Love of All Wisdom

As Christmas approaches, I return to the theme I took up two years ago of the meaning of Christmas to a non-Christian – spurred on in part by my recent reflections on single-mindedness. Ben, commenting on that previous post, noted:

Christmas appears to have a dual message in our culture. ‘Rampant consumerism’ is one half, and ‘The True Meaning Of Christmas ™’ is the second. While there are exceptions that focus more on family and loved ones and generosity, references to TTMOC largely also include references to the birth of Jesus.

I think Ben is on to something important: an unreflective understanding of Christmas can turn into a simple consumerism. So, many who do reflect on Christmas either refuse to celebrate it at all or try to make it entirely about Jesus. I think both reactions, but especially the latter, are examples of single-mindedness as a problem: an attempt to pick out one single meaning that’s most important and ignore the details. But for those of us who genuinely enjoy Christmas, the details can be the most important part. (continue reading…)

Last week I spoke of a philosophical single-mindedness shared by modernists, evangelical Protestants, Salafi Muslims and St. Augustine, and this week I’d like to reflect on it further. What these various single-minded thinkers hold in common is opposed above all, I think, by literal conservatism. Conservatives in the literal sense seek to preserve much of the world as it is – “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” They are opposed to radical breaks and revolutions, whether those aim to take us forward (as the modernists) or backward (as the Salafis). I noted in my earlier post that Jane Jacobs’s urban criticism, a direct attack on modernist architecture and modernist urban planning, is a quintessential example of literal conservatism; Jacobs would react with the same hostility to the Salafi assault on Mecca. In that respect, for all its urbanity, Jacobs’s work is of a piece with the agrarian rural conservatism of Front Porch Republic and Wendell Berry.

The appeal of such literal conservatism is certainly not limited to aesthetics, but one may perhaps see it most clearly in the aesthetic realm. (Some modernists, like the Marxist geographer David Harvey, see an aesthetic conservatism as opposed to a more ethical modernism.) For it’s hard to imagine elevating a single most important principle, as modernists typically do, as the principle behind beauty: could one ever say “Everything constructed according to principle X will be beautiful,” without making principle X entirely vacuous and devoid of content? Aesthetics seem to require a focus on the details and not merely the big picture.

Now of the various single-minded thinkers I’ve mentioned so far – modernists, evangelicals, Salafis and Augustine – one might note that they all have their historical roots in Western traditions. (continue reading…)

One of the most common slams made against modernist (Yavanayāna) Buddhism is that it is “Protestant.” I’ve previously written about how there’s more to Buddhist modernism than this, and about the curious quasi-theological assumption that having Protestant influence is seen as a bad thing. At the same time, I’ve been realizing that there are close links between Protestantism and modernism. Not too surprising, perhaps, since the two emerge out of the same historical context, the Europe of the past 500 years – but I think their similarities may go deeper than that. (continue reading…)

It will not do my readers much of a service to announce that Jack Layton has died. To non-Canadian readers, the name will probably mean little or nothing; Canadian readers in the past week will have heard of little else.

Jack Layton was the leader of the left-wing New Democratic Party, the only political party whose candidates I have ever voted for. He died of cancer on 22 August, at the relatively young age of 61 – at the peak of his career. Until Layton took over the NDP, the party had never received more than 44 of the roughly 300 seats in the Canadian Parliament. Earlier this year, under his leadership, the party earned over 100, most of those in Québec – where the party had never held more than a single seat before. It received more than twice as many seats as the third-place Liberals, a party which had governed Canada so often that it viewed itself as the “natural governing party.” And a great deal of this rapid rise derived from Layton’s personal popularity. His funeral has now been receiving coverage in Canada comparable to that of Princess Diana’s – at a time when it is held as a commonplace that people hate politicians and are fed up with them. His life and death moved a great many. My American wife, who a year ago didn’t know who Jack Layton was, was moved to tears watching the coverage of his memorials.

Now why am I going on about Jack Layton on a philosophy blog? (continue reading…)

I’m returning today to the idea of perennial questions: questions that recur throughout the history of philosophy, where both sides of a debate keep getting articulated in many different places. The key feature of these perennial questions, to my mind, is that they are large: they cannot be narrowed down to a single precisely defined question within a single philosophical subfield, of the sort that analytic philosophers aim to ask, but extend their ramifications across multiple fields of theoretical and practical inquiry.

So far I’ve explored two major perennial questions: ascent versus descent and intimacy versus integrity. I have taken these as two different axes along which philosophies can be classified – in their ethics and soteriology as well as their metaphysics and epistemology.

But why should we treat these as exhausting the perennial questions? (continue reading…)

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…)

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…)

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…)

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.

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.