What does it mean to be a Buddhist?
In “What Does it Mean to Be a Marxist?”, Norman Geras distinguishes “three meanings of ‘being a Marxist’”: personal, intellectual, and sociopolitical. He writes that “for someone to be a Marxist, in the first – personal – sense …, he or she must (a) subscribe to a significant selection of recognized Marxist beliefs and (b) describe him or herself as a Marxist”. About the intellectual meaning he writes that “a person can work – as writer, political publicist, academic, thinker, researcher – within the intellectual tradition begun by Marx and Engels and developed by later figures”, and about the sociopolitical...
“Protestant Buddhism”
The term “Protestant Buddhism” was introduced in 1970 by Gananath Obeyesekere to describe a development in Ceylonese Buddhism that started with Anagarika Dharmapāla almost a century earlier. The notion was further developed in a 1988 book he co-authered with Richard Gombrich, but variants of the term have also been used outside the Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) context – in reference to certain trends in Western Buddhism, for example, as well as to the switch from “self-power” 自力 jiriki to “other-power” 他力 tariki in Japanese Pure Land Buddhism. The term is also sometimes used in a more general sense in reference to...
Can an Anarchist Take Refuge?
The first of the Bodhisattva vows is to liberate all sentient beings (from suffering) and it isn’t a stretch to include sociopolitical liberation in that goal. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that Buddhist anarchism has been a small, but persistent undercurrent within Buddhism and anarchism throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. One may wonder, however, whether it is really possible to be both a Buddhist and an anarchist, although this very much depends on the definitions of “Buddhist” and “anarchist”. The term “anarchism” suggests that an anarchist opposes or rejects (ἀν-) (coercive/opaque) power/authority (ἀρχή) and the institutionalization thereof...