Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
The lie of modern Buddhism
Songhill
Veteran
Excuse the pun on the word lie (e.g., the lie of the ball). The title is really about situation of modern Buddhism: where is it relative to modernity.
Okay, let's start with, "What is modernity (i.e., state of being modern)?"
Reading both the Pali Nikayas and the Mahayana Sutras I am always astonished by how much Buddhism is left out of modern Buddhism.
Okay, let's start with, "What is modernity (i.e., state of being modern)?"
“This modern feeling now seems to consist in the conviction that we ourselves are somehow new, that a new age is beginning, that everything is possible and nothing can ever be the same again, we want to 'make it new,' get rid of those old objects, values, mentalities, and ways of doing things, and to be somehow transfigured” (Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 310).The above sums it up nicely (I have Stephen Batchelor's book in mind, Buddhism Without Beliefs). Personally, I see the lie of modern Buddhism as an ancient Indian religion that has been remade into a new psychology to fill the needs of moderns. What has been removed from Buddhism (e.g, karma and rebirth) we deem to be alien and foreign to the needs of modernity. Moreover, what has been removed, certainly doesn't ring of progress nor does it sit well with materialism both of which are vital elements of modernity.
Reading both the Pali Nikayas and the Mahayana Sutras I am always astonished by how much Buddhism is left out of modern Buddhism.
2
Comments
I've read the instruction manual on how to ride a bike at LEAST 10,000 times, I know exactly all the parts of the bike, how fast or slow the bike can -theoretically- go... I know what other people's experiences of riding the bike sound like, and I know by heart all the famous biographies of all the bestest bike riders out there.
but it don't mean i know anything about riding bikes ^^
(a great spiritual friend told me this one day and I could not help but laugh and also want to practice more! ^^)
In modernity, Buddhism is not allowed to speak for itself. The friars of modernity have had to reformulate Buddhism lest it present something to public consciousness un-modern. We might learn, for example, that this life in not the only one we shall ever live—there are plenty more to come otherwise called samsara. We might also learn that, intrinsically, we are not this temporal body we prize so much. In fact, we are much more.
Reading both the Pali Nikayas and the Mahayana Sutras I am always astonished by how much Buddhism is left out of modern Buddhism.
Removed ? I haven't noticed these things being removed, Perhaps it is simply the take of some authors such as Steven Batchelor then again I don't know many who regard him as a good Buddhist teacher. Anyone who tampers with Buddha's teachings in such a way should be given a wide berth, Karma and Rebirth are interlinking aspects of Buddha's teachings and proponents who like to Ignore them or remove them entirely from their presentation turn the Buddha's Liberation into a form of Nihilism. There will always be Materialists who try dilute Buddha's teachings and turn them into a form of pop psychology.
Is it just Stephen Batchelor? Who are these "modern" savages?
I said "What has been removed from Buddhism (e.g, karma and rebirth)." I never used the word "dismisses." If something has been removed, it is not there to read. Right? So you can thumb through many Buddhist books and not find a serious unpacking of rebirth or karma and a number of other important Buddhist subjects. This is a problem. It helps, in a certain way, to obscure Buddhism's true mystical context (it is only through such mysticism that salvation is possible).
The ideas of rebirth are a matter of faith. No memory or experience of rebirth? Leave it for the Buddhist zealots to pontificate on. I have no faith in heaven, hell, creationism or adoption of ignorance from hallowed Buddhist myths.
The current application of meditation needs no mystical mythology. We practice. We change. It applies. Practice changes.
I know what you mean, though. Many Buddhists don't know that Buddhism includes belief in dozens of "realms", and a complex cosmology, for example.
Mysticism is just what we make it. Karma is causation and rebirth is a logical conclusion if mind follows causation but does that make it "mystical" or just the way it rolls?
There is a fine line between the mystical and the mundane and when it is made out to be bold, we lose some peoples interest.
That doesn't mean there are no challenges. The Cultural Revolution, the Vatican, Big Protestantism, certain wealthy political Parties...all feel they have something to lose to Buddhism, and have worked or are working to exact their piece of flesh. Maybe "modern" Buddhism has joined the club, or is merely a tool for those already in the club.
But genuine Buddhism, like any movement, has always faced opposition; 2500 years is a pretty hard streak to break. It seems to have remained quite true to its basic shape, imo.
All this panic about "Modern Buddhism" is just old established religion protecting their dogma, or getting scared the new guy might take some of their followers.
...Here, it is important to distinguish a very important point. Those who have tried to make Buddhism concord with Modernism have constantly harped on the point that the Buddha revolted against all rites and rituals. There are two things wrong with this view. Firstly, this is an attempt to fit the Buddha in a ‘modernist weltanschauung’ as if the Buddha’s view of the world was exactly like what came into existence in the cultures of the Western world after the 17th century due to scientific developments and the Industrial Revolution. Till about 1950, the whole of the Western culture was under the sway of Modernism. Modernism believed that only what was scientific or looked scientific was true, real, fact, un-superstitious; anything else that didn’t look scientific or similar to Physics and Chemistry was false, untrue, and superstitious. Needless to say, many Buddhist scholars and educated Buddhists of that time (especially those Buddhist monk scholars of the British colonial Ceylon) fell for this consensual hypnotic illusion and subscribed rather vociferously to this view. So anything within Buddhism that didn’t look scientific, was not analytically linear, didn’t fit the Cartesian Reductionist linear paradigm was thrown out the window and declared that the Buddha did not actually teach such a thing but rather was brought into Buddhism by latter-day decadent Buddhists.
Symbols and rites and rituals were among those most valuable psychotherapeutic elements which didn’t fit the Modernist paradigm. So they were declared as wholesale non-Buddhist; and they were actually things the Buddha himself actually taught against. However, after the Cognitive Revolution in the West in the 1950’s, Modernism has lost its stranglehold on Western cultural weltanschauung and is no longer considered as the whole and sole criteria to decide what is true and what is not. After the 1950’s, Post-Modernism began to fan out across the Western cultural horizon and Modernism gradually died out. Post-Modernism upholds the fact that the scientific view of life is only one mode of gauging reality and is by no means the whole and sole determinant of what is true or false; and there are alternate modes to experience / evaluate and interpret the world / reality etc. which are equally valid. Now, if we subscribe to these quaint ideas that the Buddha had the same view as the Modernists whose ideas began only after the 17th century and that too in the West; today we automatically make the Buddha outdated in this Post-Modernist world. It is also absurd to believe that the Buddha in the 6th century BC taught what the Modernists believed in the 17th century and refuted whatever these Modernists refuted or saw as false...
If you can tentatively accept certain aspects of Buddhism, can you tentatively reject, as opposed to reject outright, the aspects which science has only not found and not really disproven.
Karma is simply cause and effect and there would have to be empirical evidence against rebirth for it to go against science.
The Abidharma cosmology is another matter. In his book The Universe in a Single Atom, even H.H. The Dalai Lama says we should drop that one since it goes against what we know know.
There is no reason to cling to outdated dogma.
So which one, true, olde time Buddhism do I embrace? Tibetan Buddhism? Oh, wait, that has the whole Vajrayana thing and I heard that demon worship and guru devotion stuff bothers the Buddhists in other traditional schools. Tibetan Buddhists have an entire Tantric set of beliefs and traditions that appear nowhere in the sutras passed down to other schools. Lots of monks from other traditions complained about that.
So let's find something more traditional. How about ancient China? Oh, here we have Northern and Southern Chan. These two schools of Buddhism believe and practice differently, though. They spend a lot of time yelling at each other over the role of meditation and which one has the real Dharma lineage. Lots of monks complaining about how the other one ignores important elements in the Dharma.
And Japanese Zen, why that's way too modern. It's only been around for 600 years or so. That's the modern world for you, rejecting ritual and unquestioned belief in what the sutras say for a practice that tells you to sit down, shut up, and instead of debating what the ancient monks believed, discover your own Buddha Nature. Lots of other monks at the time complained about it, too.
Yep, none of that modern stuff for me. I'm going to be a Buddhist the way it was meant to be. I'm going to put on a robe, grab a begging bowl, leave the wife and family and head out for a life of wandering from town to town, the way Buddha and his disciples did it. Near as I can see, there ain't anything in the world but modern Buddhism, no matter how much tradition they claim to own. Funny that, finding nothing but modern Buddhism in a modern world. You'd almost think that's the way the Dharma and world works.
I think that most traditionalists are well-intentioned, they want to preserve something precious for future generations and they fear that the baby will be thrown out with the bathwater. Whereas reformers welcome change and want something that is more relevant to the times.
All this panic about "Modern Buddhism" is just old established religion protecting their dogma, or getting scared the new guy might take some of their followers.
I would argue that modern forms of Western Buddhist meditation such as sitting on a zafu has nothing to do with the Buddha's meditation (dhyâna) by which he awakened. If anything modern meditation only produces a placebo effect.
No, I've stated that incorrectly.
I should have said between some scientists and religion.
Also, materialism is not the defining belief of today's world. Quite the opposite. We are simply not a materialistic society, a society that believes all that exists is the physical universe of matter and energy. I am not a materialist. I believe all that can be proven to exist is matter and energy, because that's what the universe is made of.
In the same way Karma and Rebirth are Interlinked which is why if people reject them as instead of having an open mind they obstruct their own practice and hence the results of such.
Allegedly freaked out by Asian imagery, we end up fleeing a perfectly decent and perhaps vital teaching. Who's to say our distaste for someone else's culture is actually more significant than the information it contains?
The problem I see with attempts toward secular Buddhism is that they often...aren't. Ripping down the apparently offensive thangkas without really analyzing their purpose and without seeking a genuine, secular substitute doesn't strike me as wise. I mean, if you want to, go for it, but just don't pressure others to if they don't share your feeling.
If someone suggests that perhaps the thangka represents some valid basis for the practicing mind, one is often accused of "clinging to old theocracy" or some such politically-stained nonsense. When it comes to my spiritual practice I really don't give a hoot about Tibet's political past, real or imagined - I do give a hoot about 2500 years of trial and error. Just as I wouldn't throw out Tibetan (or Sri Lankan or Cambodian or Japanese) medicine simply because it's in an Asian (created during the dark ages!!) container, I wouldn't rush to throw out traditional practices until they can be better analyzed and perhaps adapted in a gradual and careful way, with decades if not centuries of study as to what their purpose is. If someone doesn't feel like doing that, no problem - it's just that I don't expect to get flak for wanting to take that careful path.
There's absolutely nothing wrong in my opinion with looking at the idea of Westernizing Buddhism in a genuine way; I just weary of all the anti-cultural invective, as if culture itself is somehow poisonous. As Buddhists aren't we a little more adept at seeing past labels than that? Mightn't it be true that Asian imagery is really no big deal, certainly no bigger deal than the horrific images splashed across our TV sets every day?
There are almost no, if any, Indian teachers left in Tibet, and someday there will probably be no more Tibetan teachers left in the West. Then everyone can breathe a sigh of relief that they and their teachers have the same melanin levels, or something. Until then we are completely fortunate these teachers have brought Buddhism to the West in variously colored waves over the past half century.
Buddhism to me remains a religion, not a philosophy or psychology or 8-step self-help program. Being a religion means the the goal is a transforming experience, a way of looking at yourself and the world that becomes part of everything you do. The power of a religion comes from a paradox wrapped in a mystery. A religion is written in the language of ritual and belief. In this way, Buddhism becomes something profound that gives meaning to our lives.
None of this can be found in debates about no-self versus reincarnation, of what beliefs are important or not. To me, it's just an interesting way to explore a fascinating religion.
Science does not know how to formulate a question or hypothesis relevant to Buddhism. Unless science can form a question there can not be any gathering of evidence.
There probably is some effort by science, but I feel with the three marks etc you cannot find an experiment that can ascertain the true nature of the mind.
I'll make an analogy. A computer can beat Gary Casparov in chess, but it scarcely can move the chess piece which a 3 year old can do. Much like a computer is disadvantaged in motion and balance so to science cannot set up tests of karma/rebirth.
To further what I said above and restate, I am saying that we don't know what is reborn. We don't know. Because it is not a skhanda. Whatever is reborn cannot be a skhanda.
So not having a question to ask, it is clear that rebirth cannot be refuted with the means we have today.
---------
Traditionally in Tibetan Buddhism there are three motivations to practice
1. To be happy in this life
2. To escape karma and become a non-returner
3. To become a Buddha and lead all beings to happiness in and out of the world, beings inumerable, beyond perception, or appearance even.