Buddhism and Politics

Posted By Mahabodhi on Feb 23, 2024 | 0 comments

Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book…

© Mahabodhi Burton

5 minute read

Diving into the Preface of ‘The Buddhas and Global Governance,’ this excerpt explores the need to keep apart religion and politics. It follows on from ‘The political bias potential hill’ and the larger post ‘The Twitter Files.’

When you enter the temple, leave your politics at the door

The website Apramada was founded by members of the Triratna Buddhist Order ‘to bring Buddhist perspectives to bear on questions facing the world today – a task of urgent importance in an era when public discourse is often clouded by divisive ideologies and partisan animosity.’[1] The Sanskrit term apramada means ‘carefulness, vigilance, cautiousness, steadiness.’

‘We apply Buddhist ideas and insights to a range of issues in society, culture, politics, science, and philosophy. We also offer clear expositions of fundamental Buddhist teachings and practices, in the hope that people will be drawn to explore them further. In pursuing these ends, we strive to exemplify and promote “wise thinking” and “wise enquiry”.’[2]

My colleague Ratnaguna published an article on Apramada entitled, When you enter the temple, leave your politics at the door,[3] examining the problems  inherent in bringing politics into a religious context: the main objection being that doing so tends to foster divisiveness and partisanship, whereas the aim of a religion such as Buddhism is to nurture the welfare and happiness of each ‘sovereign’ individual.

Cultural and Religion are ‘above Politics’

Culture and Religion can be seen to be ‘above’ Politics (these terms have been capitalized to indicate a general field.) Ratnaguna cites the literary critic Joseph Epstein, who says,

‘To be educated by novels is to believe that human actions are best understood through individual cases, and to believe, further, that every individual case is itself immensely complex.’

Epstein contends that:

‘Most great literature is indeed separable from politics… true culture is above gender, race, and class… the point of view literature teaches is inherently anti-system, anti-theory, and skeptical of all ideas that do not grow out of particular cases…’

Dangers in Ideologies

Ratnaguna points to the danger of constructing ideologies:

‘Epstein is not denying the possibility of general truths about ‘human actions’, but he is saying that such truths are truer when they are intuitively recognized in concrete examples rather than constructed as abstract conceptual systems. His words also point to the danger that if we adhere strongly to such an abstract system, we might then think that we are ‘recognising’ it when we are really just superimposing it on what goes on around us.’ (My emphasis.)

Ratnaguna compares this ‘ideological’ approach with that of a person who is deemed wise, who:

‘Understands that whatever comes into existence does so due to a number of conditions. Life is a complex interplay of many conditions, and a wise person is consequently suspicious of any suggestion that there is just one cause for anything. We see this ‘single-cause-ism’ expressed in almost every aspect of current social and political discourse. Any disparity between different races is attributed to systemic racism. Climate change is caused by human-induced CO2 emissions. Global poverty is the result of capitalism.

 

‘The single-cause understanding of every problem is reassuring because it appears to reduce the incredibly complex to the relatively simple. But it’s a dangerous illusion. In order to solve a problem, you need a good diagnosis, and to get that you need a really accurate understanding of the problem. This is not easy to obtain, and requires close attention to and long study of the issue, an open mind, a determination to find the truth, a strong resistance to the temptation to settle for easy solutions, and patience.

 

‘… A wise person is not in thrall to any political ideology. One of the problems with ideologies is that the people who subscribe to them see the world through the lens of that ideology, and that lens distorts their vision rather than clarifies it. Instead of looking for the truth of any situation, they will look for evidence that seems to confirm their ideological viewpoint. They will distort the parameters of the problem to make it fit their ideology.’[4]

However, I would say that it is not so much that Culture and Religion are ‘above’ Politics, it is more that they refer to different domains; the American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of Science Stephen Jay Gould came up with the concept of ‘non-overlapping magisteria,’ to explain how the relationship between fields such as Science and Religion ought to be viewed.

Ratnaguna’s theme echoes a common maxim: there are three things that shouldn’t be talked about in polite society: money, politics and religion, but maybe there is a deeper truth concealed in these sentiments.

Francisco Varela and ‘The Embodied Mind’

When Buddhism was establishing a foothold in the West in the 1960s and ‘70s, the Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche was a leading light, one of whose innovations as part of his Shambhala movement was to set up the Naropa Institute[5] in Colorado in 1974 as a Buddhist-oriented liberal arts college: a kind of ‘educational bridge between East and West.’ Trungpa asked poets Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman and Diane di Prima plus the composer John Cage to found a poetics department at Naropa during the first summer session.[6]

Trungpa however, was not only interested in exploring the Arts but other aspects of Western culture. He invited the Chilean biologist, philosopher, cybernetician and neuroscientist Francisco Varela who, together with his mentor Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesis to biology,[7] to deliver several workshops exploring cognitive science at the Institute Summer School. The Dalai Lama had had a long-standing interest in science, and so this initiative led eventually, in 1987, to the co-founding, along with R. Adam Engle, of the Mind and Life Institute, an organization today dedicated to fostering dialogue between Buddhism and Science. The insights arising therein grounded secular mindfulness in scientific research and thus fostered its acceptance by mainstream culture and access to all-important funding.

‘[The Institute was initially founded] to sponsor a series of dialogues between scientists and the Dalai Lama about the relationship between modern science and Buddhism. The Institute continues today as a major nexus for such dialog as well as promoting and supporting multidisciplinary scientific investigation in mind sciences, contemplative scholarship and practice and related areas in the interface of science with meditation and other contemplative practices, especially Buddhist practices.’[8]

In 1991 Varela co-authored the book The Embodied Mind,[9] which provided the theoretical groundwork for the modern dialogue between Buddhism and Science. Varela and his co-authors—Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch—had a central insight, which is that Wisdom traditions (like Buddhism) and Science rely on different forms of evidence: namely that what he called ‘third-person evidence’ underpins Science, whereas a wisdom tradition like Buddhism is founded upon ‘first person evidence.’ For this immutable reason, they are ‘non-overlapping magisteria.’

There is great faith today—maybe too much–in what we call Objective Evidence, but this is not the only kind of evidence available to us. When presenting his teachings to the wider world, the Buddha essentially said, ’Come and see for yourself,’ use the evidence of your own experience.

As is explored in Chapter 1, religious and scientific traditions are both built upon evidence, but of very different kinds. The former relies upon the free and communal association of individuals of a common faith, whereas the latter is based upon the combined objective evidence presented to and validated by the scientific community. Being in exclusive domains, these forms of evidence do not overlap. I posit however, that there is a third kind of evidence: that is second-person evidence and this is the domain of Politics–it is the kind of evidence we use when trying to convince another person of something. Here the ‘currency of exchange’ is not confidence / personal faith or facts, but opinion: we offer our opinion to another in order to convince them of the veracity of our viewpoint. Moreover, it having its own exclusive domain, Politics does not overlap with the domains either of Religion or Science.

We essentially need to ‘keep our politics out of the temple’ then, because Religion and Politics rely on entirely incompatible forms of evidence. We will only end up confused if we try to combine them.

Each involves a different kind of evidence: which is why they need to be kept separate; however, proficiency in one domain does tend to affect the others: as when the ethics a scientist has prevents them from distorting evidence for personal gain.

Ratnaguna’s theme echoes a common maxim: there are three things that shouldn’t be talked about ‘in polite society:’ money, politics and religion, but maybe a deeper truth is concealed in these sentiments.

The chapter goes on to explore ‘outside issues’ in relation to spiritual programmes.

[1] ’About Us.‘ Apramada. https://apramada.org/about-us

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ratnaguna. ‘When you enter the temple, leave your politics at the door.’ Apramada. 3 May 2021. https://apramada.org/articles/when-you-enter-the-temple-leave-your-politics-at-the-door

[4] Ibid.

[5] ‘Naropa University.‘ Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naropa_University

[6] Ibid.

[7] Francisco Varela. Wikipedia. Accessed 2 January 2024.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Varela#Notable_articles

[8] Ibid.

^[9] Varela, F.J., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. (1991) The Embodied Mind. The MIT Press.