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?