Two Interviews

These are not new articles, but are still worth reading (or re-reading). Enjoy!

Adapting Eastern Spiritual Teachings to our Western Culture: A discussion with Shinzen Young (by Charles T. Tart) Abstract:

Eastern spiritual teachings about mindfulness and enlightenment are important sources of stimulation, methodologies and concepts to our emerging discipline of transpersonal psychology. These are embedded in a cultural matrix, however, that makes understanding and transfer of the essence difficult. The author discusses this problem of adaptation with a Western meditation teacher well trained in the Eastern methods, Shinzen Young, who had deliberately adapted Eastern methods and concepts to Western culture. Factors important in his adaptation included egalitarianism vs. hierarchy, de-emphasize of doctrine in favor of practical meditation technology, drawing key understandings out of Western students' experiences as opposed to directly teaching them, using Western scientific and psychological terminology to effectively evoke responses in Westerns, and placing the Eastern methods in the broader context of the world mystical tradition. The importance of reinforcement of practice through interpersonal networks is discussed, as well as relations between psychotherapy and meditation, including a form of one-on-one meditation counseling which has been especially effective in teaching meditation skills.

Then, Towards a Culture of Awakening, Wes Nisker interviewed Stephen Batchelor for Inquiring Mind. Excerpt:

IM: In the Pali texts the historical Buddha often seems to be addressing a particular class of people, notably "the well-born sons and daughters." Perhaps those early followers of the Buddha were the social equivalent of the highly educated and mostly middle-class folks who have now taken up Buddhism in the West.

SB: Yes, I think that's right. One can imagine the Buddha, during his time, as having had the same status and authority that a Nobel Prize winning physicist would have in our culture today. He was someone who, by virtue of what he accomplished, became worthy of the greatest respect. We have to remember that the Buddha was speaking in the context of a culture which supported and valued spiritual realization as the highest form of achievement. In the West we have a rather different set of cultural values that define what is worthy of respect.

It has always been the case, historically, that the Dharma has entered a society through first gaining acceptance by an articulate minority, through whom it then spreads into the rest of the culture. At the Buddha’s time this minority were the samanas - drop-outs effectively - who sought another way of life to the one currently on offer. It was the same in China: those initially drawn to Buddhism were disaffected intellectuals and Taoist hermits. It is no coincidence that those of us involved in Buddhism in the West tend to be products of the Sixties’ counter-culture, intellectuals, artists, eco-nuts and so on.

IM: Don't you find it curious that most of the great thinkers and philosophers of the Western world have either ignored or dismissed Buddhist thought and practice?

SB: Most Western thinkers are still stuck in their own Eurocentricity. They seem convinced that philosophy has it's origins in Plato and is an exclusive exercise of the West. Even someone like Nietzsche, who begins to question the assumptions of Western philosophy, does not look to the East for other sources of philosophical inquiry but instead goes further back into Western history, to the pre-Socratics. Camus and Sartre, who were considered radical, are really only radical within the confines of their own European paradigm.

It is amazing to me that even today, Buddhism has failed to gain notice in Western philosophical circles. One of the most famous of modern thinkers, Michel Foucault, goes right into Buddhist territory with many of his ideas, yet he never makes a reference to Buddhism. The same with Richard Rorty, one of the most important contemporary American philosophers, whose book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity reads in part almost like a Buddhist text. His analysis of the contingency of the self, for example, is a pure Buddhist analysis, but he never even mentions Buddhism.