r/ReflectiveBuddhism

This talk really captures how language impacts how we experience and internalise Buddhist teachings and concepts. Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche unpacks the Tibetan meanings related to vipassana and contrasts that with popular understandings.

Also important is his take on the english word meditation, which has Christian theological roots. Bhavana/phawana is closer to cultivate/to grow/to tend in Thai and Pali for instance.

From a Theravada perspective, there are in fact a lot of discursive themes that make up the 40 meditation subjects. The pure mindfulness/bare awareness approach should ideally work in concert with the subjects/themes.

Again, even mindfulness is a terrible translation for sati. Which is in fact, closer to recall/remember/bring to mind. Recollection is a more neutral term that conveys the skill being discussed.

Also, his podcast Siddhartha's Intent is really great.

https://preview.redd.it/gbuwvayhbt9h1.png?width=1744&format=png&auto=webp&s=fa6de3c6189231ee2371866597d54a5b9c4dfff3

Me scrolling on my phone and reading this 😂

https://reddit.com/link/1uh1ea1/video/49i3jkw6ct9h1/player

Here we can see the foundational point of incoherence: "Secular Buddhism is different from Religious Buddhism."

Like I've said, the central takeaway from what I've been documenting here is this: the claim that there is a Buddhism outside of Buddhism, a Buddhism other than Buddhism.

This incoherence is so fundamental to their project of exploitation but was and still is, completely missed.

What we usually get are critiques of their doctrinal distortions:

• They're cherry picking
• They're distorting the Dhamma

But while that is understandable and an immediately perceivable issue, there are deeper issues that actually inform what we see on the surface level.

Without deconstructing their fundamental incoherent claims and assertions, we're simply playing whack-a-mole related to doctrine. I firmly believe my frameworks get to the root of what is happening here.

The Buddhist religion/s has/have uniquely been subjected to what I would call: a cultural laundering process. We simply do not speak about any other tradition like this. (Taoism comes close I think)

Thought exercise:

What if anthropologists opined how Irish people couldn’t really understand Catholicism because of their Irish cultural baggage. Or Egyptian Muslims are Muslims in name only, since they're really too cultural to really practice true Islam.

We ONLY speak about Buddhism, Buddhist societies and Buddhist people like this.

These ideas are very old and go back to the Orientalist understandings of India. This form of racialisation and essentialism have not really substantially been confronted in academia either.

I saw a comment the other day from a professor no less, that Buddhism, like Confucianism, can be practiced without spirituality. Now, if you think about it, that statement only has the veneer of intelligibility. When reflecting on that assertion, we can easily see how vacuous it is.

Think about this other meme: Buddhism has religious and non-religious aspects.

Image if someone said to you parts of a woman are pregnant and other parts are not pregnant. Now, we know that pregnancy is a holistic and integral experience for a woman. She IS pregnant.

Similarly if we're asserting that parts of a religion are actually not religion, then we've headed straight into dumbass territory. Something cannot simultaneously be inside and outside a constructed category. Why?

It throws into question the conceptual foundation of the category. To the extent that we can't possibly make truth claims when we admit that the category is entirely subject to personal whims and feelings.

So if the category of religion depends on personal feelings and idiosyncratic readings, divorced from social consensus, then no truth claims can be made about the categories of religion and non-religion.

For example: you then cannot claim that Buddhism has religious and non religious aspects, since, idiotically, what is religion can simultaneously be and NOT be religion, depending on how you intellectually squint at it.