Notes on the grounds for a properly critical Buddhist praxis

One challenge for Buddhists in the 21st century is that the conditions for its acceptance in cosmopolitan discourse include the suppression of some of the most important insights and practices that Buddhist lineages transmit. If we seek to be in conversation, as an ethical community, with governments, corporations and INGOs, we find that the very language we are required to use already commodifies Buddhist teachings as another technology of the self, yet another iteration of the fetishization and commercialisation of an ideal citizen/consumer. This is not an accident: enforcing the self is a key strategy of the colonial/missionary project that created the cosmopolitan we presently inhabit.

Buddhist methods and doctrines emerged long ago in response to a social/epistemological crisis materially connected to the rise of cities and trade. I take Śākyamuni to be a critical theorist in the sense that he knew his own teaching, and the teaching of any Buddha, to be contingent. The teaching of the Dharma is always in response to a particular assembly of listeners at a particular historical moment in a particular environment—and it is always possible for a person to struggle over millions of lifetimes to attain Awakening only to find there is no one or no way to teach. This is the cautionary value of the figure of the Pratyekabuddha. There is always the threat that the transmission of the Dharma will be lost. The written records of the earliest Buddhist texts must be understood as efforts to found an ongoing, emancipatory, and revolutionary project.

Yet the world in which Śākyamuni taught Buddhism and founded the Sangha was profoundly different to the world in which you read these words. The context for his critical praxis was not the same as ours. It is hard to grasp how different that world was. Towns and cities were becoming an important part of ordinary life, but most people worked in primary agricultural production. There was no writing, no written records of ownership or status. Humans as a whole were far fewer. The wild places where Buddhist monasteries were to be located were actually only a short walk from the main market of the towns that supported them. The gap between the wellbeing of a peasant and a wealthy merchant was nowhere near so great as the divide between the oligarchs and the urban poor of today. Every human had direct experience of animals, both domesticated and otherwise; but most highly contagious diseases that took advantage of densely packed human settlements had yet to emerge. There was no concept of a universal humanity. How gender was conceptualised, regulated and performed was completely different.

What, then, are the features of our crisis? How must our transmission of the Dharma be ongoing, emancipatory and revolutionary? I will begin to sketch them out here. An important difference is that, thanks to the heroic effort of the being-that-came-to-be-born as Gautama and so many of his students and lineage followers, we confront our crisis with the Dharma in hand.

The emergence of the self within Euro-American societies from the 18th century onwards has been well documented by Foucault, Nikolas Rose and others. This inward transformation was paralleled by the outward-facing imperialism of the capitalist self through economic and missionary activity directed towards “savages” and “heathens” who didn’t “know who they were”. This is especially clear in the case of mission schools—but a similar process can be documented in the negotiation of trade treaties. The real teaching, the real discipline, happened in the framing of the message, not the message itself. It was the process of clothing, seating, being taught how to treat dogs and other animals. The teaching of the gospel was only the last stage in the systematic destruction of all other kinds of person and the absolute isolation of the human remainders.

The disciplined performance of atomistic individualism is not easy for humans whose person is cultured through countless symbioses, woven together with household, lineage, kinship ecologies: these natural connections must be cut off and the stumps scorched in order to have a neatly enclosed, utterly alone self that is sinful and whose only resort is God. (This severing is what I thought His Dark Materials was actually about—I was saddened to discover Phillip Pullman was an apologist for Protestant education.) Any sensibly connected person would resist such traumatic severing of their network, and overcoming that resistance has involved kidnapping children and forcing them to live in highly disciplined environments until they become civilised. Only when they have acquired the right kind of self can they they see themselves as potential converts to a doctrine that requires a kinless, friendless and lost soul as a prerequisite for being human. Communities worldwide were violently transformed: whatever it meant to be a person before the arrival of the mission schools, the process of cultural transmission and inculcation of many diverse ways of personhood had to be destroyed and replaced with a uniform education that created civil subjects with souls inside.

And in the transition through the 20th century, these processes were refined, institutionalised, professionalised and internalised as the discipline of marketing. We still use institutions both on the inside (prisons, schools) and on the outside (missions, schools) to promulgate the self, but we are several stages of metamorphosis beyond the project of the missions and early prisons: now we have marketing. Marketing is the new evangelism, and we are its blind but willing missionaries. We deliberately interrupt and surrender the process of enculturating our own children, through branded products, mass media, social media, and public display. (This is the point of Naomi Klein’s first well-known book No Logo.) There is a clear and ruthless understanding within marketing psychology, easily rivalling Buddhist insights in its precision, as to how and why corporations want to shape the ethics, experience, and social possibilities of human animals as they acquire culture on the way to becoming economic actors. Marketing as a discipline and advertising as a craft are the deliberate fetishization of a damaged self by people who know perfectly well that the self is a construct, appropriating those very processes to create insecurity and dependence. Once infected, consumers self-commodify in order to create profit for the owners of the brands through whom they struggle to grasp an ever-retreating sense of worth. 

The Western technology of the self is not compatible with Buddhist practice. For many Buddhists raised in the industrialised West, whether as children of immigrants or having taken refuge after childhood in another culture, the disciplined cultivation of the liberal self (a civil self, an economic self, a child watching adverts on the TV self) is ordinary and normal long before they encounter Buddhism, either as ‘culture’ or as ‘doctrine’. One result is a terrible disconnect between cultural practices of Buddhism such as ancestor worship, making merit, and supporting the Sangha, and ‘normal behaviour in civilised society’. Many Western Buddhists and scholars of Buddhism have responded to that disconnect by trying to separate Buddhist doctrine (which ideally should ‘make sense’) and the quirks of one or another Buddhist culture (accidental accretions around a pure message). Even this has failed, though. When I read yet another Western Buddhist dismissing reincarnation as an optional belief in Buddhism or insisting that the Sangha isn’t essential to the survival of Buddhism, I see the ideology of the liberal self successfully commodifying the challenge of Buddhism, neutralising its threat, and appropriating its charisma as a resource with which to re-sell the idea of the self.

There are points of resistance in radical theory. Examples might be Bakhtin’s insistence on the dialogic process as constitutive of ‘self’, and some moments of radical feminism (Irigary, Cixous) that opposed nonlinear, poorly bounded, indecisive, collective discourse to heroic individual assertion. Understanding this history and building resistance to it is a core project of Indigenous peoples in many parts of the world. Indigenous theorists such as Dale Turner, Kim Tallbear and Robin Wall Kimmerer work to expose and untangle whole orders of ontological and epistemological bondage and make the threads available for reweaving. I would suggest that Buddhists have a great deal to learn from all of these allies.