Dissertationsprojekt Dr. Christian Koch, M.A.

Mediating Buddhism’s original contribution to the scientific investigation of Buddhism is fivefold and begins with a "simple" starting point: we do not know what the entity named "Buddhism" actually is! The application of theories by French sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour (1947– 2022), e.g. actor-network theory and modes of existence, as well as the concept of material religion on Buddhist mediators has led to the following insights:

(1) The investigation of Buddhism does not focus on religion alone, but is instead concerned with Buddhist mediators, i.e. any images, concepts, or events that refer to Buddhist aesthetics.
(2) The study of Buddhist mediators leads to an understanding of Buddhism as ontological pluralism, where multiple truths — for instance, religious, scientific, technological or ethical — are synchronously true.
(3) The study of Buddhism-as-mediators leads to the redefinition of the discipline of religious studies as mediational studies or science of mediators.
(4) Research on Buddhism has allowed us to strengthen the material religion approach into a non-foundational and solely relational quantum religion approach.
(5) Buddhism is empty, relations-only and fully mediational.

By problematizing the subject-object dichotomy, Buddhism can therefore not appear as an object that is somewhere "out there" and could therefore simply be studied and described by subjects (i.e. religious studies scholars). Buddhism is pluralistic and — since it involves transformations and fictions in art and advertising, reproductions of politics and law, as well as references within sciences — therefore not an "object" of neoliberal, consumerist users (academics as well as laymen), since these actors (humans, animals and objects) can be considered Buddhist themselves, i.e. interwoven in networks that feature Buddhist mediators. As a result, Buddhism as a religion plays of course an important part of Buddhism, albeit only a very small one, which is why Buddhism, Buddhists, people interested in Buddhism, and Buddhism researchers should be more adequately understood as Buddhist mediators within mediation processes, which in turn point to the ever-existing gap and play, which gathers Buddhist actors, things and events. This leads us to the quite Latourian claim: we have never studied (mediational) Buddhism and so let us start studying (mediational) Buddhism at last!