My friend and colleague James Shields has just started a new site called the Radical Buddhism Project, “an independent digital humanities archive and research portal dedicated to recovering, preserving, and contextualizing the historical intersections of Buddhist doctrine with radical left-wing socio-political thought.” It collects information on Buddhist radicals in countries across Asia.
I’ve often been at pains to point out that classical Buddhism often opposed political engagement. (Others like Brian Victoria and Michael Jerryson have called attention to something that should have been obvious, that Buddhism has frequently been deployed in a right-wing direction as well.) That said, traditions flourish by being reinvented and extended in new ways, from Chinese Tiantai to medical mindfulness. I think the radical Buddhists on the site are creating an interesting form of modernized Buddhism that’s worth knowing about, and I’m excited that James has put the site together.
What I don’t understand is the use of the term radical. Why should it be associated with specifically left wing deployments of Buddhism? Aren’t far right deployments of Buddhism also radical? When ‘radical’ is tacked onto Christianity or Buddhism by a certain type of academic, the connotation is largely positive. Buddhists and Christian who stand for social causes certain academics endorse are radicals who resist authority. Romantic. One can even find scholars proposing radical forms of Christianity or Buddhism in academic publications. Yet, when radical is prefixed to Islam the connotation is usually extremely negative, regardless of the academic’s political leanings. What is the word radical doing here? In using it, are we endorsing the notion that certain religions are somehow better than others, that simply a root or intense form of Christianity or Buddhism is congruous with a certain strand of socio-political moralism, whereas a return to origins for Islam or Judaism is not? Might this in fact suggest something about Christianity and Buddhism that might be thorn in the eye of certain self-professed radicals? That Western academia is willing to entertain Christian and Buddhist radicalism precisely because these religions are deemed non-problematic and non-threatening and if that is the case, exactly how radical can a radical Buddhism be?
Those are good questions. Some of the questions are rhetorical, perhaps, but I’m moved to answer anyway. I think there is a pretty simple answer, which is that the term radical is multivalent (“having or susceptible to many applications, interpretations, meanings, or values”), and contextual cues or rhetorical criticism can tell what the word means in context and why. The term can be used positively to characterize some aspect of an intellectual in-group or negatively to characterize some aspect of an intellectual out-group. (In the case of this project, the project overview makes clear that “radical” is short for “radical left-wing socio-political thought”, and “left-wing” is presumably the in-group or at least is in contrast to the relatively more conservative position of Buddhist institutions in some places.) So, because the term is multivalent, I don’t think it’s true that in using the term we are necessarily “endorsing the notion that certain religions are somehow better than others” as you suggested. It depends on how the term is used in context. The term can also be used neutrally, as in psychologists Bruce Ecker & Laurel Hulley’s term radical inquiry, which is their neologism for the case formulation process in their psychotherapy method, coherence therapy.
As an aside, I was reading some really interesting articles by James Mark Shields, the editor of the project, at the beginning of this year.