Theoretical and Practical Reflections on Methodological Ludism: An Intra-Disciplinary Experiment in the Comparative Use of Buddhist Categories

Abstract The field of religious studies has reached a just consensus that the discipline once known as “comparative religion” was epistemically and ethically problematic. Yet, comparison remains the unacknowledged architect of the theoretical categories by which scholars delimit their more local case studies. The authors suggest scholars would perform these implicit comparisons more responsibly by externalizing and explicitly theorizing them, and that “comparative ludism” (in contrast with “liminal ludism”) provides a promising method for so doing. The authors recount an experiment in comparative ludism performed at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in which participants from non-Buddhist specialties were asked to present their research to an audience familiar with dharma, but not religion. The experiment showed that in the absence of a common subject, scholars of religion can nonetheless participate in a single conversation, one empirically and theoretically productive to all involved: a worthy goal for a post-Christian and -modern academy.