The 1960s began to open my eyes to Zen Buddhism—for me always a mystical path. But I also lived in a time just after the emergence of postmodernism which began gaining traction in the 1950s. It was, in a nutshell, the breakdown of everything which could be either sudden or gradual.
I began to think of my era as somewhat like Plato’s cave in The Republic where people live in an underground cave. They are positioned in such a way to see nothing but shadows cast on a wall by the light from a fire producing a kind of puppet show. Those like the Buddha were able to escape and see the true world. Most could not.
I would just add to the aforementioned, the puppet masters were all the time devising clever, new puppet shows (postmodernism) for the fettered masses in the cave lest anyone decide to escape like another Siddhartha.
Looking back to that strange time, the genesis of postmodernism began in modern culture due to the fact that modernism had already within it too much skepticism: call it the faith to doubt which turned, over time, into extreme nihilism even nothingness with regard to the self.
The problem that comes with such nihilism is “What do you do with the self?” This question, I believe, grew into postmodernism which, subsequently, found its way into popular culture. What do you do with the self was, essentially, a denial of meaning in human life which is where postmodernism stands today.
As for popular Zen Buddhism and even Pali Buddhism both of which had, unconsciously, waded into the swamp of postmodernism, they seemed to represent a new postmodern religion.
It is believed that Zen and Buddhism didn’t fully deny the self or the ego so much as practice was meant to transform the self or ego into an ethical agent, for example, the idea of the Bodhisattva.
What they appeared to deny was the self which attains nirvana, namely, the very self (P., paccatta) which was outside of any kind of sociological construct (interactions between people). (Soteriology in Buddhism, including Zen, is strictly first-person and transcendent. In other words, one is one’s own savior/nātha.)
In authentic Buddhism the self is awakened to itself by abandoning what is not the self, viz., the conditioned (saṃskṛta). The Buddha, in fact, tells Radha, “you should abandon desire for whatever is not the self” (SN IV. 49) which, in other words is all things, that is, the illusory. The Buddha says in fact: All things are not the self (sabbe dhammā anattā).
Modern Zen and Buddhism amount to nothing more than a carefully crafted narrative which is meant to fit within postmodern culture — not Buddhism. The transformed ethical agent is also the social justice warrior seeking revenge where the growing hatred of the victims is politically transformed which then becomes focused upon the oppressors by trying to undermine their culture.
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