What is the Future of Buddhism? (ex-Pali scholar)

Hey a minority of people watching this
channel will be aware that I have a background for more than 10 years as a scholar of Buddhism if you put my name into Google still many of the search results relate to that personal history I've had because people are still searching for that stuff people are still downloading links and articles that are on the internet from that time in my life and one of the questions I've been asked most broadly overall is what is the future of Buddhism normally people are asking it in a kind of broad hypothetical global sense and they're not asking in a hands-on human scale sense of what can you do what can I do what can we do for the future of Buddhism now I should add here the disclaimer I myself am NOT a Buddhist I openly identify as an ex bonused and as a nihilist I identify with the philosophy of historical nihilism for what that's worth and I could do a separate video talking about exactly what that's worth however I understand that a small number of people are still really interested in what I have to say under this heading because of the depth and the breadth of my experience I was asked in a conversation just today about what Judaism meant to me and what kind of participation in the Jewish community I had in my adult life and I had to say none at all I've been living in places like China and Cambodia Laos been living in Southeast Asia and even here in Canada my adult life is that almost nothing to do with Judaism and it's had a lot to do with with Buddhism in its institutional historical reality as well as on the side of scholarship research and what-have-you I've also had discussions lately with professors here sorry I am gonna answer this question about the future of Buddhism but this video is also partly about me it's not just about Buddhism it's about me and what I have to say of a Buddhism naturally or inevitably I guess while I am an ex Buddhist you know one of my professors here is a special in the South Pacific so small island societies like Tonga Fiji Samoa and in talking about both the indigenous religions there and in the total obliteration of the native culture by Christianity on those islands I'm reminded of the comparison to Buddhism and I can you know in a very real sense there's always a question of better and worse with these things although I do not believe in any of the supernatural elements of Buddhism and I never did I never believed in supernatural Buddhism nevertheless in looking at these islands that are in Asia these small almond societies but have really been cut off from Buddhism historically and now are you know captured by basically British Christianity of course you can't help but feel that they would be better off if they had been part of the Buddhist world rather than being isolated from it and then colonized by Europeans in this way and even within Southeast Asia you know we had in front of my eyes ongoing at that time the historical experience of indigenous animist peoples people who had never been Buddhists to practice traditional spirit worshipping religions converting to Buddhism for the first time and in other cases tribal peoples were converting to Christianity now of course many anthropologists would be upset to hear any discussion of these things at all and feel that you know the native culture is being destroyed or disappearing when people are making the choice as rational adults to convert to Buddhism however living there seeing the reality face to face and dealing with the extreme brutality just of animal sacrifice again one can't help feeling sympathetically that these people would indeed be better off involved with Buddhism even if you regard all this for naturalness is I remember learning in depth about one particular tribal group and their their chieftain their tribal leader decided he was fed up with their indigenous tradition that they should convert a terabyte of Buddhism partly because he said look you know this animal sacrifice it's madness and it's keeping us all locked in poverty his particular group their religious and social life centered around sacrificing water buffalo and cows so they were always bankrupting themselves these are poor people in a third world country buying and killing these animals for magical reasons and of course raising them and so on there are other groups they're indigenous to that same area whose whole religious life centers around sacrificing chickens ritual slaughter of chickens including torturing the chickens to death and some pretty gruesome ways cutting the heads off chickens and I don't want to get into the details in that religious context where on the one hand you have sort of the brutality of animism and on the other hand you have the encroachment from Christian missionaries all around it's very easy to be pro Buddhist not even the in the historical past in the historical present talking about a current ongoing process of cultural transformation even with the considerable caveat that I regard the supernatural claims of Buddhism as completely false so you can see why I've inserted this series of caveats as a introduction to this topic now in the 21st century looking ahead to the 22nd century what legitimate legitimacy can Buddhism have I'll repeat that what legitimacy can put ISM have now in the future I think there are two broad categories under which I'd speak positively with the future Buddhism and then some notes negatively positively speaking we have to be looking at on the one hand scholarship and in the other hand community service I don't know what I mean I've had so many experiences with these kind of very cynical Westerners who think they're idealistic but who really believe in a highly manipulated an insincere form of Buddhism criticizing me and these people white Western Buddhists tend to assume that my engagement with the religion was purely rational purely archaeological and in the contrary as a character I have always really appreciated that you know for example people need funeral rituals I think you know funeral rituals are quite meaningful again with no supernatural beliefs whatsoever I don't think anything magical happens at your funeral but as a social event to bring people together to mourn the dead and perform some kind of ritual for the dead I think that is meaningful this type of social function of Buddhism really is important and significant and it's worth looking at critically what is the status of it now in the 21st century problematic at best no matter where you are in the world now beyond that if you've watched this channel at all you'll know that I also have an engagement with charity work talking about social services are you talking about feeding the poor giving up sacks of rice to starving people are you talking about caring for orphans are you talking about interventions and disaster areas in these areas I mean Buddhism is the weakest religion in the world if you want a career in disaster relief services humane during work of any kind you're almost compelled to be Christian the whole field is completely dominated by Christianity and it's not a simple matter of economics anytime there's an earthquake or there's a disaster there are basically one or two very small very vocal Buddhist charities based in Taiwan that try to show up and symbolically represent Buddhism but it's drop in the bucket and within China China is a communist country and also within Thailand Thailand is a Buddhist majority country where Buddhism is the official state religion the official religion of the monarchy and so on but within both China and Thailand these types of humanitarian services a completely dominated by Christian missionaries it's not easy for Christian missionaries to operate in either of these countries there were you know restrictions on them and they've been tremendously successful exactly where Buddhism has been a failure so there's a question of can you build a constituency for Buddhism can Buddhism have a future rooted in on the one hand scholarly legitimacy in the other hand social services legitimacy and can you have a dynamic connection between the two of those now again in terms of scholarly legitimacy some people take a very unsure double set of assumptions that I'm interested in an incredibly obtuse and irrelevant details of textual scholarship that will never influence the lives of ordinary Buddhists and nothing could be further from the truth when I talk about how scholarship matters in terms of a religion as this today firstly you have to understand Buddhism today is so corrupt and has been led by people who are sincerely ignorant of the textual and philosophical basis what is enforced so long that actually I have a book here I'd like to grab it's just out of sight um I have an autobiography of a Buddhist monk on my desk here somewhere that I was gonna hold up as an example the Buddhist monk in that book his whole life was defined by being a refugee world war two in the Communist revolution in China completely shaped his life and he spent his life running away from that and you can really understand why he was basically in a struggle the cart try to sort of preserve the ignorance of his own grandparents in terms of traditional village Buddhism in China and he never developed the type of scholarly awareness of the history of Buddhism or Buddhist philosophy or Buddhist text that even I did let alone some greater expert so it is not without sympathy for people that I talk about ignorance but on the other hand a lot of what you're looking in Buddhism including that monk whose biography I have right here somewhere a lot of the ignorance is at the level of a Christian telling you that their faith is based on a dialogue between Santa Claus and Jesus or between Santa Claus and Moses and you have to say wait a minute I've read the Bible those two people never met like Santa Claus isn't in the Bible at all what are you talking about it's no joke I mean the blind leading the blind has gone a long long way in in Buddhism in the past 100 years but in the past thousand years also and the natural check on that tendency can only be legitimate scholarship now legitimate scholarship also turns up things of real philosophical interest and of real literary value the legitimacy of Buddhism cannot rest on false supernatural promises that are equivalent to prayer and other religions it can rest on people really seeing value in philosophical literature and cultural heritage that contains outlandish and mythological elements but also has elements that are at least rewarding to read and engage with in the same way that Shakespeare you know the value of Shakespeare's Hamlet does not rest on its historical accuracy if somebody discovers new evidence about what really happened to a certain prince in an obscure prince in the history of Europe nobody would say well Shakespeare's Hamlet is worthless because it's been proven to be historically false or inaccurate same is true even Shakespeare's plays about historical Kings within England or two gentlemen of verona or something none of this stuff is valuable culturally morally ethically even you know people feel they're being uplifted by edgy by educating themselves in shakespeare they want to educate their children in Shakespeare so that there'll be good people in some sense I mean there is an ethical component to why we study and teach literature especially with what's considered high or refined literature in this way there's nothing to really do with truth claims and definitely something to do with with supernatural claims of efficacy but again today the reality is Buddhism has really bottomed out in both of these things believe me very few people alive have visited as many Buddhist universities that I as I have and have spoken to as many experts to figure out if there was anywhere in any Buddhist monastery or any university anywhere in the world that you could legitimately make progress in the scholarship of Buddhist texts and the short answer is for me for my generation no there's really nowhere and if you're thinking about telling me about some exception let me tell you I've probably looked into it I've probably talked to some people off the record and found out that that exception to the rule is not accepted the rule it's a tremendously dark time right now on 21st century for but I think it'll never recover mmm being honest with you in that sense if you want to talk to me about the future of Buddhism I can give an answer that's not snarky at all and say there is no future because I neither believe that within my lifetime Buddhism will recover legitimacy in terms of social services nor in terms of scholarship those the positive side of this video the negative side is in terms of the core tenets of Buddhism many of the supernatural elements people can lose faith in without discarding the religion many Buddhists talk about the fact that you don't need to believe in reincarnation to be a Buddhist this is true however the truth claims surrounding meditation and surrounding nirvana strictly defined that is a challenge to most people's faith and to how they think about the future of the religion I think I mean I can remember reading and again I'm really a fan of you know authentic village Buddhism I'm not a fan of just hanging out in the library or the archives my approach to Buddhism was not strictly archaeological I remember reading about a traditional Buddhist preacher in the small villages of Myanmar aka Burma went from town to town and Myanmar preaching more or less the same thing for decades of his life and you know one of his great choruses one of the things he returned to the matically he would always emphasize to people they should not be trying to go to heaven after they die they should not be trying to just get a good reincarnation and they should not be worshipping gods they should instead be focused on achieving Nirvana and on doing good deeds and being good people in order to achieve Nirvana in this lifetime which is quite a rousing an uplifting approach to take actually if you know about Buddhism the vast majority of Buddhist monks do not have the nerve to suggest that you think especially not to sort of common peasants in a small village instead that indeed conservatives don't worry too much about nirvana let's not talk about Nirvana because it's pretty philosophically difficult this guy was saying no philosophy is for everybody Nirvana sir well both as a weakness as and a strength as a challenge to Buddhism now I think you have to look at a sort of progress that will come from acknowledging that Nirvana is just a philosophical concept and like many philosophical concepts in the Pali canon in the Tarot that uh written works that preserve the philosophy of Buddhism um it is interesting and it is even more interesting when you examine it in its real culture the cultural context it originated from in ancient India it's still interesting today unlike Christian philosophy if God who wants to read st. Augustine a vast majority of Christian philosophy it's very difficult to get men interested in the Buddhist philosophy is interesting so again that's a strength not a weakness but you have to really just admit that Nirvana is only a philosophical concept that both the modern assumptions about meditation and the ancient assumption of meditation are supernatural mythology and in a simple sense they are false I still do not see that as a reason for Buddhism to cease to exist as a religion though if you look at the founding of reformed Judaism reformed Judaism started off with a charter or Constitution it refers to the God idea and it's actually pretty obvious if you read that Charter the Constitution that the people founding this new new form of Judaism Reform Judaism they did not in a conventional sense believe in God or at any rate they wanted to create a version of Judaism that was open to an accepting of atheists to be frank I do not think that Judaism holds up as a religion if you switch from God to the God idea I think it falls apart if we're being honest you can read the whole Bible and you tell me if God doesn't exist how much real value is there in this religious tradition um but I actually do not think Buddhism is in a similar corner I think that you can replace Nirvana with the Nirvana idea you can look at that stuff as philosophy and like ancient Greek philosophy it's a philosophy that reflects the cultural context that originated in it reflects the other religions it was competing with at that time in India especially Hinduism and Jainism but other religions that have completely disappeared ancient religions of India that don't exist anymore and it can be meaningful in its own way but yes at some point the snake oil salesman side of Buddhism would have to stop for the religion to have a future of any kind you'd have to stop selling people the illusion that they can be happier healthier earn more money if they just close their eyes and perform a breathing exercise that is based on a horrendous mistranslation of a completely irrelevant ancient text and you have to stop pretending that a form of monastic discipline that was absolutely meant for people living in celibacy and living as beggars living with a literal begging bowl that that discipline can somehow be part of your sexy urban jet-setting 21st century life as a bourgeois executive or Buddhism was not designed to be among the accoutrement of a hedonistic indulgent lifestyle now the philosophy of Aristotle was I mean there are other ancient philosophies that actually fit him pretty well with a lifestyle of even aristocratic self-indulgence let alone bourgeois self-indulgence but again it's significant that Buddhism as a philosophy as a religion as a code in addition still has a lot to offer even with all these caveats even with all these aspects taken away and I can't say that about Aristotle I've read a ton of Aristotle in all honesty the potential is not there for Aristotle have a positive contribution in 21st century I don't feel that way about Judaism nor Christianity nor Islam I really do not think those religions have something positive to offer in the 21st century and they have a lot negative to offer and again if you have a friend someone you care about personally who was actually practicing animal sacrifice in a form of animism you would be so happy for them if they got interested in shall we say the civilizing effects of Buddhism as a religion and if I had a France and when I cared about personally who was practicing Islam practicing Protestant Christianity and they told me you know I'm gonna give it up because I'm really into this philosophy called Buddhism that teaches there is no soul to live is to suffer and everything is impermanent pretty strong pretty strong start to a popular philosophy in the 21st century if I had a friend who can't even told me that said Wow I'm so happy for you even though as I said I personally I don't believe in reincarnation and I don't believe in any of the promises that get made by meditation salesmen