The Religious Tradition
Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book… © Mahabodhi Burton 6 minute read This excerpt is from the chapter ‘The Evidence Bases in Religion, Science and Politics,’ and explores how a Wisdom or Religious tradition comes about. It follows on from The Scientific Tradition. The Wisdom tradition But what about a Wisdom tradition such as Buddhism? Here the authors [of The Embodied Mind] draw upon the philosophical tradition of Phenomenology, in particular the work of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Greek word logos traditionally means ‘word, thought, principle, or speech’ and has been used among both philosophers and theologians, and the word phenomenon—which because it comes from the Greek phainomenon, from the verb phainesthai, meaning “to appear, become visible”—means ‘appearance’ and so the word Phenomenology can be glossed; ‘what you can say about the phenomena of experience / what appears to be in the world, (by implication) if you set aside speculative theories, for instance theories about whether you and the world exist, whether there are “real objects” out there.’ Martin Heidegger’s’ answer was ‘you appear in the world as if thrown here’ and the appropriate response to your existential situation was ‘care;’ you should look after yourselves and your world (Heidegger has a critique of technological excess that is very pertinent today). Phenomenology ‘pushes us back onto our experience’, and the authors call this experience ‘first-person experience’ or ‘first-person evidence;’ because it is only accessible to a first person (to an ‘I;’ to oneself). This is relevant today: Critical Race Theory and proponents of Woke assume that all white people are racist. Obviously, it is possible to tell whether someone is racist from their words and actions, but beyond that, such a realization can only come from self-knowledge and awareness: in other words, from a first-person perspective. The only person who can truly know for certain whether they are racist is the person themselves: as they are the sole person with access to their inner world. And what they do with that knowledge is their business: this is how conscience works. In Buddhism, for true confession to take place, the practitioner must see their failing for themselves; any person hearing a confession is only witness to an inner process. Confession therefore is a ‘first-person to first-person’ matter, just as a preceptor witnesses a Buddhist ordinand’s effective going for refuge to the Three Jewels. Varela [co-author of The Embodied Mind] went on the create a new field; Neurophenomenology, bringing together neuroscience—including the scientific study of brainwaves of meditating monks—with first-person reports of meditative experience. I explored these ideas in a Shabda[1] article entitled ‘Consciousness and...
Buddhist guilt / remorse
Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book… © Mahabodhi Burton 4 minute read This excerpt is from the chapter on ‘Woke As Old Testament Religion’ and goes into the Buddhist view of guilt Buddhism and guilt The Buddhist word associated with anxiety, guilt and remorse is kaukrtya.[1] According to Subhuti,[2] it is of three kinds: general anxiety; genuinely ethical feeling; and neurotic guilt. General anxiety Functional kaukrtya or generalized anxiety is a sort of troublesome background noise one experiences in one’s consciousness: an obscure feeling of unease or tension, like the feeling you have when you wake up at night and think, ‘Did I lock the back door before I went to bed? One could argue that there could be an ethical element to this sort of feeling: because lack of mindfulness becomes negligence; and negligence can cause harm to others. Nevertheless, we would not—on the whole—consider this kind of feeling to indicate a moral misdemeanour, as it does not involve any intention to cause harm, nor to take advantage of anyone. It is more a mental alarm bell that goes off to warn us that we have omitted to do something that needs to be done. And we can respond to it by recognizing it and taking appropriate action to remedy the situation. Sometimes, we realize that there is in fact nothing that we can do about it: and so we might as well relax: there is no point in worrying about the safety of air travel when the plane you are in has already left the ground. Genuine ethical remorse We experience ethical kaukrtya or remorse when–in our heart of hearts–we know that we have done harm: when we have offended against our own ethical values. We only do feel bad (i.e., pain) because our state of mind is what Buddhists call skilful: which mean it is oriented towards, and realizes, the well-being of ourselves and others. This is the kind of wholesome ethical anxiety I mentioned in Chapter 1; in relation to religion. Such remorse leads naturally to personal reparations for any damage that we have caused; and to caution in relation to our current mental states, lest we create further such damage in the future. Neurotic or irrational guilt Yet there is also an unwholesome version of ethical anxiety: the kind of kaukrtya that Subhuti terms neurotic or false remorse. In this case our worry is about what people will think. Behind it lies fear of punishment; losing love, acceptance or status. Buddhism has the concept of near and far enemies: for instance the far enemy of compassion—its opposite—is cruelty: instead...
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