Tag Archives: authenticity

Aesthetics and ethics in Zanzibar Town

13 Sunday Mar 2011

Posted by in Aesthetics, African Thought, Food, Place, Politics

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Skholiast has an interesting riff on my recent post about happiness, and I’d like to riff right back. Skholiast quotes from Alain Finkielkraut‘s La défaite de la pensée – a book I read long ago while backpacking through France, in the hope of beefing up my philosophical French. And Skholiast’s quote from Finkielkraut got me thinking of a much more recent trip, my honeymoon in Zanzibar two months ago.

As well as spectacular beaches, Zanzibar has a tremendously atmospheric old Stone Town, and crumbling palaces built in the nineteenth century by Sultan Said. On a tour of these palace ruins, our guide spoke mournfully about how the government had destroyed and misused these palaces after independence and revolution in 1964. It is surely worth mourning when a beautiful object from the past is lost forever. In addition to this destruction, the revolutionary government built most of Ng’ambo, the “other side” of Zanzibar town – the part that is completely non-atmospheric, full of concrete blocks designed by East German engineers. It is in Ng’ambo that the majority of urban Zanzibaris live. The tourist guidebooks tend to scoff at Ng’ambo if they mention it at all, which they rarely do – and no surprise, since it is utterly charmless to look at, a generic site that could be anywhere.

And yet driving through Ng’ambo, I could also see what motivated the revolutionary government to build it that way; more than that, I was quite pleased to see it. Continue reading →

Newly authentic scriptures

09 Sunday May 2010

Posted by in Aesthetics, Christianity, Confucianism, Early Factions, Food, German Tradition, Human Nature, Humility, Judaism, Mahāyāna, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Social Science, Truth

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In my introductory religion class at Stonehill I was teaching about the Marcionite Christians, followers of the second-century Christian Marcion of Sinope, who wished to see a Christianity without any Jewish influence. This posed rather a tricky problem for Marcion, seeing as Jesus was born Jewish and seemed to claim the lineage of the Jewish prophets. That Jesus viewed himself as Jewish is not only the conclusion of modern biblical scholarship; it seems to have been the view present in the scriptures that Marcion himself encountered. Marcion, it seems, took the Gospel of Luke as known to him and edited out everything that looked Jewish.

Why did he do this? I suppose it could have been merely a cynical move to gain followers, but Marcionism had an appeal that lasted long after Marcion’s death; I don’t see much reason to believe that Marcion didn’t believe what he was writing. But this is still puzzling. To our eyes it seems like an awful sort of arrogance to edit historical writings according to one’s own theology. One might ask: how could he have believed any of this?

In trying to understand Marcion I can only think of the popular view expressed in the Mahāyāna Adhyāśayasaṃcodana Sūtra, that “whatever is well spoken is the word of the Buddha.” Continue reading →

Authenticity then and now

05 Wednesday May 2010

Posted by in Aesthetics, Buddhism, Early and Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism, Place

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A couple weeks ago Shrikant Bahulkar, an Indian scholar I studied Sanskrit with, gave a talk on language in Buddhism. During the questions and answers he said something that struck me: Tibetan Buddhists gave privilege to Sanskrit texts over Tibetan ones because the Sanskrit texts were more authentic.

He’s surely right, in the sense that Tibetans thought Sanskrit s?tras more likely to be the real word of the historical Buddha. But the wording intrigued me. For we use “authentic” as a term of praise all the time now, but in a strikingly different way.

The Tibetans cared that texts were authentically Indian because the Buddha was Indian, so such texts were more likely to have been the authentic word of the Buddha. They wouldn’t have given a toss whether texts were authentically Mongolian or authentically Persian, because the Buddha didn’t come from those places.

For us, by contrast, authenticity is a good in itself. Other things being equal, we treat blues music performed by an authentic Mississippi blues performer as better than the same music performed by some guy from Vancouver; authentic Mexican food made by Mexicans is better than Mexican food made by Bostonians. I once spoke to a friend’s relatives in Cambridge, UK, who were going to be visiting the US and were excited about going to Disneyland. I asked “Why go all the way – why not just go to Euro Disney?” They replied “No, no – we want to see the real Disneyland!” A startling response at the time to my urban geographer’s ears, to which nothing could be more fake than Disneyland – but even there, the original was valued much more highly than the imitation.

Some of this valuing of authenticity per se creeps into religious studies as well. I’ve spoken of the point before in the context of Yavanayāna Buddhism: it’s a recent creation involving Westerners and therefore seems less “authentically Buddhist,” and “less authentic” is equated in our minds with “bad.” I think this is why the “Protestant presuppositions” charge is bandied about so frequently and comes across as such a slur: the Yavanayāna emphasis on texts, on what seems to be the authentic word of the Buddha, is considered “less authentically Buddhist.”

But the Yavanayāna attitude, ironically, seems to me much closer to traditional attitudes than does this scholarly romanticism of authenticity. Scholars or otherwise, we today value a more generalized authenticity, in which everything should “be what it is.” Whereas for most premodern cultures, as I understand it, authenticity was merely a means to an end. The authentic word of the Buddha was better than an imitation because of the value of the Buddha’s word itself, not because of the value of authenticity per se.

So why this change? It seems above all an aesthetic phenomenon. We see beauty in things that are what they are, that don’t imitate. Why is this? I suggested before that it’s because authenticity is scarce under capitalism. Is that it? Is it because, as I added in the comments, so many of us want to take an oppositional posture against society at large, and so much of that society is satisfied with imitations? Or is there more to it still?

Caution towards innovation

21 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by in Aesthetics, French Tradition, German Tradition, Modernized Buddhism, Place, Politics, Psychology

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Sunday’s post, on modernism and the change in values from “old-fashioned” to “old-school,” might help explain a question that I and others have pondered here: why do human beings so often prefer what is old? Stephen Walker noted the point in his comment on Yavanayāna Buddhism: people often seem unwilling to credit themselves with innovations, to accept that their ideas are new. Rather they present themselves as defending old ideas when they come up with new ones. (In his The Sociology of Philosophies, Randall Collins suggests that this is a typical pattern in human thought (especially in Japan, but elsewhere as well): “innovation through conservatism.” A while back I asked a similar question about authenticity: why do we privilege authenticity so much, when its distinguishing feature would seem to be the absence of choice?

Maybe we can start to see an answer now that we’ve had a chance to look back on the alternative. The twentieth century, in many ways, was the century of modernism – the rejection of the past as a guide to living. As I noted last time, modernism brought us Pruitt-Igoe, the grand and innovative housing project that was dynamited as unlivable. But more than that, I think, it brought us Communism, the form of government practised in the Soviet Union, China and their allies in the mid-twentieth century. Continue reading →

“You’re no Buddhist!”

10 Thursday Sep 2009

Posted by in Mahāyāna, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism

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Justin Whitaker’s blog pointed me to some interesting recent discussions of what it means to be a Buddhist, among Buddhist bloggers mostly of the Yavanayāna persuasion. Blogger Marcus (no last name provided) threw down a strongly worded gauntlet last week: “The fact is, if you are serious about Buddhism, you don’t drink. The Buddha’s words couldn’t be clearer.”

I have at least two objections to Marcus’s claim about alcohol. First, we fail at our chosen life goals all the time; we may be serious about following Buddhism, believe that therefore we shouldn’t drink, and still drink anyway. That may make us bad at Buddhism, but it doesn’t make us unserious. Second, matters are often not so cut and dried. It would be hard to say that Śāntideva was not serious about Buddhism – he became a lifelong monk and tried hard to live according to the words of the Buddha as he understood them. But he actually advocates (following the Mahāyāna Ugraparipṛcchā Sūtra, which at least claims to be the word of the Buddha) that one give alcohol to alcohol drinkers, as a way of winning their trust. (I discuss this point briefly the fourth chapter of my dissertation, and am writing an article on it in more detail.)

On the specific matter of alcohol, I tend to disagree with Marcus. But the discussion among Buddhist bloggers centred around bigger issues, where I think Marcus was quite right. Kyle of The Reformed Buddhist (who also appears to go without a last name) made a number of objections to Marcus, some of which I think are valid, some not so. But at the core of his reaction seems to be his first sentence: “Sigh the whole you’re no Buddhist thing again.” [emphases his] He seems in this post to take offence to the idea that someone could declare someone else to not be a Buddhist, or not be a serious Buddhist. In this he would seem to be agreeing with a slightly earlier post by Scott Mitchell of The Buddha Is My DJ. Mitchell opposes the claim made by some Buddhists (presumably including Marcus?) that their Buddhism is better or (or more “authentic”) than others’: “feel free to define yourself and your Buddhist practice. But stop doing it as a means to differentiate yourself from some “other” kind of Buddhist.”

Here I’ve got issues. Continue reading →

Yavanayāna Buddhism: a defence

16 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, East Asia, Mahāyāna, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modernized Buddhism

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In my last post I spoke of Yavanayāna Buddhism, the new modernized, Western-influenced Buddhism (including Engaged Buddhism) that focuses on meditation and denies the supernatural. Many contemporary Buddhologists look at Yavanayāna with barely concealed disdain. Donald López’s article on belief in the volume Critical Terms for Religious Studies, for example, is a prolonged sneer toward the views of Henry Steel Olcott, the nineteenth-century reformer who made much of Sri Lankan Buddhism what it is today.

I’ve heard several fellow academics look at a Buddhism like Olcott’s or Walpola Rahula’s or even S.N. Goenka’s and snort “That’s not Buddhism!” And certainly, as noted, Yavanayāna Buddhism turns out quite different from what the Buddha actually taught. But few of these same academics are willing to turn around and say about East Asian Buddhism: that is not Buddhism. And yet, I would argue, East Asian Buddhist tradition has (at least at times) gone even further than North American Buddhism from anything that could be identified as the Buddha’s teaching. It’s not just Mahāyāna that I’m concerned about here; Mahāyāna Buddhism as such has its origins in the j?taka stories of the Buddha’s previous lives, which are some of the oldest Buddhist texts we know of. Rather, I think of doctrines like the Tiantai view that material things have a permanent and enduring nature – contradicting not only the classical Buddhist metaphysical view of non-self and non-essence, but also its ethical implications that material things are not worthy of our pursuit. If we’re willing to grant that Tiantai is legitimately Buddhist, I would argue, we cannot but do the same for Yavanayāna.

East Asian Buddhism is often seen as an “authentic” Buddhism in a way that Yavanayāna is not. But I’ve already posted my misgivings about the concept of authenticity. East Asian Buddhism seems authentic because people now are born into it, rather than choosing to join it as they do with Goenka; but we value what isn’t chosen because that’s what modern capitalism makes scarce. It doesn’t necessarily mean that that “authentic” Buddhism is a better path to follow; indeed, a certain romanticism may mislead us into thinking that nothing modern can possibly be good.

Authenticity

12 Friday Jun 2009

Posted by in Aesthetics, Food, German Tradition, Social Science

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To describe something as “authentic” today is usually thought to give it high praise. But I sometimes question how much of a good authenticity really is.

What makes a thing authentic? Central to authenticity, it seems to me, is the absence of choice. To decide to be authentic is a contradiction.

If people built a house out of stone in 1850 because it was the only material available, we call it an authentic stone house; we do not say this when, of the many materials available to build your house out of today, you choose stone. A Jamaican raised in a Kingston shanty, exposed to reggae all his life, makes authentic reggae himself – in a way that someone who comes in from outside to make reggae music does not. If I were to open an Indian restaurant, people might consider it authentic since I am ethnically part Indian, something I didn’t choose; whereas if I were to open a Thai restaurant, nobody would consider it authentic, even though I can cook much better Thai food than I can Indian.

So why is this something we value? Why do we praise the thing people didn’t choose over the thing they chose? I think it has to do with the inescapable presence of modernity and capitalism, living in the age Marx described so well in the Communist Manifesto, where the “bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.” What is chosen can be bought and sold easily. One can certainly buy and sell authenticity; but one cannot create authenticity. In the prosperous modern world, the unchosen is scarce, and that makes it valuable.