I was attending a lecture at UCLA by Professor Gregory Schopen. As is clear, the man is no slouch in the intellect department nor is he uninformed about Buddhism, the South Asian and Southeast Asian kind that Euro-Americans are so enamored of.
Several months ago, I won't quote who, a professor in that same department said in an LA Times article that Buddhism was anything one brought to it. It was as if it was a free-floating thing. Transcending culture. Time. Timeless.
I'm not certain what he meant. But I know what a lot of Euro-Americans think: "Hey, Buddhism is, like, this totally cool religion! I can, like, meditate, and feel good! Like I'm not making all this bad karma, you know? And it's so open. This Noble Eight-fold Path is great, the Four Noble Truths are great, and if I follow them, I am soo superior to my fellow average white American! And you know what? If I add a few new-agey, completely stupid ideas that came out of my own head, hey, that's alright because it's Buddhism! Everything and anything goes! Oh, and we're apolitical, the Buddha doesn't like that. Except when it comes to China. Then we're really political, but the Dalai Lama says it's okay."
Something like that.
I have few things to say about those opinions. First, they are wrong. Buddhism is not an open, free-floating religion that accepts all the stupid ideas that you can come up with. It's not the "new religion" that can replace the narrow-mindedness you associate with Christianity. It's also not a way to forget you are a white, Euro-American. Sorry. You don't get to just adopt the "good bits" and feel good about yourself, all the while maintaining your white superiority. Doesn't work like that.
Buddhism is a very culture-specific religion. Like all religions. There are certain practices, tenets, and beliefs that reflect very specific times, places and people. That's right, folks. You can't just plug in, take what you want, and say blithely, "Hey, I'm a Buddhist! Everything goes!"
What does this very brief cultural critique of white Americans who feel like if they don't fit into the Christian tradition, they can easily adopt and culturally colonize this other one? Well, exactly this. That during this faculty lecture, amongst the many arguments Schopen was making was that not only was the Buddha portrayed in many narratives as a businessman, but that he was an eminent pragmatist. That his concern was not to remain "up in the clouds, meditating" the way all these annoying Euro-Americans do when they're trying to escape the pain in their lives. That he was often portrayed in dialogues as teaching very practical lessons regarding institutional longevity and even basic successful institutionalization that rather less-than-pragmatic monks often did not grasp. Else what was the need for such didactic texts?
He also argues that the idiots always "meditating" were considered the fringe. Rather like they are here. Loser fringe people who can't make it in the mainstream world, so they run away to the "land of spirituality", India. Which probably doesn't appreciate all these annoying Euro-Americans looking in someone else's backyard for things they should be seeking in their own.
Moreover, and I find this particularly entertaining in re: these Euro-Americans here, things like the Noble Eightfold Path and the Four Noble Truths? Well, guess what? They weren't universal.
Gasp!
Yes, it's just that these were amongst the few scriptures that were translated into English. So lots of white people got their hands on them, assumed that they were representative of all of Buddhism, and voila! Globalization! Universalization! Stupidity.
The crux of the problem is that the majority of white Americans "practicing" Buddhism don't speak any language other than American English. They haven't grasped the fact that there are literally stacks and stacks of volumes at UCLA's YRL, East Asian Library, that have yet to be explored. Of course, that would require the average American interested in this sort of thing to be, oh, bilingual. Perish the thought!
Can't do it. Much easier to remain in a haze of ignorance abroad, traveling around India, Nepal, or wherever the heck it is convenient for these fringe Americans to be and not confront the fact that they cannot succeed in their own country. That they have to go abroad for some Cultural Imperialism before they can feel good about themselves.
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