a comment on an older post - but in view of the direction your posts have taken recently - with more discussion of science, and of anti-traditional religion, scientific-materialist thinkers like Stephen Batchelor and Richard Dawkins, what I would suggest is that what Buddhism is doing in the West is hybridising with secular scientific materialism (SSM) as a belief system (although there are of course the Buddhist Christians, Buddhist Jews etc, particularly in the US, by whom I must confess I'm slightly confused - it often seems to me that this is more like Christianity or Judaism + Buddhist meditation methods, given that otherwise one needs to accept a deity as unsatisfactory and impermanent).
It's hard for us Westerners to see this as a similar process to its previous hybridisations because we don't see SSM as a religion, just as truth or the way things are - which is in fact, I would suggest, how hegemonic religions have mostly been understood by believers - it becomes very difficult to 'think outside' of them, so to speak, and because many aspects of them 'work' in a functional sense then the system within which that functionality occurs is paradigmatically unchallengeable.
I've had this experience discussing Buddhism with people coming from this perspective - it's very hard for them to see that our present-day individualist rationalism - the perspective that one is an individual making relatively objective and pesonal choices based on knowledge and evidence which is evaluated from a neutral standpoint - is completely historically determined (ironically, one position with which it can be strongly associated is Protestantism) and based on various contingent ideologies specific to our era and our society.
But it will be interesting to see what this hybridisation produces - one thing which seems to have started to occur as a result, a result which hasn't really been the case in any other such meeting, is a largescale (though by no means universal) rejection of monasticism as a central aspect of the Buddhist path.
To my mind, while lay access to instruction beyond merit accumulation for a better rebirth is both a wonderful thing and in line with the Buddha's own teachings, at the same time the secularisation of Buddhism is dangerous because, on the one hand, it makes it very easy for it to be devoured by capitalism and sold back to us as self-help - and on the other, because of the unquestioned quality of a priori SSM belief: for example, for someone like Stephen Batchelor, it seems that Buddhism is subsidiary to SSM, given that whenever the two belief-systems are in conflict he automatically preferences the latter (and I find this leads to some odd but telling conclusions, like his argument that an 'agnostic Buddhist' would [should] seek knowledge about questions in their appropriate domains: 'astrophysics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, etc').
I agree that the intellectual milieu in the Western World is not religious, though I don't reduce it to secular scientific materialism - the social 'sciences' are extremely hostile to materialism. Many people, myself included, argue that the core of the early Buddhist teachings aren't religious either. It's clear that the Buddha was not teaching a belief system - though one evolved. It's clear that he avoided ontological and epistemological debates - which means he wasn't a philosopher either! I think religion was far from the Buddha's mind. So one has to ask, why it is so close to ours?
I agree that we have some way to go before drawing together a coherent picture - Buddhists seem to mishandle scientific metaphors quite badly and are mostly fixated with the apparent fluidity of quantum theory, which is IMHO entirely irrelevant. We have yet to grasp the significance of social psychology (almost no one I know has read any social psychology, whereas everyone has read Jung and Freud). We do need to identify the conditioning - Protestant, Romantic, Idealist, etc - and vigorously criticise it. Materialism also needs to be criticised, though of course criticism of materialism is bitter in the Western traditional already!
The commodification of religion has usually been organised by the priests. In a sense Buddhism has long been sold to lay people - in many times and places for cold hard cash. And in any case the sell-off in the West started in the 1830s.
Monks still wish to sell us their services. I don't think we should reject monasticism, only deference. Monasticism is essential, but it is just a lifestyle - a bald head and a dress do not make you special. So let the monks bow to the people in gratitude for the support they get, abandon their high seats, their ridiculous titles, their politics, and get on with meditation. We do absolutely need people doing intense practice!
Science also has a priest/lay divide which can be perilous. I think we are generally very poorly served by science journalism for instance. Many scientists are very poor communicators and not interested in the human aspect of their profession.
In the long run empirical realism is the most successful belief system in the world - it made the internet! It is organising the revolution in Egypt as I write - even though an Islamist government may result! The genie is out of the bottle. Any system of thought which does not come to terms with it will be washed away by the tide. And good riddance, because superstition has been an awful burden on us. But then again we need to be sure that we keep asking the question: "how should we live?" And "what is our potential?"
There is a real danger because we Buddhists are ironically so conservative, so frightened of change, that we will be left behind. Why do Buddhists resist change?!! Our ideas are already being commodified and sold, and not by scientists but by people like Ekchart Tolle and Deepak Chopra; and by people like John Kabat Zin (who is a scientist I suppose). Each of them is already more popular and more successful than any Buddhist teacher (with the possible exception of the Dalai Lama). Time may be running out for us!
I hear your concerns, but I'm not deterred from pursuing the revolution. Thomas Metzinger has reawakened my lifelong passion for science, and now it seems to work with my Buddhism rather than against it. I think Metzinger has some useful discussions about materialism and reductionism.
I take your point that there are various academics and disciplines which have called scientific certainty into question, but I don't think any of them are highly influential in society and indeed, particularly when coming from the humanities, are mostly derided as being ivory tower intellectuals disconnected from lived reality (that is, ultimately, from naive realism).
As someone who comes out of the humanities but has done a fair amount of work with social psychology - particularly Stanley Milgram, Philip Zimbardo, etc, I certainly think there is a lot to offer here. One important factor is that we are far less autonomous individuals than we think (again, this is a conceit of modernity) which to me resonates with the fact that the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and hence the choices that we make, are largely determined by historical and structural contexts - that is, by kamma - and that acting against this predetermination is thus extremely difficult (although, as the Buddha frequently pointed out, the flipside of this is the efficacy of virtuous cycles).
While it certainly has been the case in the past that a priesthood has been the institution through which religion has been commodified - often extremely egregiously - I would say that in the present moment we might want to differentiate between the traditional Buddhist countries, where this is certainly a problem (and which of course also now operate within the capitalist world-system), and the West, where the conditions of the market and the subsumption of marketing of rebellion against it have deeper foundations - as in the transformation of 60s & 70s radicalism into the apolitical and materialistic self-help movement of the present era (from the new age and business market, to The Secret). And while I wouldn't consider myself a scientific realist, I do think that the debunking of the figures that you mention above is necessary!
Given that this was the medium through which the Dhamma began to make more broad inroads into Western culture I think it's a tendency that needs to be watched - I don't want to give specific examples but any mainstream US venues, like Tricycle or Buddhist Geeks, will give various fairly obvious cases of this.
I think this is also why monasticism hasn't thus far taken off in the West - because it is a lifestyle so opposed to consumer materialism and our notions of how desire is to be satisfied, whether conventional (through material consumption within existing social structures) or radical (through the redistribution of material goods). But we're in early days as yet! (cont. below)
(...cont) What concerns me, is a subsidiary incorporation of Buddhism into secular scientific materialism (I know this terminology is difficult, and you've written about that difficulty, but I hope you know what I mean), in such a way that 'Buddhism' in the West essentially becomes solely a practice of meditation, with every other concern, activity and belief directed by a materialistic viewpoint which is ultimately considered a higher arbitrator, and hence the ultimate view to be clung to where conversely clinging over traditional Buddhist teachings is rejected (this would be the converse to mushy consumerist smorgasbord new age-ism). I think this would be far from what the Buddha taught and also might lead to disappointment on the part of those practicing it!
And while I still consider myself an atheist inasmuch as I don't believe in a supreme or creator god, I don't think the strident 'new atheists' like Dawkins and Hitchens are doing their own causes any favours - their belligerence, generalisations and smug certainty in their own viewpoint is a real turn-off, and doesn't give the impression of having thought deeply about the complexities of these issues before having come to a conclusion which takes them into account - rather than accepting holus-bolus a formative background ideology such as, in Dawkins' case, scientific materialism.
Of course, when it comes to Buddhism I'm very much a modernist rather than a postmodernist - some would argue that the very concept of being able to ascertain what the Buddha taught and distinguish it from other things which fall under the mantle of 'Buddhism' is both a hopeless task, and at worst a variety of typical Westernist critical imperialism!
Friday, February 04, 2011
[Image]Since the beginning Buddhism been in a constant dialogue with other religious traditions, which has been tolerant to some extent, but also critical and polemical. Buddhists have used parody, satire, re-contextulisation, as well as outright condemnation when the need arose. There is some really very biting parody of Brahmins in the Pali Canon, some very funny jokes at their expense! Sangharakshita is sometimes criticised, in a kind of weird reversal, for being critical of other Buddhists and expecially of Christians. It's as though we Buddhists have forgotten our own history and are buying into a modern myth which is telling us that all religion is ok, and not to rock the boat. However our own scriptures give the lie to that naive notion. Buddhism is and always has been quite a militant critic of unbelievers, and even of lax believers.
However Buddhism also has the interesting tactic of syncretising with indigenous beliefs. In China it bred with Taoism especially. Confucianists remained quite hostile because Buddhism appeared to deny filial piety - no family values for us! In Japan Buddhism formed an interesting syncretism with Shinto resulting in the identification of the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, with the Great Sun Buddha, Vairocana. In Tibet there was Bon and the synthesis of Buddhism and Bon has been a very dynamic hybrid indeed. However in India there were a number of major faiths with which Buddhism interacted and syncretised. Firstly there was the Vedic religion which gave us such concepts as Brahma Vihara, and Going for Refuge. More crucially there was the later interaction with Puranic Hinduism - and especially with the worship of Siva. Siva had gone through a long process of being absorbed into mainstream Indian faith through being identified with the Vedic Rudra. This was a bit of a stretch to be honest, but the Brahmins were very good at this sort of thing, offering to make the preists of competing cults into honorary Brahmins for instance. In the Mahayana Karandavyuha Sutra we see Siva being gently converted into a Buddhist, just as Brahma and Indra were in the Pali Texts. But in the Sarvatathagata-tattvasamgraha Tantra the action has been stepped up a notch. This time Siva refuses to submit, and Vajrapani kills him and tramples on his body (which is what we see in the depictions of Vajrapani). He brings him back to life however and converts him to Buddhism - both the killing and ressurection are accomplished with mantras.
But here's something interesting: I was searching around for a pic of Vajrapani doing a two-step on old Siva and his wife, and it took some time. In a lot of images they are left out and Vajrapani is just dancing around on his own - which doesn't make a lot of sense and ignores the context for him being wrathful and stomping in the first place. An important function of Vajrapani was (right back in the Pali texts) and is (in the Tantras) the thumping of people who fail to pay homage to the Buddha. Has Vajrapani been sanitised for public consumption I wonder?
We will probably never see a depiction Jesus being trampled by Vajrapani the way that Siva is because, at the time and place the Vajrayana was emerging, Siva worship was the prevailing religion, and it was a vigorous living force and a threat to Buddhism. Christianity has been in a slow decline for centuries now, and although western culture is nominally Christian, the evidence is that it is dying. The Pope (take your pick) will occasionally say something along the lines that although Buddhism has some good points it really is a failure because it is humanist, but it's like being savaged by rabbit. And the Dalai Lama is also titled His Holiness these days. In any case Christianity is fighting on many fronts. With militant Islam constantly in the news, basic Christian values being undermined, not to mention in-fighting and schism over the status of women and homosexuals; the Christian clergy really don't see Buddhism as a problem - we smile a lot and so they think we're harmless. Tee hee.
I don't see much on offer from theology generally which which to syncretise in the West. Philosophy does seem to have some promise, but I'm not well versed enough to know how things might mix and match. I think the '-ology' which provides the richest pickings for a syncretism in the west is not theology, but psychology - especially depth psychology which had its beginnings with Carl Jung, and which sees psychology as a manifestation of archetypes of a deeper layer of reality. It is said that Jung was strongly influenced by Eastern religion, and by Tibetan Buddhism in particular. So perhaps the syncretism has already begun. Perhaps we will see Freud and Jung being trampled by Vajrapani sometime soon in a Tantra near you. Now that might be interesting.
4 Comments
Close this window Jump to comment formHi Jayarava,
a comment on an older post - but in view of the direction your posts have taken recently - with more discussion of science, and of anti-traditional religion, scientific-materialist thinkers like Stephen Batchelor and Richard Dawkins, what I would suggest is that what Buddhism is doing in the West is hybridising with secular scientific materialism (SSM) as a belief system (although there are of course the Buddhist Christians, Buddhist Jews etc, particularly in the US, by whom I must confess I'm slightly confused - it often seems to me that this is more like Christianity or Judaism + Buddhist meditation methods, given that otherwise one needs to accept a deity as unsatisfactory and impermanent).
It's hard for us Westerners to see this as a similar process to its previous hybridisations because we don't see SSM as a religion, just as truth or the way things are - which is in fact, I would suggest, how hegemonic religions have mostly been understood by believers - it becomes very difficult to 'think outside' of them, so to speak, and because many aspects of them 'work' in a functional sense then the system within which that functionality occurs is paradigmatically unchallengeable.
I've had this experience discussing Buddhism with people coming from this perspective - it's very hard for them to see that our present-day individualist rationalism - the perspective that one is an individual making relatively objective and pesonal choices based on knowledge and evidence which is evaluated from a neutral standpoint - is completely historically determined (ironically, one position with which it can be strongly associated is Protestantism) and based on various contingent ideologies specific to our era and our society.
But it will be interesting to see what this hybridisation produces - one thing which seems to have started to occur as a result, a result which hasn't really been the case in any other such meeting, is a largescale (though by no means universal) rejection of monasticism as a central aspect of the Buddhist path.
To my mind, while lay access to instruction beyond merit accumulation for a better rebirth is both a wonderful thing and in line with the Buddha's own teachings, at the same time the secularisation of Buddhism is dangerous because, on the one hand, it makes it very easy for it to be devoured by capitalism and sold back to us as self-help - and on the other, because of the unquestioned quality of a priori SSM belief: for example, for someone like Stephen Batchelor, it seems that Buddhism is subsidiary to SSM, given that whenever the two belief-systems are in conflict he automatically preferences the latter (and I find this leads to some odd but telling conclusions, like his argument that an 'agnostic Buddhist' would [should] seek knowledge about questions in their appropriate domains: 'astrophysics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, etc').
With metta - Rowan.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Hi Rowan
I agree that the intellectual milieu in the Western World is not religious, though I don't reduce it to secular scientific materialism - the social 'sciences' are extremely hostile to materialism. Many people, myself included, argue that the core of the early Buddhist teachings aren't religious either. It's clear that the Buddha was not teaching a belief system - though one evolved. It's clear that he avoided ontological and epistemological debates - which means he wasn't a philosopher either! I think religion was far from the Buddha's mind. So one has to ask, why it is so close to ours?
I agree that we have some way to go before drawing together a coherent picture - Buddhists seem to mishandle scientific metaphors quite badly and are mostly fixated with the apparent fluidity of quantum theory, which is IMHO entirely irrelevant. We have yet to grasp the significance of social psychology (almost no one I know has read any social psychology, whereas everyone has read Jung and Freud). We do need to identify the conditioning - Protestant, Romantic, Idealist, etc - and vigorously criticise it. Materialism also needs to be criticised, though of course criticism of materialism is bitter in the Western traditional already!
The commodification of religion has usually been organised by the priests. In a sense Buddhism has long been sold to lay people - in many times and places for cold hard cash. And in any case the sell-off in the West started in the 1830s.
Monks still wish to sell us their services. I don't think we should reject monasticism, only deference. Monasticism is essential, but it is just a lifestyle - a bald head and a dress do not make you special. So let the monks bow to the people in gratitude for the support they get, abandon their high seats, their ridiculous titles, their politics, and get on with meditation. We do absolutely need people doing intense practice!
Science also has a priest/lay divide which can be perilous. I think we are generally very poorly served by science journalism for instance. Many scientists are very poor communicators and not interested in the human aspect of their profession.
In the long run empirical realism is the most successful belief system in the world - it made the internet! It is organising the revolution in Egypt as I write - even though an Islamist government may result! The genie is out of the bottle. Any system of thought which does not come to terms with it will be washed away by the tide. And good riddance, because superstition has been an awful burden on us. But then again we need to be sure that we keep asking the question: "how should we live?" And "what is our potential?"
There is a real danger because we Buddhists are ironically so conservative, so frightened of change, that we will be left behind. Why do Buddhists resist change?!! Our ideas are already being commodified and sold, and not by scientists but by people like Ekchart Tolle and Deepak Chopra; and by people like John Kabat Zin (who is a scientist I suppose). Each of them is already more popular and more successful than any Buddhist teacher (with the possible exception of the Dalai Lama). Time may be running out for us!
I hear your concerns, but I'm not deterred from pursuing the revolution. Thomas Metzinger has reawakened my lifelong passion for science, and now it seems to work with my Buddhism rather than against it. I think Metzinger has some useful discussions about materialism and reductionism.
What is there to hang on to?
Monday, January 31, 2011
Hi Jayarava,
I take your point that there are various academics and disciplines which have called scientific certainty into question, but I don't think any of them are highly influential in society and indeed, particularly when coming from the humanities, are mostly derided as being ivory tower intellectuals disconnected from lived reality (that is, ultimately, from naive realism).
As someone who comes out of the humanities but has done a fair amount of work with social psychology - particularly Stanley Milgram, Philip Zimbardo, etc, I certainly think there is a lot to offer here. One important factor is that we are far less autonomous individuals than we think (again, this is a conceit of modernity) which to me resonates with the fact that the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and hence the choices that we make, are largely determined by historical and structural contexts - that is, by kamma - and that acting against this predetermination is thus extremely difficult (although, as the Buddha frequently pointed out, the flipside of this is the efficacy of virtuous cycles).
While it certainly has been the case in the past that a priesthood has been the institution through which religion has been commodified - often extremely egregiously - I would say that in the present moment we might want to differentiate between the traditional Buddhist countries, where this is certainly a problem (and which of course also now operate within the capitalist world-system), and the West, where the conditions of the market and the subsumption of marketing of rebellion against it have deeper foundations - as in the transformation of 60s & 70s radicalism into the apolitical and materialistic self-help movement of the present era (from the new age and business market, to The Secret). And while I wouldn't consider myself a scientific realist, I do think that the debunking of the figures that you mention above is necessary!
Given that this was the medium through which the Dhamma began to make more broad inroads into Western culture I think it's a tendency that needs to be watched - I don't want to give specific examples but any mainstream US venues, like Tricycle or Buddhist Geeks, will give various fairly obvious cases of this.
I think this is also why monasticism hasn't thus far taken off in the West - because it is a lifestyle so opposed to consumer materialism and our notions of how desire is to be satisfied, whether conventional (through material consumption within existing social structures) or radical (through the redistribution of material goods). But we're in early days as yet! (cont. below)
Friday, February 04, 2011
(...cont) What concerns me, is a subsidiary incorporation of Buddhism into secular scientific materialism (I know this terminology is difficult, and you've written about that difficulty, but I hope you know what I mean), in such a way that 'Buddhism' in the West essentially becomes solely a practice of meditation, with every other concern, activity and belief directed by a materialistic viewpoint which is ultimately considered a higher arbitrator, and hence the ultimate view to be clung to where conversely clinging over traditional Buddhist teachings is rejected (this would be the converse to mushy consumerist smorgasbord new age-ism). I think this would be far from what the Buddha taught and also might lead to disappointment on the part of those practicing it!
And while I still consider myself an atheist inasmuch as I don't believe in a supreme or creator god, I don't think the strident 'new atheists' like Dawkins and Hitchens are doing their own causes any favours - their belligerence, generalisations and smug certainty in their own viewpoint is a real turn-off, and doesn't give the impression of having thought deeply about the complexities of these issues before having come to a conclusion which takes them into account - rather than accepting holus-bolus a formative background ideology such as, in Dawkins' case, scientific materialism.
Of course, when it comes to Buddhism I'm very much a modernist rather than a postmodernist - some would argue that the very concept of being able to ascertain what the Buddha taught and distinguish it from other things which fall under the mantle of 'Buddhism' is both a hopeless task, and at worst a variety of typical Westernist critical imperialism!
Friday, February 04, 2011