[Buddha-l] Buddhism and Postmodernism

[curt]

At the risk of making a wild over-generalization, I would
say that there is a tendency for this list to be more focused
on South Asian/Theravadin Buddhism. I am not making
any accusations here - just an observation. The reason I
make this observation in the context of the subject of the
interpenetration of Buddhism and Post-Modernism is that
the names "Steven Heine" and "Bernard Faure" have not
been mentioned - and I was wondering why. It struck me
that these names are more well known among people who
focus on East Asian Buddhism, and Zen in particular. At
any rate, one should probably check out those two authors.
An easy way to get started would be to do a google search
of the strings "buddhism" and "postmodernism" along with
each of their names - you'll get lots of hits. In fact, if you
do a google on "faure postmodernism buddhism" the very
first hit is a book edited by Steven Heine! Talk about your
interpenetration. The book is "Japan in Traditional and
Postmodern Perspectives":
http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=53203
Faure has a chapter in it entitled "The Kyoto School and
Reverse Orientalism". While looking through the chapter
titles and authors I was reminded of another guy who
would be worth checking out: Masao Abe. I have never
read anything by Abe, but I did hear hims speak once,
and I thought he was pretty boring. For some reason he
served on the Advisory Board for the Washington Times
newspaper, which always made me suspicious (the Washington
Times is a wholly owned subsidiary of Rev. Moon's
conspiracy to take over the world).

One other place one might want to look, while one is at it,
is at the writings of Aristotle. Some postmodernists like to
set up Aristotelian logic as a straw man for target practice.
But before joining in the chorus of those trashing Aristotle,
one might want to check out the Old Man himself. Right now
I am reading a very nice little book entitled "Aristotle: The
Desire to Understand". I haven't gotten to the part of the book
dealing with Aristotle's writings on logic (which is toward the
end). A very nice feature of the book is that it is intended to
be read along with Aristotle's writings - with each section of
the book referring to specific writings of Aristotle.

- Curt