The meeting of Classical Buddhism, Secular Buddhism, and the Abrahamic prophetic promise of justice

The following are excerpts from an essay by Bhikkhu Bodhi on the challenges and tensions of reciprocal learning and mutual suspicion between Classical Buddhism and Secular Buddhism, and excerpts from an interview with deconstructive theologian/philosopher John D. Caputo on the philosophical critique of “whiteness” and the prophetic promise of justice.

Bhikkhu Bodhi, “Facing the Great Divide”:

With some exceptions, adherents of both Classical Buddhism and Secular Buddhism have tended to treat political and social activism as marginal to their understanding of Dharma practice. While they may engage in certain types of humanitarian service – assistance to the sick and dying, care for orphans and animals, the operation of soup kitchens, or work among prisoners – they often shy away from overt political advocacy, which they may see as a threat to the purity of their practice. This, I feel, is where Buddhism in all its varieties has much to learn from the Abrahamic religions with their prophetic concern for social justice. For billions of people around the world the principal causes of the real suffering they face on a daily basis are endemic poverty, social oppression and environmental devastation. If Buddhism is to live up to its moral potential, its followers must make a stronger commitment to peace, justice and social transformation. Inspired by the ideals of lovingkindness and compassion, they must be ready to stand up on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves, for those burdened by harsh and exploitive social structures. For all its unsavouriness, politics has become the stage where the critical ethical struggles of our time are being waged. Any spiritual system that spurns social engagement to safeguard its purity risks reneging on its moral obligations. Its contemplative practices then turn into the intellectual plaything of an upper-middle-class elite or a cushion to soften the impact of the real world.

John D. Caputo, “Looking ‘White’ in the Face”

G.Y.: You’ve argued that true religion or prophetic religion engages the real, involves a process of risk, especially as it demands, as you’ve said, serving those who have been oppressed, marginalized, orphaned. Etymologically, religion comes from “religare,” which means to “bind fast.” I wonder if that process of binding fast is with those who are the strangers, the orphans, the unarmed black men recently killed by police, women who are sexually objectified, the poor, etc.

J.D.C.: Yes, it is, of course. In the gospel Jesus announces his ministry by saying he has come to proclaim good news to the poor and imprisoned and the year of the Jubilee, which meant massive economic redistribution every 50th year! Can you imagine the Christian right voting for that? The great scandal of the United States is that it has produced an anti-gospel, the extremes of appalling wealth and poverty. But instead of playing the prophetic role of Amos denouncing the American Jeroboam, instead of working to close that gap, the policies of the right wing are exacerbating it.

That has been felt in a particularly cruel way among black men and women and children, where poverty is the most entrenched and life is the most desperate. The popularity of such cruel ideas, their success in the ballot box, is terrifying to me. The trigger-happy practices of the police, not all police, but too many police, on the streets of black America should alert everyone to how profoundly adrift American democracy has become — attacking the poor as freeloaders and criminals, a distorted and grotesque ideological exaggeration of freedom over equality. The scandal is that the Christian right has too often been complicit with a politics of greed and hatred of the other.

To be sure, younger evangelicals are becoming critical of their elders on this point, and I am trying to reach them in my own work, and there are also many examples of prophetic religion, like the Catholic parish in a North Philadelphia ghetto that I wrote about in “What Would Jesus Deconstruct?” The secular left, on the other hand, won’t touch religion with a stick and abandons the ground of religion to the right. So both the left and the right have a hand around the throat of prophetic religion.

G.Y.: You raise a few important issues here. I wonder what it would look like for a white police officer to see an unarmed black man/boy through the eyes of prophetic religion. On an international stage, I imagine that both Palestinians and Jews would begin to see one another differently, where each would feel the deep ethical weight of the other.

J.D.C.: Prophetic does not mean the ability to foretell the future. It means the call for justice for “the widow, the orphan and the stranger,” the affirmation that the mark of God is on the face of everyone who is down and out, and a prophetic sensibility requires walking a mile in the shoes of the other.

I’d like to relate the two quotes above to some observations I making in relation to the asylum seekers situation in Australia.

I think the scenario that Caputo observes in the American context can be observed here with regard to the torture of asylum seekers, where both the Right and Left have strangled prophetic religion (as response-ability towards the vulnerable). Father Rod and the Love Will Make A Way movement are attempting to honour the commitment of prophetic religion, but I remain ambivalent and somewhat troubled by the respectability of white privilege which they command even without intentionally seeking to do so. Other religious constituencies have been incredibly silent. It is understandable why Muslim constituencies are silent. Buddhists have been very silent too, arguably being silenced by the ‘model minority’ status that is conferred on them as at once a license for cultural acceptance and mode of control. But in any case, the ethico-political strangle hold of the (Christian) Right and (secular) Left is gripped tightly around their throats.

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Buddhist retreat, constraint, freedom, and well wishes for Ramadan

From Tricycle: 5 Things that might surprise you about meditation retreats

This article promoted the following thoughts and in typing them out, I realised that this is a good opportunity to wish my Muslim friends Ramadan Kareem.

It’s been a while since I sat a structured, silent 10-day retreat. Staying at monasteries is different: there are chores to do, interactions with laypeople during alms food offering, evening chanting, and a different (and in some ways a more difficult) challenge of committing oneself to the fruitful use of personal free time to actually engage in Dharma practice rather than be idle. But in both cases, I’ve had people comment that I must have had a wonderful, relaxing time going on retreat. Not really. It is not the spa treatment luxury enjoyment that they are evoking when they say ‘wonderful, relaxing time’. Well, for a start, along with the one meal before midday routine, there isn’t even a proper bed to sleep on, just a rubber or foam mat on a low wooden frame, because one of the additional precepts taken on retreat is to abstain from luxurious beds.

But these self-restrictions around diet, dress code, speech and behaviour, and sensual indulgences—all of which would, at least in the initial phase, agitate the body-mind and provoke all sorts of habitual resistance—these are the constraints within which freedom from the constraints of the self-serving ego may be invited, whereby one gives oneself over to something other than the self.

Ramadan Kareem, my friends.

the dalai lama visits the uluru

As you may have seen in the news, the Dalai Lama visited the Uluru for the first time, even though he has visited Australia nine times. The Dalai Lama learnt about Aboriginal Australian creation stories and also stressed the importance of preserving indigenous culture. I am very intrigued by what he said in this report:

When asked about his first impressions of Uluru, the Dalai Lama replied it was “quite strange”. “I would like to … discuss with scientists, some specialists,” the Dalai Lama said. “I’m very, very keen for further discussions.”

What is it? What did he sense? I am going to speculate wildly and say that, given accounts of the Uluru in Aboriginal Australian creation stories, the Dalai Lama sensed some warp in spatiotemporality. After all, he did say that there is in fact ‘no present moment’ and therefore no basis for ‘past’ or ‘future’. I am of course just speculating and making a hypothetical claim. My point here isn’t really to guess what the Dalai Lama sensed. Rather I want to use this opportunity to draw attention to the Westerncentric, colonialist and exclusionary effects of new atheist discourses. The theme of Aboriginal creation stories reminded me of what the head of Australia’s atheist foundation in 2012, David Nicholls, said:

David Nicholls says we are now seeing the tip of the iceberg as more and more people declare themselves non-believers and free thinkers. But he admits religion will always be present in Australia because of indoctrination and because some people “need fairy stories to survive”. “Within two generations, religion in Australia will be a non event,” he said. “[It] will always be here, there’s always going to be a genetic and cultural indoctrination, enough to affect some people, some people need it, some people get comfort from it, some people need fairy stories to survive, but not as many as before.”

Bracketing questions about the definition of ‘religion’, to put it bluntly, Nicholls is effectively saying that people who still engage in ‘fairy stories’ should, well, get fucked, and that they should rightly be excluded and marginalised from mainstream society. But who gets to decide what stories ought to be dismissed as useless ‘fairy stories’? Useless to whom? Who are these people who should ‘get fucked’ and rightly be excluded or marginalised from mainstream society? The creation stories of the First Peoples of Australia play a crucial role in shaping their cultural identity, their sense of belonging with and custodianship of this land, which has been stolen from them and on which they have been persecuted, excluded, and marginalised in many ways. The creation stories could very well serve as a means by which they seek justice for the violence that has been inflicted on them and on the land, a means by which they assert and reclaim their sovereign legitimacy. So again, who or what exactly are supporters of new atheism like David Nicholls referring to when he says that people who still engage with ‘fairy stories’ are irrelevant and should be further excluded and marginalised from mainstream society?

if new atheists are not scared but angry, who bears the brunt of the anger?

Last week, the English philosopher John Gray wrote an essay entitled ‘What scares the new atheists?’. It is a long read but early in the essay he compares new atheist understandings today to the atheist understandings of the nineteenth century which were coloured by fallacious understandings about the scientific, biological basis of race. Gray says:

It has often been observed that Christianity follows changing moral fashions, all the while believing that it stands apart from the world. The same might be said, with more justice, of the prevalent version of atheism. If an earlier generation of unbelievers shared the racial prejudices of their time and elevated them to the status of scientific truths, evangelical atheists do the same with the liberal values to which western societies subscribe today – while looking with contempt upon “backward” cultures that have not abandoned religion. The racial theories promoted by atheists in the past have been consigned to the memory hole – and today’s most influential atheists would no more endorse racist biology than they would be seen following the guidance of an astrologer. But they have not renounced the conviction that human values must be based in science; now it is liberal values which receive that accolade.

He then makes this overarching point about new atheism:

The predominant varieties of atheist thinking, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, aimed to show that the secular west is the model for a universal civilisation. The missionary atheism of the present time is a replay of this theme; but the west is in retreat today, and beneath the fervour with which this atheism assaults religion there is an unmistakable mood of fear and anxiety. To a significant extent, the new atheism is the expression of a liberal moral panic.

I would add to his claims that new atheism today has not freed itself from racist or ethnocentric habits, even though it would not explicitly subscribe to or advocate the pseudoscience of race as its nineteenth century predecessor did. In fact, I would argue that anxieties about racial or ethnic or cultural difference reverberates through the Western liberal moral panic that new atheism expresses.

Along with others, the sociologist of religion Steve Bruce has articulated this response to Gray in this article entitled: ‘New atheists are not scared, but they are angry’:

The problem with sealed-room philosophy such as John Gray’s (What scares the new atheists, 3 March) is that it provides no evidence for its claims about the world. I spend my professional life studying the popularity of religion and see no evidence for his assertion that “religion is … in fact flourishing”. Church membership and attendance data, third-party censuses of church attendance, time-use diaries and surveys all show that religion in western liberal democracies (and that includes the US) continues to decline in popularity.

The only areas of religious “growth” in the UK are the result of immigration from traditionally religious countries such as Nigeria and Ghana, and far from attracting religiously indifferent white British natives this make such conversion less likely by reinforcing the notion that religion is what foreigners do.

I do not doubt Steve Bruce’s knowledge or expertise as such. Bruce says that participation specifically in churches are on the decline in Western liberal democracies. But this presumably is not equally the case for other religious traditions or for people of certain non-white ancestral heritages. And it may not be the case in other non-Western countries (Gray mentions the example of China where the Christian population could potentially be the biggest at 250million by 2030). Bruce acknowledges this as much when he says that immigrants have reinforced the notion that religion is what foreigners do.

 

So while these two empirical observations may problematise the extent to which Gray’s claim that religion is flourishing can be generalised, don’t these observations underscore rather than undermine the point about new atheism reflecting Western liberal moral panic — perhaps, against ‘culturally-bound’ citizens, migrants, foreigners, and so forth of non-Western or non-white heritages who seemingly refuse to surrender their ‘religious contraband’ when they cross the border into the ‘secular’ mainstream?

If anything, moral panic functions very well to legitimise but invisibilise operations of domination, control, and marginalisation. If it is the case that new atheists are not scared but are angry—angry at whom? angry about what? More importantly, who bears the brunt of the anger?

how to cultivate mindfulness of the media?

I’ve seen this several times. This is a common perception of what meditation is about: emptying the mind (cue Christian panic about the Devil entering). Certain 禅/Chán/Zen approaches do speak of the empty mind, but the guiding doctrine for this is not nothingness but the idea that form is not exclusive of emptiness and emptiness is not exclusive of form (色即是空，空即是色). Today the buzzword is mindfulness. Mindfulness requires and is nourished by concentration, but it is not reducible to concentration. It’s more like the appropriate use of concentration to ardently observe and clearly comprehend the conditionality of psychosomatic processes and the ethical implications of how we relate them in condition and effect. On its own, concentration can gather attention one pointedly as deep absorption. This can allow consciousness to be suffused with feelings of joy or bliss, or to abide in the seeming voidness of infinite space. When it is action-oriented it can allow for the performing of acts without the perception of a doer behind the deed, as was the objective in WWII Japanese Zen militarism, or more recently, the Norwegian mass murdering terrorist Anders Breivik’s claim that he found meditation helpful (this non-dualistic performativity also enacts selfless giving, merit-making, and service).

But to go with the tech-geek theme here, if it is neither about the interpretation or discursivity of representations nor the deleting of representational content, how might mindfulness of the media be cultivated in our digital environment framed and mirrored by screens gesturing touch gesturing screens gesturing touch…?

who gets mindfulness “right”? an engaged buddhist perspective

An opinion piece I wrote on the cultural politics of mindfulness has been published:

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/03/05/4191695.htm

on gifting and hosting: māgha pūjā

The 4th of March this year marks Māgha Pūjā (informally described a Sangha Day), which is commemorated in the Theravadin Buddhist lands of Southeast Asia.

There’s a lot of talk and certainty in ‘Western Buddhism’ about the Buddha, about the Scientific Buddha. There’s also a lot of talk and certainty in ‘Western Buddhism’ about the Dharma, about the scientific rationalism of the Dharma. But there is considerable less talk about the Sangha. I suspect the mutual hospitality, the distributional, sharing logic of the gift economy between the laity and monastics, is not something that can be transplanted easily or readily accepted in the liberal West, given the prevailing individualist ethos of entrepreneurship and the profit-making, wealth accumulation logic of the market economy. It is early days yet. The emergent ‘Western Buddhism’ is still grappling with the fact that the gift of Buddhism comprises the Triple Gems, which are not possessions to be owned but more like guests to be hosted.