This is one of two blogs I have started. My other is more focused on career-related matters — software and web development, and the activities I am engaging in as I pursue employment. On this blog I thought I’d try my hand at writing on other matters of interest to me.
I became a Zen buddhist fairly recently, but I think my take on Zen may be a bit different from most others. For one thing, from a very young age I’ve always had a very secular outlook. For another, though I am no scholar, I have had an interest in philosophy and critical theory, and the lens through which I view the world is naturally colored by that. I became a Zen buddhist because of a rather radical shift in perspective I experienced while dealing with some difficulties in my life — an epiphany, perhaps. One might even call it a “spiritual awakening”, though I tend not to think of it in those terms. Sometime after that, I picked up an introductory book on buddhism — What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula — and it really resonated with me. It made intuitive sense to me, and the buddhist notions of shunyata and conditioned genesis (a.k.a dependent co-arising) seemed to line up perfectly with my new perspective. Buddhism offered more than a perspective on the world, though; the concepts were just a vehicle. It was at root about a discipline and path to follow in life, and I chose to embrace that discipline.
I was not shopping for a religion when I embraced Zen. I was not in search of an identity for myself. And I must confess, I don’t have much of an affinity for most of what passes for buddhism in our culture — especially the shallow, commoditized New Age drivel that is so very popular. In fact, after reading that introductory book, I naturally started searching on the web and quickly became dismayed at what I found. I wondered if I had misunderstood the crux of buddhism, for my own understanding did not match up with the irrationalism and obscurantism that I found characterized on the web as “Buddhism”. People are welcome to believe what they want to believe, of course; as John Lennon sang, “Whatever, gets you through the night ’salright, ’salright.” This certainly isn’t my cup of tea, though, and I think the prevalence of irrationalism in our society today is harmful. Fortunately, I stumbled across the web site of Brad Warner (who now has a blog called Hardcore Zen). He’s a punk rocker and ordained Soto Zen priest who hates that New Age bullshit even more than I do! So I felt reassured that buddhism wasn’t simply the same as that New Age obscurantism and embraced Zen buddhism (and I still enjoy reading Brad’s blog, though he’s perhaps a bit snarky for my tastes).
I think I’m more political than Brad is. I have a great deal of interest in exploring an understanding of a Social Dharma. Most of what I’ve seen on that topic strikes me as naive, though. I’m no scholar, but I have had some exposure to social science, critical theory, and post-structuralism, and it seems that there is much that could be brought to bear on articulating a more thoughtful and rational Social Dharma. That is a subject of interest to me, and in this blog I hope to try my hand at articulating such a Social Dharma — one grounded in human values and realism — though I will no doubt be out of my depth in doing so.
I am also quite interested in the schism in our culture between scientific rationalism and spirituality. Most of the debate in this area strikes me as rather puerile. The most prominent voices in this debate promote rather narrow-minded, caricatured views of both science and spirituality. I personally see no contradiction in being an unapologetic mystic and a scientific rationalist. I’m new to blogging — and new to writing on such subjects — but hopefully with some practice I’ll be able to offer a different perspective on this than what is promulgated by the culture industry.
