Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Rob Hattam presents the opening of a seven-part lecture series examining how Buddhist practice, particularly Tibetan Buddhism, can engage meaningfully with social and political problems in contemporary times. Drawing on his PhD thesis written around the September 11 attacks, Hattam traces his journey from school teacher concerned with educational inequality to a practitioner struggling to reconcile Buddhist philosophy with Western social theory and activism. He frames the series through the question: how can one live an ethically and politically engaged life in an unjust world? In this session he outlines his methodology—a dialogue between Western critical theory and Gelug Buddhism—identifies key problems both traditions face, and previews upcoming talks on scriptural justifications, the Dalai Lama’s universal responsibility, Thich Nhat Hanh, engaged Buddhist activists, and the integration of practice with social change.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2008 08 15 CiA.mp3
UUID: 783889e1-1134-4069-b551-f6b9ebc6102e
Teacher: Rob Hattam
Collection: Compassion in Action (Rob Hattam)
Date: 2008-08-15
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~9,233
So thank you Lindsay and Jampa for inviting me to come and run this series of talks. So as Lindsay, I think accurately diagnosed my problem, I’m sort of quite interested in the way that Tibetan Buddhism translates into Western contexts. As a consequence of that, about ten years ago or more I found myself writing a PhD about that topic. And so this series of talks sort of emerges out my PhD thesis. Don’t know why Suzanne’s here, she’s the only person oh no, there’s two people that read my PhD and Suzanne’s one of them, so she knows my thesis.
Haven’t actually had a chance to actually perform the whole thing before, so this is sort of quite novel really. So thanks very much for that sort of opportunity. Suzanne reckons it stacks up, I hope I can perform it skilfully. But one of the things of course that I was trying to do inside of my writing was have this conversation across two traditions really, a Western and an Eastern one. The outset you have a problem because if you’re in dialogue with two traditions then which format do you actually use?
Because each of them have different formats and they have different sort of rituals and so on so. And here I am in Buddha House talking so there’s a ritual for talking inside of Buddha house as well. So it’s probably appropriate to start off with the ritual beginning for being in this space is there are the sort of prayer books around so maybe we should say refuge and not just launch straight into. Around the time that I stopped being so active in Buddha House you change the refuge prayer. I used to know the old version, but there’s another version.
I wouldn’t want to get it wrong. So yeah, it might be just appropriate to say we just say refuge three times that would be that would be good So I go for refuge until I’m lightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Supreme Assembly By my practice of listening to the teachings and other may I become a to benefit all sentient beings I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Supreme Assembly By my practice of listening to the teachings and other perfections may I become a Buddha to benefit all sentient beings In Tibetan texts as well, traditionally a there’s the texts themselves start with a homage homage to Mañjuśrī or homage to the Lamas or so given that this series of talks has been advertised around compassion and you know to officially begin the talk and homage to compassion. Just as again I think it’s conventional inside of Buddha house to be having a short meditation on Bodhicitta. I’ve read a lot about Bodhicitta. I’m still not quite sure that I’ve got it worked out, I’m so on and cheat.
Trying to give a meditation on Bodhicitta’s probably a little bit beyond me. Few years ago I came across this book Vast as the heavens deep as the sea Verses in Praise of Bodhi by Kunu Rinpoche. Don’t know whether people are familiar with this text but there’s something like three fifty stanzas in ‘Praise of Bodhicitta’ and if you have got any sense about what Bodhicitta is about then this prayer is incredibly moving. The way that I understand Bodhicitta there are precise definitions that Jampa could give because he would be able to remember them. For me it’s a more rough translation.
The opened heart that’s open to the suffering of all other beings, which is the first time that I came to teachings at Buddha House when Jampa was translating for Khen Rinpoche and Rinpoche started to talk about this idea of this sort of expansive form of compassion and you sort of knew about it intuitively but and you probably wanted to develop it in your own mind but it still is a pretty wild idea. It’s right out there, isn’t it? To have a heart that’s sort of that open. Anyway, just like the lotus among flowers is Bodhicitta supreme among all virtuous thoughts. Since having it brings immediate and final happiness, one should make every effort to produce it.
Since every knowledge of all modes of meditation has its origin in just this, this supreme bodhicitta, those who wish for freedom should certainly it their work. Kunu Rinpoche goes on in that sort of fashion. The ambrosia of Bodhicitta kills all sick beings wracked by the severe pains of the three sufferings in beginningless cyclic existence. So whatever sense of Bodhicitta one has then apparently it’s recommended to try and bring that idea up in your mind at the beginning of doing meditation or studying Dharma. Just sort of a preamble to this talk, suppose I’m just involved in one quite long preamble at this point.
The other day I was trying to work out what my how my talk actually fits inside of what’s considered to be a Dharma teaching at Buddha House and at that point I sort of got a little bit fearful because I’m certainly not going to be claiming to be teaching Dharma so if it’s not that then what is it? So I couldn’t answer the question the first time that I was of pondering and almost rang Jampa up and said I don’t think I can do this because I’m not qualified to present in this context. But thinking back to the times when I was active here and we were involved in lots of study groups and so on and so forth. I remembered the clear advice that Rinpoche used to give about the three key practices of the Dharma practitioner. Reading listening being one so you know getting access to Dharma teachings either through reading or listening to them.
And then the second practice is spending some time trying to understand you know what they are about and certainly the Tibetan monasteries spend most of their time on the second practice actually, debating and so on. And then the third practice is meditation and comes as a neat set. I think my presentation then is sort of an example of the second sort, so it’s an attempt to try and sort of understand the Dharma. I’m hoping that the presentation I give will actually be helpful and not confuse people. That is possible.
It’s happened in the past. But from my own side the my PhD thesis was a self clarification. I guess that’s what one does when one’s in the second phase you’re trying to clarify for yourself the meanings of the Dharma so that you can then you know enact it skillfully in meditation and in other ways so my series of talks is really just going to be an elaboration of my own self clarification but given that I’m doing it in public perhaps we can sort of engage in some discussion so that it’s not just you won’t just get to hear from me and so I get more self clarification that you might sort of engage in some yourself. It appears as though the session goes for a couple of hours so I don’t want to talk for all of that period. So perhaps the format that we might use is I just might get started so give me a little bit of time to sort of put out a few ideas but if you want to ask some clarifying questions at any time then do that by all means and if once I get started people want to want to you know start opening up the discussion then we can stop and just go wherever you want to go otherwise I’ll just keep talking for the first you know however long and then we’ll have some discussion.
So just a short introduction to these talks. I think that they’re called Buddhism in Times of Terrorism. The title is a bit provocative probably, maybe a bit misleading misleading but then maybe not. Title comes about because of the juxtaposition of the writing of my PhD, which is the material for this talk, and the September eleven plane crashes into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. So I just need to tell a little story about how that came about so that I can at least justify the title as it being more than just a ploy to get you here.
So, My project of writing a PhD thesis came about as a consequence of a couple of things. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s I was a school teacher. That’s how was making my living. I was quite concerned about social justice and education. I was working in a western suburbs high school and became quite clear to me that I think in Australia anyway that schooling produces social inequalities and if you’re interested in social justice then the trick is to try and work out how schooling might actually work for those groups in society that traditionally and historically hasn’t.
So this is not just a problem in Adelaide, it’s sort of a global phenomenon. As a consequence of that I started reading various types of social theory. Suzanne’s work in sociology and there’s philosophy, anthropology, history, political theory. Pondering questions like how did things get to be this way or what might make a difference to educational inequality or what’s the political project. So those sort of political type questions.
But then as well as you know thinking about what a teacher might do to you know make things better, I had my own sort of personal existential problems. We don’t need to go into those. But they you know, from from my reading, appear like they’re not just they’re not just ones that I’ve got that are you know, a few of you might have some of them as well, but I wouldn’t wanna impute that onto you. But anyway, through again, through sort of some happy accidents, I I turned up at Buddha House and after even a short amount of time practicing Buddhism is incredibly helpful. I found it incredibly helpful, particularly the meditation teachings.
And so at the time that I’ve got these other political type questions I’ve also got other queries like how to live an ethical life and what might I do personally to make things better or at least to alleviate my own suffering. I’ve got a sort of a double set of questions going on inside of my mind. This is not unusual I think particularly for people who just start off coming to Buddha House they have two conversations going and in the end of course is a you know how do you put the two conversations together seemed to me to be really really important otherwise I’ve got my Buddhism in one thing in my rest of my life that didn’t seem to be all that sensible Seemed quite silly actually. And part the, my sense of it as well was that living a Buddhist life meant applying my practice to my work and also to the development of the emergence of Western Buddhism. I don’t know, it appears that Western Buddhism is that old really in the scheme of things.
Some philosophers in the nineteenth century read Dharma and then wrote Western philosophy without letting it on, like Nietzsche and Heidegger. There’s been Buddhist ideas that have been incredibly important to the West even though the Western tradition, you’ve got to go digging to find that. Zen made it to the West in the 1920s and 30s and then of course the Tibetan Lamas walked across the Himalayas in nineteen fifty nine and the early 60s and all of a sudden the hippies are finding the Lamas in Northern India. So it’s relatively new and one might even argue of politically immature in the west compared to its eastern traditions. Just a couple of anecdotes around that confusion that I was having.
One sort of came to mind especially given that I was working in a school in the western suburbs in which the problem of poverty was incredibly significant for the students. The social theory that I read argues that poverty is socially constructed. It’s constructed out of the conditions of the society. It’s not an attribute or a natural condition of people. Alleviating poverty is a social problem and a political economic one.
Now you come to dharma lessons and poverty arises as a consequence of one’s karma, simply put. Of course that’s quite complicated but you know what I’m saying here. So again it appears as though I’ve got two almost contradictory propositions and this is, believe, and at that point I believed in both but how I could resolve this contradiction was quite sort of difficult. So this is just some of the themes that I’m trying to wrestle with. And I think Jampa was in the room when I asked Rinpoche about this problem.
I think the answer went something like: There wasn’t a contradiction, you just needed to understand the difference between causes and conditions. Anyway, we talk about that later, but I think I got the point. Another sort of anecdote. My partner is a self confessed recovering Catholic and many times in the past decade in response to something that was on the news, I don’t know how you guys shout at the TV and the radio. She asked me many many times, you know, provocatively where were the Buddhists?
Because at some points the social justice Catholics were making statements, but in Australia you don’t hear from the Buddhists in the public sphere. So this is sort of you know quite an interesting question for me. And of course one could pick issues such as refugee policy, support for the Iraq war, maybe even poverty and you could sort of add your own issues. You do hear from Buddhists when the Dalai Lama is concerned or around the Tibet issue but they’re related to specific political concerns to do with those communities but not so much to do with other concerns. It just appeared to me as though Buddhism has got very important things to say socially about all of those and there should be a voice in the public space from a Buddhist voice.
Anyway, there I have got this sort of problem in my mind. So it was around that time that I decided I’d write a PhD and I’d already done a master’s thesis out of my educational work and that was really what I thought I would do. And my thesis supervisor skillfully said, well, before you decide exactly what your PhD would be, you know go away and have a think about it and come back and tell me what projects you’d like to do and so I wrote down two that came out of my master’s thesis and then I wrote down this third one which was this conversation that I’ve got going in my head. So I revealed those three to him and then he said, which one do you really want to do? And the easy one was the first two.
Could have done them really, really quickly. But for some reason or other I said, I think I’d really like to do the third one. And being the bloke that he was he said well you know let’s do that. He knew nothing about Buddhism but he was interested in other sorts of theology. Anyway so I was writing this PhD as a conversation between two philosophical traditions, one Western and one Buddhist.
To give that a bit of specificity, Western tradition that I was reading goes by the term critical theory and the Buddhist tradition was the Gelug School of Tibetan Buddhism. Everyone is clear about what that means. So my thesis took about, well I took the whole eight years part time because I was working mostly full time. I don’t think I could have written it in under eight years anyway, I needed that amount of time to think about it. Anyway, at one point near the end of the process I was actually on Kangaroo Island and at Datong Ling and I was doing a writing retreat for a fortnight.
Have people been to Datong Ling? It’s sort of a cousin of Buddha House I suppose. One of the previous directors of Buddha House runs a retreat center on Kangaroo Island. If you haven’t been, it’s sort of highly recommended. And one of Jampa’s friends actually, an ex monk, has a retreat space there and he happened to be away.
Four and a half star cave, I thought it was. Very, very comfortable. So, don’t know whether have people done retreat, you know, Buddhist retreat before? You know, simple ones are quite straightforward. You wake up before the sun comes up, take the twenty four hour vows, have a cup of tea and maybe a bit of juice and then meditate for, you know, say all your prayers.
And then given that I was trying to write then I would start writing and then at lunchtime I’d have lunch, only have the one meal for the first three days I’d have to sleep in the afternoon because you’re just so tired when you start retreat. And then you don’t have any dinner and then you just meditate again after lunch and then meditate again at about ten o’clock. So meditate for three hours a day and write for the rest of the time only having one meal. I don’t know when I’m writing at home I just find it a real slog but doing it in retreat conditions by about the fourth day I was just so incredibly productive. So I managed to write nearly two chapters in two weeks and I’d taken eight years to write drafts up to this point.
Anyway, halfway through the second week my partner rang me up and told me that some people had driven some planes into the World Trade Center. So there I am, I’m on retreat and the whole world sort of shifts on me while I’m in the middle of writing my thesis. Dayton Ling didn’t have a TV that worked and the radio was pretty scratchy and so you’re in this sort of away from this monumental event. I must have been the last person on the globe to actually see it on TV. No, I think Dale was because he didn’t see it for ages.
Anyway, so when I came back, what I thought my thesis was about had taken on a whole new significance because the social conditions of the times had degenerated somewhat radically. Now terrorism really wasn’t a part of my thesis and I wasn’t going to include it at that point because I was just so far near the end, but I did have a fantasy at one point that I’d write an afterward, you know, maybe a couple of thousand words to sort of respond and tell a story about the terrorist event that happened while I was writing the thesis. But I just wanted to finish the thesis in the end and I decided I didn’t want to write the afterward but I have had a few fantasies since that I would write another book with titles like Protect Protecting Your Mind in Terrorist Times as just a ploy to get people to read a Lamrim text. It just appears to me as though the sort of the you know the Dharma teachings just become again even more sort of significant when when you’ve got this this new phenomena that’s that’s generates so much negative emotion and so on.
I told Jampa about this and so all of a sudden on the program at Buddha House there’s Buddhism in terrorist time and that’s how the title had come up really. But I think one of the provocation Buddhism in Terrorist times is from from my own side anyway, it’s think thinking about how Buddhism’s relevant for the times. And I think terrorist times is just a label we can use for talking about the times. It gives it a particular take of course. But then when you go and read, you know, Dharma teachings then there’s lots and lots of description of degenerate times even inso the cosmology goesthe times are becoming more and more degenerate.
Terrorist times I suppose is an indication of that. So for terrorist times again appears to me to be something that is quite worthwhile thinking about as a provocation not just as a ploy to get people to come to a talk. Guess on the making dharma contemporary, appeared to me anyway after I’d been studying Lam Rim here. Does everyone know what Lam Rim is? This was sort of a serious problem worth contemplating.
And it became clear it wasI’m sorry, have to apologize. I invariably forget this woman’s name every time I want to remember it. She lived in a cave for twelve years. Palmo. Tenzin Palmo came to Adelaide around the time when I was finishing my thesis.
I had opportunity to interview her for about an hour, which was fantastic one on one. I was asking her about, because I read her book and I was asking her about what she felt about the Lamrim. I don’t know whether people know but she meditated on lamb rim and did various other practices for twelve years and she said to me that when she came out of the twelve year retreat she read Dante and felt incredibly comfortable with Dante. And Dante is a medieval text so the proposition that she was putting was that studying Lamrim is like studying Dante, it’s a medieval text so if you’d all be familiar that the Lamrim’s written by a Atisha in about one thousand and something as request to the king of Tibet at the time to write a Dharma presentation for the Tibetans at that time to overcome various perversions. So you know, Lamp for the Path written more than a thousand years ago.
And then there’s various Lamrim commentaries were developed during that time and I think there’s seven or eight famous ones. Pabongka Rinpoche writes in the beginning of Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand. There’s Tsongkhapa writes three and he’s living in what the thirteenth or the fourteenth century. The third Dalai Lama writes a famous one and there’s been a couple of others since so these these the various famous commentaries on the lamb rim are all written, again sort of medieval texts, and they escape into the twentieth century over the Himalayas in nineteen fifty nine. So up to that point we’ve got them still being used, not really made contemporary because they didn’t need to because of the way that Tibetan society worked.
And then this medieval text is being taught in the West. And for some reason or another, miraculously or something it’s the power of the dharma and mostly works but there’s still you know some issues around all of that. Anyway get the point about how how we need to sort of think think through dharma texts into the times. The trick of course is not to lose the wise bits in making it contemporary. Now back to the sort of you know the terrorism.
I don’t know how you you went, I think I got the the Dalai Lama’s response to September eleven emailed to me twenty five times in the week after the September eleven event. After the invasion of Afghanistan, Lama Zopa’s feedback to FPMT students got circulated globally. There were other, what I call socially engaged Buddhist responses that were posted up on the Buddhist Peace Fellowship Every man, woman and their dog made a response. All the social theory journals I read had a special issue. You know what I mean?
There was a Buddhist response and a secular one. Because I was away on the time doing retreat, whole response to September eleven I developed as a of a fetish almost, I have to admit. But anyway, I just kept collecting people’s responses because I got incredibly interested in it anyway. I just want to read some Buddhist ones as sort of an opening move for the whole series of talks. Here’s one from Rinpoche Gelek.
I think this was up on the Buddhist Peace Fellowship website at the time. Think he was a teacher in Los Angeles or San Francisco. This is just an extract from him. I I I personally have my disgrace. I was angered by these events.
One thing I learned from my friend, the late poet Alan Ginsberg, was to be open. My friends know I hide nothing, so I admit I was angry that day. That Tuesday night, I gave a teaching at which I said I was angry. I couldn’t get the image of the second plane hitting the second tower out of my head. In the evening, when I heard that there had been explosions in Kabul, I caught myself thinking, God, I hope it was surgical.
That is the effect of anger. Some of you might become sad or depressed instead of angry. Don’t do that. You’d be hurting yourself. I don’t want to say anger is okay, but it’s natural for it to rise.
Look at me. I was angry though as a Tibetan incarnate lama. I’ve been in the love and compassion business for sixty years. For those who don’t have that much experience in the business of love and compassion, it’s okay. We just say that we shouldn’t be angry.
Not right now. Not for a while. Nobody should feel guilty about being angry. Every day of your life, anger, jealousy and hatred will arise. Disappointment will arise.
They’re all okay because we’re human beings, we have feelings. But despite objections, I’m repeating what I said that night on September eleven. It doesn’t mean we give our anger free rein or that we let it run out of control like a wild horse. We must put the bit in our anger’s mouth and hold the reins tightly and direct that anger making sure it doesn’t become hatred. And this is the Lama’s advice.
Now some of us have gone to the teachings on bodhisattva deeds and his response is quite sort of provocative really when recite the stanza about one small amount of anger causes so much problem. So here’s the guy who’s in the compassion business saying that being angry is okay but keep it under control so on and so forth. That was one response. Here’s the Dalai Lama’s letter to George Bush dated September twelve. Your Excellency, I’m deeply shocked by the terrorist attacks that took place involving four apparently hijacked aircraft and the immense devastation these cause.
It’s a terrible tragedy that so many innocent lives have been lost and it seems unbelievable that anyone would choose to target the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D. C. We are deeply saddened. On behalf of the Tibetan people, I would like to convey our deepest condolence and solidarity with the American people during this painful time. Our prayers go to the many who have lost their lives, those who have been injured and the many more who have been traumatised by this act of violence.
I am attending a special prayer for the United States and its people at our main temple today. I am confident that the United States as a great and powerful nation will be able to overcome this present tragedy. The American people have shown their resilience, courage determination when faced with such difficult and sad situations. It may seem presumptuous on my part, but I personally believe we need to think seriously whether a violent reaction is the right thing to do and in the greater interest of the nation and the people in the long run. I believe violence will only increase the cycle of violence.
But how do we deal with hatred and anger which are often the root causes of such senseless violence? This is a very difficult question, especially when it concerns a nation and we have certain conceptions of how to deal with such attacks. I’m sure you will make the right decision with my prayers and good wishes, your sincerely, the Dalai Lama. An amazing letter, really, to be written on the twelfth of September. Classic dharma lesson in the last paragraph about containing one’s anger and not moving to violence.
Here was Lama Zopa’s advice to centres after the invasion of Afghanistan. What I wanted to mention to the centres was to make sure you don’t rejoice. It’s very heavy negative karma. When we hear the name of the Taliban or whoever, of course if there is dislike or hatred towards them, then when you hear that they have been killed or destroyed, then naturally you rejoice or feel happy. Then when you rejoice, for example, when you hear one thousand were killed or hurt, you feel happy, and then you receive the same heavy karma of having killed a thousand people.
You’re sitting on the meditation cushion and you hear the information, then simply by rejoicing or just feeling happy, it’s the same heavy karma as killing a thousand human beings even though you were not in the war. You didn’t actually bomb or shoot them, you didn’t do anything. But you get the same heavy negative karma, that person who actually killed a thousand people. So as Pobankar explained Liberation and the BAM of Your Hand, I thought I would mention that there is a great danger when you hear the news and then immediately feel happy and rejoice. If you have dislike or hatred towards them, then this happens.
If you didn’t have hatred towards them, I don’t think rejoicing would happen. If you have hatred or anger, then the rejoicing happens, so bringing a a very heavy outcome. People who remember Lam Rim in daily life remember about karma and what is said in the Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand and the Lamrim teachings and who practice this don’t need to be told. But others who haven’t heard Lamrim but maybe don’t remember it in daily life, it might be useful to just announce this or to remind those students. When I heard the first time the destruction Afghanistan where there were a few places destroyed, I was not careful at that time.
The news didn’t say people but said some places were destroyed. I was not careful with the mind and watching the mind, so I felt something kind of good or something. Then immediately I remembered what I felt. There was no persons mentioned or killed, but there was a place destroyed. So after that I was more careful.
So be more careful not to rejoice when you hear the news. So here’s the lama’s opah even admitting how his mind is reacting to bombing the Taliban. Anyway, I guess this is where from my own sort of contemplation since writing my thesis that the notion of sort of protecting your mind seems to be incredibly important at this point because it seems so easy to engage in quite negative acts with your mind when there’s these sort of confusions. If you wanted to, we could sort of go on. There’s some more talk from the Dalai Lama.
The Dalai Lama has got his own sort of publishing industry really. There’s interviews about with the Dalai Lama. They’re all, you know, downloadable. There’s huge amount of information if you if you were incredibly interested about, you know, the particularly the Dalai Lama’s response to the war on terror. So that’s the sort of sets the scene for what I was trying to do with my thesis and hopefully sort of repositions it within this notion of terrorist times.
I hope people don’t feel like they’ve been gypped now that they find out that it wasn’t just sort of a ploy. But anyway, I just wanted to just sort of expand a little bit on, you know, what I was trying to do in my thesis. Gee, have I been talking for an hour already? No? Not quite.
So as I said before, thesis was a conversation between two philosophical traditions just to sort of give a little bit more of an outline about how I sort of constructed my conversation. So the Western tradition as I said was a sometimes goes by the title of critical theory. For those who aren’t familiar with the Western philosophical schools, critical theory was a term that was used to refer to a German social theory school in the 1930s called the Frankfurt School. And normally it’s capitalised so big C big T critical theory. Some of you will have critical theorists books in your libraries.
Eric Frome, Marcuse, Adorno, those people. Most hippies I know have at least got some Marcuse and some Eric Fromm. After the war, well during the war because they were Jewish they moved to New York. I think Marcuse stayed in the US and became a hero of the sixties because he was arguing for sexual liberation. He basically became the western guru of the sexual movement.
But anyway that mob of philosophers and a whole range of others with different sort of lineages tracked their philosophy back to a sort of neo Kantian form of critique developed as critiques of modernity or the Western Enlightenment project which sort of begins with the Scientific Revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I think Kant lives around that time. He sort of inaugurates a particular type of philosophical inquiry that’s interested in understanding the nature of the times. But also understanding the changing historical circumstances. Since Kant, the sort of lineage holders, if we can use that notion within that tradition, Kant, Hegel, Marx, And then after Marx, of course, there’s a whole range of other neo Marxist schools open up.
Althusser, the Frankfurt School were Marxists. I think what the Frankfurt School did was inaugurate conversation between Marxism and psychology, particularly psychotherapy. People who know Marcuse will understand that and Eric Fromm’s work. You’ve got a conversation between those that are trying to understand the social with the psychological, which is quite an an interesting project. How’s the self and the social relate?
That’s sort of the general question. More recently though, critical theories undergoing rejuvenation through feminist theory, postcolonialism, queer theory, anti racist struggle, what’s referred to as postmodernism, indigenous studies, the ecological and some even re engagements with the theological which is where I put my work. There’s some recent social theorists that are basically arguing that the postmodern condition, if we can use that term, is characterised as ‘consume more’ has turned out to be a false promise. You can’t you can’t solve your angst by buying more, and we’ve known that for a while, haven’t we? But that does seem to be the West’s religion.
Because that because that that it’s not turning out so well, then some people are die are discerning a a return return to the ancient traditions during the rise of the New Age. This center would be an example. So there’s a quite complicated conversation going on inside of the sort of Western philosophical tradition now which is almost impossible to keep up with. What I was really interested in was what some scholars are referring to as a re sacralisation of social theory. One of the characteristics of Western modernity is Nietzsche discerned the death of God.
The scientific revolution means we no longer need religion. We can use rationality that’s a secular rationality. So we no longer need the sacred. We have the rational instead. As I say, there seems to be a return to, you know, the sacred as a metaphor within the West.
And so that was sort of providing me with a space to be able to make some of my arguments. Just as for the benefit of those that are really, really interested, in critical theory there’s various types of critique. So Neo Marxists engage in ideology critique. If you like various versions of French philosophy then there’s deconstruction. Some of the Frankfurt engaged in what was called imminent critique.
Adorno developed his own form of critique called negative dialectics. Another French philosopher called Foucault developed another type of critique called genealogy. There’s various forms of social critique that are available. When I was doing my own thesis, I decided that I’d have to read some of these in my next life because it wasn’t possible to read them all. Anyway, one of the things I did with the opening move in my thesis was to try and discern not just key characteristics of both of these traditions.
I was writing my thesis as though you didn’t have you didn’t know about each tradition. The first chapter was like a formal introduction. So that’s a quick version of a formal introduction to the critical theory tradition. Then I wanted to discern some problems that each of the traditions was struggling with. If you’re going to engage in a dialogue then you want to hear what your main project is but what’s bothering you seemed to me as another important thing.
In the critical tradition, I discerned that it had a marginalised voice in the political process in neo liberal capitalist societies. I think know being in the university sector some people in my university anyway say you know impute critical theorist onto me and that’s seen as being just some quite weird freak in sort of common sense of the public space. People that I read get derided in the pages of The Australian for being freaks that are the cause of all our problems. Tradition gets derided in public sphere. As well, because of the nature of the critic, the process of critique, we love to argue amongst ourselves.
Probably for the last twenty years there’s been a quite inward looking argument going on within that interpretive community probably at the expense of speaking back into the public space as well. But the problem that I was most interested in from my side that I thought it had its biggest issues around and this is from knowing a little bit about Buddhism was the western philosophical traditions have a real problem thinking about the self. So the French philosopher Foucault made sort of an amusing comment in one of his interviews where he said that Marxism had many fiances in the century. Attempts to actually think through the self in conversation with the social. So there was phenomenology, was existentialism, and more recently there’s been various forms of psychology usually psychoanalysis.
That’s probably the more recent resource that’s being used by social theorists to think through the self. So there’s Freud and Lacan mainly but there are other forms of psychotherapy that are now providing resources for people to think that problem through. What hasn’t happened significantly or seriously is that people that are interested in the social haven’t returned to the religious traditions and engage in a conversation with those renderings of the self. That’s what I thought I might be able do with my thesis. There’s been no social theorist that had, apart from Eric Fromm I think, who’d actually referred to Buddhist resources.
So there was my sort of opening for how I might set the sort of conversation up. Buddhism could contribute to the Western conversation around thinking about the self. Well of course non self actually. That’s the sort of irony of it. I think the Western traditions have actually in the last twenty years anyway, come to a sense of non self, they’re, a Buddhist perspective, incredibly confused about what that is.
And then, of course, I introduced the Buddhist traditions briefly and the Gelugpa tradition. Then equally I tried to articulate what I thought were some problems for Buddhism, which is, how’s that? A bit courageous, being such a sort of an apprentice in the tradition. It seemed to me as though it was easy enough to make an argument that Buddhism, like all philosophies, struggles with problems of perversion and contestation between rival representeachings. One could at least say that.
Even it’s sort of a key teaching of Dharma actually in Chogyam Trungpa’s book called Spiritual Materialism. Most practitioners of Dharma are having to grapple with the perversion of Dharma. We have Dharma as opposed to practicing it mostly. I don’t know whether you’ve read Trungpa’s book but it’s a it’s a if you think you’re a Dharma practitioner then have another look at that because you maybe maybe you’re you’re just intellectualizing Dharma and not practicing it. Which is I don’t know how you go I’m often try to think I’m a serious practitioner but sometimes you’re not quite sure really but you’re just not using your own neuroses to well what does Trungpa say?
Something like you have to be careful that your ego is not your spiritual adviser. And given that the ego is such a trickster then probably mostly it is. Where the trick is to actually be done with the ego it sends up directing your spiritual practice. So our own ego commodifies the Dharma and we just keep on doing what we always were doing but saying we’re doing Dharma. But then what I thought was sort of significant and I’ve already started to identify what I thought was a problem with Buddhism in the West was the extent to which the practice of Dharma is being defined by responding to the economic, social and cultural problems of the day.
In my own life I’m not using Dharma to respond to big issues of the day I’m using it to fix up my own angst. I’m containing it within the personal it’s not part of the social. I just want to read a little bit here. The argument might be in terms of whether Dharma practice is best understood as a form of mystical quietism, something one does on one’s own and in one’s own head, or whether Dharma practice is actually more properly understood as socially engaged and hence involves a dialectical approach to the practices of mind transformation in responding to the suffering of the world. Even though Buddhism is invariably defined in terms of subduing the mind, as I’ve already demonstrated in the previous pages that doesn’t contradict the socially engaged position.
The socially engaged Buddhist position can be exemplified by the question put by Thich Nhat Hanh during his Buddhist inspired peace work in Vietnam in the late 1960s. The question, this is the question he put. Don’t know whether people know Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen practitioner, key peace activist during the Vietnam War in the 60s. When a village is being bombed and children and adults are suffering from wounds and death, can a Buddhist sit still in his un bombed temple? Provocation.
I think that’s a, you know, when I read that question and I had that one circulating in my mind as a provocation for years actually and tried to, you know, obviously it’s possible to translate that to own life. How can you just engage in your Dharma practice on your cushion when metaphorically people are being bombed and you can translate that however you want to. Found the question especially obviously it relates to someone living in a war zone and fortunately doesn’t have universal relevance. But with a little reworking similar questions can be asked which are more universally applicable. How can I sit in the meditation hall when there’s a war on outside?
How can I sit in the meditation cushion when there are people suffering outside? How can I sit on the meditation cushion when the suffering is structured into the social institutions in which we all live within? So these are reframes of the question that I started to work with. These questions opened up the need to examine carefully what it means to practice Dharma and demand that we, and this is a quote from Craft, look for ways to expand the notion of spiritual liberation to other areas without abandoning the essential role of individual enlightenment. How might awakening be interpreted in social and political terms to embrace families, nations and all people?
How can it be interpreted in environmental terms to embrace animals, plants and ecosystems. The problem of Buddhism in social context is also apparent if we consider that spiritual practice is embodied and hence having a material dimension. It doesn’t just go on inside the head. Depends upon a mind antibody and hence demands a social context. So being a practitioner involves attending to the material context.
Of course it can be said that one can practice anywhere and exiled Tibetans are certainly a testament to that. They do exemplify that practice is possible even perhaps even enhanced under the most appalling conditions. It would be possible at this point to invoke Milarepa or other solitary yogi meditators. Those familiar with the Lojong teachings of Tibetan Buddhism can also incite the instructions of transforming problems into practice. But these responses don’t speak to the sorts of social conditions that are needed if spiritual traditions such as Tibetan Buddhism are to be translated intergenerationally, nor do the conditions that are required to bring spiritual practice to fruition.
As Tenzin Palmo found out, it’s more difficult keeping a cave in the Himalayas than in Milarepa’s time. I think they evicted her, didn’t they? The people in that space. Dharma practice is dependent upon a whole range of complex social arrangements including the availability of high quality translators who are needed presently as Dharma is being translated from east to west. Dharma practice requires a society that actually supports practitioners, which is a problem that is being encountered by many Westerners who have taken ordination.
Practice requires quality pedagogical spaces for transmission and for enacting the practices that are deemed essential. My list is only indicative of the necessity to consider Dharma practice, and especially meditation, as a socially constructed practice. It’s not enough to argue that Buddhism is about working on the mind with little or no attention to the ethical political demands of one’s social context. The very viability of Dharma practice demands an engaged perspective as do the important ethical raised by Thich Nhat Hanh’s question. So anyway that was the sort of problematic that I started to sort of work on.
I think in the brief summary that went out about my talk it was of counter to that sort of ethical quietism version of Buddhism that’s otherworldly. I don’t think that’s the one that’s actually taught at Buddha House but it is a version that’s actually there and there are renderings of Buddhism that make that point. I sometimes thought I was generating a straw man, so to speak, around that. I said before, I’ve just come back from Japan and I met a Japanese professor of education while I was there and as is the they’re incredibly polite and generous anyway gave me one of his books as a gift. Only met the guy for lunch.
It was a it was a it was a you know an attempt to use Eastern philosophies to talk about what he was calling holistic education. It’s an incredibly interesting book. And you know I went to the Buddhist bit because he was using various traditions. And there it is. He’s writing this piece which is counter to, you know, the mystical quietism version of Buddhism.
So there it is you know know Japanese philosophers rendering so it’s a I felt relieved that you know my I hadn’t sort of overemphasized this notion and I’ve put this idea out before and people don’t understand what I’m talking about. Anyway, to summarise, liberation for Buddhism is about awakening the mind to its non dual nature, whilst liberation for critical theory is about struggling over the social arrangements. And I guess what I wanted to do was to see how both of those could start to of seep across the hyphen between the two that I’d sort of set up. And think early on in my talk I was saying that I had sort of two sets of questions, one from the Western tradition and one from the Eastern tradition. At a particular point in my thesis I tried to generate one question that could speak to both traditions and in the end my thesis revolved around how can we live an ethicopolitical life in an unjust world was the sort of key question.
There’s a few western philosophers that put ethics politics together and they have the term ethicopolitical. So I think the ethical generally invokes the personal, so living an ethical life. You don’t really have ethical nations, you have ethical everyday life. The political is to do with the struggle over the nation and what the nation might get up to. It just appears to me as though the ethical is almost meaningless without the political and the political is meaningless without the ethical.
After I raise this question I don’t separate the two ever in the thesis, I keep both of them together. So I guess in the end, what conceptual resources can one bring to bear on what it means to be ethical, political. Buddhism I think is fantastically positive. I think perhaps Buddhism is weak really politically actually. So it needs to be in conversation with traditions that have got much stronger political resources.
I think that’s the argument that I’m actually making. And when I sort of thought thought about this more recently through other, you know, western Buddhists, Dharma originally is developed in by Buddha in Indian village life in which mostly you’ve only got everyday life and the institutions that are actually available are quite rudimentary. There’s no pensions, you know, the government’s quite rudimentary, there’s probably very little bureaucracy, there’s no media. You know what I mean? This is throwing your food, getting on with your family.
This is very simple compared to the complicated institutional life that we’ve got. Into the twentieth century we get nations developed that have democratic institutions, the media, the law, with all the various bureaucracies that arise out of that. You get war machines of immense power. You have economic systems that the Buddha couldn’t, well the Buddha could have imagined them of course, but you know what I mean. Apart from the Buddha in two and a half thousand years ago couldn’t imagine capitalism.
So there are some western Buddhist versions that are making an argument that what’s understood by Buddhists as the three poisonous minds attachment, hatred, anger and ignorance that the Buddha argued and provided Dharma as the response to has become institutionalised. So on the basis of anger one can imagine the war machine being developed. And on the basis of greed we get capitalism On the basis of ignorance we get the media and the education system. We’re both educators so this is quite problematic for us. And so the three poisonous minds become institutionalised and come back at us from outside as well as inside.
I think that’s sort of an interesting sort of analysis. So if the idea of Dharma practice is to subdue the three poisonous minds then they’re subduing it inside and outside of ourselves. Now think I might sort of leave that that’s probably enough actually to describe what my project was. Just in terms of you know the rest of the talks just so that we can you know if you wanted to come along again. I can give seven talks in this series so for all of August and September I think there might have been some confusion there about one being in October.
This is my plan anyway. The next session will be discussing the spiritual justifications for a socially engaged view. And there’s plenty of spiritual justifications or scriptural justifications in sutras and in perhaps the one that I prefer, the one that I really, really like is Nāgārjuna’s that’s terrible, I can’t remember. The advice to the king. Anything other?
No. The precious Garland advice to the king. Isn’t that what it’s called? It was the first teaching I had here when Jampa was a translator and there’s quite a good commentary by Robert Thurman I think. Anyway, because it’s advice to the king then it’s the Dharma for organizing your kingdom.
Now that’s pretty socially engaged so you know. Nāgārjuna is around. When’s Nāgārjuna around? Four hundred years after Buddha. The third talk will be about the Dalai Lama and his idea of universal responsibility and then talk after that will look at Thich Nhat Hanh and the Tiep Hien Order.
The talk after that will be about a Thai activist called Sulak Sivaraksa who’s written extensively on what he calls a Buddhist vision for renewing society. I think what we might do during that is rather than spend the whole talk on him to start also talking about some Western interpreters and I’ve got three that I wanted to share. In my thesis I do Stephen Batchelor and a group of meditating scholar activist Buddhists called the Think Sangha that write critiques of transnational capitalism and a whole range of interesting material. But I thought as well that we could have a bit of fun and have a go at the beats. So the beat poets.
So I’m going to invite people to bring their favorite beat poem and maybe we could even play some music. If people been catching up with the recent Leonard Cohen movie, just as an example. There’s been a movie that he’s put out recently that had series of interviews with him, interspersed with a concert in Sydney a few years ago. Anyway, interviews are incredibly insightful because you just get access to Leonard Cohen, the Zen Buddhist, talking about his life. It’s quite interesting where you get a beat poet talking about his Zen master.
And of course the Dharma bums and we can go on and on can’t we? There’s the nineteen sixty’s saw quite a lot of Buddhist ideas enter enter into popular culture through the beats. The old hippie in me has taken a liking to them again recently. And then the last ones just to sort of bring it to some sort of conclusion I’ve just got living a socially engaged Buddhist life question mark. I’ve got my thesis sort of culminated in sort of like a manifesto for my life which still scares me intensely but perhaps sort of share that and find out where that might go.
Anyway that’s sort of the sequence. At this point we can have questions, discussion. One’s still awake. Yeah. Yeah.
Let’s do that. Good idea. To bring it back in. Cup of tea time.