For The Turnstiles

Reflecting on Wilber's comment that the Buddha would be a Republican today (which still has me chuckling this morning), it occurs to me that this claim has some significant points of contact with Zizek's treatment of critical and therapeutic religious practices in The Puppet and the Dwarf.

I should qualify the following by stating up front that Zizek is not particularly well informed about Buddhist doctrine or history, and is mostly working at the level of polemic and provocation rather than reason here. That said, some of what he is saying may be of present use.

Zizek posits a Leninist Christ: one who makes a violent intervention into reality and the social order, producing the "miracle" of revolution. This is an active, critical mode. To flesh this out, he then produces (along lines established since Schopenhauer) a soft, effeminate, passive, nihilistic, and uncritical Buddhism that "goes with the flow." This is a Buddhism that renounces the critical practice of Nagarjuna and the Prajnaparamita literature: in fact, Zizek's critique of "western Buddhism" is mostly argued from a reading of Brian Victoria's analysis of Fascist Zen, called Zen at War.

This means Zizek implies a kind of continuity between the "Western Buddhism" of Kornfield, Kabat-Zinn, and Brach (think Radical Acceptance) and the enforced no-thinking meditative stance of the kamikaze pilot. If this is your understanding of Buddhism (no thought, only sitting) then it is not difficult to establish the Buddha however far to the political right you might wish.

There are good reasons to be skeptical of Zizek's claims on Christ and Buddha. The more germane question for the purposes of this blog: to what extent might Zizek's critique of "western Buddhism," as distinct from the Leninist intervention he attributes to Christ, apply to the project of Ken Wilber and his followers?

For myself, as a "westerner" who practices a traditional form of Buddhism (as distinct from "Western Buddhism"), I think my own interests align more closely to the Leninized Christ than to the psychologized passive-acceptance-of-everything Buddha Zizek describes.