Ananda Abeysekara

My writing is a critical engagement with Buddhist Studies (and Religious Studies) scholarship, interrogating how its legacy of racism and white privilege informs the kinds of questions that scholars ask and do not ask as well as the types of texts they choose to engage or ignore. My current areas of research interest are Theravada Buddhism, Sri Lanka, South Asia, tradition, political sovereignty, secularism, and colonialism and postcoloniality. I am interested in the question of religion by way of thinking about the “limits” of a tradition against the backdrop of the ensemble of modern social-political life. My focus is on how the secular notions of time—connected with modern ideas of capacity, sensibility, body, etc.—remain inadequate to grasp the temporality and the form of life in a tradition, marked by a tension between moment and destiny (kairos and chronos), between what begins and what passes away, between decisive action and repetition of practice.