[Buddha-l] Back to the core values?

[Richard Hayes]

On Thursday 31 May 2007 15:18, curt wrote:

> Batchelor does in fact "threaten" something that I hold dear. Like many
> people (including Pierre Hadot, C.G. Jung, Sangharakshita, Ghandi, the
> Cleary brothers, and many others) I feel that there is something
> fundamentally missing from "western" culture - something "spiritual" if
> I may use that word.

No sensible person (if I am allowed to stipulate what is sensible and what is 
not) would deny that modern Western culture has become defective, deficient 
and dysfunctional. But what does that have to do with Batchelor? Do you 
interpret him as saying that modern Western culture is fine just as it is? If 
so, you are reqading a very different Stephen Batchelor than the one I have 
been reading. 

> It is really not
> going too far to say that the European secularist attitude toward the
> great religions of Asia is nothing short of racist - and at any rate it
> is a seamless continuation of the "white man's burden" attitude from the
> days of outright colonialism.

I can't think of any Western scholars of our times who advocates anything that 
is even close to racism. I do know of one European Buddhist teacher who has 
some very unpleasant things to say about Muslims, but he is waging a kind of 
Buddhist jihad against people he sees as deeply defective and flawed. His 
agenda is not at all a secularist one.

Somehow I have never been particularly convinced by Edward Said's analysis of 
the role of Western academics as complicit in political and economic 
colonialism. What he says may have some validity in people who study the 
Islamic world, and some of what he says would pertain to 19th century 
Indologists such as Sir Monier Monier-Williams and perhaps A.B. Keith (but 
NOT to other 19th century Indologists such as F. Max Mueller and T.W. Rhys 
Davids). On the whole, I think Western scholars of Buddhism, if they have 
been unbalanced, have erred on the side of being too uncritically 
pro-Buddhist and anti-Western. So part of what we have been experiencing in 
recent years is an attempt to achieve a more balanced attitude, one that is 
not particularly pro-anything or anti-anything. I see Batchelor in that 
context; he is striving to be intellectually and emotionally honest and to 
promote a critical attitude that he thinks (rightly, I would say) is a very 
important leitmotif in most of the Buddhist traditions. I see him as saying 
one can love Dharma without having to have contempt for the whole of Western 
culture. I seem him as saying one can love Dharma even when one knows that 
Buddhists, like pretty much everybody else in the human race, can be petty, 
unwholesome and dysfunctional and can be all those things in the name of 
being wholesome.

> As far as what I find attractive about Buddhism - I'd have to say "most
> of it". Of course I reserve the right to make up my own mind on all
> particulars - and as far as I can tell the Buddha wouldn't have wanted
> it any other way. But I love *both* the ruthless spirit of inquiry *and*
> chanting mantras, etc, in Sanskrit, Chinese, or whatever. I love big
> calligraphies that just say "MU!" *and* blatantly devotional portrayals
> of Celestial Bodhisattvas. After all, "The Great Way is not difficult
> for those who are unattached to preferences." (Not that I claim to yet
> be unattached to preferences - but it's on my "to do" list.)

In this I think you and I are very much of the same mind. I love the 
intellectual rigor of the forms of Buddhism I know something about, but I 
also find almost everything in Buddhism aesthetically pleasing, from the 
garish complexity of Tibetan painted scrolls to the spare calligraphy and 
one-line depictions of Bodhidharma. There is none of it (except for the neon 
halo I once saw flashing over the head of a Vietnamese Buddha image) that I 
don't find attractive. And I have never found a ritual I didn't both like and 
find useful. (I have to say the same about Western religion; I am every bit 
as home in an Eastern Orthodox Christian mass or a Roman Catholic mass as in 
a Quaker meeting. About the only thing that makes me uncomfortable is getting 
hugs from Methodist ministers who don't even know my name and have never seen 
my face before; when a hug is given so promiscuously, it feels somehow 
inauthentic to me.)

> Thank you for asking.

Thank you for responding.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes