Compassion in Action — 2008-09-19

Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.

About this talk. In this 96-minute session, Rob Hattam explores how compassion and engaged Buddhist practice must respond to the conditions of contemporary Western society. He traces the influence of Beat poets on Western Buddhism, then examines how scholars like Stephen Batchelor and the ThinkSangha movement are reworking Buddhist teaching for postmodern times. Rather than treating dharma practice as isolated meditation, Hattam argues that socially engaged Buddhism requires integrating intellectual inquiry, spiritual practice, and activist response to systemic injustice. He discusses the tensions Western practitioners face: balancing personal freedom with social responsibility, questioning inherited Tibetan structures through a Western lens, and translating medieval texts into a context shaped by globalisation, capitalism, and fragmented selfhood. The closing discussion addresses teaching dilemmas: how to transmit authentic dharma while acknowledging cultural overlay, and the paradox that rigorous practice—through reading, writing, and dialogue—is what holds students engaged.

File metadata (for organising)

File: 2008 09 19 CiA.mp3

UUID: afdd0ddb-cedb-4de6-b147-da6771d1f919

Teacher: Rob Hattam

Collection: Compassion in Action (Rob Hattam)

Date: 2008-09-19

Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide

Words: ~14,691

Anyway, then there’s Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was another one of the Beats. He was the guy who ran City Lights books, who was the publisher of how it got, you know, who did the did the number on getting it published. Here’s a here’s a rather long poem, poem, it’s called A Buddha in the Woodpile. This is probably where the beats, Buddhism and socially engaged come together. If only if only if there had only Buddhist in the woodpile in Waco, Texas to teach us how to sit still, one saffron Buddhist in the back rooms, just one Tibetan Lama, just one Taoist, just one Zen, just one Thomas Merton Trappist, one saint in the wilderness of Waco, USA if there had been only one calm little Gandhi in a white sheet or suit, not so silent partner who at the shouted ‘Wait!’ if there had been just one majority of one in the Lotus position in the inner sanctum who bowed his shaved head to the chief of all police and raised his hands in a mudrā and chanted the great Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, the Diamond Sūtra, the Lotus Sūtra, if there had somehow been just one Gandhian spinner with Brian Wilson at the gates of the White House and the gates of Eden then it wouldn’t have been Vietnam once again and it’s one, two, three, four, what are we waiting for?

If one single ray of the light of the Dalai Lama when he visited this land had penetrated somehow the land of the brave, where the lion never lies down with a lamb. But not a glimmer got through, the security screened it out, screened out the Buddha and his not so crazy wisdom. Only in the land of Sam Houston, if only in the land of the Alamo, if only in Wakoland USA, if only in Reno, if only on CNN, CBS, NBC one had comprehended one single syllable of Gautama Buddha, of the young Siddhartha, one single whisper of Gandhi’s spinning wheel, one lost syllable of Martin Luther King, or of the early Christians, or of Mother Teresa, or of Thoreau or Whitman or Allen Ginsberg, or of the millions in America tuned to them. If the inner ears of the inner sanctums had only been half open to any vibration except those of the National Security State and had not only been attuned to the sound of one hand clapping and not one hand punching, then that sick cult and its children might still be breathing the free American air of the First Amendment. That’s probably, you know, the most powerful one that I could find in this book.

What is the book? No, It’s just a collection. So New and Selected Poems fifty five to ninety three. So he’s published lots of books. I mean, my own sort of autobiographical fragment there.

Was I was in Seattle a few years ago and turned up and was giving a talk in, you know, one of the university halls. And, you know, he’s in his eighties. This was early, probably before two thousand and one. Maybe it was two thousand. The Bush was Bush was in.

And as an Australian, know, you thought that all the Americans must be mad, which, of course, they’re not because not very many of them voted for him. But, anyway, being in an auditorium that was full of thousands of people, Ferlinghetti comes onto the stage, who’s, you know, a a very old man, but a poet, but a really very famous one. So he got sort of a ten minute standing ovation to start with. And then he was either reading or reciting his poems, remembering fairly a lot of them, reading some. And then in between sort of giving his own rendition of the present, particularly going after the bushes and having huge sort of claps from the audience.

Well, sort of interesting to see, you know, there’s this guy, like, some like, sort of a cult figure. Those part those poets being able to, I suppose, I don’t know, articulate something something very important about the time. Enough of that little rave. I never studied the beats in my thesis, but, you know, I’ve been under their influence whether one wanted to or not. I suppose, you know, back to the sort of earlier point that, you know, we get we get access to, you know, dharma through popular culture.

I think it might have been one of what’s his name? Donald something junior. Lopez? Donald Lopez junior. One of his books got, know, a Tibetan monk with the sunglasses on on the front cover.

Oh, yeah. You know? Yeah. So it works both ways, doesn’t it? Oh, yeah.

So yeah. So Western interpretations. I I managed to track down, you know, a couple that I thought were quite interesting. One was in the work of Steven Batchelor that you’ll probably already know because you’d all be fans of Steven’s work. And the other’s in this mob called ThinkSangha.

Anyway, again, I’ll just sort of read some things. So socially engaged Buddhist views also being imagined by a number of Western Buddhist scholar practitioners. Buddhism’s translation into the West during the late 1900s, and especially the 1980s and 1990s, been deeply affected by an already existing social movements. Many Westerners who have been attracted to Buddhism and who have become serious students are also deeply affected by other social movements such as struggles against capitalism, patriarchy, racisms of various kinds, colonialism, environmentalism and homophobia. This interchange between Western social movements and Buddhism gives an impetus to the socially engaged Buddhist position.

And as an example, I’d like to outline two versions: Batchelor’s Imagining of a Culture of Awakening and the ThinkSangha’s, this is to quote a guy called Watts, one of their sort of imaginings is, they call it ‘reinhabiting the flatland’, which I quite like that sort of metaphor, we’ll elaborate on that in a moment. This work is significant because Bachelor is a Western translator of Tibetan Buddhism in the literal sense, having translated the famous text by Śāntideva. He is also a translator in the sense of living a Buddhist life. He has been ordained as a monk in Gelug tradition and writes books that argue for translating Buddhism into Western contexts, based on a sensitivity to both East and West. As for the ThinkSangha, the think tank for the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, their work represents an important advance as Buddhist practitioners reinterpret Dharma as it is being translated into the West in response to post modern conditions.

I was particularly taken by Buddhism without beliefs. Anyway, in the last chapter of that book, Bachelor draws attention to the inconsistency of Buddhist traditions and affirming freedom that is responsive responsive to the anguish in the world. He is especially wary of falling for two extremes of an inner worldly mysticism or of going along with oppressive political arrangements. In Western liberal democracies, Bachelor sees a capacity for personal and social fulfilment, but that unfortunately, this is being exercised in the service of greed, aggression and fear, which seems to have led to a breakdown of community, destructions of the environment, wasteful exploitation of resources and perpetration of tyrannies and injustices and inequalities. And you can see there’s a Sulak Sivaraksa or the Dalai Lama.

All of these people are basically making quite similar diagnoses about Western society. What Bachelor proposes is translating the ethical, meditative and philosophical values of Buddhism not just to individual awakening, liberation from self centred craving, but into a culture of awakening, leading away from a repressive and unjust society. So again, there’s sort of an attempt to try and think through liberation for self to liberating the social. He argues for a Dharma practice that is both individuated and informed by a range of Buddhist traditions and socially engaged, as it’s rooted in the awareness of how self centred confusion and craving can no longer be adequately understood as psychological drives that manifest themselves in subjective states of anguish. Again, the similar theme through all of these writers.

These are embodied in the very economic, military and political structures that influence the lives of the majority of people on the earth. Batchelor provides a useful rationale for the idea of a socially engaged Buddhism. His discussion is sensitive to the problems for contemporary Buddhism and the ways in which Dharma practice always develops within a culture of awakening. He sets up this argument with reference to the way that Buddhism understands the idea of freedom. For Bachelor, Buddhism asserts a freedom of awakening that is a relative freedom and expressed in terms of freedom.

And I’ll quote from him: Freedom from the constraints of self centred confusion and turmoil, from the craving for a fixed identity, from the compulsion to contrive a perfect situation, from identification with preconceived opinions, and from the anguish that originates in such attachments. Buddhism also asserts a freedom to, so there’s a freedom from and freedom to, which Batchelor describes here in terms of the Buddha. He was free to creatively realise the world’s possibilities, unhindered by the cravings that had previously determined his choices, free to imagine appropriate response to anguish of others, free to cultivate an authentic path and embrace all aspects of human life, free to form a community of friendships, and free to create a culture of awakening that would strive long after his death. For Buddhists, freedom is grounded in the cessation of craving, which has been affirmed as the raison d’etre of a culture of awakening. But Buddhism as religious institutions and as affiliation with autocratic and even totalitarian regimes has tended to be less affirming of the freedom to respond creatively to the anguish of the world.

In this way Buddhism has tended to either support an inner worldly mysticism and or has been Ingramd towards political Against these tendencies, a socially engaged Buddhism is now being developed. Buddhism now, in just this century, is beginning to percolate through Western cultures that privilege autonomous individual but are also suffering from what Charles Taylor refers to as the malaise of modernity: individualism, instrumental reason and a loss of political liberty. The worry of individualism involves the double edged sword. On the one hand, we live in a world where people have a right to choose for themselves their own pattern of life and to decide in conscience what convictions to espouse, but on the other, such freedom has been won at the expense of a disenchantment. The dark side individualism is a centring on the self which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poor in meaning and less concerned with others in society.

I think that’s a fairly conventional, you know, Western philosophical critique of modernity. Weber put it as well, you know, the rationalisation, but it’s a particular type of instrumental reasoning that causes this sort of flattening and narrowing. Buddhism, after being almost hermetically sealed in the East for two thousand five hundred years, is percolating through a culture that asserts personal freedom but suffers these malaises. Both the Western cultural impulse optimise the creative possibilities of the individual, along with the downside of modernity, seem to be feeding the need for a socially engaged style of practising dharma. The very extent of the damage being inflicted on people and the environment by Western rationality undermines the development culture of awakening that privileges only a mystical quietism.

Instead, Buddhism’s encounter with the West pushes Dharma practice towards a dialectic of individuation and social engagement. Individuation is a process of recovering personal authority through freeing ourselves from the constraints of authority, quote from The detraditionalisation of subjectivity in the West now well established. It’s now difficult to accept the unquestioned superiority of a tradition so an individuated Western Dharma practice is being developed. But this Dharma practice is also being developed at a time of an emerging awareness of how self centred confusion and craving are embodied in the very military and political structures that influence the lives of the majority of people on the earth. Again, a quote from Harnessed to industrial technologies, the impact of self centred confusion and craving affects the quality of the environment, the availability of natural resources and employment, the kinds of political, social and financial institutions that govern people’s lives.

Such a socially engaged vision of Dharma practice recognises that each practitioner is obliged by an ethics of empathy to respond to the anguish of a globalised, interdependent world. Buddhism in the West is forging its own culture of awakening or its own state in which the Buddhist path can be cultivated, and in this culture there is a tension between two competing imperatives: to discern the elements that are vital for the survival of Dharma practice and a need for creative interaction with contemporary life. And again, think this has been a constant theme through all of these versions: how do we bring what’s a two and a half thousand year old tradition into contemporary times and have both of them interacting? Fostering the first alone would mean Buddhism could end up as marginalised subculture, a beautifully preserved relic. Over privileging the second of these could mean that Buddhism loses its inner integrity and critical edge and ends up being swallowed by something else.

This tension is lived in community of practitioners and hence it’s the community that is the living link between individuation and social engagement. How to create an authentic community which provides a sound basis for the emergence of a culture while optimising individual freedom may be the single most important question facing those practising Dharma today. In that sense, the socially engaged Buddhist gives a high priority to the work of sustaining the Dharma community, and in the case of Buddhism in the West, this means actually establishing places that are enabling of Dharma practice. I’ve just got slight sort of bringing together of some material from previous lectures, if you don’t mind. I just wanna sort of collect this up.

You know, just so before moving on to my my reading of the ThinkSangha movement, movement, I just want to reflect on the arguments so far. In this chapter, I’ve been outlining the socially engaged Buddhist sensibility through reference to some scriptural resources and to the work of a few significant scholar practitioners. Up to this point, I’ve been borrowing views about socially engaged Buddhism to help develop my own imagining of a Buddhist inspired critical social theory, but these views about being socially engaged whilst providing inspiration and understanding have their centre of gravity elsewhere. For instance, the Dalai Lama’s struggling for freedom in Tibet and for the preservation of Tibetan Buddhism Thich Nhat Han struggles with revitalising his own Vietnamese Zen tradition whilst being forced to live in exile in the West Sulak Sivaraksa’s contribution arises from his struggles for freedom in Thailand, struggles that are against the negative impact of globalisation, and those socially unengaged Buddhist views that undermine emancipatory action. Batchelor is a significant translator of Buddhism as it moves from the East to the West and has his own partisan involvement in various theological debates central to that process.

But my argument demands that I push past merely borrowing a socially engaged Buddhist sensibility that has its focus in the concerns of another context. What is required is a socially engaged Buddhist sensibility that speaks to the malaise of modernity. What is required is a mature, engaged Buddhist theology that speaks to the concerns of postmodern conditions. There are traces of such a sensibility in the work of these activists that I’ve referred to in the previous couple of sections of this chapter. All of them have been working to rethink what it means to practise dharma in the context of contemporary postmodern society.

The work of the ThinkSangha speaks directly to this set of concerns. As such, I’ve left my discussion of their work till last. The ThinkSangha’s core concern is developing a Buddhist practice sensitive to the globalisation of postmodern conditions. As such, their investigation into what it means to be Buddhist aims to push past thinking about East and West self and society theory and practice as neat dualities. The Think Sangha emerged in the past five or so years as a dialogic space created by some of the members of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship.

And just to give you a clue here, at their meeting in two thousand and one the ThinkSangha membership consisted of Robert Aitken Roshi, David Saylor and Lindsay Troup from the Diamond Sangha in Hawaii, Alan Senauke, Donald Rothberg and Diana Winston from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in the US, Seira Jeilani from Mexico some scholars from India and Thailand David Loy and Jonathan Watts from the International Network of Engaged Buddhists, Ken Jones from the UK Network of Engaged Buddhists. So you will have heard of some of them. They’re quite famous sort of authors in their own right. Sort of on the side, David Loy was one of the examiners of my thesis. He was sort of an active member of the group.

In their words, the ThinkSangha is a space for a deep investigation of what it means to practise Buddhadharma in the age of globalisation. This group has begun an inquiry into what it means to live a socially engaged Buddhist life by rethinking how being an activist, an intellectual and a practitioner can be woven as a response to the crisis being created by globalisation. They bring those three together, that’s the way they describe themselves. That’s activist, intellectual and practitioner. Probably all the previous examples would have all those three.

They’re Buddhist activists but they’re intellectuals in their own traditions. For the ThinkSanga, the impact of globalisation demands significant theoretical work if contemporary Dharma practice is to into a mature theology of engagement, like liberation theology in the Christian tradition. I can see parallels there actually. There’s an attempt to generate a Buddhist liberation theology, if that makes sense. All of the participants have to some degree a commitment to these three strands.

Contemporary societies demand a socially engaged form of practice. Intellectual inquiry is essential at a time in which Buddha Buddhadharma is being translated across cultures and when traditional Buddhist cultures themselves are under stress from the devastating impact of transnational capitalism three. A commitment to a personally transformative Buddhist practice. Applying the Buddhist principle of these three aspects are interdependent. Thus, intellectual enquiry, social activism and spiritual practice provide an interpermeating set of modalities for a socially engaged Buddhism.

These three might be thought as a triallectic or a constellation of practices, each one providing illumination of the other two. Theoretically, the ThinkSanga focuses on the question What are the basic principles of Buddhism which inform the practice of socially engaged Buddhism? This question takes on some significance on the conditions of globalisation. In the first instance, there’s a desperate need to reform the Buddhist Sangha in almost every Buddhist culture because of the decaying state of most traditional Buddhist institutions. We need new models of what it means to be ordained or to be a lay practitioner that are in tune with postmodern concerns.

The ongoing contestation over what might constitute the future also demands that progressive elements of the traditional religions, and that includes Buddhism a step forward to create a new vision for humanity in the twenty first century. Being relevant to the conditions of postmodernity also demands that socially engaged Buddhism makes connections with other intellectual traditions, especially those that are concerned with economic, gender and racial justice. Perhaps putting this most bluntly and practically, the ThinkSangha are attempting to rethink from a socially Buddhist perspective what it means to bring the work done on the meditation cushion out into the world. This rethinking relies on juxtaposing scriptural justifications that need to be retrieved with some creative thinking about what Dharma practice means these new times. It’s important to rethink those traditional reinterpretations of Dharma practice that were developed prior to the Western Enlightenment and which assume that society is merely a collection of individuals.

These traditional representations were developed in societies in which social structures did not have the sort of complexity that shaped and characterised contemporary social formations. Chapter. As an example I referred to this in chapter three, the Lamrim presentation of Buddhadharma that defines practice in Tibetan Buddhism was first developed by a teacher in the eleventh century. There have been many variations developed since but all the extant Lamrim texts were written prior to the Western Enlightenment and hence need to be considered as medieval texts. We need to remember that these texts were written in societies in which there could be virtually no expectation of change in harsh conditions of life, even for the rich.

However, the ThinkSangha proposes we have a closer look at all representations of Buddhadharma. Of course, in the case of the Lamrim, this sort of inquiry might be considered heretical. Fortunately, such an investigation has been started by some serious practitioners. And here’s a quote from Tenzin Palmo: This Lam Rim system is now been used for one thousand years unchanged, but it’s important to consider that the Lam Rim structure was originally designed for Tibetans by Tibetans, so it doesn’t necessarily mean that every bit of the Lam Rim has universal application. This may be heretical, but the important question is how to take dharma home with you in a way that will be effectual so it can transform our everyday lives.

Tenzin Palmo, a nun, suggests some careful examination of what appropriate Westerners translate the lamb rim into their own lives. Of special interest for her is the need to rethink the lamb rim in terms of the sensitivities of the Western psyche. While she does not elaborate, she’s calling for a form of dharma representation that is able work on what I’ve already referred to in chapter two as the damaged self or the self suffering, the malaise of post modernity. For Tenzin Palmo, this damage manifests as a certain fragility of the psyche that is characterised by self loathing and guilt. Just sort of an as an aside on this, I managed to catch up with Tenzin Palmo when she was in Adelaide when I was writing my thesis.

Actually, she visited Adelaide. Did you catch up with her then? Were you around? I managed to make a time to have sort of an interview with her. Told me that after she’d come out of retreat, one of the first books that she wrote was read was Dante’s Inferno.

Said she felt very comfortable with Dante’s Inferno because she’s, you know, she actually you know, her mind had basically been constituted inside of this medieval Tibetan text. So, you know, a lot of similarities. And so I guess there, she had a real taste of the of the sort of medieval nature of the text when she’s able to reference herself, you know, where her mind was up to with another medieval text. Written in a different country, of course. Anyway, the think Sangha takes up this point in various ways.

They’re especially interested in rethinking what Buddhist ethics means, and like many others they argue that acting for the benefit of others in this era of globalisation cannot be fully realised by simply employing the individual ethical exhortations of those traditional representations. What it means to practise Dharma must be rethought in the light of the structures of greed, ill will and delusion that now imprison whole societies and communities. This means much more than giving existing critiques of globalisation a Buddhist gloss. Instead, what the ThinkSanga are calling for and beginning to develop through their early work is a unique Buddhist contribution to those significant issues of our time. But this can only happen if Buddhist practitioners are prepared to think about what are the significant non contemporaneous elements of Buddhism that must be sustained and reproduced over time and across cultural difference, and what aspects of Dharma practice require updating or renewing in light of the present conditions.

Again, we’re back to that problem. As previous sections of this chapter have demonstrated, this rethinking requires different responses in different societies. For instance, the existential issues are different in Thailand to those confronting Buddhists in Tibet or those in Australia. From my own position of relative socio economic privilege, this sort of rethinking demands working through what it means to practice Dharma in a country in which racism damages lives and especially those of the Indigenous population and recent immigrants. It means developing a practice that confronts those social structures that reproduce and naturalise socio economic inequality, and especially those that produce poverty.

To be moved by the bodhisattva vow demands rethinking how Dharma practice confronts the patriarchal social structures that damage relationships between men and women. The ThinkSangha’s writings also remind us that we cannot rest in the comfort of an aspiring form of compassion. It’s not enough to develop the ideal of compassionate action or an aspiring form of Bodhicitta in these degenerate times. The challenge is to develop a Dharma practice that manifests this aspiration. In the end, what this means is confronting my own privilege but then, as the ThinkSangha outlined, the challenge of socially engaged Buddhism is unsettling for Western Buddhists who are mostly middle class and well educated.

The Buddhist ideals of renunciation and compassionate action run counter to the values inherent in Western postmodern culture. In the long term, the development of a socially engaged Buddhist practice has to struggle with how to get people who live in environments of privilege, yet are moved by Buddhist ideas of compassionate to get involved in activities that might undermine that privilege. What makes the ThinkSangha work unique is the way that they bring these intellectual and activist into their contemplation of the nature of a contemporary personal Dharma practice. From the outset, they reject the idea that one’s own personal spiritual practice, such as meditation, chanting and studying, is some way or another separate from other aspects of one’s life. For instance, globalisation, experienced as a compression of time and space, affects the way we think about our lives.

This compression of space and time means we feel that we have so much to do and so little time to do it. We’re so busy that we find it difficult even to find time to do a little daily meditation. Being overwhelmed by the demands of everyday life becomes even more intensified if we take up a socially engaged sensibility. There are so many social issues with which we can be involved. How many different social issues can I be concerned with?

What are the priorities of engagement for socially engaged Buddhists? A socially engaged Buddhist practice in the end comes down to deciding on priorities in everyday life, whether to go on retreat or join an anti nuclear action, between spiritual practice and active social responsibility, as well as between earning a living, sustaining close relationships and friendships, bringing up children, maintaining physical health and fitness, aesthetic cultivation and so on. The ThinkSangha’s trilectic of intellectual inquiry, social activism and spiritual practice provides a working model for the development of a more mature, socially engaged Buddhist theology and one that represents an attempt to bring into dialogue the sort of critical consciousness I had been referring to earlier, with a commitment to Dharma practice. In answering the question how can I live an ethical and political life in an unjust world?’, the ThinkSangha argue that being critical and practising Dharma must be reconciled in theory and practice? As such, this trilectic represents an attempt to rethink Buddhism through a critical consciousness.

This trilectic represents an attempt to bring Buddhism into dialogue with a philosophy, but with a Buddhist commitment to spiritual practice already in place. That’ll do. That’s probably enough. So that’s where I got up to with, you know, the the Western position. There’s obviously a you know, I think Sanger had written lots and lots of essays.

Was just trying to tease out, you know, what I saw as the, you know, the sort of key point. They’ve written critiques of racism and transnational corporations and so on and so on and so on. I think if you go up to their website, the the projects sort of stalled a little bit in the last few years, but they they at least started to imagine, you know, this sort of work and then providing that to, you know, activist intellectual practitioner set. I think that was that was quite useful for me. And and then being able to see that in Thich Nhat Hanh, you know, the people that that we that we that, you know, really sort of blow us away really seem to have those characteristics.

How did the ThinkSangha fall? What was it that brought the coalescence? Was it I think it was around the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. It’s an organisation that’s connected to the International Network of Engaged Buddhists. So I think it’s a little bit like, know, Sulak Sivaraksa.

I think he’s the convener of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists. One of some person has an idea that we need to get together to think about. And so I’m not quite sure who in the Buddhist Peace Fellowship had sort of bright idea to bring all those people together. But, you know, they started to meet, and then they, you know, it’s possible to become a member if you want to, and they were writing and meeting up once a year somewhere in Southeast Asia mainly. It’s a bit like, you know, a think tank.

Provided a, you know, space for a while for them to be able to think about how practice could become relevant in, you know, post modern condition. Did you name any, say Stephen Bachelor was part of it? Well, Bachelor wasn’t part of it, no. His rendering of the Culture of Awakening was something that he was developing in his own work. No.

These are, you know, the the mob from Hawaii that are, you know, Robert Aitken and his students. You Ken Jones. What was his famous book? I haven’t got the references, but he wrote quite a famous book about sort of socially engaged Buddhism, socially transformative Buddhism or something like that. And he writes out of a Theravadin tradition, I think.

Doesn’t he? Yeah. I think so. They’re just the spellings he used for Dharma and so on. But he and then Donald Swearer, he’s written some books about socially engaged Buddhism.

Think he’s put together a couple of collections on socially engaged Buddhism. Now there’s sort of, you know, in recent years, it’s impossible to keep up with them all, actually. So is there a dialogue between the Thinseng and the traditional the the Tibetan tradition? Or Well, the Tibetan tradition, not in there. So you’ve got Zen tradition through the through David Loy and the and the the Hawaiian mob.

And then there’s some Terravadans. So, you know, the it what what what seems to me anyway is that the the Tibetan version of social engaged Buddhism is being articulated very, very strongly by the Dalai Lama. And he’s in conversation with with, you know, whoever he whoever he can talk to because he’s quite, you know, incredibly ecumenical. Mhmm. But when some of these other groups form the Tibetans aren’t aren’t present, I think probably, historically, historically, Zen’s been in the West a long time.

Probably some versions of the Theravadin tradition have as well. Tibetan traditions come a bit late. Mhmm. That might be one of the reasons. I think the Tibetan tradition in the West is still very connected back to to, you know, preserving their own tradition and supporting their own diaspora.

I think those two projects are very interconnected. You know, Lama Yeshe’s project, foundation for the preservation of the tradition. I mean, they’re all refugees in India, aren’t they? They’re living there on the behest of the Indian government, all those monasteries. Without went without Western sponsorship, it can’t happen.

I know one of the previous Geshis told me that when he was living in Sera, the Dalai Lama and Lama Zopa Rinpoche kept them alive. Without the sponsors that they generate, they can’t live. So, you know, those monks monk sponsorship schemes like Khen Rinpoche. He would have a very small one in comparison to Lama Zopa and Dalai Lama. That was a pretty good description of modern life that you read out there.

Is that something that you put together? Well, you know, tease it together. There’s some some bits of quotes. Yeah. Yeah.

I did I think it’s one of the reasons I quite like the, you know, the Western philosophers that I read. For me anyway, one of the things that good philosophy does is it provides a diagnosis of the times better than many of the other traditions. I mean, they draw on the others, but yeah. So there’s various versions of it that I outlined in a previous chapter. And that’s, you know, Charles Taylor’s ethics of authenticity.

That’s why I enjoyed that because it’s such a fantastic, you know, philosopher’s diagnosis, these malaise. So you can go after I mean, it doesn’t even mention consumerism, actually, because there’s other deeper forms of ethics that are underneath That’s right. It’s symptom, yeah. There’s some other thing underneath, which, you know, again, the philosopher is the doctor of the times. I guess that’s where, you know, that’s why Marx was so important and probably still is.

He, you know, provides a diagnosis of the of the the times, and the times that he was providing his diagnosis is the beginning of capitalism and the beginning of the industrial revolution. You know, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, the Frankfurt School, you know, their their diagnosis of the, you know, their times, nature. Different to a sociologist that’s maybe mapping some surface things. Capitalism is looking a bit sick at the moment. Yeah.

It’s it’s it’s it’s shaking, isn’t it? It’s wobbling. Yeah. Well, certainly, you know, neocon, neoliberal free market ideology fell over yesterday. Acts like a socialist.

Apparently, it was stated in by some American commentators today. It was what? The neocons are acting like socialists. It’s really interesting about how the left moves to the right at the time of the crunch. The right.

Becomes socialist. Well, all of Reagan’s, you know, get government off of off of capitalism. All of that’s just unraveled Mhmm. In the last two weeks. Is it Great example again is of you whole sort of theory and put it into practice and that sort of just falls down.

So I was trying to think when I was thinking through the day just what actually has happened here and correctly, know, but it seems to me that simply the trust game in this we’re all in this together has broken down. It has gone bang because I’m saying, you owe me money. I’m so scared that you’re not gonna pay me that I’m gonna get what I can while I can, even if it breaks you. And then my government, which you’re putting my house, is going to actually protect us. But isn’t the fact that you’re engaging in lending and borrowing money on the basis of not reading really how this is gonna work.

It it it’ll work okay when the when everyone’s flush, but when there’s a tightening of of, you know, monetary conditions, then then then the game that you’re playing no longer works. And so then you’ve got so much debt, you can’t service it any longer. And there’s and so many of the large institutions had so much debt that they can’t service that the whole the whole interdependence starts to fall down. That’s the problem. That’s right.

But isn’t that that’s what I’m And there is a psychological dimension to that, of course, but it’s more than psychology here. There’s a sort of a there’s a there’s a I haven’t got enough money to pay you back, and I’m and I owe billions. And then if I fall over, then you fall over, and then you fall over That’s right. And then we’re in a, you know, massive depression. It all held together as long as property prices were increasing and the equanimity was expanding, but this thing slowed down.

But didn’t that isn’t isn’t that part of the psychology? Because what it was doing was saying, I will loan you, person on no income or small income, a massive amount because It’s basically greed. Yeah. That’s right. Because That’s what it comes down to.

This year, and I don’t care if you can’t pay it back. I’ll screw you. I’ll take your property. The these these high highly paid executives Yeah. There was in their interest to make short term gains.

Gains. They didn’t consider the long term implications of what they were doing. They can put that out to some other time, can’t they? It’s what the way we deal with the environment as well. We put it out to another time.

Massive sums of money. The bottom line looked very good. Then a huge amount of profits in a short term. But no projections into the future and no what ifs. So what happens, of course, is that small amount of people are now living very, very incredibly wealthy, king like lives, and now the US government’s coming to prop that up.

Strange. I’m not sure where we’re You know? These poor middle class people are paying for it. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Well, we’re we’re all paying, aren’t we? We’re all gonna pay. But it seems as if it’s necessary, doesn’t it, somehow? That that’s you know, I think that’s I think it’s necessary to teach us in some ways. You know?

It’s got to be another It it’s another example of incredibly complex society we live in. You you’re talking about the Lam Rim, medieval text. Life is just so complex now that something happens on the other side of the world which you’ve got nothing to do with. It can come down here and totally damage your life. Think it’s great.

When a hurricane starts up in the bottom of Mexico, peso pedal goes up here. Yes, that’s right. That’s right. It’s mobilisation. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Which makes some small business person’s, you know, whole thing shaky. You know, you’re a courier and you depend on fuel prices, you know, as to whether you make money or don’t make money to feed your kids or whatever, I it’s it’s you have to watch the weather. Yeah.

In Mexico. Yeah. True. Yes. Frauding in a way, though.

So there’s a lot of resistance I’ve become aware of. I don’t know about especially, but within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition to questioning. Yeah. It’s not not quite Abhidharma. Yeah.

Has that always been the case, you think? Or is it? You know? I don’t even I I was I’ve been thinking about this weekend. Even, know, with in the, you know, I went to Buddhist School of Dialectics, Dialectics and the monasteries they debate and they say, Oh, we question everything, question everything, question everything.

It was in a very tight stricture. Don’t go outside of that boundary. When you create boundaries, you question. How many angels on the heavens? It’s interesting to learn.

Well, I mean, the debating system seems to, you know, the right answer’s been sort of predetermined. Come up with the right answer and then you get to clap. Is it a cultural thing, do you think? Or is it something Well, yeah, I mean, okay, it’s Tibetan Buddhism. So, you know, there’s a cultural element as opposed to some other form of Buddhism, other forms of Buddhism Buddhism has taken.

Well, I don’t think it’s particularly Tibetan. Is it? Tibetan is Indian also. Mhmm. There’s a great deal of Indian influence.

I don’t know. I think yeah. I hope I guess it’s just difficult to to know, you know, this process of bringing Buddhism to the West is gonna have done pretty organically. Just can’t throw the baby out with the baby. Yeah, it’s very difficult.

Yeah. But it’s a very difficult transition. And I think it causes people a lot of confusion Mhmm. In in the meantime. Yeah.

Maybe that’s inevitable. Mhmm. Yeah. Just that yeah. That’s right.

I mean, I guess that’s if you’re trying to get a if you’re a beginner like I am and you’re trying to you’re trying to work out what the what the dharma is, finding a Geshe is pretty useful. But he but he’s culturally bound. Yes. That’s right. But he but I mean, that’s right.

I mean, we understand that, but that’s what you work that out after while. No. It takes a long I think it takes a long time to start to work out what what’s Buddhist, what’s cultural, what’s the cultural overlay. Because wherever we’re getting our Buddhism from, it’s gonna come with a cultural overlay. Whether it’s American Buddhism or whether it’s Tibetan Buddhism or Theravadan or whatever it It doesn’t matter if you’re learning from someone from Sri Lanka or Thailand or wherever.

There’s going to be a cultural overlay. And starting to sort that out in our own minds, I actually think it takes a long time. I’ve read it’s an excellent book. It’s called Buddhist Practice on Western Grounds. That is a fantastic book.

Yeah. And he’s he’s also a psychotherapist. Yeah. He’s a very long time practitioner of both Theravāda and Tibet Buddhism. And, you know, the the dilemmas that people put themselves in.

He hit the nail on the head to a lot of things. Me an example. It’s a good library, shouldn’t it? Yeah. I put it in there because of such a good Oh, is that?

Yeah. It’s really an excellent book. Really. And in fact, that sparked me. That particular book really hit the nail on the head for a lot of issues for me that I was sort of groping with on my own.

And then that book, I’ve gone back and read probably ten books that he’s got in his references. And it’s just fantastic. Like he’ll mention something and think what an idea!’ And then you go back to the book that he’s referred to, that he’s got his idea from, and you just get a much more detailed explanation. It’s really almost like a central reading, I reckon. Yeah.

So that’s enabled you to to make sense of your own navigation in this Starting to feel a lot. How do you be true to your own culture? Exactly. Exactly. And to Yeah.

Lead a spiritual Buddhist spiritual life. Yeah. In a Tibetan tradition. Yeah. It’s an easy So let me be heretical here and say, are we actually, by teaching in the methods that we teach, making it harder for people rather than making it more cogent for people, the Dharma more cogent for people.

There wouldn’t be one answer to that. Will depend on the person. In some cases, that wouldn’t be the case, and in others, people can navigate around it. But, you know, some people would come in, take one look at it, and just run. And other people would come and find it quite comfortable.

Many people, they don’t have the either the patience or the the intellectual capacity to unravel. To unravel? No. It took it was a couple of years before I could work out the relevance What’s going on here in this space? It’s complicated.

It’s really complicated. Really was. I mean that’s only a couple of years to the point where I said it’s worthwhile actually sticking in here and seeing what I get from it. Not that I understand it or still can work out. Just that I would be guessing that you’d already started to get something from it.

Otherwise you would have already decided not to. Because I think, you know, we’re Sometimes in spite of the obstacles which are placed in front me. Yes, for me it was in spite because for me the ritual I came from a Protestant background which was anti symbolism, even a cross in a church was considered to be the peak of careful, you’re going to be worshipping the cross. Sensitivity to iconography. Absolutely.

Absolutely. So coming into this environment, woah. And so my staying there was in spite of. And at at times, still is, I think. But but then being able to get the the other good stuff at the same time and having to question the whole time about, hang on.

What’s this for? What’s this doing? Do I know what this is about? Didn’t it? That’s still the the whole time.

Yeah. It’s like you’ve got two conversations really having you. You’ve got the you’ve you’ve got the cultural translation stuff going. What the hell is going on here culturally? But on the other hand, you’re trying to work out if you’re gonna give some part of yourself up to Yeah.

You know That’s right. What they’re telling you to try. And if you don’t give up some don’t give yourself up to it, then you’re not getting anything out of it, and all you’ve got is the cultural. No. You’re you’re It’s pretty Yeah.

In terms of how you just sort of asked a question about teaching styles I think one of the issues for me in terms of Sunday mornings and so forth when I was on the roster was this fear of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. So therefore, Okay, I’ll stick. In a sense, I saw myself, I’m representing Buddha House, so I’ll stick to the To the dogma? Yeah, to the way the language is, the way it’s presented. But not at the same time feeling confident enough within myself to try and perhaps adapt it enough.

Improvise. Yeah, you know, and so there’s this long period of struggling with that feeling and then starting to feel like, hey, I’m not really comfortable with this anymore, but I’m not quite sure what I am comfortable with in terms of changing the presentation. And it was probably around that point I read Aronson’s book. And that just I thought, okay, I’m gonna step back for a while, do a whole lot of other reading. Copping out.

That’s alright. I can live with that. Sorry? No. It’s okay.

Didn’t find out. I’ll leave it over the over the top there. I reckon that that the the model that we have that says simply keep pushing on pushing on pushing on is actually a Western consumerist and and almost managerialist approach to things. You know, you’re not sure what’s going on. We’ll just keep doing it.

You know? Well, that the advice that’s been given, is it? In managerialism, it is. No. I mean, within the center, within the organisation.

No. Not within the centre. No. No. I’m saying it’s coming from the outset.

I think so often in part of our Western culture is that you keep doing it, you keep doing it, because it’s almost like the scientific thing of saying we will keep exploring this as long as the funding’s there, we’ll keep going. It’s not a questioning of have we gone far enough on this one, should we drop it and go somewhere else? And in managerialism, it’s this is the way it’s always been done. Yeah. Now if you question these things, we no one knows where it’s gonna lead.

Well, mean, with the Tibetans, of course, you’ve gotta you know? And you’ve you’ve been you’ve you’ve of perfected it for eight hundred years on the other side of the Himalayas. It works. Why would you want to? Why would you want to question it?

Well, you know, they’ve got sort of, you know, enlightenment factories, haven’t they? I mean, they just churn them out over eight hundred years. They’ve got all their stories of all the enlightened beings that their monasteries generate. I mean, you know, they know that that they know that that system works. So Mhmm.

And then that that comes across the Himalayas, and here we are. Maybe maybe it works for a small percentage of population. Yeah. Yeah. Well If you if you if you have, you know, hundred thousand people involved in Monastery, you’re bound to have a few outstanding vigil.

That’s the way the US university sector works as well. They have they have huge numbers of Nobel Peace Prize winners. Yeah. I don’t wanna be bothered. You know?

I that ninety eight percent that maybe doesn’t work well. Yeah. Marshall’s people in the audience are spectators, aren’t they? But is that the yeah. I guess that’s that’s it’s difficult, isn’t it, that one?

But it’s the times. It’s part of the times, this transition. Yeah. And I think I think perhaps it’s always part of the spiritual path is this tension. Yeah.

It’s being pulled in different directions. Yeah. But at least being aware of it, I guess. I’m trying to be authentic, but at the same time, it’s like what are they saying, Christian? If if only you had more faith.

Yeah. That’s not everything, you would be you would be okay. Yeah. Yeah. But it’s not only no.

That’s said in Buddhism. Yeah. At some point, yeah, I I don’t Well it’s just maybe you can reach some maturity and say, well, this doesn’t work for me. You start to rely on your own experience. You become your own authority.

But that’s also shaky because a great deal of the authority is placed in your teacher. Actually, there’s a tension even in that. And they talk that, you know, that we are we are ignorant, and we don’t we don’t quite know what to do, so we have to. Mhmm. On the other hand, I think we sometimes, I mean, like, Lama Yeshe, he he very much was of the inclination that we should trust our own wisdom.

He always kept pushing that. That was kind of his emphasis. You can’t rely on the guru. You have to run on your own. So it was even within that Buddhism and Buddhism, there are a few iconoclasts that kind of shake that notion.

Gyatso told me a story last week about Lama Gyatso was with Lama Yeshe, and student came up and said had had a problem and said, I think I should do this. What do you think? And I was like, she said, yes. That’s exactly what you should do. And the woman went away happy that she got advice from the guru.

Well, yeah, she said, Gyatso, do you think I gave her the right advice? Gyatso said, no. I don’t. And I was, you know, you’re right, but she’s the one who’s gonna find her out. But in terms of even sorting out what’s cultural and stuff, I mean, I’ve travelled a fair bit in India, a lot of other places.

Button, we’ve had quite a lot of contact at work with Indian students, with friends there, and this sort of stuff. And if I didn’t have that experience, and then you can start to read some of these things and think, hang on. Like you were saying, Indian influence. You can see this authoritarian line and various things happen. You think, this is like the Indians do it and so forth.

If I hadn’t actually seen things like that for myself, I’d be struggling a lot more than I am to even sort out what’s cultural and Buddhist, what’s the baby and where’s the bathwater thing. So people if they haven’t had that experience I can well understand they come in here and they really can’t sort it. Which is a tremendous handicap in a way to sort of adapting it to your own Western needs, I think. But I don’t know how to address that. Of course, the problem that happened, you know, the other the other dimension, of course, is that when you come here, you’re sort of presenting with, you know, suffering.

Yeah. And you are confused. Yeah. You are looking looking for something. And then you can hardly say that your introduction is, well, but you’re going to have to be really careful, wouldn’t it, while you translate this culturally?

Yeah. It’s always unfair. That’s right. You have to cover you have to give it your best shot at being able to provide some, you know Yeah. Alleviation for their suffering.

Mhmm. That’s it’s about, isn’t it? Mhmm. Mhmm. I mean, when having when I was living in India, was struck by how almost childlike Indians are and following Mhmm.

Figure. Mhmm. And I think, you know, that’s where that’s where we’re coming from. But but here we have the as you remarked, empathy, the ethics of empathy, individualism. Yeah.

Yeah. And But then but then there’s that fragility of the self as well. So we know the Western is a quite sort of complicated being as well because I, you know, I don’t know. I I got a funny feeling that, you know, that the the that there’s a willingness to follow as well. Oh.

But it’s a bit but it’s but it’s it’s mediated differently to may maybe the way the Indians do it. Yeah. You just look at the way that well, I don’t know. Just the way that people vote or you know? There’s a There’s a difference.

They like they like they do like their authority figure. They can they can That’s a power figure. Yeah. Yeah. Howard was very clever at all of that.

Maggie Thatcher. I mean, there’s a you you present an authoritarian figure, a lot of the population go for that. Well, they they like the surety that comes with it, don’t they? Yeah. The the strong leader.

I know where we what’s wrong. I know where to go. Just follow me. It doesn’t matter if you do agree with me. You can go for the strength.

That’s right. Howard worked that out in his first year. He was vacillating too many times, and he decided he wouldn’t vacillate after that. Would work out his position and then hold on to it. Don’t sack people on his front bench.

He started out proclaiming a high ethical standard, didn’t he? Yeah. But it didn’t last long. No. Because he was sacking too many.

Yeah. Cover of about three or four. Three or four. Realised he better They’re all disappearing. All gonna go.

He looked at them all and realised how unethical they all I think it’s my definition of postmodernism. It’s a postmodernist doesn’t know what they don’t know. Yeah. What is the twenty five words of that? Oh, god.

I mean, I hear the term kicked around quite a lot. No, no, no. I’m sorry, but a postmodern man doesn’t ask that question. I guess I’m Okay, I understand. There’s various definitions for it.

Jameson talks about the postmodern in terms of late capitalism. So it’s a particular type of capitalism. I know I you know, the Marxist in me quite likes that, and he uses the dot the the the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles as a as a marker of that particular type of capitalism. I think the term postmodern actually comes out of architecture actually and jumps over into other sorts of social theory. You need to you need to be able to distinguish between postmodern and post postmodernity.

Oh, really? Yeah. So So Postmodernism can be the, you know, theoretical explanation for the present and the presence post modernity, so they are sort of linked. Say it again. The Well, the post modernism is a is in a theoretical position, a diagnosis of the present, and postmodernity is the present.

So theorists of you know, social theorists and philosophers juxtapose modernity to postmodernity. So they’re making an argument that, since the Western enlightenment in the, you know, sixteenth, seventeenth century, which is sometimes inaugurated as modernity. There’s been a, you know, a character a a a significant shift in the in the times, and so we now live in in postmodern condition. And the post perhaps the best articulation of the postmodern condition, if you’re not a Marxist, which is Jameson, is Lyotard. And Lyotard talks about it in terms of, knowledge.

So the defining feature of the postmodern is, suspicion at grand narratives. So the grand narratives no longer stack up. That’s the defining feature of the postmodern. So the grand narratives of socialism, capitalism, patriarchy, whichever grand narrative you wanna go for. The big the big narratives.

Relig you know, we kill god. We kill god. Include religion. Religion. Yeah.

Yeah. The grand narrative of religion. And, you know, it’s it’s that’s that’s fair enough. So there’s a suspicion towards truth claims made from of certain authority. That would be, you know, the grand narratives, which we know we’re talking about now.

I guess that’s the theological problem. So how how how contemporary that idea is is, you know, perhaps just a poor reading of, you know, history. I think there’s always been suspicion at grand narratives. It’s just maybe maybe it culminates in our times where where it’s so many of them are shaking. I just thought that, you know, in my own reading of the Frankfurt School that, you know, the Frankfurt School, two of their scholars wrote dialectics of the enlightenment, you know, in the post World War you know, nineteen forties.

And if that wasn’t a that wasn’t a diagnosis of a, you know, downfall of grand narratives, then I’ll go, hey. There were certainly plenty of texts written in the nineteen twenties after the first World War, though the grand narratives were, you know, the grand narrative of enlightenment and progress was seriously shaken by the First World War. Yes. But there were lots of But they re they’ve patched it back together, and we have another go at it. Yeah.

So so it one of the defining factors then is is, in fact, within that that was only questioning a certain grand narrative, not the total range, which so many are being questioned now. Yeah. I mean, they’re all up for grabs, aren’t they now? Yeah. Well, I guess I guess you’d have to say that, you know, racism, patriarchy, they’re still well in place, aren’t they?

So you’ve got some narrative around Western progress gets seriously dented, they patch it up with various, you know, well, they patch it up around the sort of economic system. They certainly don’t you know, the whatever suspicion we might have around technology and and a connection between technology and military. That seems to get pretty well worked. Know, we don’t worry about that. Particle physics Yeah.

That’s right. Is the, you know, the the the pinnacle of Western science only goes ahead as a consequence of the military. So all that all that high particle physics between the two wars, that’s all being funded by military. The email, satellite communications, you just pick all the major ones. They’re all being developed out of out of military concerns, and then they get shared with the rest of us.

Commercialized to pay for the rest of Well, everyone works out that we want it as well, don’t they? Someone works out that it’s useful. Because the email started as in military, didn’t it? GPS and always Yeah. GPS.

That’s right. Just go on and on and on to up there. Yeah. Capitalism gets on onto it. I think yeah.

The sort of grand narrative of progress, that’s one that’s particularly or the grand narrative of reason. The you know, for the Marxists, it was the grand narrative of history. You know, there was a teleology inside of history, and then enlightenment liberation becomes possible because, you know, the the working class will be the bearers of an of enlightenment. So, yeah, all the big all the big capital capital h history, capital r reason, all of those all come crashing down in the last century. Capital m man, that one comes crashing down.

Capital s science? Well, particular type of reason. And I think it’s the I think it’s one of of the physics. I think it’s one of the it’s there’s there’s a really, really nice piece that Habermas wrote, which I quite like because he was he he wrote he wrote this really nice paper basically arguing against the term the postmodern in the nineteen seventies when the when the term was being mooted as as being, you know, having some sort of explanatory power to explain the present. We’re living in postmodern times, and so all of a sudden, there’s a flurry of postmodern theory.

And Habermas, who’s the who’s got the the the the Frankfurt School chair, you know, the school that I’m really interested in. He wrote this piece called what’s it called? Something like, you know, the the the the the potential of the Western enlightenment is unrealized, and we haven’t gone into this new phase that’s still still it’s the the the, you know, the the the the trajectories of Western enlightenment are still being worked out, and we haven’t we haven’t we haven’t got into a new period because that was that was really what was being debated. And he he he he he was arguing around just what the term modernity means. You can’t really understand what post modernity means unless you know what modernity means.

So he was arguing that modernity needs to be understood as a separation of the three big questions in the social context. The three big questions are: what’s good, what’s true, and what’s beautiful. So, what’s what’s true gets taken by Western science. And so, reason, you know, Western reason is the is, develops its own set of experts around the answer to what, you know, what’s true. And and then you get a sort of an instrumental rationality arises around the around the answer.

As well, you get a separation from what’s true and what’s good becomes separate. They’re in separate spheres. Mhmm. So you get truth claims being made separate from, ethical claims Mhmm. Which to me is the one of the defining features of modernity actually is you’ve separated ethics from truth.

And the same with aesthetics. So the aesthetic question of what’s beautiful also gets separated off. So you have series of experts all dealing with these three questions independently of each other, and that’s where all the problems set in set in for the, you know, for for the for for being modern. Mhmm. I quite like that, actually.

So, you know, pre, pre the Western enlightenment, those three questions are are being are are are together in everyday life, and everyone has to struggle with the answer to those three for themselves in everyday life. And there’s no, there’s no one you could turn to to, you know, get a slice of just one. All they’re all together. So so all of a sudden, those three get separated into various separate, you know, silos. But then again, back in everyday life, we’re having to sort of try and put them back together again.

So you get that sort of, yeah, fissure. Anyway, I thought I thought I thought that you know, it’s, I think you only get instrumental forms of reason when you’ve actually separated the two questions of what’s true and what’s good. You don’t get instrumental reason if they’re together, actually. You can’t by definition. I think that’s one of the things I quite like about, you know, Buddhist Buddhism, the that’s a nonsense to Buddhism.

It’s like the it’s like the the separation of reason from emotion that, again, that sort of merges out of the, you know, Western tradition. Descartes inaugurates and doesn’t he? I mean, it’s around, but, you know, I think in Buddhism, there’s always some emotion that taints reason. It’s just which emotion do you want to taint your reasoning is the trick. Do you want negative ones or positive ones?

That’s the only option you’ve got. So if you can generate positive ones, then your reasoning is going to, you know, lead to virtue. If your reasoning is tainted by negative ones, then you know where that leads. It’s as I say, the the proposition that you can separate them is a nonsense. And that’s why that’s what I’ve come to understand anyway in the last, you know, five or ten years that the the the way that the Tibetans present dharma anyway, it’s it is about sorting out the cognitive, about how you do your reasoning, and but it’s also getting your motivation together Mhmm.

Because those two are, you know, definitely working in tandem. So if you don’t do the the cognitive and with the with the effective, then you’re only doing half your Dharma practice, really. Exactly. I think. Yeah.

The problems are causing, you know, not connected as Yeah. No. Well, that’s the problem. I mean, that’s I mean, that’s one way of understanding understanding how the wars arise, all the problems we’ve now got. We’ve made those separations.

Yeah. It’s a very, very nice essay. I thought it was, you know, an incredibly, you know, interesting way of understanding the present. And, again, that’s around, the way knowledge is working. You know, Habermas has got this rendering of modernity around knowledge and leotards doing the same.

So you’ve got the, you know, his critique of grand narratives. But prior to So it’s a knowledge problem. That’s, you know, the way we the way we know and how we how we, you know, our whole knowing industries set up the the, you know, the the the institutions and the and the and the conditions. I think that Tibetan’s you know, Buddha knew knew that a long time ago as well. How he knows absolutely fundamental.

I was just gonna say, I mean, talking about wars, I mean, by the separation of the true and the good and so forth, I mean, You have the crusades where the true and the good are joined together. Yes. Well that’s right, we’ve got God on our side. We know the truth therefore we are good. Yes, that’s right.

That’s right. Yeah that’s true, of course, of course. I mean, this this is you can still see this. Can is not different in that sense, though. No.

No. But I think there’s a different way that Habermas was describing that. I mean, you can see that already as I think, you know, the Muslims have gotten the good on their side and, you know, so on. I mean, that but that’s a different way of talking about what Habermas is describing. I think that’s that’s yeah.

That’s that’s always been with us, that version, isn’t it? It’s the next not the next not the next couple of books. The book after that, they wanna write some titled I’m Sick of Being Good. Mhmm. I think the West has a really bad case of well, not just the West, but we we we we convince ourselves that we’re good a priori, and then that lets us off the hook for everything we do because we we claim being good.

Yeah. And some of us have been, you know, claiming the high moral ground for, you know, most of our lives. And god. I’m just so unconvinced by that now. But I’m still stuck with all those habits of having done it for, you know, nearly, you know, for fifty years.

What’s the alternative? I don’t know. A bit something a bit more humble. Yeah. Not not not rushing for the I’m right to the high moral ground.

It’s more I might be wrong, actually. I’m not quite sure. What are you saying again? You know, there’s a lot of other moves that you can make Yeah. Than to, I’m right, and I’m gonna prove it.

And I’m well, not only that. I’m I am right. I’ve claimed the the high moral ground. I’ve just you know, I’ve got this this this you know, I see this being played out at work where you you can you can claim it by claiming that you are ethical. So you just assert it.

You just assert the position. I’m good. I’m ethical, which and that sets up that that, you know, your interlocutors aren’t even though they’re really struggling with being ethical in their own lives, but because you’ve claimed it. And, of course, when people start to do that go through that narrative, most of the people in the room just go, oh, go away. You know?

Yeah. It it undermines any possible dialogue you might have or Mhmm. And then I just see myself in, you know, these things as well having done it and probably still doing it. Yeah. I can think of You’re not.

You you never demonstrated doing that. You what do you mean you’re asking me the question you know what the other alternatives are? I just I think that’s another it’s another you know, it’s a grand narrative that I am good See? Claiming it a priori. It’s well, in in the in the What is that?

Present. Present. Before practice. Before practice. Well, here’s the hearer’s the hearer’s the hearer’s the the clincher is in A given.

It’s a given. In the in the in the that philosophical tradition that I’ve been reading that’s, you know, goes back to Marx, there’s there’s a version of it inside of education. Okay? So there’s educational scholars that position themselves inside that debate. So, again, in in the the the the critical tradition, the way that it sort understands epistemology.

It basically diagnoses three alternative epistemological frameworks or positions that one can take around knowing the world. So there’s there’s a there’s a positivist, crude empiricist. The Tibetans might call them a eternalist. Anyway, they believe in a type of objectivity that’s actually impossible. You know, they believe in the separation between subject and object, and one can know the world with some sort of naive objective sense.

You know, that’s the positivist. And positivist knowledge, when you have a look at the way that it operates politically, gets activated by people who wanna control the world. It’s to do within, you know, western western science, connects up with the military, usually, it’s actually about control, controlling nature, controlling others. So you have that sort of knowledge. Okay?

So in my in my field, you have basic skills testing and all these sort of technologies that produce knowledge about people to control them, and we get done in by these various knowledge frameworks. People in management, they hoist us onto onto them onto us. You know, plot. And then you’ve got the made available. Yeah.

And then you’ve got then you’ve got the sort of interpretivists, which are, you know, historically the phenomenologists. The knowledge interest is to understand, not so much to control. So it’s released itself from that naive form of objectivity and now attempts to account for the sub subjectivity as being significant in the way that humans understand the world. An interpretivist position takes subjectivity quite seriously and tries to research it and understands that subjectivity is in play constantly. But the interpretivist is usually very weak on the political law, the way that power works through knowledge, so it has a weak understanding of the relationship between power and knowledge.

The critical tradition is interpretivist because it understands the the, importance of subjectivity, but it also understands that our subjective understandings, are constituted inside of power relations. That’s the sort of basic definition. Inside power relations? Power Power relations. So people who work in the field where the, you know, the the critical philosophers meet education, they the knowledge interest is generally understood to be emancipatory.

So if you’re working within a critical epistemology, you’re trying to produce knowledge that’s more emancipatory and liberatory as opposed to controlling or just about understanding. So, what what what what tends to happen in in in in in in in this field is, people that that, aspire to or wanna work within the critical, they can claim emancipatory or liberatory, before anything that they do. And that’s the way gets played out. I’m working in this tradition, so I’m liberatory. So they they they claim it a priori anything they say.

So all, you know, all these theories about the world get generated out of a sense of I’m working in this liberatory tradition. And that’s what’s always been wrong with the left. It claims it’s liberatory and it’s about justice and so on. And I think its intentions are probably that’s probably right. Having the intention and then generating some theory or some action out of it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve got that together because you’re There’s no self awareness.

Well, without any self reflexivity, then you’re in real, real strife. And so within that within the within the left’s or, you know, the critical tradition, reflexivity is incredibly significant, but, the sort of type of reflexivity this requires also very, very, difficult to, you know, sustain or you know, you can you can that’s yeah. I just say So so, I mean, I think I think the the side that I position myself in have got, lots of claims for being good, and so they claim good a priori. But then so does the other side. Look at the way it gets played out.

And because you can claim well, I think in, you know, in in, in the tradition that I’m that I sort of study in, then as soon as you kind of go, well, my motivation’s okay, but maybe what I’m saying still got problems. You know? Now that’s so that sort of suspicion about your own grand narrative is now starting to take over conversation if you track what’s happened in the literature in my field, maybe just in the last ten years. So you go back ten years and you’ve got critical scholars who are just standing on their on their box and shouting at the rest of the world about their good and you do this. Now some of us tried that, but it’s never ever that easy.

You know what I mean? Tried what they said. It’s much more complicated. So much more sort of humble, more self reflexive, and, you know, so that’s the way that the the writing in the fields moved as well. So not claiming good as an opening move.

I could be good. It might turn out okay. And I think perhaps, again, in the in the the way that the Dharma practice gets structured, I think probably those, you know, that those dilemmas are central. So I think right from the beginning you’re it’s quite clear if you understand the way the Lam Rim presents that the thing you are trying to do is you are trying to actually purify your motivation. So I think what happens in the tradition the Western tradition, I I, I I I read in, there’s motivation and there’s motivation.

They don’t understand the just because you can claim it doesn’t mean you’ve actually That’s right. Got it together. It doesn’t mean your motivation is actually what you’re saying. So but, I mean, in the way that the argument gets structured in here, just claiming it sort of has been enough. But now there’s that’s now a problem.

We’re in we’re in, Dharma practice. Well, it’s quite clear that your motivation is a lot of work. You know? That’s the key point. You know?

But I don’t even know whether I could introduce that conversation inside of the tradition I read in because they don’t think I just don’t think they can hear it. That’s part of the problem really with the East West conversation too. Some things just can’t be heard at this moment of the way the translation works. Well, not enough people can. You’re just seen as a maniac or an idiot or a fool or tradition that I read in.

This is the critical tradition I read in. Yeah. So wouldn’t understand that. No. No.

I don’t think they would. Not the one they wouldn’t they wouldn’t it in the nice clean, crisp way that, you know, someone who’s studying in the Lamrim would. Oh. Okay. Because it’s not a it’s not a it’s not a key idea.

The gurus in the tradition aren’t talking talking about that. No. Each traditions have their gurus. Absolutely. So there’s a lot of this is getting back to, you know, the West pretends to be, you know, about everyone making their own decisions, I just, you know, I just read in my own tradition, you know, in my own Western tradition, and I go to conferences.

And if you’re actually saying what the Gurus say and and you can and you can and you can say it in a way that most of that that the other second authors can agree that you’ve got that right, well, then you get published. You can look at the education. Oh, no. I’m just talking across the Western social sciences in general. Education is just one part of it.

So, I mean, in in education in the bit that I read anyway, education’s a a sort of a mongrel discipline. It’s not really a discipline. It actually it lives off of all the other traditions. So education feeds off of psychology and sociology substantially, but then there’s his there’s history, and there’s sociology and anthropology are quite closely related. And then those that are more sociologically inclined tend also possibly to be philosophical.

So, you know, educational scholarship gets constituted out of debates that are happening in other disciplines. So I read I read as much social theory as I can, just general social theory. Sociology, which is critical social theory is really a conversation between sociology and philosophy. Again, diagnosis of the times with some sort of empirical reference. That’s why you need the sociology.

So, you know, if an educator and you’re interested in justice, however you might sort of want to understand that, then you go to social theory for theories of justice. Theories, you know, for accounts of how poverty gets constituted socially and so on and so on and so on. On. And then you try and work out how education fits into that. Given that education’s a, you know, a key site for social and individual formation, then, you know, an educator doesn’t have any trouble reading any social theory because I can read myself into it.

If you have a look at the key sites for social formation there, you know, religion, family, media culture, and school. Twenty years ago, it’s probably religion, family school. Media culture is definitely much more significant now for our children. I didn’t get a TV until I was in grade eight. I made my own crystal set, and I was listening to it on the night that Jimi Hendrix died.

No. No. Just little ones. No. I didn’t have the paper.

One. And you just I bought those. Yeah. And so perhaps even, you know, religions I don’t know, maybe it’s on the ascendancy again. So I mean, as an educator and as a father, you know, you realise that media culture’s probably the one that’s the most dominant site for social and, you know, in identity formation now.

You’ve got to compete with that. So it’s very, very important for educators to be reading, you know, picking up on the times. I mean, for some of us anyway, the the idea of the traditional school I must be on its last gasp. I can’t work out how come it’s still going. The the contradictions that are being played out at the moment.

It’s it’s can’t it can’t last much longer. It’s gotta fall over. I guess it’s So what’s holding it together? The need for expert childcare, I think. Childminding.

I’m going off to work. I need to send my kids somewhere. And then we have a whole lot of hullabaloo about what goes on inside of there. But, you know, information technology, it’s just sort of revolutionizing all along. Mean?

The the capacity to for teachers inside of conventional curricula to provide some way that’s relevant to young people. Very difficult to compete. But that’s another story. Yeah, so, you know, the Western Western social theory has its own journals and, you know, again, own gurus. Most of the gurus are philosophers.

So and it’s the Germans and the French are big. Germans and the French are big. So, you know, I ended up reading this German tradition, and then also some French philosophers. But having said all that about media and so forth, I still found coming to Buddha House, one of the most powerful things was the fact that, Rinpoche quite a few years ago, that you actually had a live human being up there who was saying, you know, I found this useful speaking with some enthusiasm about something. That has a tremendous impact.

The same with anybody. You know, you have a person teaching something, that personal presentation, it just has an impact that other forms of presentation don’t have. I mean I agree entirely. I mean in the type of education that I’m interested in, can’t even see how it’s possible to go critical on an online conversation. I need to be, as the teacher, with people face to face and I can challenge them in real time for the for the education that I’m trying to provide.

And for this sort of setting, sure, we can read books, and I think that’s highly beneficial and so forth, but you still need that personal Well, I think I suppose, you know, that’s the thing that’s, you know, you’ve twigged on to the, you know, having someone who’s sort of embodied the the learning, like a meditation teacher like Rinpoche. That’s very compelling. Also, it’s a it’s a have you heard of incline? Mhmm. Incline is very interested in in I don’t know what she calls it, orality or something like that.

And that you listen to a teaching in a context. And it’s very much different than reading. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.

No question. More going on. Yeah. I found Yeah. Then getting the ideas from it.

Yeah. Absolutely. I found the reading and the oral teaching just really sort of support each other in a way, you know? Yeah. There’s a synergy there.

Something’s happening. The other two things that we’ve mentioned were the actual writing ourselves and the other one is the discussion. That people actually engage in discussion. It doesn’t have to be debate but discussion of some sort. I think Sharing, you know, however you want to That’s exactly Which is probably more of what’s going on.

Well, that was the that was the thing that, you know, in the experiments that I was having with the basic program when I was really, really active here a number of years ago. The the for me anyway as a teacher, there’s there’s always a name for having some rigor. Yeah. That’s why I understand it. I don’t use standards, it’s rigor.

And there’s a sort of a paradox, really. Without rigor, then no one comes because it just be it doesn’t really challenge them. But if it’s too challenging, then they run as well. So Yeah. You have to be able to manage the rigor to get people to stay.

Yeah. And without it, they run. And so I I for a while there, I thought that Buddha House had a rigor problem. I still you know? Rigor mortis?

Well, not rigor mortis, but just a rigor problem. So so we sort of up the ante by giving people homework and forcing them to talk with others in small groups and perform their learning in fairly well, you know, it wasn’t too challenging. And so we we upped the rigour a bit. Well, quite a bit probably. And, yeah, for a few years there, we had about twenty five people coming, studying, at least reading and listening and talking, but the writing wasn’t there.

So, you know, when I work when I work with teachers out of a university context, I’ve got two two or two formats that are possible. One, I get invited to come to the school and work, usually one offs and they’re terrible, but, sometimes more than one offs. Sometimes I can get to work with them for maybe four or five times or even over a couple of years. When I have to go to the when I go to their space, I can’t make them do any writing, and I can’t make them do any reading. And therefore, the rigor, is less.

But if they come onto my context and they enroll in one of my graduate programs, then they have to read all the things I tell them to, and they’ve gotta write. And as soon as they are forced to read and write, then the rigor just dramatically jumps. I wonder if it’s just writing, though. Because think Writing without the writing, it’s the same. No.

I’m not not dispelling that. I think it’s actually putting things in a visual representation. For some people, they don’t write, but they can draw, they can Oh yeah, they need they need to do something. Yeah. That’s right.

They need to represent it. They’re learning. Yeah. That’s it. Yeah.

Somehow. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. That’s right.

I mean, it doesn’t have to be the essay. Somehow. And and Where where you can get some feedback Yeah. On on how that representation Well, it’s actually it’s actually bringing it from the from the ethereal into the concrete. And as soon as you put it into the concrete, you’ve got something to bat against.

And and with with Well, other people can engage with then. Everybody. That’s right. It’s out. And then you can get some feedback on how you understand it and what’s missing and what’s not.

And that that’s that’s that’s really how you learn. But then how you you know, to actually just make the representation, you’ve gotta you’ve gotta be Conceptualize. You’ve gotta you’ve gotta do stuff that you normally wouldn’t. Yeah. Yeah.

So just reading something is one thing. I keep on telling my students is that there’s a big difference between reading and studying. Between reading and understanding. Yeah. Because when you study a text, you’re really trying to make the text your own.

When you’re reading it, it’s you can just read it. And, you know, some people have photographic memories, but they haven’t really made the ideas their own. They just know what was in there. So if you know if you’ve made text your own, then you know the argument the person’s making, and then you’ve got your own reading of that argument, and you’re bending it the way you way you want to, then, you know, you’ve really made you’ve made it your own. Anyway, we’re up to well past nine thirty again.

So I think we should stop there.