Sunah Chang - “Just Do It Zen”: The Kwan Um School of Zen, Orientalism, and Commodification in American Cultural Discourses
After over a decade of living in the U.S., working as a laundryman, and gaining a steady following of students, Korean-born Zen Master Seung Sahn founded the Kwan Um School of Zen in 1983. Now an international organization with over 100 physical centers dispersed across the world, the Kwan Um School has succeeded in garnering recognition and popularity, predominantly among a Western audience. This thesis explores the rise of the Kwan Um School, focusing on the ways in which Seung Sahn and his organization have become interpolated by various discourses of racialization and commodification in the U.S. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork collected from the Cambridge Zen Center (a branch of the Kwan Um School) along with media archival sources covering the organization’s rise to prominence, I situate the Kwan Um School’s public positioning within broader configurations of Zen Buddhism, meditation, and mindfulness in the U.S. Informed by postcolonial scholarship, I analyze the ways in which these representational practices both reiterate and renegotiate Orientalist discourses and consider how complex dynamics of race, cultural adaptation, and national identity manifest within narratives about Asian cultural practices in the U.S.
