Love of All Wisdom

Skholiast’s blog pointed me to an excellent review of a collection of Marx’s and Engels’s writings on “religion.” (The author goes by “pomonomo2003″ in his review; his own very interesting website reveals his name to be Joseph Martin.) The topic is notable today, at a time when the militant atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens grab the headlines – and those whom one might expect to be their staunchest allies, Marxists like Terry Eagleton, have instead been among their sharpest critics.

It is likely to the Communist regimes of the 20th century that we owe Marx’s reputation as a despiser of religion. Stalin and Mao ruthlessly persecuted Christians and Buddhists, and found scriptural support for their actions in Marx’s famous claim in his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” that religion is “the opium of the people” or “the opiate of the masses.” From there it seems a short step to Mao’s infamous claim to the Dalai Lama that “religion is poison,” as the Cultural Revolution burned so much of Tibet’s great heritage.

But hold on just a second. Martin’s review points to an important insight that blew me away when I first heard it in Geoff Waite’s class on Marx, Nietzsche and Freud: opium, to someone of Marx’s time, was not the addictive danger that it seems to us, or to the post-Opium War Chinese. (continue reading…)

One of the most important anthropological studies to be conducted in the past century is Horace Miner’s (very short) 1956 classic Body Ritual among the Nacirema. If you haven’t read it, you owe it to yourself to follow the link now and examine Miner’s penetrating insights into one of the most unusual cultural groups yet to be studied by ethnographers. Please do read the essay before you read the rest of this blog post, as the post won’t be very helpful without it. (continue reading…)

Brit Hume of Fox News has been lighting up the Buddhist blogosphere lately, with this criticism of adulterous golfer Tiger Woods:

“The extent to which he can recover, seems to me, depends on his faith. He’s said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So, my message to Tiger would be, ‘Tiger, turn your faith, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.”

Shortly afterwards, in an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor, Hume attempted to defend his comments with the claim that his point was about Christianity rather than about Buddhism: (continue reading…)

“Religion” and “science” are typically held to be opposing worldviews, especially in the United States where they identify two sides of a cultural divide (such that Jesus fish and Darwin fish are as common on American cars as are bumper stickers). For those of us who are trying to learn from both, it often seems like a relief to hear compromises like the late Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of “non-overlapping magisteria” (abbreviated NOMA). Briefly, in effect, Gould says that there is no need for conflict between science and religion, because science deals with questions of fact and religion with questions of value (or of “moral meaning”). Ken Wilber puts forward a slightly more sophisticated version of the non-overlapping magisteria view:

Simply imagine what would happen if we indeed said that modern physics support mysticism. What happens, for example, if we say that today’s physics is in perfect agreement with Buddha’s enlightenment? What happens when tomorrow’s physics supplants or replaces today’s physics (which it most definitely will)? Does poor Buddha then lose his enlightenment? You see the problem. If you hook your God to today’s physics, then when that physics slips, that God slips with it. (from Grace and Grit, p. 20)

Gould’s claim would be a great way of resolving the conflicts between science and religion – if it were true. The problem is that it isn’t. (continue reading…)

It was a delight to attend the American Academy of Religion conference this year – and not only because it was in Montréal, possibly my favourite place in the world. There were many interesting presentations and conversations. I was particularly happy to attend a session of the Buddhist Critical-Constructive Reflection group, a group whose area of interest is quite dear to my heart. (A little while ago I published a paper on constructive Buddhist studies in a book for Deepak Heritage Press.)

I was particularly excited by Rita M. Gross’s presentation, on the connection between academic historical work and Buddhist communities. Gross noted that in many Western “dharma centres” – centres of Yavanayāna Buddhist practice, such as monasteries and meditation centres – Buddhists uncritically accept the claims of Buddhist texts, even on historical matters. Most startlingly, they’ll accept the claim of the Mahāyāna sūtras that they were preached by the historical Buddha in his lifetime: if a sūtra says it was a discourse given by the historical Buddha in Rājagṛha, India, then it must be exactly that. (continue reading…)

What does it mean to respect another culture, or the people and ideas within that culture? In the prevailing climate of contemporary academic religious studies, it seems taken as a given that one should refrain from criticizing other cultures and their beliefs and ideas. Older Buddhologists like Edward Conze are viewed as an embarrassment, with their strong opinions, positive and negative, about Buddhism and India. We are told not to judge other cultures the way Conze did. Sometimes the refusal of judgement derives from a positivistic desire to ape natural science, with an “objectivity” that denies reference to value; but more often, making judgements about other cultures seems imperialist and disrespectful, a form of Orientalism or even racism.

This refusal to make judgements seems to me to underlie the currently fashionable “performance theory” in studies of ritual, and religious studies more generally. The approach here (usually drawing on the speech-act theory of J.L. Austin) is to remove attention from ideas and truth claims and direct it instead toward social functions: don’t look at what people’s claims say, look at what the claims do in their social context. (As a former sociologist it’s curious to me that the hot and trendy methodology in religious studies – look at functions rather than ideas – looks very similar to the sociological functionalism of Talcott Parsons, an approach that sociologists now discuss only to explain how discredited it is.) One former colleague of mine, describing his studies of Vedic texts, explained his approach as follows: “What do these texts mean when they say ‘gold causes jaundice’? They can’t really believe that gold causes jaundice! There must be something else going on here, something that it does to say such a thing.” As far as I understand it, much of this performance theory is motivated by a desire to respect other cultures. Surely people can’t be so stupid as to mean these bizarrely unscientific things they say; they must be saying it for another reason.

It seems to me, though, that this view gets it exactly backwards. (continue reading…)

Justin Whitaker’s blog pointed me to some interesting recent discussions of what it means to be a Buddhist, among Buddhist bloggers mostly of the Yavanayāna persuasion. Blogger Marcus (no last name provided) threw down a strongly worded gauntlet last week: “The fact is, if you are serious about Buddhism, you don’t drink. The Buddha’s words couldn’t be clearer.”

I have at least two objections to Marcus’s claim about alcohol. First, we fail at our chosen life goals all the time; we may be serious about following Buddhism, believe that therefore we shouldn’t drink, and still drink anyway. That may make us bad at Buddhism, but it doesn’t make us unserious. Second, matters are often not so cut and dried. It would be hard to say that Śāntideva was not serious about Buddhism – he became a lifelong monk and tried hard to live according to the words of the Buddha as he understood them. But he actually advocates (following the Mahāyāna Ugraparipṛcchā Sūtra, which at least claims to be the word of the Buddha) that one give alcohol to alcohol drinkers, as a way of winning their trust. (I discuss this point briefly the fourth chapter of my dissertation, and am writing an article on it in more detail.)

On the specific matter of alcohol, I tend to disagree with Marcus. But the discussion among Buddhist bloggers centred around bigger issues, where I think Marcus was quite right. Kyle of The Reformed Buddhist (who also appears to go without a last name) made a number of objections to Marcus, some of which I think are valid, some not so. But at the core of his reaction seems to be his first sentence: “*Sigh* the whole you’re no Buddhist thing again.” [emphases his] He seems in this post to take offence to the idea that someone could declare someone else to not be a Buddhist, or not be a serious Buddhist. In this he would seem to be agreeing with a slightly earlier post by Scott Mitchell of The Buddha Is My DJ. Mitchell opposes the claim made by some Buddhists (presumably including Marcus?) that their Buddhism is better or (or more “authentic”) than others’: “feel free to define yourself and your Buddhist practice. But stop doing it as a means to differentiate yourself from some “other” kind of Buddhist.”

Here I’ve got issues. (continue reading…)

You can’t go very far in cross-cultural philosophy without quickly running into the category of “religion” – indeed it’s already come up a number of times on this blog. When I was deciding where to do a doctorate studying the questions of cross-cultural philosophy, the most appropriate places seemed to be departments of religious studies; the departments where I’ve taught after graduation were religious studies as well. (This was for a variety of reasons, but the most important and obvious is that very few philosophy departments make any room for non-Western philosophy.)

But to what extent does the category of “religion” help us think cross-culturally – especially the idea of “different religions”? My suspicion is that it hurts more than it helps, because it puts up unnecessary barriers to inquiry; it discourages conversations across the boundaries of traditions.

Now let me be clear: I don’t at all buy the view that all religions are the same – or as Kevin Smith had Chris Rock put it in Dogma, “It doesn’t matter what you have faith in; what matters is that you have faith.” This is a dangerously simplistic move; one can supply countless historical examples of people who have had faith in the wrong thing. (Wilfred Cantwell Smith took a more sophisticated version of this position, but still, to my mind, a wrong one.) The differences in people’s beliefs and practices matter, and they matter a lot.

Still, one should ask: which differences matter? We tend to focus on the differences across traditions – the boxes one checks on the census, the differences between Christianity and Buddhism, say. But the more important differences may be within traditions. It seems to me that on many of the most important questions – Should we live ascetic lives or worldly ones? Should we ever lie, or kill? Should we be politically active? Should we love our own families more, or the whole world? – most “religions” have members taking positions on both sides. The difference between a liberal Canadian Anglican and an Engaged Buddhist, for example, seems to me much smaller than the difference between that same Anglican and an anti-gay Anglican African who believes in magic.

No post this coming Sunday, as I’m moving to a new apartment then.

My father, Jayant Lele, has often liked to say of Hinduism that it doesn’t exist. His view made a lot of sense to me when I first travelled around India – first encountering claims that Hindus were vegetarians because of their deep respect for animals, and then visiting the temple in Calcutta where the priest suggested I stick around to watch them sacrifice a goat. Could there be anything in common here?

I’ve moderated my own views on the subject a little. I think there is such a thing as Hinduism now; it’s just a relatively recent invention. The first person to use the word “Hinduism” was Rammohun Roy, a modern reformer who wanted to see a modernized, politically active Hinduism. I have no problem using the term “Hinduism” and “Hindu” to refer to modern Hindus who follow Roy’s example (like Gandhi, Aurobindo, the Arya Samaj, or Swami Vivekananda). Hinduism, then, is something closely parallel to Yavanayāna Buddhism: a modern reform movement that can be intellectually honest as long as it recognizes itself as such.

Before that, things get hazy. True, Muslims in India referred to non-Muslim Indians as “Hindu.” But it was a generic term for exactly that: non-Muslim Indians. When “Hinduism” is used to mean anything other than the 19th-century reform movement, it means little more than “miscellaneous Indian traditions”: Indians who are not Muslim or Christian, and in more recent cases not Buddhists or Jains or Sikhs. (Muslim chroniclers like al-Biruni would have been startled to hear Buddhists called anything other than Hindu.)

I’m fairly comfortable, then, in saying that premodern “Hinduism” doesn’t really exist. But let me be clear on this point, as it’s one of the things that’s got me into trouble with Hinduism’s would-be defenders before: this isn’t a criticism. I like the fact that in early India, “religious” boundaries were so porous: the same king might pay homage to Buddhist monks and Śaivite bhakta mystics. Early India is comparable more to “Greek and Roman religion,” or perhaps to “Chinese religion,” than it is to Judaism or Christianity: a set of philosophies, practices, supernatural beings moving around between traditions. If you were going to give yourself to a certain idea wholeheartedly (as a monk would do), your loyalty might have needed to be more absolute – as it would have been in Greece for those who wanted to follow Epicurus in his garden. For most people, though, it wasn’t, and the point strikes me as something worth learning from now. Wisdom can be found in many places, and we do well to look for it in as many of those places as possible, rather than refusing to look at ideas and practices that aren’t Christian – or are Christian, depending on where our allegiance has been declared.

Over the past decade, the academic study of Indian traditions has become heavily politicized. For those who haven’t been following the issue: basically, some people of Indian origin (usually Hindu), in India and elsewhere, have started finding out what North American religionists are saying about the traditions they recognize as their own; and it outrages them. Their most visible leader is Rajiv Malhotra, a New Jersey-based businessman with pockets deep enough to get his views a hearing. Most of the time the flashpoints for the critics are around sex: they are outraged at frankly sexual depictions of the tradition they follow and the gods and leaders they revere. The outrage is not so much about the obviously sexual parts of the tradition – the Khajuraho temples or the Kāma Sūtra – so much as it is about Freudian psychoanalytic depictions of beloved figures in the tradition, such as the elephant god Gaṇeśa (Ganesh), the military hero Shivaji or the nineteenth-century mystic Ramakrishna. There have been calls to ban or even the offending books (respectively by Paul Courtright, James Laine and my friend Jeff Kripal). Sometimes these calls have effectively succeeded, with Courtright’s Indian publisher removing his book from circulation in India. As a result of these controversies, a group of activists from the right-wing Hindu Shiv Sena party broke into the offices of Shrikant Bahulkar – one of the kindest, gentlest and most generous men I have ever had the fortune of working with – and blackened his face, as well as destroying priceless manuscripts at the institution where he works, solely because James Laine had thanked Bahulkar in the acknowledgements of his book. (continue reading…)