It’s hard for me to view B.R. Ambedkar as a real Buddhist, when he threw out the Four Noble Truths after getting to Buddhism by a mere process of elimination. But then, to a real Buddhist, it shouldn’t matter – at least it shouldn’t matter much – whether you are a “real Buddhist”! Buddhism has no more essence, no more svabhāva, than anything else does. What really matters is relieving suffering. What’s more important than his status as a Buddhist is that Ambedkar’s rejection of the Four Noble Truths deeply inhibits the relief of suffering – or rather, it has the potential to. Yet things might be a bit more complicated than that.
Dr. Ambedkar, the 20th-century leader of the lowest (“Dalit”, formerly “untouchable”) Indian caste groups, might be having a moment. In my Indian philosophy class in 2019, I wanted to have a segment on modern Indian philosophy, so I introduced the students to Gandhi and to Ambedkar as a critic of Gandhi – and was interested to see how the students absolutely loved Ambedkar. This year, I attended a fascinating workshop at Princeton on black Buddhist perspectives, where Ambedkar probably played a larger role than any other figure, even the Buddha himself. I’m glad to see black Americans discovering Ambedkar, since there are such close analogies between American race and Indian caste – already observed by Martin Luther King. A recent Economist article now mentions that even Narendra Modi is trying to proclaim Ambedkar as an ally for his militant Hindu agenda – a claim that should be laughable, given Ambedkar’s clearly expressed hostility to Hinduism, but an understandable attempt given Ambedkar’s huge popularity in India: there are now more statues of Ambedkar than any other Indian political figure, including Nehru, Gandhi and Aśoka.
I find Ambedkar overall a very admirable figure – both his personal story of rising through the ranks intellectually and becoming a leader, and his accomplishments. I also find his approach to caste more sensible than the American approach to race, one that Americans could learn a lot from. My late father admired him greatly. He is also a figure who makes me personally uncomfortable – perhaps in a good way.
One of the first things you’d learn in any Intro to Buddhism course is that most Buddhists alive today are part of the Mahāyāna tradition, in which one aspires to be a bodhisattva (and eventually become a buddha). Mahāyāna is the majority tradition because it’s the one practised in Japan, Korea, most of Vietnam, and China including Taiwan and Tibet. (Tibetans sometimes refer to their tradition as “Vajrayāna”, but they know that that’s still a form of Mahāyāna; there are no non-Mahāyāna Vajrayānists.) The name “Mahāyāna” (translated as “Great Vehicle”) is not in dispute; everybody agrees that that’s the preferred term. That part is easy.
Now here’s a question: what do you call all the other Buddhists?
Your typical intro Buddhism course gets around that question pretty easily, because there’s a simple answer if you’re exclusively talking about Buddhists today, in the modern era. As of about 1850, basically all the non-Mahāyāna Buddhists in the world identified as part of the Theravāda tradition, practised throughout Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia. The only Buddhists who might identify as something else are more recent modernist Buddhists of one stripe or another – hippyish Western Buddhists who don’t want to be pinned down to specifics, or perhaps B.R. Ambedkar’s Navayāna – and they understand they’re doing something new and a little weird. (“Navayāna” means “new yāna”.) In general, it’s pretty reasonable to say that the Buddhism existing in the past thousand years or so has been divided into the two traditions of Mahāyāna and Theravāda.
But go back before that, and things look very different.
A common paraphrase of H.L. Mencken says: “For every complex question there is an answer that is clear, simple – and wrong.” These days we see how helpful that quote is, when it is applied to the question “What is a woman?”
The OED’s first definition of “woman” is “an adult female human being”. Webster says “an adult female person”. It has become a commonplace on the right, of late, to feel so very clever by defining “woman” as “adult human female” – roughly but not exactly following the dictionary definitions – and then watch others struggle to provide their own definition. UK activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull put up billboards proclaiming as much; director Matt Walsh even made a whole movie with this definition as its thesis. The intended point of this exercise, of course, is to say that transgender women are not really women and that presumably this should be obvious. And while I do think it can reasonably be debated whether trans women are women, this particular piece of rhetoric does far more to illustrate foolishness on the anti-trans side than the pro-trans side.
If Nāgārjuna, the great Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher, is known for anything, it’s his doctrine of the emptiness (śūnyatā) of all things. But in his most famous work, Nāgārjuna warns his audience about emptiness: “Misperceived emptiness ruins a person of dull intelligence, like a snake wrongly grasped.” (MMK XXIV.11) If you know how to pick up a poisonous snake properly, you can move it to a place where it will do less harm, or even milk it to help produce an antidote. But if you don’t, then trying to grasp it will get you bitten and maybe killed. Likewise, if you perceive emptiness wrongly, that’s worse than not perceiving it at all.
If you’re going to try this, you’d better know what you’re doing. Adobe Stock image copyright by kampwit.Continue reading →
Buddhists have never agreed on an overall metaphysics. They have long agreed that prajñā – accurately seeing things according to the ultimate truth – is hugely important, but they differ greatly on what that ultimate truth is. The Theravāda Abhidhamma view says everything is ultimately reducible to smaller parts; the Madhyamaka says it’s ultimately just emptiness; the Yogācāra says it’s all mind; Chinese Huayan and Tiantai views have their own trippy takes.
It recently hit me, though, that there’s actually a huge point of metaphysical agreement among all the Buddhist schools: huge enough to mean that this disagreement about the ultimate isn’t what matters most to them. And that’s on the point I discussed last time: namely that what really matters in Buddhist metaphysics isn’t so much the nature of the ultimate. Rather, it’s breaking down the conventional!
While Buddhist schools have many different takes on metaphysics – on what the world really is – they all acknowledge a distinction between two truths, or two levels of reality. That is: there is a conventional truth, the one familiar to us in everyday life where we can fruitfully speak of individual selves or persons and other everyday objects – and another, more ultimate (paramārtha) truth that is distinguished in some respect from the conventional, truer than the conventional. Their widely varying metaphysics mostly have to do with how we understand the ultimate truth, and I’ll talk about that more next week. I want to start this time, though, I want to note a key point that the metaphysical schools share: the importance of breaking down the conventional – or, put another way, of seeing through it.
One of the reasons Buddhists emphasize the idea of non-self so much, I think, is they see the kind of danger that can emerge from self-focused approaches like expressive individualism. That danger is when we identify with our bad qualities in a way that stops us from getting better. Buddhists emphasize the lack of an essential self so that we can shed our bad qualities, become better than we are.
Having discussed the history of standpoint theory, I now want to dive into it more philosophically. While I have plenty of outsider’s objections to standpoint theory, here I want to explore what goes wrong with standpoint theory on its own terms – noting a key tension internal to standpoint theory which I do not think it resolves.
Namely: the main justification for standpoint theory – the reasoning that gave it plausibility – was materialist, in a sense drawing on Karl Marx. But as it grew, standpoint theory lost that materialist justification, leaving it with little grounding. We can see the loss of standpoint theory’s materialist underpinnings just within the work of Nancy Hartsock, one of its key founders.
Hartsock’s original 1983 chapter, “The feminist standpoint” states what I think was standpoint theory’ in general’s core underlying claim: “If material life is structured in fundamentally opposing ways for two different groups, one can expect that the vision of each will represent an inversion of the other, and in systems of domination the vision available to the rulers will be both partial and perverse.” (285) The key word in this claim is material: for Hartsock as for her predecessors Marx and Georg Lukács, one’s viewpoint is deeply structured by the material conditions of one’s life. What Hartsock’s feminist analysis adds to Lukács and Marx is the materiality of household work and childrearing. She cites Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room to illustrate how this materiality works:
Washing the toilet used by three males, and the floor and walls around it, is, Mira thought, coming face to face with necessity. And that is why women were saner than men, did not come up with the mad, absurd schemes men developed; they were in touch with necessity, they had to wash the toilet bowl and floor. (quoted on Hartsock 292)
