For most people who have left behind theistic religion, there are only two widely understood alternative contemporary identifications, one being pagan/shamanic and the other Buddhist. Buddhist-derived thought is extremely influential in New Age spirituality, and many people in need of a comprehensible label will loosely describe themselves as Buddhist or Zen. These are rich traditions with many insights into the human condition, but in my opinion Buddhism also commits some ghastly errors to which many of its adherents remain blind.
As I have found an excellent summary of these errors here, I can summarize briefly. Many people loosely assume that by labelling themselves “Buddhist” they have chosen an appellation which does away with the dualist denigration of the body and earthly life which predominates in mainstream Christianity, Judaism and Islam. This is a profound misunderstanding, because Buddhism is closely aligned with other world religions in its promulgation of a belief system which promotes acceptance of the established order. Indeed, Buddhism owes a good part of its secular success to the fact that repressing it is entirely pointless.
Buddhism is a transcendentalist philosophy. This is epitomized in the core notion that desire is the root of suffering, and therefore desire needs to be overcome. Yes, you read that right: there is something wrong with man’s basic drive to achieve or accomplish anything at all. Absolutely everything is illusory; all that “works” is meditation, and a specific kind of meditation which is directed against our biological essence.
In my understanding, any true spiritual path is not transcendental, but restorative. What we are dealing with is not overcoming any inadequacy in our biological nature, but fundamental flaws in our social conditioning. We can trust who we are, and merely need to unlearn who we believe ourselves to be. This process comes completely from within and does not need any external goal to focus on, and certainly not the goal of elimination of desire. On the contrary, we very much need to cultivate desire, which is our life force. Desire, we can say, is the masculine aspect of love, and love is incomplete, indeed inconceivable, without it. This perspective I will continue to call non-duality; it is not Buddhism.
As a Buddhist you cannot live life, you can only renounce it. Sometimes in very subtle ways that may look like they affirm one or other aspect of human existence, but when you take a look under the cover, this is merely instrumental to a transcendent agenda. In a way, these aspects are not affirmed, but only admitted, because they are not important enough to reject, or because the war on biological nature also counts as a desire which undermines the attitude of strict passivity and acceptance. Even if it may be cognitively strained neither to struggle against a force nor its social counterforce.
In opting for a restorationist perspective, I am not of course arguing for a Flintstonian return to Eden. Such a call would be practically useless, but also spiritually flawed. I believe what we need to do to live a good life and heal our planet is to free our biological nature now, and that society is a transpersonal construct which is an inevitable and necessary part of our human existence, which can neither be abandoned nor simply refounded on a utopian (meaning inevitably dystopian) basis. It is clear to me that evolution continues through social institutions, even if it may take wrong paths. But it is also clear to me that nothing intrinsic to our biological nature is hostile to global welfare; on the contrary, it is precisely its repression which is at the root of all neurosis and cruelty. That is to say, society has not changed in ways which are simultaneously functional and to which our ancestral legacy renders us maladapted. This is because society merely reflects the attempt to achieve ancestral drive satisfaction under manufactured environmental conditions. This is all it does; and thus trying to inflect drives is inherently at odds with its purpose. Contemporary social reality is only one, path-dependent solution, and it lies well within the happiness production frontier. In other words, we can do very considerably better.
If there is no idea of revolution within a spiritual tradition, it is not human, and it is not fit for purpose. This social bias towards the status quo and the stigmatization of desire is what Bertold Brecht spoke of when he observed that “the rushing stream is called violent, but no-one so speaks of the riverbed which locks it in“. In fact, the embedded violence of social institutions is far greater than the observed violence of those who seek to break free of them. The centrality of embracing desire (Bejahung) also underpins Nietzsche’s philosophy, as for example when he wrote, in the Will to Power, that “if we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence… and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.”
It is not that there is no transcendence; there is indeed transcendence but one cannot transcend that which one has not restored. In fact, it is the very restoration which is transcendence because, in that moment, the problem has ceased to be; the faculty is restored and reintegrated and the more complete woman or man is better equipped to find her or his way in the world. The idea of transcendence presupposes something which is lower and problematic; but there is no reason to believe that anything in the human biological constitution (any more than that of any other species) fits this description. I believe that the effort to transcend necessarily ties one into a dualistic samsara. Thus in fact that Buddhism cannot, by its very structure, solve the problem it has posited. Biological energy flows naturally in spiritual directions, but only if it is embraced in its totality, unselectively.
Let us be clear. Human beings are not unhappy solely because they have failed to resign themselves to the circumstances of their lives. They are also unhappy because social institutions frustrate the full expression of their biological nature. Somewhere, each of us has to come to terms with that part of this apparatus of repression which we can at a given moment not change. In this, there is an art, and Buddhist ideas can help us negotiate this path. They should not, for one moment, blind us or make us indifferent to all the horror embedded in our social institutions and all the suffering which they beget.
It is a tiresome, new-age cliché to say that, beneath their superficial diversity, all religions are different paths leading to the same place. It’s a bit closer to the truth to respond by saying that all religion is equally bullshit, but this too is just a lazy pot-shot at a slow-moving target: Religions are practiced by human beings, and most human beings are not very sophisticated thinkers; if you look for evidence of stupid in any religion, you’ll find it.
There is support in Buddhism, within the practices and canonical texts, for overcoming duality. I’d cite three things: 1) The “there is no attainment” Heart Sutra; 2) the Lotus Sutra, with its subtext that the supernatural elements of Buddhist metaphysics are metaphorical fictions; and 3) the practices of mindfulness which, if followed correctly, tend to overcome the illusion of dualism. The fact that most self-identified Buddhists don’t take that route, and instead rub Fat Buddha’s belly hoping to get the winning lottery numbers this week, may not be the fault of the teaching… unless you can demonstrate that another teaching does better, with diverse practitioners of varying backgrounds.
This “better practice” probably exists, or could. But to shape it will require a less dismissive criticism of the existent and historical traditions. I would put the useful form of the question in an anthropological way: What kinds of cultures arise around the different metaphysical systems? Jainism does not lead to the same kinds of culture as Buddhism; Buddhism does not lead to the same kind of culture as Hinduism. Hinduism leads to different cultures than do the Abrahamic religions. (I’ve been listing them in increasing order of patriarchal brutality.) And then there’s Zoroastrianism, Mormonism, Scientology, and so on.
Insights like yours (and of the article you link and refer to) are important antidotes to the exotification and idealization of eastern and “new” spiritualities, but misses the opportunities to see the values within and differences between various traditions and practices. As an observer of human culture, I’d say Buddhism supports inner and out peace better than most organized religions, and it’s worth recognizing this and asking why.
Frederick, thanks for your comment. Certainly, Buddhism supports the notion of overcoming duality. But I tried to make clear in the article that for me it is not a question of “overcoming” anything, but that rather we should fully embrace life. Granted, both I and Buddhism wish to strip away illusion, but I think we have very different ideas of the extent and nature of such illusion. I profoundly disagree with the notion that worldly existence is characterized by suffering and that we should seek to escape it for this reason. I think we are incarnated precisely because worldly existence is wonderful and has a quality which disembodied existence does not.
I don’t think I missed any opportunity; the article simply wasn’t about the absolute or relative value of Buddhism or Buddhistic practices. I think many of these practices – the ones familiar to us from Western Buddhism and Zen anyway – have great value. I am as big a fan of Thich Nhat Hanh as I am of Rumi and St Francis, perhaps more. However, I do think that a lot of people risk adopting a very pessimistic view of life if they do not make the corrective to the usual discursive framework of Buddhism to which I invite. It goes without saying that some may have done so. You are probably right in saying that the Lotus sutra and the Zen practice of mindfulness are closer to my view of the world, but I was not dismissing them (any more than Bertrand Russell dismissed everything associated with Christianity in Why I am not a Christian), I merely wanted to explain why I did not wish to identify as a Buddhist and what a major risk in such an identification was. Those traditions within Buddhism more in line with advaita vedanta are probably rightly viewed as non-Buddhist in origin anyway, just as Sufism is non-Islam in origin, Kabbalah non-Judaic, and gnosticism non-Christian. For me, Zen seems more a form of Taoism than of Buddhism.
Your question about the link to culture was not one I sought to address, but since you mention it, I think it is very problematic implicitly to seem to imply a direction of causality from religion to culture. In fact, the causality mainly flows in the opposite direction. In any case, practicing Buddhists are a majority in Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia, Sri Lanka and Bhutan. I don’t know about Bhutan but the rest are pretty violent places. For me, the more interesting question is why Buddhism does not support social justice. I think the Abrahamic religions have a better track record in this regard. But I suspect that all religions impede social progress, just to different degrees; I would be loathe to give any of them any credit, even if certain figures affiliated with religions have on occasion played a very positive role (Wilberforce, Desmond Tutu, Gandhi…). Honestly, I think you are romanticizing Buddhism based on Western Buddhism which presents a huge selection bias.
Plus, if Buddhism indeed supports inner and outer peace more than other organized religions, this could be because it is not an organized religion. I would say the same of Islam – you get a lot of scope to do what you want. So it provides a language, which is appropriated by persons who are led to seek inner and outer peace. There’s your selection bias. The question is, how good is this language? I am not sure it is very good, and neither is it the only game in town. It seems to me that Taoism and some recent developments in Western shamanism actually provide better languages with which to approach reality on the basis of an understanding that humanity is intrinsically adapted rather than maladapted to its environment, and that therefore a restorationist agenda, not a transcendentalist one, provides the best foundation for personal growth.
This is an interesting critique of Buddhism by Slavoj Žižek: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAtUPfF1R_s, in which he also notes the support by D.T. Suzuki of Japan’s invasion of China in WW2.
And here a discussion of Nietzsche’s views on Buddhism – close to Zizek’s and my own. http://thus-spoke-nietzsche.tumblr.com/post/19194412041/nietzsche-on-buddhism