Buddhism

1 comment on Hacker News

1. NeutralpmoriartyJul 20, 2021

   "I saw a well regarded movie recently where the main characterized Buddhism as "a philosophy rather than a religion" which made it clear that no Asians had been involved in the making of that film."

   Asians are as capable as anyone else at secularizing Buddhism (or of doing anything else, really).

   Take the example of D T Suzuki[1] himself -- the man who is arguably more responsible than anyone else for bringing Buddhism to the West.

   "In the mid-20th century, Japanese lay scholar D. T. Suzuki was instrumental in creating a Zen which would be acceptable to Westerners, a project undertaken to position post WWII Japan as a modern, powerful nation and its culture as refined and superior in the face of Western hegemony. Suzuki sought to remove Zen from its historical and cultural context and make it accessible and applicable to everyone. This extraction cut its ties to monks and monasteries, the precepts, sangha life, rituals and teachings, and set up instead the individual internal experience of awakening as the only reliable "truth." Positioning Zen as based on the truth of personal experience protected it from rejection as superstition or as a creation of a bewildered community. At the same time, it could not be replaced by science or rationalism because the awakening experience was said to be subjective and ineffable. It was beyond all the limitations of organized sects, cultural manifestations, or political exigencies. As Robert Sharf explains,"

   "The notion of "pure Zen"--a pan-cultural religious experience unsullied by institutional, social, and historical contingencies--would be attractive precisely because it held out the possibility of an alternative to the godless and indifferent anomic universe bequeathed by the Western Enlightenment, yet demanded neither blind faith nor institutional allegiance. This reconstructed Zen offered an intellectually reputable escape from the epistemological anxiety of historicism and pluralism."[2]

   "Several scholars have identified Suzuki as a Buddhist modernist... Buddhist modernist traditions often consist of a deliberate de-emphasis of the ritual and metaphysical elements of the religion, as these elements are seen as incommensurate with the discourses of modernity. Buddhist modernist traditions have also been characterized as being "detraditionalized," often being presented in a way that occludes their historical construction. Instead, Buddhist modernists often employ an essentialized description of their tradition, where key tenets are described as universal and sui generis. It was this form of Zen that has been popularized in the West... In his discussion of humanity and nature, Suzuki takes Zen literature out of its social, ritual, and ethical contexts and reframes it in terms of a language of metaphysics derived from German Romantic idealism, English romanticism, and American transcendentalism."[1]

   [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_T_Suzuki

   [2] - https://ancientwayjournal.wordpress.com/2016/05/15/origins-of-secular-zen/