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?

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

angry asian buddhist, mindfulness, cultural baggage, border control

This morning I  read this interview by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship with the blogger Angry Asian Buddhist. This bit jumped out at me as this relates to the politics of knowledge surrounding the cultural translation of mindfulness, which is one of my main research interests:

When we assume that the dominant culture is neutral — isn’t actually culture — that’s a sort of deflection. It reinforces the assumption that there’s no culture here, but there’s unwanted “cultural baggage” that comes with mindfulness from Asia.

A commentator on the BPF’s Facebook page said:

To me, this is effectively saying: ‘Speak English or fuck off’. What such a response effaces is that ‘ethnic’ communities in white-dominant societies are not participating on equal grounds as privileged white constituencies—it is hardly a matter of ‘voluntary isolation’. This also betrays a very bad habit of a lack of humility and gratitude in the emergent ‘Western Buddhism’. The Triple Gems are not something to be owned or possessed. They are gifts or guests to be received and hosted. ‘The West’, whether it is America, Australia, England or whatever, has received the precious gift of the Triple Gems from various Asian cultural heritages who have faithfully honoured and preserved the Buddhadharma for over 2,500 years. ‘Western Buddhism’ is what?—200 years old, to give a very generous estimate. To demand that the Buddhadharma which emerged and flourished in historical and cultural contexts that cannot be readily subsumed under a Latin-inflected linguistic-intellectual paradigm—to say that this betrays a lack of humility and gratitude is to put it very lightly, I think. This is not to suggest that all attempts at translation are futile or that we can and must only engage with the Buddhadharma in Asian languages. I am simply noting the habitual reluctance to extend hospitality to the cultural specificities and differences of others. I reposted the interview on Facebook with the following quote:

‘[Amongst other things, Derrida’s notion of globalatinization refers to a process of cultural translation that functions as] the epistemological equivalent of immigration and border control. [The Western theo-philosophical-scientific tradition] has had a key role to play as a kind of intellectual border police or “Homeland Security” office, making sure that any foreigners crossing the border are properly classified as “religious” rather than “philosophical” (that is, in the “proper” western sense of the term). In effect, indigenous wisdom traditions of the non-western world are separated from their western counterparts at customs and forced to travel down the red channel. This is because, unlike western philosophies, they are believed to have “something to declare” – namely, their “religious,” dogmatic or “tradition-bound” features which mark them out as culturally particular rather than universal. Before being allowed to enter the public space of western intellectual discourse, such systems of thought must either give up much of their foreign goods (that is, render themselves amenable to assimilation according to western intellectual paradigms), or enter as an object of rather than as a subject engaged in debate.’

~ Richard King ‘Philosophy of Religion as Border Control: Globalization and the Decolonization of the “Love of Wisdom” (philosophia)’, in Postcolonial Philosophy of Religion, p. 45.