Zen og kunsten at spejlvende orientalisme

Resumé

This article intends to put into perspective the critique on Orientalism raised by Edward Said with a case story (beyond Said's Orient) exemplifying how the Orientalist discourse has been inverted, serving as a means of religious and cultural identification. Focusing on the religious environment around the Japanese interpreter and poluparizer of Zen Buddhism., D. T. Suzuki, it is argued that a genealogical network of interrelated persons and a reciprocal exchange of ideas and representations, placed within certain historical contexts, made it possible for him to systematically invert those Orientalist ideas, turning them into new East-West dichotomies. It is argued that neither Suzuki-zen nor Orientalism nor inverted Orientalism must be ignored but recognized and contextualized in order to reconstruct Buddhist studies as a natural and important field within the comparative study of religion.