Engaged Buddhism in the West: Neo-colonialism or a long-standing tradition?

Engaged Buddhism in the West:
Neo-colonialism or a long-standing tradition?

by Sean Hillman
Religion Department
University of Toronto
April 2008

[Based on Yarnell's
"Engaged Buddhism: New and Improved?"]

Thomas Yarnell’s article “Engaged Buddhism: New and improved?” summarizes the views of both traditionalists and modernists in the debate over the status of socially engaged Buddhism. He shows the traditionists as those which hold that both textual sources and activities of social engagement can be found throughout Buddhist history as the natural extension of the call to action explicitly and implicitly found in the teachings of the Buddha. The modernists are shown to be those who feel that Buddhism has historically not been a tradition of social engagement and that although traditional Buddhism does not have the ability to adequately address the unique problems found in today’s world and is thus an unsatisfactory model for effective social engagement, the methods found within modern Western social and political thought and practice can both directly help confront these problems and activate the latent ability within Buddhist thought and practice to do the same. Yarnell also compares the biased use of texts which led to the creation of a dualistic philoshopy/non-philosophy split by early European Buddhologists/Orientalists with modernist engaged Buddhists, who he feels have similarly created a dualistic engaged/disengaged split by approaching Buddhist history without fitting it into the greater context of the history of Asian thought, society and politics. The author also presents three movements of both neo-Colonialists/Orientalists and modernist engaged Buddhists as recognition, appropriation and distancing. Finally, he analyses the writings of modernist scholars and discovers the common habit of such Buddhologists to extend their criticism of engaged Buddhists who use the religion not for the spirutual purpose of inner and outer transformation but rather to merely affect systemic change in society, or reductive modernism (secularising religion from within), as a blanket generalisation that includes all engaged Buddhists.

Firstly, Yarnell’s own dichotomy of engagement versus renunciation at the outset of his article sets a major tone to the exploration to come. He immediately falls prey himself to the construction of a “disengagement” that engaged Buddhist traditionists see as a Western misperception. To say that engaging is opposed to renunciation means that one cannot do both; an engaged renunciate is a non-existent phenomenon, like the child of a barren woman. “Renunciate” refers not only to ordained members of the Sangha, the mendicant order of monks and nuns that are usually referred to by this term, but to anyone who has the intention and practice of renouncing worldy concerns. “Worldly concerns” is used in Buddhist scripture, such as in the section on the “Eight Worldly Attitudes” found in any Lam Rim (Tib: “Graduated Steps [to Enlightenment]”) text, to indicate activities that are tainted with a harmful or selfish motivation and does not imply that any activity that is done “in the world” is poisonous to one’s practice of purity and mental training. One can be a renunciate, either ordained or lay, by being one who is committed to giving up all the causes of pain for oneself and others, and simultaneously partake in socially engaged activities. To go even further, one who has such a motivation can affect even greater change at large and within their own mind because of the difficulties met while being “in the marketplace” because of the difficulty of the challenges confronted and the rarity of pure intention.

It seems that there are examples in the Buddhist tradition, with regard to social engagement, of both long-standing attention to society and politics, historically in both practice and in textual sources, as well as there being uniquely new manifestations which could be accused of being neo-colonialistic.

In his modernist overview, Yarnell quotes Joseph Kitigawa as saying that
“[in early Buddhism] neither the monastics nor the laity seemed to have given much thought one way or the other to the norms and structures of the social or political order, which to them had no immediate religious significance.”
This statement is the result of a very narrow look at Buddhist history and scripture. Kitigawa must be completely unaware of the requirement in the monastic code (Skt: Vinaya) of providing service to the king when necessary, something mutually opposed to monastic life because it could involve such activities as bearing arms. The Buddha also made it a requirement to receive permission from one’s parents to enter the Homeless Life. To enter into the monastic order for life after 21 years of age would be a shock to the Hindu system of phases where each male member moves naturally through pre-pubescent youth, a pubescent period of student celibacy (Skt: brahmacarya), becoming a child-rearing householder and entering the last stages of life by retiring to the forest as a mendicant. In these ways the Buddha made it compulsory for the monastic community to respect the structure in society. How is this not paying attention to social order?

A current example of neo-colonialism is shown in the case of a Toronto Tibetan Buddhist temple run by a Western monastic. Similar to Nelson Foster’s position that the Western environment is optimal for the development of Buddhism, the leader holds that practicing the Dharma in the West is far superior to practicing in Asia. Of course there can be some health found in this approach. Demystifying the idyllic picture painted of traditional Asian Buddhist environments and thus making the East seem less appealing for practice might make it easier for practitioners to feel contentment in less than ideal conditions, such as those found in communities that have co-ed monastic dwellings and full-time physical labour to the exclusion of quiet inner-training exercise and scriptural study. It can also be a form of distancing, one of three symptoms of colonialism. The community focus of individual and group-therapy with the leader as the main tool for personal transformation is supported in part by attempts to prove the non-existence of such methods at any other time or place in Buddhist history. It recognizes and appropriates the Buddhist idea that personal transformation depends on changing one’s thoughts and emotions, and the Tibetan Buddhist emphasis that this must be done in conjunction with a teacher, but distances by saying that it is unique and much more effective done in the hustle-and-bustle context of the city, and when using Western psychotherapeutic methods. The bi-weekly monastic confession is an example to the contrary. In some communities, this ritual has degenerated into the mere recitation of confession formulas and the reciting and listening to the Pratimoksha (Skt: “personal liberation”) vows, in full or in abridged form. In best practice, such as that done at the time of the Buddha and still today in some monastic communities in Asia and in the West, the confession event is a personalised and emotional ritual where the spirit of expressing one’s faults, and feeling remorse for them, is done openly in the presence of one’s teachers, senior and peer monastics [the fully-ordained (Skt: Bhikshus) do not confess in the presence of novices (Skt: Sramanera)]. Even if it is not practiced ideally everywhere and at every time, is this not an example of group therapeutic healing and purification through both the transparency of oneself and others, and the implementation of reparative countermeasures? Is it not done using traditional Buddhist practice, and can it not be transplanted into any setting? One last example of this community being neo-colonialistic is how unconventional, and even unethical and illegal activities, are justified. Activities that naturally cause immediate discomfort to a person attempting to practice purely living according to the spirit and letter of Buddhist ethics, such as appropriating funds raised for orphans, are rationalised as being direct orders received from the Guru while in communion. This is reminiscent of the very powerful Christian colloquialism of “What would Jesus do?” when confronted with difficult and unique scenarios that stretch the strength and preparedness of our personal ethics and can even can be paralleled further in Christian history in the examples of saints such as St. John of the Cross and St. Francis who are said to have communed with Jesus. Is this distortion, since Buddhist monastics are required to not reveal extraordinary powers, perhaps a play on a Westerners Christian sensitivities? If so, it would be an appropriation by fitting something couched in Buddhist ideas and images into a Western Christian society. In this modern and current example of a living Buddhist community in the West, we find all three movements that Yarnell outlines as existing in the approach of both neo-Orientalists/Colonialists and modernist engaged Buddhists.

Yarnell’s idea that the growing pains that we see surrounding engaged Buddhism, with the engaged Buddhists themselves who sometimes feel the need to prove the validity of their practice within the context of Buddhism, and amongst the scholars analysing the movement from the outside, will result in an eventual levelling off in the extremes of its debate and end in the acceptance of socially engaged Buddhism as a legitimate tradition, is both appealing and supported by Buddhist history with other Buddhist movements. The Mahayana tradition, Tantric Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism which were each accused by some people (Buddhists and Buddhologists alike) and at some times (from their inception up to the present) as either a degeneration of original Buddhism or as being fabrications that did not come from the Buddha at all. The strength of these often criticised legacies is shown both by their unapologetic migration into every possible environment and by the numbers, and inner and outer accomplishments, of their membership. If history proves to be cyclic and true, Yarnell’s description of engaged Buddhism as “nacent” will one day be replaced with “omnipresent” and “flourishing,” despite its opposition.