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authenticity, Donald S. Lopez Jr., Henry Steel Olcott, Jātakas, S.N. Goenka, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Tiantai 天台
In my last post I spoke of Yavanayāna Buddhism, the new modernized, Western-influenced Buddhism (including Engaged Buddhism) that focuses on meditation and denies the supernatural. Many contemporary Buddhologists look at Yavanayāna with barely concealed disdain. Donald López’s article on belief in the volume Critical Terms for Religious Studies, for example, is a prolonged sneer toward the views of Henry Steel Olcott, the nineteenth-century reformer who made much of Sri Lankan Buddhism what it is today.
I’ve heard several fellow academics look at a Buddhism like Olcott’s or Walpola Rahula’s or even S.N. Goenka’s and snort “That’s not Buddhism!” And certainly, as noted, Yavanayāna Buddhism turns out quite different from what the Buddha actually taught. But few of these same academics are willing to turn around and say about East Asian Buddhism: that is not Buddhism. And yet, I would argue, East Asian Buddhist tradition has (at least at times) gone even further than North American Buddhism from anything that could be identified as the Buddha’s teaching. It’s not just Mahāyāna that I’m concerned about here; Mahāyāna Buddhism as such has its origins in the j?taka stories of the Buddha’s previous lives, which are some of the oldest Buddhist texts we know of. Rather, I think of doctrines like the Tiantai view that material things have a permanent and enduring nature – contradicting not only the classical Buddhist metaphysical view of non-self and non-essence, but also its ethical implications that material things are not worthy of our pursuit. If we’re willing to grant that Tiantai is legitimately Buddhist, I would argue, we cannot but do the same for Yavanayāna.
East Asian Buddhism is often seen as an “authentic” Buddhism in a way that Yavanayāna is not. But I’ve already posted my misgivings about the concept of authenticity. East Asian Buddhism seems authentic because people now are born into it, rather than choosing to join it as they do with Goenka; but we value what isn’t chosen because that’s what modern capitalism makes scarce. It doesn’t necessarily mean that that “authentic” Buddhism is a better path to follow; indeed, a certain romanticism may mislead us into thinking that nothing modern can possibly be good.
The more I think about this, the more I hold no principled opposition to the proliferation of new systems of thought from old ones. Buddhism has already done it a zillion times, why not do a zillion more. Our evaluation of the results should focus on their philosophical merit rather than on their “authenticity”.
There is something I am, however, very opposed to, which tends to go hand-in-hand with this proliferation. Namely, humans in general are very reluctant to credit themselves with innovations. This may seem a strange thing for a contemporary American to say, given our cult of individual creativity, but I think in practice Americans are little different from people in the numerous other cultures which give less discursive priority to individual innovation. Religions would not be able to proliferate “new versions” at all unless people habitually attributed their new thoughts to old authorities. My own experiences tend to persuade me that ignoring the difference between what the old authority says and what you or I say leads to huge amounts of intellectual sloppiness and is bad for considered philosophical and religious thought.
And so, for as long as my contemporary Western interlocutors think that their own thoughts, however incisive and cool, are coming from old authoritative texts…I’m going to correct them where appropriate. Of course that leads immediately to the question of why we value old authoritative texts to begin with, which sounds like great fodder for a blog thread!
Yes, that is an interesting question. Randall Collins in The Sociology of Philosophies has the interesting thesis of “innovation through conservatism”: that the people trying to defend old ideas in new contexts are the ones who really make the biggest philosophical innovations while doing so. Not sure if I buy that, but it is interesting food for thought.
I also agree with your caveat: it is important to notice the differences, or we don’t really learn anything from an old text or tradition, we just treat it as a mirror.
The question of the old and the new is an interesting one… especially given the fact that in the past 150 years or so in the West, newness has been valued far more than at probably any other time in human history. And yet we still find a need to justify some things on the grounds of their antiquity. Hmm…
Maybe here we can play around with yet another one-line solution to the problem of how to define “religion”. Is “religion” definable as the cultural domain in which it is least desirable, across cultures, to present oneself as an innovator?
Because early Chinese thought has so little theological content, I tend to be friendly to definitions of “religion” that focus on the nature and sources of authority, while leaving aside questions of substantive belief. I wonder what your reply would be to the contention that, even where a religious leader becomes famed for being “new” in some way, he often innovates by claiming that the beliefs of his surrounding religious climate distort the true meaning of an older tradition.
Well, I think this definition of “religion” runs into pretty much the same problems as all such: that there remain many phenomena we think of as “religious” which it doesn’t cover. I think here of the Marcionites, the early Christians who denied any Jewish inheritance to Christianity, presenting Jesus as doing something entirely new. Now, it’s been argued that the reason they died out was precisely because nobody could respect something entirely new – but that was characteristic of Roman culture in general.
In our time, by contrast, newness is valued, and organizations like Scientology and UFO cults thrive while presenting themselves as innovators. One could certainly say that they are not religions according to this definition; but then the definition presents no obvious advantages over, say, a definition of religion as theism that adds “therefore Theravāda Buddhism is not a religion.”
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