through free trade and world markets was a phenomenon introduced to the world in onlythe last sixty years. Although a more rare phenomenon, globalization can be applied to cultural, social, and religious movements and interconnectivity. These religious movements in particular have what has become known as a “disjunctive flow” which not only allows for organic melding of cultures, but also for the imagination of a people “to consider migration, resist social violence, seek socialredress, and design new forms of civic association and collaboration, often across national boundaries.”
The specific movement of Buddhism, both through exile by Chinese communists in the 1950s and the modern-day voluntary spread of Buddhist ideology represent this reformation of the imagination. Considering the variety of definitions for globalization, it is imperative to distinguish betweenthem as to which is represented through separate fields of study because of the vast difference in meanings; while economic globalization presents the idea of free market trade and technological advancements as well as political ones such as those of Jürgen Habermas which are presented later in this essay, globalization of religion proposes the transnational intermingling of religious ideologies andcultures as a means to create diversity. For this particular analysis, I propose globalization in the same way as Anthony McGrew, stating, “Goods, capital, knowledge, images, communications, crime, culture, pollutants, drugs, fashions, and beliefs all readily flow across territorial boundaries.” This definition allows the beneficial aspects of globalization to surface through the concept offaiths as shapers of globalization, while concurrently addressing the critiques of religious globalization including fundamental views and appropriation. My first goal in this chapter is to propose how the transnational movement of religious philosophies, or faiths, demonstrates the strong and positive cultural diversification within the broader theoretical framework of globalization in modernitythrough Buddhism. My second is to analyze both the appropriated and authentic versions of Buddhism I explored in Chile as representations of the reality of global flows.
Transnational Religious Connections
In order to direct a more specific focus toward Buddhism’s migration to the Western world – the Western world, in this context, meaning literally any place west of Japan and where other forms ofBuddhism may have originated, including Latin America - globalization of religion must be further explained to provide a context within which the spread of religions – Buddhism – can make sense beneficially, through the human-to-human compassion and communication it creates, as well as geographically. Transnationalization of religious ideologies has been written into histories for centuries throughthe diasporic movements of groups of peoples. These movements, often unintentionally, helped begin the spread of beliefs of various collective peoples. Diasporas were the first historically recognized movement of ideologies from one nation-state to another; it was from there that religious globalization began through technological advancements including the opportunity for missionary work.Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, first expanded throughout Asia through exile of the Dalai Lama, which will be more profoundly discussed later in this essay, but then slowly expanded through the Dalai Lama’s, and followers, missionizing goal of creating awareness of Tibet’s desire for independence and simultaneously encouraging global compassion and peace. Diasporic movements are important to the...