Buddhist Protestantism and Social Justice

Namaste from the Burn Ward

Hot holy hell does this guy David Chapman have some refreshingly woke takes on the incessant moral/political sermonizing of progressive Buddhists. Some great names for it too, like "FTFY Buddhism" to describe the ethos of reform. Problem is, the ethics we are supposed to adopt, though presented as Dharmic, are not particularly Buddhist. In fact, they are suspiciously identical to the pious morality of the left.

David Chapman's thoughts are of special interest to me because he's a fellow Vajrayana Buddhist, specifically of a Nyingma lineage. As a Nyingmapa myself, I expect there might be a great deal of convergence between us. So far much of what I've read has me nodding along as I read many of the same things I've been saying.

Chapman calls the Buddhist progressive axis "Consensus Buddhism." I'm not sure why. I don't believe there actually is a consensus in Western Buddhism, except perhaps in its media organs. But I suppose he refers to the fact that a number of highly visible Western Buddhist teachers have formed a homogeneous ideological bloc that crosses traditional sectarian lines. It's the sort of bland, feel-good Buddhism you find in publications like Tricycle.

Consensus "Buddhist ethics" can't be derived from fundamental Buddhist principles in any consistent way. It's actually at odds with morality as prescribed in Buddhist tradition (for example, Buddhist sexual ethics). We're told that Buddhist contemplative methods belong to a complete unified package and should not be practiced without these ethics. But while the Buddha did teach meditation, and he did teach ethics, he did not teach anything like the "Buddhist ethics" being sold to us today.

This "Buddhist ethics" is supposed to be Buddhist because it's compassionate, although exactly how you derive it from compassion is unclear. My best guess is that it's compassionate because it's the sort of morality that would be held by a Democrat and not a Republican.

The Culture Wars Come to Vajrayana Buddhism

I disagree with Chapman's premature announcement in 2015 that Consensus Buddhism was undergoing dissipative heat death. It had lost the fight against the apolitical secular mindfulness movement which has no qualms ministering to capitalists and soldiers, but it would soon target traditional Asian Buddhism, aka Buddhism.

For a time, Consensus Buddhism conformed predictably to what you would have found in other upper middle-class liberal circles of the time, but with more compassion, or at least more talk about compassion. I say "would have" and "of the time" because at some point this meh brand of progressivism (I mean the general non-Buddhist variety) mutated into a truly nasty virus called the social justice warrior. If I had to pinpoint the catalyst for that transformation, I would venture Gamergate. That would be the moment when meddlesome but mostly benign activists became militants in a culture war, although in hindsight the failure of the Occupy movement to even specify demands was an early indicator of dysfunction growing within the left. The social justice warrior was present in a nascent form, already radicalized by postmodernist professors and critical race theory.

My first encounter with this deadly strain of social justice was in a discussion about a well-reputed scholar who was accused of date rape and lost his job. The victim's description of the alleged rape didn't particularly sound like rape, but that wasn't even the controversial part. The controversial part was that I said it was a dangerous precedent if the mere accusation of rape without substantiation was enough to destroy a man's career and reputation. I recommended that, since rape is a felony, it should be prosecuted as a criminal case in a court of law, not as a witch trial in the kangaroo court of Twitter and Facebook. I further made the suggestion that due process is a good model here, since it protects the rights of the accused.

This brought a now-predictable shitstorm of condemnation down on me, as I was called a misogynist, rape apologist, and MRA. At the time I had to google the latter term and was both amused and perturbed that support for due process was being relegated to some fringe idpol faction. Beyond the fact that feminists were politicizing due process and ready to sacrifice it to their all-important agenda, what I found disturbing was the hysterical, bigoted tone of their discourse and how closely their excoriations resembled the ritual humiliation of a Maoist struggle session. And to add a grotesque irony to the whole thing, one of my accusers was an American-born Tibetan. Surely, if anyone should have built up an immunity to totalitarian ideological mania and the persecution of class enemies, it would be Tibetans, for whom the horrors of the Cultural Revolution are seared on their collective consciousness. Well, when the shoe's on the other foot...

Samayagate

Of course, feminist moral panic has since become commonplace. So it seems quaint that even a few years ago, I would have been naïve enough to try to reason with the people on the other side of such an issue. The moral panic has not spared Vajrayana Buddhism, either. SJWs soon moved on to putting Tibetan lamas in their crosshairs for the crime of having sex with female students, which they termed sexual abuse. Despite the fact that this is perfectly permissible behavior according to the Buddhist tantric code, it is not permissible according to feminism. For them, Tibetan Buddhism is a "patriarchal system" that needs to be purified. Never mind that no one forced them to join this patriarchal system in the first place; they're here now and they will reform it, whether you like it or not. If you want to know what someone really believes, don't listen to their words; look at their behavior. These people do not believe in Buddhadharma; they believe in feminism. They are trying to cannibalize Buddhism from within.

In Buddhist tantra, the guru-disciple relationship is inviolable. The guru has complete authority; he is an absolute monarch. SJWs want to turn him into a constitutional monarch and establish consensus processes for decision-making in Buddhist institutions. In other words, they want to seize power from the lama and put it in the hands of a board. This board will no doubt be almost entirely composed of an ideologically radicalized coterie of Caucasian progressives. It's a power grab.

But the Vajrayana model of organization not democracy, it is the mandala. As Ronald Davidson showed in Indian Esoteric Buddhism, the mandala is a political metaphor. Specifically mandala is a medieval feudal term that refers to the the dominion of a sovereign. At the center of the mandala is the sovereign and surrounding him are his vassals. And the sovereign of the mandala is the guru – or, in Tibetan translation, the lama.

This is an explicitly inegalitarian structure. It comes into conflict with the egalitarian legacy values of the West, and especially of America. This anti-clerical egalitarianism bears a remarkable resemblance to something... a religious movement... I can't quite place it. But I get ahead of myself.

These developments brought me out of my neutrality. Somehow I could tolerate intolerance in the land of my birth, but I could not abide these zealots trying to destroy the Dharma. As far as I was concerned, the attack on the institution of the Vajrayana guru was a declaration of war.

A Lama Fights Back

While all this was going on, Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche stuck his head above the parapet to defend the Vajrayana and, no doubt, his friend. If you're practitioner of Vajrayana, the post is worth reading in full. If not, it will probably be of no interest to you.

The replies he got to his Facebook posts were mostly positive, but the smattering of negative reactions were illuminating for their hostile and not-so-compassionate tone:

The Tibetan male equivalent's of Harvey Weinstein are yet to be held to account. I would imagine it wont be too much longer before non-Tibetan followers of Tibetan Buddhism will be forced to express their complicity in the ongoing power abuses in much the same way as Hollywood is at present.

A threat: "Even if you're innocent, you're not innocent. We're coming for you next."

too much bourbon i am guessing. adored by thousands for his duplicity. i remember when he taught about ethics, critical thinking and decency as companions to dharma. well that's gone. back to the himilayan hillbilly world

Note the reference to ethics. Whose ethics, I wonder? Also the inventive ethnic slur didn't go unnoticed. Nice folks, these progressives.

I would be remiss if I didn't also mention what was a truly inspired piece of trolling, a photo of the revered lama standing in front of a lingerie advert, captioned only with the MeToo hashtag. Its aim is so exact, it evinces a virtuosity in social media communication that would seem masterful even if he weren't a 50-something Tibetan lama from Bhutan. Clearly not just another himilayan [sic] hillbilly.

(Trolling may seem to be a rather unrestrained, immoderate, un-Buddhist response to the mob, but I don't think so. The mob itself is not amenable to reason. Trying to defend and justify your position discursively is futile. It will only be taken as further evidence of your guilt. The inexorable, logically necessary outcome of the social justice mob's piety signaling is to go into a feedback loop that can't stop unless over the charred remains of a victim. Appeals to reason only feed this social-psychological mechanism. So far, the only effective counterattack seems to be mockery, or meme warfare.)

So, no, David Chapman, Consensus Buddhism never petered out. It drew energy from the ferocity of the culture wars and began attacking traditional Buddhism with renewed vigor. And it's not going to leave us alone.

Buddhist Protestantism

Up until now I have used Chapman's preferred term, Consensus Buddhism, but I don't particularly like it. I prefer Protestant Buddhism or, better yet, Buddhist Protestantism, which I use in an unusual way to mean watered-down Buddhism with a foreign graft of progressive political values. My reasons are twofold:

1. To mock the reformist pretensions of political progressives in Buddhism. It's pretentious because they want to reform the morality of Buddhism, but they have done almost nothing in the way of ethical reasoning themselves. There is no serious thought behind these ethical reforms; it's a cultural reflex. Just as the historical Puritans originally sought to purify the Anglican Church by purging the Roman "Papist" elements, modern Puritan Buddhists seek to purify Buddhism by expunging it of "extraneous," "cultural" elements and "backwards" (read: incompatible with contemporary leftism) morals.

2. Because the actual source of Western Buddhist ethics is Protestantism, quite literally, in both a historical and theological sense, with secularized progressive ideology as the intermediary form.

I also have to confess that I'm using this term in non-standard way. It's usually acknowledged that, through colonialism, Protestant ideas influenced Asian Buddhism. Chapman is correct to point out that this compromised Buddhism was often what hippie travelers encountered and brought back in the 60's when they went to Asia.

And he's also right to point out that the so-called "Buddhist ethics" promoted nowadays are not Buddhist at all, but Western and leftist. He even makes an aside that the American leftist ethics he's identifying are "rooted in Calvinism" and throws this burn into a footnote: "It’s amusing, and perhaps illuminating, to view Consensus Buddhism as a mildly eccentric Protestant Christian sect that replaced Palestinian fairy tales with Indian fairy tales." Nailed it. But he doesn't quite make the argument.

I think I can help him with that, with a little assist from Mencius Moldbug. (Now I'm not a neoreactionary, but to repurpose a Moldbug's own words, "I am not exactly allergic to the stuff." I'm working on a post critiquing certain tenets of neoreaction.)

The historical development of progressivism as traced by Moldbug goes something like this, as far as I can tell:

John Calvin > Levellers, Ranters, Diggers, Quakers, etc. / Brownism > Massachusetts Bay theocratic state Puritanism > Unitarianism, Universalism, Transcendentalism / abolitionism > turn-of-the-century Progressive Era > postwar mainline Protestantism > Progressivism

Moldbug didn't quite sell me on this the first time I was reading him, and there are still some lacunae in this picture. But when I did some digging and actually read some of the primary sources of 17th-century British Protestant sects, I was convinced. In fact, there's scarcely a major movement or ideological system of the left that wasn't prefigured in some radical Protestant sect of the 1600s in Britain.

Late 20th century progressivism is more proximally the heir to the ideological mood of the 19th century Progressive Era, which was inextricably tied up with Protestantism in the same way that cultural conservatism prior to 2016 was inseparable from evangelical Christianity. Progress as used by this ideology is a calque for Providence and elides the religious specificity of its Protestant ethical orientation and teleological view of history. It did this in order to repackage a parochial religious ethics as a universal humanist ideology founded on secular values. This system is marketed to us as rationalist but, as Nietzsche pointed out in Twilight of the Idols about similar attempts at smuggling Christian morality in his era, it can't be derived rationally but depends fundamentally on disguised Christian theology.

G. Eliot. – They have got rid of the Christian God, and now think that they have to hold on to Christian morality more than ever: that is an English form of consistency, and we do not want to blame the moral little females à la Eliot for it. In England, every time you take one small step towards emancipation from theology you have to reinvent yourself as a moral fanatic in the most awe-inspiring way. That is the price you pay there. – For the rest of us, things are different. When you give up Christian faith, you pull the rug out from under your right to Christian morality as well. This is anything but obvious: you have to keep driving this point home, English idiots to the contrary. Christianity is a system, a carefully considered, integrated view of things. If you break off a main tenet, the belief in God, you smash the whole system along with it: you lose your grip on anything necessary. Christianity presupposes that humans do not know, cannot know what is good for them or what is evil, they believe in God who has privileged knowledge of this. Christian morality is a command; it has a transcendent origin; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth, – it stands or falls along with belief in God. – When the English really believe that they ‘intuitively’ know all by themselves what is good and what is evil; and when, as a result, they think that they do not need Christianity to guarantee morality any more, this is itself just the result of the domination of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this domination: so that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, so that no one can see how highly conditioned its right to exist really is. For the English, morality is not a problem yet . . . .

I have a lot more to say on this topic, and I realize I haven't quite made the case yet. I'm saving that for my next post. But for now I think this will suffice as a sketchy outline of my contention that the version of Buddhism being sold to many Westerners is not only not exactly Buddhist, it's not even secular. It's secularized, Buddhicized Protestantism.