From the @yalepress Fall 2019 catalogue -- a short interview about my forthcoming book, Why I Am Not a Buddhist. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/sites/default/files/fall_2019_catalogue_web_final.pdf …pic.twitter.com/NASJCU6P6e
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Writer, UBC Philosophy, Assoc Member Asian Studies & Psych Depts. Married to @beckettodd
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From the @yalepress Fall 2019 catalogue -- a short interview about my forthcoming book, Why I Am Not a Buddhist. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/sites/default/files/fall_2019_catalogue_web_final.pdf …pic.twitter.com/NASJCU6P6e
Dear Evan, I'm looking forward to reading your book. I'm fascinated by the position you describe as 'Buddhist modernism' and look forward to understanding it better. Does that include claims like 'Buddhism offers us a first-person 'science of consciousness'?
Yes, it does. That kind of claim is a typical Buddhist modernist one. I talk about it in the book.
There is one response to the claims of Buddhist modernism which I anticipate myself being sympathetic to: which is that these kinds of claims are a kind of concession to scientism, that Buddhism is made 'respectable' by 'acknowledging' some 'scientific aspects' of it.
Yes, but this move can and has been made with other religions, so there's nothing special about Buddhism here.
What are the other moves that are novel with respect to Buddhism? In the sense of which features of Buddhism provoke those claims? I'd imagine the supposed lack of a Supreme Being or its atheism are among them?
Buddhism doesn't lack a supreme being -- the Buddha, especially in Mahayana Buddhism, is a supreme being (though not a creator deity).
Indeed. But that's a common claim made about it, which I'd imagine underwrites some of these modernist claims.
Yes, that claim is an example of what I call "Buddhist exceptionalism" -- also that Buddhism relies on reason, not scripture; or that Buddhism emphasizes causality (in the scientific sense of the term)
I'd imagine that lurking over, above, and all around this is the supposed personality of the Buddha himself: calm, serene, non-dogmatic, above the fray, dispassionate, moderate etc (almost starts to sound like a scientist's imagined moral and intellectual qualities.)
Yes! From my book: "This Buddha - who manages to be the founder of a 'world religion,' while also being 'spiritual but not religious,' a heroic iconoclast, a mind scientist, a free thinker, and a rational empiricist philosopher--was forged 'in a European philological workshop'"
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