[Buddha-l] Conservative and liberal Buddhists

[Richard Hayes]

Dear denizens,

Recently I was trying to sort out what distinguishes liberal Quakers from Evangelical Quakers, the latter category usually being subdivided into conservative and orthodox Quakers. There are many treatments of the topic, but one that I found especially clear is the one in Pink Dandelion's book The Quakers: A Very Short Introduction. (There are several titles in the Very Short Introduction series that I have found helpful, including Damien Keown's two books on Buddhism. I am waiting for someone to write Very Short Histories: A Rather Long History.)

Dandelion's account is not at all original—it is not meant to be—but it is clear, and it works pretty well. And as I was reading it, I thought that much of the framework he uses to talk about Quakers would also apply to Buddhists. So I thought I would paraphrase the framework and leave it as an exercise to the reader to see whether it applies to Buddhists (and especially Buddhists in the latter part of the month of May and perhaps early June in the year 2010). The framework consists of a distinction between realists, semi-realists and non-realists, which are described as follows:

Realists believe that their experiences are real and that their theological expressions of their experiences are real, which entails the belief that the theological expressions of other people, insofar as they differ from what is deemed true, must be false. (In a Quaker context, for example, realists would be those who believe that they really are communicating the word of the holy spirit and that their claims about God and Christ are true. They also believe that their experiences verify scripture, which is useless until it is verified by one's own experiences.)

Non-realists claim that doctrinal expressions are neither true not false but are instruments for bringing private and subjective experiences about and giving those who have the experiences a common language to talk about them. (So a non-realist Quaker would be one who learns to say such things as "led by the spirit" and perhaps even "God" and "Christ" but who thinks those terms do not name anything real but are vague symbols for things that are valued by the person who uses them.)

Semi-realists believe that the contents of experiences are real but that all attempts to talk about them are purely heuristic and ultimately have no truth value. (So a Quaker semi-realist would be someone who believes in God and believes that God can really be experienced but is convinced that statements about God are at best only partial, provisional and essentially subjective statements that cannot be considered true for all people at all times.) 

Dandelion claims that Evangelical Quakers tend to be realists, while most liberal Quakers are semi-realists and a minority are non-realists. 

Well, as I read these descriptions (which are more detailed than the brief summaries I have given here), I realized that as a Quaker I would unquestionably best be described as a liberal and most probably as a non-realist (although I would probably hold that it is neither true nor false that I am a non-realist). And then it occurred to me that as a Buddhist I am also pretty much a liberal and much more clearly a non-realist, especially since Jamie Hubbard convinced me that there is no such thing as nirvana and therefore no such a thing as a buddha, an arhant or a bodhisattva. But it is still fun, in a harmless sort of way, to throw those terms around as if they had referents, and one feels a certain amount of kinship with other people who use those words at least three times before lunch.

Bhikkhu Bodhi strikes me as mostly a realist. He makes all kinds of noises that lead me to think that he really believes there was a buddha and that nirvana really exists and that there really is a method of achieving it and that the Pali canon really is a record of the truths spoken by that very real buddha. Perhaps I misread Bodhi, but from what I have been able to gather, there are quite a few Buddhist realists, even in such liberal enclaves as Massachusetts and California.

After sorting out some of what distinguishes evangelical from liberal Quakers (who, not surprisingly, tend not to hold one another in terribly high esteem and can barely occupy the same room and observe the Quaker peace testimony at the same time), Dandelion goes on to discuss ecumenism and religious pluralism. Needless to say, realists have hardly any room at all for pluralism, and many fear that too much exposure to people with other convictions might undermine their faith and loosen their grip on truth. But most manage to overcome their fear of contact with others for long enough to try to convert them. There is little of an ecumenical or interfaith spirit among realists.

What really struck me about Dandelion's account of various attitudes to truth was what he said next about liberal Quakers, which I think might apply also to liberal Buddhists (if there are any). Religious liberals, he says, promote what he calls "the absolute perhaps." Whenever anyone says anything, pluralistic liberals are inclined to respond by saying there may be a grain in truth in what was said, but there are at least as many grains of truth in other views, and since there is no way of tallying up the grains, every claim must be preceded with perhaps (a kind of syādvāda?). Liberals tend to be so wary of definitive and absolute claims of any kind that they tend to be at least mildly contemptuous of anyone who shows dangerous signs of being certain of anything.

I have to confess that when Dandelion got around to characterizing the absolute perhapsism of theological and philosophical liberals, I had the uneasy feeling he had planted a bugging device in my mind and had recorded my thoughts. As Quakers are wont to say "he spoke to my condition" and perhaps even described me to a tee.

All this is by way of explanation for why I have provisionally decided, for the time being at least, to consider perhaps changing the name of buddha-l to perhaps-l. It feels to me as though most of us who can stand to read buddha-l have our feet at least temporarily somewhere near the "absolute perhaps" camp. But perhaps not.

It doesn't really matter anyway. So let's change the subject.  

Richard