So, how would you reply, we hear this a lot both in terms of students,
the popular press, people in general, even specialists who are writing books
about teaching Buddhism and so forth, and who have experience back in Asia.
They talk about Buddhism as not being a religion.
They say it's a philosophy.
They say it's a way of life.
They say it's a science, but It's not a religion.
So, focusing on Buddhism in its original context within Asia, and
not so much thinking about its current adaptations and
what that might mean in terms of such claims.
How would you respond to people asking the question,
is Buddhism, in its original context over 2,500 years, is that a religion?
>> Well, religion itself is a really slippery category,
and people have questioned its utility.
It's a fairly recent invention, this idea that there is such a thing called religion
and that it applies to all these things out there.
Generally, it's modeled on a kind of Christian religion [COUGH] and
it's a term that basically was invented by Westerners when they started to go out and
look at other phenomenon and sort of say, okay, well, that looks kind of religious,
and it looks religious because it looks kind of like what we're doing here.
This over here looks kind of superstitious, and
this here doesn't look religious at all.
So all these categories emerge in a particular context of modernity
in the first place, but I'm not saying that we should chuck the category.
I still think it's useful.
I teach in a religious studies department,
so, if I say religion is a meaningless term, I'd be talking myself out of a job.
But, I think, if we identify things religious with certain
things like prayer and belief in supernatural beings, and
things like that, then certainly we find those in Buddhism
going very far back, probably back to the beginning.
There are all kinds of supernatural beings in the earliest Buddhist scriptures.
There's not so much of a devotional worship orientation in the earliest
stratum of Buddhist scriptures, but that seems to enter in very quickly.
It may have been sort of outside the canons that we have today,
but still around, so the easy, short answer is yes.
Buddhism is a religion, and
the reason I think people can think of Buddhism as not a religion is because
it has been presented in various ways, often by Buddhists themselves,
as a kind of way of life, a philosophy, a science of mind, and stuff like that.
And, is that a complete misrepresentation?
Well, it is if we're talking about Buddhism in its various
multiple contexts in Asia, but it is kind of, I think,
an open question whether Buddhism can be practiced today in a kind
of non-religious way, in a secularized way, and I think that's possible, too.
It can become a kind of secularized technology of the self that
does not rely on ideas, for instance, of unseen beings, or does not incorporate
prayer, mythology, or what we think of today as kind of a mythical cosmos.
So, that's my shot at an answer.
>> So, if you were to look at, in this case, a religious tradition, or
particularly focus in on a specific contemplative tradition, and
asked the question about what makes it secular, or
what would it take to look at a particular contemplative tradition, and
make a series of changes that would take something that was inherently religious,
keeping in mind that religion, like every other word we're gonna use today,
has a history and is constructed and etcetera, etcetera.
Then, what would that primarily consist of?
What you referred to just now is two different aspects.
You talked about, on the one hand, a belief in supernatural beings, and then
prayer, presumably being, potentially, a medium of communication with them.
Then, on the other hand, you referred to mythology, which would, I guess,
be narratives about the past, that somehow we don't think, or
attested by historical inquiry, or using
the kind of evidentiary resources that we typically embrace within the academy.
Could you give us a picture of a sense of thinking
pragmatically about how a practice would go from religious to secular?
What the primary aspects of that process would be.
>> Yeah, that's a good question.
There are a lot of issues.
I think, first of all, you have to recognize that it might
look different in different national contexts because
different national contexts have different ways of dividing up the secular and
religious division, these categories.
So, we're here in America, so, in this case, I think, first of all,
you have to be sensitive to where these things are coming from.
Where these practices are coming from, and
be in dialog with the traditions that we're taking them from.
There are practices in Buddhism that were never meant to be widely distributed, and
so, I think, before you set yourself up as a teacher of Tantric contemplation or
something like that, you might wanna check what actual Tantric
practitioners think of the practices that you're teaching.
And just because you read it in a book doesn't necessarily mean that you're
authorized to teach it, so I think the first thing is that
you have to have kind of an understanding with the traditions themselves.
And I think Buddhists have been rather generous actually
in sort of offering a lot of their basic meditation techniques to the world.
And I don't think it's a matter,
at this point of cultural appropriation, like we would see and
say New Age folks doing Native American rituals or something like that.
I think there's a whole other set of issues there, but
I guess the way that divide happens in the US, I mean,
there is always gonna be a little bit of a blurry area because you're always.
I think one of the important things about meditation that I've
been thinking about and writing about lately is that it's not just a kind of
bare practice in which you have a kind of
unmediated access to your own experience, or to the world, or something like that.
You're bringing in certain values,
a certain kind of, maybe not explicit, but at least a kind of implicit ethic.
So I think you have to consider what kind of ethic you're bringing to it.
So, when we sit down and meditate, and
we go off then and say, well, I think this helped me.
I think it helped me today because, what?
Well, because I didn't yell at my spouse when she did something that annoyed me.
Well, there's a value there that you shouldn't yell.
I might live in a cultural context in which it's fine to yell my spouse, and
nobody would say anything about that, but
we're bringing a certain value to that that meditation seems to foster.
So, in a sense, meditation is fostering a set of ideas,
of values, even if these are often very implicit.
And so I think you have to kind of reflect on what those values are and
where they come from.
And ask whether they're really coming from a particular tradition.
Then, of course, the question comes up, are we then kind of imposing
a certain kind of religious value system on the people that we are teaching?
Again, I think there's always a kind of fuzzy area because people talk, for
instance, about civil religion, that there's a kind of unofficial
quasi-religion in America that we all sort of espouse.
And so, is it okay to espouse those values?
Is it okay to import certain Buddhist values that could work in a secular
context and don't necessarily have a kind of religious connotation in our culture?
So, yeah, it's a difficult question, really, the how question.
Do you have any thoughts, yourself, about that?
[LAUGH] >> Well,
since we actually have to teach about it, just like you do.
>> Yeah.
>> I've just been going through it very analytically, and
it's great what you said about situating it within a particular nation or
a particular culture cuz we often like to just go abstract and say, well,
here's how you do the secularization process.
>> Mm-hm.
>> But I think one of the things I've become interested in is the division
between secularization and
moving across cultural boundaries, which raises a complex issue.
Which is, what is the relationship of religion and culture?
I think we were raised in certain context to think about these as fairly kind of
separate things, that religions are a set of beliefs and
a set of practices, and culture, on the other hand, is over here and separate.
But, when we're moving across fairly dramatic cultural differences,
such as Europe and America going over to Asian cultures and becoming interested
in Buddhism, for example, and then wanting to bring those back,
we're moving across two different things if we're interested in secularization.
We're both trying to think about how might these be appropriate in a public place,
a healthcare industry, a K-12 environment, whatever it might be.
And, on the other hand, how we might take
that very specific tradition within a particular cultural context and
move it into a very different cultural context with different assumptions,
different values, different aesthetics, and so forth.
And it strikes me that a lot of people, including a lot of teachers,
are very dismissive of this.
They talk about cultural baggage, they talk about culturally laden, or
they use dismissive terms like metaphysics or philosophy and so forth.
And they just say we're not gonna deal with any of that because we're just gonna
focus on the real deal, the practice, and yet, it raises questions.
Is that really the real deal?
Is that really the profundity?
When Buddhism itself talks about some Nirvana being the same thing, or
being in the same place, and yet we make all these dismissive comments about
the stuff we're going to leave behind.
Have we really understood what we're doing?
>> Right. Well, I think that in itself, the very
inclination to do that, is also a part of our Western culture because we have
a certain strand of Western culture that says, basically, I,
in order to self-actualize as an individual, I have to rise above culture.
I have to put culture aside.
I have to be my own person.
And so that whole narrative gets wrapped into Buddhist meditation practices
and changes them in a lot of ways.
If I'm meditating in order to create a certain kind of self,
whether I conceive of it that way or not, and free myself from society,
social influences, cultural influences,
I think that's a very different thing than what most Buddhists are doing.
>> If we go back to your own past, and
you grew up in an Evangelical tradition, what does someone in an Evangelical
tradition have to give up in order to imagine that there's something useful?
It could be a component, if not the whole tradition in Buddhism.
Because that's a tradition, it's a deeply emotional tradition.
>> Yeah, yeah.
>> It's a deeply interpersonal and social tradition.
>> Uh-huh.
>> And if we can imagine Evangelical traditions as test scripts for
imagining, where is the dividing line between conflict and accommodation, right?
>> Yeah. In other words, how-
>> Right, if someone,
a member of an Evangelical tradition is interested in meditation,
what does that need to be, right?
How Buddhist or un-Buddhist can it be for someone?
It's an abstract question, but if we can imagine a certain
quite well-defined group that
places a great deal of importance on their right to religious identity in America.
>> Yeah.
Well, I think that's where the framing of meditation in completely
secular terms, and I'm always using secular in quotes here,
has been kind of essential for it's popularity,
its spread, because, on the one hand, we wouldn't be here
under the auspices of the contemplative sciences center if that weren't the case.
This is a public institution, and
you would never see it in churches because it would be religious competition.
It's only if somebody keeps saying over and over,
this is not a religious practice in the way we're doing it, that it can have any
hope of gaining any traction in a Christian church.
And this is something that goes back to, I'm reminded, for
instance, of a discussion between DT Suzuki and
Thomas Merton, where they were sort of analyzing the place of meditation.
They both did it, and, for Suzuki, the idea was, yeah, you
might have sort of theistic experiences, but ultimately the goal of meditation is
to kind of get beyond that, beyond this personal deity and things like that.
Whereas for Murtin, meditation, the Buddhist meditation,
was something on the way to encountering God.
>> Mm-hm.
>> So again, these things can be contextualized in dozens of different
ways, depending on what particular group they're interacting with.
>> When you think back to childhood experience with Evangelical Christian
communities, and later you learned very well what Buddhist meditation was,
not just in its modernized form but in its traditional settings.
Do you see a place in Evangelical communities, a space that you might point
to for an Evangelical as to, like, this is what Buddhist meditation is all about.
Where there is analogous kind of moments or analogous practices that,
I think, following what Curtis said have an opening there?
>> Yeah, well, [COUGH] I mean,
thinking of meditation as a kind of psychological practice,
I suppose, might be a non-threatening label to put on it.
And, as I said, I think meditation, in a way,
it can be a kind of lens to amplify one's own values and ethics and so on.
So, if meditation is seen as a tool to live a better life,
according to a Christian model, and a way of becoming more in touch with your
own impulses towards either God or away from God, then I think that's possible.
I think the biggest obstacle in very conservative Christian communities is
that there's a real belief in supernatural forces that are evil, demons and so on.
And I think that it's probably much more pervasive
than people at universities tend to think.
And I think a lot of people think that meditation means kind of making your mind
blank and that leaves a door open for those forces.
So, there may be a limitation to how far it can.
>> Well, they might like those tantric forms of meditation,
where it's about fighting the good fight.
>> Well, yeah.
[LAUGH] That's possible, yeah.
And there are evangelicals, from what I understand,
who are sort of following around the chakra initiations and
cleansing the waters that the sand has been poured on.
Cleansing it of demons and things like that.
And so there is this model of spiritual combat,
but usually Buddhism gets on the other side of that.
[LAUGH]