In the West, a new generation of Buddhists claims secularity without losing the spiritual essence
DÍDAC P. LAGARRIGA
Barcelona 21/03/2018
Immersed as we are in the paradigm of updates, it should be hard for us to accept that every update respects the essence. It is not one replacement after another, runaway, but of a constant doing that always has the place in mind, the time, the circumstances. In the religious field, often seen as a threat, but updating does not have to be scary when it is done from this perspective of contextualization, keeping the essence.
The field of Buddhism is perhaps the one that has experienced the most transformations over the last few decades, when it became a global fact, also in the very heart of the West. More and more voices of this modern Buddhism advocate an update, understood, as we said, like the action of col·place the teachings in a context, l’actual, which requires different challenges and responses than those of other eras and societies.
One of these voices, respected and erudite, it is that of the British Stephen Batchelor, author of numerous books and who now publishes a synthesis of his thinking in Después del buddhismo (Cairo). for him, many of the traditional forms of Buddhism inherited from Asia seem to have stagnated: “Their initial creativity and imagination have dissipated long ago, while the main intention of its practitioners seems to be to preserve traditional doctrines and practices, tirelessly repeating the teachings and instructions of the past”. The update it promulgates happens to claim a notion, the secular, which sometimes wants to be confronted with religiosity, when for him they are not opposing options, but complementary. "I do not see why people who declare themselves secular cannot be deeply religious from the point of view of their ultimate concern to accept, here and now, his short and poignant life", Explain. Batchelor fa serves the secular term conscious of seva etymology, a century, "of this century and world": "When we are secular our primary concerns are those we have about this world, about everything related to the quality of our personal experience, social and environmental derived from living on this planet".
This worldly concern, vital, it is not detached, but, of religious longing. When the spiritual goal is left aside, the practice loses strength or is put at the service of a harmful purpose: "I do not conceive of a Buddhism that aspires to banish all vestiges of religiosity, which is little more than a set of self-help techniques that allow us to function more calmly and effectively as agents or clients, or both at the same time, of capitalist consumerism. we could say, For example, that the practice of mindfulness divorced from its original context reinforces the solipsistic isolation of the self by immunizing its practitioners against disturbing emotions, the impulses, the anxieties and doubts that overwhelm our fragile ego".
The United States is one of the western countries where Buddhism entered most strongly, especially from the sixties onwards. The proliferation of people who in one way or another have been attracted to these teachings has been very great. Today there is a new generation of Buddhists who claim this update to be able to serve in the specific context. at the same time, they denounce the loss of the liberating essence and the commercialization of practices that often serve to accept and allow inequalities and injustices and not to deal with them. One of these inequalities that deteriorates American society is racial, and many Buddhist voices are beginning to denounce it because they do not want their practice to promote the acceptance of a model as cancerous as this. It is the case, For example, by three authors, Angel Kyodo Williams, Jasmine Syedullah i el lama Rod Owens, who a year and a half ago came together to write the book graphically titled Radical dharma. Talking race, love, and liberation (North Atlantic Books). The text is a critique of white privilege that also affects the American Buddhist community, and that these authors understand as one of the main problems for the awakening of collective consciousness·teaching, added to other equally worrying factors, such as gender inequality or homophobia. These three authors do not only speak from a theoretical and academic perspective. Their lives bear witness to this. Angel Kyodo Williams, For example, is a combative and lucid African-American Zen master who became known in 2000 with the autobiographical work Being black: Zen and the art of living with fearlessness and grace (Viking Press).
On the other hand, lama Rod Owens brings his experience as a gay African-American, became a Buddhist lama after years of training with Tibetan masters. Owens, who is considered one of the most original and profound voices of this new generation of Buddhist teachers, és docent a la Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, a recess center for young people and teenagers, and also offers workshops and conferences around the world in which he combines Buddhist teaching with the denunciation of patriarchy and racism. Precisely these days it is at the Casa del Tibet in Barcelona, where today Thursday evening he gives a conference and this weekend he teaches the workshop "Radical Dharma in times of change".
Enchant us again
“¿It is possible to recover the dharma that existed before the appearance of Buddhist orthodoxies and then to erect an ethical practice on this foundation, contemplative and philosophical suitable to optimize human flourishing in the era of post-belief?”, asks Stephen Batchelor. Ell, like all these voices of the new Buddhism, he is convinced that it is. A new Buddhism that is both timeless, updated without losing the essence. Because, com conclou Batchelor, rather than imagining a Buddhism that erects ever-firmer barriers around our alienated self, we can conceive it to work "in favor of a re-enchantment with the world", being able to cultivate a sensitivity towards what he calls the "everyday sublime".
