Category Archives: Protestantism

Glenn Wallis’s Buddhist Manifesto

01 Wednesday Dec 2010

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Meditation, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism, Protestantism, Rites

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Glenn Wallis has recently produced a fascinating new piece of “Buddhist theology” called the Buddhist Manifesto. The document first strikes me for what it tells us about the process of writing about Buddhism today. Wallis, like me, was once a Buddhist-studies academic in a fairly standard mold: PhD from Harvard, assistant professor at the University of Georgia. (I was offered his old job at Georgia, and turned it down because the offer given would have required me to teach twice as many courses as he did, for less total pay and no chance of tenure.) I had read the major work he produced in that capacity: Mediating the Power of Buddhas, a study of a seventh-century Buddhist Sanskrit ritual text called the Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa. Mediating the Power of Buddhas offers a close and careful reading of this particular text. But one is left wondering at the end: why was this written? It avoids historical context, attempting instead to “enter into the world” within the text, which makes it difficult to learn much from the study about the text’s historical period and its contemporaries (say, Śāntideva). But it also avoids constructive philosophical engagement with the text – asking how it might challenge our current ideas about the world and how to live in it. If one can get neither history nor constructive application from this study, what can one get from it?

My critique of Wallis’s older work is hardly limited to Wallis; one could make it about a great number of works produced in contemporary religious studies. Anne Monius encouraged her students to ask of the texts and rituals they study: “Why bother?” and “So what?” Why do people bother doing this, and what is its significance for their culture? What she never asked students was to turn those same questions on ourselves: ask of our own work, “Why bother?” and “So what?” But it seems to me like these are the most pressing questions to ask of a work like Mediating the Power of Buddhas.

No such problem exists in the Buddhist Manifesto! Continue reading →

Of constitutions and the Constitution

20 Wednesday Oct 2010

Posted by in Greek and Roman Tradition, Politics, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism

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Good news this week: after a difficult, expensive and often harrowing process, I had a successful interview with the American immigration service, so I am now a legal permanent resident of the USA (holding a “green card”). While we waited for the interview, I was reading my notes on James Doull‘s Philosophy and Freedom, and realized it had given me a much better understanding of the country in which I have settled.

One of the more curious features of American political conversation is Americans’ attitude toward their Constitution. In American politics, the Constitution is a scripture, a sacred text; and I do not mean this at all metaphorically or analogically. The Constitution literally is a scripture, for it has the most important hallmark that a scripture has: while the meaning of the text is endlessly debated, the text itself is universally regarded with great reverence and respect. Both of the warring sides of American politics accuse the other side of disrespecting the Constitution (the language used is typically stronger than “disrespecting,” often involving bodily functions of some variety). Some might argue that the Constitution is not a scripture because it is not “religious,” but this is already to beg the question; I have yet to find an adequate reason to distinguish between the “religious” and the “non-religious,” or reasonable way of classifying the two.

This attitude toward the Constitution has perplexed me since before I arrived in the country. Continue reading →

Of convenience and saving time

11 Wednesday Aug 2010

Posted by in Death, Food, German Tradition, Mahāyāna, Monasticism, Protestantism, Social Science, Work

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One of the most derided concepts among upper-class Westerners is “convenience.” The foods most often subject to public loathing, whether frozen, instantly prepared or at a takeout fast-food chain, are usually the ones eaten in the name of convenience. To say that something was “convenient” is often to damn it with faint praise (“a convenient excuse”). Joel Garreau puts it well in Edge City, his 20-year-old breathlessly eloquent defence of suburban office parks: “Interesting word, ‘convenience.’ In everyday use it lacks punch. It sounds optional, frivolous. It connotes something we could easily do without. It has no sense of urgency, no aura of importance.” What’s unfortunate about the use of “convenience,” Garreau rightly notes, is that what it actually refers to is

the most precious element any human has, the very measure of his individuality — time…. Everything we value, from love to lucre, takes time. Time is the measure of the conflicting demands put upon us, and as such is the measure of our very selves. It is the one commodity that turns out, for each individual, irrevocably, to be finite. (111, emphasis in original)

Seen from this perspective, there is nothing frivolous or optional whatsoever about “convenience.” This is true whether we live a worldly life seeking worldly ends or a monastic one seeking liberation. Continue reading →

Seeing God’s form

13 Sunday Jun 2010

Posted by in Deity, Epics, Islam, Judaism, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism

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How do you depict a perfect being? The Jewish and Islamic answer is pretty clear: you can’t. From Exodus onward, idolatry is considered a sin. In the Ten Commandments the God of Exodus tells his subjects not to bow down before idols of anything on heaven or earth, for he is a jealous God – and, the implication is, all these things in his creation are different from him. Muslim tradition becomes much more explicit on the point. Islam’s cardinal sin is widely considered to be shirk: the association of any partners with God, saying that anything worldly – such as a drawing or statue of God – shares God’s attributes. Protestants have tended to follow the Jewish and Muslim lead. Catholics have been a bit more slack about it, but still accept the basic principle through fine distinctions, saying they don’t worship images, but merely venerate them; even for them, it’s understood that there’s a fine line they’re walking, something a little suspicious about depicting God that needs to be defended.

No such suspicion is found in India. I was struck recently by the climax of the Bhagavad Gītā. The god Krishna explains to the hero Arjuna what he needs to do, and explains his own divine nature as lord of the universe. Then, Arjuna asks to see Krishna’s true form – and Krishna agrees to show him. Arjuna can’t see it with mere human eyes; but Krishna grants him a “divine eye,” which has no such problems.

The form Arjuna sees is clearly divine – not like the God of a Renaissance painting, who could be mistaken for a bearded old human if you didn’t know the context. But when Arjuna sees that form, he really sees it – he sees God just as God is. I think this represents a very different conception of divinity in India – divinity as divinity can be seen.

Krishna’s divine form is infinite, extending in all the directions – but with infinite numbers of eyes seeing everything, infinite numbers of mouths swallowing the dead as they go to their fates, infinite crowns on his infinite heads. This divinity is physical, visible, even tangible.

What does this mean for thoughts of a God as structuring the universe, a First Explanation with metaphysical significance for the way we understand the rest of the world? YHWH precedes the physical world, stands in some sense outside it, describing himself only as “I am that I am.” Krishna, on the other hand, seems a much more physical God, a part of the world itself, a creator of standing in some sense equal with his creation. I haven’t quite figured out what the implications are of all this. But I suspect they’re important.

Anti-Protestant presuppositions in the study of Buddhism

02 Sunday May 2010

Posted by in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism

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The anti-Protestant view of religious studies has come out particularly strongly in the study of Buddhism. By most accounts of the field, one of the leading scholars of contemporary Buddhism is Gregory Schopen. Most of Schopen’s work criticizes scholars’ emphasis on Buddhist texts, advocating a turn instead to archaeological and epigraphic data. Schopen claims that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Buddhist scholarship focused on texts because of “Protestant presuppositions” about what religion really consisted of. He advocates instead for a scholarship of Buddhism in which “texts would have been judged significant only if they could be shown to be related to what religious people actually did.” What Schopen never considers, to my knowledge, is the idea that scholarship in Buddhism might be seeking the truth found in Buddhist ideas, rather than “what religion was” in remote and hoary periods of human history. Perhaps, in other words, we think about texts not because we have been trained to think as Protestants, but because we are trying to think as Buddhists.

Anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere took methodological anti-Protestantism a step further, effectively labelling not merely scholars of Buddhism but Buddhists themselves as regrettably Protestant. Obeyesekere coined the unfortunately widespread term “Protestant Buddhism” to describe what I have called Yavanayāna, the new modernist and rationalist form of Western-influenced Buddhism whose roots go back to nineteenth-century Sri Lanka and the reformers Henry Steel Olcott and Anagarika Dharmapala.

What’s wrong with calling this modernized Buddhism Protestant? First of all, neither Olcott nor Dharmapala were Protestants themselves. Dharmapala was born and raised a Sri Lankan Buddhist. While born and raised a Protestant family, Olcott had converted away from Protestantism to “spiritualism” well before calling himself a Buddhist. Moreover, as Stephen Prothero has rightly argued, Protestantism was only one influence on Olcott’s thought; secular modernism was at least as important. For example, Olcott was a firm believer in the theory of evolution, rejected roundly by the Protestants of his time, and was enthusiastic about Buddhism partially because he took it – unlike Protestantism – to be compatible with evolutionary theory.

But beyond that historical point, one must also ask: what’s wrong with Protestantism? The term “Protestant Buddhism” carries the whiff of an accusation that there’s something wrong with this Buddhism, that these Buddhists are not really Buddhists but Protestants in Buddhist disguise. In a class I took from him, Robert Gimello once criticized Yavanayāna Buddhists who would make claims like “??kyamuni and I have got it right, and 2500 years of Buddhist tradition has got it wrong.” The class laughed, and Gimello added “I think that’s extremely arrogant.” Looking back on that experience, I sorely wish I had raised my and and asked the following question: “So may I clarify, Prof. Gimello? You are, in fact, telling us that the Protestant Reformation should never have happened?”

For after all, what was Martin Luther doing except to say “Jesus, Paul and I have got it right, and 1500 years of Catholic tradition has got it wrong”? To make a claim like Gimello’s is effectively to claim that Protestantism is a tradition founded on illegitimate arrogance. And one can reasonably make that claim – as a matter of anti-Protestant apologetics. Indeed Gimello – always a devout Catholic – has since moved to the University of Notre Dame to help develop “robustly Catholic” theological views of Buddhism. I believe in the value of apologetics, of theological or sectarian claims aimed at persuading members of one tradition to move to another. I only have a problem with apologetics when it poses as neutral, disinterested scholarship, as Gimello had once claimed his class to be. It may well be that a “robustly Catholic” sectarian apologetic helps us understand Buddhism better – but only if we acknowledge that that is what it is.

Protestantism and populism in religious studies

28 Wednesday Apr 2010

Posted by in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Protestantism, Social Science

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As a religious studies grad student, I used to joke that if you wanted to say someone was a bastard, you called him a Protestant. If you wanted to say he was a filthy bastard, you called him a liberal Protestant. And if you wanted to say he was a dirty rotten filthy stinking bastard, you called him a nineteenth-century liberal Protestant.

I said this because the trendy scholars in religious studies (especially performance theory) tended to view “nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism” as the root of all evils in the field. Religious studies, I heard over and over, had been too dominated by the study of texts and scriptures and ideas, all the pernicious influence of nineteenth-century liberal Protestants like Friedrich Schleiermacher. We needed to be exploring “lived” religion (with the implication, it was admitted in more candid moments, that the study of texts amounted to “dead” religion). For most people in history, they said, religion is not about texts but about ritual, performance, history, society, supernatural beings. Colleagues cited Vasudha Narayanan‘s JAAR article entitled “Liberation and lentils,” in which she recounted how Indian traditions like her family’s, involving rituals like picking the most auspicious lentils to eat at particular holidays, had been marginalized in favour of philosophical claims about liberation, or the myths in the Vedas. Religious studies, it was said, needed to focus more on lentils and less on liberation, more on ritual and less on philosophy.

I didn’t and don’t buy a word of this argument. To begin with, it relies almost entirely on the obscuring and pernicious concept of “religion,” a highly unfortunate term that leads us to emphasize the wrong differences, to give some beliefs a legal privilege they don’t deserve, to underplay similarities between “religious” and “secular” phenomena. The assumption is that what we had in common in religious studies was that we intended to study “religion.” Which, in my case, was completely false. I had no interest in “religion”; I was there to study Asian philosophy, which is marginalized if present at all in the vast majority of philosophy departments. But because the departments where one could study Asian thought were called “religious studies,” we were told that the concept of “religion” should have a normative value in deciding what we consider worthy of study.

Beyond the word, there’s an unspoken populist criterion of value underlying the anti-textual argument: the fact that more people do ritual than texts is taken as implying that ritual is therefore more worthy of study than texts. Such a view, I think, is one of the factors behind the current tendency to study other people’s ethics and act as if one is doing ethics oneself. But why, again, should this be so? More Americans, at least, believe in creationism than in evolution. By the populist criterion, it would seem that the sociology of creationism is more worthy of study than is evolutionary biology.

Consequentialism and lying to oneself

31 Wednesday Mar 2010

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Family, Foundations of Ethics, Happiness, Honesty, Prayer, Protestantism, Psychology, Truth

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I’ve been noticing a topic I’ve dealt with repeatedly in other contexts but would like to address head on: the possibility of deliberately lying to oneself, of intentionally believing things that aren’t true. I spoke before of “noble lies” to others, but not to oneself.

The point seems to come up again and again, for there are many reasons why trying to believe false things might prove valuable. In cases where one’s children make one less happy, one is still a better parent if one falsely believes that children make one happy. Some psychologists suggest the possibility of depressive realism: the idea that depressed people actually view the world more accurately than others. In a comment I noted the happiness often radiated by evangelical Christians: should one perhaps try to become such a person even if their God doesn’t exist? Last time the point came up in speaking of prayer: there seem to be real benefits from prayer, but it might require belief in an entity that isn’t real.

Now in every one of these cases, the good thing about lying to oneself has something in common: it is a good result. Continue reading →