Response to Sulak Sivaraksa's Paper

Abstract

to Buddhism is not connected with my first major issue regarding the strong dualism of religion and culture. If the domains of religion and are thought of as sharply distinct from each other-religion being morally much stronger than culture-then it would be very difficult to see how the problems of the secular world can be directly addressed religiously at all. Here H. R. Niebuhr's analysis of the Christ against culture tendency in Christianity is very much to the point, I think. Niebuhr shows that there has been a tendency for Christian sectarian groups to retreat from large scale social and political responsibilities precisely because of their sense of a sharp dualism of the sort suggested in Sulak's paper. With these attitudes there appears to be neither a practical way for such a group to address social problems nor an adequate theoretical understanding of how religion and can be meaningfully connected with each other, with each fruitfully restricting, yet also learning from, the other. In contrast to dualistic approaches, however, as Niebuhr shows, some strands of Christianity (the Christ transforming culture groups) appear to have a more adequate theoretical understanding of the interdependency of the church and the secular order, and of the transformative effects each can have on the other, and thus they are able to work out more practical kinds of institutional interaction between religion and culture. There are obviously many problems with this stance also, but it leads to an understanding of the issues quite different from the Christ against culture stance. All of this, then, gives rise to my last set of questions. Is the dualism in Buddhism between religion and culture-between the Sahigha and the political order-such a sharp one that a significant connectedness and interconnectedness (both in theory and in practice) has never really been worked out? Is traditional Buddhism in this respect more like sectarian Christianity than church-type Christianity? And does this dualism thus make it difficult for contemporary Buddhism to find a way to connect Buddhist ideals directly to modern institutional problems? The sharp divisions in Sulak's paper seem to me to suggest that there is an overdrawn dualism between religion and here. But whether that is representative of Buddhism or not, I simply do not know. I will be very interested to listen to the discussion and to learn more about these matters.