Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy with Bee Scherer: Buddhist Scholars, #1

By Wise Studies and Bee Scherer

This course introduces key concepts of Indian Buddhist thought. Over 5 lectures Bee explains the fundamental themes and problems of Buddhist Philosophy from the early Buddhist teachings on 'suffering', 'karma' and 'No-Self', to the later schools of thought around 'emptiness' and 'mind-only'.

Each chapter introduces another layer of Buddhist philosophical development and depth. The course forms a very clear and intriguing introduction to the wealth of Buddhist thought.

• Session One: Introduction – Buddhism as religion, philosophy or psychology? Modernism and Buddhist thought; the Buddha and the Four Noble Truths
• Session Two: Understanding the Four Noble Truths – unsatisfactoriness, afflicting emotions, nirvana and the eightfold Path
• Session Three: Buddhist psychology of no-self – heaps of grasping, dependent arising and cause & effect (karma)
• Session Four: Buddhist ontology. Scholasticism and reality (Abhidharma); perfection of wisdom and emptiness (Madhyamaka)
• Session Five: Buddhist metaphysics. Mind and Buddha-Nature.

Professor Bee Scherer, PhD is a long-time practitioner of Buddhism and has been globally teaching as a Buddhist lay teacher. Bee currently serves as the vice-chair of the International Lay Buddhist Forum.

After the study of classics, Indic (Sanskrit, Pāli, Prakrits) and Tibetan philology in Germany and the United States, completed by a PhD (Groningen, The Netherlands 2002), Bee published among others on karma; Nāgārjuna and early Mind-only; and, in recent years, on transnational Tibetan Buddhism; radical, reform and socially engaged Buddhism in Asia; and on Buddhist perspectives on gender and sexuality.

Currently, Bee is chair (full professor) in Religious Studies & Gender Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University and directs the INCISE research institute (http://incise.center).

As a trans/non-binary scholar-cum-activist Bee has established the interdisciplinary, transnational Queering Paradigms Social justice academic network and conference series.

Prof. Scherer has authored more than a dozen monographs and edited volumes in German, Dutch and English, among which features the substantial Introduction to Buddhism (2005, in German) with a foreword by HH. The Dalai Lama.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wise Studies
• Release date: Feb 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393418887

Book preview

Wise Studies presents The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy with Professor Bee Scherer. At Wise Studies we are committed to illuminating the sacred texts and teachings of the world's great contemplative traditions.

In this course, Professor Scherer introduces key concepts of Indian Buddhist thought. Over five lectures Bee explains fundamental themes of Buddhist philosophy, from the early Buddhist teachings on suffering, karma, and no-self to the later schools of thought around emptiness and Mind-Only. Each session introduces another layer of Buddhist philosophical development and depth. The course forms a clear and intriguing introduction to the wealth of Buddhist thinking.

In this first session, Bee looks at Buddhism through a religious, philosophical and psychological lens, as well as discussing the influence of modernity on Buddhist thought.

Newsletter

Tap here linktr.ee/wisestudies to subscribe to Wise Studies' newsletter to access exclusive updates, special offers, new releases and bonus content.

Session One

In this lesson, I want to ask the question what is Buddhism? Is it a religion, a philosophy, a psychology? And I want to talk a little bit about what is called Buddhist modernism and how this has influenced the way we think of Buddhism as a philosophy, and how we think of Buddhist philosophy. Finally, I want to introduce to you the Buddha, the awakened one.

Buddhism: Is it a religion a philosophy, a psychology? One of the highest Tibetan Buddhist masters, the 17th Karmapa, Thaye Dorje (one of the two current Karmapas), talked in a recent interview about Buddhism and defined it as a ‘way of life’; he said, 'it is more like a science, a helpful knowledge.' Earlier he has said, 'the dharma,' which is the Buddhist teaching, 'is simply a method to realise the nature of everything.'

So, Buddhism is not a religion then? Well, if we understand religion as that which links (Latin: re-ligare) the human sphere to the sphere of a God, then, no, Buddhism is not a religion. But there is a problem with the term ‘religion’. Since roughly two hundred years, people are querying about the question what is a religion, and in the nineteenth century, different definitions have been put forward; according to an assumed essence of a religion, such as a God, or a relationship between humans and God(s), or according to the function that religions might have in a community to offer cohesion and answers in times of pressure. In the twentieth century, approaches to religion became more complex, and religion has been seen more as a system of cultural science, beliefs and practices which engender a deep and lasting sense of meaning and belonging. So, in that sense, also Buddhism is a religion.

If we think about Buddhism as a philosophy, again we have a problem, since the idea of philosophy comes from our Greek understanding, of the love or the pursuit of wisdom; but it might appear easier to understand Buddhism as a philosophy as it exempts us from the need or the firm commitment to do any practice (such as rituals or meditation). On the other hand, many Buddhist schools are very practically orientated, so maybe Buddhism is a practical philosophy? Or maybe Buddhism is even a psychology, a method, as the 17th Karmapa, Thaye Dorje, said.

In academic departments around the world Buddhism is meaningfully observed and studied as a religion. And in particular, in traditional Asian Buddhist countries, we see Buddhism behaving sociologically exactly as a religion, engendering community cohesion and giving deep and lasting sense of meaning and belonging. So why is it that so many, and so many distinguished Buddhists and global Buddhist leaders preach that Buddhism is not a religion? In order to understand that, we need to study the recent development in the history of Buddhism, connected to globalisation and to what we call Buddhist modernism.

Until the eighteenth century, Buddhism was mostly disseminated in Asia. Buddhist modernism(s), we see as a response to the arrival of modernity in Asia. Western scholars and the first Western converts read Buddhism through the lens of their European and Anglo-American backgrounds and, in particular, they tried to understand Buddhism through the lens of what we call the foundations of the Western project of modernity, that is, the rejection of ritual and magic, the embracing of rationality, of individualism, universalism, and of empiricism.

As the scholar David McMahan shows, modernism in this context, bases itself on Western theism, and mainly on the Protestant Christian tradition. It also bases itself on scientific rationalism, and as the third pillar on romanticism, transcendentalism and its philosophical successors. Buddhism becomes, as the American scholar Donald Lopez says, 'a system of rational and ethical philosophy, divorced from the daily practices of the vast majority of Buddhists.'

For intellectuals from the nineteenth century onwards, Buddhism became the spiritual beacon of rationalism and science in an ocean of emotive religious irrationality, as especially espoused by powerful Christianity - Catholicism and Protestantism. Consequently, Buddhist teachings were selectively received in the West ignoring anything mythical and cultural, focusing only on that which was compatible with the modernity project. An example is Colonel Henry Steel Olcott the so called 'first white Buddhist,' in the terms of Stephen Prothero. Olcott is a great point in case. In the nineteenth century, he creolised his own version of Buddhism, combining as Prothero argues, 'a Buddhist lexicon with a Theosophical accent, and with a liberal Protestant grammar.' Olcott assimilated Buddhism to largely Protestant categories, assumptions and logic.

Asian Buddhist leaders swiftly appropriated or, you could say, ‘self-colonised’, the Western discourse of modernity aided by imperialism, and, thus, a specific form of Buddhism arises, also aided by further cultural flows, such as the Asian immigration into North America, where many Chinese came to work in the mines and on the railroads, and also aided by the need of the elite and of the middle class to exoticize, and to exert oriental romanticism and project this on to Buddhist teachings; Edward Said's term, 'Orientalism,' is particularly important here. What arises is ‘Protestant Buddhism’. This is a term that was coined by the Sri Lankan scholar Gananath Obeyesekere, and we use this term to describe how the cultural flow of modernism ebbs back and forth, between the colonisers and the colonial subjects.