The following "Researcher Reflection" from Dr. Fabien Muller is part of an ongoing series where we spotlight CSWR scholars and their research.
In the twentieth century, certain Christian theologians argued that religion cannot be true, for that would imply that it is coherent with other forms of truth, such as scientific or historical truth. Ancient and medieval Christian thinkers believed that the truth of religion and the truth of science were not only compatible but ultimately identical. The God of the Bible was also the primordial cosmic cause, and nature confirmed the supernatural. One overarching Christian truth encompassed all singular truths.When Christian thinkers acknowledged the presence of other religions around the globe the paradigm shifted. If Christianity is but one among many religions, then its universal and objective validity is not tenable. Religious coexistence defies claims that any certain religion is ultimately true. The categories of religion are incommensurate with truth-claims—and in this sense, religion is not true but false.
Yet, contemporary Religious Studies seems to seek truth in religion once again, but this time Buddhism rather than Christianity is asserted to be true. A New York Times bestseller by Robert Wright bears the title: Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment (2017). Buddhism is true, Wright concludes, because it is coherent with cognitive science and psychology. Buddhism reconciles human perception with the reality of the material world described by science. Religious scholar Evan Thompson calls this “Buddhist exceptionalism,” in which Buddhists have newfound license to practice religious apologetics again. They assert that there is truth in Buddhism.
Why is it, asks Thompson, that we would be offended to see a book titled: “Why Christianity is True,” but we willingly accept a title claiming Buddhism to be true? Many religious scholars and academic institutions are not concerned about these truth-claims, some even feed off the trend.
Universities establish mindfulness and yoga centers, drawing upon popular literature on the health benefits and scientifically proven effects of these and other Buddhist meditation techniques. Everything happens so quickly that the very question whether these practices and their neo-apologetic advertising are compatible with the scholarly rigor of Religious Studies becomes a taboo.
As long as the spiritual quest of the younger generation of students-seekers—who are overenthusiastic that they can finally practice and preach what they study—economically supports the new way of approaching religion, there is no reason to call it into question.
A few adventurous scholars challenge universities’ economic interests and willingness to cater to the Buddhist trend. Buddhologist and philosopher Glenn Wallis sets out the most critical response. Wallis has long critiqued established normality. He was a founding guitar player in the band Ruin, pioneers in Philadelphia (Philly) Punk, one of the most trailblazing and radical musical movements in the history of US punk and hardcore music. In his Critique of Western Buddhism, Wallis dissects this neo-apologetic Buddhism and its claim to truth; and while dissecting this Buddhism, he uncovers dynamics of capitalist self-legitimation. The West has found in Buddhism a new way to justify its thirst for comfort, bodily wellbeing, and embrace of apparent reality. This Buddhism defends the West’s dread in the face of anything non-consumable and non-profitable. Rather than criticizing normality, it reestablishes normality.
I translate Wallis’s criticism into a Buddhist-Christian comparative study that does the opposite of these neo-apologists: returning the radical and critical to religions. What religions have in view is not wellbeing, personal growth, and forms of world-immanent truth, but opposition to the world. Buddhism is not the long-sought alternative to Christianity; it is a close correspondent to Christianity, that springs from the same intuitions and posits similar solutions about the world and human existence.
Monastics like the Christian Desert Father Evagrius Ponticus and the Buddhist teacher Vasubandhu do not seek to make us comfortable with the world or to embrace its immanent truth; they propose ways out of the established normality. In the words of an old Buddhist text, the Path of Discrimination (Paṭisambhidāmagga, II, 166-7): “They transcend (atikkamanti) the world; they cut away (samucchindanti) the world; they vomit forth (vamanti) the world;” or, in the harsh language of Anthony the Great: They “hate the world and all that is in it.” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Abba Antonios 33)
Such Buddhist and Christian proposals are irrelevant and even contrary to truth claims inside normality. Religion, I would argue, ought not to be a functional aspect of social norms, but a method to escape the ordinary world. Outside the ordinary is an eternally unadjusted transcendence. Aversion to such transcendence conceals a desire to convert religion to the logic of non-religion and to impose capitalist this-worldliness as the unique truth. But religion must resist this desire: otherwise, it would truly be false.
—by Fabien Muller, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy of Religion, Transcendence and Transformation Initiative, at the Center for the Study of World Religions.