Evan Thompson

 “Buddhism is one of humanity’s great religious and intellectual traditions. It is, and deserves to be, a participant in the secular and liberal democratic societies of our modern world. It is, and deserves to be, a contributor to a cosmopolitan community, one in which people participate in relationships of mutual respect and cooperation, despite their differing beliefs.”

Above are the first sentences from Why I Am Not a Buddhist by Evan Thompson. 

Why do I feel like he's going to spend the rest of the book dismissing it?

It's good to explore the opposite case. I have a lot of hope for this book, hope that I don't renounce Buddhism. But it has to be a real possibility to engage honestly. 

I've been playing a lot of chess. When you make a bad move, inaccurate, it ruins a game, you lose. I hope I can get through the book without quitting too early. If I'd quit Buddhism because I made some bad moves, I would have regretted it. I keep playing.

Lindisfarne Association (1972–2012) was not something I knew about. 

Thompson's experience when the zen of Reb Anderson joins the community:

“My sister, Hilary, and I were not so impressed. The other kids weren’t either. We were used to running all over our ten-acre property doing whatever we liked. Now we had to take off our shoes and keep quiet whenever we entered the main lodge. There were more dinners with mushy brown rice and overcooked steamed vegetables that not even huge gobs of ketchup could fix. A weird formality seemed to have taken over many people in the community. The occasional silent meals were the worst. To get anyone to pass you anything you had to make hand gestures and bow afterward. Of course, we made faces at each other trying to get someone to break down and laugh. Then we’d run around imitating the pious expressions and silly gestures of the adults. I was the oldest kid, and sometimes I would go to the daily group meditation at five-thirty in the afternoon before we ate dinner at six o’clock. My father thought the presence of Zen made the meditation room’s atmosphere thick and weighty, but the Zen demeanor seemed forced to me.”

He went on to study with Thurman, and did his senior thesis on Keiji Nishitani and his first published article was comparing Nishitani and Heidegger. “Thurman had taught me that critical reasoning was itself a form of meditation.” In his explorations in mediation, “I kept encountering anti-intellectualism, sanctimoniousness, naïve reverence, and downright fetishism.” I've seen that word a lot lately. Feishism's non-sexual meaning is "worship of an inanimate object for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit."(Oxford Languages)

He references this article regarding the sexual misconduct of Buddhists, and others. He's referenced so many interesting books I want to read, including Ann Gleig's American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity. He writes, “I mention the scandals because people I know have suffered as a result of them. These events and their harmful effects need to be acknowledged in any book on modern Buddhism. They’re also one reason why I was unwilling to join the Buddhist communities I encountered.” 

Wow. I respect his decision but I don't expect teachers or gurus to be perfect. Sexual misconduct is a huge problem in the sangha, true, but only because perhaps we expect to renounce sexuality in pursuit of the goals. And as everyone knows making things forbidden can ramp up the excitement. 

He takes a turn into neuroscience that I'm afraid loses me. But he asks some interesting questions: “Can scientists who are personally invested in meditation practice be objective and impartial in their research on meditation? Why is there so much antecedent commitment to establishing that meditation is beneficial when many people also report experiencing negative effects?” He starts to define Buddhist exceptionalism: “Buddhism was seen as superior to other religions, or as not really a religion but rather as a kind of “mind science.”

“From a philosophical perspective, the problem with Buddhist exceptionalism is that it presents Buddhist theories of the mind as if they’re value-neutral descriptions, when they’re based on value judgments about how to cultivate or shape the mind to realize the supreme Buddhist goal of nirvana. In philosophical terms, the theories are normative—they’re based on ethical value judgments—and soteriological—they’re concerned with salvation or liberation. Buddhist theories of the mind lose their point if they’re extracted from the Buddhist normative and soteriological frameworks.”

He goes on to describe Buddhist modernism: “This is the modern and transnational form of Buddhism that downplays the metaphysical and ritual elements of traditional Asian Buddhism, while emphasizing personal meditative experience and scientific rationality. Buddhist modernism presents itself as if it were Buddhism’s original and essential core, when in fact it’s historically recent.”

He gives his answer as to why he wasn't a Buddhist: “Since I didn’t want to join a traditional Theravāda, Zen, or Tibetan Buddhist monastery, the only way to be a Buddhist was to be a Buddhist modernist. But Buddhist modernism is riddled with philosophical problems.” (p.22)

“Buddhist modernism encourages a kind of false consciousness: it makes people think that if they embrace Buddhism or just pick out its supposedly nonreligious parts, they’re being “spiritual but not religious,” when unbeknownst to them religious forces are impelling them.” (p.24)

He references an article: Spirituality as Privatized Experience-Oriented Religion: Empirical and Conceptual Perspectives

At a certain point I see that I'm quoting too much and I just suggest you read the interesting book, and indeed I hope I can follow up on some of the interesting stuff he refers to as well.

I’ll be looking for a path between Buddhist exceptionalism and modernism without being a mother mastic which Thompson doesn’t think possible.