Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

guernicamag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 423 posts

Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

#341

Post by throwawayacc2 »

Reading the comments, one argument I keep seeing in different form is essentially “corporations/the west are hollowing out/perverting/distorting/using only some parts of buddhist teachings, and this is bad”.

Why? Why is modifying an idea, even by twisting it to be the very opposite of it’s “original meaning” ( I don’t believe that exists, everything is a modified version of something else) an intrinsically bad thing?

If it’s not, what’s the problem with corporations twisting buddhism to suit their needs?

Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

#343

Post by lolinder »

standardUser wrote: post #303
thisiscorrect wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really vague answer. Can you elaborate? What happened 500 years ago that explains why the authors are right in their attempt to ban certain ethnic groups from certain ideas?

The West violently occupied most of the non-Western world and forced its culture on to those peoples.

This doesn't explain why I as an individual cannot adopt and adapt non-Western perspectives, values, and religious beliefs. Why should the actions of people long dead to whom I bear no relation other than shared skin color mean that I have to go to contortions to avoid adopting valuable ideas into my own life?

Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

#344

Post by throwawayacc2 »

rawgabbit wrote: post #180
gumby wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I stopped reading upon seeing at the very stop this “ Silicon Valley is the latest player in a history of Western appropriation of Buddhism” I think you jumped the gun. The extended interview with the book author showed that her position is aligned, or even the same as yours (your comment is naturally too brief to tell whether I should have used only “aligned” or “same”). And indeed it’s Buddhism we’re talking abou…

He did jumped the gun. The author Carolyn Chen made some very compelling arguments saying corporatized Buddhism is unrecognizable. Carolyn Chen is arguing corporatized Buddhism is a new religion that celebrates 70+hour work weeks and the celebrity CEO. "What we see in American religion, even if it is practiced in a corporate setting, is often the question, “How can the group help the individual realize themselves?” W…

> The author Carolyn Chen made some very compelling arguments saying corporatized Buddhism is unrecognizable.

I agree with that. I don’t see the problem though. Why is modifying an idea a bad thing?

> Carolyn Chen is arguing corporatized Buddhism is a new religion that celebrates 70+hour work weeks and the celebrity CEO.

I agree with this too. I am also left asking, why is this considered bad? To clarify, I don’t refer to the ethics of working 70 hours per week, I refer to the emergence of this new religion. Why is the emergence of a new religion bad?

Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

#345

Post by lurquer »

thisiscorrect wrote: post #293
pc2g4d wrote: post #281

"Chen: What we see is the erasure of Buddhism as a religion or tradition that Asians or Asian Americans can claim or identify with." She writes from a race-essentialist framing to a degree and that drives me crazy. "white Americans" "white Westerners" x6 There's a sort of cultural appropriation shame being layered here---as if it's bad to have light skin and be interested in Buddhism, or adapt Buddhism to your existi…

Somehow these arguments about cultural appropriation only ever go one way. I've never heard anyone claim that it's cultural appropriation when non-Westerners adopt -- and benefit from -- various Western schools of thought. I've never felt the urge to gate-keep, say, the germ theory of disease from non-Westerners. What right do I have to do that? What right does the author have to gate-keep Buddhism? Why do people do…

> I've never heard anyone claim that it's cultural appropriation when non-Westerners adopt -- and benefit from -- various Western schools of thought.

They call it colonization.

White liberals prefer nonwhites to be quaint, uneducated, and poor.

Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

#346

Post by selimthegrim »

riskneutral wrote: post #202
selimthegrim wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shahrastani, whose book Kitab al milal wan nihal is sitting in front of me right now, had a lot of things to report about Buddhists, and not only that verdict. Have you read him? Furthermore, Biruni on this subject alone is notoriously unreliable, relying on secondhand sources.

> had a lot of things to report about Buddhists Would love to know more ...

Best to find the Bruce Lawrence translation - in short Muslims had varying opinions of them based on different understandings

Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

#347

Post by rayiner »

standardUser wrote: post #325
rayiner wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re confusing the concept of “status quo” (the current state) with the direction of change. Roe took the US outside the mainstream among developed countries. Just a couple of years after Roe , the German constitutional court found that legalized abortion violated the Basic Law’s right to life. In the intervening decades, only a handful of other high courts recognized abortion as a right, rather than a legislative…

"So yes, undoing Roe returned us to the mainstream." Repeating that just makes you sound like a pedant more concerned with crafting an argument than grappling with the real world situation. In terms of abortion access , the thing actual humans care about, the US just joined the cultural hinterland in denying abortion access to a vast amount of its populace.

And prior to Dobbs the US was part of a small handful of countries that guaranteed the “right” to kill humans that had developed a face, feet, hands, and could suck their thumbs.

Abortion law requires balancing individual autonomy against a nascent human life. It’s not an issue where “progress” marches in a single direction. That’s why considering the actual legal effect of Dobbs is critical. We replaced a regime that imposes a nationwide viability standard that the majority of Americans oppose (see the second chart: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23167397/abortion-pu...) with the same regime that applies in Europe: voters decide.

Yes, the US has more parts that resemble Poland than the EU does. But, on the flip side, the Mississippi law upheld in Dobbs reflects the mainstream view in large European countries: elective abortion in the first trimester, with certain exceptions applying after that.

Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

#348

Post by NoraCodes »

throwawayacc2 wrote: post #331
NoraCodes wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To give you an example of this, a claim often made is “trans kids are being harmed due to lack of access to hormones/surgery”. I find this revolting. I would consider, for this example at least, the current system is doing good in protecting them, certainly it is not harming them. Then I probably don't care about your opinion on this - we are almost certainly speaking from completely different ontological perspecti…

Fair enough. But, something has cough my attention. > we are almost certainly speaking from completely different ontological perspectives Do you consider me ontologically evil? Am I, as some people on the internet often refer to those with my sense of mortality, “a demon wearing human flash”?

I'm not sure why you would think that, as it's not what I said at all. Rather, I suspect based on this opinion that I disagree with some things you take as axiomatic, and vice versa, and therefore we have little to learn from arguing with each other.

Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

#349

Post by throwawayacc2 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #174
throwawayacc2 wrote: post #93

I stopped reading upon seeing at the very stop this “ Silicon Valley is the latest player in a history of Western appropriation of Buddhism” I was very curious about the article. I am wondering if it treats ideas such as “hire fast fire fast” - In a way a concept related to the Buddhist ideas of detachment, or the opposite, “bing your whole self to work” which in a way seems contradictory - you have attachments, cont…

Cultural exchange of food and clothes and such is great. I’m a lot more sympathetic to the complaint here, though, which seems to be that people have taken the surface level of Buddhist religious practice while tossing out all the parts that make it meaningful to the interviewee. I’m imagining how I would feel if my company hosted prayer sessions where you speak to your unconscious mind rather than God and the sign o…

> which seems to be that people have taken the surface level of Buddhist religious practice while tossing out all the parts that make it meaningful to the interviewee

I agree this is happening. Why is this an intrinsically bad thing? It seems to me to be just how cultural exchanges work. An idea comes, parts of it are kept, others removed, and others modified. Why is stripping an idea of it’s “original meaning” ( I don’t think that exists) and changing it, even beyond recognition an intrinsically bad this?

> I’m imagining how I would feel if my company hosted prayer sessions where you speak to your unconscious mind rather than God and the sign of the cross represents the intersection of personal and professional responsibilities

I’m going to assume the comment means “I imagine how I would feel experiencing a twisted version of christianity”. Under that assumption, the answer would be the same way a conservative christian feels when seeing a church displaying the gay flag. Just like you in the hypothetical scenario, they feel weird.

Are you as sympathetic to the conservative christian as you are to the traditional buddhist? After all, in both cases, “surface level of religious practice while tossing out all the parts that make it meaningful to the person” seems to apply.

Re: Buddhism has found a new institutional home in the West: the corporation

#350

Post by rayiner »

markdown wrote: post #332
rayiner wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abortion legalization is an offshoot of the same early 20th century progressive anti-natalism as eugenics. Planned Parenthood was, of course, founded by a eugenicist. In most of the developing world, like my home country of Bangladesh, abortion is still justified primarily to avoid poor women having too many children. There’s other justifications for it now, of course, but I’m not drawing a novel comparison here. In…

LOL abortion has been done since before homo sapiens branched off into their own species. Christians believe that their god performs millions of abortions every day (they call them miscarriages). Abortions are in every culture on every continent. Claiming it stems from the 20th century is insane. You have it wrong, future humans will look back and wonder why we didn't abort more when we clearly couldn't even meet the…

> Christians believe that their god performs millions of abortions every day (they call them miscarriages).

I’m pretty sure it’s not just Christians that distinguish between a child dying of natural causes and a deliberate killing.

> Abortions are in every culture on every continent.

Abortion restrictions also exist in a vast variety of cultures in every continent: https://vividmaps-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/vividmaps.com/w.... It’s not something “Christians” came up with.

Post reply on HN