Speculative Non-Buddhism
Call for Submissionsruins of the buddhist real
I am collaborating with Shaun Bartone of Engage! on this project. Its main goal is to stimulate thinking about the forms that a practice community might take going forward into the 21st century. Our aim is to stimulate the creation of actual, concrete communities in both in-person and online formats.
From the beginning of this blog’s existence, I have been hearing from readers about the loneliness and disorientation that comes with being estranged from a practice community. We believe that some of the reasons for this increasingly common experience of x-buddhist alienation are addressed in the questions and themes we bring to your attention below. In the end, we hope to see real life groups of people regularly engaging thought, practice, action, one another, and the world in impactful ways.
What might such community, and such practice, entail? In following the non-buddhist impulse, we still envision the incorporation of x-buddhist materials, but likely in permutations unrecognizable as x-buddhist to current practitioners. As you can see, our Call for Submissions contains values that frame the project. For instance, we desire to instigate forms of community that are autonomous, horizontal (non-authoritarian and non-hierarchical), decentralized, and networked. These values implicitly challenge two pervasive x-buddhist axioms: the necessity of the traditional teacher-who-knows, and the contemporary neoliberal assumption of the atomized individual. Can you envision a practice group without a teacher? How do you see that operating in real terms?
Please join us in imagining—out loud, in writing, in public—a future that includes a Buddhism unbound!
Buddhist Spring May 2020 calls creative writers, practitioners, teachers, poets, academics, para-academics, institutionally exiled nomads and pirates, thinkers and dreamers, and all other stakeholders in the World of Buddhism to submit original texts. Length, style, tone, and form can vary. Examples may include: scholarly article; essay; blog post; sociological fieldwork; interview; poetry; utopian fantasy; fiction; satire; screed; humor; ritual instructions; aphorisms; exercitia; catechism, litany; farce. Accepted texts will be published, as received, on the sponsor blogs Engage! and Speculative Non-Buddhism, and uploaded to the Action Network and Keybase file systems and other social media. These texts will form the cache of materials needed to feed and fuel the BS52020 movement. They will serve us in collectively imagining, conceiving, discussing, and creating a new future for Buddhist community in the West.
Befitting the purpose of BS52020, our focus is on the social organization of Buddhism. And given our desire to instigate forms of community that are autonomous, horizontal (non-authoritarian and non-hierarchical), decentralized, and networked, we are most broadly interested in anarchist approaches. Yet, at this stage, we invite you to explore a wide range of questions and themes, including but not limited to the following:
Please submit either a brief proposal or your finished piece at any time to engagedharma.net@gmail.com.
I used to be somewhat intregued by the question “What will become of Buddhism in the West / Modernity?” But now it seems to me that all of the operational terms and references for thinking about that sort of thing are in complete disarray on account of the West / Modernity’s mythos being in … more than disarray… It’s in collapse. Modernity’s edifice is still visible everywhere but hardly anyone any longer believes in, or is invested in, its mythos. Politics, which is at the heart of Modernity (a particular kind of politics) has collapsed in the societies which claim to have invented it, celebrated it…. Buddhism just doesn’t seem all that important any longer — to me. It cannot salvage what is in ruin.
I’m wondering now why Taoism, rather than Buddhism, didn’t set down its Eastern roots in America and the West, thus calling upon us to wonder how Taoism would mutate in a new, modern, Western setting. In Taoism are to be found a fair number of hints about what we call “nature” — not as a conceptual / representational thing but as a living, unfolding experience. It is this living, unfolding experience of nature which we will need to cope with the collapse of our culture’s mythos — which cannot be halted. It is reaching free fall collapse these days. We only pretend to believe in it, if that much.
Ultimately, both Taoism and Buddhism point beyond myth / representation / attachment to conceptual schemas … in order to liberate myth, representation, schemas by allowing them to to return to their dynamic, spacious openness in our use and experience of the same. You cannot wrap any of this up in a neat, tidy package with a singular handle. And I’m pretty okay with that! I never wanted to jump out of the airplane with the parachute. I never wanted to discover that I’m not wearing the chute on the way down. I never expected to grow wings! I never imagined I could fly free! How’s that for a short, poetic Buddho-fiction? Quick: Send it to Disney and Hallmark Cards!