ReligionWise
ReligionWise
The Narratives of Buddhism - Tim Loftus
This installment of ReligionWise features Tim Loftus, a recent Ph.D. from Temple University who studies contemporary forms of Buddhism. In this conversation, we discuss Buddhism in various geographic and cultural contexts. In particular, our conversation turns to the way that Buddhism is imagined in the contemporary world and the relationship between that narrative and the historical record.
Welcome to ReligionWise, the podcast where we feature educators, researchers and other professionals discussing topics on religion and their relevance to the public conversation. My name is Chip Gruen I'm the Director of the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding at Muhlenberg College, and I will be the host for this podcast. It gives me great pleasure to welcome Tim Loftus to ReligionWise. He is a recently minted Ph.D. in May of 2022, from Temple University on Tibetan Buddhism. In today's conversation, we not only talk about Buddhism, but we talk about the reception of Buddhism in various cultural landscapes, at different times, not only in India, but also in Western Europe, and the United States. I think this is an interesting conversation, because it seeks to destabilize the idea of a pure in this case, Buddhist tradition, we could say the same about Christianity, or Hinduism or Islam. But one of the things that anybody in religious studies, anybody who studies religion, academically, will attest to is that there are great diversities of all of these traditions, within different times in different places around the world and throughout time. And so we really think about the problems with thinking about what a pure Buddhism from 500 BCE would look like, what are the sources for that, given the absence a lot of good sources for that, how is the tradition constructed or reconstructed in later time periods? And then beyond that, how does that tradition fit or not fit in the Western cultural landscape, for example. How does the story get told of the Buddhist tradition that suits particular values, agendas, or narratives? Now, I don't want this to seem like this is an overly pessimistic or cynical take on Buddhism, in fact, it's quite the opposite. Instead, it's a recognition that the human practice of religion, whether it be in Asia, North America, Europe, Africa, Central, South America, Australia, wherever, is complicated. And to imagine a orthodox description of any religious tradition becomes a theological rather than historical or academic endeavor. And so it was great fun to talk to Dr. Loftus about these issues and how they pertain to Buddhism, about the translation of Buddhism to the West, and how that happens, and a number of different historical contexts, how Buddhism is considered and understood today, and how we might get a richer, more fuller understanding of this ancient tradition. Welcome to ReligionWise Tim Loftus.
Tim Loftus:Hey, Chip. Thanks for having me. It's really, it's great to be here.
Chip Gruen:So a lot of our conversation today is going to be digging down into particular cultural translations of Buddhism, how the tradition changes when it goes into different, different cultural manifestations, and so forth. But before we can get there, I think it would be really helpful for our audience, just to hear Buddhism on one foot, if you will, just what you know, for someone who doesn't know a lot about the tradition. Where does it come from? What are some of the central tenets? How can we begin to understand this tradition?
Tim Loftus:Yeah, sure. I think there's probably a lot of sort of, like in the popular imagination, a sense of Buddhism, being generally an Asian tradition, which is the case I mean, in root, you know, that's where that's where it comes from originally. But I think it's important to note that Buddhism comes out of South Asia specifically, it's an Indian religion, originally, and it's coming out of the Vedic context. So that so when you think about South Asia and India, think about Hinduism, I think it's important to kind of put Buddhism into that family and recognize the Buddha as a kind of historical figure was in that milieu. He was a Hindu, if you will, for lack of a better term, and a bit of a reformer. So he is at the beginning of what we think of as the renunciate tradition in South Asia, so he renounced his status his his cast his claim to the throne, he was a prince. And began wandering and practicing asceticism, meditation in search of some kind of like higher spiritual knowledge, right inspired by really the Upanishads. Upanishadic tradition gave rise to this renunciant movement and he is coming out and we call that the Shramana tradition where the rise of kind of wandering mendicants in India, which now I think we kind of associated with India generally, but this is kind of the beginning of that movement, Jainism, Buddhism, Ajiva, these renunciate traditions have come out of this moment, like 500 BCE, where this kind of wandering tradition really took off. Buddhism being the most famous and kind of well established of those renunciate traditions that continues into the present. Um, so, the so kind of, in a general sense, the, the goal of Buddhism is to emulate that path that the Buddha kind of undertook in renouncing his worldly life. And in search of some kind of spiritual attainment, there's this kind of an understanding in the Buddhist tradition, that through effort on the spiritual path, one can attain kind of a deeper realization about what it means to be a human, how to become free from suffering, essentially, one of the big insights the Buddha had after he left his palace and began wandering was, it's called the, they're called the Four Noble Truths, where he became kind of acutely aware of the reality of kind of a universal sense of suffering that people have. Suffering and kind of a general sense associated with pain, but also a more kind of existential suffering, where we kind of have this yearning for deeper meaning, right, like a sense that something is wrong. And that drove him to find something, something beyond our kind of regular rat race, sort of approach to, to living. So that's kind of built in or kind of, baked into the sense of how Buddhism works, I think, at least in a kind of general sense that, that through effort on the spiritual path, one can attain some kind of deeper understanding about what is true, what it is to be a human, how to break free from suffering.
Chip Gruen:So one of the things you didn't mention here, and I just want to underscore for the audience is that there's not any, you know, in, in the forms of Buddhism you're talking about, there's not any idea of reverence for deity, the importance of gods, so much so that in religious studies, sometimes there's conversation about whether, you know, Buddhism, you know, depending on how you define religion, whether Buddhism fits into the category or not, can you talk a little bit about that, and how it separates a little itself a little bit from that older Hindu tradition that you mentioned?
Tim Loftus:Yeah, there is. Yeah, exactly. There is this sort of long standing kind of tension, I guess, and the reception of Buddhism in the West about, like, whether to think of it as atheistic or non theistic? Or what is the kind of status of transcendence or like, is there a god or something else? And the kind of settlement I guess, that's been sort of reached regarding this, like, like His Holiness, the Dalai Lama has described Buddhism as like a non theistic tradition. And that's generally I think, the way scholars and maybe in like popular imagination, we think about Buddhism as non theistic. So this idea that Buddhism is just not taking a stance on the issue, that it's more concerned with describing kind of mind and mental events describing the way in which suffering happens and then leaving whatever happens after the alleviation of suffering or the elimination Nirvana, which is this word that means like extinction or the end of suffering that is left unarticulated in kind of the original, maybe, let's say, like, in a basic sense. So it's almost like this not this this kind of take on non theism is sort of like, well, maybe there is or maybe there isn't we're not, we're not that interested in talking about, like, what what's happening afterwards, it's almost as if, like, one was stuck in a dark room, you know, I think the Buddhist stance would be, well, we could sit and talk about how great it is. outside the room, you know, we could describe the the landscape and the sun in the sky, and the green grass and all of that. But that doesn't help us get out of the room, you know. So instead of sitting around and talking about that, we could give instructions, like maybe take 10 steps to the left, feel the wall and you'll feel the doorknob, and then you can get out. What's outside is something that like what one would would see when they get there. There's not much sort of being articulated about what that world is. So that I think is like maybe a way of thinking about this kind of non theism. It's not so much like there is or there, isn't it sort of like, it's not a fruitful conversation from a Buddhist point of view to like, speculate on that sort of like ontological kind of like question, is it or is it not there, you know?
Chip Gruen:So a lot of your work work concentrates on this contemporary South Asian Buddhist movement that is associated with B.R. Ambedkar?
Tim Loftus:Ambedkar. Right. Yeah.
Chip Gruen:And I want to use that and your work as a doorway, into thinking about how this tradition emerges, as you mentioned, in about 500 BCE long time ago, for people who are keeping score about 500 years before the emergence of Christianity. But then, you know, over the course of the millennia, it because of the different contexts it might it develops, right, and it takes on the cultural attitudes and values and so forth, that are around it. And this is true of any any religious tradition. So I want to start with this contemporary South Asian Buddhism that you do your work on. And then after that, we can think also about the translation to the west. That happens at various times, both in, in Western Europe, in particular and in the United States.
Tim Loftus:Yeah, I mean, Buddhism is an interesting case, right, in some ways in this with regard to this, because it was eliminated from the Indian subcontinent, you know, around, maybe, let's say, 1100 CE, like a roundabouts, right, due to several factors like Hindu, Hindu pressures, kind of competitive pressures from Hindu or brahminical, religionists in India, you could say, and then outside Muslim invasions. Buddhism was basically completely eliminated from the subcontinent with a few, like exceptions like Sri Lanka, or Nepal, but it creates this vacuum, right where we don't, we don't know that much about what nothing was written down in, in the Buddhist tradition until pretty late, like some of the earliest texts that we have actually, like written texts are really only around 200 CE ish. So there's a big gap in this kind of reconstruction. And then even from 200 CE until that ending of Buddhism in the subcontinent, a lot of what we're relying on is the translation worked on by the Chinese and in Tibet, to reconstruct the picture of Buddhism there. So it creates this vacuum, where we can sort of imagine we can rely on our imagination to kind of fill in the gaps about like, what Buddhism looked like in India. And that criss created I think, opportunity for kind of a particularly like, modernist inflected idea of what kind of the nature of Buddhism is, because we're kind of, we're creating it in many ways, in a way that's kind of unique to Buddhism, because of that, the vacuum that was created by its absence in India. So the story that I told about the Buddha and about the kind of the essence of Buddhism, I think, you can probably hear in it this, this particular kind of maybe liberal inflection, you know, there's this individual sort of quest for meaning and, you know, this emphasis on contemplation and rationality. And I think it's safe to say that a lot of that is present in the texts that we that we do have, and we look back to recreate this kind of idea of Buddhism. It's there, we can read it. But we also are, I think, missing a lot of other stuff, right? We're particular creating a particular kind of like modernist inflected Buddhism inflected by, like these discourses of liberalism, in particular individualism, contemplation, scientific compatibility, rationalism, the stuff that we often associate with Buddhism. So it's a little bit reconstructive right and Ambedkarite Buddhism. So you reference my, my particular interest there, is a particularly interesting example because it's it's a modernist movement that for those who don't know, B.R. Ambedkar was this figure in monumentally important figure in India, he was the chief architect of the Constitution. He studied at Columbia with John Dewey, he went to London School of Economics, did a Ph.D. there. I did a Ph.D. at Columbia. He was the first Law Minister of India. Massively important figure, but he did all of this as an untouchable. So when you kind of factor that into it, it's almost impossible, the kind of profile that he was able to kind of like, you know, create the impact that he had. And one of the most incredible things about and that's not often discussed is that he converted to Buddhism just before his death in 1956. He decided there was no place for him as an untouchable and other untouchables formally untouchable people now called Dalits in India, and they converted to Buddhism in mass and probably the largest mass conversion moment in modern human history is about 600,000 people at the ceremony and then like millions follow, there's now about seven million Dalit Ambedkarite Buddhists in India. And they created this this new modernist kind of form of Buddhism. That is a conversion movement like we see in Europe and in America. But this story that they tell about to the Buddha was and what the important teachings are of Buddhism are very, very different than what we see in Europe and in America. So where in America, we see this kind of transcendentally inflected kind of inflected by the discourses of liberalism, as I was describing before, we see this very ethically oriented tradition in in South Asia. And Ambedkarite Buddhism, where the Buddha is seen as a social reformer, or someone who kind of really prominently rejected caste and Ambedkarite Buddhists today, like build clinics and schools and are politically active, and they think about Buddhism as sort of like a theological ground for social action, you know, where, in the West, I think we often that would be a shock, I think, to think about Buddhism as being kind of a liberation theology. So it yeah, there are all these different kinds of iterations at different times, and in different places, and even in like, modernist sort of moments, you know, Ambedkarite Buddhism can provide this contrast of like, even just shifting the dial a little bit to South Asia, you get this very different modernist presentation of Buddhism. So yeah, that was a lot. And you know, I think it's also interesting to say that, like, you can watch Buddhism in India, even in its original Indian context, where the early tradition we associate with Pali, the Pali language, but as as Buddhism becomes more kind of marinated in brahminical culture in India takes on Sanskrit, Buddhist hybrid Sanskrit as a text language develops. And you get this sort of more high culture, more kind of Buddhist elite, the establishment of Buddhist monasteries, and great universities happens in India during the golden period. So you see Buddhism being kind of like, pulled up, out of maybe the renunciant tradition that the Buddha that is associated with the Buddha originally, so this kind of constant shifting, as you noted, like common across religious traditions, but...
Chip Gruen:Yeah, and I just want to jump in here and underscore lest anybody get the misconception that, ah, you know, Buddhism is this, you know, shifting thing that you can't get your hands on. Not like my religious tradition, right? That this is that, you know, you study religion, you know, of any stripe, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, you know, go spread the gamut, that you'll see incredible diversity within any of those traditions for these very same reasons, right, that the context is different, the time is different. The values that are espoused by the community is different. So you mentioned, you know, the sort of liberation theology kind of tilt of this particular type of Buddhism and contemporary India, you know, go and look at liberation, you know, that word liberation theology comes, comes out of, you know, Catholic tradition in South and Central America that has particular either liberal or even more left leaning, socialist, Marxist tendencies, right, which is, of course, very different than, you know, other types of Christianity that lean, you know, as we're reminded of daily, you know, further and further right word in many parts of the world. So, you know, this is this is the way that that religion works. It's not, it's not corruption of religion, it's not, you know, it's not cynical in any way. It just reflects, not only influences, but reflects cultural attitudes and values that surround it.
Tim Loftus:Right. I mean, it's interesting to note like, that we don't know, Dr. Ambedkar's name very, most popularly in the West, where we may know, Gandhi's name right, where that's Gandhi is a household name, I think, at this point and kind of Euro America, but we don't know Ambedkar's name, and it's interesting given, like, as I was describing earlier, how prolific you know, he was is, I mean, he produced like, 17 volumes of writing. He was a pragmatist. You know, as a student of Dewey, he, he wrote on economics, political economy, you know, he held political office, he was this huge figure. We don't know, we don't know his name, generally speaking. And you know, he had this huge beef with Gandhi throughout his life these two is not an an overstatement to say they were actual enemies, you know. So this is fascinating, kind of, like, conspicuous omission in our imagination about what is removed from my point of view, concerned about religion or thinking about religion and Buddhism. Why don't we know his name? And it I think one of the interesting kind of avenues for thought about that why is the way in which there is this kind of like coalescing or kind of attempt to nail down what like, that's not Buddhism and a lot of the scholarship that has been written about his approach to Buddhism in particular has kind of focused on that. Or, you know, apologists will say like, well, it is this big deviation from the norm, but it still counts, or or those who, who argue that it's just too far afield that it's not, doesn't concentrate enough on meditation, it's not doesn't look enough, like the kind of Buddhism that we imagine in the West inflected by our own presuppositions so that it's, it's too far afield. It's it's not Buddhism. So we see that even happening right now that like, there is this thing called Buddhism and it has these particular features. And yeah, this kind of natural tendency and Ambedkar can can really disrupt a lot of those commitments, I think, in a very interesting way.
Chip Gruen:Yeah, I always find it really interesting that that can be a kind of distinction, that I'm going to be cynical here for a minute masquerades in scholarly clothing, right? That real Buddhism looks like this or real Christianity looks like this or what have you. But I've always found that when you start making those distinctions, sooner or later, they become theological, rather than scholastic scholarly academic distinctions.
Tim Loftus:Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point Buddhism, again, I mean, obviously, I have, I think it's an is a particularly interesting example in this regard. I may be biased there. But but because, again, maybe because of that absence, or the initial reception of the category, through the lens of let's say Transcendentalism via like theosophy, which was this kind of movement, this kind of occultist movement had spearheaded by people like Madame Blavatsky, or Colonel Colonel Olcott, sorry, these kind of big, you know, interesting occultist figures who were kind of like Colonel Olcott. In particular, you know, we're kind of interested in a respiritualization, of Christianity, a kind of creation of a universal perennial spirituality. And they sought to do it through the construction of Buddhism, and in some ways, really consciously, were, were constructing a new Buddhism, if you will, right? That then got kind of interculturally through like a process of mimesis. Right, I think Charles Hallisey and Richard King have taken up this idea of intercultural mimesis, this where, or maybe the pizza effect, where like, something gets exported, like, like pizza gets exported from Italy becomes an American thing. And then, you know, now there's Pizza Huts all over in Rome, you know, people buying the sort of American thing, right, like Buddhism, you can think about, like the construction of Buddhism via theosophy is this sort of, like pizza effect, where they're taking this sort of, ostensibly at least Asian thing, making it into this sort of rational science, universal religion sort of thing. And then sending it back, you know, like to Sri Lanka, in particular, right, Colonel Olcott goes there, and he does this whole kind of like, through with Dharmapala, Anagarika, right, they, they create this new, rational movement that exists today. Right, so you have this, this self identification from Asian elites, Asian monastic elites, with this Buddhism that's inflicted by this Euro American kind of liberalism, if you will, right. Without much memory of anything that was that happened prior, you know? So there's this interesting kind of case with Buddhism, I think, where because it's, it's received in this really kind of consonant way, consonant with a lot of the dominant discourses like of liberalism, then it's, it's kind of a darling, you know, it's not very threatening, right? It's, it's nice, it's rational, it's sort of like, it's private. It's not, it doesn't make any like kind of demands socially. Whereas like, in contrast, we could think about Islam as this sort of like, like, if Buddhism is the darling child Islam is maybe the problem child in terms of the construction of a world religion and, and, you know, Euro American scholarly mind, Islam is kind of antinomical I think, right. Generally speaking, to liberal commitments, it's this kind of, it's imagined to be as, you know, violent or, or regressive, or primitive or something and anti liberal. So a lot of postcolonial scholarship people like Saeed or or Assad, right, Saba Muhammad that have been writing really cogently and critically about liberalism, you know, it's no, I think it's no coincidence that's coming from this Islamic studies or from the Islamic point of view. Whereas from the Buddhist work, I think from Buddhist studies point of view, we're kind of really behind the curve, you know, there's there's still this ability to just sit back and translate texts focus on the literary tradition talk about meditation, and everybody's fine with that, because there's not a there's no real sort of push to like, go harder. You know, I think there was a moment maybe like 15 years ago, where there was this, like, this burst of literature critic, like drawing on critical religion theory, from Buddhist studies point of view, but it seems that we seem to have like, stepped back. And we're doing a lot of more just sort of good old fashioned philology lately. So,
Chip Gruen:Yeah, it's interesting. It didn't have to be that way, though, right. I mean, that you could get a translation of Buddhism, you know, and I think that we see this in other parts of the world, although not major traditions, where the concept of the community is, is big. I mean, because that's that, you know, you're talking about the individual versus, versus the community in Islam, you know, the sort of the dominant paradigm of how that gets exported, is very interested in community and how one acts in community with other people. Whereas, you know, that's present in Buddhism, right? It just hasn't been emphasized.
Tim Loftus:Totally, it's almost more compelling. Like, I feel like you could tell a really interesting, compelling story through that lens, you know, this, there's a whole body of text. So the Buddhist canon texturally is divided into three baskets. It's called like the Sutra Pitaka, Abhidhamma Pitaka, Sutra Pitaka, like the stories of the Buddha. Thus have I heard the Buddha was at this place in this happen, and the Abhidhamma Pitaka, this basket where a lot of those Sutra teachings get distilled into like lists and numbers, it's sometimes thought of as like Buddhist psychology, describing mind and mental events are the kind of distilled points. And then the Vinaya, which is the third basket, and the entire basket is about basically how to live in community. It's ethical prescriptions for what to do and what not to do. These original followers of the Buddha, when he became a renunciant, wanted to hang out with him follow him around, and rules had to be made. And they got more and more compli-complicated and articulated. And it turned into an entire body of texts that are used to this day to organize monastic life. You know, we often Buddhism if there's no way around, like, and it is the case, Buddhism has been pretty monastically oriented wherever it has gone. And there's some interesting exceptions, exceptions to that, but but monasticism has been a part of Buddhism from the beginning. So you could tell a really interesting story. And Ambedkar is somebody actually who does something like this, who really kind of radically tries to rethink what the Sangha or the community is in the Buddhist tradition. And he does it along these lines of kind of bringing the laity in and making these kinds of demands on them on monastics to serve as kind of servants or social models for how to live an ethically oriented life, as opposed to being renunciate to go kind of live in a secluded separate place, which is often the way we think about it in contemporary Buddhism, or maybe even has been practiced historically. So there's more kind of engaged idea of sangha that would very much make demands on, you know, that would raise red flags about, for example, Google, using mindfulness meditation to squeeze like more productivity per employee, you know, out of, you know, to increase revenue or whatever, right. So like these kind of questions about like, Well, should the military be using mindfulness medicate meditation to be like, helping snipers fire more, you know, accurately under pressure? These are these are big questions and a more ethically oriented, maybe less, darling kind of reception of Buddhism, I think, what if you will, would have this ability to push back a little bit, you know, Slavoj Žižek wrote a piece, not, I guess, a little while ago at this point, arguing that if we're not careful Buddhism, the reception of Buddhism will make, you know, Calvinism look like kind of child's play in terms of its ability to buttress the, the dominant power dynamic, you know, capitalism, generally speaking.
Chip Gruen:So you mentioned something and I want to sort of take a break and go back a little bit, just to sort of fill in some gaps because honestly, because this is something that's super interesting to me. But when we talk about the translation of of Buddhism to the United States, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but you've you've mentioned one that historical periods here being you know, sort of the turn of the 19th into the 20th century we see the rise of spiritualists, I would also point to the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago as being a really big point where people are exposed to Asian, Southeast and East and South Asian thought from a lot of people if you don't know anything about out there and listeners who don't know anything about the World Parliament of Religions, it's an interesting thing to look up, you know, simply because photography hit emerged at that point too, it's just really interesting to look at the, the records of that particular meeting. So that's one historical period I'd like to talk about as we get and you've mentioned this a little bit already, but I'd like to flesh that out a little bit. And then the other one is that we get the liberalization of immigration policy from Asia generally in the 1960s. And I think that that really changes the face of the kinds of your the presence of of not only communities, but ideas in our world that then that then really, you know, sort of grow and develop in that period as well. So I'd like to highlight both of those and think about how those have affected the growth and development and how we think about Buddhism in in the contemporary West.
Tim Loftus:Yeah, that's a good point, I think the World Parl... 1893 World Parliament is this, as you know, a really important moment and Dharmapala was there like along with Swami Vivekananda, I think, Swami Vivekananda, who was this kind of Neo Hindu, Neo Vedanta, Bengali Renaissance figure who was engaged along with a few other kind of modernist South Asian, kind of pre independence figures who were interested in thinking about how to export Hinduism, or respond to the colonial enterprise in a way that kind of re empowered people in the subcontinent, to kind of push back right to, to kind of reclaim some high ground that Hinduism can be conceptualized as, as rational, as modern, as you know, we had these ideas in our Vedas, you know, the scientific ideas in our Vedas, you know, 1000s of years before the Britishers kind of came up with them, this sort of like re empowering narrative or project, along with like, the Arya Samaj or the Brahmo Samaj, this sort of like moment that was happening. And Dharmapala was there as well, who is really important, Sri Lankan figure and brought Buddhism into the conversation in a similar way. But what's interesting there about that, I think, is where Swami Vivekananda made big waves, and we are continuing to continuing to feel them. The picture that we get through that presentation is a pretty brahminically inflected, if you will, like high caste sort of way of thinking about what South Asian religion is, if you will, and it's inflected with this kind of orientalist, maybe mystical East kind of way of thinking about religion in the subcontinent. And I think that continues to this day because of the diaspora. The maybe related to your second point about the way in which the doors opened to Asia, via immigration, the people who were able to come here from South Asia, largely have been continued to be from Suvarna or higher caste backgrounds, just because maybe they're more well off, or they've had access to accumulate wealth and can leave India. So the picture that we've gotten about religion in South Asia has been sort of from monophonic, if you will, it's it's brahminical. Dharmapala went back to Sri Lanka, through the Theosophists reanimated this sort of like Buddhist revival movement, but then he broke with them over this construction of like a Universalist religion more in line with that, like Vivekananda project that like continues to inflect our understanding about like yoga and mysticism and stuff. And Buddhism in Sri Lanka, although having its roots in this theosophy movement, took this turn into my ethics, where Sarvodaya Shramadana is this movement that in Sri Lanka, that continues to be very active and important in thinking about Buddhism as an indigenous and nationalist kind of nation building project. So there's all kinds of like road building and works projects and stuff that are built on like Buddhist ideals in Sri Lanka, that then influenced Ambedkar in the creation of his Buddhism in India. So we get this sort of like, I think, here in the West, I guess the point being is we get this kind of particularly inflected view of what religion is like via Vivekananda and then continued through this sort of like imagination of Gandhi as this, you know, this sort of mystical man in his dhoti or his loincloth and staff and you know, this kind of like, spiritual thing, we do our yoga and it's all very, like, spiritual or whatever. But that's, it's because I think through this vehicle through which we're receiving it through the diaspora that is like largely high caste and has maybe benefited from like the Boston Brahmins received a literal Brahmins from from India to construct this kind of elite transmission line kind of project. Lost and that is like the everyday sort of quotidian aspect of like, you know, the way in which religion just is a basic meaning making moral meaning making vehicle in people's lives. So, yeah, that's yeah, I don't know. That's a long kind of wandering thing...
Chip Gruen:No, no, I mean, well, what's coming through to me and I'd like your your take on this is the way in which, even though we might have separate chains of transmission through Hindu channels, or Buddhist channels, different immigrant communities, different leaders, whether they be from Sri Lanka or Bengal or what have you, at the World Parliament are moving forward. I'm just thinking about the suburbanite in the contemporary United States who loves who says, oh, yeah, I'm a Buddhist, I go to yoga, right, you know, and really, you know, mixes these things up, right, and sort of takes this sort of general sense of, of Eastern traditions, and you can't see my scare quotes I'm making, and just sort of put them in the blender. Right. And that that's, that's the, you know, again, not the proper, the pure, the unadulterated form of the traditions, but it is the public discourse on these traditions in our world that that we encounter.
Tim Loftus:Right, yeah, I think a little bit, I'm here, I'm trying to just be descriptive, but I'm sure there's some hint of like, a normative stance in here. And a little bit, I mean, I know you're like, when you look at Buddhism, and like in the, in the West, for example, there largely are two different camps, like in historically, like scholars have kind of thought about it this way. Where there are immigrant communities, so people who have come from Asian traditions and continue to practice their form of Buddhism with their community, right. So like, here in Philadelphia, where I am, there are Cambodian, Thai, Vietnamese, a lot of temples in South Philadelphia, but then there are another camp, right? Where there are these meditation centers, or even more religiously oriented Buddhist centers, but almost exclusively populated by converts, who are largely white, middle to upper middle class, highly literate, highly educated people who are coming to Buddhism through this kind of maybe initial popular contact via, you know, reading or whatever kind of media, they've used to consume this thing, right? So there's historically been these two different kinds of camps. And there's a lot of discourse around why that is, or whether that's a problem or not a problem, or who, who gets to claim what Buddhism is, is this sort of, like, open question, you know, but I think a larger point around that is, is just the fact that, you know, that's kind of the way it is, at this point, you know, like modernity is, the tentacles are totally all reaching now, there's not I don't think there's a part of the world we can say that it's not affected by modernity, even like uncontacted peoples, right at this point, are like the pressures from, like, modernity is, like, just a fact. So I think we we may be in this is a normative stance, we do need to get past this discourse of purity. And maybe a lot of what I've been saying is like, there really isn't, it's, it's, it's pretty much impossible, I think, at this point to articulate or find some kind of pure Buddhism, it's so complicated by the original kind of reception, that vacuum of Buddhism and its original, that huge vacuum, right, that it's disappearance from the subcontinent, it's, we're our reliance on its transmission via, you know, multiple different kinds of cultural backgrounds. And then just our ability to access beyond the horizon, if you will, you know, this is just sort of like the, the problem that postcolonial theorists are always pointing to, or subalterns at least saying, Well, how can we know what traditional is, right? We're, we're limited by our own methodologies. And really, the task seems to be just to be honest with like a reflexive stance, and recognize that we're studying our own kind of presuppositions and commitments as much as much as any kind of a sensible object out there. So there's something sort of maybe a little bit not so satisfying about that stance, but it's also kind of honest, I think, right? Where, where there never was a Buddhism, you know? And then that can kind of you can kind of go down a pretty, pretty, pretty deep hole with that. And some scholarship does thinking about, like, Where does the idea of Buddhism actually start? You know, like, where do people where do people actually say like, I'm a Buddhist, and it's actually I think it's pretty late. You know, it's, it seems to be like in the, during the colonial period, where, where maybe prior to that Buddhism is one of the many kind of multifocal You know, you have you have Yogachara Buddhists and Yarmulke, Buddhists. And you have like Vedanta, proponents of Vedanta and all this sort of like, tons of loud kind of chaotic discourse happening in classical Indian tradition. And it's not clear that people are conceptualizing themselves as like religionists maybe in the way that that, that we would now, you know, so that kind of retrospectively, kind of creating this category is more like a product of our own way of carving up the world than it is in anything actually having been there and that way, you know?
Chip Gruen:Yeah, so you mentioned just the term, you know, talking about modernism, and I just want to highlight, you know, it's everywhere, its tentacles are everywhere. And for those, you know, those out there who don't sort of get the implication of what you mean, by that, I mean, can you highlight some of the key characteristics of modernism? Are you talking about competition? Are you talking about sort of the cafeteria attitude towards culture? Like, what are some of the things that are really highlight those tentacles of modernism that you talked about?
Tim Loftus:Yeah, I think this sort of, well, maybe just from my own experience, I could say, so having spent a lot of time in India. I'm back and forth there, pretty much every year, I lived there for extended periods of time. And I'm always still sort of taken by just how entrenched this sort of like how the how market, market economics are just sort of ubiquitous how people like getting an MBA is, you know, there's different kind of programs, for getting an MBA on billboards all over the place, like in you know, rural villages in India. So, like this, this sort of orientation towards consumerism, and kids wearing like, Marvel t-shirts in like, you know, Lassa or something. So there's, there's this, this kind of ubiquity of, I think, if you will, like me, like modernity, for lack of a better term, I think. And in terms of like, maybe Buddhism, specifically to kind of keep it on topic, even just this idea of like Buddhism being, so with the Ambedkarites that I've spent a lot of time with in India, it's clear to me that the way that they think about Buddhism is subaltern, if you will, but also very modernist, you know, they are text oriented, they are thinking about this as like an individual sort of like, path. And the Buddha is this very rational kind of person. But it's an Asian iteration, you know, Ambedkar was, was a student of Dewey, but came back and like, engaged with this sort of indigenous religion, if you will. There's no real escaping it, I think. Yeah, I don't know if that answers it. Yeah,
Chip Gruen:Yeah. No, and I'm really interested in this. And I've run into it in other in other traditions, as well, you know, talking to other, you know, other other scholars of other religious traditions, but I'm interested in the way that, you know, we think about lines of transmission for influence that we almost always as sort of our shorthand think of influences going one way. But it's not only going both ways, but it's imagine a continuing circle, you know,of things picking up accruing characteristics and then dumping them back again. That is just, it's just so interesting. One of the key things I'm taking away from this conversation.
Tim Loftus:Yeah, I think this kind of like pizza effect idea. I mean, I'm particularly kind of like taking, like, because I think the implications are pretty big, right? Though, maybe the natural impulse and sort of like diving into a more kind of critical reading of like the construction of the category of Buddhism, where their initial reception or whatever, is to say, Oh, well, there's nothing there or we were wrong, there's this other thing or some kind of impulse to go back maybe even go back further, you know, what is the Pali say, or to kind of like short circuit some of that culturally driven or like the presuppositions that are underneath the creation of this category to kind of short circuit that but I think is a maybe like a fool's errand, right? That's what kind of comes through from this is that like, even though there's no there there, so to speak, it doesn't have to turn into this kind of like nihilistic project, we can kind of be brought back to like, let's, let's drop that whole thing. And maybe adopt, like, Richard King has argued for, like, maybe creating, like a more like, cultural studies approach where like, there is this sort of, like, maybe what we're doing is like, through the merging of horizons, right, we're kind of like, learning as much about ourselves as we are about other right, and there's, and that's the work at the end of the day, right? The work isn't necessarily to nail down some kind of museum-afide kind of, like, accurate picture object or something, you know.
Chip Gruen:Yeah, I think another way of saying that, maybe, maybe, and you you mentioned, that you are aiming in our conversation to be descriptive. But I really like and this is something in my field and in ancient Christianity that people talk about redescription all the time, even though you know, even though we're talking about something from whatever the second or the third century, we're talking about sort of picking up and describing it in its particular context at its particular moment. And again, not necessarily connecting it to, you know, a master narrative of the history of Christianity, but saying, okay, in I don't know, Carthage in this year, this is what people are doing. This is how people are, are living in their world. And we can we can describe that, which is not necessarily navel gazing about 21st century American identity, right, which I think is the other side of the slope that we can go down.
Tim Loftus:Yeah. It's tricky, right? I think Ambedkar does this interesting project. And one of the reasons he's really attacked is he, he heavily re narrates the life of the Buddha, like, it strips out all kinds of details from what we find in traditional sources, like Ashvaghosa's Buddhacharita that which he leans on and other sutra sources. But he unapologetically says straight up what he's gonna do, he's gonna He's gonna re narrate the story, eliminate this is kind of Jeffersonian course, sort of who really just cuts out all of the, all of the magic stuff and just keeps it super rational. And and, he gets rid of the Four Noble Truths. So that what I was saying earlier about this focus on on psycho spiritual suffering of the individual just cuts that out, puts this other kind of, to, like, this other postulate in in its place. And he makes the Buddha basically like a Member of Parliament, if you will, like a local parliament because of the Democratic situation. And it's fascinating, right? Any, he's aware that what he's doing is sort of radical. But I think as a student of Dewey, there's interesting kind of takes, or arguments being made about how, how, just how influenced he was by American pragmatism. And you can see it in this regeneration of the of the Buddha's life, how he's, he's sort of doing this other project where he's sort of like, look, I don't have access to any of that early stuff. And part of the reason I don't have access is that Brahmins have been writing these, these powerful kind of dominant castes have been writing it writing history. So you know, they've left out a whole bunch of stuff. I'm gonna be driven by these basic principles. So like compassion, love, justice. And I'm gonna build a story of the Buddha around these principles, and basically use this kind of hermeneutic that says, if the if the early texts endorse or support these principles, then we keep it and if it doesn't, then we cut it out. And we acknowledge we're creating this new thing, he calls it a Navayana, a new vehicle. But at the same time, he makes his argument that like, this was the original kind of teaching of the Buddha, right. But he doesn't point to the literary tradition, necessarily. I mean, in some ways he does to point to, like, you know, this is all in the sutra material. But he's also unapologetic to say that, like, well, I'm cutting all this other stuff out, you know, that stuff that was written by Brahmins or it's not in accord with what we know of, like an enlightened person would be like. So it's this kind of like, interesting, interesting move, he kind of, on the one hand, you could say, like, he's an opportunist, you know, he's taking what he wants and throwing out what he doesn't. But on another from this kind of pragmatic point of view, he's saying, like, look, I'm interested in action. You know, I'm, I'm pragmatist. I'm trying, I'm trying to create this sort of, like, just world right now. I'm not interested in, in museums, you know, I'm not interested in like accuracy, or like, whatever, for like, history sake. In fact, when people do that, you know, that's what the Brahmins do, they look to, and he's using that pejoratively. He's saying, like, they looked at these mantras and, and the Vedas as like written in stone, and it's very important that we we pronounce each seed syllable properly, and each syllable of each mantra properly, and only these people can do it. And it's kind of this religion of rules and ritual. But it provides no kind of ground for like a just world. So yeah, yeah, it's an it's an interesting approach to this. Yeah.
Chip Gruen:So I have one more question for you. But before we get there, I just want to gloss one more thing you said in that you were you refer to that as Jeffersonian, for those of again, for those who we have in podcast land who don't know it, Jefferson wrote his own version of the life of Jesus, in which he stripped out all miracles and the resurrection, right, kind of Yeah, cut, cut them out and said, Yeah, that's just superstition. What's really important are the ethical teachings. And so he made his own. So that was the Jeffersonian reference. But I think, you know, particularly in the narrative we tell about sort of colonial America now or the late 18th century United States. That kind of thing gets forgotten is sort of written out of the narrative. Alright, so the last. The last thing I always like to ask is, you know, one of the interests of ReligionWise is thinking about the public discourse on religion, right? Like, how do we talk about religion as a category? How do we talk about individual traditions within that Um, you know, if I'm wanting to be an informed, you know, informed citizen that has a well grounded discourse on Buddhism and the contemporary world is, I mean, is there anything that I should be paying attention to anything particular I should be not to make this overly academic, but I should be reading or somebody I should be listening to, to really sort of get my hands around, you know, what, how Buddhism is being shaped in our world?
Tim Loftus:Yeah, I mean, maybe there's a couple of maybe there's like two prongs to that. I think when we look around the world of Buddhism right now, there's, it's almost, it's a little bit dark, actually, you know, there's there the civil war in Sri Lanka, which abruptly ended with cameras turned off and Sinhalese kind of nationalist Buddhist sentiment finally, I think, ended that situation violently. Myanmar, you know, there's been a lot of, of ethnic violence. And Rohingya people being pushed back into Bangladesh with a lot of violence. There's, I think, a complicated narrative, if we're paying attention, that disrupts some of the kind of simplistic readings of Buddhism as just like, you know, a religion of peace or something, or contemplation or whatever, like, it's a religion like any other, right? So we can kind of maybe complicate our understanding in that way. But um, maybe something that would be good to read for Buddhism would be, um, Ambedkar, so Ambedkar person, right, wrote this text called"The Buddha and his Dhamma". He wrote it in English. It's really accessible. And his intention in writing it was to create like a gospel, if you will, like a really kind of handy, contains everything portable kind of thing he calls it like a could be a Buddhist gospel, isn't it? Those are his words. But it's a fascinating read, because it turns a lot of what we I think associate with Buddhism, not on its head, but but adds another dimension to what how we could think about Buddhism acting in the world. So these basic kind of maybe theological or dharma logical principles that are underneath the Buddhist tradition, like basic stuff, like interdependent origination, or how Buddhists understand compassion, like self without a self, like how compassion can like, inform action. It's kind of baked into that, that work. But you know, he kind of frames the Buddha as this person who kind of gets his hands dirty. And I think, I think that is needed right now. And it seems to be happening I just gave it was a speaker, April 14 is the National Day of Recognition for Dr. Ambedkar in India. And there's been a debate grades have been agitating for that to be kind of accepted, more widely around the world for a long time. And in this past year, Canada, as a nation has recognized it, I think, the state of Michigan, state of New Jersey, it's been happening, kind of different municipalities and stuff. So I gave a talk in New Jersey and in Jersey City in the city of City Hall, council chambers. It was really well attended. And it was really kind of fantastic to see this sort of like, maybe a tension complication of the narrative of like Buddhism being just this sort of like, more self help individualistic project to like how those principles which are valid, can also inform like, community engagement, ethics, justice. Yeah, so So I guess"The Buddha and his Dhamma" I would recommend it is a really awesome, interesting, fantastic read
Chip Gruen:As maybe a corrective to the way that Buddhism has been ingested in the West.
Tim Loftus:Yeah, definitely.
Chip Gruen:Yeah. Okay. Well, great. Well, thank you, Tim Loftus very much for joining us on ReligionWise This has been a lot of fun.
Tim Loftus:Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Chip.
Chip Gruen:This has been ReligionWise, a podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. For more information and additional programming, please visit our website at religionandculture.com There, you'll find our contact information, links to other programming, and have the opportunity to support the work of the Institute. ReligionWise is produced by the staff of the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College, including Christine Flicker, and Carrie Duncan. Please subscribe to ReligionWise wherever you get your podcasts. We look forward to seeing you next time.