This event is sponsored by the RHNHFF BCS Program, with generous support of the Department of Asian Studies UBC.
This keynote is part of the academic Conference, Buddhism and The Cold War
We are delighted to host this hybrid lecture entitled:
Shaken, Not Stirred: Richard Gard, the CIA, and the Invention of Cold War Buddhism
About this Event
This talk examines how the CIA-backed Asia Foundation sought to “modernize” Buddhist monastic education to support Cold War liberalism and Free World development. It focuses a failed attempt by the Asia Foundation to implement monastic curricula invented by Richard A. Gard, the Foundation’s founding Buddhism consultant, at Mahamakut Buddhist University in Thailand as a window into larger American efforts to instrumentalize Buddhism during the Cold War as a tool for development, diplomacy, and ideological containment.
This talk explores a failed attempt by a covert CIA front organization—the Asia Foundation—to re-shape Buddhist monastic education in Southeast Asia to align with Cold War modernization ideology and the moral ideals of the U.S.-led Free World. From 1951 to 1967, the Asia Foundation funded dozens of Asia-based programs that reimagined Buddhist institutions as stabilizing forces within U.S.-aligned nation-building. The Foundation’s new-and-improved monastic curricula presented to the Mahamakut Buddhist University in Thailand in 1956-57, epitomizes larger American efforts to instrumentalize Buddhism as a tool for development, diplomacy, and ideological containment.
The Asia Foundation’s first full-time Buddhism consultant and the architect of their Buddhist programming, including their monastic curriculum, was Richard A. Gard (1914–2007). Gard’s authority to define “modern” Buddhism emerged from a distinctly Cold War cocktail of U.S. Army language training, a personal relationship with D.T. Suzuki, wartime Orientalist study, Rockefeller-funded graduate research, and a dissertation on Madhyamaka metaphysics, shaken together with Asian visions of Pan-Buddhist solidarity and modernization. Working alongside Buddhist reformers who were themselves advancing ambitious postcolonial religious projects, Gard sought to inflect these efforts with liberal internationalist ideals and Free World strategic priorities, subtly steering them toward Cold War ideological ends.
The Mahamakut experiment ultimately failed—not because of doctrinal resistance, but due to the American inability to navigate the university’s internal hierarchies and institutional politics. Gard’s career reveals how Buddhist Studies was not merely an academic field in formation, but a Cold War project of religious translation, pedagogical engineering, and strategic overreach.
About the Speaker
Her current book project, Cold War Karma: The Making of Buddhism in Cold War America, investigates how Buddhism became entangled in U.S. geopolitical strategy through the activities of the Asia Foundation, a cultural diplomacy organization that operated as a front for the CIA during the early Cold War. Supported by a research grant from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, the project examines how the Asia Foundation’s Buddhist programming sought to shape religious networks, educational reform, and postcolonial alignments in Asia under the banner of the Free World.
