Scholarly articles on Buddhism

Monks and Money by Ajahn Brahmavamso

2008-07-19T19:31:00.000-07:00

This is the second article in the series about the Vinaya, the body of monastic rules and traditions binding on every Buddhist monk and nun. In this article I will be concerned with the controversial issue of a monk's or nun's dealings with money.
The issue has been controversial for over 2,000 years. Around 200 years after the Buddha's final passing away, there arose a great quarrel in which "both endless disputations arose and of not one speech was the meaning clear" [1]. This dispute arose because a large community of monks were accepting money in defiance of the Vinaya. The proceedings of the dispute became known as the Second Council and it sowed the seed of the first great schism in the Buddhist world, which happened soon after.

Then, as now, there is no excuse for uncertainty on this point, for the Buddha's own words make it plain...

On Monks and Money

Buddhist monks (bhikkhus) and nuns (bhikkhunis) are not allowed to accept money for themselves. Nor are they allowed to tell a trustworthy layperson to receive it on their behalf and keep it for them (e.g. keeping a personal bank account). Such practices are explicitly prohibited in the 18th rule of the section of Vinaya called Nissaggiya Pacittiya.

Nor may monks or nuns buy and sell things for themselves using money. This is prohibited by the 19th rule in the Nissaggiya Pacittiya.

Some people argue that these two rules refer only to gold and silver but such a view is indefensible. The Vinaya specifically states that these rules cover "whatever is used in business" [2], i.e. any medium of exchange.

Other people try to get around this rule by saying that it is only a minor rule, inapplicable to monastic life today. Indeed, the Buddha once did say that the Sangha may abolish the "lesser and minor" rules.

But is this rule a minor one?...

'Monks, there are these four stains because of which the sun and moon glow not, shine not, blaze not. What are these four? Rain clouds... snow clouds... smoke and dust... and an eclipse. Even so, monks, there are these four stains because of which monks and priests glow not, shine not, blaze not. What are these four? Drinking alcohol... indulging in sexual intercourse... accepting gold or money... obtaining one's requisites through a wrong mode of livelihood. These are the four stains, monks, because of which monks and priests glow not, shine not, blaze not.' [3]
Obviously, the Buddha thought that the rule prohibiting the acceptance of gold or money was, indeed, a very important rule.

The non-acceptance of money has always been one of the fundamental observances of those who have left the world. Money is the measure of wealth and to most people material wealth is the goal of life. In the renunciation of money by monks and nuns, they emphatically demonstrate their complete rejection of worldly pursuits. At one stroke they set themselves significantly apart from the vast majority of people and thus become a constant reminder to all that a life based on the struggle to accumulate money is not the only way to live. Through giving up money they give up much of their power to manipulate the world and to satisfy their desires. Thus, as the Buddha once said when asked whether money was permissible to the monks and nuns:

'Whoever agrees to gold or money, headman, also agrees to the five strands of sensual pleasure, and whoever agrees to the five strands of sensual pleasure, headman, you may take it for certain that this is not the way of a recluse, that this is not the way of a Buddhist monk.'[4]
References
[1] Book of the Discipline, volume 5, page 424.
[2] Book of the Discipline, volume 2, page 102.
[3] Anguttara Nikaya, volume 2, page 53. (my translation)
[4] Samyutta Nikaya, volume 4, page 326. (my translation)

Source: http://www.zencomp.com/greatwisdom/ebud/ebsut018.htm

Is there a connection between a person's health and religion?

2008-06-14T23:34:00.000-07:00

Health
A Matter Of Belief or Evidence
January W. Payne
Special to The Washington Post
1172 words
10 June 2008
The Washington Post
FINAL
F01
English
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved

An integral part of many people's lives, religion defines patterns of worship and socialization, but its impact, if any, on health is unclear. Some studies show a benefit to religious practice, while others -- including much of the research into prayer -- fail to prove its health value.

The question of the role something as unquantifiable as religious belief might play in health troubles some scientists in an age when mainstream medicine is turning ever more toward epidemiological science to define research protocols and to determine the validity of treatments.

That said, it's not hard to understand why being religious might be good for the body, experts say. Religious people often attend regular services; this puts them in a socially supportive environment, which has widely acknowledged health advantages. And some religions promote healthful diets and discourage unhealthy behaviors such as drinking alcohol and smoking.

"Religions package many of the ingredients of well-being to make them accessible to people," said Richard Eckersley, a visiting fellow at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University in Canberra. And the "psychological well-being" that religion can promote is "linked to physical health through direct physiological effects, such as on neuroendocrine and immune function, and indirect effects on health behaviors, such as diet, smoking, exercise and sexual activity."

Interest in researching the impact of religion and spirituality on how we live seems to be surging. David Myers, author of "A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists" (to be published in August) and a professor of psychology at Hope College in Holland, Mich., did a database search to compare recent and past interest in the topic. Between 1965 and 1999, 1,950 study abstracts mentioned religion or spirituality, he found. Myers's search for the same terms in abstracts published between 2000 and 2007 came up with 8,719 hits, he said.

Among that research is some evidence that religion and spirituality offer health benefits and even longer life spans. A national survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and mentioned in Myers's book found that people who did not attend religious services were 1.87 times more likely to have died during an eight-year period than those who attended services more than weekly. The life expectancy for infrequent attendees was age 75, and it was 83 for those who attended frequently.

A 1996 study looked at the association of Jewish religious observance with mortality by comparing secular and religious kibbutzim in Israel. Belonging to a religious group appeared to prolong life, and the lower mortality rates seen in the religious group were consistent for all causes of death, the authors wrote. And a 2003 study published in Psychosomatic Medicine found that meditation might alter brain and immune function in positive ways, an effect similarly seen in research involving Buddhist monks.

But researchers have had trouble replicating such statistics in the randomized studies that are the gold standard for medical research. It's hard to show conclusively whether or how a belief system affects one's health; other life experiences might provide benefits to health so similar to religion and spirituality that it's hard to differentiate.

Despite the lack of scientific evidence, some common religious practices are widely thought to enhance health.

It's not unusual for people to pray for their own health and for that of others. In a 2004 survey of more than 31,000 people, 45 percent said they'd prayed for health reasons, 43 percent prayed for their own health, and 25 percent reported that others had prayed for them. About 10 percent said they'd participated in a prayer group for their health, according to the results, released by the National Center for Health Statistics and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

But science says that prayer might not help a person who is ill. A 2003 update to an earlier systemic review of clinical trials on distant healing found that intercessory prayer, which involves someone praying for the healing of a person located elsewhere, with or without that person's knowledge, probably doesn't offer specific therapeutic healing effects.

Any benefit seen from prayer might come from the fact that "knowing that your friends and family are praying for you is part of social support, . . . and [that is] probably really helpful to people, independent of if there is a higher being that answers those prayers," said David G. Schlundt, an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, who has researched the connection between faith and health.

Still, there is no question that many people believe strongly that having a religious or spiritual foundation is ultimately beneficial to their health. "Actively religious people are considerably more likely to report that they're more happy than not-religious people," Myers said. "Religion is a communal experience that helps provide hope and motivates healthy living."

Although religion might provide social support, purpose, a belief system, a moral code -- and even happiness -- these benefits can also come from other sources, notes a 2007 study by Eckersley published in the Medical Journal of Australia. Future examination of the health benefits of religion and spirituality should be done in a broader context, he said, especially with regard to how cultural influences affect faith and health.

That cultural context could be key to understanding how people's beliefs factor into their health outcomes, experts note, because religion and spirituality don't seem to produce a uniform effect on everyone. Differences are apparent between groups of varying socioeconomic and racial and ethnic backgrounds.

"You have to think of a religious group not just in terms of beliefs but also the socioeconomic context of that group," Schlundt said. "For instance, southern Baptists in rural communities will look different than big-city Baptists."

A dangerous aspect of the purported faith-health connection is fatalism, the belief that health is predetermined and is not within a person's control. Research shows that people who hold such beliefs are less likely than others to participate in health promotion programs and to seek health care.

Research shows that African Americans are more likely to endorse fatalism than whites. A 2007 study published in the American Journal of Health Behavior reported that such beliefs could be a reaction to chronic illness or poor health rather than something that inhibits beneficial health behavior from the outset.

"Religion can have its dark side, too," Schlundt notes. "If you belong to a community that induces guilt or creates discomfort, that can have the same effect as any source of stress. If your religious belief gives you a feeling of fatalism where you don't step forward to protect your health because you believe God will do that for you, that's another potential downside."

January W. Payne is an associate editor at U.S. News & World Report. Comments: health@washpost.com.

The real authentic You

2008-05-02T20:38:00.000-07:00

IN SEARCH OF THE REAL YOU
Wright, Karen
3263 words
1 May 2008
Psychology Today
71
Volume 41; Issue 3; ISSN: 00333107
English
© 2008 Psychology Today. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.

A SENSE OF AUTHENTICITY IS ONE OF OUR DEEPEST PSYCHOLOGICAL NEEDS, AND PEOPLE ARE MORE HUNGRY FOR IT THAN EVER. EVEN SO, BEING TRUE TO ONESELF IS NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART. ARE YOU UP TO LIVING AN AUTHENTIC LIFE?

IT STARTS INNOCENTLY enough, perhaps the first time you recognize your own reflection.

You're not yet 2 years old, brushing your teeth, standing on your steppy stool by the bathroom sink, when suddenly it dawns on you: That foam-flecked face beaming back from the mirror is you.

You. Yourself. Your very own self.

It's a revelation-and an affliction. Human infants have no capacity for self-awareness. Then, between 18 and 24 months of age, they become conscious of their own thoughts, feelings, and sensations-thereby embarking on a quest that will consume much of their lives. For many modern selves, the first shock of self-recognition marks the beginning of a lifelong search for the one "true" self and for a feeling of behaving in accordance with that self that can be called authenticity.

A hunger for authenticity guides us in every age and aspect of life. It drives our explorations of work, relationships, play, and prayer. Teens and twentysomethings try out friends, fashions, hobbies, jobs, lovers, locations, and living arrangements to see what fits and what's "just not me." Midlifers deepen commitments to career, community, faith, and family that match their self-images, or feel trapped in existences that seem not their own. Elders regard life choices with regret or satisfaction based largely on whether they were "true" to themselves.

Questions of authenticity determine our regard for others, as well. They dominated the presidential primaries: Was Hillary authentic when she shed a tear in New Hampshire? Was Obama earnest when his speechwriters cribbed lines from a friend's oration?

"Americans remain deeply invested in the notion of the authentic self," says ethicist John Portmann of the University of Virginia. "It's part of the national consciousness."

It's also a cornerstone of mental health. Authenticity is correlated with many aspects of psychological well-being, including vitality, self-esteem, and coping skills. Acting in accordance with one's core self-a trait called self-determination-is ranked by some experts as one of three basic psychological needs, along with competence and a sense of relatedness.

Yet, increasingly, contemporary culture seems to mock the very idea that there is anything solid and true about the self. Cosmetic surgery, psychopharmaceuticals, and perpetual makeovers favor a mutable ideal over the genuine article. MySpace profiles and tell-all blogs carry the whiff of wishful identity. Steroids, stimulants, and doping transform athletic and academic performance. Fabricated memoirs become bestsellers. Speed-dating discounts sincerity. Amid a clutter of counterfeits, the core self is struggling to assert itself.

"It's some kind of epidemic right now," says Stephen Cope, author of Yoga and the Quest for the True Self. "People feel profoundly like they're not living from who they really are, their authentic self, their deepest possibility in the world. The result is a sense of near-desperation."

Just What Is Authenticity, Anyway?

PSYCHOLOGISTS LONG ASSUMED authenticity was something too intangible to measure objectively. Certainly Michael Kernis did when, around 2000, graduate student Brian Goldman approached him about making a study of individual differences in authenticity.

"I said, 'Well, you can't do that,'" recalls Kernis, a social psychologist at the University of Georgia in Athens, "because nobody thought you could." But the two plunged ahead, reviewing several centuries' worth of philosophical and psychological literature. They came up with a technical description of authenticity as "the unimpeded operation of one's true or core self in one's daily enterprise."

Kernis and Goldman (now atClayton State University) identified four separate and somewhat concrete components of authenticity that they could measure in a written test. The first, and most fundamental, is selfawareness: knowledge of and trust in one's own motives, emotions, preferences, and abilities. Self-awareness encompasses an inventory of issues from the sublime to the profane, from knowing what food you like to how likely you are to quit smoking to whether you're feeling anxious or sad.

Self-awareness is an element of the other three components as well. It's necessary for clarity in evaluating your strengths and (more to the point) your weaknesses: acknowledging when you've flubbed a presentation or when your golf game is off, without resorting to denial or blame. Authenticity also turns up in behavior: It requires acting in ways congruent with your own values and needs, even at the risk of criticism or rejection. And it's necessary for close relationships, because intimacy cannot develop without openness and honesty.

Kernis and Goldman have found that a sense of authenticity is accompanied by a multitude of benefits. People who score high on the authenticity profile are also more likely to respond to difficulties with effective coping strategies, rather than resorting to drugs, alcohol, or self-destructive habits. They often report having satisfying relationships. They enjoy a strong sense of self-worth and purpose, confidence in mastering challenges, and the ability to follow through in pursuing goals.

Whether authenticity causes such psychological boons or results from them isn't yet clear. But they suggest why people crave authenticity, as those low in authenticity are likely to be defensive, suspicious, confused, and easily overwhelmed.

Considering the psychological payoffs, Kernis and Goldman ask, "Why, then, is not everybody authentic?"

The Invented Self

FOR ONE THING, pinning down the true self is increasingly difficult. Western philosophers have sought some pure and enduring touchstone of I-ness ever since Socrates began interrogating the citizens of Athens. He famously asserted that the unexamined life is not worth living-but left vague exactly what insights and actions such inquiry might yield. Aristotle later connected the fruits of self-reflection with a theory of authentic behavior that was not so much about letting your freak flag fly as about acting in accord with the "higher good," which he regarded as the ultimate expression of selfhood.

Spiritual and religious traditions similarly equated authenticity and morality. In the wisdom traditions of Judaism, Portmann points out, "people do the right thingbecause they see it as an expression of their authentic selfhood." In Christianity, the eternal soul is who you really, truly are; sinners are simply out of touch with their core selves. "The authentic human self is called to be much nobler than what you see on the streets," Portmann says.

Enlightenment philosophers secularized ideas of selfhood, but it took the 20th century's existentialists to question the idea that some original, actual, ultimate self resides within. To them, the self was not so much born as made. One's choice of action creates the self-in Sartre's words, "existence precedes essence." For Heidegger and confrères, authenticity was an attitude: the project of embracing life, constructing meaning, and building character without fooling yourself that your socalled essence matters in any absolute, a priori sense.

"The philosophical question is, do we invent this authentic self?" says Portmann. "Or do we discover it?" Socrates believed we discover it; the existentialists say we invent it.

"There isn't a self to know," decrees social psychologist Roy Baumeister of the University of Florida. Today's psychologists no longer regard the self as a singular entity with a solid core. What they see instead is an array of often conflicting impressions, sensations, and behaviors. Our headspace is messier than we pretend, they say, and the search for authenticity is doomed if it's aimed at tidying up the sense of self, restricting our identities to what we want to be or who we think we should be.

Increasingly, psychologists believe that our notion of selfhood needs to expand, to acknowledge that, as Whitman wrote, we "contain multitudes." An expansive vision of selfhood includes not just the parts of ourselves that we like and understand but also those that we don't. There's room to be a loving mother who sometimes yells at her kids, a diffident cleric who laughs too loud, or a punctilious boss with a flask of gin in his desk. The authentic self isn't always pretty. It's just real.

We all have multiple layers of self and ever-shifting perspectives, contends psychiatrist Peter Kramer. Most of us would describe ourselves as either an introvert or an extrovert. Research shows that although we think of ourselves as one or the other (with a few exceptions), we are actually both, in different contexts. Which face we show depends on the situation. As Kramer puts it, "To which facet of experience must we be 'true'?"

"Whether there is a core self or not, we certainly believe that there is," says social psychologist Mark Leary of Duke University. And the longing to live from that self is real, as is the suffering of those who feel they aren't being true to themselves. Feelings of inauthenticity can be so uncomfortable that people resort to extreme measures to bring their outer lives in alignment with their inner bearings. Portmann notes that people who undergo sex-change operations or gastric-bypass surgeries will say of their new gender or clothing size, "This is who I really am. I'm myself at last." People who experience religious conversion often voice the same conviction, he says.

Likewise, "patients who recover from depression will say, 'I'm back to myself again,'" reports Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac. "You can make the case that people are sometimes able to be more authentic on medication than not."

But most of us experience inauthenticity less dramatically, as vague dissatisfaction, a sense of emptiness, or the sting of self-betrayal. If you've ever complimented the chef on an inedible meal, interviewed for a job you hoped you wouldn't get, or agreed with your spouse just to smooth things over, you know the feeling.

Inauthenticity might also be experienced on a deeper level as a loss of engagement in some-or many-aspects of your life. At the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Massachusetts, where he often teaches, Stephen Cope opens his programs by asking attendees to reveal their deepest reason for being there. "Eighty percent of the time, people say some variation of: 'I'm here to find my true self, to come home to my true self,'" he reports. That response is as likely to come from young adults struggling to build careers and relationships as from people in midlife reevaluating their choices. "They say, 'Who am I? Now that I've had a decent career and bought a house and had a marriage, I'm still feeling profoundly unfulfilled.'"

The Pain of Authenticity

ANOTHER REASON WE'RE not always true to ourselves is that authenticity is not for the faint ofheart There is, Kernis and Goldman acknowledge, a "potential downside of authenticity." Accurate self-knowledge can be painful. When taking a test, it isn't always fun to find out where you score on the grading curve. "Our self-images can be highly biased," Leary notes. "But in the long run, accuracy is almost always better than bias."

Behaving in accord with your true self may also bring on the disfavor of others: Must you admit to being a Democrat when meeting with your conservative clients? Does your wife really want to know whether you like her new dress? "Opening oneself up to an intimate makes one vulnerable to rejection or betrayal," Kernis and Goldman observe. It can feel better to be embraced as an impostor than dumped for the person you really are.

Authenticity also requires making conscious, informed choices based on accurate self-knowledge. Like the existentialists, today's psychologists emphasize the role of active choice in creating an authentic life: a willingness to evaluate nearly everything that you do. That's no mean feat in a culture where even simple acts-you can dye your hair any color you want, your television carries more than 500 channels, and Starbucks advertises more than 87,000 ways to enjoy a cup of coffee-require conscious consideration among alternatives.

Such freedom can be exhausting. Baumeister has found that deliberation, no matter how trivial, exacts a cost in psychic energy, of which we have only a finite amount. His studies show that authentic action demands a certain amount of psychological exertion that depletes the self's executive function. "It's harder to be authentic," he says. "It takes more work."

Leary sees it as an outright burden, part of the perennial longing and doubt that he calls "the curse of the self." So here we are, stuck with our self-awareness, which also compels us to continually define and refine our sense of ourselves as unique individuals against a background of conformity, superficiality, exhibitionism, and lots of other unique individuals.

But wait, there's more. In order to realize an authentic life, says Kernis, one often has to set aside hedonic well-being-the kind of shallow, short-lived pleasure we get from, say, acquiring things-for eudaimonic well-being, a deeper, more meaningful state in which gratification is not usually immediate. Sissies need not apply.

The fact is that we tend to flourish under the most challenging circumstances, and enduring the pain and confusion that often accompany them can bring out the best-and most authentic-in us, fostering such deeply satisfying qualities as wisdom, insight, and creativity. But our cultural climate is filled with an alluring array of distractions, from online gambling to video games, that often turn out to be junk food for the mind.

Too Rigid for Our Own Good

BUT THE REALLY hard work, according to Cope and others, is the amount of ego-wrangling required to contact the core self. One of the biggest barriers to authentic behavior, he says, is the arbitrary and rigid self-image that so many of us nurture but which in fact distorts experience and limits selfknowledge. Oftentimes, the very first line of defense you get with the folks who say, Tm leading an inauthentic life,' is that they're living life according to a fixed set of views and beliefs about how they should be."

A man at a dinner party admits that he married his first wife "because, well, you have to get married sometime, right?" (Actually, you don't.) A composer who sets music to blockbuster films complains that they are too commercial, but is unwilling to forego such movies' wide audiences and big paychecks for work on more meaningful projects. In each case, the individual may be guided by unexamined assumptions about what constitutes responsibility, satisfaction, even success.

Kernis contends that we each acquire a mixed set of shoulds, oughts, and have-to's while still too young to process them. They are neither fully conscious nor deeply considered but are acquired through convention and the expectations of others. Getting beyond these arbitrary strictures often demands the kind of soul-searching that most of us put off or avoid entirely. In fact, much of the work that people do in cognitive and behavioral therapy is to hold such beliefs up to the light and examine where they came from, a necessary step to resolving the anxiety or depression they typically create and that drive people to seek help.

"Jung says the first thing you should do is take a look at those things that are dark in you, the things that are problematical, that you don't like," says psychotherapist and former monk Thomas Moore, author of A Life at Work, '"fou have to be willing to look at things that don't fit snugly into the image you have of what you would like to be."

Failures R Us

BECOMING AUTHENTIC, THEN, means accepting not only contradiction and discomfort but personal faults and failures as well. Problematic aspects of our lives, emotions, and behaviors-the times we've yelled at the kids, lusted after the babysitter, or fallen back on our promises to friends-are not breaches of your true self, Moore insists. They're clues to the broader and more comprehensive mystery of selfhood. "In fact," he notes, "we are all very subtle and very complex, and there are forces and resources within us that we have no control over. We will never find the limits of who we are.

"People carry around a heavy burden of not feeling authentic," he says, "because they have failed marriages and their work life hasn't gone the way it should, and they've disappointed everybody, including themselves. When people think of these as just failures, as opposed to learning experiences, they don't have to feel the weight of their lives or the choices they've made. That disowning creates a division that becomes the sense of inauthenticity."

Kernis' studies show that people with a sense of authenticity are highly realistic about their performance in everything from a game of touch football to managing the family business. They're not defensive or blaming of others when they meet with less success than they wanted.

Eastern spiritual traditions have long furnished ways to glimpse the messiness of the self, and to view with detachment the vicissitudes of mind and emotion that roil human consciousness. Buddhism takes the self in all its variability as the principal subject of contemplation; the yogic tradition accords self-study great importance.

The Hindu Bhagavad Gita suggests we also have a duty to act: to realize our full potential in the world, to construct or discover a unique individuality, and thereby to live authentically. You have to "discern your own highly idiosyncratic gifts, and your own highly idiosyncratic calling," Cope elaborates. "Real fulfillment comes from authentically grappling with the possibility inside you, in a disciplined, concentrated, focused way."

That lesson isn't confined to Eastern spirituality. In The Way of Man, philosopher Martin Buber relates a Hasidic parable about one Rabbi Zusya, a self-effacing scholar who has a deathbed revelation that he shares with the friends keeping vigil at his side. "In the next life, I shall not be asked: "Why were you not more like Moses?'" he says. "I shall be asked: "Why were you not more like Zusya?'"

THE NEW, TRUE, EUDAIMONIC YOU

Eudaimonia refers to a state of well-being and full functioning that derives from a sense of living in accordance with one's deeply held values-in other words, from a sense of authenticity. Some characteristics of the eudaimonic life include:

* Being open to experience without censorship or distortion

* Living fully in the moment, so the self feels fluid rather than static

* Trusting inner experience to guide behavior

* Feeling free to respond rather than automatically react to life events

* Taking a creative approach to living, rather than relying on routine and habit.

Religion and secularism

2008-05-02T20:23:00.000-07:00

Power points - Religion and secularism
By Mark Juergensmeyer.
1075 words
3 May 2008
The Economist
ECN
387
English
(c) The Economist Newspaper Limited, London 2008. All rights reserved

The slogans of political Islam remain highly resonant, whether as a programme for peaceful governance or an inspiration to wage war. Two new books explain why

WHEN the British and French empires were at their height, imperial service often provided an outlet for the talents of precociously clever ethnographers, social anthropologists and scholars of religion. On the face of things, Noah Feldman is a similar figure, rendering important services to the American imperium, both as a rising star in the intellectual establishment and in more practical ways—he helped to draft Iraq's new constitution.

A young professor at Harvard Law School with a doctorate in Islamic political thought, Mr Feldman is brimming with the sort of expertise that America's new proconsuls in the Middle East and Afghanistan badly need. Above all, he is qualified to opine on how America should react to the dilemma posed by the huge popular support, in Muslim lands, forexplicitly Islamic forms of administration.

In a short, incisive and elegant book, he lays out for the non-specialist reader some of the forms that Islamic rule has taken over the centuries, while also stressing the differences between today's politicalIslam and previous forms of Islamicadministration. In particular, he shows why “justice” is such a resonant slogan for Islamist movements. At least subliminally, it evokes memories of a dimly remembered era when Islamic law, as interpreted by scholars, acted as a real constraint on the power of rulers. To many Muslims, the legal tradition of their faith is not viewed as an alternative to Western democracy, based on secular law, but rather as the only real alternative to totalitarianism.

That perceived dilemma—either Muslim law and scholarship, or unfettereddictatorship—is not just a hangover from history; it also reflects the fact that many secular regimes which replaced traditional Muslim empires were dictatorships, with no separation of powers.

So far, that is a familiar argument. Mr Feldman becomes more interesting when he shows how the Ottoman empire, in its efforts to modernise while retaining some Islamic legitimacy, almost unavoidably grew more dictatorial and less Islamic.

The very fact that Islamic law was codified implied a downgrading in the authority of Muslim scholars; their task had been to apply a set of abstract, unwritten principles to an infinite variety of situations, and the written law code risked putting them out of a job. When the Ottoman sultan-caliph tried some cautious constitutional experiments in 1876, it appeared to hispious subjects that he was undermining God's sovereignty. This was not so much because the experiments seemed bad, but because constitutional change implied that an earthly ruler could tinker withsystems that had been divinely ordained.

The modernising challenges facing the late Ottoman era dimly foreshadow, as Mr Feldman demonstrates, some of the problems of modern political Islam. But there are differences: the Islamists of today are not trying to reinstate the power of the scholars, which was a hallmark of all previous Islamic regimes. Instead, what modern Islamism proposes is an odd mix of popular sovereignty and the sovereignty of God; as though the people, having been offered sovereign power, freely decide to render that power straight back to God.

Another of Mr Feldman's paradoxes: any modern constitution or legal code that consciously proclaims its intention to be Islamic and deferential to God, will fall short of the early Islamic ideal, where the sovereignty of God was so deeplyassumed that it did not need spelling out.

Mr Feldman's book is more descriptive than prescriptive. But many readers may conclude that in Islam's heartland only forms of governance that incorporate Muslim values can hope to be legitimate. If secularism has been imposed in many places by dictatorial methods, thatis not because the secular rulers weregratuitously cruel; it was because secular principles had little hope of gainingspontaneous popular assent.

One huge question, unanswered by this book, is how minorities—practitioners of other religions or none—can expect to fare in countries where a form of political Islam is practised by the will of the majority. Even if the Islamic majority offers its non-Muslim compatriots generous forms of cultural autonomy, the infidel minorities can hardly be anything more thansecond-class subjects of an Islamic realm.

Whereas Mr Feldman's argument is about Islamic principles as a basis for creating stable, legitimate regimes, Mark Juergensmeyer, a professor of sociology and religious thought at the University of California, Santa Barbara, highlights the odd fact that the slogans of Islam, and other religions, are more effective than any secular battle-cry as a way of rallying people to wage war, or at least to live in armed readiness. Mixing analysis with reportage, he describes encounters with the leaders of Hamas, and with Jewish zealots who cheer the killing of Palestinians. He traces the advent of Hindu bigotry as a force in Indian politics and the role of Buddhism in Sri Lanka's conflict.

Any book that takes in such a sweep is bound to have errors of detail. But it is more than a minor error to describe the first decade of the Soviet communistregime as “relatively tolerant” towards religion. Still, Mr Juergensmeyer is right in his broader point—that in the early 21stcentury, religion retains a mobilising power that secular nationalism and universalist ideologies like Marxism have lost. If you are trying to make people risk their own lives and take the lives of others, then calling the enemy “infidels” (or, literally,demonising them) is more effective than calling them foreigners or class enemies.

In each of these books, there is at least one lacuna. Having made the fair point that scholarship and modern political Islam don't easily mix, Mr Feldman should have said something about Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the hugely influential and telegenic sheikh based in Qatar who seems to straddle both those worlds quite happily.

Mr Juergensmeyer distinguishes between the effects of secular nationalism and transnational religion, but he says little about religious nationalism, the opportunistic but effective combination of these two supposed opposites. As any thieving Balkan warlord knows, decent people often kill in the name of a half-forgotten national cause and for a religion in which they hardly believe. Using both tricks at once is especially effective.

The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to Al Qaeda.

Teaching babies compassion

2008-04-08T00:26:00.001-07:00

TEACHING COMPASSION, LEARNING TO CARE
Janet I Tu
Janet I. Tu. Seattle Times staff reporter
1195 words
6 April 2008
The Seattle Times
Fourth
B1
English
© 2008 Seattle Times. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights reserved.

At the University of Washington, researchers are testing whether toddlers will imitate them when they push buttons and pull open drawers.

At The Gottman Institute in Seattle, a psychologist has put together a program for parents of newborns to help them create stronger relationships with each other and their baby.

And halfway across the country, at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, a neuroscientist studies changes in the brain when people meditate on compassion.

What these researchers have in common: Their work contributes to the scientific exploration of compassion -- insights they'll share with the Dalai Lama during a five-day "Seeds of Compassion" gathering that starts here Friday.

The Tibetan Buddhist leader will headline the gathering, where events and workshops will examine numerous aspects of compassion: why it's important, what science says about its roots, what children and adults can do to develop it and what specific steps society can take to nurture it.

"We're not talking about compassion as some nebulous concept," said Ron Rabin, executive director of the Bellevue-based Kirlin Charitable Foundation, which focuses on early-childhood development. Seeds is an initiative of the Kirlin Foundation. "We want sustainable, actionable, measurable results."

Scientists play a big role in that.

Psychologists, neuroscientists and other experts will speak at the gathering's opening day about their research and how people can use that knowledge.

Compassion arises from the "interaction of biology and culture -- including the family environment and larger culture in which we are raised," said Andrew Meltzoff, a developmental psychologist and co- director of the UW Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.

"The roots of compassion is one of the grand challenges for science today."

How toddlers learn

At the UW's institute, researchers are examining how 3-year-olds learn through imitation.

Rebecca Williamson, a postdoctoral fellow, sits at a small table, pushing a button, then opening a drawer to get at a small toy. She sees if the child will do the same.

Meltzoff says one of the most important ways children learn is by imitating adults, including how well they treat others.

Further, his view -- which he calls the "like me" theory -- is that the ability of babies to imitate the movements of others ultimately leads to compassion.

It goes like this:

When a baby opens and closes her hand or shakes a rattle, a parent will often do the same, and back and forth. The baby feels what it's like to make movements in her body, and over time, realizes that other human beings can make movements just "like me."

That's paving the way for empathy -- for "standing in the shoes of somebody else," Meltzoff says.

Imitating behavior helps infants and young children eventually understand that "you are also 'like me' in terms of your underlying feelings or emotional states. ... When I feel sad, you may feel sad."

Meltzoff and his colleagues are also studying how adult brains work.

When they took brain scans of adults, they discovered that two parts of the brain became very active when adults saw pictures of somebody in pain.

"We're beginning to look at the seat of empathy in human beings," Meltzoff said. "It takes what otherwise can be a fairly abstract and ephemeral part of human nature -- our feelings of compassion for others -- and helps look at the biological mechanisms for that."

That's helpful, he said, if society wants to help people who lack empathy -- bullies, for instance.

Growing compassion

Current research also indicates compassion can be enhanced through practice, similar to how one gets better at playing the violin or tennis, says Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology and psychiatry at University of Wisconsin- Madison.

The conventional wisdom had been that a person's level of happiness or irritability is pretty much fixed by late adolescence, Davidson said. But current evidence shows that "the brain exhibits what we called neuroplasticity -- the organ is built to change in response to training."

Though Davidson focuses much of his research on Tibetan monks who've practiced compassion meditation for years, he also works with those with much less experience.

"There's no question that even short-term practice produces discernible changes in the brain," he said. "After two weeks practice, 30 minutes a day, you can detect very notable changes in the brain in rank novices."

More adults being more compassionate would be welcomed by John Gottman, a psychologist and co-founder of The Gottman Institute in Seattle, which conducts research on relationships.

Gottman's view is that a baby's temperament is shaped even as early as in the womb.

It makes a difference, for instance, if parents fight often while the mother is pregnant.

"Cortisol -- the stress hormone -- gets past the uterine barrier," Gottman said. "If a mother is pregnant in a family that loves and accepts her, it's a whole different uterine environment for the developing fetus. ...

"You can predict how much a baby smiles, or how quickly they calm down, by how the parents interact with each other," he said.

All of which is to say that the more compassionate the environment, the better for the baby.

That view isn't particularly new, Gottman acknowledges.

"I think Hallmark Cards knew that 50 years ago," he said. "But maybe what's new is even having that as a goal -- that the world would be a better place if people were more compassionate to each other."

Janet I. Tu: 206-464-2272 or jtu@seattletimes.com

IF YOU GO

Seeds of Compassion

What

The Seeds of Compassion gathering -- a free, five-day event focused on the importance of nurturing compassion -- runs Friday through April 15. Tickets for events featuring the Dalai Lama are gone; those without tickets will not be admitted. All events are full, except for workshops at Seattle Center next Sunday and April 14, and admission will be on a first-come, first-served basis.

How to watch

* Most events will be streamed live and translated into 24 languages over the Seeds Web site: www.seedsofcompassion.org url>

* Most events will also be broadcast. Friday's Day of Review and Learning starts at 9 a.m., and will be broadcast on UWTV Channel 27. Saturday's Compassion in Action starts about 1 p.m., broadcast on KONG 6/16. April 14th's Children and Youth Day starts at 10:45 a.m., broadcast on Seattle Channel 21 and UWTV 27. The April 14 UW Convocation starts at 3 p.m., broadcast on Seattle Channel 21 and UWTV 27. The April 15 Youth and Spiritual Connection Day starts at 9:30 a.m., broadcast on UWTV 27.

More information

www.seedsofcompassion.org

photo; Caption: Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times : Rebecca Williamson, a postdoctoral fellow working at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, studies how children learn through imitation with Simon Skonieczny, 3, of Seattle. Williamson's research focuses on young children's social learning, including what children learn from others and how they do so. (0404871081)

The Moral Instinct by Professor Steven Pinker Harvard University Part 1

2008-01-17T02:27:00.001-08:00

The Moral Instinct
By STEVEN PINKER
7998 words
13 January 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
32
English
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.

Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it's an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in ''I Hate Gates'' Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?

Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the ''Green Revolution'' that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.

It's not hard to see why the moral reputations of this trio should be so out of line with the good they have done. Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. Gates is a nerd's nerd and the world's richest man, as likely to enter heaven as the proverbial camel squeezing through the needle's eye. And Borlaug, now 93, is an agronomist who has spent his life in labs and nonprofits, seldom walking onto the media stage, and hence into our consciousness, at all.

I doubt these examples will persuade anyone to favor Bill Gates over Mother Teresa for sainthood. But they show that our heads can be turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish. It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks. Illusions are a favorite tool of perception scientists for exposing the workings of the five senses, and of philosophers for shaking people out of the naive belief that our minds give us a transparent window onto the world (since if our eyes can be fooled by an illusion, why should we trust them at other times?). Today, a new field is using illusions to unmask a sixth sense, the moral sense. Moral intuitions are being drawn out of people in the lab, on Web sites and in brain scanners, and are being explained with tools from game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary biology.

''Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them,'' wrote Immanuel Kant, ''the starry heavens above and the moral law within.'' These days, the moral law within is being viewed with increasing awe, if not always admiration. The human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity, with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and its neurobiological foundations.

These quirks are bound to have implications for the human predicament. Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings. We seek it in our friends and mates, nurture it in our children, advance it in our politics and justify it with our religions. A disrespect for morality is blamed for everyday sins and history's worst atrocities. To carry this weight, the concept of morality would have to be bigger than any of us and outside all of us.

So dissecting moral intuitions is no small matter. If morality is a mere trick of the brain, some may fear, our very grounds for being moral could be eroded. Yet as we shall see, the science of the moral sense can instead be seen as a way to strengthen those grounds, by clarifying what morality is and how it should steer our actions.

The Moralization Switch

The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (''killing is wrong''), rather than merely disagreeable (''I hate brussels sprouts''), unfashionable (''bell-bottoms are out'') or imprudent (''don't scratch mosquito bites'').

The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, ''I don't like brussels sprouts, but I don't care if you eat them,'' but no one would say, ''I don't like killing, but I don't care if you murder someone.''

The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to ''let them get away with it.'' People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, ''The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists -- that is why they invented hell.''

We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us -- the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch settings. Health vegetarians avoid meat for practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins. Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to treat meat as a contaminant -- they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues, like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and bestial.

Much of our recent social history, including the culture wars between liberals and conservatives, consists of the moralization or amoralization of particular kinds of behavior. Even when people agree that an outcome is desirable, they may disagree on whether it should be treated as a matter of preference and prudence or as a matter of sin and virtue. Rozin notes, for example, that smoking has lately been moralized. Until recently, it was understood that some people didn't enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as immoral. Smokers are ostracized; images of people smoking are censored; and entities touched by smoke are felt to be contaminated (so hotels have not only nonsmoking rooms but nonsmoking floors). The desire for retribution has been visited on tobacco companies, who have been slapped with staggering ''punitive damages.''

At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices. They include divorce, illegitimacy, being a working mother, marijuana use and homosexuality. Many afflictions have been reassigned from payback for bad choices to unlucky misfortunes. There used to be people called ''bums'' and ''tramps''; today they are ''homeless.'' Drug addiction is a ''disease''; syphilis was rebranded from the price of wanton behavior to a ''sexually transmitted disease'' and more recently a ''sexually transmitted infection.''

This wave of amoralization has led the cultural right to lament that morality itself is under assault, as we see in the group that anointed itself the Moral Majority. In fact there seems to be a Law of Conservation of Moralization, so that as old behaviors are taken out of the moralized column, new ones are added to it. Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer. Food alone has become a minefield, with critics sermonizing about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the distance the food has traveled from farm to plate.

Many of these moralizations, like the assault on smoking, may be understood as practical tactics to reduce some recently identified harm. But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the ''moral'' setting isn't just a matter of how much harm it does. We don't show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or creme brulee. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.

Reasoning and Rationalizing

It's not just the content of our moral judgments that is often questionable, but the way we arrive at them. We like to think that when we have a conviction, there are good reasons that drove us to adopt it. That is why an older approach to moral psychology, led by Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, tried to document the lines of reasoning that guided people to moral conclusions. But consider these situations, originally devised by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt:

Julie is traveling in France on summer vacation from college with her brother Mark. One night they decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. Julie was already taking birth-control pills, but Mark uses a condom, too, just to be safe. They both enjoy the sex but decide not to do it again. They keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel closer to each other. What do you think about that -- was it O.K. for them to make love?

A woman is cleaning out her closet and she finds her old American flag. She doesn't want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.

A family's dog is killed by a car in front of their house. They heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cook it and eat it for dinner.

Most people immediately declare that these acts are wrong and then grope to justify why they are wrong. It's not so easy. In the case of Julie and Mark, people raise the possibility of children with birth defects, but they are reminded that the couple were diligent about contraception. They suggest that the siblings will be emotionally hurt, but the story makes it clear that they weren't. They submit that the act would offend the community, but then recall that it was kept a secret. Eventually many people admit, ''I don't know, I can't explain it, I just know it's wrong.'' People don't generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.

The gap between people's convictions and their justifications is also on display in the favorite new sandbox for moral psychologists, a thought experiment devised by the philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson called the Trolley Problem. On your morning walk, you see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says ''yes.''

Consider now a different scene. You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge? Both dilemmas present you with the option of sacrificing one life to save five, and so, by the utilitarian standard of what would result in the greatest good for the greatest number, the two dilemmas are morally equivalent. But most people don't see it that way: though they would pull the switch in the first dilemma, they would not heave the fat man in the second. When pressed for a reason, they can't come up with anything coherent, though moral philosophers haven't had an easy time coming up with a relevant difference, either.

When psychologists say ''most people'' they usually mean ''most of the two dozen sophomores who filled out a questionnaire for beer money.'' But in this case it means most of the 200,000 people from a hundred countries who shared their intuitions on a Web-based experiment conducted by the psychologists Fiery Cushman and Liane Young and the biologist Marc Hauser. A difference between the acceptability of switch-pulling and man-heaving, and an inability to justify the choice, was found in respondents from Europe, Asia and North and South America; among men and women, blacks and whites, teenagers and octogenarians, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Jews and atheists; people with elementary-school educations and people with Ph.D.'s.

Joshua Greene, a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist, suggests that evolution equipped people with a revulsion to manhandling an innocent person. This instinct, he suggests, tends to overwhelm any utilitarian calculus that would tot up the lives saved and lost. The impulse against roughing up a fellow human would explain other examples in which people abjure killing one to save many, like euthanizing a hospital patient to harvest his organs and save five dying patients in need of transplants, or throwing someone out of a crowded lifeboat to keep it afloat.

By itself this would be no more than a plausible story, but Greene teamed up with the cognitive neuroscientist Jonathan Cohen and several Princeton colleagues to peer into people's brains using functional M.R.I. They sought to find signs of a conflict between brain areas associated with emotion (the ones that recoil from harming someone) and areas dedicated to rational analysis (the ones that calculate lives lost and saved).

When people pondered the dilemmas that required killing someone with their bare hands, several networks in their brains lighted up. One, which included the medial (inward-facing) parts of the frontal lobes, has been implicated in emotions about other people. A second, the dorsolateral (upper and outer-facing) surface of the frontal lobes, has been implicated in ongoing mental computation (including nonmoral reasoning, like deciding whether to get somewhere by plane or train). And a third region, the anterior cingulate cortex (an evolutionarily ancient strip lying at the base of the inner surface of each cerebral hemisphere), registers a conflict between an urge coming from one part of the brain and an advisory coming from another.

But when the people were pondering a hands-off dilemma, like switching the trolley onto the spur with the single worker, the brain reacted differently: only the area involved in rational calculation stood out. Other studies have shown that neurological patients who have blunted emotions because of damage to the frontal lobes become utilitarians: they think it makes perfect sense to throw the fat man off the bridge. Together, the findings corroborate Greene's theory that our nonutilitarian intuitions come from the victory of an emotional impulse over a cost-benefit analysis.

A Universal Morality?

The findings of trolleyology -- complex, instinctive and worldwide moral intuitions -- led Hauser and John Mikhail (a legal scholar) to revive an analogy from the philosopher John Rawls between the moral sense and language. According to Noam Chomsky, we are born with a ''universal grammar'' that forces us to analyze speech in terms of its grammatical structure, with no conscious awareness of the rules in play. By analogy, we are born with a universal moral grammar that forces us to analyze human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness.

The idea that the moral sense is an innate part of human nature is not far-fetched. A list of human universals collected by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown includes many moral concepts and emotions, including a distinction between right and wrong; empathy; fairness; admiration of generosity; rights and obligations; proscription of murder, rape and other forms of violence; redress of wrongs; sanctions for wrongs against the community; shame; and taboos.

The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress. And according to the psychologists Elliot Turiel and Judith Smetana, preschoolers have an inkling of the difference between societal conventions and moral principles. Four-year-olds say that it is not O.K. to wear pajamas to school (a convention) and also not O.K. to hit a little girl for no reason (a moral principle). But when asked whether these actions would be O.K. if the teacher allowed them, most of the children said that wearing pajamas would now be fine but that hitting a little girl would still not be.

Though no one has identified genes for morality, there is circumstantial evidence they exist. The character traits called ''conscientiousness'' and ''agreeableness'' are far more correlated in identical twins separated at birth (who share their genes but not their environment) than in adoptive siblings raised together (who share their environment but not their genes). People given diagnoses of ''antisocial personality disorder'' or ''psychopathy'' show signs of morality blindness from the time they are children. They bully younger children, torture animals, habitually lie and seem incapable of empathy or remorse, often despite normal family backgrounds. Some of these children grow up into the monsters who bilk elderly people out of their savings, rape a succession of women or shoot convenience-store clerks lying on the floor during a robbery.

Though psychopathy probably comes from a genetic predisposition, a milder version can be caused by damage to frontal regions of the brain (including the areas that inhibit intact people from throwing the hypothetical fat man off the bridge). The neuroscientists Hanna and Antonio Damasio and their colleagues found that some children who sustain severe injuries to their frontal lobes can grow up into callous and irresponsible adults, despite normal intelligence. They lie, steal, ignore punishment, endanger their own children and can't think through even the simplest moral dilemmas, like what two people should do if they disagreed on which TV channel to watch or whether a man ought to steal a drug to save his dying wife.

The moral sense, then, may be rooted in the design of the normal human brain. Yet for all the awe that may fill our minds when we reflect on an innate moral law within, the idea is at best incomplete. Consider this moral dilemma: A runaway trolley is about to kill a schoolteacher. You can divert the trolley onto a sidetrack, but the trolley would trip a switch sending a signal to a class of 6-year-olds, giving them permission to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Is it permissible to pull the lever?

This is no joke. Last month a British woman teaching in a private school in Sudan allowed her class to name a teddy bear after the most popular boy in the class, who bore the name of the founder of Islam. She was jailed for blasphemy and threatened with a public flogging, while a mob outside the prison demanded her death. To the protesters, the woman's life clearly had less value than maximizing the dignity of their religion, and their judgment on whether it is right to divert the hypothetical trolley would have differed from ours. Whatever grammar guides people's moral judgments can't be all that universal. Anyone who stayed awake through Anthropology 101 can offer many other examples.

Of course, languages vary, too. In Chomsky's theory, languages conform to an abstract blueprint, like having phrases built out of verbs and objects, while the details vary, like whether the verb or the object comes first. Could we be wired with an abstract spec sheet that embraces all the strange ideas that people in different cultures moralize?

The Varieties of Moral Experience

When anthropologists like Richard Shweder and Alan Fiske survey moral concerns across the globe, they find that a few themes keep popping up from amid the diversity. People everywhere, at least in some circumstances and with certain other folks in mind, think it's bad to harm others and good to help them. They have a sense of fairness: that one should reciprocate favors, reward benefactors and punish cheaters. They value loyalty to a group, sharing and solidarity among its members and conformity to its norms. They believe that it is right to defer to legitimate authorities and to respect people with high status. And they exalt purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality.

The exact number of themes depends on whether you're a lumper or a splitter, but Haidt counts five -- harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity -- and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense. Not only do they keep reappearing in cross-cultural surveys, but each one tugs on the moral intuitions of people in our own culture. Haidt asks us to consider how much money someone would have to pay us to do hypothetical acts like the following:

Stick a pin into your palm.

Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don't know. (Harm.)

Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it at no charge because of a computer error.

Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family. (Fairness.)

Say something bad about your nation (which you don't believe) on a talk-radio show in your nation.

Say something bad about your nation (which you don't believe) on a talk-radio show in a foreign nation. (Community.)

Slap a friend in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit.

Slap your minister in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit. (Authority.)

Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like idiots for 30 minutes, including flubbing simple problems and falling down on stage.

Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like animals for 30 minutes, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage. (Purity.)

In each pair, the second action feels far more repugnant. Most of the moral illusions we have visited come from an unwarranted intrusion of one of the moral spheres into our judgments. A violation of community led people to frown on using an old flag to clean a bathroom. Violations of purity repelled the people who judged the morality of consensual incest and prevented the moral vegetarians and nonsmokers from tolerating the slightest trace of a vile contaminant. At the other end of the scale, displays of extreme purity lead people to venerate religious leaders who dress in white and affect an aura of chastity and asceticism.

Part 2

2008-01-17T02:24:00.000-08:00

The Genealogy of Morals

The five spheres are good candidates for a periodic table of the moral sense not only because they are ubiquitous but also because they appear to have deep evolutionary roots. The impulse to avoid harm, which gives trolley ponderers the willies when they consider throwing a man off a bridge, can also be found in rhesus monkeys, who go hungry rather than pull a chain that delivers food to them and a shock to another monkey. Respect for authority is clearly related to the pecking orders of dominance and appeasement that are widespread in the animal kingdom. The purity-defilement contrast taps the emotion of disgust that is triggered by potential disease vectors like bodily effluvia, decaying flesh and unconventional forms of meat, and by risky sexual practices like incest.

The other two moralized spheres match up with the classic examples of how altruism can evolve that were worked out by sociobiologists in the 1960s and 1970s and made famous by Richard Dawkins in his book ''The Selfish Gene.'' Fairness is very close to what scientists call reciprocal altruism, where a willingness to be nice to others can evolve as long as the favor helps the recipient more than it costs the giver and the recipient returns the favor when fortunes reverse. The analysis makes it sound as if reciprocal altruism comes out of a robotlike calculation, but in fact Robert Trivers, the biologist who devised the theory, argued that it is implemented in the brain as a suite of moral emotions. Sympathy prompts a person to offer the first favor, particularly to someone in need for whom it would go the furthest. Anger protects a person against cheaters who accept a favor without reciprocating, by impelling him to punish the ingrate or sever the relationship. Gratitude impels a beneficiary to reward those who helped him in the past. Guilt prompts a cheater in danger of being found out to repair the relationship by redressing the misdeed and advertising that he will behave better in the future (consistent with Mencken's definition of conscience as ''the inner voice which warns us that someone might be looking''). Many experiments on who helps whom, who likes whom, who punishes whom and who feels guilty about what have confirmed these predictions.

Community, the very different emotion that prompts people to share and sacrifice without an expectation of payback, may be rooted in nepotistic altruism, the empathy and solidarity we feel toward our relatives (and which evolved because any gene that pushed an organism to aid a relative would have helped copies of itself sitting inside that relative). In humans, of course, communal feelings can be lavished on nonrelatives as well. Sometimes it pays people (in an evolutionary sense) to love their companions because their interests are yoked, like spouses with common children, in-laws with common relatives, friends with common tastes or allies with common enemies. And sometimes it doesn't pay them at all, but their kinship-detectors have been tricked into treating their groupmates as if they were relatives by tactics like kinship metaphors (blood brothers, fraternities, the fatherland), origin myths, communal meals and other bonding rituals.

Juggling the Spheres

All this brings us to a theory of how the moral sense can be universal and variable at the same time. The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life -- sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on -- depends on the culture. Many of the flabbergasting practices in faraway places become more intelligible when you recognize that the same moralizing impulse that Western elites channel toward violations of harm and fairness (our moral obsessions) is channeled elsewhere to violations in the other spheres. Think of the Japanese fear of nonconformity (community), the holy ablutions and dietary restrictions of Hindus and Orthodox Jews (purity), the outrage at insulting the Prophet among Muslims (authority). In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible -- what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother?

The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It's not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.

Reassigning an activity to a different sphere, or taking it out of the moral spheres altogether, isn't easy. People think that a behavior belongs in its sphere as a matter of sacred necessity and that the very act of questioning an assignment is a moral outrage. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that the mentality of taboo -- a conviction that some thoughts are sinful to think -- is not just a superstition of Polynesians but a mind-set that can easily be triggered in college-educated Americans. Just ask them to think about applying the sphere of reciprocity to relationships customarily governed by community or authority. When Tetlock asked subjects for their opinions on whether adoption agencies should place children with the couples willing to pay the most, whether people should have the right to sell their organs and whether they should be able to buy their way out of jury duty, the subjects not only disagreed but felt personally insulted and were outraged that anyone would raise the question.

The institutions of modernity often question and experiment with the way activities are assigned to moral spheres. Market economies tend to put everything up for sale. Science amoralizes the world by seeking to understand phenomena rather than pass judgment on them. Secular philosophy is in the business of scrutinizing all beliefs, including those entrenched by authority and tradition. It's not surprising that these institutions are often seen to be morally corrosive.

Is Nothing Sacred?

And ''morally corrosive'' is exactly the term that some critics would apply to the new science of the moral sense. The attempt to dissect our moral intuitions can look like an attempt to debunk them. Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested -- to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes. The explanation of how different cultures appeal to different spheres could lead to a spineless relativism, in which we would never have grounds to criticize the practice of another culture, no matter how barbaric, because ''we have our kind of morality and they have theirs.'' And the whole enterprise seems to be dragging us to an amoral nihilism, in which morality itself would be demoted from a transcendent principle to a figment of our neural circuitry.

In reality, none of these fears are warranted, and it's important to see why not. The first misunderstanding involves the logic of evolutionary explanations. Evolutionary biologists sometimes anthropomorphize DNA for the same reason that science teachers find it useful to have their students imagine the world from the viewpoint of a molecule or a beam of light. One shortcut to understanding the theory of selection without working through the math is to imagine that the genes are little agents that try to make copies of themselves.

Unfortunately, the meme of the selfish gene escaped from popular biology books and mutated into the idea that organisms (including people) are ruthlessly self-serving. And this doesn't follow. Genes are not a reservoir of our dark unconscious wishes. ''Selfish'' genes are perfectly compatible with selfless organisms, because a gene's metaphorical goal of selfishly replicating itself can be implemented by wiring up the brain of the organism to do unselfish things, like being nice to relatives or doing good deeds for needy strangers. When a mother stays up all night comforting a sick child, the genes that endowed her with that tenderness were ''selfish'' in a metaphorical sense, but by no stretch of the imagination is she being selfish.

Nor does reciprocal altruism -- the evolutionary rationale behind fairness -- imply that people do good deeds in the cynical expectation of repayment down the line. We all know of unrequited good deeds, like tipping a waitress in a city you will never visit again and falling on a grenade to save platoonmates. These bursts of goodness are not as anomalous to a biologist as they might appear.

In his classic 1971 article, Trivers, the biologist, showed how natural selection could push in the direction of true selflessness. The emergence of tit-for-tat reciprocity, which lets organisms trade favors without being cheated, is just a first step. A favor-giver not only has to avoid blatant cheaters (those who would accept a favor but not return it) but also prefer generous reciprocators (those who return the biggest favor they can afford) over stingy ones (those who return the smallest favor they can get away with). Since it's good to be chosen as a recipient of favors, a competition arises to be the most generous partner around. More accurately, a competition arises to appear to be the most generous partner around, since the favor-giver can't literally read minds or see into the future. A reputation for fairness and generosity becomes an asset.

Now this just sets up a competition for potential beneficiaries to inflate their reputations without making the sacrifices to back them up. But it also pressures the favor-giver to develop ever-more-sensitive radar to distinguish the genuinely generous partners from the hypocrites. This arms race will eventually reach a logical conclusion. The most effective way to seem generous and fair, under harsh scrutiny, is to be generous and fair. In the long run, then, reputation can be secured only by commitment. At least some agents evolve to be genuinely high-minded and self-sacrificing -- they are moral not because of what it brings them but because that's the kind of people they are.

Of course, a theory that predicted that everyone always sacrificed themselves for another's good would be as preposterous as a theory that predicted that no one ever did. Alongside the niches for saints there are niches for more grudging reciprocators, who attract fewer and poorer partners but don't make the sacrifices necessary for a sterling reputation. And both may coexist with outright cheaters, who exploit the unwary in one-shot encounters. An ecosystem of niches, each with a distinct strategy, can evolve when the payoff of each strategy depends on how many players are playing the other strategies. The human social environment does have its share of generous, grudging and crooked characters, and the genetic variation in personality seems to bear the fingerprints of this evolutionary process.

Is Morality a Figment?

So a biological understanding of the moral sense does not entail that people are calculating maximizers of their genes or self-interest. But where does it leave the concept of morality itself?

Here is the worry. The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?

Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not -- if his dictates are divine whims -- why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others -- if a command to torture a child was never an option -- then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

This throws us back to wondering where those reasons could come from, if they are more than just figments of our brains. They certainly aren't in the physical world like wavelength or mass. The only other option is that moral truths exist in some abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians) are there for us to discover. On this analogy, we are born with a rudimentary concept of number, but as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning, the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths and not others. (No one who understands the concept of two, the concept of four and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that 2 + 2 = 4.) Perhaps we are born with a rudimentary moral sense, and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning, the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others.

Moral realism, as this idea is called, is too rich for many philosophers' blood. Yet a diluted version of the idea -- if not a list of cosmically inscribed Thou-Shalts, then at least a few If-Thens -- is not crazy. Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself.

One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other's children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the other's child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we'd both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim foris the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things.

The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me -- to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car -- then I can't do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can't act as if my interests are special just because I'm me and you're not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.

Not coincidentally, the core of this idea -- the interchangeability of perspectives -- keeps reappearing in history's best-thought-through moral philosophies, including the Golden Rule (itself discovered many times); Spinoza's Viewpoint of Eternity; the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant's Categorical Imperative; and Rawls's Veil of Ignorance. It also underlies Peter Singer's theory of the Expanding Circle -- the optimistic proposal that our moral sense, though shaped by evolution to overvalue self, kin and clan, can propel us on a path of moral progress, as our reasoning forces us to generalize it to larger and larger circles of sentient beings.

Doing Better by Knowing Ourselves

Morality, then, is still something larger than our inherited moral sense, and the new science of the moral sense does not make moral reasoning and conviction obsolete. At the same time, its implications for our moral universe are profound.

At the very least, the science tells us that even when our adversaries' agenda is most baffling, they may not be amoral psychopaths but in the throes of a moral mind-set that appears to them to be every bit as mandatory and universal as ours does to us. Of course, some adversaries really are psychopaths, and others are so poisoned by a punitive moralization that they are beyond the pale of reason. (The actor Will Smith had many historians on his side when he recently speculated to the press that Hitler thought he was acting morally.) But in any conflict in which a meeting of the minds is not completely hopeless, a recognition that the other guy is acting from moral rather than venal reasons can be a first patch of common ground. One side can acknowledge the other's concern for community or stability or fairness or dignity, even while arguing that some other value should trump it in that instance. With affirmative action, for example, the opponents can be seen as arguing from a sense of fairness, not racism, and the defenders can be seen as acting from a concern with community, not bureaucratic power. Liberals can ratify conservatives' concern with families while noting that gay marriage is perfectly consistent with that concern.

The science of the moral sense also alerts us to ways in which our psychological makeup can get in the way of our arriving at the most defensible moral conclusions. The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.

Though wise people have long reflected on how we can be blinded by our own sanctimony, our public discourse still fails to discount it appropriately. In the worst cases, the thoughtlessness of our brute intuitions can be celebrated as a virtue. In his influential essay ''The Wisdom of Repugnance,'' Leon Kass, former chair of the President's Council on Bioethics, argued that we should disregard reason when it comes to cloning and other biomedical technologies and go with our gut: ''We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings . . . because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear. . . . In this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done . . . repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.''

There are, of course, good reasons to regulate human cloning, but the shudder test is not one of them. People have shuddered at all kinds of morally irrelevant violations of purity in their culture: touching an untouchable, drinking from the same water fountain as a Negro, allowing Jewish blood to mix with Aryan blood, tolerating sodomy between consenting men. And if our ancestors' repugnance had carried the day, we never would have had autopsies, vaccinations, blood transfusions, artificial insemination, organ transplants and in vitro fertilization, all of which were denounced as immoral when they were new.

There are many other issues for which we are too quick to hit the moralization button and look for villains rather than bug fixes. What should we do when a hospital patient is killed by a nurse who administers the wrong drug in a patient's intravenous line? Should we make it easier to sue the hospital for damages? Or should we redesign the IV fittings so that it's physically impossible to connect the wrong bottle to the line?

And nowhere is moralization more of a hazard than in our greatest global challenge. The threat of human-induced climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting. In many discussions, the cause of climate change is overindulgence (too many S.U.V.'s) and defilement (sullying the atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that these numbers don't add up: even if every last American became conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on climate change would be trifling, if for no other reason than that two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness. Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere. Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.

Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, ''Man will become better when you show him what he is like.''

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the author of ''The Language Instinct'' and ''The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature.''

Buddhist Boomers

2007-11-09T00:21:00.000-08:00

WEEKEND JOURNAL
Taste -- Houses of Worship: Buddhist Boomers: A Meditation
By Clark Strand
1084 words
9 November 2007
The Wall Street Journal
W13
English
(Copyright (c) 2007, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

A colleague recently took me to task for consulting Jews and Christians on how to keep American Buddhism alive. He didn't agree with either premise -- that Jews and Christians could offer advice to Buddhists, or that Buddhism was in any danger of decline. But he was wrong on both counts. American Buddhism, which swelled its ranks to accommodate the spiritual enthusiasms of baby boomers in the late 20th century, is now aging. One estimate puts the average age of Buddhist converts (about a third of the American Buddhist population) at upwards of 50. This means that the religion is almost certain to see its numbers reduced over the next generation as boomer Buddhists begin to die off without having passed their faith along to their children. And Jewish and Christian models offer the most logical solution for reversing that decline.

The basic problem is that non-Asian converts tend not to regard what they practice as a religion. From the beginning, Buddhism has been seen in its American incarnation not as an alternative religion, but as an alternative to religion. American converts have long held Buddhism apart from what they see as the inherent messiness of Western religious discourse on such issues as faith and belief, and from the violence that has so often accompanied it.

The author Sam Harris, though not himself a Buddhist, is nevertheless fairly representative of this point of view. In his book "The End of Faith," Mr. Harris is strongly critical of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but he gives Buddhism a free pass. "Buddhism has also been a source of ignorance and occasional violence," he concedes, but "it is not a religion of faith, or a religion at all in the Western sense."

Mr. Harris goes so far as to claim that "the esoteric teachings of Buddhism offer the most complete methodology we have for discovering the intrinsic freedom of consciousness, unencumbered by any dogma." He likens the Dalai Lama's encounters with Christian ecclesiastics to a meeting between Cambridge physicists and Kalahari Bushmen, which is offensive on so many levels -- to Christians, to Buddhists, to Bushmen, and maybe even to physicists -- that one hardly knows where to begin. And yet most American converts would probably agree with Mr. Harris's portrayal of Buddhism as an empirically based spiritual practice. In its pure, idealized form (which, admittedly, exists mostly in the minds of Western converts), that practice is relatively free of dogma and superstition. Unfortunately, it is also free of folk tales, family and -- dare I say it -- fun.

For the most part American converts don't see this as a problem. When I suggested to my colleague that he might want to think of ways to integrate his Buddhist experience into the long-term life of his family, and that he might look to existing religious models, like his local synagogue, for ideas on how to do that (rather than to the out-of-state monastery where he goes alone on retreat twice yearly), he answered shortly, "When my kids get old enough, they can decide for themselves whether to meditate or not."

It's an argument I have heard before. Having left the religion of their birth, often with good reason, American converts tend to be wary of anything approaching religious indoctrination, even if that means failing to offer their children the basics of a religious education. This has the advantage of giving Buddhist children great freedom of religious expression, with the disadvantage of not giving them any actual religion to express. The result is a generation of children with a Buddhist parent or two but no Buddhist culture to grow up in.

What does this mean for the non-Buddhist culture at large? Why be concerned that so few Buddhist baptisms, weddings or funerals occur among Buddhist converts each year that most of them have no idea what such ceremonies even look like, or that years after their conversion, their extended families persist in thinking of them as basically Jewish or Catholic at heart? The answer is surprising all around.

In the contemporary discourse on religion, it is striking how often Buddhism is privileged over Judaism, Christianity or Islam as a scientifically based or inherently peaceful version of religion. Note that the Dalai Lama (rather than the pope) was asked to provide the inaugural address at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in 2005, even though, like Catholicism, Tibetan Buddhism includes beliefs (think reincarnation) that are anathema to medical science. Likewise, though Japanese Buddhists melted their temple bells to make bombs during World War II, the idea of Buddhism as a peace-loving religion persists as an enduring fantasy in Western people's minds. And yet, such fantasies are instructive nonetheless.

Though some of my more devout Buddhist associates may balk at the idea, these days I have increasingly come to see Buddhism in America as an elaborate thought experiment being conducted by society at large -- from the serious practitioner who meditates twice daily to the person who remarks in passing, "Well, if I had to be something, I guess I'd be a Buddhist." The object of that experiment is not to import some "authentic" version of Buddhism from Asia, as some believe, but to imagine a new model for religion altogether -- one that is nondogmatic, practice-based and peaceful.

In that case, all the more reason to keep Buddhism in America alive. But to keep that experiment running (as it must if it is ever to yield practical results for the broader religious culture), it has to get itself grounded in the realities of American family life. That is why I tell every Buddhist I meet these days to make friends with a local priest or rabbi and ask what kinds of programs he (or she) is offering for children and families. For if Buddhism has much to offer the West, it surely has much to receive as well. Whatever new religious model is going to emerge over the next 100 years as the result of the inevitable cross-pollination of religious cultures in America, one can only hope that it will preserve the best of East and West.
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Mr. Strand is a contributing editor to Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and the author of "How to Believe in God (Whether You Believe in Religion or Not)," forthcoming from Doubleday Religion.

Instant karma: behind Asia's monastic activism

2007-11-09T00:08:00.000-08:00

Instant Karma: Behind Asia's monastic activism --- Economic pain spurs Buddhists in Myanmar; Falun Gong's determination
By Andrew Higgins
2301 words
7 November 2007
The Wall Street Journal Asia
1
English
(c) 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. To see the edition in which this article appeared, click here http://awsj.com.hk/factiva-ns

AFTER EVENING PRAYERS on Sept. 18, the abbot of a small monastery in Myanmar's largest city convened the roughly 30 Buddhist monks in his charge. The bonds between secular and religious authority had broken, the abbot said. Then he gave the monks his blessing to take to the streets in protest.

That meeting, one of many held in monasteries across Myanmar in mid-September, helped turn a sputtering campaign of dissent led by secular democracy activists into a mass movement led by the Buddhist clergy. The country formerly known as Burma erupted in the biggest wave of antigovernment demonstrations in nearly 20 years.

"We wanted to stay out of politics," says U Zawtiga, a monk at the monastery in Yangon, formerly Rangoon. But "how can religion thrive when the country is so desperate?" Mr. Zawtiga, active in the protests, fled Yangon after the military started shooting protesters on Sept. 27. He is now in hiding along Myanmar's border with Thailand. His abbot, he says, has been arrested.

The vanguard role of monks in the Burmese revolt underscores a curious turn for a creed often associated with quiet contemplation. Unlike Islam and Christianity, Buddhism offers no clear scriptural mandate for revolt against unjust rulers. Rooted in nonviolence, a belief in rebirth and a conviction that salvation lies in the conquest of worldly desires, it has no tradition of crusades or jihad in service of an almighty God.

Across wide swathes of Asia, however, Buddhism has emerged as a powerful spur to political activism. Motives differ from place to place. So, too, do the strands of Buddhism involved. But in each case, the faith has taken the lead in often noisy campaigns for change.

The phenomenon extends from Tibet, where Buddhist monks have doggedly resisted Chinese rule, to Myanmar and several other countries of Southeast Asia, where monks have become a significant political force. Monastic activism has taken on a sinister tone in some places, particularly in Sri Lanka, where hard-line nationalist monks have formed a political party that wants all-out war against rebels of the mostly Hindu Tamil minority.

In China, meanwhile, a Buddhism-tinged group called Falun Gong has eclipsed a moribund pro-democracy movement as the Communist Party's most determined foe.

Buddhism should "not run away from society but reform society," says Sulak Sivaraksa, a prominent Thai champion of Buddhist activism against poverty and injustice. Focusing on meditation and the next life, he says, is "not Buddhism but escapism." In 1989, Mr. Sivaraksa helped found the International Network of Engaged Buddhists, a group of Buddhist activists that includes some from Myanmar and also Tibet.

Christopher Queen, a Harvard University religion lecturer, says the trend began in the latter half of the past century, a time when the shocks of modernization and war prodded many faiths to become increasingly political. Some Roman Catholics embraced "liberation theology," and Muslims increasingly turned to political Islam. For Buddhists, though, activism has involved a fundamental rereading of their generally quiescent creed.

Buddhism holds that an individual's lot in life is determined by actions -- or karma -- in previous lives. This offers hope that evil leaders will pay a price for their misdeeds in a future life but provides little impetus for immediate action. As a result, Buddhism for much of its history has tended to shore up the status quo.

But Myanmar's current plight demands action in the here and now, says Bo Hla Tint, a Buddhist and member of Myanmar's government in exile. "We can't wait," he says. He adds that military strongman Gen. Than Shwe will face further punishment later -- with rebirth as a stray dog or an animal raised for slaughter. Rebirth as a household pet, says Mr. Hla Tint, "is too good for him."

A big factor pushing Myanmar's monks onto the streets is their own economic pain. Dependent on donations of food from an increasingly impoverished populace, monks are going hungry as public alms giving declines. "If people are starving, how can they give to us? If they suffer, we suffer," says U Kaw Thala, 48, another Yangon monk now moving between safe houses in the Thai-Myanmar border zone.

In contrast to secular activists, who are often easily silenced by arrests and intimidation, these faith-fired Buddhist campaigners have demonstrated tremendous stamina. Such perseverance is often helped by the fact that monks and nuns usually have no spouses or children about whom to worry. Activists also benefit from a loose but durable support network provided by their faith.

Mr. Zawtiga, the Yangon monk, entered the monkhood at the age of 7. Now 39, he has lived in five monasteries and has a network of contacts across the country. During the September protests, he traded information with old monastic friends and helped coordinate street protests. His parents are both dead. Two of his brothers are abbots.

When the military started raiding monasteries the night of Sept. 26, Mr. Zawtiga took refuge at the home of a devout Buddhist. The next day, accompanied by two other monks, he traveled by bus to the border with Thailand. Local Buddhists gave him shelter and a set of orange-colored robes to help him pass himself off as a Thai monk. Burmese monks wear burgundy. Mr. Zawtiga stays in touch with monks in Yangon and elsewhere by cellphone.

"Everybody knew the military would use violence," he says, "This was not unexpected. We are not afraid." Students and other pro-democracy forces, he says, have been severely weakened by years of repression, but "the Sangha [Sanskrit for Buddhist clergy] is getting stronger and more organized." Last week, more than 100 monks took to the streets again in Pakokku, a town in center of the country. They chanted a Buddhist prayer associated with the democracy cause.

One of the better-known demonstrations of stalwart Buddhist resistance is in Tibet, a Buddhist enclave until China invaded in 1950. Its monks again defied Beijing last month by celebrating the U.S. Congress's decision to award its highest civilian honor to the exiled Dalai Lama. Clashes were reported in several towns between Chinese security forces and monks.

Persistence and organization are also hallmarks of China's banned Falun Gong movement, a blend of Buddhism, Chinese folk religions and pseudoscience founded in 1992. After initially tolerating the group, authorities cracked down hard in 1999, branding Falun Gong an "evil cult" and arresting thousands.

Since then, the movement has taken up politics with gusto, promoting a political tract called "The Nine Commentaries," a denunciation of communism written in 2004. Falun Gong has no monks or clergy, but, through a web of motivated and well-organized lay followers in Hong Kong and elsewhere, it continues to needle Beijing. A TV station and radio network run out of the U.S. beam anticommunist messages into China.

The head of China's state-controlled Buddhist Association denounced Falun Gong, but a few activist Buddhists rallied to defend the group. Among them was Xu Zhiqiang, a protest leader during China's 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement who, after being released from jail, joined a Buddhist monastery. Buddhism, he says, offered him a sanctuary and also toughened his resolve.

In 2004, Mr. Xu helped in a civil suit filed on behalf of an imprisoned Falun Gong follower. He says he doesn't support Falun Gong's reading of Buddhism but does support religious and political liberty. Last year, authorities booted Mr. Xu out of his monastery, accusing him of corruption and "improper relations" with three female Buddhists. He denies the allegations.

Though often wary of Falun Gong's sometimes cult-like behavior, secular Chinese dissidents voice admiration for its staying power. Democracy campaigner Wei Jingsheng, who spent 19 years in Chinese prisons and now lives in exile in the U.S., isn't a believer but sometimes attends Falun Gong events outside China to show solidarity. At a big July rally in Washington, he looked out on a sea of anticommunist banners and said his own dwindling band of secular democrats "could never get a crowd like this."

Buddhists have moved beyond cloistered contemplation before. In medieval Japan, a time of political turmoil, monasteries ran their own armies. China, too, had warrior monks. Starting in the 13th century, China saw periodic rebellions stirred up by the White Lotus, a Buddhist sect greatly feared by rulers as a symptom of dynastic decline.

Generally, though, Buddhism has tended to support established power. This pattern dates back more than 2,500 years to the religion's founder, Siddhartha Gautama, better known as Buddha, or the "enlightened one." A north-India aristocrat, he found spiritual liberation -- Nirvana -- through meditation under a tree. Unlike Jesus and Mohammed, he didn't challenge ruling elites.

Roughly two centuries after Siddhartha Gautama's death, King Asoka of India declared Buddhism a state religion. Since then, Asian rulers through the centuries have sought to emulate his example, supporting monasteries in return for the clergy's blessing of their rule.

Even fanatical atheists have cloaked their rule in symbolism borrowed from Buddhism. In May 1975, shortly after their conquest of Cambodia, Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot and his lieutenants retired to a Buddhist sanctuary, the Silver Pagoda, to plot a murderous program that would result in an estimated 1.6 million deaths and included the slaughter of many monks. Pol Pot slept on a raised dais previously used to display a statue of Buddha.

Burma, as Myanmar was known until 1989, has a particularly deep Buddhist heritage. According to Burmese tradition, the faith was first brought to the country by a mission sent by King Asoka in 250 B.C. When Britain seized Burma in the 19th century, loyalty to Buddhism helped rally resistance.

Since independence in 1948, Burmese leaders have all sought to revive the ancient model of close bonds between monastic and state power. More than 80% of the population is Buddhist. U Nu, the country's first prime minister, rebuilt temples and monasteries and, in imitation of King Asoka, held a Buddhist Council that brought together faithful from across Asia. After a 1962 coup brought the military to power, dictator Ne Win, a xenophobic Marxist Buddhist, built two huge new pagodas -- but also purged the clergy of monks suspected of disloyalty.

Democrats tapped Buddhism, too. When students took to the streets in 1988, Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the democracy cause, visited Yangon's Shwedagon Pagoda to call for an end to military rule. Monks joined the movement, which mushroomed into a peaceful mass uprising. In September 1988, the military crushed the protests. As many as 3,000 people died. Nine months later, similar scenes played out in China, Burma's closest ally. Hundreds and possibly many more died when the Army launched an assault on Tiananmen Square to end student-led protests.

In both China and Myanmar, democracy activists went into hiding, fled abroad or were jailed. In both countries, various strains of Buddhism helped fill the void as a vehicle for dissent.

China worked hard to shore up the Buddhist bona fides of its increasingly beleaguered allies in Myanmar. Starting in the mid-1990s, it arranged several times to have Buddha's tooth -- a relic greatly revered by Buddhists -- sent from China to Myanmar for display. Myanmar's generals built a special sanctuary to house the tooth and invested in other Buddhism-related construction projects.

The lavish spending on temples won over some monks but in general, ties between the state and the clergy continued to fray. Dissident monks set up the All Burma Young Monks Union to organize resistance to the junta. Ms. Suu Kyi, the opposition leader, reached out to elderly abbots and, while in detention, calmed her nerves by reading a book on the "liberation teachings" of Buddha.

The deepening economic crisis of recent years hit monasteries hard, pushing even apolitical monks towards activism, says Mr. Kaw Thala, the Yangon monk now in hiding. He says he used to collect small donations of rice and other food from about 20 people each week. The number of alms givers, he says, had dwindled to a handful by this summer.

Meanwhile, soaring unemployment drove many jobless men to seek shelter in monasteries. At a monastery in the hills above Myawaddy, a town on the border with Thailand, a 44-year-old former professional kickboxer explained that he grew too old to practice his martial skills and couldn't find another job. He decided five months ago to become a monk.

Myanmar's recent protests were initially triggered by an abrupt increase in the price of fuel on Aug. 15. Veteran political activists, mostly former student leaders from 1988, organized a series of small marches and delivered fiery speeches. Most were promptly arrested. The protests died down.

In early September, security forces threw gasoline on the dying embers by manhandling a group of monks in Pakokku, the central-Myanmar town where monks marched again last week. Rumors quickly spread of a blood bath. Senior monks demanded an apology from the military. Officials ignored the plea.

When a mid-September deadline set by monks for an official apology for the Pakokku incident passed, monastic anger bubbled over. At meetings in monasteries across the country, monks denounced the military's failure to apologize and called for action.

Mr. Zawtiga, the monk from Yangon who is now on the run, says discussion of the Pakokku episode dominated the meeting held at his own monastery on Sept. 18. The military "insulted our religion," he says. "We can't tolerate that."

50 dates of world history

2007-10-19T04:59:00.000-07:00

The 50 key dates of world history
Richard Overy
2082 words
19 October 2007
The Times
Times2 4
English
(c) 2007 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved

The eminent historian RICHARD OVERY, editor of The Times Complete History of the World, chooses the dates that he believes have most influenced humanity

Choosing 50 key dates from world history is a daunting task. No two people are likely to choose the same 50. Any list will prompt the response "why did you leave that out? Or put that in?"

Important dates are not the same as well-known dates. Every schoolchild used to know 1066, 1588 and 1815 but only the last appears in my list, and not just for the sake of the Battle of Waterloo. Any list of just 50 dates has to take account of some obvious limitations. No date appears before the start of human civilisations about 5,500 years ago and the beginning of a written or pictorial history. Some dates are very fuzzy, partly because there is no particular year in which it is possible to say "the wheel was invented then", despite its clear importance; partly because the accounts we have, even of quite recent events, can be misdated; partly because primarily oral cultures produce either no chronology or one that is wholly speculative.

The question of geography means leaving out many key dates from the history of Europe to make room for dates from Ancient China, or the Middle East, or the Americas. World history is global, even if it much of it has been dominated by Europe.

Why, then, these dates and not 50 others? Human history is a vast and complex story, but human society has worked over the past 5,000 years only because of some key inventions and discoveries. That is why the wheel, the plough, the sail and the watch are there.

Human societies have been held together by religion, which is why the major religious founders are here. Religion links the modern world with the past 2,000 or 3,000 years. Every day millions of people read the Bible, a document of an entirely lost world, but a book, like the Koran, of enormous power.

Political events are seldom as important, but at times they shape the future in fundamental ways. That is why the unification of Ancient China is there. China is still a large, unified state occupying roughly the same area that it did 2,000 years ago. If the Persians had blotted out Ancient Greece, or the Carthaginians had destroyed Rome, the classical world would have been very different. The rise and fall of Communism in the 20th century affected the lives of millions.

Lastly, human intelligence and creativity shaped the way we think about the world.

Newton-ian physics, Einstein's relativity theory, Darwin's biology and the works of Shakespeare have all made the world a different place. If there were room, Copernicus or Goethe or Nietzsche, or a dozen non-European thinkers, might all have as good a claim.

These are dates that arguably changed the way human society developed for better or worse over the past five millennia.

The Times Complete History of the World, edited by Richard Overy, is published by Collins and available now, price Pounds 75. It is available from Times BooksFirst for Pounds 67.50, free p&p. 0870 1608080, timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

THE HISTORIAN'S CHOICE

1 c.3500 BC Invention of the wheel and plough in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq); invention of the sail in Egypt: three fundamental inventions for trade, agriculture and exploration.

2 c.3200 BC Invention of writing in Mesopotamia: the means to record and understand human history.

3 c.3000 BC Founding of the first cities in Sumeria (present-day Iraq): origin of modern social and administrative structures.

4 c.1600 BC Modern alphabet invented: the essential means of communication of complex concepts and culture.

5 c.1600 BC Beginning of Greek civilisation: essential to Western heritage and the root of mathematics, philosophy, political thinking and medicine.

6 753 BC Foundation of Rome: the Roman Empire is a pillar of the modern age, producing ideas on justice, law, engineering and warfare.

7 c.670 BC Invention of iron-working: metallurgy is the key to further technical, economic and military developments.

8 c.551 BC Birth of Confucius, the founder of one of the world's major philosophical systems.

9 490 BC Battle of Marathon: the Greeks repel a Persian invasion, securing the survival of Greek culture and science.

10 486 BC Birth of Buddha, founder of one of the world's major religions.

11 327 BC Empire of Alexander the Great reaches into India: the first example of a long-term and often violent interrelationship between Europe and Asia.

12 202 BC Hannibal is defeated by Rome: the victory is essential to secure the survival and expansion of Roman civilisation.

13 27 BC Founding of the Roman Empire: this is the start of the classic period of Roman domination in Europe and the Mediterranean.

14 c.5 BC Birth of Jesus Christ, founder of the many branches of Christianity. The exact date is disputed.

15 AD 105 First use of modern paper: this replaced stone, slate, papyrus and vellum as a cheap and convenient medium.

16 AD 280 Unification of China under the Western Chin dynasty creates the political shape of modern China.

17 AD 312 Roman Emperor Constantine converts to Christianity: this made it possible for Christianity to spread across Europe.

18 AD 476 Fall of the Roman Empire in the West ends 800 years of Roman hegemony.

The creation of moderen Europe begins.

19 c.AD 570 Birth of Muhammad, founder of one of the world's great religions.

20 c.AD 730 Printing invented in China: an essential step in mass communication/ administration/cultural dissemination.

21 AD 800 Charlemagne crowned Emperor of the new Western Empire. This marked the point at which Europe began to reintegrate. The Holy Roman Empire lasts for 1,000 years.

22 1054 Schism of Greek and Latin Christian Churches divides Christianity permanently into two geographical and denominational halves.

23 1088 First university founded in Bologna, Italy: the start of a modern conception of higher learning and universal knowledge.

24 1206 Genghis Khan begins his conquest of Asia. This has a major impact on Asian development and the movement of peoples.

25 1215 Magna Carta signed by King John at Runnymede: this is the origin of the modern concept of constitutional rule.

26 1453 Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks: Almost 500 years of Turkish domination of the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle East begins.

27 1455 First book printed with moveable type: Johannes Gutenberg's revolution in printing technology makes mass-market reading possible.

28 1492 Christopher Columbus discovers the New World, bringing the Americas into a global trading/cultural system.

29 1509 Invention of the watch: essential to a modern economy and administration, this introduces the concept of regular timekeeping.

30 1517 Martin Luther launches the Reformation. It is the start of Protestant Christianity and the idea of religious individualism.

31 1519 Cortes begins his conquest of South America, which becomes part of the wider world economic and political system.

32 1564 William Shakespeare is born: his plays make fundamental statements about the human condition.

33 1651 Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan is published: this is the origin of the modern idea of civil society, equality before the law and egoistic individualism) 34 1687 Isaac Newton publishes Principia Mathematica, the foundation of modern physics.

35 1776 American Declaration of Independence determines the political evolution of the New World and the rise of American power.

36 1789 French Revolution marks a fundamental break with the tradition of monarchy; the "rights of man" are enshrined.

37 1815 Battle of Waterloo: the Napoleonic Empire ends, and with it Napoleon's ambition to rule and reform all of Europe.

38 1825 Rocket steam locomotive built, marking the start of the railway age of cheap, fast land transport.

39 1859 Publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species. His theory of evolution transforms the view of Man and his environment, and belief in God.

40 1885 Benz develops first petrol-driven car, starting the most profound technical and social revolution of the modern age.

41 1893 New Zealand introduces unrestricted women's suffrage. At this point women win the principle of full political equality.

42 1905 Einstein's theory of special relativity published. It transforms the nature of modern physical knowledge.

43 1917 Russian Revolution creates the first successful, long-term revolutionary state.

44 1918 End of the First World War. The Habsburg and Ottoman empires collapse; maps of Europe and the Middle East are redrawn.

45 1939 Outbreak of Second Worldd War: 50 million die worldwide from 1939-45 in the world's largest and most deadly conflict, which ends the long age of imperialisms.

46 1945 End of Second World War; when the first nuclear bomb is detonated, mankind develops the means to destroy itself.

47 1949 Communist China founded: China is created as a single territorial unit with a common administration and a modernising economy.

48 1959 Invention of the silicon chip is the major technical invention of the past century, making possible the computer age.

49 1960 First contraceptive pill made available for women, who can now make their own biological choices about reproduction.

50 1989-90 Collapse of Communist regimes in Europe: marks the end of the long communist experiment; Asian communism is also transformed.

..OR ARE THESE MORE IMPORTANT?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes, adventurer

AD0000 Birth of Christ

1415 Battle of Agincourt: always nice to keep the French in their place

1066 My family arrived at Hastings and we've been here ever since

1990 Berlin Wall knocked down: victory over Marxism

1945 VE Day: victory over Fascism

Amanda Foreman, biographer; author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

753BC Foundation of Rome: the spread of civic virtue

1564 Birth of Shakespeare: the apotheosis of the English language

1767 Invention of the Spinning Jenny: the subjugation of man to machine

1945 Detonation of the A-bomb: the perfection of war

2001 9/11 attacks: the triumph of terrorism

Orlando Figes, historian; author of A People's Tragedy

c. 1438 Johannes Gutenberg's printing press

1685 Birth of J.S. Bach, father of modern music

1789 The first modern revolution (French Revolution)

1796 Edward Jenner's smallpox vaccination: the first real breakthrough in combating infectious diseases

1833 Abolition of slavery by the UK Parliament

Baroness Neuberger, rabbi; Liberal Democrat peer

2737BC The discovery of tea by the Chinese Emperor Shen Nung

1847 Ignaz Semmelweis demonstrates that thorough handwashing by doctors and midwives dramatically reduces death in childbirth

1849 Henry Layard discovers the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh and the standard version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which contains the earliest version of the flood story

1907 James Murray Spangler invents the vacuum cleaner that becomes the Hoover

1967 Dame Cicely Saunders founds St Christopher's Hospice in London, the first modern hospice

Richard Morrison, columnist and critic

1066 Last invasion of Britain (Battle of Hastings)

1685 Birth of three great composers: Bach, Handel and Rameau

1807 Abolition of the slave trade

1876 Wagner completes The Ring, the most stupendous artwork ever created

1926 John Logie Baird gives the first public demonstration of television

Hugo Rifkind, Times diarist

456BC Birth of Aristophanes, father of comedy

1789 Most famous misquote, when Marie Antoinette almost certainly does not say "let them eat cake"

1875 Henry Nestle and Daniel Peter invent milk chocolate

1912 Opening of the world's first fast-food outlet, Automat, in New York City

1957 Panorama shows the world's greatest hoax, of Swiss spaghetti farmers preparing for harvest

HOW GOOD ARE YOU AT HISTORY?

1 How old was Alexander the Great when he died?

2 When did Julius Caesar cross the Rubicon?

3 In which city was the prophet Muhammad born?

4 Which island group did Christopher Columbus arrive at first in 1492?

5 Where did Luther launch the Reformation?

6 When were the United States formed?

7 Who was the author of The Rights of Man?

8 Where was Napoleon exiled after Waterloo?

9 What was signed on June 28, 1919?

10 In which year was the Chinese "Gang of Four" overthrown?

History Quiz Answers

1. 32 2. 49BC 3. Mecca 4. The Bahamas 5. Wittenberg 6. 1783 7. Thomas Paine 8. St Helena 9. The Treaty of Versailles 10. 1976

A Response to Shyam Ranganathan's Review of The Virtue of Non-Violence: From Gautama to Gandhi/Reply to Nicholas Gier

2007-10-05T19:53:00.000-07:00

A Response to Shyam Ranganathan's Review of The Virtue of Non-Violence: From Gautama to Gandhi/Reply to Nicholas Gier
Gier, Nicholas F; Ranganathan, Shyam
2650 words
1 October 2007
Philosophy East & West
561
Volume 57; Issue 4; ISSN: 00318221
English
© 2007 Philosophy East & West. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.

Nicholas F. Gier

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Idaho

Shyam Ranganathan's review of my book The Virtue of Non-Violence: From Gautama to Gandhi (Philosophy East and West, vol. 57, no. 1) exceeds all the expectations that an author might have for a fair and constructive appraisal, and I thank him for it. Ranganathan offers accurate summaries of each chapter, praises the strong points, graciously indicates some weaknesses, and offers viable options for alternative interpretations. Before I tender more specific remarks, I would like to offer an anecdote.

While on sabbatical in India in 1992, I attended a meeting of the Indian Association of Christian Philosophers held at Dharmaram College in Bangalore. The topic of the conference was Sankara and Christian theology. As I sat and listened, in quiet amazement, to talks about how well these two suited one another, I was moved to make a comment. I stood and declared that Ramanuja would be a much more promising partner for Christian theology. The audience went deathly still, as if I had uttered some sort of rude remark. Looking back at this incident, I have imagined that it must be the equivalent of someone standing up and promoting Duns Scotus, my favorite medieval philosopher, in a group of confirmed Thomists.

In my thirty years of teaching Indian philosophy, I thoroughly documented the references to personal theism in the Upanisads, and I informed my students that many of them have invocations to Visnu or Siva. I also reminded them that the word advaita is found only once in all the Upanisads and that there are over a dozen schools of Vedanta. My students were amazed to learn that many Indian philosophy professors, after lecturing on Advaita Vedanta, go home and make offerings to Ganesa. Just as no European ever worshipped Aristotle's unmoved mover, no Hindu has ever bowed before nirguna Brahman. I do not think it is too much to say that I have been a devoted champion for the "neglected" Vedanta.

Professor Ranganathan's main critique of my book is that I did not consider theistic Vedanta as a way to read Gandhi. He grants that I briefly compare Ramanuja and Gandhi favorably, but he fails to note that I refer frequently to Gandhi's devotion to Rama and his Vaisnava background. Furthermore, I also reference Glyn Richard's article relating Gandhi, quite successfully in my mind, to neo-Vedanta,1 thus refuting Ranganathan's charge that I conflate Vedanta with Advaita. My statement that "Vedantist metaphysics cannot possibly serve . . ." is made in the context of a discussion of the Advaita school. Finally, in my chapter "Rules, Vows, and Virtues," I concede that making vows to a personal deity is a viable Gandhian alternative to my preference of virtues supplanting vows. Gandhi's several references to nonviolence as a virtue led me to press on with my thesis.

The main reason for my focus on Advaita Vedanta is that, with very few exceptions, it is the Vedantist school with which Gandhi is associated. Although I stand firm in my belief that Gandhi is not an Advaitin, I definitely do not exclude a Jain or Hindu theistic interpretation. I propose a Pali Buddhism framework, not because I think Gandhi would have chosen it, but because I believe that is the best way to develop a philosophically coherent Gandhian ethics of nonviolence. If he had actually allied himself with Buddhism, his Vedantist tendencies would have drawn him to Mahayana.

I am most troubled by Ranganathan's attempt to make Jainism, Samkhya-Yoga, and the Vedantist schools into process philosophies. First, I object to his phrasing that Buddhism "makes room for a process conception." It is not a problem of accommodating Buddhism to process philosophy, because Gautama's explicit rejection of an impermanent Atman and affirmation of the flux of existence makes his view the standard for ancient process philosophy. Second, Samkhya-Yoga has process only on the material prakrti side, not in the spiritual purusa where ahimsa is an intrinsic and not a developed virtue. Even though Jain commentators have attempted to give their philosophy a process interpretation, I believe that they have failed.2 Ranganathan admits that only Ramanuja's lower self is impermanent while the higher self remains permanent, so this is a substance metaphysics and not the process philosophy I learned from John Cobb and David Griffin as a graduate student at Claremont. Third, the isolated individual self of Jainism and Samkhya-Yoga, which Ranganathan contrasts favorably with Sankara's absolute monism, does not support the relational self that is implied in Gandhi's organic holism and required for nonviolent activism.

I found it disappointing that a recent book on Indian ethics had no chapter on virtue ethics.3 The fact that virtue ethics does not appear in this volume does not mean, however, that one cannot find it in the Indian tradition. In my essay "Toward a Hindu Virtue Ethics,"4 I have sketched what this option might look like. I was inspired to write that essay because of Bimal Krsna Matilal's book Ethics and Epics, but his view of Krsna's virtue aesthetics gave me pause, and I returned to Confucianism or Buddhism as the preferred Asian virtue ethics.

I am not convinced, without much more discussion, that theistic Vedanta, as Ranganathan suggests, would give us the developmental model of virtue that I find in early Buddhism and Confucianism. I suspect that one would find a "recovery" model of virtue that is found in Plato and the Stoics. Because of my limited knowledge of theistic Vedanta, I will not foreclose the possibility of the developmental view. Nevertheless, I very much doubt that one would find there the ethical pluralism that is definitely implied in Gandhian experiments in truth, especially Gandhi's controversial attempts to remain spiritually pure while sleeping with young women.

It appears that Ranganathan has confused a relativized Hindu nonviolence with Buddhist/Gandhian pragmatic nonviolence. Ranganathan describes the former better than I did in my book: "Its nature and scope is defined relative to ritual and social contexts and self-interest (e.g., ritual slaughter is the general occasion when the general prohibition against killing is suspended)." The sacrifice of a goat to Durga and eating its flesh, which a priest declares is not killing or meat eating in this ritual context, is very different from Gandhi's decision to euthanize a calf at the Sabarmati Ashram in 1927.

Gandhi's 1927 decision sounds utilitarian in that he is principally concerned about the calf's suffering, but Gandhi's experiments in truth have a strong personal and pragmatic tone ("this works for me") without reference to the hedonic calculus. In my book I discovered the same pragmatism in the Buddha's eightfold path being interpreted as, for example, suitable livelihood and appropriate speech.5 Arjuna was exempt from ahimsa because of his caste and Krsna's assurance that no negative karma could affect his inviolable soul, but Buddhists have no such soul, and because they are never excused from any intentional act, Buddhist farmers, for example, must perform penance for killing insects with pesticides.

Finally, considering the fact that Gandhi was not a systematic thinker and warned us against unitary views of his thought, I find Ranganathan's attempt to eliminate legitimate Gandhi interpretations by syllogistic reasoning the most un- Gandhian hermeneutic imaginable. This is, after all, a thinker who declared that he was an Advaitin and a Dvaitin at the same time. (Gandhi was not trained in philosophy, so we must take this as an affirmation of the identity-in-difference that describes his organic holism.) With the exception of an Advaita interpretation, I made it clear that I would not foreclose the possibility of a Jain or Hindu view, which of course includes theistic Vedanta. Ranganathan demonstrates that he has solid grounding in these schools, and I urge him to write a full-fledged essay on this topic. This would be a welcomed contribution to Gandhi scholarship, and perhaps it would also convince some Indian Christian philosophers to take a second look at Ramanuja.

Notes

1 - Glyn Richards, "Gandhi's Concept of Truth and the Advaita Tradition," Religious Studies 22 (1) (March 1986): 1-14.

2 - See my Spiritual Titanism: Indian, Chinese, and Western Perspectives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 92-97.

3 - P. Bilimoria, J. Prabhu, and R. Sharma, eds., Indian Ethics: Classical Traditions and Contemporary Challenges: An Anthology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishers, 2007).

4 - "Toward a Hindu Virtue Ethics," in Contemporary Issues in Constructive Dharma, ed. R. D. Sherma and A. Deepak (Hampton, VA: Deepak Heritage Books, 2005), vol. 2, pp. 151-162. The editors went to press without my revisions to the piece, but you can read it in full at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/ hindve.htm. More revisions are forthcoming.

5 - The Virtue of Non-Violence (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), pp. 76-80.

Reply to Nicholas Gier

Shyam Ranganathan

Philosophy Department, York University

I must thank Professor Gier both for his kindness toward me in his response and his invitation for me to write a full-fledged essay on the topics that our exchange has raised. While I have not written on Gandhi's thought as such, much of what I have to say on Gier's book is influenced by the research and arguments I put forward in my Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy (Motilal Banarsidass, 2007) and my forthcoming translation and commentary, originally titled The Moral Philosophy of Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, to be published as Patanjali's Yoga Sutra (Penguin). Gier's closing comment not only serves as an invitation-and challenge-to me to systematically defend my views on these topics but also encapsulates what might be the locus of disagreement between Gier and myself. He suggests that it is I who have foisted a syllogistic argument onto the task of interpreting Gandhi's thought, whereas my original complaint was that I thought that this was the only way to make sense of Gier's arguments. If Gier were not offering such a disjunctive syllogism, the extended and recurrent criticisms of Jain and Advaita interpretations do nothing to positively make the case for a Buddhist interpretation of Gandhi and are gratuitous within the structure of his presentation.

But let us take some of Gier's responses to me in order. Gier appears to believe that the fact that he notes Gandhi's devotion to Rama and his Vaisnava background (which I did not mention in my review) shows that he was sensitive to theistic Vedanta in his analysis. My complaint was that he did not fully consider reading Gandhi in terms of Visistadvaita-a very specific school of Vedanta, and not synonymous with theistic Vedanta as such. Moreover, that Gier noted Gandhi's devotionalism is hardly evidence that he considered theistic Vedanta seriously. Even Sankara in his commentary on the Brahma Sutra betrays a devotion to Rama and an affinity for Vaisnava religious practices (see his Brahma Sutra Bhasya, I.ii.7), but this hardly means that Sankara advanced theistic Vedanta. Gier claims that his reference to an article that recognizes the Neo-Vedanta leanings of Gandhi refutes my claim that he conflates Vedanta with Advaita Vedanta. My claim was not that Gier never makes a distinction between different types of Vedanta, but that he is not careful in his talk of "Vedanta" given that the only form that he seriously considers is Advaita Vedanta and that he refers to it simply as "Vedanta."1

Gier defends his neglect of theistic interpretations of Gandhi on the grounds that Advaita Vedanta "is the Vedantist school with which Gandhi is associated." This is a remarkable admission, for it suggests that Gier thought reading Gandhi in light of Jainism or Advaita Vedanta was more plausible than reading him in light of Visistadvaita-this despite the fact that he does so much in his book to show the plausibility of interpreting Gandhi in this light, as I make clear in my review. Given Gandhi's cultural proximity to Visistadvaita, the omission is glaring.

The question thus presents itself: why did Gier not take this route of interpretation seriously enough to treat it systematically? Gier's honorable candor in his response gives us one explanation: he is out of his depth when it comes to theistic Vedanta and thus failed to appreciate its salience. If this is the reason for his omission (and I suspect it is part of the explanation), this is a serious deficiency in a study of Gandhi's thought for obvious historical reasons.

There is also another possibility, namely that Gier thought that he could exclude several historical options (including all Vedanta, theistic or otherwise) because they are a species of a type of view that he believes is incompatible with Gandhian process thought. Gier's response confirms this. He states that Jainism, Yoga (which he incorrectly conflates with Samkhya), and Ramanuja's Vedanta cannot be process philosophies. He argues: (1) in Yoga, ahimsa is an intrinsic virtue of the purusa and not a developed virtue, and (2) Ramanuja's philosophy is not a version of Cobb's and Griffin's process philosophy. With respect to the latter claim, it is particularly odd that we should be looking to Cobb and Griffin to set the conditions of interpretation, when Gandhi was an Indian thinker, emerging from an Indian and Gujarati philosophical milieu that is indisputably influenced by Visistadvaita.

But the first argument Gier raises is very telling of the error of his approach that I initially raised in my review. Gier wishes to draw a dichotomy at the conceptual level between substantialist and process philosophies that does not translate into the Indian philosophical views on the ground. For instance, in the case of Yoga, ahimsa is both an intrinsic virtue of the purusa and a developed virtue. How is this possible? Because the purusa qua embodied being has a double aspect: one aspect transcends prakrti, and the other is deeply enmeshed in a pedagogical union with prakrti that Patanjali calls "samyoga"-an enmeshment that is so profound that the purusa misunderstands itself and acts contrary to its transcendent nature. So understood, the purusa must develop and perfect the practice of yoga so that it can understand its own essence and reach kaivalya. The practice of yoga takes the yogi qua purusa from a very rudimentary commitment to the yama rules such as ahimsato dharmameghasamadh, or the absorption in the "Rain-Cloud of Morality." To fail to appreciate the process and developmental aspects of Patanjali's philosophy of Yoga as it pertains to the purusa is a major error of translation and interpretation that is characteristic of a failure to distinguish Patanjali's Yoga from Isvarakrsna Samkhya.2

But how can ahimsa be both a developed and an intrinsic virtue, both a process and a substantial quality? Is this not a contradiction? In response to this question, I ask whether a thinker could logically advance both Advaita and Dvaita, as Gandhi had apparently done? An answer to both of these questions could be had by a careful elaboration of Ramanuja's philosophy, which, unfortunately, Gier's provocative book at once invites and neglects.

Notes

1 - Nicholas F. Gier, The Virtue of Nonviolence, ed. D. R. Griffin, SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 44.

2 - See Ian Whicher, The Integrity of the Yoga Darsana (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Shyam Ranganathan, "Samkhya and Yoga: One Darsana or Two?" Namaru pa: Categories of Indian Thought (Winter 2004): 29-33.

Karma, Rebirth, and the Problem of Evil: A Reply to Critics

2007-10-05T19:49:00.001-07:00

Karma, Rebirth, and the Problem of Evil: A Reply to Critics
Kaufman, Whitley
2027 words
1 October 2007
Philosophy East & West
556
Volume 57; Issue 4; ISSN: 00318221
English
© 2007 Philosophy East & West. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.

My goal in "Karma, Rebirth, and the Problem of Evil" was to stimulate discussion about karma and rebirth as a solution to the problem of innocent suffering in the world. As such, I welcome the chance to hear from critics such as Chadha and Trakakis and am happy to attempt a response.1 In their critique, they attempt to portray me as ignorant of the many precise subtleties and refinements of the karmic philosophy, and thus incapable of judging it. However, as I stated in my original article, my purpose is not to present a historically based synthesis of the karma-rebirth doctrine, but rather to attempt, using the most charitable interpretation possible and not being rigidly bound to doctrinal traditions or texts, an active reconstruction of the best case for a systematic theodicy based on karma, in order to see whether it can successfully explain the origin of evil.

But I would also suggest that there is often a certain advantage in having a detached perspective on a subject, since one who is too closely involved in the subject matter may fail to attain objectivity about it, and be prone to dogmatic acceptance of doctrines even when they defy common sense. But let the reader decide: I will briefly present my reactions to their criticism of my six principal objections to karma and rebirth.

The Memory Problem

It is, I argued, a basic principle of justice that one should in general be apprised of what one is being punished for and why; indeed, this knowledge would seem essential to the process of moral education. But the karmic system does not provide us this knowledge. The critics' responses are disappointing.

First, they distort the objection into an "unreasonable demand for precise correlations between bad acts in the past and consequent sufferings in the future." In fact, the problem is not merely the lack of precise correlations, but of any correlation at all. I am unaware of a single verified historical example of anyone having a memory of one's deeds in a past life presented as explanation for present suffering. Anyway, why is demand for a precise correlation unreasonable? Isn't that exactly what we demand when parents punish children, or when society punishes criminals?

Their second reply is simply the dogmatic insistence that one should simply have faith: karma tells us that our present sufferings are correlated with past deeds, and that's the end of the discussion. It should suffice that one knows one is being punished for an unspecified wrong committed at an unspecified past time and place, because that is what karma says. This, of course, is simply to ignore the objection and to refuse to countenance the possibility that karma might not be an ideal explanation of human suffering.

The Proportionality Problem

The widely-accepted proportionality principle holds that the punishment should be proportional to the crime. But it seems implausible that people have committed such horrendous crimes in past lives to deserve the kinds of horrible suffering that is all too common in human life. Thus, karma seems to violate the proportionality principle.

In response, first, they try to evade the question by a misdirection, quibbling about theism versus an impersonal cosmic mechanism. But justice requires proportionality no matter whether there is a personal God or an impersonal mechanism behind human suffering.

Next, they acknowledge the Proportionality rule, but insist that it follows that it is in fact satisfied by karma. People who suffer terribly really must have been horribly sadistic, brutal, and Nazi-like in past lives. But this is just my point: such a claim is highly dubious. Even a superficial knowledge of history and of human nature makes it simply implausible that so many people could have been so evil.2 Again, it seems a case where an a priori conviction that karma is true can lead one into a distorted conception of reality.

The Infinite Regress Problem

There is no doubt that belief in radical free will would manage to avoid a regress in explaining the origin of evil. However, this is no better an explanation of evil than that of Christianity and the doctrine of the Fall. Thus, the concerns raised about the Fall doctrine apply equally to karma. John Hick, for instance, has questioned the coherence of the idea of humans creating evil ex nihilo. Recall, my goal is not to show that karma is any worse an explanation than Christianity, but only that it is not demonstrably better.

The Death Problem

The critics simply assert that, according to the karma doctrine, death is not an evil, so therefore "we do not need to account for it." I leave it to the reader to decide if this is a satisfying explanation of why living beings have to die, and why death is so often difficult and painful. There is, by the way, another problem raised here: if death is unequivocally not an evil, then why should killing be considered a moral wrong? The Hindu scholar Franklin Edgerton points out a disturbing oddity of the Gita: it is forced to downplay the moral ideal of ahimsa or nonviolence in order to justify killing in war.3

A related claim made by the critics is that I have failed to "appreciate" the Hindu/Buddhist view that life is nothing but "suffering and misery." But I submit that to any reasonable person this claim is patently false. As anyone can attest, life is not merely suffering and pain, but full of happiness and pleasure as well (are they denying that pleasure and joy even exist?). A successful theodicy must account for the world as it is, and not paint a distorted picture of the world in order to make it fit the theory.

The Free Will Problem

The problem here is simple: is one free to perform genuine evil, that is, to harm the innocent, producing undeserved suffering? If one is, then there really is undeserved suffering in the world, in contradiction to the claims of karma philosophy. If one is not, then that would seem to be a severe restriction on free will, indeed a denial of the possibility of any sin at all. The critics attempt to respond with a dubious argument about who has the proper role and responsibility to dole out suffering. They seem to endorse the view that the worst possible sin that one can commit is to improperly take upon oneself the role of administering a justified punishment for a wrongdoer, rather than leaving it to karma to administer. If so, this is a very strange view. It entails that what was wrong about the 9/11 attack-or any crime-was not that innocent people were killed (everyone who died, those in the buildings and in the planes, deserved, according to karma, exactly what they got) but that the wrong people did the dirty work. The only thing wrong about what Al Qaeda did, it follows, was that it was "not [their] role to carry out the punishment." Indeed, they claim that harm is supposed to be administered not by wrongdoers but by an "impersonal process." But what exactly does this mean? That the destruction of the planes and the buildings on 9/11 was supposed to have been accomplished by a lightning strike or some other natural force? Were the six million Jews in Nazi Germany supposed to have been gassed to death by some impersonal, natural process, rather than by the Nazis?

Moreover, this is an oddly constricted view of free will, in which we are prevented from ever harming innocent people and yet not prevented from inappropriately providing justified punishment to guilty people. It also would appear to contradict the stronger claim about free will that they endorse elsewhere in the article. The dilemma stands.

The Verifiability Problem

As I said in my original article, religion ought not to be held to the same level of verifiability as claims of science. Nonetheless, religious claims that are wholly and completely unverifiable in this life, and yet which have serious practical consequences for this life, can be subject to dangerous abuse. Prime evidence of this is the use of karma to justify the oppressive caste system in India. Reportedly, the untouchables in India originally resisted Mother Theresa's attempts to improve their plight, as these might interfere with their karmic progress.

The critics' response is to insist that karma is indeed verifiable and falsifiable, but only after death-not very helpful to us here and now! It is also, they claim, verifiable in principle, since it is logically possible in that any one of us might suddenly be "miraculously transported to a higher level of consciousness" where we see karma verified. True enough, but of course also entirely unhelpful. Moreover, by that standard any theory, no matter of what kind, would be verifiable, making the very idea of verifiability meaningless. Finally, as to the question of predictive power of the theory, their analogy with the relation between smoking and lung cancer is quite ill chosen. The causal connection between the two was merely a hypothesis until it was in fact verified by epidemiological studies. I am unaware, however, of any such similar studies testing the predictive power of karma. Once again, what these critics are saying is simply that, if the karma doctrine claims to have predictive power, that's all the evidence they need. There is, of course, not a single verified example in recorded history of a successful prediction being made on the basis of karmic causation.

Let me summarize my main concern about the karma/rebirth system this way. The great attraction of the karma system is its reassurance that we are completely in control of our own fate, that whatever happens to us is a predictable consequence of our own choices. While it means we are prisoners of our past, it also means that the future is entirely within our control. No doubt, this feature of karma is a source of its great appeal. But this promise comes at a great price. It entails that there is no such thing as innocent suffering, that everyone gets just what he deserves. But then there can be no moral obligation to help others in distress, to protect, to rescue, perform acts of charity, or even to feel compassion for a sufferer. Most other theodicies begin with the acceptance that there is such a thing as innocent suffering, that as humans we do not have godlike control of our destiny, but are fragile, vulnerable beings, often in need of help from others. The implication is a deep moral obligation to help those in need, to feel compassion and pity for those in pain. In contrast, karma elevates the "blame the victim" idea into a systematic principle. The question at stake is which account is more plausible, the idea that everyone is getting just what he deserves, and so we should not interfere with the cosmic punitive scheme, or the idea that there is genuine, undeserved suffering in the world, and that it is thus our duty to help reduce the misery and pain in the world?

Copyright University Press of Hawaii Oct 2007 | Notes | 1 - Let me, however, express a wish that the debate not descend into petty meanspiritedness. These critics correctly point out an error in the original article: at one point within a parenthetical remark I had inadvertently placed the terms "moral evil" and "natural evil" in the wrong order. They declare this an "inexcusable blunder." I hope that the karmic system, if it exists, is not so unforgiving! My apologies for the error. | 2 - Or that particular groups are so much worse than others: were all the Africans who were enslaved really so evil in past lives that they deserved enslavement more than other races? Were the Jews in Nazi Germany so much worse in past lives than everyone else? | 3 - Franklin Edgerton, The Bhagavad Gita (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 185. | Whitley Kaufman | Department of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts, Lowell

Mahatma Gandhi and other great souls - successful failures?

2007-10-05T19:35:00.000-07:00

Gandhi, fighter without a sword
882 words
1 October 2007
Indo-Asian News Service
English
© Copyright 2007. HT Media Limited. All rights reserved.

Indo-Asian News Service Mumbai, oct. 1 -- Gandhi, the Mahatma, truly considered himself a citizen of the world though he worked for the freedom of the Indian nation from foreign yoke. "My religion has no geographical boundaries," he explained to Kakasaheb Kalekar. "If I have a living faith in it, it will transcend my love for India herself." It was that brand of religion that taught him to believe in the soul and rely solely on soul force to fight all the ills in human hearts.

Humanity was his religion. He believed that for victory, war was the most blunt weapon, and the sharpest one was obviously non-violence. He abhorred the concept of might being the right.

Gandhi's saying - "Most religious men I have met are politicians in disguise. I, however, who wear the guise of a politician, am at heart, a religious man!" - remains the key to the value system of the political philosophy he adhered to. Gandhi entered politics to fight irreligion. He also accepted the fact that he might not be absolutely accurate as regards his words used. This is the hallmark of a truly great person.

Truth for him was god. And non-violence, or soul force, was his only means of fighting the ills of life. He was not a nationalist in the narrow parochial sense. Gandhi was at pains to explain to American writer Jeanette Eaton that his nationalism in reality is intense internationalism.

"Our nationalism can be no peril to other nations in as much as we will

exploit none, just as we allow none to exploit us." In her book, "Gandhi: Fighter Without A Sword", Eaton narrates that the greatest influence of Gandhi on her was Gandhi's notions on oneness of the world.

Gandhi told C.R. Das: "How heartening it is to imagine that when there is One World and no militarised boundaries and all the natural and human resources, all the sciences and technology which are today marshalled and arrayed for destructive purposes, will be used for the elimination of poverty, ill-health and ignorance. They shall be used for promoting goodwill and for creating better conditions of life for the whole humanity. Though this rosy picture is today the privilege only of the poets and the utopian dream of idealists, there is no doubt that this is the cherished hope of everyone who strives for harmony."

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad in his "India Wins Freedom" states that Gandhiji is universally acknowledged as the greatest man of his age because despite affecting the destiny of the whole sub-continent, he held no high office nor did he rule countries. By sacrificing political gains, he bought peace like all true thinkers and philosophers.

He was above all the frivolities of political life, drawing strength from what he termed "soul force", an inner strength that comes only when one believes in non-violence and truth and has abiding faith in the innate goodness of fellow beings. It was this quality that made Gandhi a leader of the world leaders.

Maulana Abdul Waheed Siddiqui, a noted Islamic theologian and founder editor of Nai Duniya Urdu weekly, writes in Gandhi Number issue of Oct 2, 1953, on the importance that Gandhi laid on Hindu-Muslim unity. Gandhi told Siddiqui that India could never reach her goal if she were hit by Hindu-Muslim hostility.

He threw himself in the struggle to heal the breach between the two communities. He supported Muslims in the Khilafat campaign and agitated for the release from the prison of the Ali brothers. It was at this time too that the Khadi movement was inaugurated.

Because he possessed such an enlightened and secular world view, Gandhi unhesitatingly advocated the causes of Hindu-Muslim unity, social progress, religious tolerance, spread of modern knowledge, individual liberty and above all educational reforms. He had the courage of a statesman for initiating reforms. However, he did not live long enough to see his ideas implemented as the life of this saint who advocated non-violence was cut short by a most heinous act of violence.

Duty to Gandhi was of paramount importance. He said: "Duties to self, to the family, to the country and to the world are not independent of one another. One cannot do good to the country by injuring the world at large."

Tagore had feared that Gandhi would fail. Wrote Tagore: "Perhaps he will not succeed. Perhaps he will fail as the Buddha failed, as Christ failed and as Lord Mahavira failed to wean men from their inequities, but he will be remembered as one who made his life an example for all ages to come."

Will Durant, in an article in The Manchester Guardian, said: "Perhaps Gandhi failed as saints are likely to fail in this very hostile, selfish and Darwinian world. But these very failures are the eternal successes attained by saintly people as they can never stoop to the detestable levels of this materialistic world in which each one is running after god of Mammon."

Monks as advocates of change in a political system

2007-10-05T19:29:00.001-07:00

The Burmese monks' spiritual strength proves religion has a role in politics: Buddhism and its values have inspired a tradition of non-violent protest more powerful than secularists understand
Pankaj Mishra
1215 words
1 October 2007
The Guardian
32
English
© Copyright 2007. The Guardian. All rights reserved.

In recent months, militant atheists have tried to convince us religion ought to be expelled from public as well as private life. It is not hard to imagine how their salon wisdom would have fared last week in the streets of Rangoon, where ordinary Burmese protesting against a military dictatorship rallied behind Buddhist monks - the "highly revered moral core", as the New York Times put it, of Burmese society.

If the images of saffron-robed mendicants braving police brutality seem oddly familiar, it is because Buddhist monks left their monasteries and led protests against political repression frequently in the 20th century. So great and prolonged was the suffering of war in Indochina that the Buddhist attempt to alleviate it may seem a distant memory. But it was the self-immolation of a monk in Saigon in June 1963 - rather, pictures of him serenely meditating as flames devoured his body - that first troubled America's conscience about what was then an obscure war.

Thich Nhat Hanh, another Vietnamese monk, was a prominent figure in the anti-war movement in the US who eventually persuaded Martin Luther King to pit his voice against the destruction of Vietnam. In Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge killed almost all the 60,000 monks, the Buddhist monk Maha Ghosananda became a major figure in the reconstruction of his country.

In September 1987 Buddhist monks and nuns began the first major political demonstration in Tibet in years by unfurling the Tibetan flag in central Lhasa. They were arrested and severely beaten, sparking off clashes between Tibetans and police that provoked Hu Jintao, now China's president and then the Chinese administrator in Tibet, to declare martial law.

How did a supposedly meditative tradition produce political protesters? If "religion is a poison", as Mao Zedong informed the Dalai Lama - a sentiment echoed by the secularists of our time - why then has Buddhism proved such an effective means of mass mobilisation against tyranny?

The Buddha himself was no political theorist or activist. He preferred to address the question of what constitutes the ruler's right to rule. Unlike the theorists of ancient India who claimed divine sanction for kingship, the Buddha did not find the ruler's legitimacy in some transcendent realm. As the many stories about ideal kings in the Jataka Tales - a compendium of Buddhist stories - attest, righteousness is the only proper basis for the ruler's authority.

The Buddha preferred small political communities in which all members shared the power of decision-making. In his lifetime, however, he witnessed the emergence of large states. Aware that these impersonal regimes exposed many people to a sense of powerlessness and insecurity, he hoped that the Buddhist sangha , or monastic order, would base itself near urban centres and help give newly uprooted people a sense of spiritual community and tradition.

Thus Buddhist monks, living not in forests but in retreats close to populated settlements, are traditionally bound to laymen by an ethic of social responsibility. Not surprisingly, in Tibet and Burma, where a modern, militarised state tyrannises a largely pre-modern and unorgan ised population, monasteries have been exalted as alternative centres of moral and political authority, and monks and nuns have come to spearhead resistance to unrighteous regimes.

Certainly, Buddhists are not immune to ideological delusions. In early 20th-century Japan, and in Sri Lanka in the 1980s and 90s, many Buddhist monks succumbed to the lure of nationalism and militarism. Nevertheless, with its absence of dogma and emphasis on intellectual and spiritual vigilance, Buddhism has proved to be less vulnerable to fanatical zeal than not only other major religions, but also such modern ideologies as nationalism and secularism. As Nhat Hanh exhorts, echoing a major theme of the Buddha: "Do not be idolatrous about, or bound to, any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones. All systems of thought are guiding means; they are not absolute truth."

It helps, too, that Buddhist political methods aim, relatively modestly, at dialogue and moral conversion rather than total revolution. Writing to Martin Luther King in 1965, after another Buddhist self-immolation in Vietnam, Nhat Hanh explained that "the monks who burned themselves did not aim at the death of the oppressors, but only at a change in their policy. Their enemies are not man. They are intolerance, fanaticism, dictatorship, cupidity, hatred and discrimination which lie within the heart of man."

Maha Ghosananda, who lost his entire family in the Cambodian killing fields, insisted on including the Khmer Rouge at UN-sponsored talks on the future of Cambodia, claiming that he wanted an end to antagonism, not to antagonists. (Such practical wisdom traditionally preserved peace in Afghanistan's tribal society, and the country's current president, Hamid Karzai, appears to have embraced it by offering a seat in his cabinet to the Taliban.) Similarly, Samdhong Rinpoche, the monk prime minister of the Tibetan government in exile in India, claims he opposes the injustice and violence of Chinese rule rather than the Chinese people or state. Calling for a Gandhian-style campaign of satyagraha , or non-violent resistance, Samdhong Rinpoche asks Tibetans to actively reject Chinese rule through non-cooperation and disobedience, without hating or harming any Chinese. Both he and the Dalai Lama have reservations about even an economic boycott, which they believe hurts ordinary people more than it damages governments.

Living through a worldwide upsurge of violence, most of us may find it hard to conceive of Buddhist principles as politically efficacious. Nevertheless, the history of the modern world furnishes many examples of political victories achieved through moral persuasion and spiritual strength: national self-determination in colonised countries, the civil rights movement in the US, the velvet revolutions in Russia and eastern Europe, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the gradual spread of parliamentary democracy around the world.

Today the Burmese generals confront the "authentic, enduring power" of people, before which, as Hannah Arendt presciently wrote in her analysis of the Prague Spring of 1968, a repressive regime eventually surrenders. The Buddhist monks chanting on the streets of Rangoon may look naive and defenceless when you consider the power of the political-military institutions of the modern, secular era that they are up against: heavily armed nation-states with hyper-competitive capitalist economies. Certainly, the Burmese generals know the way the world works. Apparently isolated, they play shrewdly the game of international realpolitik, buying the silence of their two rising and needy neighbours, democratic India as well as authoritarian China, with oil, gas and timber. However, to such a ruthlessly amoral politics, based on purely rational self-interest, the moral and spiritual values of religion can and often do pose a challenge.

No doubt devotees of science and rationality will continue to call for a religion-free politics. But what the Burmese demonstrators prove is that, as Gandhi said, "those who think religion has nothing to do with politics understand neither religion nor politics".

Ecology and religion

2007-09-21T21:16:00.001-07:00

Faith upon the earth - Religion and ecology
839 words
22 September 2007
The Economist
ECN
384
English
(c) The Economist Newspaper Limited, London 2007. All rights reserved

Whether they like it or not, ecologists and clerics need each other

In many parts of the world, religious groups and environmental scientists are teaming up—albeit sometimes reluctantly

“THERE was a functioning bridge until 1470 AD,” says Praveen Togadia, a Hindu fundamentalist, smoothing out his dhoti. “Due to natural calamities, it was disturbed, and parts went into the sea.” To modern, secular eyes, at least, the “bridge” is a 30-mile (48km) chain of sandy shoals across the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka. But millions of Hindus see the shoals as physical proof of their beliefs. The Ramayana, a Hindu text, says a bridge was built by monkeys at the behest of a Hindu god, Ram—who duly crossed over to wrest his wife Sita from a Sri Lankan demon. The shoals are known in India as “Ram Setu”, or “Ram's Bridge”.

Now take a deep breath and consider the conflict over a plan by India's Congress-led government to dredge the strait for a shipping canal. While Hindus loathe the project on spiritual grounds, ecologists have different objections. At the junction of the deep, cold Indian Ocean and the shallow, temperate Arabian Sea, the strait is an ecological prize. So far, 377 endemic species have been found in nearby waters.

On this issue at least, the devoutly religious and the greens are on the same side. But the former, it seems, have more clout than the latter. On September 12th the government told the Supreme Court that the Ramayana was not proof of the existence of Lord Ram; and that science suggested the shoals were made by sedimentation, not monkeys. On the same day, the World Hindu Council, headed by Dr Togadia, staged protests across the country. On September 14th the government, at the behest of Sonia Gandhi, the (Catholic) leader of Congress, put the canal plan on hold: a setback for a government which wanted to save ships from a 24-hour loop round Sri Lanka. With elections due next year, Congress feared giving its Hindu foes in the Bharatiya Janata Party a new slogan.

India's greens have little love for their accidental allies. “I'm not protesting against this project for religious reasons but for environmental ones,” says Kushal Pal Singh Yadav, of the Centre for Science and the Environment, a Delhi think-tank.

In many other parts of the world, secular greens and religious people find themselves on the same side of public debates: sometimes hesitantly, sometimes tactically, and sometimes fired by a sense that they have deep things in common.

One more case from India: ornithologists who want to save three species of vulture (endangered because cattle carcasses are tainted by chemicals) see their best ally as the Parsees, who on religious grounds use vultures to dispose of human corpses.

In China, organised religion is much weaker and conservationists also feel more lonely. But Pan Yue, the best-known advocate of green concerns within the Chinese government, says ancient creeds, like Taoism, offer the best hope of making people treat the earth more kindly.

Other tie-ups between faith and ecology are less obvious. In Sweden, the national Lutheran Church, working with Japanese Shintos, recently held a multi-faith meeting on forestry. They agreed to set a new standard for the care of forests owned or managed by religious bodies—in other words, they said, 5% of the world's woods.

This month, representatives of many faiths, including a local Lutheran bishop and a shivering Buddhist monk (see above) gathered in Greenland to talk to scientists and ecologists. Patriarch Bartholomew, the senior bishop of the Orthodox Church, led his impressively robed guests in a silent supplication for the planet.

The terms of the transaction between faith and ecology vary a lot. In places like Scandinavia, where religion is weakish, a cleric who “goes green” may reach a wider audience; in countries like India, where faith is powerful, spiritual messages touch more hearts than secular ones do. That doesn't stop some environmental scientists from saying they are being hijacked by clerics in search of relevance. But Mary Evelyn Tucker, of America's Yale University, says secular greens badly need their spiritual allies: “Religions provide a cultural integrity, a spiritual depth and moral force which secular approaches lack.”

Martin Palmer, of the British-based Alliance of Religions and Conservation, says faiths often have the clearest view of the social and economic aspects of an environmental problem. In Newfoundland, he notes, conservationists put curbs on cod fishing—and left the churches to care for families whose living was ruined.

Still, one selling point often used by the religious in their dialogue with science—the fact that faith encourages people to think long-term—may be a mixed blessing. The most pessimistic scientists say mankind has a decade at most to curb greenhouse gases and fend off disastrous global warming; that doesn't leave much time to settle the finer points of metaphysics.

Thai buddhism on the crossroad by Sanitsuda Ekachai

2007-09-14T21:08:00.001-07:00

Keeping the Faith: Thai Buddhism at the Crossroads.(Book Review)
Taylor, Jim (American writer)
1839 words
1 April 2003
SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in SE Asia
154
ISSN: 0217-9520; Volume 18; Issue 1
English
Copyright 2003 Gale Group Inc. All rights reserved.

By Sanitsuda Ekachai. Edited by Nick Wilgus. Bangkok: Post Books, 2002. 328 pp.

Sanitsuda Ekachai's new book is a collection of short, critical articles and commentaries on various aspects of contemporary Thai Buddhism, arranged under eight sub-headings with a short introduction. An appealing feature of this ensemble is that "other" voices are heard with reader-friendly and short, insightful comments over debates concerning the relevance and place of contemporary Thai Buddhism, especially monasticism.

The author uses few words and some broad brush strokes to construct some extraordinarily vivid frames of everyday religious life in Buddhist Thailand.

In reviewing a book such as this on Thai Buddhism, we need to ask ourselves what this religion is, which is not always lived in accordance with the texts that most Thais seem to follow and identify with to some extent. The imagination, itself a social fact, is important as a means of informing the way we think, feel and act, in this case in relation to religion. It also accounts for the many expressions of Thai Buddhism that we see around us. Perhaps also these days we need to venture outside the monasteries to experience living religion and what it means in the construction of everyday contemporary life in the villages, towns, and cities. Lest we forget, Thailand is still one of the few remaining Buddhist countries where the Arahant (self-accomplished "saint") ideal--and its liberating possibilities--remains alive and well in the collective imagination. Not so any longer for the wellspring of Theravada Buddhism, Sri Lanka, and doubtful in neighbouring Burma, Cambodia, and Laos. It seems to me that many Thais are now asking the question: if these "acclaimed" exemplars or monastic teachers are still around, where are they to be found?

Modern Buddhists would seem to claim that what is needed these days is a system of standardization as a requirement for continued monastic registration. Imagine, if you will, a situation in this period of globalization where each monastery (and monks), like many businesses in Thailand, would carry an "ISO" classification engraved over the front gate; for those "good monasteries" able to show that they have adhered to "best-practice standards". But, more seriously, who would determine what is "best practice"--monks or laity?

As an expression of diversity, Thai monasticism, we are told, needs to recognize the contribution of monk-activists engaged in this world, in as much as it recognizes the normative spiritual achievement of the reclusive, disengaged meditative "Path" questers (to be found among the remaining forest enclaves). This is certainly a theological mute point. These modern activist-exemplars are to be found in urban monasteries, places of teaching and learning, various refuges, rural community centres, conservation sites, and hospices. Importantly, as the author says, while encouraging a worldly engagement we should not forget the all-important questions of monastic discipline.

In the past decade or so we have been overwhelmed by media accounts of serious monastic infringements, abuses of monastic privilege and power. These are the "other" images of Thai Buddhism that are not usually affixed to either glossy tourist brochures and postcards to send back home, or media representations, circulated and consumed widely through both print and electronic media (Thai and English). These images have not been favourable to defining a respectable "place" for Buddhism in modern Thai society. At this point we may ask ourselves, what, if anything, has gone wrong with Thai Buddhism in recent times? Or has the media had a greater influence than we realize? There is not much talk around about "good monks", as these persons are in any case hardly "newsworthy" (unless the reader believes there are no exemplary practising monks left any more--which I do not believe, and clearly neither does the author--though we may differ on what constitutes an "ideal" monk).

Sanitsuda Ekachai attempts to capture this complexity, while at the same time show us that there are "other" religious possibilities, mainly from the social interstices. At the same time the author shares the concerns of many educated Thais in suggesting that Thai Buddhism needs to be linked to the wider processes of democratic reform so that internal change can likewise occur in the Sangha (male and female monastic orders). The assumption is that Thai Buddhism is in a state of "crisis" needing serious structural attention and that little trust can be placed in the monastic elders who, we are told, are unaware of current social realities. The position throughout (in so far as it is possible to identify a consistent thread) starts on the premise that the forces of modernization in Thailand have destroyed the fundamental basis of tradition, especially cultural forms such as religion. This has led to a new materialistic and individuated society based on consumption.

Thais, it would appear, clearly like to go shopping instead of going to the monastery, or in a manner of speaking, the Buddha has been "relocated" in the shopping centres and arcades. Thus said, we need to be careful in assuming cultures are static, without any capacity to change through internal and external influences. Thai Buddhism has always been contested and changing (Is this not one of the fundamental tenants of Buddhism?) and, in going with historic flows, this has accounted for its continuities.

It is from global realities that Thailand struggles to find a new identity. It is from this scenario, as the author makes another important thematic point, that Theravada Buddhism in Thailand has re-established a new "relevance" for "modern Thai life and problems" (p. 10); a religion that is, contrary to contemporary images, "still alive and well in the Thai psyche" (p. 11).

The responses from the Sangha to the conditions of modernity have been mixed and not without tensions and contradictions involving various actors. Everyone, it seems, has something to say concerning "problems" over discipline, monastic training, and the maintenance of religious sanctity.

Many of the case studies in this book received media attention over the past decade or so due, in no small part, to the author herself writing on social issues for the Bangkok Post. The reader is taken through some depressing scenarios of monastic corruption and scandals on the one hand, and tales of hope and promise on the other. The compilation (even if the reader has already read some of these accounts penned by the author) gives a broad overview of a modern society in change, especially through the confused and traumatic social and economic crisis of the late 1990s. However, unfortunately, the events of 1997 were not clearly factored into the discussions and implications for Thai Buddhist practices.

Although "other" voices are heard in the text, the author also makes her own position clear, which is in support for the reform Dhamma heritage of the late modernist scholar-monk Buddhadasa Bhikkhu and, correspondingly, an active, engaged monastic order (male and female). This engaged "here-and-now" Buddhism (espoused by the well-known Sulak Sivaraksa) confronts contemporary concerns and issues (women's rights, environment and conservation, social equity, justice, and so forth), reaching out to a society clearly much in need of spiritual nourishment. The proviso is that these "concerned" monks keep to the disciplinary charter; though how they do this while being "engaged" and "this-worldly" (as they are encouraged to do so) is not fully addressed--as are the inherent contradictions in this proposition.

Monks gain respect and veneration precisely because of a ritual separation from society at large, where the temptations of ordinary life are minimized. Even Buddhadasa Bhikkhu--particularly popular among the Thai middle class--preferred a forest hermitage for his contemplation and scholastic pursuits.

The very problems confronting modern monks have been a blurring of spatial boundaries with the gradual attrition from the simple, distanced, reclusive life. In other words, the increasing worldliness of monks has created its own problems--as it did in the West among Protestant and Catholic clergy. There was even talk of whether Buddhist monks should be allowed to marry if they are going to be more engaged in the world.

In the matter of "keeping the faith", the modern-day problems are indeed complicated, but the solution is simple if we go back (forward?) to the essence of (timeless) dhamma practice. In the present "crisis" we need to understand the practical implications of the monastic discipline, and its limitations on worldly engagement. It is not possible to have it both ways. The Theravada monastic discipline is to ensure that being a monk, even these days, is unambiguous and without hindrance. It is in ambiguous situations that confusion arises.

For most ordinands, keeping the minutiae of the discipline is not easily done and disciplinary infractions occur with increasing frequency because monks, after all, are human. There are many Thais who have fallen into a crisis in "faith" over the condition of the contemporary Bhikkhu Sangha. Some even believe that most of the remaining good monastic teachers have now established branch monasteries outside the country, especially in the West, while one or two alleged monastic miscreants were forced to flee the country out the back door for fear of facing criminal proceedings. But, looking at the situation overall, these cases were few and far between. In regard to the question of women in Thai Buddhism, the author is most articulate: "It boils down to power: the male-dominated order wants to continue excluding women from entering and sharing monks' sphere of authority" (p. 287). It is not that the author is necessarily incorrect in her moral assessments--it is more a question of whether all concerns, even more conservative ones, have been adequately considered.

The progressive position is that if the Sangha's administrative structure (and its geriatric monk-administrators) is not in accordance with modern norms and values, it should be changed. After all, Thailand is rapidly changing. The same argument is heard over the necessity of providing secular education to monks to enable them to keep abreast with the informational world-in-change, especially information technology, though issuing bachelor's degrees to ambitious monks, or a new digital monastic order ("Cyber-Sangha") does not, in itself, ensure a "better fit" monastic order that is more able to respond to contemporary social needs than now.

There would be little to disagree about the subtext in the book, with its concerns for much-needed reform, which also seeks connection back to the untainted origins of the teachings. The book is about the concern in making "faith" work in the present; making the varieties of Thai Buddhism relevant and meaningful in today's world in order to "keep faith". Thai Buddhism, in a sense, may be at a "crossroads", but to my mind it all depends on perspectives, ways of seeing and understanding, and which particular road one is looking down.

Jim Taylor is Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, University of Adelaide, South Australia.

The journey of one buddhist nun

2007-09-14T21:06:00.001-07:00

The journey of one Buddhist nun. (Book Reviews: Thailand).(Book Review) (book review)
Ashley Thompson
2488 words
1 February 2003
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies
185
ISSN: 0022-4634; Volume 34; Issue 1
English
Copyright 2003 Gale Group Inc. All rights reserved. COPYRIGHT 2003 Singapore University Press Pte Ltd.

The journey of one Buddhist nun

Sid Brown

Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Pp. xi, 180. Notes, Bibliography, Index.

The journey of one Buddhist nun gives an invaluable account of Thai Buddhism in practice. The account is invaluable -- beyond value, more valuable than any value -- not simply for its content but also because in some important way it is offered without the expectation of a return: Sid Brown's patent intent is to give without measure. The intention is that of one engaged in Buddhism and in life, in Buddhism today and, more specifically, in the life of a contemporary Thai Buddhist nun (maechi) named Wabi. The book is explicitly offered to a deceased brother, and implicitly to Maechi Wabi. We begin, then, with the sacral gravity of the gift -- a book offered to those who can not read it.

Yet the author's gift lies also in a remarkable capacity to measure her account. From an unbounded field of sources, ranging from the immense Pali canon to the immense life of Maechi Wabi, Brown has harvested and winnowed an extraordinary amount of material. With the essential that remains she tells a series of inter-related stories. These are, most importantly, the on-going stories of Meechi Wabi, of the institutionalisation of the Buddhist nunhood in Thailand and also a certain story of Sid Brown. Together, these stories engage numerous issues of interest to students of Buddhism and contemporary Southeast Asia, as well as to those seeking to explore questions of sexual difference and processes of globalisation.

The author's inaugural goal, as evidenced throughout the book by a sustained interlacing of canonical material with field observation and as stated in the Appendix, was to represent a living Buddhist tradition, 'textually defined but also, most assuredly, culturally defined and defining' (143). Interplay between Pali text and Thai practice is indeed well represented, at once in the words and actions of Maechi Wabi and other Thai Buddhists documented by Brown, and in the author's narrative trajectory as she brings her own textual knowledge to bear in interpreting experience. This approach posits a system of mobile exchange in which no single entity can be simply fixed, isolated, reduced and understood as such. Texts inform and explain practice as practice illuminates and motivates the use and production of texts. Similarly, the narrator frequently changes place with the narrated as Brown tells both her story and that of Wabi, including translations of Wabi's interpretations of her own and Sid Brown's stories. This approach, in a book meant not just to describe or analyse but in some sense to teach, is best exploited on the subject of meditation.

Meditation takes on increasing importance as The journey progresses. We follow the gradual amplification of Wabi's engagement in meditation, along with her and others' descriptions of increasingly intense meditation visions and experience. This attention to meditation reaches a climax at the book's centre (Chapter 6) in which the author pursues her own and Wabi's Buddhist interpretations of meditation experience. These interpretations are framed, more or less consciously, within the particular sociological, psychological and intellectual realms which the two protagonists -- Wabi and Brown -- inhabit. Still following Maechi Wabi, and as if coming down from the high point of meditative intensity, the narrative focus begins then to gradually shift to the life story of the Institute of Thai Maechi. In this way, the author takes us into the experience of meditation. We learn of the visions as recounted and analysed by the nuns themselves, and through the narrative staging, we ourselves undergo a sort of meditative experience. Comparisons made by Brown between the experience of reading and that of meditation, though somewhat problematic if only for their brevity, are in a sense performed by the narrative. This reading experience appropriately includes a sense of vacuity -- not necessarily that of meditation's most rarefied element but rather that of leaving such a state to re-enter the mundane world.

This is the world of the Institute responsible for administrating Thai Maechi and in which focus strays from meditation. In this institutional context, one wonders to what extent meditation, while supported as one of many activities (including classes on Buddhist doctrine, general education, sewing and flower arrangement), may in fact lose its focus. The paradox of teaching meditation -- and perhaps of any teaching at all -- is thus coupled with the dilemma of the institution. How can one relate knowledge of experience -- that is, knowledge of a specific experience and knowledge attainable only through singular personal experience? Yet meditation must be taught -- the dangers of unguided exploration, feared in many traditional Buddhist contexts, are made apparent by Maechi Wabi. How can an Authority authorise the most interior individual experience? Yet individual freedom is inseparable from, and strictly speaking inconceivable without, some form of institutional frame.

Although these issues are not explicitly addressed in a sustained manner, this book offers a detailed look at a very telling example: in the present socio-economic and cultural context, Thai women's freedom in such religious practice is highly dependent upon institutional support. It is in fact the first encounter with this inextricable paradox which triggers a formative crisis of faith for Maechi Wabi. It is doubt in the honesty of teaching -- in the very possibility of teaching honestly -- a doubt in the authority of authorities, which brings Wabi to nearly lose and then reconfirm her Buddhist faith.

Her story is like that of many contemporary Thai Buddhist nuns. Seeking refuge in the nunhood was seeking refuge from poverty and domestic abuse or unhappiness. But she is exemplary in another sense: rigorously compassionate, giving, hard-working, studious and calm, she is, in Brown's account, a model Buddhist nun. In cultivating such traits, Wabi has improved her lot in life, or rather reaped the merits sown in this and past lives. The explanation of Wabi's life is not, however, hermetically sealed within Buddhist doctrine. Brown shows Wabi's life to be not strictly of her own fashioning, but also largely affected by the course of contemporary history. Understanding the intricacies of this singular life within the context of both Thai nation-building trends and massive globalisation (and it should be noted that at least in the current state of affairs these two forces have contracted a manage de raison) requires extraordinary analytical agility, open to critiquing East and West, and capable of standing on pe rpetually shifting ground. Those points in The journey in which Sid Brown seems to lose her footing are precisely such points of translation: linguistic, cultural, intellectual, political translation. These are faults only insofar as, uncovered by the reader, they lay bare the chasms created when different worlds or continents meet.

The author's notably recurrent appeal to choice provides an intriguing demonstration of the complexities of the interpretive task at hand. The temple in which Wabi lives is said to be a 'community of choice' (104); Wabi is frequently said to have 'chosen' her path. The establishment of choices for Thai girls and women is lauded as a goal and accomplishment. The nun's alter-ego in this Thai women's history play is of course the prostitute. Both have left a difficult home for homelessness; they are of similar socio-economic origins. In Brown's narrative, however, an important distinction between the two lies in the question of choice: while the prostitute is forced into her vocation, the nun enters voluntarily. This attribution of choice to the nun is an explicit attempt to combat contemporary Thai preconceptions of the nun as a woman who, having lost in love, 'chose' the nunhood only out of desperation, not unlike the prostitute. More implicitly, the interpretation reflects a certain and steady spread of Ameri can political culture which promotes choice in stripping it of philosophical and political complexity. A more precise calculation of the degree of choice exercised by Wabi and other Thai nuns, or even by the Institute for Thai Maechi could be had, for example, by investigating the duplicity of karma as it masterfully conjugates determinism and its opposite, free will.

Like Wabi's multiple 'choices' made to enter the nunhood, the 'choice' to establish the Institute of Thai Maechi was a complex one. The Institute can be seen in many ways as itself born of prostitution. Steadily expanding and increasingly institutionalised sexual exploitation of poor girls and women in Thailand over the course of the twentieth century necessitated a concerted institutional effort to provide a viable alternative path for these vulnerable populations. Though not of course without roots in traditional culture, both institutions have been established as such in close conjunction with the unrelenting machine of globalisation. On the one hand, since the Vietnam War, Thailand has been exploited as an international prostitution playground. On the other, American feminism (and here I pose another question to Sid Brown: would many references to 'Western' not be more precisely construed as 'American' -- whether or not they come directly from American nationals?) directly incited Thai authorities to form alise female roles within Buddhist hierarchies. In both its working structures and its philosophy, the Institute owes much to Thai social and cultural complexes, of course, but also to Western-inspired forms of private organisation, grassroots resistance and good works. Though Brown delineates this Western influence, she leaves it more or less unanalysed. We are left with a number of vast and imprecise ideas, such as that of choice being what Thai nuns need or want or have.

American hegemony also makes itself felt in The journey's referential frame. The foreign case in hand is repeatedly illuminated by reference to contemporary American scholarship on a wide variety of issues, including but by no means limited to Buddhism. This shuttling between Thailand and America would seem to aim at isolating universal truths shared by all cultures, and to give an American public access to a distant subject. In the process, the most essential point -- i .e., the universality of truth, the very notion of truth as a fixed, self-sufficient concept -- remains unquestioned. See, for example, the observation (p. 73) that 'meditation removes the "bulwarks of ignorance" when we might otherwise actively refuse knowledge of truth'. The American referents, summoned in view of demonstrating the universality of the Thai Buddhist example, are, like the concept of choice, left unanalysed. In the name of laudable and indeed necessary ideals, difference is elided.

A certain nostalgia, even conservatism, enveloping the text at times is not without relation to this lack of analytical edge. Many readers would undoubtedly welcome sustained analysis of the structure of a feminist path like that of Wabi, explicitly based on emulation of the father who abandons the family; of the significance of sexual repression and expression within the Thai nunhood and so apparent in Wabi's life; of the significance of Catholicism within contemporary institutionalisation of the Thai nunhood. Those for whom sewing or flower arrangement classes (or the Vessantarajataka tales) have no place in feminism, and those who see danger in the unsounded naivete of American political culture at large, may particularly suffer from this absence. Brown's determination to celebrate the courage of those who obtain or make it possible to obtain high school diplomas at a late age, like those who demonstrate compassion when struck, tends to inhibit acknowledgement of irreducible complexity. 'Choices' made, con sciously or not, to winnow out certain details of Buddhist narrative parallel such analytical lacunae. Though we are told, for example, the story of the Buddha's disgust at the sight of revellers drooling in their sleep the day after, never are we told these revellers were women. Though we are told the story of Mahapajapati's long struggle with her son the Buddha to gain his authorisation for acceptance of women into the Buddhist order, never are we told the severe conditions under which authorisation was finally accorded. Sid Brown has told a compelling story; we should however remember to what extent this story is her own in the making.

As final note on language, this book is a vast translation. I would like to reiterate my admiration for the skill and care with which Wabi's life has been given to us. Here again, those points at which translation seems wanting reveal the impossibility of perfect exchange. Yet it is precisely here, where language resists facile translation, that careful analysis can best demonstrate how specific cultures articulate, in their own terms, universal truths. One of these points arises with the Pali/Thai term dhammata/thamata (p. 58-9). That this single word is spelled differently in its Pali and Thai forms leads, first, to confusion. Commentary in the text and the Appendix do not sufficiently clarify the issues at hand. Never are we told, for example, that Pali words are transliterated letter for letter while Thai is phonetically transcribed. Never is it made clear that Dhammata and thamata are virtually (etymologically at the very least) one and the same word. Relationships between Pali/Sanskrit and Southeast Asi an vernaculars, though relatively straightforward, are frequently difficult for Western students to grasp. This is largely due to an initial inability to envisage how one language could be written in any number of scripts. A more careful presentation of this situation would have facilitated reading this book and, more generally, conceiving Indian languages as cultural vehicles in Thai. The transliteration of the Thai form, dharrmata, gives in fact an interesting link to an extraTheravadin past: Thai 'suchness' retains reference to Sanskrit, most probably brought to Thai through Khmer. The uninformed reader is likely instead to understand there to be two related words which mean two different things: in Pali: 'suchness,' and in Thai: 'normal'. Understanding the semantically extensive use of thamata in Thai, be it in a secular or a religious context, gains from an understanding of the term's religious roots. The fact that these roots are not entirely cut in popular Thai usage allows Wabi to come to an intensely religious insight of the term. 'Normal' is in fact far too normal a translation for thamata.

It is, on the other hand, the informed reader who may wish for clarification of the translation 'heartmind'. While we learn the relatively irrelevant fact that 'food', is gap khao ('with rice') in Thai (p. 8), never are we given the original of 'heartmind', a key concept recurring throughout the book. Is this the Thai chai or a Pali 'equivalent'? These are of course details, but details which, carefully studied, could bring us that much closer to the 'heartmind' or the 'suchness' of Thai Buddhism -- to its specificity, there where it promises to communicate a universal.

Total number of pages for this article: 5 FULL TEXT Singapore University Press Pte Ltd.

A land where God is absent - Human society by Charles Taylor

2007-09-08T22:15:00.000-07:00

A land where God is absent - Human society
By Charles Taylor.
961 words
8 September 2007
The Economist
ECN
384
English
(c) The Economist Newspaper Limited, London 2007. All rights reserved

The Western world may believe that it has liberated itself from clerical power, but divinity just keeps on breaking in

IN MEDIEVAL Christendom it was almost impossible not to believe in a transcendent power that determined human destiny. In the modern West there are contexts where the absence of any such power is so deeply assumed that religious belief becomes almost impossible to articulate. When people from theistic cultures meet those who think in a “modern” way, it can be difficult for the two sides to communicate at all. Something even more impenetrable than a language barrier is at work.

The possibility of understanding reality without reference to God is often seen as one of the defining features of the modern era. It follows that an abiding theme of Western history is a weakening of religion's power, even in countries where people remain relatively pious. That, of course, is a huge over-simplification and Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher, has devoted more than 800 pages to picking it apart—without completely denying it. The Western world's gradual movement towards something he calls “secularity” is what gives shape and meaning to his book.

Objections to the view that secularism has been Western history's driving force come easily enough. By some measures, the power of religion (including its power to inspire fanaticism and hatred) is rising again in the early years of the 21st century. Moreover, there have been periods (including most of America's modern history) when the formal practice of religion has been on the increase.

Understandably, then, one of Mr Taylor's keenest concerns is to show that man has not progressed down a simple, linear path from one mode of consciousness to another. Modernity, he argues, implies a huge range of possible ways of thinking, including many variations of theism and atheism.

It is also significant that theocracy is not monolithic either. Societies can be brutally theocratic in either or both of two senses. Sometimes worldly rulers draw on religious symbolism to enforce their authority, impress their subjects or legitimise war. Alternatively, “pure” clerical power can use its prerogatives (over sacraments like baptism or marriage or absolution) to exercise authority over everybody else, including worldly rulers. Neither kind of theocratic power can guarantee that its subjects are deeply religious in their personal consciousness; indeed the opposite is very often the case.

Working through Mr Taylor's careful but idiosyncratic prose (a mixture of colloquialisms, technical jargon and terms that he has invented or redefined), one finds big nuggets of insight, useful to almost anybody with an interest in the progress of human society. His book is not exactly a history of secularism; he is a philosopher, not a historian. The account does have a chronological element, but it is more a vast ideological anatomy of possible ways of thinking about the gradual onset of secularism as experienced in fields ranging from art to poetry to psychoanalysis.

Intricate as it is, there are certain threads that run through Mr Taylor's argument. The Enlightenment and the scientific revolution made it possible to think about the material world without reference to any transcendent power. He calls this way of thinking the “immanent frame”. But this frame is not hermetically sealed. People's yearning for, or intuition of, some ultimate meaning continues to break through in many different ways. One sign of divinity “breaking in” is the transcendental experience which can still be undergone by rational, modern people; he cites several descriptions of such moments, including one by Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident-turned-president.

Mr Taylor accepts that the “liberation” from clerical power (over thought and society) that occurred during the Enlightenment amounted to something real and legitimate. But he picks apart some crude versions of post-Enlightenment secularism. In some secularist accounts, he notes, religion is presented as an odd, temporary delusion into which mankind was unfortunate enough to fall for a brief moment. Once science had proved the falsehood of religious statements about the origins of the world, man could “revert” to a more “natural” way of thinking. Mr Taylor argues that a secular, scientific way of thinking is also a sort of existential choice, a particular moment in human development rather than a “natural” state of affairs.

Mr Taylor also lays bare the inconsistencies of some secular critiques of religion. Many modern thinkers have criticised Christianity as a faith of repressive, life-denying killjoys; they say that by holding up asceticism as the ultimate ideal, Christianity denies the value of existence as it is enjoyed by most ordinary people, including erotic love and family life. At the same time, a more Nietzschean critique is advanced, finding that Christianity rejects humanity's most extreme passions, including those that drive people to accomplish heroic deeds. Mr Taylor argues that the task of holding together the ideal, the passionate and everyday life is as much a difficulty for post-Enlightenment secularists as it is for Christians.

Mr Taylor's field of study is the Christian West, broadly speaking Europe and North America—and that is more than enough to fill his pages. But he would not have to look very far outside that world to find new answers to the religious problems that he so meticulously describes. How, for instance, can the pious affirm the sanctity of the human body while urging people to discipline their bodily desires? Eastern Christianity, which takes a less pessimistic view of human nature than Augustine or Aquinas did, has answers to such dilemmas; so has Buddhism. But to go down those routes would, at Mr Taylor's careful pace, require thousands more pages of intricately woven argument.

Merit and the millennium: Routine and crisis in the ritual lives of the Lahu people by Du, Shanshan

2007-09-05T03:31:00.000-07:00

Merit and the millennium: Routine and crisis in the ritual lives of the Lahu people.(Book Review)
Du, Shanshan
857 words
1 June 2004
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies
359
ISSN: 0022-4634; Volume 35; Issue 2
English
Copyright 2004 Gale Group Inc. All rights reserved.

Merit and the millennium: Routine and crisis in the ritual lives of the Lahu people By ANTHONY R. WALKER New Delhi: Hindustan Publishing, 2003. pp. xxxi, 907. Maps, Figures, Plates, Bibliography, Notes, Index. DOI: 10.1017/S0022463404230181

As one of the most politically marginalised ethnic minorities living along both sides of the border between southwest China and several Southeast Asian countries, the Lahu people, along with their cultural traditions, have drawn little academic attention in either Chinese- or English-language literature. Resulting from intensive fieldwork and library research that spans 35 years, Anthony Walker's Merit and the millennium is a monumental work on Lahu religion. The extraordinary detail of its ethnographic descriptions, which some will treasure while others may debate, is further enriched by a large number of excellent illustrations and photographs. Complementarily, Walker's library research accesses archival material, historical sources, photographs and missionary reports on Lahu residents in several countries, giving admirable historical depth and comparative scope to this book. Contributing greatly to Lahu studies, this book will also become a valuable resource for specialists in Southeast Asia and religious studies in general.

The book has 11 chapters. Following two introductory chapters, Chapters 3 through 9 explore the religious ideas and ritual practices of the Lahu majority and Chapters 10 and 11 explore the cultural continuities and discontinuities among the Christian Lahu, who make up about 10 per cent of the population. Furthermore, while Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 8 all focus on indigenous Lahu traditions, Chapters 6, 7 and 9 highlight the influence of Mahayana Buddhism. On the one hand, all four of the chapters on traditions emphasise non-Buddhist features of the Lahu region, exploring respectively indigenous ontology and worldviews, animist ritual practices, the pursuit of merits and blessings versus sorcery practices, and rituals concerning annual and life cycles. The three chapters on Buddhist influences respectively examine Mahayana Buddhism in Lahu history, the similarities shared by contemporary temple rituals across different Lahu regions and the critical role prophets played in Lahu millenarianism in both historical and contemporary contexts.

In addition to a comprehensive presentation of the complexity of religious ideas and practices across the different Lahu communities, this book also addresses several important theoretical issues in Lahu studies. Most importantly, Walker provides an insightful explanation for a seemingly paradoxical phenomenon that is crucial to our understanding of Lahu culture and history. Specifically, although characterised as socially egalitarian and culturally autonomous in addition to being well known for their frequent armed resistance against various external powers, the Lahu have also drawn considerable interest for their spectacularly large-scale conversions to Christianity. Availing himself of several sociological theories on prophetic millenarianism, Walker argues that struggles for ethnic survival and cultural renewal have fused with mystic faith. The result has been that, while Lahu warriors faced the might of imperial China in addition to British and Burmese bullets (p. 546) with faith-based courage, there has been a massive zeal in embracing the Christian Messiah (p. 628). These analyses challenge, although only implicitly, the hegemony in most of the Chinese-language literature of Marxist-Leninist approaches to account for the large-scale Lahu resistance movements against local Dai officials and the imperial Chinese state.

Another major theoretical contribution of this book is the attempt to identify and explain the particularity of Lahu theism within the wider context of mainland Southeast Asia. Based on detailed comparative data on a large number of Lahu communities, Walker provides a fascinating illustration of how the Lahu across a wide expanse of regions and numerous countries all share, to a great extent, beliefs and rituals oriented towards the creator-divinity named Xeul Sha. The author also sharply and convincingly points out that, in contrast to similar creator-divinities among other Tibeto-Burman speaking peoples, the Lahu deity (Xeul Sha) is unique for being believed to be involved in and to determine the daily lives of human beings. After successfully identifying the traits of Mahayana Buddhism in many temple rituals revolving around Xeul Sha worship, the author traces the source of its uniqueness to the dramatic impact--especially through Lahu millenarian resistance movements (p. 628)--of the transcendental Buddhahood of Mahayana Buddhism (p. 161). However, it may be more accurate to state that Mahayana Buddhism greatly intensified, rather than determined, the significance of Xeul Sha in Lahu socio-religious life. After all, few Buddhist influences are identifiable in the encyclopaedia-like Lahu origin myths that revolve around Xeul Sha and lay the foundation for the Lahu worldview and rituals. Specifically, unlike temple rituals and despite their sporadic incorporation of both Mahayana and Theravada Buddhist components, household rituals are often not only oriented towards Xeul Sha, but also closely concordant with indigenous Lahu origin myths.

Notwithstanding the risk of some controversy, Walker's work will stimulate further scholarly explorations of the mystic fusion in Lahu culture of theism with animism, which are often considered two extremes in the continuum of religious beliefs across cultures.

Doubts are as old as faith and rationality by Jennifer Michael Hecht

2007-09-05T03:14:00.000-07:00

BOOK REVIEW Doubts are as old as faith and rationality, and as vital
BY ROBERT NERALICH SPECIAL TO THE DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
811 words
31 January 2004
The Arkansas Democrat Gazette
43
English
Copyright (c) 2004 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.

In the introduction to Doubt: A History, Jennifer Michael Hecht reveals a major reason why she decided to write a comprehensive chronicle of such a subject: "Once we see it as its own story, rather than as a mere collection of shadows on the history of belief, a whole new drama appears and new archetypes begin to come into focus."

Hecht, an assistant professor of history at Nassau Community College in Garden City, N.Y., and an award-winning poet, brings uncommon intelligence, wit and sensitivity to bear in her discussion of this drama, and the book's subtitle offers an indication of its breadth and depth: "The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation From Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson."

In Hecht's view, the fundamental difference between believers and doubters resides in their responses to an existential truth.

"We live in a meaning rupture because we are human and the universe is not," she writes.

While believers seek comfort and consolation in this situation, doubters simply confront it and accept its implications. In Hecht's words, doubt "prizes [the] rigorous approach to truth above the delights of belief."

BELIEF AND DOUBT TOGETHER Hecht begins her historical survey with ancient doubters, and her discussions of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Cynics, Stoics, Skeptics and Epicureans constitute an overview of Greek philosophy. Epicurus (341-270 B.C.), in particular, emerges as a hero of doubt, and Hecht distills the essence of his wisdom as, "The world was not made by the gods and it was not made for us. We may enjoy it in peace."

Two millennia later, in a letter to a friend, Thomas Jefferson remarked, "I too am an Epicurean."

Like the magnificent Roman doubters Cicero, Lucretus, Pliny the Elder, Lucian and Marcus Aurelius, the Jews of ancient Alexandria developed a tradition of sly cosmopolitan doubt that persisted through such luminaries as Maimonides and Spinoza, and which continues in the present day. Hecht finds precedents for this current of Jewish skepticism in the Hebrew Bible, most notably in Job and Ecclesiastes.

Hecht conceives the relationship between belief and doubt as a subtle symbiosis in which each influences the other. This interaction is nowhere as evident - or as important - as in the genesis of Christianity. In reaction to the Greeks' rationalism, skepticism and secularism, Christianity based itself entirely on belief, and in the process changed the character of doubt.

Beginning with Jesus and Paul, Hecht traces this transformation, in which doubt is no longer "about getting to the bottom of what's real, but rather ... is all about actively trying to commit oneself to belief, and momentarily at least, failing." Hecht details this new inflection of doubt through an array of Christian thinkers, from Augustine to Kierkegaard.

The book also contains informative discussions of Muslim doubters, ancient and modern, as well as elaborations of the nontheistic and profoundly skeptical traditions of Cavraka in India and Buddhism in India, China and Japan. Hecht demonstrates that Zen Buddhism is among the most unrelentingly skeptical traditions in Asia, and she cites one of its most famous admonitions: "great doubt: great awakening; little doubt: little awakening; no doubt: no awakening."

A WHO'S WHO OF DOUBT Finally, Hecht traces doubt in the West from the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution to the modern world, and in the process masterfully records the contributions to human knowledge and self-understanding of a wealth of brilliant and courageous personalities, many of whom endured brutal persecution at the hands of violent, credulous fools.

She mentions Michel Montaigne, Galileo, John Locke, Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Sartre and Camus.

The history of American doubt is ably represented, as well, by such figures as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain. And the book's final chapters will especially delight people who enjoy reading about well-deserved rebukes to ignorance and folly.

The experience of reading Doubt: A Historyis akin to drinking a glass of cool well water: Both clear the head and freshen the spirit. While there are many compelling reasons for recommending the book, in its conclusion, Hecht offers what is perhaps the most important: "Most crucially, the murderous tension surrounding fundamentalism right now demands that the history of doubt be understood, and that secularists, arguing for cosmopolitan tolerance, be deeply conversant with its history."

Robert Neralich has a doctorate in English and teaches Asian studies at Fayetteville High School. Write to him c/o Northwest Religion Editor, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, P.O. Box 5105, Springdale, Ark. 72765, or e-mail: rneralich@aol.com

How the Buddha still speaks to a modern city by Dr Elizabeth Harris

2007-09-05T02:59:00.000-07:00

ANALYSIS: How the Buddha still speaks to a modern city
By Dr Elizabeth Harris
774 words
5 September 2007
Birmingham Post
11
English
(c) 2007 Birmingham Post & Mail Ltd

Today, in our series investigating 'What makes a Good City?', we look at the Buddhist and Muslim perspectives. Buddhism expert Dr Elizabeth Harris argues diversity is essential, while DrJabal Buaben, a lecturer on Islam at Birmingham University, states it depends on a morally principled society Buddhist Perspective

A city is a place of radical plurality - plurality of religion, belief, ethnicity, culture, economic status, political affiliation, sexuality and ability. How to manage this plurality is a major challenge for any city authority. For plurality can be explosive if awareness of difference is triggered by international events, perceived discrimination or resentment about unequal distribution of resources. Different words and phrases have been coined to describe the task of making a city harmonious: integration; cohesion; regeneration; renewal; capacity-building; gaining stakeholder confidence; co-responsibility; co-existence.

What can the insights of Buddhism offer to this? Buddhism as we know it today began in the 5th century BCE with a 29 year old, Sid-dhartha Gautama, leaving an aristocratic home in north-east India to become an itinerant religious searcher and then preacher. According to Buddhist practitioners, he became a Buddha - one who had awoken to the truth that upholds the cosmos - after six years of exploration. He taught this truth for about 40 years, forming around him a fourfold community of lay men, lay women, monks and nuns.

He died at an advanced age surrounded by loving disciples, having created a movement that was to spread throughout northern India, Central Asia and far beyond. Can what he taught speak to a modern city? Buddhists would say it can for two main reasons: the context of India in the 5th century BCE was not completely unlike the 21st century; the teaching of the Buddha transcends the particular and can speak to the human condition throughout time.

Buddhism was successful in India because it offered something for the whole of society. Not only did the Buddha call upon people to leave their families to follow him as celibate members of an Order, he also advised rulers and inspired many who remained deeply involved in family life. He did this against a backdrop of growing urbanization, economic change and a plethora of competing beliefs and ideologies.

Those who left their homes to follow him had to compete for lay patronage in a market-place of religious practices and political affiliations. It is also clear from the earliest Buddhist texts, the Therava da Buddhist Canon, that there was violence in the Buddha's India.

One stereotype of Buddhism is that it is about individual well-being and peace only. The texts challenge this. They are often about society.

The aristocratically-born Buddha is seen as an adviser to kings and political leaders, in times of war and conflict. References to torture methods, the consequences of war, communal conflict, criminality, patronage, poverty and privilege pepper the Canon. For instance, when speaking about the dangers of selfish craving in one discourse, the Buddha is recorded as saying:

"Again, with sensual pleasures as the causemen break into houses, plunder wealth, commit burglary, ambush highways, seduce others' wives and when they are caught, kings have many kinds of torture inflicted on them. The kings have them flogged with whips, beaten with canes, beaten with clubs; they have their hands cut off, their feet cut off, their ears and noses cut off "

At one level, this may seem a world away from 21st century Europe. There are no highwaymen on horseback or kings with a license to torture, at least not in England.

However, there are muggings, cases of anti-social behaviour, domestic violence and robberies, from mobile phones to personal identities. And torture has certainly not left the world scene. Buddhists would say that the teachings of the Buddha have as much to say to this situation as to the 5th century BCE.

A Buddhist code of conduct for a good city would stress courtesy, respect and willingness to engage in dialogue where differences between people become acrimonious.

The Buddha originally attracted followers by inviting them to come and see if his teachings worked; to see if they actually led to the decrease of suffering and greater harmony.

On the evidence we have, the Buddha was concerned about what worked, about what could be valued empirically. He sometimes avoided dogmatic statements because of this.

It is empirically obvious that a society will be more harmonious if people of different world-views or from different cultural backgrounds listen to one another with respect and courtesy; if people feel valued and affirmed.

The evolution of Morality and Religion by Keith Green

2007-09-04T02:21:00.001-07:00

The Evolution of Morality and Religion: A Biological Perspective.(Book Review)
Green, Keith
2653 words
1 September 2005
Religious Studies
363
ISSN: 0034-4125; Volume 41; Issue 3
English
Copyright 2005 Gale Group Inc. All rights reserved.

Donald M. Broom The Evolution of Morality and Religion: A Biological Perspective. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Pp. xi + 229. [pounds sterling]50.00 (Hbk), [pounds sterling]18.95 (Pbk). ISBN 0 521 82192 (Hbk), 0 521 52924 7 (Pbk).

In The Evolution of Religion and Morality, Donald Broom seeks to show that an evolutionary account of morality and religion is compatible with moral and religious truth-claims. His is an ambitious interdisciplinary endeavour which seeks to bring together the insights of evolutionary biology, ethics, theology, and the social scientific study of religions. His goal cuts against the grain of the common intuition that any evolutionary theory of morality and religion, or any genetic explanation for the human propensity to moral autonomy and piety, is reductionist as such. He argues, instead, that natural selection has selected the cognitive traits which predispose humans to moral autonomy and religiosity because these practices are conducive to survival and reproductive success.

Broom begins with the assumption that any more or less universal feature of culture must ultimately rest upon biocognitive attributes which have been selected because they contribute to species survival and reproductive success. As such, this book ventures into the choppy waters of evolutionary and genetic explanations of human behaviour--the stormy waters in which the likes of E. O. Wilson and others have so dramatically floundered. The other great challenge mounted by Broom is that of the interdisciplinary character of his project. Genuinely successful interdisciplinary scholarship manages not to short-change any of the disciplines whose insights it seeks to harvest.

Broom's study displays two strengths: his command of the scientific literature in genetics and evolutionary biology, and a willingness to challenge the deep reductionist presumption about any evolutionary account of morality and religion. The deficits of his project are: (1) the incipient assumption that demonstrating a contribution to reproductive success for any behaviour amounts to a moral justification of the explained behaviour; (2) dependence upon impressionistic accounts of morality and religion; and (3) an unpolished style and way of quoting and making attributions to other authors that make his line of reasoning and connections very hard to follow. The end result is a book in which one hopes the author's less convincing and sometimes even naive notions about religion and morality won't detract from the nobility of his as yet unrealized intellectual goal.

The outline of Broom's overall argument is laid out in his first chapter. Emergent moral and religious concepts and practices are part of the way in which the human brain controls human behaviour. Natural selection favours patterns of behaviour and behavioural control that conduce to reproductive success. Morality and religion (which are presumably cultural universals) constitute part of the brain's regimen of control for conscious, self-aware, and social animals such as humans. Human grouping is enabled behaviourally by what Broom ought to call moral autonomy and are reinforced by religious thought-forms. Broom specifically focuses upon protection of the young, more efficient mating, and the reduction in competition as evolutionarily critical benefits of human sociality made possible by uncoerced moral self-restraint. And so natural selection selects traits that engender a bent toward moral autonomy. Finally, and more naively: an evolutionary account of morality and/or religion 'does not devalue spirituality. It may well encourage people to be a part of a religion because they understand it and its benefits better' (29).

In subsequent chapters, Broom makes it clear, unsurprisingly, that the beneficial behaviours he believes morality and religion engender are essentially reciprocal altruism and other trust- and co-operation-engendering patterns of conduct, as well as care for the young and mate-guarding. So the second and third chapters propose a genetic foundation for these behaviours. Some of Broom's best ideas are in the third chapter, in his discussions of biological foundations--both at the genetic and neural levels--of different levels of awareness and consciousness. Broom acknowledges that even for humans, many beneficial behaviours are not intentional as such. Morality, however, is essentially a social system for controlling intentional actions and promoting trust- and co-operation-engendering traits of character for an animal species that must be social in order to flourish. Broom's appeal to parallels between kinds of animal behaviour and intentional human behaviour to demonstrate how these behaviours conduce to survival and reproductive success are generally illuminating.

Broom turns to morality and religion in chapters 4 to 5, in what must surely be accounted the weakest sections of his study. He defines both morality and religion in impressionistic ways that ignore whole traditions of scholarship that call into question his ways of defining each. The sad fact of the matter is that it is not even clear that the conceptions with which Broom is working are the ones most beneficial or intuitive for his project. It is exactly here that Broom fails to give us a convincing piece of genuinely interdisciplinary scholarship. Morality is treated flatly and unconvincingly as (1) a code of rational rules (2) that enjoin beneficial actions and prohibit or minimize harm. Broom shows no cognizance of the deep challenges to the notion that morality even essentially or most universally is following a code of rules, as opposed to, say, cultivating virtuous traits of character. Broom quotes with approval Aldo Leopold's assertion that 'a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise' (Broom (121) quoting Leopold's A Sand County Almanac.)

Broom's chief counsellor on matters of moral theory seems to be Richard Brandt, and Brandt's version of rule-utilitarianism. Utilitarianism of any kind assumes, of course, that a human can reliably make (and, therefore, ought to make) intentional choices that optimize human advantage overall, counting his interests as one among others. What seems to have attracted Broom to the Brandt brand of rule-utilitarianism is that it is a moral theory that focuses, like the trajectory of natural selection, on the optimization of advantage. The trouble is that Broom seems to have collapsed intentional and non-intentional ways in which human behaviour might redound to human advantage, reproductively and otherwise. Broom assumes that if following a particular rule optimizes chances of species survival and reproductive success that this fact justifies it as a moral rule.

Broom's code-of-rules conception of morality, and his naive consequentialism are hard to square at the theoretical level with his earlier claim (chapter 3.5) that it is through the emergence of a capacity for sympathy and altruistic and participatory emotions that humans acquire their evolutionarily significant bent toward altruism, co-operation, and trust. What is intentional about the intersubjective patterns of self-restraint is not well captured by the notion that humans reason their way by assessing optimal outcomes to the self-conscious adoption of rules of conduct. This makes about as much sense as the gathering-under-the-tree-to-sign caricature of social contract that is so appealing to every generation of undergraduates. It is more likely the case, as Adam Smith intuited, that the advantages of human co-operation, trust, and reciprocal altruism cannot rise to view until humans are already sufficiently evolved to exhibit moral autonomy and to enjoy other benefits of co-operation. Following Darwin, Broom has nothing to lose by admitting (following the model of Adam Smith) that natural selection functions like an invisible hand to reproductively reward predispositions to moral autonomy and sociality.

Philosophical confusion about moral justification becomes clearest in the five final sections of chapter 4, with a sweeping discussion about obligations, rights, evaluation, codes of sexual behaviour, conscience, etc. But not only are explanations and justification two different things, even Broom's explanations are not convincing. The weight given to mate-guarding, as well as disease-prevention in his discussion of codes of sexual behaviour make little sense of such rules, either as explanations or justification. This discussion is pervaded by a flat and conjectural use of the liberal 'harm-criterion'.

One needn't doubt that 'morality has a biological basis and has evolved'. I am convinced, though Broom didn't convince me (and probably won't succeed in convincing sceptical minds). But Broom declines to make the more powerful argument that the evolved character of human consciousness is that we are inescapably and deeply social animals, and it is the character of that sociality that is both evolutionarily accountable, and that thing about us which both requires and produces the socio-cultural phenomenon of morality--or of a capacity for moral autonomy.

Broom's discussion of religion, like his sweeping discussion of morality, lacks a critical sense of nuance. He seems, for example, unaware that his way of defining religion: 'a system of beliefs and rules which individuals revere and respond to in their lives and which is seen as emanating directly or indirectly from some intangible power' (164) is widely regarded as ethnocentric and inadequate as a characterization of religion, like the naive notion that all religions are 'faiths'. Only theocentric Western traditions vaguely answer to Broom's characterization. Broom's effort to accommodate non-theistic traditions such as forms of Buddhism or Confucianism to his definition of religion is strained. It is simply false that most religious traditions 'codify beliefs'. There is arguably a cosmogony--a most general sense of the character and order/disorder of the sum totality of things, and the place of humans and other living beings within it--implicit in everything that can be identified as 'religion'. But beliefs about 'the really real' entailed by it are less often made explicit and 'confessed' in a ritualized way as an institutional mark of a religious identity. It is simply false to equate religion, a religion, or religious identity with 'belief statements' and 'belief structures' in the absence of other fundamental components of religion.

The same must be said of the notion that religions evolve essentially to provide justification for morality. Goodness or rightness, as such, are most manifestly not 'a central issue for all religions' (173)--at least, if you aim to describe or identify any component or function of which the participants are aware. Nor is it at all obvious that religious practice always supports or makes more secure moral autonomy. The notion that 'morality is the core of religions' and that 'religion would have developed in order to provide a structure which encouraged the widespread observance of the moral code' (176) is simply not supported by evidence. This conjecture once again reflects Broom's uncritical assumption that a naive conception of religion as a 'belief structure' perhaps represents a scholarly consensus, or that those who support this view have convincingly responded to critics of it. Broom appreciates some of the challenges that can be raised to the notion that they do so. He attempts to anticipate these responses in the final two sections (6 and 7) of chapter 5. His response is (shockingly) the vague and unconvincing claim that religious practice improves welfare, together with the notion that religious believers and organizations should tone down the features of their confessional ethos that tend to promote exclusivism and violence--as if this could just be done as a matter of decision. The trouble is that Broom proceeds as though the tendencies and notions that engender exclusivism and intolerance are somehow always less central and definitive of those traditions than the presumably beneficial universal features. (See his list of ten recommendations, 192-193.)

Broom sometimes quotes other scholars whose language he appears not to understand, and so quotes them out of context. For example, on 177, he twice quotes passages from John H. Crook The Evolution of Human Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 185, 287, where the latter describes religious and ethical thought-systems as 'legitimizing' political institutions and socio-economic arrangements. In the ensuing paragraphs and section, it seems clear that Broom has simply read this term to mean 'support' or to provide a justification for something. But 'legitimation' is a critical term of art drawn from critical languages deriving from Marx's notion that religion and other thought-forms are ideologies which render the contrivance of oppressive social arrangements beyond challenge or criticism by representing them as part of a given order of reality. A closer reading of Crook's text leads me to conclude that this was how he was using the term as well. As such, Crook's quoted claims do not support Broom's claims about the origins and function of religion. Another baffling problem is Broom's assumption that religions as such are essentially theocentric, and that the idea of God is 'usable' (180). What follows for twenty more pages is a meandering discussion of religion in which it is alleged that the evolved presence and usefulness of the idea of God and other ideas Broom imagines are more or less universal features of religious belief are 'useful' in promoting reproductive success and survival, and so justified beliefs.

The book's final two chapters make further attempts to respond to a range of thinkers whose view, Broom thinks, are that morality, religion, and biology are inherently antithetical. He also articulates a social vision of religion and morality that mobilizes recognition of human connections to other species, and moral concern for them. One hardly encounters arguments here, and the claims are so general that they are hard to argue with. Broom's primary concern in chapter 6 settles upon those whom he regards as promulgators of the 'selfish-gene' notion. And his counter-argument advances little beyond an objection to the use of the word 'selfish' to describe genetic function in natural selection. Otherwise Broom relies, through quotation, upon Holmes Rolston's (Genes, Genesis and God: Values and Their Origins in Natural and Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)) argument against the 'selfish-gene' notion, and upon others by citation, to overcome the (as yet, unvanquished) idea that moral autonomy and 'religion' are anything other than irrelevant by-products in culture of human DNA's successful replication of itself.

The one genuinely fresh idea in the final two chapters of the book is the notion that we cannot characterize (what ought to be called) moral autonomy in such a way that we can meaningfully deny that it is an extension of observable animal behaviours in other species. The general idea here, and one which runs directly counter to Broom's characterization of morality, is that to the degree that a capacity for empathy is a capacity found in other species, the most fundamental and motivationally salient ingredient of moral autonomy is present. The specific form of 'morality' as a cultural product among humans reflects the character of human self-consciousness, and the cognitive necessity for generating linguistically communicable concepts. Interesting, though hardly a new idea--but we do not really find a sustained argument for it in Broom.

Broom needs to return to the drawing board, and to do so with the aid of collaborators from ethics and religious studies. There is something to be said for sweeping and radically challenging programmes of conceptual revision and vision. And it is not unreasonable to think that interdisciplinary scholarship might impel them. But it isn't surprising that the most interesting and compelling moments in Broom's endeavour are those informed by his disciplinary expertise. As it stands, Broom's work is of interest to scholars primarily for its courage--his willingness to entertain a still radical seeming notion that ascertaining the biocognitive, evolutionary sources for moral autonomy and 'the religious' does not explain it away. This extends to his closing reflection that moral autonomy as such may not radically demarcate humans biologically.

KEITH GREEN

East Tennessee State University

COPYRIGHT 2005 Cambridge University Press

Research on Buddhist Nuns in Japan, Past and Present by Wacker Monika

2007-09-04T02:16:00.000-07:00

Research on Buddhist Nuns in Japan, Past and Present
Wacker, Monika
2853 words
1 July 2005
Asian Folklore Studies
287
Volume 64; Issue 2; ISSN: 03852342
English
Copyright (c) 2005 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved.

Research on Buddhist Nuns in Japan, Past and Present RUCH, BARBARA, General Editor. Engendering Faith: Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan. Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, NO. 43. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2002. Ixxviii + 706 pages. Map, plates, list of characters, selected bibliography, index. Cloth US$69.00; ISBN 1-929280-15-7.

WHEN SCHOLARS of Religious Studies talk about Buddhism the focus is usually on Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhism of South and Southeast Asia, Tibet, and Japan. Traditionally they concentrate on monks and doctrines. A fairly comprehensive bibliography listing the scarce literature in Western languages on women in Buddhism can be found in Barbara Ruch's monumental reader, Engendering Faith, one of the publications under review.

While conducting research for my PhD thesis in Japan, I heard of a friend staying at a convent in Kyoto during her research there. From my perspective, the nuns themselves were invisible in modern Japanese society. I clearly recall my astonishment, while on Taketomi Island in the Yaeyama Archipelago of the Ryukyu Islands in the first half of the 19905, when I learned that the Buddhist temple on that island was inhabited by a nun and her husband, a monk. While he ran the local museum she was not to be seen in public.

On the other hand, there is quite a tradition of research of women involved with Shinto and Japanese folk religion. My own studies clearly revealed that women had played an important role in religion even as late as the twentieth century in Okinawa (WACKER 2001). Nevertheless, I still did not suspect nuns of earlier times to have had as a great impact on Japanese Buddhism as the monumental volume edited by Barbara Ruch demonstrates.

In this short article I will first take up the epoch-making volume by Barbara Ruch together with the catalogues of two exhibits that took place in 2003 in direct relation with this volume-one held in Kyoto entitled "Art by Buddhist Nuns," the other held in Nara entitled "Women and Buddhism." Then I will discuss two publications by modern Buddhist nuns and lay women. The latter publications approach the topic of "Women in Buddhism" from a socio-religious point of view.

ENGENDERING FAITH: WOMEN AND BUDDHISM IN PREMODERN JAPAN

The publication of this reader is the first in a series of projects of the Institute of Medieval Japanese Studies (IMJS) of Columbia University, New York, headed by the editor, Professor Emerita Barbara Ruch. A specialist on medieval Japanese literature and cultural history, she is also the director of the international Imperial Buddhist Convents Survey Project. The prologue of the volume reveals some initial findings of this project. In the year 2000 the IMJS opened a small branch office in Kyoto, which serves as a base for the work with Imperial Buddhist Convents in the area and the Restoration of Convent Treasures Projects, which are funded by the World Heritage Foundation. In 2002 the Center for the Study of Women, Buddhism, and Culture, which serves as an archive for microfilm and research materials on convent culture, was opened in Kyoto. It is also a meeting place for Buddhist nuns from Southeast Asia, Taiwan, the People's Republic of China, Korea, and Japan, as well as a resource center for graduate students from Europe, Asia, and the Americas. As such it also is the location for public lectures, exhibitions, and programs related to the culture of convents (IMJS report 2000/12). All this happened just in time to celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the IMJS and the tenth installment of the international Imperial Buddhist Convents Survey Project in October 2003. But let us now turn to the book itself.

This volume is the outcome of a unique collaboration between Japanese and North American scholars. It brings together the results of long-term research by two study groups that first held a meeting in 1989. The Japanese study group, led by Nishiguchi and Osumi, had already published four volumes of essays (OSUMI, NISHIGUCHI 1989) of which ten were selected, translated, and adapted for this reader. The North American study group added ten more essays to make up a veritable treasure trove of new information in English, capable of dissolving any prejudice against the religious practice of nuns and lay women in medieval Japan.

The contributors as well as the translators are briefly introduced in the appendix. It is a truly interdisciplinary work spanning from social history, history of religions, and art of medieval Japan to archaeology (Nicole Fabricand-Person) and literature (Marian Ury, and most of the translators with the exception of Philip Yampolsky). Only one author (Nagata Mizu) is a Buddhologist. It is also a highly egalitarian project: The contributors and the translators are of both sexes, and the deep insights of professors emeriti as well as the brilliant and fresh views from young promising scholars are bound up into one volume.

The volume is well-structured, starting off with a three-page table of contents, notes to the reader, remarks on transliteration, and pronunciation, which is especially important for readers not familiar with Japanese language. Chronological tables and a map of Japan delineate the historical and regional setting for the following chapters. In the appendix the scholar of Japanese studies finds a very useful and extensive list of characters for names and terms used throughout, a selected bibliography containing mostly but not only literature in Japanese. A thirty-odd-page index finishes off the more than seven hundred pages of this volume.

The main body of the volume is made up of twenty chapters in five sections according to their focus. Section I, "Women in Early Chinese and Japanese Buddhism," by Chikusa Masaaki, starts out with Buddhist nun communities in China. The other two chapters are about court women and Buddhism in Japan from the seventh to ninth centuries (Hongo Masatsugu), and Empress Komyo and the development in state Buddhism (Mikoshiba Daisuke). This certainly leaves the impression that early Buddhism was mainly focused on an aristocratic elite. However, one must take into consideration the dearth of material on the lives of the lower classes in general, and especially the non-tangible aspects of culture that hinder their study. This data illustrates how aristocratic women acted independently of the men in both their natal and marital families and had great political influence.

There are also very basic questions that need to be answered: Who is considered a nun? How and why do women become nuns? How are they portrayed in literature? The chapters of Section II, "Nuns and Nunneries," offer some answers looking at the various forms of tonsure (Katsuura Noriko), the procedures of ordination (Paul Groner), convents or living quarters being converted into a temple (Ushiyama Yoshiyuki), widowhood (Ushiyama, Martin Collcutt) and divorce (Anne Dutton, Diana E. Wright) as points in life when women decide to dedicate at least some time if not the rest of their lives to practicing Buddhism.

The two chapters of Section IV, "Deities and Icons," take their starting point in iconography but both also relate to female believers and sponsors by taking a look at the context in which such art might be produced by a female artist and/or a female sponsor. (Fabricand-Person, Hank Classman). Readers interested in more visual signs of Buddhist nuns' faith can refer to the catalogues of the two exhibitions I mentioned, which will be introduced in some detail later on.

The Section V is dedicated to "Faith and Practice," with a strong focus on death (Nishiguchi Juno) and the hereafter (Obara Hitoshi, Susan Matisoff, Endo Hajime, and Ruch). Both recipients of rituals and practitioners are-at least in part-women. Endo's essay also is the only one that focuses explicitly on nonaristocratic women, or rather couples. His study looks at the True Pure Land sect (Jodo Shin Shu) founded in the Kamakura era. It is well known that during this period, the introduction of faith as a main element sufficient for salvation made possible the spread of Buddhist teachings to the masses. Ruch's essay shows that women at that time were active proselytizers who aimed their sermons especially toward women and taught them the promises of the Lotus Sutra.

As a whole the volumes articles teach the reader one main message: Even in medieval Buddhism Japanese women never were reduced to being mere passive recipients of teachings. Throughout medieval history Japanese women could maintain important roles in religion and society: They were the first to go abroad to study Buddhism in Korea (Osumi), and they were active proselytizers (Ruch section v). Through patronizing temples they helped to bequeath a truely rich material culture as can still be witnessed nowadays. The Lotus Sutra, and more precisely the Devadatta chapter, promises Buddhahood to women (Nagata) and its influence on Japanese women penetrates the whole volume: Besides Yoshida's essay on the Devadatta Chapter of the Lotus Sutra, it is also mentioned by Osumi, Chikusa, Mikoshiba, Groner, Katsuura, Ury, Nagata, Classman, Nishiguchi, and Obara. Wives and daughters played important socio-religious roles in their True Pure Land Congregations (Endo). Nishiguchi demonstrates that after death one's sex was considered irrelevant as women, especially mothers of monks, were interred within the holy precincts that they could not enter while alive. This, too, is a sign of medieval Japan being a basically egalitarian society in which social power was evenly distributed among the sexes. Neither political and military power wielded by men nor religious and political power of (aristocratic) women dominated the other sex. Taking the vows and tonsure was always done through the will of women, most often in early childhood, or after being widowed. Yet it could also be used as a means to sever marital ties during the husband's lifetime (Dutton, Wright) After all, both male and female powers not only coexisted but enhanced each other. The means may be different but the tendency is similar to what I found in the Kingdom of Ryukyu as late as the nineteenth century before it was annexed to mainland Japan to become the modern prefecture of Okinawa. While men were prominent in politics and scholarship, women were important social and religious leaders with respect to practicing faith (WACKER 2001).

I am not the only one who considers this reader to be epoch-making: This is the first time such findings of Japanese and Western (American and Canadian) scholars are published together, and thus the volume makes a fine introduction into the matter. Haruko Wakabayashi "strongly recommends [it] to scholars of all fields related to premodern Japan" (WAKABAYASHI 2005; 204). Ford is a little more critical of the work because he feels it lacks a concluding essay that sums up the implications of the studies presented in this volume for methodology, thus providing an outlook on further investigation into the field (FORD 2004, 452). However, as the editor, Ruch, already gives a detailed introduction into the chapters that make up the main body of the volume, this seems needless. Actually, in an interdisciplinary collaboration such as this, discussion of traditional methodologies used in the various disciplines might very well have distracted the authors from their goal: To publish their findings in a field of studies neglected so far.

EXHIBITIONS IN KYOTO AND NARA

The same year Engendering Faith was published, there were two exhibitions of works of art by Buddhist nuns. "Art by Buddhist Nuns: Treasures from the Imperial Convents of Japan" was held in April in Kyoto at the Nomura Art Museum. As the subtitle suggests, this exhibition is closely linked to the imperial Buddhist Convent Research and Restoration project, which in turn is conducted by the Medieval Japanese Studies Institute at the University of Michigan (MJSI) headed by Ruch. Due to limited space it was a small exhibition, but the catalogue was put together with much care. As it also serves as an anniversary publication to commemorate the thirty-fifth of the MJSI and the first of the Center for the Study of Women, Buddhism, and Culture, it is bilingual, with English following the Japanese text.

The titles of the exhibits are listed in English, but for detailed explanations again the reader has to go to the explanatory section in Japanese. So while the Kyoto catalogue is clearly dedicated to both readers of English and Japanese, the Nara catalogue provides only a short introduction to those not able to read Japanese. This is a pity, as valuable information is only available to the specialist in the field.

WOMEN AND NUNS IN MODERN BUDDHISM

The first volume, which was published in 1999, was the first document of discussions on the role of women in Buddhism between women and men across the borders of the various Buddhist schools. Imai Masaharu, professor at Tsukuba University who specializes in the medieval history of Buddhism explains the subtitle of the book. "Nyozegamon," which can be translated as "Such I heard," is taken from the first words of each sutra. Therefore, "onnatachi no nyozegamon" [such women heard] reflects the purpose of both these publications: To make known to the public how women understand the Buddhist teachings and how they propose to reform Buddhism. The goal of volume 1 is to take stock: How do nuns and lay women live within the various schools, what are the restrictions they encounter, and where do they feel discriminated against?

The prologue by Kawahashi Noriko explains a little more about the discrimination against wives of priests. Chapter 1 is entitled "Women in the Scriptures" and comprises two theoretical essays: Nagata Mizu explores Shakamuni's view of women. His fellow Buddhologist Tsuruoka Ei puts the misogynist view in Japanese Buddhism into the context of the late Kamakura era, the age of mappo.

The main sections of this book are made up of very personal accounts of how women experience Buddhism in their everyday lives. Chapter II comprises three essays on women in history and doctrine as seen from the point of view of women. Chapter III explores the position of women in the congregation and the system, and mainly discusses nuns. Chapter IV reports on the situation of women in the temples where they call for a gender-equal Buddhism. The last section, "In search of a revival of Buddhism," records a discussion between five members of the two study groups.

So while Buddhist nuns and lay women of medieval times spoke though their writings and art work of hope and devotion, modern Buddhist women in Japan add their words of hope and devotion free of complaint on their situations. These two volumes are important material from within the Buddhist world and make good reading for a scholar interested in how Buddhist women live and think about their lives nowadays.

CONCLUSION

The studies taken up in this essay show vividly how interest in the subject of women in Buddhism has risen in the past two to three decades in both Japan and the Western world. It is definitely not just a pet subject of feminist scholars, as the sizeable number of male contributors, scholars and monks alike, represented in all the studies demonstrates. As Buddhism is mainly an Asiatic religion, it is only natural that discussion on the joys and woes of living a life in faith in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries began in an Asian country such as Japan and was first published in Japanese only. The narration of modern Buddhist women on their experience makes good material for further studies by Western scholars of comparative religious studies or Japanese social studies in general.

A symposium on "Constructing Gender in Religious Symbolic Systems," scheduled to take place in Zurich in May 2006, indicates that interest in the rest of the academic world in the lives and practice of female Buddhists has been stimulated. These volumes are the first on a new shelf in one's library that could be labeled "Women in Buddhism through the Ages." We should now be on the lookout for more publications about women in other Buddhist countries, and for similar ones on women in Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Taoism, and so on.

WACKER, Monika

2001 Onarigami. Holy Woman in the Kingdom of Ryukyu: A Pacific Culture with Chinese Influences. In Ryukyu in World History, ed. Kreiner, Josef, ed, 41-67. Bier'sche Verlagsanstalt, Bonn.

WAKABAYASHI Haruko

2005 Book Review: "Engendering Faith: Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan," edited by Barbara Ruch. The Journal of Asian Studies 64: 202-204.

A fairly comprehensive bibliography listing the scarce literature in Western languages on women in Buddhism can be found in Barbara Ruch's monumental reader, Engendering Faith, one of the publications under review. A specialist on medieval Japanese literature and cultural history, she is also the director of the international Imperial Buddhist Convents Survey Project. The narration of modern Buddhist women on their experience makes good material for further studies by Western scholars of comparative religious studies or Japanese social studies in general.

Ideas: a history from fire to Freud by Peter Watson

2007-09-04T02:14:00.000-07:00

Lost in thought: thanks to academic specialisation, the history of ideas is not a flourishing discipline. Most English-speaking philosophers know little of their own intellectual traditions, let alone non-western ones. John Gray applauds a study that avoids the usual parochialism.(books)(Ideas: A History From Fire to Freud)(Book Review)
Gray, John
1362 words
30 May 2005
New Statesman
48
ISSN: 1364-7431; Volume 134; Issue 4742
English
Copyright 2005 Gale Group Inc. All rights reserved.

Ideas: a history from fire to Freud

Peter Watson

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 822pp, [pounds sterling]30

The history of ideas has a history of its own, and it is not long. Peter Watson believes the first person to conceive of intellectual history may have been Francis Bacon, which places the birth of the subject in the late 16th century. In Greece and China more than 2,000 years ago, there were sceptics who doubted whether the categories of human thought could correctly represent the world, but the recognition that these categories change significantly over time is distinctly modern. Thanks to thinkers such as Vico and Herder, Hegel and Marx, Nietzsche and Foucault, the notion that ideas have a history is an integral part of the way we think today, and it surfaces incongruously in unlikely places. Thinkers of the right may rant against moral relativism and look back with nostalgia to a time when basic concepts seemed fixed for ever, but these days the right is committed to a militant belief in progress--and so to accepting that seemingly permanent features of the conceptual landscape may turn out to be no more than a phase in history.

Given the importance of the history of ideas to the way we understand ourselves, you might expect it to be a flourishing discipline, but that is far from the case. As Isaiah Berlin used to say, it is an orphan subject. Ever sceptical of abstraction, historians complain that it slips easily into loose generalisation. For philosophers, who tend to assume that questions asked hundreds or even thousands of years ago about knowledge and the good life are essentially the same as the ones we ask today, it is irrelevant. Very few economists know anything much about the history of their discipline, and the same is true of many social scientists. At a time of grinding academic specialisation, intellectual history seems a faintly dilettantish, semi-literary activity, and the incentive structures that surround a university career do not encourage its practice. More fundamentally, the history of ideas is a casualty of the growth of knowledge. Anyone who aspires to study it on anything other than a miniaturist scale needs to know a great deal about a wide range of subjects--in many of which knowledge is increasing almost by the day.

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In these circumstances, a universal history of ideas seems an impossibly daunting project. Yet in Ideas: a history from fire to Freud, Watson gives us an astonishing overview of human intellectual development which covers everything from the emergence of language to the discovery of the unconscious, including the idea of the factory and the invention of America, the eclipse of the idea of the soul in 19th-century materialism and the continuing elusiveness of the self. In a book of such vast scope, a reader could easily get lost, but the narrative has a powerful momentum. Watson holds to a consistently naturalistic philosophy in which humanity is seen as an animal species developing in the material world. For him, human thought develops as much in response to changes in the natural environment--such as shifts in climate and the appearance of new diseases--as from any internal dynamism of its own. This overarching perspective informs and unifies the book, and the result is a masterpiece of historical writing.

Watson's sympathy for naturalism enables him to spot some crucial and neglected turns in the history of thought. Nowadays, naturalistic philosophies are usually connected with those Enlightenment beliefs which hold that humanity progresses through the use of reason. Watson notes, however, that Spinoza, a pivotal thinker who may well have had a greater role in shaping the early Enlightenment than better-known figures such as Thomas Hobbes and Rene Descartes, took a different view. He never imagined that human life as a whole could be rational, and in a lovely passage quoted by Watson he wrote: "Men are not conditioned to live by reason alone, but by instinct. So they are no more bound to live by the dictates of an enlightened mind than a cat is bound to live by the laws of nature of a lion."

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In Spinoza's view, the capacity for rational inquiry may be what distinguishes human beings from other animals, but it is not the force that drives their lives--like other animal species, humans are moved by the energy of desire. This view reappeared in the 20th century in the work of Sigmund Freud, who took the further step of recognising that much of human mental life is unconscious. In conjunction with later work in cognitive science showing that there are many vitally important mental processes to which we can never consciously gain access, Spinoza's naturalism has helped shape a view of human beings that is different from the one we inherit from classical Greek philosophy and from most Enlightenment thinkers.

One of the curiosities of intellectual life is the persistent neglect by philosophers of non-western traditions. No doubt this is partly ignorance on their part. Beyond a smattering of Plato and Aristotle and a few scraps from the British empiricists, most English-speaking philosophers know practically nothing of their own intellectual traditions, and no one would expect them to have any acquaintance with the larger intellectual inheritance of mankind. A more fundamental reason may be the view of the human subject found in some non-western philosophies. The ideas of personal identity and free will we inherit from Christianity have often been questioned, but they continue to mould the way we think, and any view of human life from which they are altogether absent remains unfamiliar and troubling. Watson is refreshingly free from the cultural parochialism that still disables so much western thought. Ranging freely across time and space, his survey includes some enlightening vignettes of Chinese and Indian thought, and he gives a useful account of Vedic traditions in which human individuality is regarded as an illusion. For those who want something more engaging than the dreary Plato-to-Nato narrative that dominates conventional histories of ideas, this wide range of reference will be invaluable.

Inevitably there are gaps in Watson's account. His treatment of Buddhist philosophy is cursory--a surprising omission, given his naturalistic viewpoint. He concludes with some interesting thoughts on the failure of scientific research to find anything resembling the human self, as understood in western traditions. He asks whether the very idea of an "inner self" may not be misconceived, and concludes: "Looking 'in', we have found nothing--nothing stable anyway, nothing enduring, nothing we can all agree upon, nothing conclusive--because there is nothing to find."

This conclusion is also mine, but it was anticipated more than 2,000 years ago in the Buddhist doctrine of anatman, or no-soul. The thoroughgoing rejection of any idea of the soul was one of the ideas through which Buddhism distinguished itself from orthodox Vedic traditions, which also viewed personal identity as an illusion but affirmed an impersonal world soul: an idea that Buddhists have always rejected. For them, human beings are like other natural processes, in that they are devoid of substance and have no inherent identity.

The view of the human subject suggested by recent scientific research seems less strange when one notes how closely it resembles this ancient Buddhist view. Modern science seems to be replicating an account of the insubstantiality of the person that has been central to other intellectual traditions for millennia. It is an interesting comment on prevailing ideas of intellectual progress that one should be able to find such remarkable affinities between some of humanity's oldest and newest ideas.

Constituting communities: Theravada Buddhism and the religious cultures of South and Southeast Asia by John Clifford Holt (editor et al.)

2007-09-04T02:01:00.000-07:00

Constituting communities: Theravada Buddhism and the religious cultures of South and Southeast Asia.(Book Review)
Rozenberg, Guillaume
2195 words
1 February 2005
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies
154
ISSN: 0022-4634; Volume 36; Issue 1
English
Copyright 2005 Gale Group Inc. All rights reserved.

Constituting communities: Theravada Buddhism and the religious cultures of South and Southeast Asia. Edited by JOHN CLIFFORD HOLT, JACOB N. KINNARD, JONATHAN S. WALTERS. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Pp. 224. Index. DOI: 10.1017/S0022463405220076

This collection, composed of an introduction and ten individual chapters, could equally well have been titled Revisiting Theravada Buddhism. It can in effect be read at two levels. As the actual title and the introduction indicate, its varied contents address the issue of what are the Buddhist elements and principles at work in the making of social communities in South and Southeast Asia and how they function. The theme of 'constituting communities' is, it must be said, a loose organising thread for the contributions to the book: the word 'communities' refers in the articles to various kinds of entities, and it rarely appears at the forefront of the authors' perspective. In other words, the question underlying the book may be put in even more general terms: how does Theravada Buddhism work as a medium for representing, organising and changing the world? To answer this question, the authors draw their insights mainly from the reading of textual sources, be they doctrinal, historical or contemporary. In spite of the subtitle suggesting a wide geographical scope, the focus of the chapters dealing with historical or contemporary aspects of Theravadin societies is mostly on Sri Lankan religious culture. Burmese, Cambodian, Lao and Thai religious cultures are not at the core of any of the chapters. Still, as some of the contributors themselves suggest, the questions raised and the interpretations put forward from the reading of texts or the observation of the Sri Lankan contexts could often be fruitfully transposed to the study of the history and religious cultures of Southeast Asian Theravadin communities.

Therefore and secondly, the book can also be seen as a major contribution to the study of Theravada Buddhism at large. Each of the chapters revolves around one or more core issues in the field of Theravada Studies: karma, merit and its transfer, kingship, sainthood, religious reform, localisation of imported monastic lineages, monastic authority, ways of spreading the Buddhist religion and the cult of the Buddha. In each case, the book renews our understanding of these issues by revealing aspects usually overlooked in the existing scholarship.

In the opening chapter, entitled 'Communal karma and karmic community in Theravada Buddhist history', Jonathan S. Walters calls for a change of focus in the analysis of the notion of karma. He argues that it has mainly been considered in its individual dimension, whereas the ways it links individuals and forges community bonds have been neglected, with the remarkable but far from satisfactory exception of James P. McDermott's work. Karma is not only an individual's stock of meritorious and demeritorious actions accomplished throughout one's successive existences and influencing one's becoming, it is also a collective making and something which bears collective results. Coining the term 'sociokarma' to stress these collective dimensions, Walters proceeds to offer a typology of seven kinds of sociokarma. Thus individuals such as the Buddha and his entourage may encounter each other and be linked one way or another through existence after existence because of the dynamics of their karmic interactions, a phenomenon which the author labels the 'co-transmigration of social units'. Also, social institutions may be endowed with a kind of karma: they may be reborn with the same organisation (but not necessarily with the same individuals) at different times.

In 'Towards a theory of Buddhist queenship. The legend of Asandhimitta', John S. Strong suggests that thinking about Buddhist kingship, a much-studied institution, requires attention to Buddhist queenship, a much-disregarded institution. He examines the various dimensions in the personality and role of one of Asoka's queens, Asandhimitta, as it is described in three ancient sources from Southeast Asia. His analysis simultaneously shows what makes a genuine Buddhist queen according to these sources (merit-making in past and present lives, ability to manage the kingdom in the place of the king, conspicuous subordination to her husband's authority and spiritual accomplishment), and demonstrates the kind of mutually supportive though hierarchical relationship that exists between the king and the queen, so that the paradigmatic Asokan kingship could not be fully instantiated without the queen's contribution.

The two subsequent essays deal with the ways a Buddhist saint may act in the world to save people. In 'Beggars can be choosers. Mahakassapa as a selective eater of offerings', Liz Wilson emphasises how the relationship of gift-giving between a holy figure such as Mahakassapa and lay people entails a mechanism of 'transfer of demerit'. Mahakassapa is well known for choosing to take gifts of food from especially destitute people. In consuming this food or accepting what is an impure gift, Wilson explains, the saint consumes a part of the donor's bad karma and allows him or her to obtain a better rebirth. Throughout the chapter the author compares this mechanism with the principle of the Vedic sacrifice.

This is specifically the argument of Julie Gifford in 'The insight guide to Hell. Mahamoggallana and Theravada Buddhist cosmology', namely that the Buddhist saint, far from being solely the kind of world renouncer typically embodied in the figure of the forest monk, is also and correlatively a world saviour. In fact, it is the accomplishment of the saint in the solitary practice of forest meditation that allows him to work towards others' salvation. Gifford expands upon the case of Mahamoggallana, a disciple of the Buddha famous for his supernatural powers. These powers notably make possible his travels to different planes of existence of the Buddhist cosmology: deva (heavens) and peta (ghosts, hells). He subsequently reports to the Buddha and to lay people about his encounters with the inhabitants of these planes and relates the karmic paths that led them there. This is a way the compassionate saint may teach the community of his devotees and guide them towards right action.

The next three chapters move from a concern for doctrinal or ideological patterns to an emphasis on historical patterns. In 'When the Buddha sued Visnu', Jacob N. Kinnard investigates how from the end of the nineteenth century until the 1950s, the internal divisions and external frontiers of the community constituted around the site of Bodhgaya, the place of the Buddha's Enlightenment, evolved dramatically. Focusing on a few significant events and characters, Kinnard sheds light on how Hindus, Buddhists, the Indian nationalist movement, colonial justice and the Western conceptions of Asian religions all interacted throughout the period in the complex and tense making of this community. The author's historical approach allows him to suggest that Victor Turner's notion of communitas is not fully adequate to give account of what happens around such a pilgrimage site.

John Clifford Holt's 'Minister of Defense? The Visnu controversy in contemporary Sri Lanka' attempts to explain why the cult of Visnu, widespread in Sri Lankan religious culture as the deity is considered a defender of the Buddhist religion and of the country, has recently been under fierce attack by some members of society. Dwelling at length on the discourse of a foremost critic of this cult, a highly mediatic monk named Soma, the author argues that the call for religious reform through the exclusion of what has often been termed popular practices originates less in a concern for the preservation of an unachievable purity of the Buddhist religion than in a reaction of fear by some members of the Sinhalese community, especially urban middle-class people, who see the presence of Hindu Tamils on the island as a threat to the national Buddhist identity. Ethnic conflict is at the roots of religious reform, while religious reform also nurtures ethnic conflict.

While Holt's chapter gives a bleak account of a dynamic of closure and exclusion within Sri Lankan society, Anne M. Blackburn's essay on 'Localizing lineage. Importing higher ordination in Theravadin South and Southeast Asia' describes how the same society was able to incorporate successfully a foreign tradition of higher ordination coming from Ayutthaya in 1753, at a time when there were no longer any fully ordained monks in Sri Lanka. She discusses the factors that made this importation a success and the steps taken by its supporters to transform a foreign cultural product into a local tradition. She concludes by suggesting how her model of localisation may offer new insights on some episodes in the history of Southeast Asian Buddhism.

The last three chapters deal with some of the ways the Buddhist religion may spread and take root in a community: preaching, religious booklets and the visual cult of the Buddha. In 'Preacher as a poet. Poetic preaching as a monastic strategy in constituting Buddhist communities in modern Sri Lanka and Thailand', Mahinda Degalle depicts the rise and characteristics of a style of preaching known as 'poetic preaching' (kavi bana) in modern Sri Lanka. The distinctive feature of this mode of preaching lies in the use of verse language and musical tone to give a Buddhist sermon. It renders the sermon far more appealing to the audience and has thus constituted an effective technique for spreading the Buddha's words, particularly in rural areas. Degalle compares the Sri Lankan founder of this kind of preaching, the monk Gunaratana (1914-1989), with the Thai monk Phayom Kalayano (b. 1949), whose lively style and concern for social matters, especially the behaviour of the younger generation, have also made him a most famous preacher. The author stresses the resistance both figures met in their endeavour, since monastic discipline forbids the use of poetry for preaching. He links such resistance to tensions inherent in the structure of national Buddhisms, notably between those seeing Buddhism as a normative tradition to be preserved as it is and those favouring an evolutional and adjustable Buddhism. True, Degalle concludes, were the Buddha here to give his opinion, he might reject poetic preaching, but it nevertheless fits with a modern context and is an indispensable tool in spreading the Master's words.

In examining the contents of a handbook of Buddhism which has contributed significantly to shaping the religious culture of generations of Sri Lankan Buddhists in the twentieth century, Carol S. Anderson's chapter, "'For those who are ignorant". A study of the Bauddha Adahilla', illustrates another of the ways the Buddhist religion spreads. Anderson emphasises that the main impression the handbook left on its numerous readers concerns the idea of the Buddha as the greatest superman in the world and not of the view of a great rational thinker; such a representation notably implies that the ritual cult of the Buddha has a protective effectiveness. This leads the author, among other things, to question the nature of the Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which has generally been equated with a move towards 'Protestant Buddhism'. Was the true driving force of this revival, she asks, an intellectual re-examination of the Buddhist doctrine or the reformulation of the ritual worshipping of the Buddha?

The final chapter by James R. Egge, 'Interpretive strategies for seeing the body of the Buddha', discusses successively two types of material: some canonical texts depicting the extraordinary physical characteristics of the Buddha through his encounters with some disciples, and some early stupa reliefs which include such non-figurative elements as trees, wheels, thrones, etc., representing the Buddha. Egge is asking what the body of the Buddha may mean to the one who sees it, and how it may be seen when the Master has physically disappeared from the world. The Buddha's body and its markers appear from both sets of materials as signifying either his mundane or his supramundane greatness, his status as superman or his status as one Awakened; both are sometimes articulated in a single representation. Inspired by Charles Pierce's terminology, the author distinguishes symbolic and iconic modes of representation. The former uses signs as conventions to evoke the essential qualities of the Buddha, while the latter works through an 'immediate' display of his Buddhahood; the former grounds belief, while the latter arouses devotion. Egge suggests that a shift took place from the one to the other around the first century BCE.

It is no wonder that this stimulating book, written with great clarity and insight, is dedicated to Frank K. Reynolds. Reynolds' work and teaching at the University of Chicago have deeply marked and renewed the study of Theravada Buddhism from the early 1970s onwards, his influence being especially formative for the constitution of the field of Theravada Studies in America. Most of the contributors to the book, all of whom are his former or current students, now teach in American academic institutions. The book thus also offers an image of the current state of Theravada Studies in America; in reading it, one can only be truly optimistic about the future of the field.