Caught Between Worlds: An Ethnography of Western Tibetan Buddhists in Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The development of Buddhism in the West as a vital and viable religious path is currently in process. Buddhism has become increasingly visible in mainstream popular culture, and multiple images and conceptions of Buddhism and Buddhists are relatively common. As Buddhism becomes more personally, philosophically, and spiritually relevant to an increasing number of Westerners, to ask the question, "Who are Buddhists?" in the West elicits responses that may be complex, nuanced, and even contradictory. This research explores the ambiguities and the assumptions surrounding popular and scholastic understandings of "Western Buddhists" in Canada. Focusing on narrative accounts of men and women practising Tibetan Buddhism in Toronto, this thesis will examine the reasons and motivations underlying the contemporary interest in Buddhism. Further, I argue that these reasons and motivations are themselves influenced and shaped by the representation of Buddhism in the West as a textually based, genderless, and timeless tradition. I propose that within any response to the question "Who are Buddhists?" is a matrix of meaning, underpinned by a number of dualities in dynamic tensions between male and female, monastic and lay, the individual and the communal, doctrine and social reality, religion and spirituality, and Buddhist and non-Buddhist. My research will help explicate the emergence of new religious ideas in Canada, and will contribute to the understanding of an emerging "Western" form of Buddhism as the tradition struggles to become increasingly active in Western socio-cultural contexts. This thesis is one of the first ethnographic accounts of the everyday relgious lives of "Western Buddhists" in which participants have an active voice in the research process. It is also one of the few accounts of Buddhism in the West to come out of Canada, and could provide the basis for more nuanced investigations of the emergence of a "Western Buddhism" in general.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".