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.

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?

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

how might a buddhist interrogation of ‘the secular’ be articulated?

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age has generated much debate and is an invaluable reference

In posting about some of the ethical, political, and ideological challenges (and indeed, the possible neo-colonial effects) of the widespread adaptation of meditation practice or mindfulness training across various settings, I’ve come to realise that I am brushing up against a broader issue about the secularisation of Buddhist teachings. That is to say, the challenges emerging from the so-called McMindfulness industry are inter-involved with the move to articulate what is called ‘secular Buddhism’.

I do not personally advocate the term as such but I have always been curious about ‘secular Buddhism’, because I am participating in it in some ways and cautious about it at the same time. Indeed, in some ways I am trying to resist it, or at least be critically reflexive about it, because I think there’s much about the notion of ‘the secular’ that needs to be thought through more carefully.

So, instead of accepting the notions of ‘the secular’ and ‘secular Buddhism’ as givens, I want to explore the question, ‘How might a Buddhist interrogation of “the secular” be articulated?”

Now, this is a huge question and I do not quite know yet how to approach it. So this will be an ongoing topic for the blog. To kickoff the discussion, I’ll use this post to signpost very schematically some of the reasons why I think ‘the secular’ needs to be interrogated.

First off, a few words about ‘secular Buddhism’. It is becoming increasingly common, especially amongst Western commentators, to express a preference for ‘secular Buddhism’. One prominent advocate of ‘secular Buddhism’ is Stephen Batchelor, who probably helped to popularise it significantly with his writings about ‘Buddhism without beliefs’ or ‘Buddhist atheism’. An Australian Buddhist practitioner-academic Winton Higgins have also written about secular Buddhism. And we also find that non-sectarian approaches to Insight Meditation tend to characterise themselves in secular terms.

On the whole, ‘secular Buddhism’ advocates an approach to practice that is not bound to any sectarian position and which does not accept doctrinal propositions unquestioningly. I do not have any issue with such a general attitude as such. However, what I think needs to be interrogated more carefully is the extent to which the notion of ‘the secular’ in ‘secular Buddhism’ rests on axiomatic, Westerncentric understandings of ‘un/belief’, ‘religion’, ‘a/theism’, and related ideas about ‘ritual’, ‘superstition’, and so forth.

So this is what I hope to explore in future posts:

The notion of ‘the secular’ – or more precisely, the ‘religious/secular’ dualism – has a specific Euro-Christian genealogy. This genealogy is inter-involved with colonialism, whereby the ‘religious/secular’ dualism served, and still serves, as a tool of Western imperialist domination and control. What emerges out of the Euro-Christian genealogy of the ‘religious/secular’ is a particular ideology of un/belief (see chapter on ‘Belief’ by Donald Lopez here). This ideology of un/belief continues to constrain public debates in such a way that it often glosses over how the concept of ‘religion’ is a Latin invention that cannot be directly translated to the custom and practices of non-Western heritages, including Dharma traditions like Buddhism.

Therefore, there are serious consequences that result from the extent to which we are critically reflexive or not about such notions as ‘religious/secular’ and ‘secular Buddhism’. These consequences do not simply impact on the way we think about the world. They are consequences that would impact on the ways in which the lifeworlds of others are valued or devalued, denigrated, marginalised, or excluded – this is especially so for non-Western heritages who have long been living under the imperialist hegemony of the West. Such consequences are nicely encapsulated by the title of Tomoko Masuzawa’s book, The Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. I have also alluded to some of these consequences in the post on ‘border protection’ against non-Western, non-white understandings of mindfulness.

To be clear, I am NOT dismissing the potentials of ‘secular Buddhism’ or the promises of inclusivity and egalitarianism offered in the name of ‘the secular’. I am simply suggesting that the development of these potentials and promises need to be cultivated with mindfulness of the historical, ideological, and even ethnocentric baggage of such framing categories as ‘religious/secular’ and ‘un/belief’, which we have inherited from the worldwide legacy of a Western European-Christian heritage.

Whether we like it or not, whether we embrace it or resist it, like one’s birth name and the language and culture in which one is raised, inheritances (with all their problematic complexities and complicities) come before us and are received by us without our choosing – hence, a matter of responsibility, or better, response-ability.