Beautiful and important truth-telling from our friends Ron Purser and Andy Cooper! Much gratitude for this piece! Our concerns have nothing to do with complaints that Buddhism is being diluted or whether the mindfulness movement is an authentic and accurate representation of traditional Buddhist teachings, although those who venture to raise critical questions are often immediately pigeonholed as out-of-touch Buddhist purists. To be clear, we know of no one opposed to meditation being employed for reducing human suffering of any kind. But we do take issue with the troublesome rhetoric that the Buddhist tradition amounts to nothing more than an outdated set of cultural accretions. Author Sam Harris exemplifies this in his essay Killing the Buddha, when he characterizes the Buddhist religious tradition as an accidental strand of history and tells those in the mindfulness movement that they no longer need to be in the religion business. Dan Harris, co-anchor of ABC’s Nightline and Good Morning America and the author of the best-selling book 10% Happier, decries meditation’s massive PR problem, code for shedding any associations with anything that smacks of Buddhism. This kind of deprecatory, at times hostile characterization of the Buddhist tradition betrays a terrible lack of understanding of what it means to engage meaningfully with a religious tradition, and a naïve belief in the unassailable authority of science as the sole arbiter of truth, meaning and value...To say that one has arrived at a universal essence of an ancient world religion is not only a bold claim, but it bears the stamp of colonialism with its rhetoric of universal reason. Mindfulness is now being marketed as a scientifically tested natural food for the mind, purged of all the extraneous fat and toxic preservatives of Asian cultural baggage. If this sounds familiar — educated Westerners and Western entrepreneurs appropriating elements of Asian culture with the attitude that Western modes of thought provide a privileged understanding and means of employing of those otherwise exotic elements — it should. It is characteristic of the imperialist mindset, which says, we know better than you what you are about.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 17:43:46 +0000
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