[Buddha-l] Re: Diversions, distractions and off-topic discussions

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Sat, 2005-10-08 at 10:55 -0400, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> This list has, for some time, devoted more attention to playing out certain
> political demonizations than it has to discussing anything Buddhist. 

Over the past twelve years or so I have seen you say quite a few silly
things, but this may be the silliest. I have seen quite a lot of
political discussion here, and that seems appropriate given that we are
living in times when public policies are generating quite a lot of
dukkha. But I have not seen any "demonization" as you call it. I have
seen what struck me as honest attempts to sort out some very complex
issues, but no one here seems to be slavishly spouting ideological
rhetoric or indulging in cheap demonization. (I attribute the lack of
cheap facile rhetoric to the scarcity of Republicans on this list.)

Thomas Berry made an interesting observation in his address to Harvard
Divinity School in 1996. He said that he felt that the division of
policies into left and right had run its course and was essentially
backward looking. The way of looking at policies that he offers as an
improvement to the now-useless rightist-leftist liberal-conservative
dichotomy is to examine the extent to which policies are geocentric
rather than humanocentric, nationalistic and selfish. Ways of thinking
that place human beings at the top of the hierarchy of creation are, he
argues, decidedly morally inferior to ways of thinking that are based on
recognizing that human beings are deeply conditioned beings who depend
on everything else on earth. Ways of thinking that place American (or
Israeli or Saudi or Pakistani) interests above all others are defective
and in need of stern criticism, as are ways of thinking that place
Christian or Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist interests above the interests
of other religions. Given that Berry, a Passionist brother, studied both
Chinese and Sanskrit and wrote books on Buddhism and Vedanta in the
early part of his career, it would not be difficult to support the claim
that he learned much of value from his study of Asian writings.

Another writer who learned a thing or two from Asian sources was Ralph
Waldo Emerson. Early in his career as a Unitarian minister and
missionary (yes, even Unitarians have missionaries) in the 1820s and
1830s, he advocated a view that morality is the principal business of
religion and that all else that one finds in religion is a non-essential
sideshow. Morality for him was the cultivation of character, and this,
he argued, could best be achieved by studying nature until one
recognized one's own interconnectedness with every other thing, living
and dead. This interconnectedness of all things Emerson called God. The
principal revelation of God, he wrote, is the universe itself, and those
of us who busy ourselves with studying how people in the past understood
the revelation presented to them run the risk of failing to see that the
up-to-date revelation we need to be studying is all around us.

Later in his career, Emerson refined the views expressed in his early
sermons and devised, however unsystematically, his Transcendentalist
philosophy of religion (which academic philosophers studiously ignored
until around 1985 and which most American religious leaders ignore to
this day, leaving it to professors of English to keep it alive). As
Thomas Tweed points out, Emerson is one of the most Buddhist thinkers of
the 19th century, with the possible exception of his student Thoreau.

What I find interesting about the trajectory of Emerson's career is that
he began with personal ethics, evolved into a metaphysics of
interconnectedness and universalism, and then spent the later decades of
his life sharply criticizing the public policies of his day, most
famously in his passionate criticisms of slavery (which the majority of
religious "leaders" of his day were either defending or ignoring
altogether).

Like everyone else, Emerson managed to defend a few things that now seem
questionable, even astonishing, such as the American invasion of Mexico.
(Actually, Emerson did not advocate that awful war so much as he thought
it inevitable, given the expansionist passions of the day, and therefore
he seems to have concluded that there was little point trying to stop
the American juggernaut.) 

But questionable positions aside, Emerson offers reflective people an
admirable example of how an essentially contemplative person might go
about getting involved in trying to straighten out the crooked thinking
of his times. It is an example that I recommend to serious Buddhists
everywhere, and especially to those who tune in to buddha-l. After all,
if we on buddha-l do not use our collective compassionate wisdom to help
straighten out a world gone pathological, who will?

-- 
Richard Hayes
***
"Where the clear stream of reason 
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit...
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."
                             --Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)