Removing The Sheen From Buddhism

[Guest]

Another episode of Western love towards Buddhism: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ethan-nich...71972.html

Critical theorist Slavoj Zizek has an interestingly harsh critique of Western Buddhism and the meditation tools it employs. Framing his critique in Marxist terms, he argues that Buddhism is the perfect spiritual tradition to be co-opted by our self-absorbed, destructive, and consumeristic society. For him, Buddhism represents the perfect ideology for passive acquiescence to the world as it is, a panacea of inner peace that fits neatly into an advertising culture where, by now, "be present" could just as well be the slogan of a credit card company as an instruction from a meditation teacher.

In other words, for Zizek, Buddhism, in the context of a Western consumer culture, allows the individual to believe he is transforming his mind without actually changing the conditions of suffering that shape the individual's society. This represents a dangerous type of inner peace - a peace not based on true insight into the interdependent nature of reality, but instead based on withdrawal into a mental cocoon, some personal oasis isolated from the turmoil of the world outside. In this cocoon, the whole world can go to hell, and the meditator can -- put simply -- be ok with that. In fact, the meditator can even be a willing actor in a system aiding great oppression, and still live at ease, because it's "all good" anyway. By practicing "acceptance," we simply become comfortable with the status quo. Of course, as is true of most things said by contemporary critical theorists, Zizek's best point is made more convincingly and artfully by someone else, in this case Stevie Wonder: "Make sure when you say you're in it but not of it, you're not helping turn this into the place sometimes called hell."