Matthew O’Connell of The Imperfect Buddha Podcast just published an intriguing essay on non-buddhism and beyond. It is on Tricycle Magazin‘s online edition. I’m not sure if there is a paywall or not. Have a look!
Waking Up to Non-Buddhism
7 responses to “Waking Up to Non-Buddhism”
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Please note, I had written a more up to date introduction to non-buddhism that was rejected in favour of the text they chose, which was adapted form an older intro at the Imperfect Buddha website. I will post the newer version at my site at some point, not that regulars here will need to read it!
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Matthew,
I will look forward to reading your new “introduction.” It is startling to see a discussion of ideology on the Tricycle site. I expect readers there will either stay away in droves or be quite hostile. I particularly like this point: “You could call it a story or a telling, but identity formation and the calibration of the subjective to new ways of being, feeling, and thinking go far deeper than mere narration.” Ideology is much more subtle and pervasive than merely the stories we tell: it is what makes particular stories are compelling, and others seem dull. The “telling stories” trope is quite popular with x-Buddhists, though.
I would suggest that it is a problem to so consistently see ideology only as “entrapment”. I can be that, of course, but it is also empowerment—without ideology, we have no agency at all. The point is to avoid reifying our ideology—reification, not ideology, is what entraps us. That is, in fact, the point of the project I’m working on now—a series of hyper-translations from the SuttaNipata presenting Buddhism as the practice of de-reifying our ideologies. As Balibar reminds us: Conscienta sive ideologia.
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Tom,
Thank you for the reminder about the good of ideologies. I tend to come at the topic from the perspective of the practitioner so am always attempting to articulate for Buddhists how they are far more than an individual self and the ways in which Buddhism produces ideological practices that are anything but ahistorical and magically free of human hands. This does mean I tend to focus on the way ideologies lead to identity formation and specific forms of ignorance.
As for Tricycle, it does seem odd to see non-buddhism in its online pages. I imagine there will be plenty of dismissal on the part of the die-hard Buddhists that actually take the time to read it but you never know, some folks might find it helpful and even illuminating! -
Tom, ….just as the Heart Sutra de-reifies Buddhist ideology.
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Henry: A hyper-translation of the Heart Sutra could be a powerful means of de-reifying our ideology today. What are the Skandhas for us? Perhaps this could be a kind of Buddha-Fiction?
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That’s a great question, ‘What are the skandhas for us?’ especially when run through the non-buddhism mill to rid them of sufficiency and their decisional attachments.
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Yes, that’s the question: what would non-buddhism do with the skandhas? Once we see that rupa, vedana, sanna, sankhara, vinnana, are signifiers in an ancient theory of the subject, we would not proceed with the futile task of trying to find a single English word to correspond with each term—or to arguing over which English term is the best one. The question is, which Buddhist texts work to reify this theory of the subject, and which are attempting to deconstruct this reification? Which do we want to do with our own theory of the subject? Perhaps our own skandhas are things like consciousness, emotion, free will, etc. Each of which have had literally hundreds of volumes written about them…with no clear consensus yet on what they might mean. On my understanding of non-buddhism (I’m never sure if I am within the decisional fold of this project) we would say something like: consciousness is a floating signifier in the empiricist theory of the subject, it doesn’t refer to any actual thing, but here is how it is used to produce an ideology….
I would see the five skandhas in the same way. They generate enormous discussion because they are not labels for any actual thing, but signifiers producing and ideology of the subject.
This is why I think a hyper-translation of something like the Heart Sutra would be very productive today. The Heart Sutra could be taken, as Henry suggests, to de-reify a particular Buddhist ideology; but more often it has been used exactly to reify it, suggesting that there really are deep and profound meanings to those five terms which only the enlightened can see.
Non-Buddhism 
What do you think?