Okir

exactly! i agree. this sounds like the Christian concept of “revelation” and “grace” to me. which corresponds to Buddhist “insight” and “fruition.”

although i’m still interested in grand narratives, i don’t take them very seriously a “truths”. they are useful as maps and for other applications (e.g. philosophy, psychology, health and well-being). in Daniel Ingram’s model, i treat them as ” Training in Morality”.

integration can be very useful as we navigate our way in our everyday relative existence. however, from a hardcore Buddhist perspective, what ultimately counts is our own experience, perception, and realization of what is. that’s why i put more emphasis on practice over philosophizing and metaphysical conjecturing

~C

P.S. the fact that we exist and communicate like this is already a contradiction. so yeah, i have no problem with it

You’re describing secularising the Dharma as a twofold process. Firstly, it’s stripping Buddhism of its cultural baggage, which is generally a good thing, if it’s done by someone who’s deeply versed in both Western Culture and Traditional Buddhism.

But secondly you’re describing it as also looking for the common threads in mystical traditions, which I don’t see the point of. It seems to me that Vince Horn is right on the money that this second kind of secularisation comes from simply being uncomfortable and “embarrassed by certain components of Buddhism–the adherence to strict moral codes, the magical and mythical pantheon of Buddhist cosmology, the metaphysics of enlightenment, etc.–that we feel the need to throw them all out without further discourse?”

Also, I think there’s a modern psuedo-egalitarianism going on here, where all religions are considered to be basically the same. Which isn’t my experience. All the major world religions may have broad similarities, but they’re definitely not the same. Buddhism, to me, has the subtlest take on the nature of reality, denies the existence of a creator god, and has emptiness (and even this emptiness is itself empty), as a core, well, ‘belief’, using that word guardedly. (In reality, even beliefs in Buddhism are just the finger pointing to the moon.)

And who would we be to think we know the Dharma well enough to radically re-invent it? Those people who I consider modern translators of the Dharma invariably go back to the word of the Buddha to validate the principles of his system of practice. And they are out-and-out Buddhist, not Catholics!

Finally, if we were to secularise Buddhism and remove all the religious associations, we would be left with one of two things: a ‘Dharma’ stripped of it’s profundity, or a Dharma which retains the profundity, but looks almost exactly like the Dharma we already had, only using more western words for the terms. But I think the likelihood of it being the first would 99.999999%.

IMHO, of course…

VS.

Every honest thing is simple. Every original teaching of The Buddha is simple, i. e., “If you want happiness, help someone.” Complexity is added later to sell things.

Of course, not every simple thing is honest. One must pay full Attention.

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
I am vast, I contain multitudes.”

A multitude of errors!

Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. It sounds similar to me, to what Ken Wilber has tried to do with his Integral Psychology models, where he lines everything up to see the commonalities, and then from there you are in a position to do a more kind of intelligent distillation and re-packaging.

I respect that drive, and I think folks like Wilber and Young are doing a decent job at it, and I’m glad they are. Perhaps it’s just that I’ve become more and more a post-modernist thinker though, in that I’ve been questioning that drive, within myself, to want to find commonalities and universals and then titrate them down into some sort of super-essence. Because though I’ve bought into theories that do that, and even constructed some of my own, I always find that new information surfaces and my previously held beliefs about how things connected get challenged and they are undermined slightly.

For example, as I write about on my blog, while doing Robert Kegan’s Immunity to Change process recently, I unearthed an invisible assumption that, “I should be able to resolve all paradoxes and contradictions that I encounter.” That assumption was one of the primary things driving me to try and bring everything together, see commonalities, and build theories. It seems like what Kegan refers to as the “self-actualizing mind.” But I don’t think that is how Wilber (or perhaps even Shinzen) came to their synthesis. When Wilber talks about his process of writing SES (Sex, Ecology, Spirituality) he talks about how he took in all this information, reading for like 3 years straight, and how he was completely stuck, not knowing how things fit together, or even if they did. He had to bang his head against that no knowing for YEARS! It was only then that his theories “emerged”.

My sense is that his process (and his understanding and conclusions) were quite different from say, you or I, picking up a book, reading it, and agreeing with or including, the points into our meta-theory of how things are, and how they relate. That, while it can be difficult at times, is fairly easy in comparison to the process he describes. And I’m not convinced that everyone doesn’t need to go through that process before they can really value the fruits of such conclusions…

Anyway, I guess my core concern is with the methodology by which we agre or disagree with what is “essential” or what is “core” in Buddhism. My method for years was to resolve paradoxes and contradictions into an ever-evolving super-theory about how everything makes sense, but i personally found the very structure behind that drive to be “not me”. It became an object in my attention, and now recently I’ve been feeling like a better methodology is to rest in not knowing how things fit together, and as Kegan would say, letting that mystery “solve us” rather than us “solve it”. It seems paradoxical, but it’s clear to me that I can’t go back to building sand castles during high-tide.

I relate to what you are saying so much. I’m a Christian Contemplative, and I practice Buddhist meditation intensively. At the place that is beyond the root there is no difference. Thank you for bringing your perspective to the discussion.

LOL — the photo with the sign.