Pragmatic Buddhism

In the spirit of still trying to come up with a valid recontextualization of an existing tradition I offer Pragmatic Buddhism, first mentioned in the “spirituality without belief” thread. (I cannot post a link because there's an embedded video in the thread and I'm at work and blocked from opening it.) It seems to be a good compromise between the pick-as-you choose smorgasboard and the strict follow-the-leader types of meditative practice/path/view. I will kick of this thread by posting a few excerpts from their site. 
 
The Center for Pragmatic Buddhism (CPB) is located in St. Louis, MO. Our work is the synthesis of Nikayan (early Indian), traditional Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen Buddhism, and the American Pragmatist tradition, in what we call Pragmatic Buddhism. 

Today at the Center for Pragmatic Buddhism, we utilize the methods of Chan and Zen, along with American Pragmatism in a manner that takes the needs of the Western mind into consideration, one that appreciates personal and cultural background. As Westerners, Americans have specific needs in developing a meaningful Buddhist practice. Just like every phase of Buddhism's evolution, a new form arises to meet the needs of its new sociocultural environment. 

One of the primary goals of CPB is to present an historically perceptive Buddhism to Americans in a Western vocabulary. While particular language is often used in the Buddhist community, it can often hinder a practitioner's ability to make Buddhism meaningful. The Buddhist jargon is often confusing, and may require years of study in itself. The Center for Pragmatic Buddhism has created a vocabulary to achieve the practical purpose of conveying Buddhism in a way that makes sense today.
 
A feature of our Pragmatic Buddhist practice is our approach to Dharma (the “teachings and methods”) discussion. In addition to traditional Dharma talks given by OPB monks, our group discussions that follow are facilitated by the Socratic Method, encompassing an engaged “open-forum” atmosphere for its participants. Though directed by OPB teachers, these discussions are intended to cultivate intersubjective agreement (social consensus and understanding) among the group members in addition to deeper personal awareness, while allowing students to synthesize creative solutions to today's problems. Participants are shown that they must play an integral, proactive (rather than passive) role in their training to arrive at new understanding, perspective and the ability to engage harmonious action. In Pragmatic Buddhism, personal development is an active process that must be continuously applied, while remaining open enough to be revised when necessary.
 
Pragmatism as embraced by Pragmatic Buddhism includes classical American pragmatism and neopragmatism. These two branches of the pragmatic perspective share an equal emphasis with our embracement of traditional Buddhism in the thought and practice at CPB. American pragmatism is a system of philosophy that values practical application and function over theory as a way to solve human problems. It stems directly from great thinkers such as William James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, Charles Horton Cooley, A. N. Whitehead and George Herbert Mead.
 
Neopragmatism is most commonly associated with the late Richard Rorty, an internationally recognized philosopher, whose work emphasized the social and creative aspects of language. Neopragmatism rest on the idea of antifoundationalism, the idea that there is no privileged vocabulary or way of speaking or believing. Language is purely relational and does not “mirror” nature, or escape its own unique historical and cultural situation. Through the neopragmatism of the late Richard Rorty, the Center for Pragmatic Buddhism is developing an “American” approach to Buddhism, having revised the language employed to describe Pragmatic Buddhism and having embraced an indigenous system of thought alongside traditional Buddhism. This position is liberating, as it allows us the ability to redescribe our selves and our society through the playful and creative use of an ever-shifting language. Impermanence must indeed be applied to all things, including our forms of Buddhism.
 
The CPB’s Board of Advisors includes Stephen Batchelor, Tom Clark, Steve Odin and Owen Flanagan.
 

Re: Pragmatic Buddhism

“… antifoundationalism, the idea that there is no privileged vocabulary or way of speaking or believing …”


Except for antifoundationalism, no?

Re: Pragmatic Buddhism

We should strive to use vocabulary as precise as possible. For example, Edward requested me to remove my embedded video in the “spirituality without belief” topic instead of the correct title, “spirituality without faith”.

Re: Pragmatic Buddhism

Except for antifoundationalism, no?

No, because there is no privileged vocabulary within it, no one right or ultimate way to express or practice it. It's open to “creative solutions.” In Buddhistic terms must not reify emptiness itself (make it an ultimate foundation), for it too is empty, i.e., dependently arisen.

Re: Pragmatic Buddhism

Tom,

Except for antifoundationalism, no?

No.
Foundationalism is a belief.
Antifoundationalism is a behavior.

Re: Pragmatic Buddhism

Recall I quoted Odin in the “Mead thread”:
 
The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism by Steve Odin. SUNY Press,1996:

Now I would like to briefly consider how the psychosomatic theory of selfhood as a bodymind unity developed in…traditional Japanese Buddhism…can be elucidated in terms of Mead’s nondualistic theory of the embodied social self as a dialectic of I and Me. It has been seen that for Mead the human self is not merely an I or disembodied Cartesian subject but a conversation of I and Me, thereby expressing the dialectical unity of subject and object, mind and body…. Similar to Japanese Buddhism the Chicago school pragmatism of Mead holds that the self is always connected to a body and the body is a part of the environment so that only through the body is the self related to its surrounding physical environment of society and nature…. Also Mead’s communicative interaction model of the social self expressed in behavioristic terms as a conversation of significant gestures, provides a framework by means of which to elucidate the Japanese Mikkyo (Tantric) Buddhist concept of realizing the true self as a bodymind unity by means of the “three secrets” (sanmitsu) practice of transforming body, speech, and mind through mudra (bodily gestures), mantra (vocal incantations), and mandala (mental images) (372).

Re: Pragmatic Buddhism

Ed: no one right or ultimate way to express or practice it


Round we go.


What is “it”?  The privileged way of talking, meinfers.

Re: Pragmatic Buddhism

Yes, privileged in that it is considered a better, more contexually relevent view. But not foundational in the sense of an absolutely better view in all contexts forever. There is an acceptance of its relative status, that it is dependtly originated and that it will change yet again.

Re: Pragmatic Buddhism

The following is from a review by the Journal of Buddhist Ethics (Volume 4, 1997) of Odin’s The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism: 

Odin has chosen the final picture in the sequence [of the Ten Oxherding Pictures], which shows the boy who, having tamed the ox and returned from a realm of primordial nothingness, is now entering into the marketplace, thereby unifying ultimate and mundane reality, or nirvana and samsara. This entrance, or re-entrance, into concrete experience after having apparently fully transcended it exemplifies Odin's focus on the social side of Japanese Buddhism. For Odin, the key to Zen is not meditation in a manner that remains detached and isolated from society but a realization articulated by modern philosophers that is firmly rooted in a sense of “betweenness” (aidagara or ma, in Watsuji Tetsurô) or the “place” or topos (basho, in Nishida Kitarô) of intersubjectivity. According to Odin, the Ten Oxherding Pictures “illustrating the Zen process of becoming a person culminates with the realization of the true self as a compassionate Bodhisattva located in the between of I and Thou as the standpoint of Nothingness… . [this] thereby makes fully explicit that the goal of Zen is not simply an inner state of tranquillity but the social reconstruction of the self” (453). Therefore, Odin's choice of the last picture implies not a sense of completeness or finality but of an ever continuing process of becoming within the social realm. Yet Odin is wary of the facile or biased nature of some of the arguments for social selfhood in Japanese philosophy, which tend to lead to an overemphasis on the value of loyalty to the group as an end in itself or to a communitarianism such that the “odd nail gets hammered into place” (deru kugi wa utareru). Odin consistently cites criticisms of the Kyoto school from non-Buddhists in the postwar period such as Maruyama Masao as well as Western skeptics such as Peter Dale who has sought to expose The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (New York: St. Martins, 1986). 

Odin's book is structured in three parts: the first deals with Japanese philosophy, especially Watsuji, Nishida, and psychologist Doi Takeo; the second part deals with American pragmatism and demonstrates how Mead, often an overlooked figure, is the culmination of a movement including Peirce, James, Royce, Cooley, Dewey, and Whitehead (and more recently Buchler and Hartshorne); and the third part focuses on the relative strengths and weakness of each camp. The sequence of the volume moves smoothly from interpreting Watsuji's critique of Heidegger's notion of temporality from the perspective of a new emphasis on spatiality to the argument that Mead surpasses the Kyoto school because he has stripped away the kind of the thinking that is vulnerable to charges of nefarious political associations. Odin's main thesis is beautifully summed up in the following passage:

Like Mead in American pragmatism, Nishida Kitarô develops an explicit theory of the social self based on an I-Other dialectic which overcomes Cartesian subjectivism while preserving the “I” of creative human agency and the acting self. Similar to the I-Me dialectic of Mead, the I-Thou dialectic of Nishida underscores the irreducible self-creativity and radical discontinuity of the individual I as over against the social determinism of the “Thou.” However, at the political levels of analysis, it has been seen that whereas the social self and I-Thou dialectic of Nishida is used to support the emperor system, the social self and I-Me dialectic of Mead instead functions as the basis for a liberal democratic society (39).

Re: Pragmatic Buddhism

One point in the above review is that despite the progress made in some eastern philosphies they still tend to be stuck in pre-democratic societal forms. The same can be said of the Buddhist tradition more generally, not just Zen and Japan. The whole guru structure is obviously not democratic and leads to exactly the kinds of abuse we've seen. And why the Wilberoidegral model still promotes the guru model, given the status of the One Right View of Oz Almighty.

Now I can agree that we must give up our egos to learn something from an expert. This is obviously so with learning the piano or dance or anything, including meditation. However, the eastern traditions, still embedded in pre-democratic social structures, combined with still thinking of meditative experience as an “absolute reality,” give license to the guru over every aspect of the student's life, not just his meditative training. In fact, the meditative training itself is fused with all other apects like Right View so that it is not a separate skill in itself, hence one cannot be taught it without the necessary accoutrements of the entire system. In AQAL-speak, it's not just a line but the whole shebang.

Hence to me it's an advance to bring in democracy to the meditative tradition. Yes, we still need to receive training from experts in particular skills, but not bow down to them for everything in our lives. Meditation skills need to be contextualized for what they are and such a new tradition must allow for individuals to teach the teachers in areas-lines in which they are far stronger. And even within meditation training the individual must be allowed to eventually, after a certain level of advancement, create his own path-artwork, as we do with all such skill acquisition.

Re: Pragmatic Buddhism

I also posted this in the “spirituality without faith” thread but it bears repeating here.

From “No hindrance: emulating nature in service to the self” by Tom Clark, The Pragmatic Buddhist, 1:3, Winter 2007

“The naturalist’s commitment to the intersubjective empiricism exemplified by science means that one’s personal experience, in particular experience arising during meditative practice, does not count as a direct, accurate perception of reality. Conscious experience is a brain-based phenomenon that helps organisms like us negotiate the world, so it is a highly selective representation of things, not an unbiased reflection of what is outside the head. Should the meditator experience, for instance, the dissolution of the sense of a separate, observing ego, this is not direct perception of a fundamental feature of reality (i.e. its emptiness or suchness) rather it is an experience with the content, among other things, that no fundamentally separate being is having this experience. 

“The feeling of unity and connection the experience of egolessness might bring mirrors what science shows to be the case about the human person: that we are in all respects causally enmeshed in the world, historically and in the present moment. But the subjective feeling of unity is not direct confirmation of the objective scientific proposition about human embeddedness in nature. To suppose that meditation is an unmediated window on reality is, from a naturalistic perspective, a delusion, since reliable knowledge is always gained using intersubjective evidence and observation. One’s personal psychological states, in and of themselves, do not necessarily count as evidence of things beyond themselves, even if they convey intense conviction and certainty, as is sometimes the case in meditation. We should therefore be skeptical about the veridicality of experience uncorroborated by evidence assessed within a community of inquiry.”

I'd also like to qualify the intersubjective, communal validation aspect of meditative experience. If the community's “right view” on the meaning of meditative experience is one of “a direct, accurate perception of reality,” then it's obviously not a naturalistic view according to Clark. Hence communal validation of this kind is not a pragmatic persepctive of Buddhism.