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"Why Study Buddhism"

From Theologia Evangelica June 1992 vol 25:2 pp 58-63

Reproduced without the kind permission of the editor, but then, he never
made me sign a copyright release form, either! And you are all going to
rush out and order a legit copy from your library, right?

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ABSTRACT

In this essay, the value and relevance of the study of Buddhism generally and
at the University of South Africa in particular are described. Despite the
small number of Buddhists in South Africa, Buddhology can benefit us by
provide valuable clues to our understanding of contemporary social events and
by providing an alternative paradigm for the appraisal of philosophical and
theological questions.

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It is valuable for academics to reflect from time to time on why they do what
they do, and the relevance of their study fields for the wider community. Not
that relevance is the only criterion by which to determine what should or
should not be studied - the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake has ever
been a driving force of the human species with its innate monkey curiosity.
Furthermore, what is irrelevant today may be of vital importance tomorrow and
vice versa. The periodic table, for instance, is the crowning achievement of
nineteenth-century physics, but at the time, its relevance was highly dubious:
it would simply not have been possible for Queen Victoria, Abraham Lincoln or
Paul Kruger to assemble the foremost scientists of the day and say, "Gentlemen,
I should like you to invent the fast breeder reactor". The acquisition of
knowledge and understanding for their own sakes is and should remain an
important aspect of any university's academic programme.

But even if the contemporary relevance of a given field of study is only one
factor in determining whether it is worth studying, it is nevertheless an
important one. In this essay, I shall examine my own primary field of interest,
the academic study of Buddhism, and attempt to justify its existence. Needless
to say, an "objective" approach to such a topic is almost a contradiction in
terms - this is primarily an apologetic for Buddhology, and I shall leave it to
others to criticise my work and judge whether my attempt has been successful.
Hopefully, this will start a debate on the justifiability of other religiously-
oriented disciplines as well.

So, why study Buddhism? And more particularly, why study Buddhism at Unisa?
The first, most immediately obvious answer is that there are Buddhists in this
country, and that by studying the fundamental tenets and the practical
implications of their tradition, we can render the same kind of service to them
that, say, a theologian can render to the Christian community or an expert in
Islam to the Muslim section of the population. While this argument is valid on
the face of it, it contains two defects. Firstly, it does not question the
societal worth of theological and religious studies; it simply assumes that
such studies are worthwhile. As I shall attempt to demonstrate below, the study
of religious phenomena, in this case Buddhism, is in fact indispensable for our
complete understanding of the human life-world in general and contemporary
society in particular, and brings many practical benefits, but this must be
established by argument, not merely assumed. Secondly, the argument falls
rather flat in a country like South Africa, where Buddhists make up a
negligibly small part of the population.

If the number of adherents is to be the deciding factor on the question which
subjects are to be studied, then the existence of Buddhist studies at South
African universities would imply that we should also have scholars and even
whole academic departments specialising in the fulltime study of the
International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the Ahmadiyya movement in
Islam, Zoroastrianism, and so on. In fact, while there are certain scholars of
religion with a interest in these fields, they generally subsume their studies
under other headings, subdivisions of Religious Studies such as Hindu, Islamic
or Ancient Near Eastern studies. But Buddhology is recognised as a distinct
research field with equal status to these; it is presented by Religious Studies
departments worldwide as an integral part of the curriculum and in more
affluent societies such as the USA, there are in fact academic institutes
entirely devoted to this subject (e.g. the Kuroda Institute for the study of
Buddhism and human values at the University of Illinois). Not many of them, it
is true, but the subject is clearly recognised as a valid and valuable area of
study.

It is however true that an understanding of Buddhism will assist us in our
understanding of and dealings with traditionally Buddhist societies. Since many
of these are situated on the Pacific Rim, currently the global economic
growthpoint and containing some of South Africa's major trading partners, such
as Japan and Korea, this may yet become an increasingly important issue. If
Japanese businesspeople attain their competitive edge by reading the deeply
Zen Buddhist-inspired "Book of three rings" by the legendary samurai Minamoto
Musashi (1982:22), perhaps they know something we do not.

A more sophisticated variant of the above argument is as follows: while it is
true that there are but a few committed Buddhists in South Africa, western
society, of which South Africa is at least partly a member, is slowly being
permeated with oriental influences. Youngsters who thirty years ago would have
taken up boxing now do karate. Even small towns have ikebana displays in the
annual show of the local flower arranging club, not to mention the popularity
of bonsai trees. Certain trends in art, fashion and architecture show an
affinity with Japanese ideals of simplicity and spontaneity or, conversely,
with a riotous display of colours and patterns that may be seen as a
manifestation of Sino-Tibetan influences. The inspiration behind all these new
Oriental influences, the argument continues, is Buddhist philosophy and the
Buddhist view of reality and the ideal life. Thus, if we wish to understand
what is happening to our society and possibly take steps to either prevent or
facilitate this paradigm shift, we should study Buddhism. A similar argument
could naturally be made in respect of the popularity of hatha yoga and the
study of Hinduism.

It was on grounds such as the above, that the Northern Transvaal synod of the
Dutch Reformed Church in 1983 expressed its concern over the Buddhist
influences discernible in the practice of karate (Nederduitse Gereformeerde
Kerk 1983: 177; see also Gous 1983: 125-208). While I do not share the
negative assessment of Buddhist influences that underlies this decision, the
logic underlying their decision is valid and, in my opinion, sound within the
synod's prevailing paradigm. Other commentators, especially, it appears, those
of a Jungian bent, have reacted in the opposite way, welcoming the change with
open arms (e.g. Standen 1987: 125-143).

Such an argument can easily be taken to quite ridiculous extremes, as can be
demonstrated by inverting it; baseball and golf are currently two of the most
popular spectator and participant sports, respectively, in Japan. Purely on
this basis, would we advise the Japanese to study Christianity? (cf. Schmidt,
quoted in Gous 1983: 192) But such flippancies apart, there remains an element
of truth in the argument. It is true that traditional oriental society did not
draw the rigid distinctions between the "sacred" and the "secular" spheres of
existence that westerners are accustomed to. Martial arts can serve as a way
of losing the concept of selfhood and attuning to the totality of existence,
and ikebana can be an expression of one's understanding of the emptiness of
conditioned reality.

They need not be this, of course. Most occidental practitioners of karate see
their pursuit of this art purely as a form of physical exercise and
self-defence. But, the argument goes, something of the original inspiration
behind these activities remains. If we prefer not to understand this on a too
esoteric level, then perhaps we can express it as follows: the possibility
exists that the practitioner of karate or ikebana might decide to read books
about their respective arts, and there encounter descriptions of the origins
of their pursuits and how these are related to Buddhist philosophy. This might
then lead, if not to an outright adoption of Buddhist principles, to an
appreciation of and behaviour commensurate with Buddhist practices. If this
were to occur on a sufficiently large scale, the result would be a drift
towards the gradual Buddhification of society.

Naturally, whether one approves of such a process or not depends on one's own
prior commitments and one's opinion of Buddhism. But then at least let this be
an informed opinion; and for this we need to study Buddhism. Forewarned is
forearmed - we cannot leave an important social development such as this to the
historians of future ages. Only a thorough understanding of how Buddhist
philosophy has influenced societies in the past will enable us to predict how
it may yet influence our own world.

A personal anecdote may be apposite here: when my sister was still at high
school, she attended a meeting in which a locally well known evangelist told
her that Buddhists worshipped by rubbing the fat stomachs of Buddha statues!
This shows the enormous extent of ignorance of other faiths in our society. Not
only is the corpulent statue commonly seen in the west an image of a Chinese
saint called Pu Tai (Jap. Hotei), and not of the historical Buddha, but anyone
even slightly familiar with Buddhist philosophy would be aware that such
behaviour, if in fact it exists anywhere, would be on the same level of
religious behaviour as a westerner "touching wood"; in other words, the level
of popular ritual and superstition rather than orthodox spirituality. While
the evangelist in question is undoubtedly entitled to his views, Buddhology
could ensure that at least he would be able to base his attitude on factually
correct information.

On a more strictly academic level, one could mention that Buddhist philosophy
has addressed many of the same questions as other religious and philosophical
traditions, but starting from often radically different starting-points. This
provides us with an unique vantage point from which to examine our own beliefs
and arguments, and discover the often well-hidden presuppositions, prejudices
and apparently self-evident "facts" on which our arguments are so often based.

For instance, in the western theistic religious tradition, one problem is why
there is such a thing as evil in a world created by a loving deity. Possible
answers to this question are called "theodicies" and it would be beyond the
scope of this article to describe the history this philosophical debate.
Buddhists have a similar dilemma, but couched in slightly differing terms;
"why is there suffering?". Let us briefly look at the ways in which the
Buddhist paradigm would approach the question.
                        
"Is there a problem of evil?" asks Marco Pallis (1980: 31-51), a contemporary
Buddhist thinker. He comes to the conclusion that the imperfection of the world
is an inseparable aspect of its finitude and therefore a normal part of
phenomenal existence (Pallis 1980: 39-40). Moreover, he points out that in
Buddhism no "beginning" or "end" to phenomenal existence is posited: thus evil
is merely "... a particular case of the relative, viewed from its privative
angle. Suffering in all its forms is then accepted as a measure of the world's
remoteness from the divine principle" (Pallis 1980: 45-46). In other words,
"evil" is merely our word for that aspect of existence which we dislike. And
in Buddhist philosophy, the fact that we like and dislike demonstrates how far
we are from enlightenment, thus "(the problem) is neither the existence of the
world nor our idea of what a world might have been like had we been asked to
create one, but solely the question of how best to rejoin our own centre, which
is also the centre of all things ..." (Pallis 1980: 47). In other words, the
reason for the existence of evil or suffering should not be sought in the
world's constitution so much as in the way we approach and interact with the
world: more specifically, it is stated that a grasping, self-centred attitude
towards existence will produce suffering.

In Buddhist mythology, too, the abstract nature of "evil", as opposed to the
more immediate, existential nature of "suffering", is symbolised by the tale
of how it was the very presence of sickness, disease, old age and death that
prompted prince Siddharta Gautama to set out on the road to his eventual
Buddhahood. Good, therefore, needed the presence of evil to allow its full
fruition. This is not seen in the Buddhist tradition as a suggestion that the
"evil" was somehow an expression of a "higher good", but as a symbolic
expression of a higher "nirvanic" view of reality which is beyond our good/evil
system of classification.

In the higher reaches of Madhyamika Buddhist philosophy, the distinction
between good and evil is completely eradicated: samsara is itself nirvana,
being is emptiness, phenomenon and noumenon are one in all their apparent
diversity. While nonBuddhist thinkers may have arrived at similar conclusions,
and some have, the value of seeing Buddhists handle such issues lies not so
much in the conclusion reached as in the way it demonstrates how a different
set of initial assumptions change the entire approach to the question. The same
is true, of course, of oriental scholars now becoming aware of the western
religio-philosophical tradition.

Let us take a perhaps even more fundamental issue: Buddhists deny the existence
and relevance of a personal, all-powerful deity, the very life-blood of western,
theistic religion. Yet Buddhists, by general consensus, have managed to be
religious people. Does this then imply that the category "religion" transcends
theism, or is there something fundamentally wrong with our understanding of
what religion is, when we can lump such philosophically incompatible phenomena
as traditional Christian monotheism and near-nihilistic Buddhist causal
interdependency within this category? In other words, when we start to define
religion, do we not already have an mental impression of what religion is, to
which we then accommodate our definition? The Indian nontheistic religions have
been a gadfly to those who sought an easy definition of religion ever since
the founding of Religious studies as an academic discipline towards the end of
the nineteenth century.

By raising such questions, the study of Buddhism can clarify matters in
sometimes surprisingly remote corners of academia. And that might well include
theology: Kruger (1989: 98) makes the point that "... a Christian theology
conceived of in terms of the philosophy of Gotama rather than that of Plato,
Aristotle or Plotinus is not unthinkable". 

But of course the same type of argument could be raised to support the study
of, say, Jainism or the religion of the Inuit. Why Buddhism in particular? The
answer would appear to be that most of the other religions mentioned are too
interwoven in a particular set of sociohistorical circumstances to be broadly
applicable to the outside world. Religions like Hinduism have developed a
missionary outreach in the last century (e.g. the Ramakrishna Mission and the
Hare Krishna movement), and other religions like Judaism, while rarely
proselytising actively, have always been open to converts, but only three
religious traditions are universal religions, that is, only three have from the
outset regarded their message as important for all humanity: Christianity,
Islam and Buddhism (Schmidt 1980: 55-62).

Accordingly, only these three have developed their philosophical and
theological theses, arguments and positions in a way that allows a relatively
easy transition to other, very different cultures. When I say "easy" I do not
imply that we do not require a sophisticated hermeneutical strategy to
understand the transition; to the contrary, I merely mean that, by and large,
only these three traditions have "designed" their doctrines to be
understandable to outsiders who are unfamiliar with a thousand details from
everyday life. Other religious traditions, venerable and instructive though
they might be, are simply too closely involved with the experience of a
particular group of people to be readily assimilated into the universe of
general academic discourse.

But the "family resemblance" between Islam and Christianity, at least as seen
from the Buddhist perspective, is sufficiently great to enable us to see them
as variants of one religio-philosophical tradition for the purpose of
macro-cultural information interchange and comparison (cf. Scharfstein 1978:
49-52). And perhaps that by itself is an indication of how attention to the
Buddhist paradigm can demonstrate our intellectual blind spots. That leaves us
with two great religious systems of thought, Buddhism and occidental theism,
here represented by Christianity, but what about nonreligious thinking?

In 1920, H. G. Wells co-authored a series of essays on the "six greatest men
of all time" (described in Wells 1970: 209). They were, in no particular order,
Jesus, Aristotle, Asoka, Roger Bacon, Abraham Lincoln and the Buddha. If we see
Aristotle and Lincoln as standing at the very beginning of the western liberal
and scientific tradition (of which Marxism too is an offshoot), the Buddha and
Asoka (a Buddhist monarch famous for his clemency and wise administration) as
representing Buddhism and Christ and Bacon as the Christian representatives,
then this leaves us with three great paradigms or systems of thought; Buddhism,
Christianity and science. And this is yet another reason to study Buddhism:
being a religious tradition that takes all truth-claims with a generous pinch
of salt, it may yet serve as a mediating factor between the conflicting claims
of the other two traditions. If Buddhism, and the study of Buddhism, can serve
as an honest broker, if it can allay the fruitless war between faith and reason
that has so severely split western society for well over a century, then
perhaps the study of Buddhism is the best possible investment we can make in
our own future.

Those, then, are some of the reasons for studying Buddhism. As intimated above,
to these very pragmatic reasons must always be added the value and sheer joy
of gathering knowledge purely for its own sake. The final relevance of Buddhist
studies will be for history to decide, but I hope that I have demonstrated that
from our perspective Buddhology, apart from its intrinsic fascination, is more
than a mere intellectual luxury. Even in the absence of a substantial Buddhist
community, it helps us understand other societies whose importance in the
global economy is increasingly rising, it gives us valuable information about
contemporary changes in our own society, and it serves as a critical tool for
nonBuddhist thinkers that can enhance academic discourse as a whole. A
nonsectarian university such as Unisa is then particularly well suited to take
advantage of these benefits of academic Buddhology.

REFERENCES

Gous, A. 1983. Perspektief op Satan en sy werkinge - joga, transendentale
meditasie, karate. Pretoria: N. G. Kerkboekhandel.

Kruger, J. S. 1989. Metatheism. Early Buddhism and traditional Christian
theism. Pretoria: University of South Africa.

Musashi, M. 1982. A book of three rings. (trl. V. Harris). London: Allison &
Busby.

Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk 1983. Agenda vir die negende gewone vergadering
van die sinode van Noord-Transvaal van die Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk.
Pretoria: Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk.

Pallis, M. 1980. A Buddhist spectrum. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Scharfstein, B. 1978. Philosophy East/Philosophy West. New York: Oxford
University Press.

Schmidt, R. 1980. Exploring religion. Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth.

Standen, R. 1987. The changing face of the hero. Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical
Publishing House. 

Wells, G. H. 1970. The works of H. G. Wells. New York: Burt Franklin.


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