What's So Wrong With Engaged Buddhism?
A reply to Ian Kidd
1.
The great German theologian Adolf von Harnack was satirised by a contemporary, George Tyrrell, who famously remarked that ‘The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic darkness, is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well.’1
In this eloquent and provocative critique of the ‘Engaged Buddhism’ movement, Ian Kidd offers a similar satirical thought about Buddhists who look down the well of the centuries and find just what they were looking for reflected back at them: the Buddha as social activist, liberal, feminist, egalitarian. Kidd’s view, by contrast, is that if we study the early suttas we shall find that this picture not only has no purchase but, if anything, is contradicted by the evidence. He writes:
I suspect what most people think of as ‘Buddhism’ is really shaped by some kind of engaged Buddhist image. I think that’s a problem: the fidelity of those images to the teachings of the Buddha is very questionable.
By ‘the teachings’, I mean the suttas or discourses that are taken to be the earliest statement of the Buddha’s teachings.
The question for Kidd is whether engaged Buddhism distorts those teachings, whether it is faithful to or consistent with those teachings, and he remarks
I only want to provoke doubts about whether the ethos of engaged Buddhism is consistent with what the Buddha taught. We can find perfectly good reasons to want to address racism, economic inequality, and unsustainable abuse of the environment. But few, if any of these will be drawn from the teachings of the Buddha.
Now, when Kidd talks of ‘consistency with’ or ‘fidelity to’ the earliest statements of the Buddha’s teaching it may look to some as though he endorses a traditionalism which resists the critical developments which define a living tradition, which can both correct and be corrected by the past. I think such a reading would be a mistake. Kidd is asking whether or not the engaged Buddhism movement distorts the past in order to justify its own position.
Nevertheless, the questions crowd in. Is this what engaged Buddhists are doing? Aren’t those conclusions of Nineteenth Century European scholars and philosophers more accurate? – that Buddhism is essentially quietist, and pessimistic about the human condition? Does an ‘engaged’ Buddhist really have to draw on this picture of the Buddha as a ‘social activist’ to find support for their own activism? Should they be looking for this kind of support anyway? If the Dalai Lama tells me that the Buddha would have been ‘green’ should I understand him to imply that the Buddha was ‘green’? – if that notion had any conceptual traction at all in the time of the historical Buddha. By the same token, someone might say that the Buddha would have been an activist without implying that activism had any counterpart in the socio-political environment of the early suttas. Isn’t the engaged Buddhist simply using rhetorical shorthand, and talking about the possible demeanour of an ‘enlightened person’ in our own times and our own desperate circumstances? Nevertheless these comments hardly imply that it is true that the Buddha would have been green, or would have been an activist, so doesn’t Kidd’s challenge to engaged Buddhists stand? My own view is that they shouldn’t be looking for support for their activism in the tradition: – they should be looking there for support for the form of their activism.
2.
We need to address the starkly negative way that Kidd represents social activism itself. If that was the whole story it would be difficult to see how a Buddhist or indeed anyone of good conscience could countenance it:
‘Boundless compassion’ and equanimity together are not a call to arms for the sake of the victims of injustice around the world. An enlightened being certainly desires they be liberated from suffering, but they do not experience anger or frustration at their circumstances. There is no raging against the elite, no angry calls for revolution, no ardent political campaigning (my italics).
Kidd is right that ‘an enlightened being’ does not ‘experience anger or frustration’ and so on. But this is not yet an argument against Buddhist activism; rather, the idea of an ‘enlightened being’ could be thought to provide us with a criterion or measure for how not be an activist, rather than a reason for refusing to be an activist at all. Elsewhere, Kidd says
The Buddha’s instruction was that one’s speech should be ‘factual, true, beneficial, and endearing & agreeable to others’. Nothing false, harsh, or likely to cause dissension and hostility. The ‘wholesome topics’ concern morality and liberation – modesty, contentment, seclusion, non-entanglement, virtue, concentration, and the nature and possibility of ‘right vision’ and mokṣa. All this is very far from activist and political discourse: there is nothing of Right Speech in angry denunciations, partisan polemics, divisive ‘us vs. them’ polarisations, scorn for opponents, and other depressingly familiar phenomena. Indeed, the desire to talk politics is a failure of Right Speech (my italics).
As Kidd represents it, ‘angry denunciations’, ‘scorn for opponents’, ‘raging against the elite’, ‘angry calls for revolution’ are written in to the very idea of social activism, and being an ‘enraged’ Buddhist is not a good look. Does Kidd have a point? Isn’t there a kind of snarling self-righteousness about activism when the chips are down? Well, social activism is certainly poisoned by the ‘hate speech’ and anger that Kidd refers to, and yet there are also models of non-violent protest available. What this suggests is that activist discourse and conduct need to be reformed, and that the reference to ‘right speech’ etc. gives us the form of an ethical criterion for how activism is to be conducted. This is not to say that non-violent protest, for example, is easy or sustainable, especially in the face of provocation or brutal retaliation, but this is precisely the milieu within which the ethical teachings can inform and promote conduct that arises out of prior judgments of moral necessity. After all ‘the desire to talk politics’ that Kidd refers to is an expression which can be understood in more than one way, as Sophie Scholl could have told us.
Now Kidd rightly says, as we have seen, that we have good reasons …
… to want to address racism, economic inequality, and unsustainable abuse of the environment. But few, if any of these will be drawn from the teachings of the Buddha.
This mention of ‘good reasons’ is a useful starting-point. It seems to me that Buddhists are ‘activist’ for the same reasons as anyone else, and that, as I have hinted, the form of their activism qua Buddhist is or should be influenced by Buddhist diagnoses of moral failure – both of conduct and disposition – and ways of overcoming it. This would yield an ‘engaged Buddhism’ which didn’t rely on allegedly false readings of the suttas. The pursuit of justice, for instance, doesn’t arrive free of the fault-lines of human fallibility, those on the side of the angels often think they have permission for hatred, disdain and contempt for their opponents. To put it another way, is engaged Buddhism derived from a reading of the traditions, as Kidd alleges, or does their social activism and its attendant moral difficulties lead Buddhist practitioners to reflect on the traditions to help them both sustain and purify it?
It seems implausible that their social activism is motivated by this picture of the Buddha as activist, even if it were true that he was. My own view is that, like anyone else, activist Buddhists are already motivated by the ‘natural sentiments of humanity’, to use an expression of David Hume, and this activism then becomes a part of the flawed moral life of unenlightened beings that needs to be freed from zealotry, anger, hatred, rage. Moral agency needs to be corrected by moral considerations: – you have to get the demeanour right as well as the agency. This leads us to a crux about the nature and scope of morality and to a consideration of a crucial comment made by Kidd:
The Buddha’s moral ethos was quietist. It eschewed the radical, socially-engaged, world-changing kinds of activity. The focus was upon individual self-cultivation and on such quieter virtues as equanimity, humility, self-restraint, and modesty.
I am not so sure. ‘Quietist’ is a term of moral criticism which belongs to an opposing stance in a social and political environment in which the scope of moral action has become a pressing and critical issue, and the criticism is that a ‘quietist’ refuses to engage. ‘Quiet’, maybe, but isn’t it a distortion of the Buddha’s teaching to represent him as ‘eschewing’ ‘radical, socially engaged, world-changing kinds of activity’? What would these latter terms even mean? Kidd is right that activism in favour of structural change is not to be found in the early writings, but wrong, I think, to claim that such conduct is ‘eschewed’. It seems much more plausible to find an undeveloped paradigm of moral agency not yet confronted by the turmoil and pressure of geo-political events and the prospect of eco-catastrophe.
3.
Now, Kidd claims that there are two main ‘senses’ of karuna or compassion in the suttas, and two corresponding senses of suffering or dukkha. As for compassion,
The first {sense} is a commitment to personal responses to specific instances of the suffering of the beings one encounters. Helping an injured dog or tending to a sick friend or feeding a homeless person would all be instances of karuna. Compassionate acts are immediate, direct, tangible. Of course, this is consistent with certain kinds of modern moral action – volunteering at a shelter, caring for elderly neighbours, being a caring friend. But karuna in this sense is different from ‘bigger’ sorts of moral activism.
But these ordinary, everyday examples of compassion are also evident in ‘bigger’ forms of collective action even if there is no sense of this in the early suttas. There is no need to ‘find’ collective compassion in the early writings in order to apply it as Buddhists in our own circumstances. By contrast, Kidd sees ‘boundless compassion’, the compassion that belongs with the Brahmaviharas, as a ‘second sense’ of karuna, that which is ‘felt by the enlightened being for all other creatures.’ And he asks
Could this be a path to social activism aiming at changing the world for the sake of all people? No, since that would not make sense given what the Buddha says about this sort of karuna. ‘Boundless compassion’ is not a virtue we can exercise for the sake of specific people – the victims of oppression, say, or those suffering due to treatable diseases. It is a transformed way of experiencing the world. The Buddha’s moral teachings are really a sort of ‘moral phenomenology’ – a set of practices for disciplined transformations of how we tend to experience and engage with the world.
But I wonder whether this is a misleading contrast. Kidd says that this ‘boundless compassion’ is ‘a transformed way of experiencing the world’. It makes sense to see it from a ‘faith position’ as a perspective on the human condition from a point beyond it – if there is such a point, and this for most of us is a matter at best of intimations and the projections of the imagination. Kidd has contrasted this ‘transformed way of experiencing the world’ with the idea of ‘a virtue we can exercise for the sake of specific people’, and he takes this to be a contrast of sense. But the acquisition of a virtue often involves a change in how you see things, what you attend to, and so forth; a sense of justice disposes you to notice what you previously overlooked: it represents a point of view, though it may not be accompanied by other virtues of action, its responses might be intemperate, for instance. These are also ways of ‘experiencing the world’, then, and they can be transformed. Rather than thinking in terms of two ‘senses’ of compassion as Kidd does here, I should rather talk of two aspects of compassion, and twin, internally related, trajectories of its transformation, twin aspects of a single phenomenon, our natural responsiveness to human suffering, dulled, or overlain or even engulfed, as it may be, and our conception of what constitutes suffering at all, a phenomenon that Buddhist tradition represents as moving towards an ideal limit, imagined in the form of the wheel of life or a Bodhisattva looking with pity at the human condition. What we can conceive is the idea of an unfolding moral education of the species, perhaps even conceptualised as a path towards ‘awakening’, and this will include just such glimpses of the condition of the species, moments when the particular depravities, corruptions and stupidities that overwhelm us are seen to exemplify the universal (‘man’s inhumanity to man’). But this ‘seeing’ is also a human possibility that we project into the gaze of a Buddha or Bodhisattva figure. The figure of the Bodhisattva may work as a prophylactic against misanthropic despair and disillusionment. We rarely achieve this kind of perspective, or keep it in view for long, it is not for us yet anything like ‘an abode’. But again the idea of such an abode can encourage resilience in the face of oppression.
However, neither the ‘boundless compassion’ Kidd refers to, nor the idea of it as a possibility of human experience, is a path towards social activism. Kidd is surely right about that. Such activism is an expression of the natural sentiments, including sympathy, benevolence and generosity, growing towards a compassion and a sense of dukkha that belongs among the Brahmaviharas. Buddhists conceive this as an ideal limit, an ultimate measure of conduct, but also, as Kidd has pointed out, a perspective upon our common, flawed, humanity that serves as a kind of reality-check against illusions about human virtue – and against disillusionment in the face of the all too human.
It is not surprising that engaged Buddhists find in archetypes and historical exemplars the virtues they themselves seek to cultivate. This will sometimes become a matter of projection, which seems to me a main thrust of Kidd’s critique. But this projection is not so much an error of scholarship as an existential refuge of the imagination. Social activism, conceived as a moral necessity, is then part of the practical life of the Buddhist, a further milieu within which to overcome the hindrances, the mental poisons and conceits, develop the five indriyas, and so forth. Engaged Buddhists are precisely practitioners and as such they will presumably see themselves as on a trajectory towards insight into the possible forms of compassion and the nature of suffering, towards inhabiting the transformed perspective Kidd refers to. But Kidd is also right that the conditions for the cessation of the suffering that belongs to the human condition itself stands as a task beyond the particular forms of wretchedness and human misery that can be alleviated. Kidd is right to claim that dukkha is endogenous and that its cessation comes, if it comes at all, only when that condition is transcended, if indeed such transcendence is more than a consolatory figment: – bodhi, after all, is to be tested on the pulses of experience. What also has to be tested on the sometimes racing pulses of experience is whether there are indeed forms of activism compatible with the Buddhist path.
Acknowledgments
I’m grateful to Probal Dasgupta and Dhivan Jones for their comments on an earlier draft.
Michael McGhee on Daily Philosophy:
Cover image Thomas Oxford on Unsplash.
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(George Tyrrell, Christianity at the Crossroads (London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co, 1909) ↩︎
