When someone composes an epic fit for the times, we call that person a “genius”. When their work makes sense only within their own head, the unfortunate author is dubbed a “crank” instead. Nevertheless, cranks and crackpots often go to lavish extents to deliver their personal fantasies to the world. And there is hope within reach for all dreamers: if the resulting work is unambiguously astounding, we are forced to call the author a “genius” no matter how outlandish his subject.
Here, then, is a list of seven books which, despite or because of their difficult or unreadable text, have captured my imagination with their otherworldly images.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: June 19th, 2010 | Books
No human being is really a free agent. We taken in the universe through the filter of our five senses, and we are limited by the ability of our minds to process these experiences and make something coherent out of them. Our actions are thus determined by what we have been permitted to see. It is truly awe-inspiring that we live in a world where information comes constantly steaming in to us, second by second, from millions of fellow humans. It was once thought that the Internet would usher in a sort of utopia, since everyone would have access to the sum of all contributed information. This has not proven to be the case, because so many things disrupt total perception, not least of which is our own limited understanding. But this global consciousness, however problematic, is the main benefit that this age has over previous ones.
Before the 20th century, even the most powerful people in the richest lands could only have a dim sense of what was going on on the other side of the planet and why it was happening. Today, that information is available not only to the ruling class but to roughly half the world. This allows us to root out wrong views and instill peace like never before. It’s not clear how long this age will last, but surely it is not permanent, so the vast information flow of the present day has given us a great responsibility to find ways to put our new consciousness to good use. Most people today are using this information flow for their own entertainment, but I believe that’s because they are unsure of what to do with their power; it’s as if everyone has been made a king in their own house, and they can’t think of much use for their tiny kingdom except to hire an army of jesters. I personally struggle to get beyond that point. Going on JET instead of taking a job at home will be the first of hopefully many excursions to help me increase my understanding.
Consciousness is shared only to the extent that we are willing to put ourselves into other people’s shoes. This is why the work of the translator is precious and delicate, and why, even in the saturated market of American-Japanese dialogue, I want to throw myself in, to disrupt and reconstruct. Presenting people’s own narratives in a positive way helps the rest of the world learn. Twisting words in unintended ways, on the other hand, leads to misunderstanding and sometimes hatred. Japan is a country that has spent almost 150 years trying wholeheartedly to engage itself with Western modernization, yet it is a country still subject to an unspoken distrust that Western Europe and the Anglosphere have long since eliminated from their own cross-national dialogues. If we can’t communicate openly with this culture that has aimed from the start to please us, how can we positively approach the billions of Asians and Africans who treat the West with an open enmity? According to Importing Diversity, part of the impetus for the JET program was the Western world’s distrustful reactions following the death of Emperor Showa in 1989. Japanese officials were gravely moved by the unequal treatment the Emperor was given in outsider eulogies. There must be some lack of understanding going on here; how can it be resolved?
This, of course, links into the greater problem of the endless possibility for misunderstanding. It seems that no matter how much truth lies behind a person’s words, the act of rendering it into speech links you into a specific time, place, and community. Even the simple message of the Buddha, which I regard as sublime philosophy, is today crammed into the box of one “world religion” among many. I recently read a comment that referred to Buddhism as a literal “hoax”. What is the hoax? Cause-and-effect? Impermanence? This is what happens when Buddhism goes through the lens of Protestantism and their insistence on history rather than story, on the question of whether or not something happened hundreds of years ago rather than the truth that underlies it. It would be impossible to correct this wrong view without completely uprooting the culture on which it lies. And if Buddhism is subject to this, then there is no statement which can survive such a brutal, inevitable misunderstanding.
As a spiritual person, I have a sort of conviction that the ideal of world peace can only be built on the foundation of inner peace, after the philosophy of Thich Nhat Hanh. In Japan, religion in the Western sense is disliked as anti-social dogma. But Japan, of course, is possibly the most peaceful country in the world; most crime is committed by foreigners. If my theory is correct, where does their inner peace come from? And if I am wrong, what is the origin of their national character? I will try to answer these questions for myself, and bring the answers to the rest of the world.
Going on JET will change my global consciousness radically. I don’t expect to give up my commitment to peace, but I may develop a new outlook on the world. So, I’m archiving these questions now to look back on them in a year, or two, or three; perhaps I will have answers, or perhaps these questions will seem less important in the face of new and larger ones.
Posted: June 2nd, 2010 | JET, World Peace
Ahistory: not the absence of history, but the recognition that history — the past as a meaningful narrative, as a story — never existed in the first place. It is wrong, having pierced the veil, to try to tell the history of this idea. I can only speak of my own recent ventures into the area: knocking down the “historical evolution of religion” in my undergraduate thesis and seeing the power of history textbooks in Texas, Japan, and China. History cannot be “politicized”, because it is at its heart a political endeavor; not just the facts, but an arrangement of the facts that imbues personal or collective power. It disguises one particular path among many as the single road to perfection. In its incarnation as “world history”, it seeks to universalize one of these paths as “humankind’s journey from childhood to adulthood”, but as Oswald Spengler put it, “‘Mankind’, however, has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the family of butterflies or orchids.” We are not climbing a mountain. The world is here, the same as always. Only the stupid things we’re doing on its surface have changed.
As Spengler points out, before the interruption of colonization, India existed in a state of ahistory. Oh, sure, India is a country full of stories. There are epic stories that can enlighten and entertain the reader for centuries on end, but in such a stubbornly diverse and divided continent, none of these stories were meant to identify the persons who told or heard them. A culture of friendly anonymity prevailed; there was no word for “India” in any Indian language, and indeed, stories like the Ramayana were told and revered as far east as Thailand and Vietnam. The historians of South Asia were not the brilliant philosophers, but the marginalized and cast-off Sri Lankans. Seeking to define themselves as a monocultural people, they manufactured a narrative, the Mahavamsa, which will be recognized today as a pioneering work of ethno-nationalism. Probably India did not understand the peace-making power of ahistory, for even in light of the ethnic strife in Sri Lanka, they have begun to define themselves, as Hindus, Muslims, or urban Indians, uniting their stories into a common ethnic narrative (i.e., a national history that would no longer be interesting to Thais or Vietnamese), or else casting them off and adopting the trendy Western narrative of economic development and globalization.
How can ahistory retake its rightful place on the world stage? There will always be critics around to deconstruct or uncover ideological histories, just like the resounding criticism of recent developments in Texas. But the interesting thing about criticism is that, by adding to that particular discourse, it reinforces that history’s authority as official, even if some people doubt that it may be true. The more people talk about it, the more that history becomes bumped up the ladder towards world-class ideology.
Perhaps the only way out is to promote the telling of stories. The more unruly and unregulated stories that get told, be they first hand experiences, second hand gossip, folklore, fables, or simply snippets of books from here and there, the more the approved histories get put in their place as just one brand of story among many. In a world full of wonderful stories, it will be difficult to identify oneself with any particular history. Then, perhaps, we can leave the past behind and turn our thoughts towards the present.
Posted: May 30th, 2010 | Postcolonialism
I’ve decided to start a blog about Diaspora, a free software alternative to Facebook. Since I’ll be using this blog to talk about Japan, I’ll be keeping advocacy posts about that subject at Avery’s Diaspora News. Feel free to subscribe! Or don’t!
Posted: May 17th, 2010 | Site news
In the immediate postwar period, several “utopian groups” became quite prominent in Japan. The four outlined by David W. Plath in his article in American Anthropologist 68.5 (1966) are Ittō En in Kyōto, Atarashiki-mura in Miyazaki-ken, the Shinkyō Commune in Nara-ken, and the Yamagishi Assocation in Mie-ken. It appears that all of these received significant media coverage in the 1950s and 60s. However, none of them are exactly thriving today. They have all taken significantly different paths reflecting their uncertain status in Japanese society.
Shinkyō Commune (心境荘苑)
Shinkyō is located in a rural part of Nara prefecture, as can be seen on my map of the area. It was born out of a village feud sparked by a charismatic economist named Ozaki Masutarō. (Ozaki’s life-encompassing and humanist economic, moral, and metaphysical opinions, offered fiercely but never imposed, are reminiscent of Japanese folk hero Ninomiya Sontoku.) What started as a loose coalition of shunned households soon became a commune where men and women bathed together, looked after each other’s children, and eventually even shared their rice–a startling move for a group of farmers to whom rice meant everything. As Japan industrialized, Ozaki started a tatami-weaving business from scratch that, through his good business sense, quickly came to supply most of Japan’s tatami. Despite these close ties, Shinkyō neither legally incorporated nor aimed to write down any doctrine; the name Shinkyō is a complicated pun which was given by outsiders and reclaimed by insiders. It did not publicize any of its remarkable achievements, and only after it was “discovered” by national media did Ozaki’s wife write a semi-biographical account, Sensei and His Teachings, which was translated into English.
Since the 1966 article, obviously, Ozaki has died, and with him much of the motivation that kept the group’s hearts burning (read Sensei and His Teachings for a fascinating discussion of this). Shinkyō halted manufacture of tatami, switching focus to care for the mentally retarded, and incorporated as a “social welfare corporation”. It is unclear to me how successful this program is; only one person has written about it online. One wonders how a charismatic humanist in the style of Ninomiya or Ozaki would operate in today’s Japan, where neither government works nor communes are especially popular.
Ittō En (一燈園)
I visited Ittō En, which has an English website, in the fall of 2008. Ittō En seems slightly strange to me, neither secluded nor inclusive. It was founded along the lines of Tolstoy’s hermitage, and syncretizes some of the symbols of his Christianity with Japanese animist and pantheist concerns, as well as ascetic practice which I will describe shortly. It was actually founded in rural Manchukuo. Along with the use of shared property and burial in a communal grave, this seems to make it a difficult group to break into. In fact, most people in that area of Kyōto had never heard of it before! But it is nonetheless in the midst of a suburban area. Most of the manpower of commune members has been poured into maintaining an elementary and middle school open to the public, which for some reason Plath passes over in his article.
It seems that Ittō En is struggling to stay relevant today. Its founder, Nishida Tenkō, was a brilliant economist, politician, writer, and moral theorist who spent a day every month cleaning out the toilets of area villagers, even after he was elected to serve in the national Diet. In the 1930s when Nishida did this shugyō, toilets were the least sanitary part of a Japanese home. They were usually holes in the ground with no plumbing system; Nishida was performing a great and humbling service to the public with his monthly rounds. But bizarrely, Ittō En continues this practice today, even after most Japanese people have brought self-cleaning Western toilets into their home. Members, as well as kaishain brought to the commune, go from house to house demanding entry so that toilets can be cleaned. As Ittō En is unfamiliar in the area, this is usually met with a frightened refusal. The site of the commune itself has become somewhat of a museum showing off Nishida’s house and a collection of his writings. I imagine the rest of the life at this commune (~90 people, not many children) has been similarly deadened.
Atarashiki-mura (新しき村)
Wikipedia has an article on Atarashiki-mura (“New Village”) written by someone who lived there. It seems silly to duplicate what is written there, and I have never personally been to the village, so I will just add what Plath says about the subject. This project was started by one Mushakōji Saneatsu, an intellectual who was also spurred by Tolstoy. It resembles other art villages, like Lobo, Texas, in that the small number of people who could afford to live on-site were supported financially by other artists who would come to visit for clean-up festivals. As an artistic commune, its membership turnover was quite high, but it became a farming village in the 1960s it became both solvent and stabilized. It also became, I imagine, more boring to outsiders. Wikipedia says that this utopia is currently moribund, although unlike American communes, its members continue to farm under the communal flag and will likely persist for the rest of their lives.
Yamagishi Association (ヤマギシ会)
Now this group is quite interesting, and I don’t think I have a coherent image of it at present. Even though Plath has a lot to say about it, his presentation is contradicted by the modern group’s website as well as outsider police reports. It was founded by Yamagishi Miyozō, a “self-styled anarchist” according to Plath, who created a new style of group decision-making and incorporation called “Yamagishism”. He emphasizes the group’s dispute resolution and anger management. However, most of its growth occurred after Plath’s article and its own self-description seems to move it closer to a communal farm, like Shinkyō. Stranger still, Japanese media describe it as a religious cult which brainwashes its members. Did I mention it has a Korean branch? The only thing any two sources agree on: both Plath and an outsider describe it as similar to a kibbutz. Definitely a more involved look is needed to really understand this group, as it has little English material at present.
Modern Japanese communes
There are still communes being formed in Japan, although they get none of the press that these received. Here are a few: Ecovillage Index, 茗荷村, 獏原人村, モモの家
Posted: April 26th, 2010 | Japan
Homi Bhabha is a famously incomprehensible writer in the field of postcolonial studies. He is regarded as the second most unreadable academic in the world, after Judith Butler. In this article I’ll tell you how to interpret his work and make yourself look really smart in your postcolonial grad papers.
The 1980s-era theoretical writings of Homi Bhabha should not be read like a typical academic paper. There is no criticism, thesis, or conclusion. He is not attempting to make any political point or support any belief system. Instead, they are written as works of poetry. They are intended to make readers pay close attention to how he is playing with his subjects, and develop some insight from that which can be applied to their own works. Also, and importantly, he is completely unconcerned with agency. Many of his block-quoted examples seem confusing from a postcolonial perspective–they do not describe the colonized in “empowering” or flattering ways, and one might wonder whether he has any sympathy for them at all. In fact, Bhabha is unattached to any desire to assign blame or credit to anyone. He does not want to pat the natives on the back, but only to describe what is going on.
Bhabha, of course, operates in the tradition of Jacques Derrida, and many of his artistic gimmicks, like repeating the same statements over and over in different contexts, come from Derrida. Operating fully within the tradition of deconstruction, he views the individuals he’s quoting as fellow observers, who had equal rational capacity, rather than objects of criticism. He is not trying to discover some fault in their analysis, but to discover the processes that gave rise to their mode of thinking. In short, Bhabha does not assume the preexistence of a colonizer and colonized. His primary interest is in understanding the complex ways of speaking, writing, and thinking that arose out of the mere act of establishing a colony. Questions like “What is Indian?” or “What is English?” can only be answered by a discourse that separates them. Here we can see why a colonial discourse is different from discussions about the internal problems of a country. Everyone in England is English, but the natives of colonial India cannot be fully British, even though they are subjects of the Queen!
This colonial discourse, in Bhabha’s writing, has several important characteristics. First, colonialism is anti-Enlightenment, because it denies egalitarianism. The colonized as a constructed group are asked to achieve a certain standard of civilization, but they cannot actually achieve it, or else they would cease to be a colony of a mother nation. This gives rise to hybridity, a process where the discourse of the colonists becomes a discourse of the colonized via their responses of acceptance, rejection, or misunderstanding (the last of these three categories is particularly important to Bhabha, since he considers it influential and unacknowledged). Whether they intend it to or not, the natives’ hybridity undermines the colonial discourse and confuses or angers the colonists. Thus, the colonists’ message must be proclaimed again and again, as long as they care about their civilizing project.
Bhabha acknowledges that some natives inevitably feel comfortable being in a colony, an imagined world with a secure leadership. But as above, hybridity is a force that upsets, whether people want it to or not. In the form of mimicry, the futile if well-meaning attempt to achieve full citizenship or humanity within the discursive borders of the colony, the native response becomes “civil disobedience within the discipline of civility”. Their actions upset colonial power, since a colony ruled by its native inhabitants without interference is not really a colony at all, nor are the natives really colonized. Mimicry is therefore “the sign of the inappropriate”, meaning that it is undesirable to the colonist rulers as well as demonstrating the impossibility of fully appropriating the colonists’ power. (This is an obnoxious Derridean pun.)
It appears to me that hybridity includes any disavowal of colonial domination, including resistance, misunderstanding, and an acceptance of rule that denies the negative effects of that rule. Mimicry is more specifically a misreading of the meanings given to institutions by the colonists, and an embrace of those misreadings. It appears in Bhabha’s block-quoted examples as an accident which neither illiterates nor intelligentsia really understand the origin of. But this does not mean that conscious resistance is better for the world than mimicry, because that assumes that the colonist reading is in fact the correct reading. Mimicry, too, is a legitimate, creative act which disrupts the colonists’ intentions. Perhaps the name “mimicry” marginalizes that important process.
This is as far as I’ve got so far. I think that if you take this cheat sheet with you, then you may be able to make some sense out of Homi Bhabha’s gobbledy-gook. Whether his theory has useful application to real-world disputes is a subject for another day entirely.
Posted: April 7th, 2010 | Postcolonialism
Jai Bhim! Dispatches from a Peaceful Revolution by Terry Pilchick
Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1988. BQ336.P5
This is a wonderful little book about the human legacy of one of my favorite people from all history, Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar. Pilchick strikes me as a practical and compassionate (although sometimes insufferably British) person who wanted to find out how Ambedkar’s Buddhist community in India was faring. Rather than reading one of Professor Zelliot’s books about it, he went there himself and made friends with the Mahars!
I learned some interesting things along the way: for example, how Sangharakshita, so controversial in Britain, was to Dr. Ambedkar a light of philosophical purity in the chaos of Buddhism as practiced in Sri Lanka and Burma, (74) and how despite being British born and raised, Sangharakshita knew his audience of unimaginably poor Dalits so well when he gave a speech in Maharashtra, he brought knowing smiles and laughter from the crowd. (77) “Sangharakshita sees his listeners in a paradoxical, twofold aspect. On one hand, they are poor, uneducated, mainly illiterate. Even as they sit listening, their bodies express an air of physically ingrained humility … But they have also struggled out of a trap that ensnares most of the world … They know life holds greater purpose than placid obedience to some divine plan.” (128) Thus, his message:
Some people say that, because the Buddha taught ‘impermanence’, Buddhism must be gloomy and pessimistic. But it is wonderful that things are impermanent: it means they change. And if things have to change, then why should they not change for the better. People are changing all the time, so people can become better. Society is changing, so society can become better. … A bad man can become a good man; a good man can become a better man; a better man can become a Buddha. (130)
His talks stay simple and direct, and references to the great Dr. Ambedkar are peppered throughout. My opinion of this guy was certainly raised a little. The eagerness of the Dalits to learn Buddhism was also impressive: “Lokamitra told me that one woman came along to retreats quite regularly in the full knowledge that her husband would beat her when she returned home.” (96) There are so many wonderful stories here, I must quote another
A diminutive man squeezes his way through the throng, hammering open a path with the tiny baby he carries in his arms. He thrusts the dazed infant under Sangharakshita’s nose.
‘Name! Please, Bhanteji! Name!’
Sangharakshita looks at the well-wrapped child. ‘Is it a boy or girl?’
‘Girl, Bhanteji.’
He takes another look, smiles. ‘Bodhipushpa—Flower of Enlightenment.’
Overcome with rapture, the father spins on his heels and batters his way back through the crowd, his eyes wildly seeking out the rest of his group. The entire affair has lasted no more than fifteen seconds, but that name will go with the girl for the rest of her life … as a highly prized talisman. (136)
If you went to India to give a dhamma talk, would you be prepared for an encounter like this? Wow!
One last thing I’d like to talk about today is Pilchick’s observation that “even today many Hindus regard Buddhism as nothing more than just an archaic branch of Hinduism”. (23) Dismissive comments like this are an interesting theme I am seeing in many books about “religion” in India and Japan. Many Japanese people will say that Shinto is non-religious custom. For some reason, we laugh off this insider account as due to ignorance, rather than realizing that this is truly a gem of knowledge to understand the role that our imagined “Shinto” or “Buddhism” play in their home societies.
Pilchick states, correctly, that Buddhists were subject to persecution from Brahmins. But at the same time, Buddhism in India was constantly developing throughout the time it was there. Consider this: the oldest form of Buddhism, Sthaviravada, is strictly materialistic and preaches cessation of suffering in the here and now. (I’m ignoring the developments in Theravada in Southeast Asia.) The next form, Mahayana, holds that the forms in which Sthaviravada were taught were empty of independent meaning, and that true insight can be awakened within oneself without the need to follow a rigid path. The next form, Vajrayana, says further that you can come to identify yourself with these perfections in the forms of bodhisattvas, if you have a competent guru to instruct you. Now, all this is moving away from materialist description of life, and towards yogas. Couldn’t we just tack on modern, guru-based “Hinduism” to this list? The gap between Theravada and Hare Krishnas is huge, but the gap between Vajrayana and Hare Krishnas is not so big, I think. Vaishnavas even had major debates about whether you are allowed to identify yourself with God. So maybe this conception of modern Hindus, that Buddhism was just part of modern Hinduism, is essentially correct.
Posted: March 23rd, 2010 | Book Reviews
The Making of Buddhist Modernism by David L. McMahan
Oxford University Press, 2008. BQ316.M36
Are you aware of the vast gap between the Buddhism you know and the culture familiar to hundreds of millions of people in “Buddhist countries”? All of the practices and goals described by Western Buddhists, such as meditation, a philosophical quest, and an emphasis on freedom and egalitarianism, are part of a great revolution in Buddhist knowledge as the Western world discovers it. In this book, David McMahan seeks to describe these differences, neither demeaning or praising either side, but raising our awareness of the new role that our Buddhist modernism is giving to these ancient teachings.
When we read about Buddhism by choice, seeking out its most fruitful and meaningful teachings, we are doing virtually the opposite of how laypeople experience Buddhism in Thailand or Tibet. For an average Thai woman, Buddhism means a concern with “honoring, appeasing, and managing the spirit powers that pervade her existential world and with generating the karmic effects to provide good fortune in this life and lives to come.” (37) She doesn’t pick out what interests her the most, nor is she familiar with what the Buddha actually taught, except on the most basic level of virtue and compassion. She might see us as a strange phenomenon: we know as much about Buddhism as a fully ordained monk, but we do not perform any of the rituals that she considers essential for moral upkeep.
Our creation of a philosophical world for Buddhism in the Western/Greek tradition makes us undeniably modern, and grounds our Buddhism in European history just as much as Asian history. Even the act of reading a Buddhist text on your own is a transformation: “It would have occurred to virtually no one [in medieval Tibet] simply to pick up a book and try to understand it himself … The vast canonical literature of Buddhism was written as an aid to oral and personal instruction by an authorized teacher.” (17) And this, too, is only one of a huge variety of ways that reading was performed throughout Asia. The way we Westerners read texts is no more culturally neutral than any of these, but comes down to us from Martin Luther’s idea of sola scriptura.
In a major sense, this modernism arose in response to the demands of 19th century Christians to see either rationality or superstition in the teachings they came across. India is the most important case of a complex culture being reduced to a perceived primitive, uninteresting superstition which the British called “Brahmanism” or “Hinduism”. In the Buddhist world, too, accusations like “atheistic, nihilistic, quietistic, pessimistic, and idolatrous” came fast and furious from Western colonists. (69) When contemporary Sri Lankans and Japanese aimed to combat the ignorance of these critics, they created in response a Buddhist modernism, that is to say a Buddhism that was compatible with the Western philosophical tradition. This was the Buddhism that was equivalent to science, opposed to superstition, and in agreement with Christianity or even superior to it.
Although he is in some sense trying to demythologize this modern Buddhism, McMahan is careful to note that modern portrayals of Buddhist literature have often turned out to be accurate. For example, the Tibetan Book of the Dead was given an intense psychological rereading by Carl Jung which described its images of fierce Buddhas and bodhisattvas as “‘nothing but’ the collective unconsciousness inside me.” We might assume that Jung is projecting his own beliefs onto the traditional book of chants. (53) However, if we look at the text of the book, we find that Jung had ample basis for this representation: these powerful beings are indeed described as “appearances” (pratibhasa) who are “not distinct from the deceased subject wandering in the bar do“. (54) Jung’s interpretation was certainly novel, in the sense that any Tibetan he talked with would not have been familiar with it. But that does not mean he was wrong.
In fact, the main criticism I have of this book is that it does not attribute enough agency to Asian Buddhists for the elements of Buddhism that have reached us today, such as meditation, interbeing, and aesthetics. McMahan quotes Paul Heelas as saying, “people—whether ‘premodern’/’traditional’, ‘modern’ or even ‘post-modern’/’post-traditional’—always live in terms of … typically conflicting demands” to change or renew the meaning of their culture; our own modernism is just the past 100 years of change in a long, living history. (58) One of the Victorian conceits in their encounter with Buddhism was to portray it as ancient teachings submerged in a “dead” religion, and I think we should avoid framing the Western encounter with Buddhism as “breathing life” into it. Some examples of undoubtedly traditional Buddhism used to modern effect, such as tree ordination in Thailand, might have sufficed to round out the complex image presented here. McMahan brushes over these developments as “post-modern” or “retraditionalization”, which seems to imply (falsely) that they have progressed beyond a stage of modernism. (247)
One thing I think McMahan could pay more attention to is the Western discourse on the terms “religion” and “religions”, and their role in the creation of this modernism. D.T. Suzuki’s claim that Zen is “the essence of religion” (143) is novel, not because nobody had ever claimed an essential nature for Zen before, but because he connects it to the Western ecumenical idea of “religion” as the universal impulse that arises in various forms throughout the world, as opposed to different impulses for different places. He then places Zen as the breakthrough technique to uncover the Ground-Source of this mysterious impulse. It is good to note how Buddhism was reconciled with science by 20th century modernists, but how was it reconciled with this idea of “religion”? Has a discourse on universal spiritual impulse been important, or perhaps even necessary, in the creation of this modernism? This question may be confusing, but I believe it is quite important for understanding how we modern seekers relate ourselves to Buddhism today.
Posted: March 23rd, 2010 | Book Reviews
Light of Liberation: A History of Buddhism in India
Dharma Publishing, 1992. BQ286.L54
Today I had to plug through many history books of the sort described in my last post. Some were fascinating in their own right (The Search for the Buddha was a roller-coaster ride, guiding me through the excitement of discovering a lost civilization in the midst of colonial India) but few told me anything new about Buddhism, even the ones which were purportedly about Buddhist history. For some reason there is a book of “history” attributed to Daisaku Ikeda in this library, full of inaccuracies and quite obviously cribbed from other texts by a ghostwriter. But just because a book is written from an insider perspective doesn’t mean it is necessarily ignorant of real Buddhist history. My favorite book today actually presents Early Buddhism from an unapologetically Tibetan perspective.
It is refreshing, after reading so many books which shrug or speculate about the origin of Mahayana scriptures, to read one which proclaims, apparently without any embarrassment, that Buddha left some of his higher-level sutras with nagas, devas, and gandharvas for safekeeping, and that the most difficult sutras, for the sake of expedience in the limited time given to Buddha on earth, were proclaimed in higher realms that “humans and devas alike could not normally access … on their own”, but which it was possible to visit “through the perfection of a profound samadhi”. Like a passworded chatroom! (125)
Well, I don’t mean to laugh at these cosmic fantasies. Rather, it is disappointing that historians who search for the “real” early Buddhism often fail to report them, because learning the way that Tibetan Buddhists themselves think about the most powerful sutras is the best way to understand them. Think about it this way: for those monks who had only material understanding, Buddha explained the simple teachings of dependent arising and nonself. Then, when he appeared to be meditating in this world, he held a special conference for his best disciples and gave them the sort of insights only perceivable by a Buddha. These teachings were, of course, held back from the general public until the sudden Mahayana revolution of the first and second centuries CE, when they were revealed. (300)
A lot of useful territory is covered in this account, so let’s just talk about what interests me. First is the Trial of Ananda, an incident where Mahakashyapa blocks Ananda from attending the First Buddhist Council on the following grounds:
- Ananda had requested that women be admitted into the order.
- Ananda had not asked the Buddha to remain in the world.
- Ananda had [stepped] on the Buddha’s robe [while sewing it].
- Ananda had once given impure water to the Buddha.
- Ananda had not clarified with the Buddha which Vinaya rules were to be always kept and which could be sometimes set aside.
- Ananda had shown the Buddha’s unclothed corpse to the Sangha.
- Ananda had shown the corpse of the Buddha to women, who profaned it with their tears. (159-160)
I don’t know about you guys, but to me this list damns Mahakashyapa as a prude and an old fuddy-duddy, while making Ananda out to be the more compassionate and eager of the two. I guess he does seem a little absent-minded, though.
It is also interesting to see the constant citation of Bu-ston, whom I imagine to be a sort of Eusebius of Mahayana Buddhism. Well, this book is a lot more readable than those confusing histories based on Eusebius… when we get to the Mahayana section, especially, our teachers like Nagarjuna and Asanga travel to the land of the nagas, extremely high mountains, and even Tushita Heaven to study with Maitreya. They hear truths so powerful that they cannot understand them. Yes, even if the Mahayana canon is just “fanfiction”, this does sound like an interesting subject to read more about.
Posted: March 18th, 2010 | Book Reviews
The British Discovery of Buddhism by Philip C. Almond
Cambridge University Press, 1988. BQ162.G7
This book could better be titled “The British Invention of Buddhism”, since Almond demonstrates how the British were tying together a multitude of traditions dispersed throughout Asia. As he writes: “The religion having been ‘created’, there came the ensuing realization that its adherents outnumbered those of Christianity.” (12) Rather than putting scare quotes around the world “created”, I think they would be better placed around the words “religion” and “adherents”, since the Chinese being labeled by the British did not think of themselves as “adherents” of anything endorsed in Thailand, and vice versa.
In terms of religious-secular discussions, it is also extremely interesting to see the British nation as a religious icon in this period, pitted against the falsehoods of the pagans. One jeremiad bewails that as the British flag “is displayed over the mountain capital of Ceylon, it tells us of principle sacrificed, of religion dishonoured, of atheism perpetuated, of idolatry countenanced, and of a false and wide-spread superstition protected and maintained.” (134) Parallels might be drawn with the modern British anxiety about protecting the Muslims in their midst, or the use of “secular” American symbols in the evangelical community–do we not hear similar complaints emanating from that group, even today?
There are all sorts of treats to be found in this text, such as Francis Wilford’s quest to identify Mount Caucasus with Britain, the theory that Buddha was really African or Mongolian, the identification of Buddha with Odin (!), or the fact that these inquiries proliferated for decades before a single examination was done of any Buddhist teaching, probably out of disinterest–Christianity, after all, had superior knowledge!
When the dhamma begins to leak into the narrative, I feel an intense annoyance with how the conservative Christians responded to this new and unusual culture. Although they were a minority, they approached the topic with an insistence on superiority and domination, an demeaning attitude towards those interested in foreign things, constant comparison of “Orientals” to children, and so forth. Consider how John F. Davis described Buddhist monks: “They have, nearly all of them, an expression approaching to idiotcy [sic], which is probably acquired by that dreamy state in which one of their most famous professors is said to have passed nine years with his eyes fixed upon a wall!” Almond simply says that these writers were overwhelmed by a monastic simplicity that “contrasted so much with their more active, ‘muscular’ vision of the Christian life.” (122)
We can be indebted to Almond for his cool, neutral exposition of these poor excuses for debate; today’s evangelical movement can only hope for such an undeservedly fair treatment a century from now. But at the same time, even the positive Victorian image of the Buddha, exemplified by The Light of Asia, is clouded in Oriental fantasy and British inventions. This is where Edward Said comes into play, as the creation of the Orient, even in a positive light, constructs a West that is necessarily in opposition to “Oriental” ideals. I am very glad that I was not alive at that time!
Posted: March 17th, 2010 | Book Reviews, Secular-Religious
