Evan Thompson quote

 “it’s not the case that the experience of bare attention independently establishes the descriptive truth of the Buddhist mind-doctrine; rather, the Buddhist mind-doctrine is needed to give meaning to the experience of bare attention.” (Why I Am Not a Buddhist by Thompson)

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.

Evan Thompson's Criticism of Buddhism Modernism

From Sam Littlefair's excellent interview with Evan Thompson

"Buddhist modernism is the idea that Buddhism is either not a religion or is fundamentally different from other religions. I challenge that idea by pointing out that the, that the formative concepts in Buddhism — the whole Buddhist way of looking at the world: that existence is unsatisfactory, that liberation comes from the realization of not-self — those are religious notions.

Buddhist modernism says that science has shown that there is no self. It uses science to try to legitimize Buddhism. I argue that the scientific story about self is actually much more complicated than that. It’s not that “science says that there is no self.” Science says that self is a construction, and, from a scientific point of view, it’s actually a very useful and functional construction. Whereas, from the Buddhist perspective, it’s a problematic illusion.

I also criticize a recent form of Buddhist modernism that is sometimes called neural Buddhism, which is the idea that neuroscience shows the validity of Buddhist meditation by showing how Buddhist meditation changes the brain in beneficial ways and (again) proves that there really isn’t a self — because, if you look inside the brain, there is no self to be found. So, I argue that, first of all, the evidence for the effects of Buddhist meditation on the brain are very tentative. There’s a lot of hype around that. And, it’s not really the right way to think about what meditation is. Meditation is as much a kind of ritual, communal practice as it is something that occurs in an isolated individual, inside their head. Many of the beneficial effects of meditation may come from the community support structure and the sociality of the practice

Then, when Buddhist modernists say that Buddhism isn’t a religion and try to use science to justify Buddhism — that’s an instance of misunderstanding what religion is and what science is and the relationship between religion and science. Religion is about communities, texts, traditions, and practices that give meaning to life and life’s great events, like birth and death. Religion has frameworks for understanding those events. And those frameworks have to do with community and, and shared practices and rituals. And science is about the knowledge that we acquire when we are able to agree publicly and inter-subjectively on modes of investigation, ways of testing things, tools — like mathematics — that we can use to model and check things. Asking whether science and religion are compatible or incompatible is like asking whether religion and art, or science and art are compatible or incompatible. It’s not the right kind of question to ask. Religion isn’t inherently incompatible or compatible with science. It depends on how you practice religion and how you think of science."

He wrote a book about how he's not a Buddhist.

Later he goes on to say, "“You know, this isn’t really about seeing things as they are. This is about learning to sculpt your experience in a certain way. You’re being given certain concepts, like impermanence and moment-to-moment arising and you’re using them to attend to your experience in a certain way, and you’re accentuating things in your experience, and you’re not speaking — because it’s a silent retreat — so you’re internalizing these instructions and concepts in a powerful way. And you know that everybody else is doing this. And this is kind of a collective social construction that we’re all reinforcing for each other. It’s as much about creating a certain mode of experience as it is about revealing anything pre-existently there.”"

He writes, "My criticisms are meant to be friendly ones that grow out of my own involvement with Buddhism and my belief that it really is a very fundamentally important human tradition. But, I want to bring these things out and have people reflect on them."

Later, "...the recognition of the diversity of intellectual, philosophical traditions and the importance of their interaction, without shutting down a conversation by affirming allegiance to one."

Also, "The Buddhist communities that I was interacting with had very much a Buddhist exceptionalist attitude, a sense of having found the true path, a sense of superiority, of sanctimony. While, at the same time, they were filled with interpersonal human relationship dynamics, often involving a lot of sexism and in some cases abuse of women on the part of the teachers. So, as a result of all of those different elements, it became important for me to really think about and clarify both philosophically and personally what my relationship to Buddhism was. And that, in effect, is what led to this book."

Fascinating stuff. I better stop quoting. Go read the article linked at the top. And read other articles by Littlefair, he's quite a journalist.

But I liked this line of thought: "I would object to an idea of authenticity or purity — the idea that I’m a member of a tradition and it’s the authentic and pure one. If it’s “authentic and pure” that means that it’s insulated unto itself and has a special, unchanging inner teaching that isn’t shaped by the world and history and context and culture. I think that’s just false. Everything is always changing and interacting with other things. That’s the world in which we live."