David Chapman on the Death of Consensus Buddhism - Discussion
Milo:
2) Into more traditional or hybrid-traditional forms as information and teachers have become more accessible. This provides probably deeper and more authentic traditions at the cost of dealing with the 'mystical' aspects that can be off putting to westerners who have tended to seek these traditions as an oppositional to Christian tradition.
I was an atheist when I found MCTB and I immediately liked no-bullshit approach. Over time however my horizon broaden enough to include all the supermundane stuff and there went my atheism, thus gone
For western culture current pragmatic meditation approach with simply not concentrating on supermundane aspects is imho the right one.
Ni Nurta:
Milo:
2) Into more traditional or hybrid-traditional forms as information and teachers have become more accessible. This provides probably deeper and more authentic traditions at the cost of dealing with the 'mystical' aspects that can be off putting to westerners who have tended to seek these traditions as an oppositional to Christian tradition.
I was an atheist when I found MCTB and I immediately liked no-bullshit approach. Over time however my horizon broaden enough to include all the supermundane stuff and there went my atheism, thus gone
For western culture current pragmatic meditation approach with simply not concentrating on supermundane aspects is imho the right one.
Ni Nurta,
To your first point, I've met a surprising number of "closet Christians" (And Hindus) in pragmatic dharma communities, both here and in person in communities I would class as pragmatic dharma.
Although such coexistence of these different traditions does not bother me personally in the slightest at this point in my spiritual development, I am genuinly curious how people balance that tension early on and whether it's conceived as a competitive thing, Buddhism being non-religious, the "jealous God" bit not taken literally, syncretism, having first advanced far enough in Christian spirituality that this tension of undertaking multiple traditions can be framed in an acceptable way, being from the more liberal and cosmopolitan branches of Christianity, or some other way to make it work. I'd be very interested to hear from people on this particular journey and whether that made them more or less open to the mystical parts of Buddhism.
That being said, Buddhism has had ways of approaching more skeptical/rationalist people since the the time of the discourse to the kalamas.
Personally, I think however relying on an ultra rationalist approach exclusively will limit the audience for Buddhism to a select few. This has also been recognized in Buddhism for a very long time and led to different diaspora schools teaching at different points on the rationalist-ritualist axis depending on the perceived reception for their particular audience (Traditionally divided on caste). Hence why we have schools like Nichiren. Once upon a time I would have regarded chanting nam-myoho-renge-kyo as your path to awakening to be a ridiculous project doomed to fail by lack of any sophistication. Having advanced enough along a different path however, I now look at this tradition and realize how cleverly such a method works.
Now on to whether pragmatic dharma doesn't concentrate on supermundane aspects. Perhaps not in some forms. Here, however, we come right out with the powers and magick in the same book as our hardcore rationalist approach, even if we sort of tiptoe around that in discussion. So we are open to such things but don't tend to lead with them or talk about them without some feeling of taboo. But we do discuss them.
Mindfullness movements, on the other hand, go to great lengths to sanitize any of that out and strongly wall it off. This functions not for the purpose of attracting rationalists, IMO, but to avoid offending, or losing market share when it is presented to people of non Buddhist faith, who may be curious but would become uncomfortable if it feels like we are getting into 'jealous God' territory. Yet we rarely see people awakening from mindfullness alone. The question is, what does mindfullness lack that ritualist traditions like Nichiren possess?
Ni Nurta:
Interresting points... somehow I see them as very inspiring 
Thank you
Thank you
You're very welcome, Ni Nurta. Glad they could serve as inspiration.
Here's some hot air of mine from an old essay (on Flannery O'Connor, actually, lol), on the meditation/contemplative prayer situation in the Church:
The Roman Church’s reaction to Luther and Calvin, the Counter-Reformation, began with the founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius of Loyola, whose Spiritual Exercises, written between 1522 and 1526, are a systematized program of gradated prayer, moving from what the Church traditionally called mental prayer, or “meditation,” an active prayer involving the mind, imagination, emotions, and will, through affective prayer, a more spontaneous and simpler movement of the will as the fruit of these reflections, and finally to contemplation, in which the active will yields to passivity in infused prayer which has its supernatural source in God’s action. This simple prayer, or prayer of quiet, as Teresa of Avila called contemplation’s first stage, in her Interior Castle, was regarded as the normal development of a devoted prayer life; but already the pressures of a divided Christianity were hardening party lines across the board. This is also the period when the Inquisition came into its own, of course; orthodoxy inevitably grew narrower, by the light of the bonfires, and by 1574, Everard Mercurian, Loyola’s successor as Father General of the Jesuits, had forbade the bulk of Loyola’s exercises, allowing only the first stage of active mental prayer or meditation, a decision which effectively institutionalized an astonishing and explicit anti-contemplative bias in the entire Catholic Church. In the seventeenth century, Miguel Molinos attempted a sort of contemplative renewal against the grain, based on the writings of Teresa of Avila, which brought him into conflict first with the Jesuits and then with the Inquisition itself; Molinos’s writings, stressing the passivity of Teresa’s prayer of quiet to a degree that seemed to undermine the more active foundations of prayer, were eventually condemned as what came to be termed the heresy of “Quietism,” and Molinos spent the last nine years of his life in the Spanish Prison of the Holy Office, where he died in 1696. By 1700, even the writings of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila were beginning to be seen as dangerously Quietistic, and basically no one dared to really raise the issue of contemplative prayer in the western Catholic Church for the next two centuries. If anyone was praying during these centuries in a way that brought them to the frontier of silence in the cloud of unkowing, they generally had the good sense to keep quiet about it.
* * *
It is worth dwelling on these recent centuries for a moment, and on the profound irony of the Church’s policy. The first stage of Ignatius’s exercises is the prayer we are all familiar with, an active prayer, consciously turning our mind and heart toward God, in the myriad ways, and with the myriad applicable techniques, that a long-term believing culture has devised; and it was here that the Church chose to draw its line in the sand. Ignatius’s second stage of prayer, affective prayer, which for a millennium and a half had been seen as the natural progression of prayer beyond words and techniques into a spontaneous movement of the heart and will, was banned; and the third stage, the further, radical simplification of the simple prayer of the heart and will into a silencing of all the faculties and the dawn of a passive infusion of the grace of contemplation, the divine gift of an intimate and supernatural encounter with God that had been seen as both the natural fulfillment of prayer and the desired goal of every praying Christian, was also banned.
To put it baldly: At the very moment when the effects of not just the Reformation but of what we have come to think of as modernity began to be felt— at the moment, that is, when the culture at large began to move from it being nearly impossible to not believe in God to disbelief becoming not just easy but practically inescapable, as Charles Taylor put it— the Catholic Church formally shut down every avenue of prayer that was based on anything other than human will and knowledge and effort.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the degree of wrong-headedness here; it was the institutionalization of what amounted to a panic. If prayer does not lead beyond what may be accomplished by human effort into some meaningful encounter with That which is beyond all human accomplishment and comprehension, and bear its fruits through the astonishing and ever-renewing gift of that, then the whole God thing is much ado about nothing, which of course is exactly what the Enlightenment thinkers were beginning to say, and which our own era now takes almost as a matter of course. At the epochal, civilization-defining moment when faith began to be most deeply questioned, when the division of grace from nature began to acquire its full nihilistic force— hundreds of years before Nietzsche— the Church itself shut down all prayer that invited grace, for all the world as if it had lost its faith in grace’s unforeseeable efficacy in the surrendered soul, and retreated into enforcing a kind of prayer that was human, all-too-human, and nothing more.
* * *
I hope my readers will forgive the apparent historical digression, and rant, in an essay on “the novelist and prayer.” I am trying to establish at least two points here, the first being that the kind of prayer I am talking about has never been an easy thing to practice, even if the Church itself wasn’t going to kill you for it, since Jesus flung himself down on his face and sweated blood through the night in the garden on the Mount of Olives, or Moses climbed alone through the thunder and lightning, into the cloud of darkness shrouding the mountain of God.
The second point is that the writings of the great Discalced Carmelites, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, which were never quite actually condemned and have reemerged in the last century as the epitomes of orthodox contemplative theology— John was named a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius XI in 1926, and in classic Catholic better-late-than-never fashion, Teresa, along with St. Catherine of Siena, was named the first female Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI in 1970— remain the gold standard for any Christian approaching contemplative prayer, to this day. When T.S. Eliot, beginning to lose his modernist audience as he moved toward the ever-fresh scandal of faith, asked, in “Ash-Wednesday,” “Where shall the word be found, where will the word/Resound?” he concluded, “Not here, there is not enough silence.” Seeking enough silence, after hundreds of years of nothing but talk on the part of even the Church’s finest, one of the few sure guides he found was John of the Cross. When Eliot says, in “East Coker,” “You say I am repeating/Something I have said before. I shall say it again./Shall I say it again?”, what he is repeating, and saying again, for the entire stanza, is John of the Cross 101, lifted more or less directly— with characteristically felicitous Eliot nuances— from some of John’s most dauntingly ascetic verses, in The Ascent of Mount Carmel, book 1, chapter 13.
* * *
The thing is, it is not only possible, it is natural and almost inevitable, for a devoted soul, in all sincerity, to get good at Ignatius’s first stage of discursive prayer and meditation, and to enjoy all manner of relatively replicable comforts in such prayer. It is also natural and almost inevitable, human nature being what it is, that such a soul grows proud of this. The dark nights, as John of the Cross conceives them, are precisely God’s cure for this pride, and its associated faults. It is not a failure, to arrive at this point, John says; it is the simple and very real limits of human nature itself that we reach here: “No matter how much an individual does through his own efforts, he cannot actively purify himself enough to be disposed in the least degree for the divine union of the perfection of love. God must take over and purge him in that fire that is dark for him.” (The Dark Night, I, 3:3):
What God does here first, John says, is take away the gratifications of prayer. The glow in the heart, the surge in the will, the lucidity and delight of the mind making sense of things: all the comforting evidence of our holiness and righteousness up to this point is removed by God’s purgative action of love, and we are left, quite literally, to our own devices, which are revealed to be entirely useless. After elaborating the spiritual logic of this abrupt and pervasive onset of God’s gift of the most desolate internal emptiness in these formerly contented souls, John adds, with what strikes me as a very dry touch of contemplative humor, “This change is a surprise to them because everything seems to be functioning in reverse.” (The Dark Night, I, 8:3)
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally,” Flannery O’Connor wrote (Habit of Being, 100). “A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.”
Indeed. But one of the points all those individual saints are making is that the dark night, for all its terrors and aridities, is in fact a supernatural grace. “God it is who is working now in the soul,” John says (Dark Night II, 8:1), “and for this reason the soul can do nothing.”
This is, quite literally, the crux of the matter. The soul, at this point, seeing to its dismay that it can do nothing, by the incomprehensible grace of God, quite naturally feels abandoned. God, for all intents and purposes, has disappeared. And this disappearance, John assures us again and again, through all his writings, doing his pastoral best to help the souls under his care not freak out completely, is God’s living flame of love doing its deepest purifying work. It is part of John’s daunting reputation— and Flannery O’Connor’s, for that matter— how much he stresses the deep human horror of the dark night. But think of bougainvilleas, the beauty of a fence-full of fuchsia-colored glory. Why do we have to go so far south to see that beauty? It is not because of the summers that bougainvilleas don’t grow in Michigan, or even Virginia. It is the winters. John of the Cross is bearing witness to a variety of bougainvillea that blooms at the South Pole in the dead of the southern hemisphere’s worst winter. That he should dwell on what it takes for those flowers to appear under such conditions— speaking as a gardener here— seems eminently practical to me.
Tim Farrington:
What God does here first, John says, is take away the gratifications of prayer. The glow in the heart, the surge in the will, the lucidity and delight of the mind making sense of things: all the comforting evidence of our holiness and righteousness up to this point is removed by God’s purgative action of love, and we are left, quite literally, to our own devices, which are revealed to be entirely useless.
Thank you for your essay. I have been mystified of the use of the the term "Dark Night" by Buddhist teachers. It seems to be made an equivalent of some kind of generalized depresive state without definite cause. Your analysis and description is spot on. For contemplatives of any tradition, the Dark Night is the end of self congratulation, of the wonder of new experiences and the looking for states. It's the last step towards normalization of practice, of everyday "enlightment". Of course, the harder you try to hang on to all the "conforting evidence" the more difficult it will be. But eventually, when you let go and jump, you find yourself operating out of trust in the source of inteligence. As it has been called, the "Inconceivable".
Tim Farrington:
Pepe:
Hi Tim,
I'm a fun of your essays in Christian stuff. Thanks for sharing. I am no scholar in the history of Christianity, so my comments are only the opinions of someone vaguely informed. I'm going to play devil's advocate for the Vatican (if you'll allow me the irony). The Vatican has played a role over the centuries, of containing centrifugal forces within Europe. This was done by being the bearer of the official religion and as administrator of the law, functioning as a court of appeals and arbitrator between the European kingdoms, although it was also an interested party in conflicts. I'm not saying if the Vatican's performance was good or bad, but simply saying what role it played. Its performance was not only at the palace level, but also at the popular level. From the ninth century onwards, popular religious manifestations began to emerge, pilgrimages to visit religious relics, etc., which exceeded the capacity of the Church to contain it. In a static society, religion was the safety valve. And the subsequent reinterpretations of the scriptures and searches for direct religious experiences, without intermediaries, were seen not only as a danger to the status quo but also as a genuine concern for popular spillovers. Perhaps the historical memory of the abrupt collapse of the Roman Empire was burning in the background. I think that with all this context, it is understandable (not justifiable) the intention of the Vatican to suppress any "populist" movement (excuse the anachrony) that expressed itself through religion. There are several historical examples of popular hysteria, which here we could perhaps qualify as massive A&P and their subsequent Dark Nights ... It is a fight that the Church fought since the 1st century, just remember the personal crusade of Saint Paul against the infiltration of the Gnostics in the Christianity, not only for doctrinal issues but also for the show of charismatic powers, prophecies, etc. He kindly asked them not to act like lunatics so as not to scare other parishioners. I believe that the compromise solution that the Vatican eventually found was to suppress at the popular level any development of a contemplative practice while internally calmed internal pressures by enabling the creation of contemplative monastic orders enclosed within walls, without connection with the common people. That is why now in the 21st century, the likely expansion of Buddhist techniques within the Catholic public poses a new and much greater challenge for the Vatican, internally pulled by conservative inertia, charismatic movements, modernist secularism, and accelerating loss of parishioners, and externally by the impossibility of internationally condemning Buddhist techniques and beliefs.
I'm a fun of your essays in Christian stuff. Thanks for sharing. I am no scholar in the history of Christianity, so my comments are only the opinions of someone vaguely informed. I'm going to play devil's advocate for the Vatican (if you'll allow me the irony). The Vatican has played a role over the centuries, of containing centrifugal forces within Europe. This was done by being the bearer of the official religion and as administrator of the law, functioning as a court of appeals and arbitrator between the European kingdoms, although it was also an interested party in conflicts. I'm not saying if the Vatican's performance was good or bad, but simply saying what role it played. Its performance was not only at the palace level, but also at the popular level. From the ninth century onwards, popular religious manifestations began to emerge, pilgrimages to visit religious relics, etc., which exceeded the capacity of the Church to contain it. In a static society, religion was the safety valve. And the subsequent reinterpretations of the scriptures and searches for direct religious experiences, without intermediaries, were seen not only as a danger to the status quo but also as a genuine concern for popular spillovers. Perhaps the historical memory of the abrupt collapse of the Roman Empire was burning in the background. I think that with all this context, it is understandable (not justifiable) the intention of the Vatican to suppress any "populist" movement (excuse the anachrony) that expressed itself through religion. There are several historical examples of popular hysteria, which here we could perhaps qualify as massive A&P and their subsequent Dark Nights ... It is a fight that the Church fought since the 1st century, just remember the personal crusade of Saint Paul against the infiltration of the Gnostics in the Christianity, not only for doctrinal issues but also for the show of charismatic powers, prophecies, etc. He kindly asked them not to act like lunatics so as not to scare other parishioners. I believe that the compromise solution that the Vatican eventually found was to suppress at the popular level any development of a contemplative practice while internally calmed internal pressures by enabling the creation of contemplative monastic orders enclosed within walls, without connection with the common people. That is why now in the 21st century, the likely expansion of Buddhist techniques within the Catholic public poses a new and much greater challenge for the Vatican, internally pulled by conservative inertia, charismatic movements, modernist secularism, and accelerating loss of parishioners, and externally by the impossibility of internationally condemning Buddhist techniques and beliefs.
Pepe, Amen to all of this. It took me a long time to come to terms with the mixed wheat and tares legacy of Mother Church--- it can all seem like toxic weeds at times (cf, for instance, James Carroll's horrific and riveting study of 2000 years of Christian anti-semitism, "Constantine's Sword" https://www.amazon.com/Constantines-Sword-Church-Jews-History-ebook/dp/B004M5HKJI/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Constantine%27s+Sword&qid=1596959694&s=digital-text&sr=1-1 ). But in the end, what's burned into your nerves is what you have to work with, as I've come to see it. And i do understand the politics of mystical anomialism well--- the "Heresy of the Free Spirit" has been a particular fascination for me, and I've got this novel about Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart bubbling on the back burner of my mind (they were contemoraries, she was actually burned at the stake in downtown Paris while he was there early in his career). The Beguines, and all the popular non-official innovative groups and individuals through the centuries: the politics can be foreground or background, but they are always there. And the tension between them, so often tragic, seems built in, all the way. The stabilizing institutional function of the Chruch is without question, however often it serves oppressive regimes in that capacity. And remember Poland, and the Solidarity's Black Madonna and the Polish Pope, and the way the priests have factored in many liberation movements in Central and South American, as you know well. (Yes, our Argentine Pope is a mixed blessing--- he has EVERYONE mad at him, lol, which I take as a good sign, until someone poisons his soup or something). We have our human institutions, and they lean heavily toward inertial, and c'est la vie. God bless us all, lol. Thanks for your thoughts, it's such a joy.
love, tim
sorry, sam. It morphed into the death of consensus Christianity, lol. my bad.
I do think the broader dynamic of evolving faiths is relevant here. Chapman's critique of the contemporary Buddhism is very sharp and has so much to it, but in the end it is political, and adversarial: he is selling something here, his new synthesis of modernity (and even post-modernity), social analysis, and ancient ritual. But his costumed Tibetan tantra and his absolute submission to his master are as indigestible to the contemporary psyche as anything he has critiqued, in the end, if you follow him all the way. He thinks you can do the spiritual path with sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and a good strong sense of irony, and maybe he can. He seems to have his shit together, to produce such volumes of intricate intellectual output that is almost always interesting, is often true, and is always in the conversation. But he hasn't solved anything, and his new paradigm is a non-starter for anyone who knows their shit, to be honest. There was a reason for the horrifying Renunciation the old school religious and spiritual traditions insisted on, and it is that samsara dukha. Deep dukha. He wants to privilege parts of dukha somehow as indulgeable within reason, or whatever his criteria for the sex, drugs, and rock and roll are, but a whole generation of hippies failed with that, spectacularly, as every generation does. The eightfold path and John of the Cross's ascent of Mount Carmel are both sutrayana paths, in Chapman's scheme, dismissed up front as non-starters for the contemporary psyche. But they were non-starters for everyone when they were formulated too. You're either desperate for this wheel of shit to stop spinning by any fucking means, or you're not. The way you pretty up the doomed-to-fail compromise doesn't really mean shit. Chapman doesn't seem to be making a living off his pretty, false solution path, which is to his credit, and i am quite sure he is sincere. But the bottom line remains the First Noble Truth, this world sucks bad, and that desire to escape the suffering through means that are themselves dukha-generating is doomed to fail. The Buddha, and Jesus, and others, have said there is a way out of the bind of samsara, out of "the world," and their words have become scripture, and been used for liberation for thousands of years. I'll stick to that path, for lack of anything else that doesn't seem like smoke being blown up my ass: good old sutrayana, more orthodox in its way than the fucking Pope, or Analayo, for that matter; and more radical than a drunken lama partying in a goofy camp costume.
2 cents:
David Chapman doesn't like Joseph Goldstein, so he has created some concepts to justify blaming Goldstein
.Simple!
David Chapman doesn't like Joseph Goldstein, so he has created some concepts to justify blaming Goldstein
.Simple!
Siavash:
2 cents:
David Chapman doesn't like Joseph Goldstein, so he has created some concepts to justify blaming Goldstein .Simple!
David Chapman doesn't like Joseph Goldstein, so he has created some concepts to justify blaming Goldstein
.Simple!
Sam Gentile:
Siavash:
2 cents:
David Chapman doesn't like Joseph Goldstein, so he has created some concepts to justify blaming Goldstein .Simple!
David Chapman doesn't like Joseph Goldstein, so he has created some concepts to justify blaming Goldstein
.Simple!Sam, you called me back to the topic, with rigor, and then answer two cents worth only!? I put a nickel in, man! I want change back!
Tim Farrington:
Sam Gentile:
Siavash:
2 cents:
David Chapman doesn't like Joseph Goldstein, so he has created some concepts to justify blaming Goldstein .Simple!
David Chapman doesn't like Joseph Goldstein, so he has created some concepts to justify blaming Goldstein
.Simple!Sam, you called me back to the topic, with rigor, and then answer two cents worth only!? I put a nickel in, man! I want change back!
But I'll give you a nickel for coming back
Tim Farrington:
P S:
Hey Tim, thanks for your reply and warm welcome. I can see you already get the flavour of what I wanted to convey "being primed to find that the world sucks bad is often a self-fulfilling prophecy" and also that the ineffable nature of "the world" is beyond our limited and limiting appraisals. It's an interesting theme to me, and I hope we'll take it up elsewhere sometime, but won't hijack this thread. Thanks again, and best wishes.(I've enjoyed all your posts).
Hey P S, stop by and have a drink or ten sometime at the Bar of Last Resort, and we can discuss The Death of Consensus Everything!
love, tim
Stoop hijacking my topic
oops, my bad, sorry Sam!
How about this: In the notion of "Consensus Buddhism", David Chapman has cleverly set up a straw man, a myth, a big bright stupid nonexistent target to tear down, with broad unusable generalities, few of which hold up at almost any local level, and none of which hold up as a package. He does this because he is a very smart guy who likes social commentary with an eye toward in crowds and the Latest Thing, and also because he is selling his own, ostensibly hipper flavor of Buddhism. As Nietzsche declared the Christian God of his Lutheran youth dead, without any real grasp of the vast array of God practices beyond his asshole father and the local hypocrites, so Chapman declares "Consensus Buddhism" dead. Meanwhile, we all go on practicing, somehow surviving both Nietzsche's and David Chapman's declarations.
love, tim
