On Buddhist bullshit

The Age of Enlightenment was not about a rejection of religion or just about reason.  For example, Hume distrusted reason while others tried to find loopholes in it or find its limit.  If anything, the Age of Enlightenment unbridled the power of thought and imagination, letting both freely roam wherever they might—not always in a good direction either.  If this sounds anything like the opening of Pandora's jar—yes, it did that.  But with this opening also came the Procrustean couch which stretches or cuts off pertinent facts in order to evade a particular conclusion or present another conclusion made up of stretched facts with a conspicuous absence of others.

With the unbridling of thought and imagination, which the Enlightenment offered, came also hum-bug, mumbo-jumbo and bullshit, all of which are not easily detected despite a somewhat persistent belief to the contrary.  (A timely book on mumbo-jumbo is Francis Wheen’s book, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions.)  Much of this comes hidden in the form of ideology, scientism, psychology, mathematics, nationalism, historicism, etc., all of them capable of creating fictional accounts of reality—and bullshit.

Turning now to the subject of 'Buddhist bullshit'; setting forth the essence of bullshit has been already done for us.  Harry G. Frankfurt in his essay, On Bullshit, puts the essence this way:  “It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit” (pp. 33–34).  But there are other pertinent elements in the makeup of bullshit I hasten to add.  Importantly, the bullshitter “misrepresents what he is up to” (p. 54) and “he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false” (p. 56).  Frankfurt even goes so far as to say that “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are” (p. 61) and its source springs from “various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things really are” (p. 64).

Carrying the aforementioned forward into Buddhism so that we might see how much bullshit there really is in Buddhism, it starts to become apparent when an authentic concern for what Gautama taught is demonstrably lacking in popular books about Buddhism, including Zen Buddhism.  Let me give the reader some comparisons.

 Johannes Bronkhorst's book, Buddhist Teaching in India is not bullshit—far from it.  First of all, we know what the author is up to; moreover, he is on the side of truth in regard to Gautama’s teachings.  By comparison, Stephen Batcherlor’s book, Buddhism Without Beliefs, is bullshit.  When Frankfurt describes bullshit or excrement as “matter from which everything nutritive has been removed” (p. 43) we can't help but read Batchelor’s book as Buddhism With Gautama's Teachings Removed.  Along side of this, what Batchelor is up to is not clear at all because the book is not really about Buddhism since there is no commitment on the part of the author to be true to the facts of the Buddha’s teachings as they exist in the canon.  Incidentally, Batchelor’s book only mentions nirvana twice with no attempt to unpack it.  What is clear about Batchelor is his sincerity but then as Frankfurt informs the reader, “sincerity itself is bullshit” (p. 67) for the likely reason that sincerity is only as good as knowledge of oneself which must be  substantial and unchanging; further implying a deep commitment to the acquisition of truth.  Short of this, sincerity is more than likely bogus.

Examples of Zen Buddhist bullshit include Shunryu Suzuki's, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Joko Beck's book, Everyday Zen, and Genpo's Merzel's book, Big Mind, Big Heart.  Compare any of these books with Blofeld's or Red Pine's translations such as The Zen Teaching of Huang Po or The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma.  The divergence between bullshit Zen and the non-bullshit Zen of Huang-Po and Bodhidharma is obvious.  Let me also add that wearing the robes of a Buddhist monk or a Zen teacher is no guarantee of no bullshit Buddhism—in fact it almost guarantees it.

 

Comments

[Paul]

Great post! You point out that one needs to be wary and suspicious of so-called experts and self-proclaimed ‘muni’. I like the honesty of Alan Watts when he simply referred to himself as a “spiritual entertainer.”

Perhaps *not* being a bullshitter is being a truly orthodox person, i.e., a person possessing a sufficient depth of scholarship and forthrightness to always inform you when he or she is speaking in the realm of opinion.