I'm one of those Westerners who has little use for the cultural elements in Buddhism - I want the technology of transcendence the Buddha taught, as well as the tools of compassion so many of the subsequent teachers have added.
I don't want superstitious beliefs, pre-modern ideas about sexuality, or any of the other "baggage" Buddhism has carried with it in moving to the West. Too much of the Eastern values (especially those from 2500 years ago) don't hold up in a post-modern world.
Am I disrespectful? Discuss in comments, please.
Why We Need a Plan B
Norman Fischer, a Soto Zen priest who has practiced and studied Buddhism for more than three decades, says that when it comes to teaching the dharma in the West, it’s important to be open and flexible—even if it means forgoing the “usual Zen stuff.”
One of my Zen teachers in the 1970s, an American who had trained fairly briefly with a Japanese Zen master, mostly in the United States, used to say that he kept checking to see that his students didn’t “backslide” into a Judeo-Christian Western viewpoint. This, he believed, is what would happen if we were left to our own devices. He felt it was his job to give us enough Zen input that we would learn to see the world as the masters saw it.
In the 1980s, two eminent Asian Buddhist teachers appeared on the Western dharma scene: Thich Nhat Hanh and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Each made early visits to the San Francisco Zen Center and astounded us by delivering exactly the opposite message. They had no wish to spread Buddhism or to convert anyone. Both wrote appreciative books on Christianity, and said that Buddhism’s mission in the West was not to establish a beachhead, but rather to help Westerners return, with renewed spirit, to their own religions.
Among the early voices that introduced Buddhism to the West (people like D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, and Christmas Humphreys) there was a point of view that Buddhism was beyond religion. All the trappings, all the Asian cultural stuff—the chanting, the robes, the incense, the piety, the family tradition—was extra, and even a corruption of what was originally a purely rational, psychological, almost scientific, approach to the mind. Meditation was the heart of this Buddhist approach. According to this view, if you sat down in meditation, with an honest effort to investigate the mind deeply, you would eventually, given enough time and energy, achieve enlightenment, a non-conceptual transformative experience that was the basis of all religions, though most had become corrupt and had lost track of it.
So when the early American Vipassana teachers came home from their Asian sojourns in the late 1960s and early 1970s it made perfect sense to them to abstract pure meditation practice from its Asian Buddhist contexts and teach what they saw as a “secular” form of dharma that anyone could participate in, regardless of tradition or circumstances. The idea that Buddhism and Buddhist meditation was nonreligious drew many thousands of Americans to the dharma, in spite of the fact they never had any intention of joining an Asian religion.
This view of Buddhism is considered completely incorrect by most contemporary Buddhist scholars I know and have read. They maintain that there is no way to strip religion from its context, and that without its texts, rituals, customs, and traditions, it isn’t Buddhism at all. Moreover, they maintain that whatever good might come from meditation practice as a so-called secular activity is pretty superficial. It won’t last. Or, if it does last, it will be so watered down, so unmoored from any cultural ballast, from any actual substance, that it will eventually be subsumed into the general American consumerist madness (as, they feel, yoga has been).
I have been considering these various perspectives about what Buddhism is and what it has to offer in the West as I try, through no intention of my own, but because I seem to have had no choice, to apply Buddhism thoughtfully and flexibly to life in post-modern Western culture.
Excerpted from the Summer 2009 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly, available on newsstands May 19.
ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER is the founder and spiritual director of Everyday Zen, an organization dedicated to adapting Zen Buddhist teachings to Western culture. He is also a senior dharma teacher at the San Francisco Zen Center, where he served as co-abbot from 1995–2000. He is the author of Opening to You: Zen-inspired Translations of the Psalms and Sailing Home.
9 comments:
I think yes, it is disrespectful to speak of "the technology of enlightenment" and forego the "cultural" baggage of Buddhism. As if speaking of "technology" while referring to a psychological process is not "cultural". I think there is nothing superfluous in honoring the tradition and culture from which our teachers stem. This doesn't mean going native, but honoring, letting that culture be a gracenote in our practice. I grew up in an orthodox jewish environment and to hear anyone describe the culture habits in that environment as cultural baggage and superstition would have seemed very disrespectful to me. I think it is a good lesson in humility and in the relative value of our own culture (deemed universal in its properties) to face head on what we consider "baggage" in other cultures. Buddhism has always adapted itself while traveling from India to South East Asia, Tibet, China, and no Northern America and Europe. It has always retained a strong, cultural "Indianness". I for one am not going to trade the richness of this cultural tapestry for any "technology"
william, i think lodro had some great insight/input! i too agree that one cannot seperate "history/tradition" from culture. it is what i love about my practice! i think it ultimately depends on the individual and their karma what one picks to adhere/practice or how one picks what lineage they study under...it's all karma and appearance to mind. at least thats my understanding! love/compassion....hazel
I would have taken this 'Buddhism without Baggage' view a few years ago. But I don't any more, I do think there's a core message of Buddhism, something that moves within different contexts, but the practices and tradition and 'baggage' that surround that are important to and provide a real manifestation of that truth in this world. Could that happen in a different way?
I think there is some baggage that should be discarded, all forms of discrimination, sexism, racism and so on, and meat-eating as well.
But the ritual of Buddhism, for me, provides a great structure in which to practice. And if some of the ideas challenge how I think about the world, this life, and the next, all the better..
I agree with the previous comments. I would also like to point out that many points of what I take "superstitious beliefs" to indicate here have scientifically verified instrumental uses. I propose that the transcendent impact of the practices may in fact require them to bootstrap the Self. Also, my own practice has revealed reasons for many beliefs I initially scoffed at; I believe this type of experience created the need for terminology like "transrational."
Hello everyone -
Thank you so much for sharing your experience, the more so since you all disagree with me.
To clarify: I do see the value in ritual, and have practiced some of these myself. I understand that many of them are designed to "tame" the ego.
I wonder how much the different teachings work for some people and not for others? I guess at this point in my journey, anything more than the Noble Eightfold Path seems like extra-credit, so I'm sticking with basics.
Peace,
Bill
[Too much of the Eastern values (especially those from 2500 years ago) don't hold up in a post-modern world.]
Thanks to The Mother & Sri Aurobindo this time lag has been spectacularly bridged. [TNM]
Bill,
I would like to question your dichotomy that Buddhism consists only of a technology of transcendence and cultural baggage. I think there's a third category -- culturally-neutral doctrinal views that developed based on the very real spiritual experience of advanced practitioners through the ages.
Yes, I agree with you that we can to apply Buddhist "technology" in any context and have it be effective and worthwhile. In fact, I think this is a good thing all around. However, to take one's practice more deeply into any faith, Buddhism or otherwise, I think requires taking on a worldview that begins to diverge from others.
Specifically, I am thinking about one key difference between Buddhism and the Judeo-Christian doctrine: Buddhism says that humans have an inborn potential for reaching the ultimate, whereas theistic traditions teach that man and God are separate. The latter implies to me that there is a ceiling on how far man can go on his own. I think that point can have a profound effect on how one views one's own potential, and one's relation to the ultimate (however you happen to define that). Mind you, I'm no expert on theology, so I may be misrepresenting things here. But regardless, the things of which I speak aren't cultural baggage, but a true difference of doctrine that can affect how we view ourselves in relation to our world.
I'm not trying to argue that any faith is more "right" than any other. I do believe that all the world religions offer genuine paths to the ultimate. But to reach the highest potential with any one of them, I think we have to specialize and take on the relatively unique perspective that one's chosen faith presents. By analogy, you can't become a virtuoso pianist if you spread your energies around to also learn how to be a wind instrument player. It's up to each of us to determine which of those doctrines are helpful to our own circumstances and life choices, and whether they are helpful to our personal growth.
Sunada Takagi
www.mindfulpurpose.com
Sunada,
Thank you for adding your thoughts - I think you make a great point.
There is very much I have adopted (or maybe always believed?) from the Buddhist worldview, such as the inherent goodness and wholeness of all human beings that you mention. Having been raised Catholic, that wasn't part of my life until I became a Buddhist. I always knew that the Catholic worldview (original sin, and so on) didn't work for me, but it wasn't until I became a Buddhist that I knew why.
So perhaps I have adopted the Buddhist worldview, without the cultural elements. That's a good distinction.
Peace,
Bill
Bill:
I'm a bit late to the conversation, but I think the East-West comparison is a little unequal. Growing up in a "Christian" country, we see people practicing Christianity at all levels. The vast majority don't get very far (or even want to get very far), perhaps because they're going along to get along. The Buddhists we encounter are mostly people who got where they are by swimming against society's tide. We don't see a representative cross-section of Buddhists at all levels as we might if we lived in a "Buddhist" society, where so many people worship the Buddha they meet on the road, and where meditation practice is an anomaly reserved for the few. Imagine how different Christianity would look if the only Christians we met were mystics! Holy rollers, televangelists, much of the clergy and 99 percent of church-goers would be out of the picture. Once I got really serious about Christianity (which came about in part by seriously studying Buddhism), "original sin" to use your example, looks very different than what's taught in catechism.
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