Books: The Pagoda & Politics

THE NEW FACE OF BUDDHA by Jerrold Schecter. 300 pages. Coward-Mc-Cann. $6.95.

Some 2,500 years after the death of its founder, Siddhartha Gautama, Asian Buddhism has come to life in ways that puzzle and often confound Westerners. Gautama taught the denial of self, a reverence for life and a search for the Middle Way to noninvolvement. Yet his modern disciples are everywhere involved in the turmoil of their times. In Ceylon, a Buddhist monk assassinated one Prime Minister, and Buddhist ward politicians turned another out of office. In Viet Nam, the grisly silhouette of a Buddhist toppling in flames of protest has symbolized the Buddhists' own private wars against one Saigon government after another.

Buddha's new look is that of a politician. This book, which grew out of a TIME cover story (Dec. 11, 1964), is by Tokyo Bureau Chief Jerrold Schecter, 34, who did much of the research for the story. It is the first comprehensive, country-by-country attempt to unravel the passions and contradictions of Buddhism in the political arena.

Headed Off at the Pass. If in Japan, Ceylon and Viet Nam the Buddhists are on the march, in Communist China and Burma they have been headed off at the pass. Peking has assiduously emasculated Buddhism in China, emptying it of its religious content while retaining its temples as shrines to the "cultural creativity of the Chinese people under the feudal empires of the past." General Ne Win of Burma has used arrest and intimidation to undercut the young monks who crave political power, at the same time borrowing Buddhist principles to shape his "Burmese Way to Socialism."

Buddhism in Viet Nam is accorded Schecter's closest scrutiny and lengthiest appraisal. From the last days of President Diem, who fatally underestimated the power of the political monks, to the past year's Buddhist uprisings, which Premier Nguyen Cao Ky expertly quelled with a combination of "tenacity and guile," the book reconstructs the sorties to the barricades in Viet Nam. There, as elsewhere in Asia, the Buddhists' problem is to resolve "the conflict between tradition and transition in Asian life."

Because Buddhism has for so long been "the ultimate source of Asian values," says Schecter, it was inevitable that the pressures of colonialism and modernization would stretch the faith into new shapes. One of the strangest shapes may some day emerge from the confrontation between Buddhism and science; the Vietnamese Buddhists hope eventually to create a Buddhist university whose curriculum would include engineering, mathematics and medicine, but today that prospect seems close to fantasy. At present, Buddhism is less concerned with adopting Western ways than with providing a kind of "cultural defense" against them. Part of that defense rests on an identification with the forces of Asian nationalism.