Abstract
Traditionally in Religious Studies courses, origin stories were the starting point for introducing students to the variety of religious traditions. Part and parcel of such stories are discussions revolving around founders. Central to these ongoing discussions are questions on who founded a specific set of beliefs and practices that one now defines as a religious tradition. Yet, as many of us who teach the various “Introduction to World Religions” courses know, the contested nature of origins and founders does not paint a black and white picture that many students first expect when taking these classes. Patrick Gray’s edited volume Varieties of Religious Invention: Founders and Their Functions in History (2016) unravels the problematic nature of founders in origin narratives that are so often espoused and taken for granted in Religious Studies. His work displays the complicated, contested and constructed nature of the very traditions themselves and assumptions around the archetypal categories of religion. Often this means addressing aspects of authority, including the role of scholars in the constructive process of legitimizing specific claims and narratives.
In the opening chapter Gray offers multiple questions that drive the book, including: Who is considered a founder and how are such claims argued? To whom do these debates matter and when are such debates intensified? Does the founder also embody the “essence” of a religion? How do arguments regarding founders represent broader questions in society? Via the lens of a putative founder, what can be learned about a particular religion or the category of religion? Gray recognizes there is a need for more volumes to address these questions in full, though the authors do a thorough job of bringing forth approaches to the study of founders in each of the case studies.
The authors do not look to solve all the questions or problems that arise. Instead they put the debates about these issues into a conversation to elicit how much of the claims and narratives is constructed on the very debates themselves. Particularly, the very choice of case studies on Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism shows a direction taken by the authors that tackles the constructed World Religions paradigm that pervades Religious Studies.
Mark Leuchter opens his chapter by analyzing the complicated founder narratives in Judaism that are “regularly taught according to the terms of its own mythology, or what some might call the ‘classic’ myth of Judaism” (15). Rather than state which narratives are “correct,” Leuchter points out that even if the patriarchs are constructed, these founders function in symbolic narratives to create cohesive identities for a Jewish people. This includes a discussion on how narrative structures can legitimate an authority via a historical claim of authenticity. While Leuchter examines the historical claims surrounding the patriarchs and who might be a founder, in the end it is about how the claim of the founder functions for a community and for whom.
In contrast Nathan McGovern’s chapter on the Buddha examines not how scholars teach Buddhism based on its own mythology, but rather how Western scholars constructed a historical narrative of the Buddha that differs from the traditional approaches to these narratives by insiders. McGovern describes how “a modern historical approach to the Buddha was driven by a set of idiosyncratic assumptions derived from the particular history of religion in the West” (59). In large part, McGovern speaks to the role of the scholar’s involvement in the construction of the traditions and how the categorical nature of the World Religion paradigm is driven by a specific set of ideologies.
In another fashion Liang Cai, in discussing Confucius (and thus Ru), explores how a founder is reconfigured in a manner designed to meet a society’s political and ideological needs. The image of the founder is not solely a description of a founder (such as Confucius) or the tradition (such as Ru or Confucianism), rather it is a lens that can display how people address the social concerns of their times (81). This is a point that continues through the book, for it is the debates themselves that tell us more about the institutional and historical contexts in which they develop, rather than about a historical or mythical founder.
Mark W. Muesse’s chapter “Crossing Boundaries: When Founders of Faith Appear in Other Traditions” takes a slightly different route. As the title makes clear, Muesse examines the function of religious innovators and reformers for those who are usually categorized outside their tradition. Building on the previous chapters, Muesse displays the spectrum of boundaries that divides insiders and outsiders. Within this spectrum one finds “founders” that work outside what is viewed as their central tradition, in oppositional, harmonious, and indifferent manners.
Overall the book explores and deconstructs the taken for granted narratives that are often deployed in the construction of the World Religion categories themselves. Each chapter, acting as a case study, further offers an approach to how these very categories have been constructed and how insiders and outsiders (including scholars) are part of the constructive process. Prevailing throughout the book are persistent themes of legitimation, authority, authenticity, essentialism, and scholarly construction. In the very question of “who is the founder,” the volume illuminates that it is not necessarily the role of the scholar to answer this question. Rather, in examining who decides and what is at stake in the very naming process of a founder one finds the intersection of a set of power relations.