American University philosopher Karin Meyers made an important contribution to Buddhist philosophical studies with her 2016 essay “The damned topics of Buddhist philosophy“. The essay (available free online) has never been formally published, though it clearly deserves to be: when I met Meyers recently, she noted that people have already discussed and commented on it more than any other piece she ever wrote. While I disagree with Meyers’s substantive conclusions, I think she takes an often methodologically wrong-headed field and points it in the right direction.
Meyers calls “damned” those Buddhist topics that would typically be called “supernatural” (a term that she dislikes but I have no problem with myself). That is, “topics such as rebirth, karma, non-human beings and realms, siddhis, devotional and contemplative practices, and even aspects of Buddhist soteriology.” And she claims:
Although such topics are described and analyzed by textual historians and anthropologists, they tend to be avoided or dismissed by philosophers. This is not because they are inherently immune to rational scrutiny or lack philosophical relevance. Instead, I suspect it is because of an implicit and often unacknowledged allegiance to certain modernist assumptions—namely, physicalism and epistemologies that privilege a cognicentric empiricism restricted to the five senses, as well as rationalistic and disembodied ways of knowing. Basic Buddhist doctrines and traditional forms of Buddhism directly challenge these assumptions.
Meyers is absolutely right that these topics are not immune to rational scrutiny. Many might not survive such scrutiny. But that’s all the more reason for them to receive it! And too often, they do not.
Consider the claim (of the Tibetan historian Butön) that when Śāntideva recited verse IX.34 of the Bodhicaryāvatāra, he levitated into the air and disappeared, with the remainder of the text being recited by a disembodied voice. This claim deserves discussion and examination. On a historical level – one which would be disputed by few scholars – the claim points us to the enormous importance that Tibetan scholars attached to this verse, the significance of a nondual metaphysics to his thought, in ways I had once avoided.
But Butön is also making a particular factual claim – that a human being did levitate into the air and turn himself invisible in front of an audience of spectators – and that necessarily implies a more general factual claim, that levitating and turning invisible in this way is a thing which at least some human beings can do. (Siddhi, a term Meyers uses above, is a typical term used to refer to such super-powers.) If we are to regard medieval Tibetan scholars seriously as partners in scholarship, rather than denigrate them with patronizing embarrassment the way one might with a four-year-old, then we must take such claims seriously.
Now it is crucial that to reject the claim is indeed to take it seriously – if one does so with engagement, evidence, argument. What refuses to take the claim seriously is the simple dodging of the question, avoiding the question as if it just doesn’t matter. It does matter. Being able to turn invisible or levitate would be extremely useful to human beings in a wide variety of contexts. If it were actually possible to do that, that fact would be extremely important to know!
It is also true that one does not need to investigate every question that is related to one’s research; we scholars are all too familiar with the way related questions can expand drastically and crowd out the core questions that concern us most. It is possible to take a purely ethnographic or textual approach, where the only question one is investigating is about what the people one is studying happen to believe, whether or not those beliefs are true. One can leave the questions of their truth to other scholars in related fields.
The problem is that too often those questions of truth get shunted to the side, even in contexts – philosophical, ethical – where they are relevant. I recall a workshop in my Harvard grad-school days twenty years ago that was supposedly on the question of “the Real” in religious studies, led by a visiting scholar who studied spirit mediums. I found myself frustrated because the scholar seemed to keep dodging and stalling on the question of whether spirit mediums’ purported abilities were real. That is: can they actually talk to the dead? If the scholar had simply been willing to answer that she didn’t think so, I would have been fine with it, but she never was willing to go there. I tried to point out: my grandmother died the year before I was born. If these mediums really could talk to the dead as they said they could, that’s a huge deal, because I want to talk to her!
I don’t think that they can, but I’m interested to hear debate on that, and for that reason I really welcome what Meyers brings to the table. Because while I’m much more of a skeptic than Meyers is, I agree with her on one really big thing: the one thing that the question of supernaturalism is not, is unimportant or irrelevant to Buddhist studies. I’ve put a lot of time and effort into the project of developing a conception of karma that doesn’t depend on the supernatural; there’d be no need to do any of that if I thought that the traditional supernatural conception were true, that we are reborn at death in a way shaped by our ethical conduct in the present life.
In the context of Buddhist studies, the most important “damned topics” are those questions of karma and rebirth – important because a great deal of traditional Buddhist thought have hinged on the answers to them. There’s a lot more to say about those questions and answers, and I’ll turn to them next time.
Interesting material here. I don’t know how to think about such things, but cannot dismiss them, out of hand. When I was much younger, elders would discuss/debate the notion of “speaking in tongues”. As a skeptical kid, I was not convinced one way or the other. Many years passed. I grew up, had a tolerable career and did not think about the idea much. A couple of summers ago, I met an unusual person and we struck an acquaintance. She is a dozen or so years younger than me; a little crazy; a bit eccentric.
I don’t recall what we were talking about, on one particular day, but something set her off. She became agitated and started a monologue in some indeterminate language. I let her go on because she was in a trance like state. Louise (not her real name) was speaking in tongues. After a few minutes, she calmed down and we continued our conversation. I had never heard anything like it. We never discussed it, and, are still friends. So, one just never knows…does one?
That incident seems relatively easy to dismiss as her just being crazy. It would be less so if someone there could have determined that what she was speaking was a real language that she would have had no way of knowing. (Or, for that matter, if she had levitated.)
REMARK:
I am relieved that Louise did not levitate from her chair that day. That would have really creeped me out! You know?
You are probably right. That said, you and I, I think, had very different religious upbringings. As a young boy, I was admonished to receive and accept certain beliefs and lore around things such as revivals, holy rollers, and the miracle epiphany of salvation. As I approached teenage years, I came to understand the controlling significance of this dogma and became rebellious towards all of it. Eventually, elders gave up on both me and my brother. Eventually, my attitudes towards moral philosophy began to gel.. Our parents were of mixed emotions over this. Our father feared we were, uh, lost. Our mother looked at it differently, accepting that we were not swayed by social dogma and pleased we wished to develop our own beliefs and ideas about reality. Our father died, convinced his sons were lost to the world. Our mother smiled and was (I think) proud that we would find our own ways, making mistakes and enjoying successes, in our own time—just like ordinary people. They were decent, very different people.
Way off topic:
There are reports now concerning weather conditions here. I understand that. I guess. But, these are no-reply prognistications, so, it does not matter what one thinks when communication is one-way only. Just wondered what you thought. Thoughts?
I hadn’t seen Karin Meyers’s paper “The damned topics of Buddhist philosophy” before, but what immediately strikes me now upon reading it is that it seems to assume a very academic and bookish conception of philosophy: Buddhist philosophy as an activity that scholars do with words, as opposed to “philosophy as a way of life”. To be fair, the quote from Jay Garfield that she uses to set the stage for her paper also makes this assumption.
I’m not uninterested in the kind of philosophy she’s talking about, but I’m not a scholar by vocation, and the primary site of Buddhist philosophy-as-a-way-of-life in my life is a US American (Japanese lineage) Soto Zen Buddhist sangha, where Meyers’s “damned topics” are very much talked about and taken seriously as part of the tradition, in a way open to multiple interpretations but always taken as a means for understanding Buddhist practice more deeply. Truth is important in that context but the truth criteria are not exactly the same as in scholarship. We do a segaki ceremony that involves offering food to hungry ghosts. Interpret “hungry ghosts” as you wish, but any interpretation is beside the point if it’s not deepening your understanding of Buddhist practice. I’m not saying that Meyers is wrong; she’s just talking about a particular milieu, and there are other milieus where Buddhist philosophy is focused on practice as a way of life, and where her recommended “participatory engagement” is the whole point of being there.
Meyers also seems to presume that “Buddhist cultures” have an understanding of the “damned topics” that is radically different from that of Westerners, but that’s not necessarily so. Soto Zen philosophy (as a way of life) was already modernized in Japan before it was popularized in the US among people like me who were not raised Buddhist, so the duality modern/traditional doesn’t correspond to the duality Western philosophy/Japanese Buddhist philosophy. Here again Meyers is focused on a particular milieu, but I think it’s a mistake not to acknowledge what we could call Japanese Buddhist modernism, though that modernism doesn’t align with Meyers’s list of “certain modernist assumptions”.
A paper that comes to mind that helped me make better sense of a traditional Buddhist concept, merit transfer, that I hadn’t thought much about, or even thought was worth thinking much about, is Steven G. Smith’s “What is merit, that it can be transferred?”, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 90(3), 2021, 191–207. It’s a great example of a seemingly “damned topic” that can be interpreted in a beautifully undamning way, and good modern Buddhist teachers know how to do such interpretations with excluding people who have alternative interpretations.
The last sentence of my comment should say “without excluding people who have alternative interpretations”.
Scratch my off-topic remark of June 16. Nathan’s comments are far more interesting. Practice, as a way of life, is paramount. Practice, in any other context, is window dressing, or, facade. And that is the point. Or, one of them, anyway.
Thanks for this piece. It’s an interesting topic I contemplate a lot. There is a great deal in buddhism, an enormous amount of different topics, and there is this tendency to ‘put aside’ and mine out what is ‘valuable’. But the question to be asked is what this really means and what it really implies. It needs to be considered especially for the ritual aspect – what exactly do rituals of devotion do and imply for the philosophy? It’s very easy to cast these aside into the realm of anthropology.
But while I don’t agree that ritual is what religion ‘is’, and don’t really believe in category of religion, ritual has a linkage to scripture and the two form a larger system. The monk is a magician; the king is an emanation of a bodhisattva. What does that imply in the larger philosophical view? I was reading Zhiyi’s address to doubts about Pure Land – he notes at one point that devotion to Amida Buddha is preferred over Maitreya because Maitreya is in Tushita Heaven and is much harder to get to without succumbing to the pleasures of heaven, whilst Amida’s pure land is accessible by way of his vow much more easily.
What does this soteriological logic actually imply for philosophy? I have had this feeling with a lot of studies of Eastern philosophy. I agree with many scholars that we can’t take the Dao as just a mystic concept or Confucius as some kind of dispenser of hoary wisdoms. These are philosophers. But their philosophy had implications which totally disagree with ours, and they were present in a universe that they saw very differently! Confucian Ru is a ritual system, and that ritual and rite is core to much of how it functions. The synchronicity with heaven is essential.
There’s often a remark that Daoism as a magical system and Daoism as a philosophy are separate. Feng Yulan delineated this way and it and serves as a way to restore the reputation of the Dao as a philosophy to the West, not this other grody stuff. But doesn’t this, in and of itself, imply a level of embarrassment over this ‘other stuff’? Why don’t we take it seriously instead as a part of the system, even if it is to question it? What is implied by the belief that harmony to the Dao can produce immortality? What does that mean for the philosophy?
It’s something I notice in discussions of Buddhist political philosophy. I think Buddhism is extremely connected to political philosophy but all that philosophy is tied to an unfamiliar series of assumptions that scholars can struggle with if they don’t have the historical or anthropological background, or because it’s uncomfortable. For example: What does the repetitive emergence of millenarian Maitreya cults in China imply about Buddhist theories of history? There’s often a statement that Buddhism is ahistorical or operates in cycles disconnected with eschatology. But Maitreya’s arrival (interestingly, introduced thru Mithras in Gandhara) produces an interpretable telos, an Event, into this cyclic time. The theory of dharma decline (mo fa/mappo) creates the possibility of change and transformation, or justifies stagnancy; several Japanese Kamakura schools used dharma decline as an ideological and soteriological justification for their reformation. Pure Land in general, does. It’s present across different yanas. What does it mean to take dharma decline seriously rather than just dismiss it as a superstition? Is it justifiable? If not, why not? Is there something Buddhism can contribute to a concept of history in this theorizing?
In particular I simply don’t think Buddhist political philosophy makes sense without the Chakravarti king. If you try to look at monasticism alone for evidence of ‘engagement’, as scholars sometimes do, they run into the fundamental difficulty that engagement in this way is fundamentally part of samsara. But then, what are we to make with the constant statements from monks and chroniclers of kings upholding the dharma? Of killing enemies with skillful means? With interventions by temples into political affairs? It is easy enough to dismiss it all with a cynical hermaneutics as political expediency and royal ideology. But if we take it seriously, what does it actually mean that kings who evidently violate basic precepts are then hailed as bodhisattvas? That there is so much concern about worldly affairs? What does it actually mean to uphold dharma? What justifies the intervention of monks into court politics? What about their beliefs permits them to do this? Why did both Japan and Korea countries converge on a Confucian-supported ‘division of cloister and court’ in the late medieval and early modern period?
It seems to me that anti-political monasticism actively needs the support of a very political kingship. The anti-politics is shielded by the politics; they are symbiotic, and are all legs of the dharma. These are different stages on the path and not mutually exclusive philosophies. And so the Way of Kings is not really separate but actively generates merit for the king who upholds the dharma, and that merit-transfer is also performed by the monastic communities he supports and defends. If there is ever to be a western monasticism it would have to operate on very different premises and probably function more like crowd-funded academies, publishing houses, mutual aid societies, or art collectives. Why? If we don’t accept the premise anymore that dana provides boundless merit to prevent descent into a hell realm, then we have the same problem for traditional justifications of monasticism that the Catholic Church ran into when both kings and enough of the populace lost interest in supporting monastic communities because they no longer believed the justification for them. Monasteries weren’t supported because they were being nice – laymen thought there was an urgent need to give alms to generate merit.
Confucians took all of this very seriously when arguing with Buddhists because the position of Buddhists in the Tang Dynasty threatened them. They confronted the Buddhists on their own terms and attacked them comprehensively. It would do for both critics and apologists of Buddhism to take it as seriously as they did, even if the project utterly transforms the dharma. Otherwise, the whole thing becomes a kind of curated museum artifact (if we decline to judge) or an empty commodity to be reproduced for the purpose of selling an aesthetic (if all we want is to preserve the form without content).
Someone like Evan Thompson is pessimistic this can be done; I disagree. It will just take time and effort, and the plural modern buddhisms (sahāyana, perhaps, for the overall tendency to pull to concern for this world and mundane questions above all!) is immature. There’s been some major changes in the last twenty years because of the internet making so many scriptures more accessible, and exposing communities to one another. We’ll see what happens next!
Cetashwayo, you would be interested in reading, if you haven’t already, Amod’s earlier post, “Bultmann for Buddhists”, which starts with a Buddhist paraphrase of theologian Rudolf Bultmann on the topic of dharma decline as a myth.
I would emphasize, similarly to what I said in my previous comment, that Japanese Buddhist philosophers already asked many of the kinds of questions you asked; for example, Masao Abe already engaged with Bultmann and other Western theologians and philosophers in conjunction with Buddhist philosophy. So if you’re perplexed by the gulf between ancient Buddhist ideas and modern ones, it may help to look up what people like him already thought about these issues in the 20th century. They already commenced the rethinking of Buddhist philosophy in a way that you suggested needs to be done. We are all “syncretic selves” (a term from Jeffrey Carlson that I mentioned in a comment on a previous post here), mixing together different traditions (however you define tradition), and that’s as true for Japanese and American Buddhists as for anyone else. There are no pure religions, just as there are no pure races of people.
Your comments about monastic decline are just as relevant to Japanese family-run temples. A recent Pew Research Center report, “Buddhism’s Recent Decline in East Asia” shows the extent of the decline in quantitative and interview data. They quote a Korean college student as saying that she does not see the point of religious practices: “I tend to believe in science more than anything spiritual, so I don’t believe in things that you can’t see.” (I’m with her on science, but I see the point of certain religious practices!) That attitude mirrors the reported quantitative Buddhist decline in China, South Korea, and Japan. Pew reported a year earlier on long-term Christian decline in the US, so declining participation is not an issue unique to Buddhism.
I am not crying about religious decline in either the Buddhist or the Christian case. I suspect that if wisdom communities have sufficient wisdom and creative intelligence to understand how to “create value” for people (to use an economic term but not with a narrowly economic sense) and communicate how they create that value (i.e. to communicate “the point of religious practices”), then they will continue to attract participants. If comparable value is being created elsewhere for people, then older wisdom communities are no longer needed. But if important value is being lost with religious decline, then wisdom communities have a responsibility to reinvent themselves to keep that value alive.
I’m a bit perplexed by your belief in the importance of the Chakravarti king, a term that I’ve never heard in my decades of participation in Soto Zen the US. To the extent that it is political, the political philosophy of the US-based Soto Zen Buddhist Association seems to be pretty standard US liberal democratic-republican, no different in that regard from more populous liberal religious groups in the US such as liberal Christians or Jews. But post-WWII, Soto Zen was being imported to the US from a country with a liberal parliamentary political system.
Hi Nathan,
Thanks for the link to the Bultmann article.
When I talk about mappo I’m not really talking about the actual literal decline of religious adherence or attendance in Buddhism. Mappo emerged as a concept in societies which had large Buddhist communities. When Shinran made assertions on the basis of Mappo in his works he was making claims about karmic attainments and the metaphysical decline of the dharma, not whether or not there was participation in Buddhism – this wouldn’t matter if the Buddhism was corrupt or incorrect. It’s a theory of history where the dharma goes through inevitable stages of growth, decline, and decay, and then rejuvenation by the eschatological arrival of a new Buddha. That’s what is at play here. It’s not a factual statement but an eschatological one and has implications which are much broader than “is Buddhism in decline in a self-identity sense”. It’s an accusation of theological failure and an ontological fact simultaneously. That’s what is more interesting about it as an idea of a religion with a built-in pessimism of its own ability to survive in the present era, and that pessimism doesn’t necessarily imply survival of an old community – dharma decline was used as an argument for revivalist reform.
And to be clear I use the chakravarti concept more broadly as a stand-in for the dharma king symbiosis with the temples. Buddhists would refer to the shogun as a kami or holy king as a figure of praise, for example. This was coterminous with the Qing appropriation of the Chakravartin title during the wars with the Dzungar for legitimacy in Tibet. This is not well-known to Japanese Buddhists today because the Shogunate’s intimate relationship with temple authorities, and the overtaxation of families to support temples, led to such a vicious and explosive reaction that it practically destroyed institutional Buddhism in Japan and led to an overall reorientation of Japanese Buddhism following this time to be either private or openly supportive of the Imperial line. Which says something about the difficulties of traditional Buddhist politics and its linkage with royal (or in this case, Shogunal), authority.
There was a Buddhist political philosophy, it was just unabashedly tied to courtly authority and kingship. g. When this was destroyed across the Buddhist world, there was a vacuum in Buddhist political thought which was never fully resolved in more liberal modernist movements – people either adhere to a private religion and a secular public politics or try and merge it with a more left-wing Engaged Buddhism which has a genealogy from Evangelical Christianity and radical politics of the early 20th century (Taixu was a Kropotkinite Anarchist as a young man, for example). That’s a very different story and is in my view also not a fully matured tradition with a number of theoretic problems, as Amod Lele has written about before.
I don’t think that the other side of this coin, the nationalist Buddhist movements like those in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, the monks who gave apologetics for Imperial Japan, or the well-known problems with the establishment sangha in Thailand where dharma kingship still exists in theory, are understandable without this history in mind. These aren’t aberrations unthinkable in Buddhist thought and were/are defended on Buddhist terms.
I think Japanese Buddhist studies has done great work, to be clear. Much of that work has only become available in English in the last 30-40 years thanks to the efforts of the Kuroda Institute and Pure Land Buddhist Studies to publish studies. I’m especially enamored with Jacqueline Stone’s work on Original Enlightenment, which was also relevant to the extremely live dispute in the 80s and 90s over Buddha Nature in the country, which was prompted by questioning by Soto Monks!
Fascinating, thanks!
But, to clarify, when I said “your comments about monastic decline” I was referring not to mappō but instead to your statement,
Nevertheless, I am not super familiar with the Buddhist myth of dharma ages, so I appreciated your further commentary on it. I’ve heard it mentioned in passing in Soto Zen talks, but Dōgen apparently completely rejected the theory of mappō (and other dharma ages) in contrast to other Kamakura era innovators, which is probably why it’s not taught as a practice-relevant teaching in Soto Zen. And if Dōgen already dismissed the theory as a superstition in the 13th century CE, it would be surprising if American Soto Zen Buddhists suddenly found a reason to take it seriously in the 21st century!
Ah, I see.
Yes, one of the values of sectarianism when held to academic standards is that these are not ‘dead doctrines’ but live disagreements with important implications, and so you can get some interesting and important arguments back and forth. Zen unsurprisingly is generally opposed to the concept of Mappo given its priorization of practice and lineage, which mappo suggests is no longer feasible because of the degeneration of the dharma.
It’s something Lele has put well in past writing – sectarianism is not necessarily a negative. If you take something seriously you want to get it right. There are 84,000 dharma gates but whether or not a practice is good or wise or proper is an issue of paramount importance, not a curiosity.
And if a scholar wants to take Buddhism seriously, as many do, then that approach has real value.
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