An American Buddhist Life: Memoirs of a Modern Dharma Pioneer, by Charles S. Prebish.

An American Buddhist Life: Memoirs of a Modern Dharma Pioneer. By Charles S. Prebish. Richmond Hill, ON: Sumeru Press, 2011, 266 pages, ISBN 978-1-896559-09-4 (paperback) $24.95 US/CAN, euro17.50 EUR.In the "Member Spotlight" for February 2012 at the American Academy of Religion's website, Charles S. Prebish notes that, as scholars, "our professional and personal lives are interdependent, and that collectively we can make Buddhist Studies and Religious Studies even more remarkable avenues of inquiry than they already are" (American Academy of Religion, 2012). With this statement, he seemingly hearkens back to issues raised in his book Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America: in his discussion there of the "scholar-practitioner" (a now-common term that he himself coined) in the field of Buddhist Studies, Prebish weighs the pros and cons of the critically distant scholar, the fully fledged practitioner, and the blended scholar-practitioner. In that book, he cites Luis Gomez, who wrote, crucially, that, regardless of their possible status as practitioners, "Buddhism is an object that makes claims on" the lives of scholars in the field of Buddhist Studies (Prebish, 1999: 182-30. Buddhism has clearly made claims on Prebish's life, and, according to the telling in his remarkable new book, on the lives of many of his mentors and colleagues. For these reasons, it is no surprise that the now-retired Prebish looks to the future with hopes that the new young generation of scholars will emulate "a [previous] generation of wonderful scholars... who were not only brilliant, but also remarkably kind and compassionate" (American Academy of Religion, 2012).Prebish offers a roadmap toward this sort of idealized teaching and scholarship in the form of a memoir. In addition to its possibilities in terms of enriching our qualitative experience of the field itself, he points out in the "Membership Spotlight" that more autobiographical work by scholars themselves might also aid in the historiography of Buddhist Studies by providing "great historical insight into the developing North American School of Buddhist Studies." Indeed, An American Buddhist Life demonstrates how this type of writing can bring exciting new dimensions to our understanding of the development of Buddhist Studies in North America, and also inspire up-and-coming young scholars.This is without question a life and a career that are uniquely rich fodder for memoir. Indeed, Prebish hardly requires an introduction: it was he who firmly established the study of Buddhism in North America as a sub-discipline within academic Buddhist Studies. Now retired as the Charles Redd Chair of Religious Studies at Utah State University (and before that a professor for thirty-five years at Pennsylvania State University), he is the author and/or editor of more than twenty books, as well as the co-founder of this journal as well as The Journal of Buddhist Ethics, the Buddhism Section of the American Academy of Religion, and Routledge's "Critical Studies in Buddhism" series. He was also honored with the festschriftBuddhist Studies from India to America: Essays in Honor of Charles S. Prebish in 2005, which acknowledges the field's debt to him for all of his myriad efforts on its behalf.Honestly (even, at times, surprisingly so) and engagingly written, An American Buddhist Life succeeds brilliantly at pioneering memoir as an absolutely essential area for development in Buddhist Studies: with his own earnest stab at it, Prebish effectively conveys by example why it is that we need to see more contributions of this sort from Buddhist scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners. Organized across nine chapters that represent momentous points in his career-sometimes geographic career shifts, other times academic legacies, and also periods and issues of more personal importance-the book "makes history come alive" with the author's reflections on the extraordinary figures (everyone from his mentor Richard H. …