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.
Would you agree that the tolerance of themes in Eastern Philosophy in the average Anglo-American Philosophy Dept. would be slight given the general bias towards the analytic tradition. Being and Nothingness whether in French or Pali are perhaps equally spurned as ‘not even wrong’. Not any sort of Continental then. That is my not very well informed impression.
What is the Buddhist position on magic? Wouldn’t it vary across the sects? I thought that the Buddha forbade the practice of magic which implies that there is something to be practiced. Is there a distinction between low and vulgar thaumaturgy and spontaneous compassionate miracles?
Yes, I think that’s mostly right; I talked a little about the point in my first post. Many analytic philosophers (following models of natural science, to which history is viewed as basically irrelevant) aren’t even interested in the history of their own tradition, let alone anybody else’s. So in large philosophy departments you’ll often find the one token Continental philosopher, often as isolated as the token Marxist in an economics department, and maybe one token Asianist. But not enough to do graduate work with, for sure.
As for magic, well, it’s complicated. There were certain practices, like fortune telling, that the Buddha is said to have prohibited in the early texts (the Pali suttas). But the same texts speak of magic powers that one can attain through high spiritual achievement – the trick is you’re not supposed to let anyone know about them, basically because it’s showing off. And certainly throughout the history of Buddhism people have had practices we would consider magical (like wearing amulets displaying the Buddha or revered Buddhist teachers in the hopes of warding off bad fortune). That’s the basic summary, but beyond that you’re quite right that it varies by sect: there’s a lot more magic in the tantric traditions, for example, which have influenced Tibetan Buddhism. Which is part of the point I was hoping to make in this post: the ideas of the suttas, in which magic’s role is real but limited and the goal is to seek one’s own liberation, may be closer in the end to Greek and Roman Epicureanism than they are to Tibetan tantra or Japanese Pure Land Buddhism.