Reply to "The Elephant in the DharmaHall" on Trike

Or is it a China Closet

https://tricycle.org/magazine/western-buddhism-individualism/

I wrote the following reply to this article on Tricycle today. I am reproducing it here because Trike is behind a paywall, replies are unformatted, and their mods might not approve it…

There are some significant unspoken assumptions and oversights in this article, interesting and well-written though it is.

What is being discussed here are the vicissitudes of “White” Buddhism, the kind of Buddhism we find in white upper middle-class, liberal enclaves like Western Massachusetts, Upstate New York, Santa Fe, Boulder, the Bay Area, England, Australia, and so-on. Also this excludes the communities of people of color in Europe, America, etc., which this magazine has in general, covered well.

One oversight is that Buddhism is a politically irrelevant institution in the West. There has yet to be a social leader of any significance or stature to arise from a Western Buddhist context.

We have to recognize that until now Western Buddhists trend liberal, whereas Asian Buddhists trend conservative.

Another is that the issue raised by Zizek has been amply explored by Ron Purser in McMindfulness, that is, the anesthesia-like effect of the mindfulness movement when it comes to mitigating the stresses of surviving in a neoliberalized world economy.

In general, Western Buddhist engagement with social issues has largely taken its lead from the environmental and civil rights movements in Anglo-American democracies which ultimately find their ethical roots in writings of Locke, Hume, and so on.

Ask most Western Buddhists about reproductive rights, they will generally respond they are pro-choice. Ask most Asian Buddhists, they will respond they oppose abortion in any form. In several Buddhist majority countries, notably, Burma, Bhutan, and Śrī Lanka, abortion is only legal when the life of the mother is threatened. Not surprisingly, Burma, Bhutan, and Śrī Lanka are three countries where the ethnic cleansing of non-Buddhist minorities has also occurred.

We also see a trend towards the right in younger, male white Buddhists. You can see this on Dhammawheel, for example, whose owner is a libertarian. Moreover, since Eastern Europe now counts as part of the West, we see that many Eastern European Tibetan Buddhists, largely informed by the racist politics of people like Ole Nyadahl and a strong, historical, anti-muslim bias amongst their Tibetan teachers, are embracing right wing ideals which are generally in opposition to the kinds of democratic and open-society values that underlie the editorial policies of magazines like Trike, values which we have superimposed on a tradition whose social and political success has been completely dependent on alliances with royal families and the economic, magical, and political benefits such alliances would bring.

Many Tibetans in the US openly support Donald Trump. According to Vox, half the polled Vietnamese Community in the US supported Trump in 2020 (https://www.vox.com/first-person/2020/10/30/21540263/vietnamese-american-support-trump-2020).

Excluding these trends from an assessment of Western Buddhism is perilous. If someone lives in the West and is a Buddhist, they count as Western Buddhists.

Thus, we cannot speak of a singular buddhist social and political consciousness. There are too many buddhisms and too many buddhists with too many differences in historical and social experience living under too many different kinds of governments and different experiences with colonialism to try and forge anything like a buddhist consensus on any of these issues.