And I imagine in this Great Feast of Knowledge that the Buddha, and the bodhisattvas and the arhatsareall arrayed in their attire and their weapons, their conceptual weaponry. He emphasizes he is not trying to recapture some pristine, pre Western Buddhism, nor is he advocating a return to Buddhist orthodoxy. So Charles Hallisey is the Yehan Numata Senior Lecturer on Buddhist Literatures at Harvard Divinity School. These are powerful human concepts that, as Charlie mentioned, serve very much to allow us to stay in the condition of things but not when they're loaded with Buddhist postulates. Was there with them, and almost immediately, security forces show up. CHARLIE HALLISEY: It's a positive thing, non-Buddhist. GLENN WALLIS: That's a great question. But we might say that encounter had something to do with him starting to be challenged to think about the true and the real. He always used a capital W. A world is a kind of ideological overlayering of the earth. So to explain the purpose of the rest of the book, I emphasize some points that I made earlier. Let me just point out there's no commas between those words. And there was a similar experience I had read in this book. CHARLIE HALLISEY: McMaybe. It captures the human being's desire, brings the human being into an institutional system of subject formation. GLENN WALLIS: Decision is another major concept operating here. With the examples I gave of Western Buddhist treatment of no self, suffering, desire, and emptiness, of terms that I treat earlier in the book, I tried to show that there, too, the impossible happens. Western Buddhism is not what the Buddha was meant to be about. So in a certain sense, for me the great thing of reading Glenn's book, struggling with it-- it's not easy. [17], Sotaesan named his community Bulbeop Yeongu Hwe (Society for the Study of the Buddha-dharma) in 1924. The person who went the other way that we didn't hear about it, he got it right. So as Marjorie Gracieuse warned us, such an endeavor is not easy. One-- Western Buddhism thinks Western Buddhism represents a momentous effort sustained over centuries and in multiple cultural contexts to understand and improve our human condition. Let me just-- one of the things you say, oh, there's two things going on here. It may be said to have orig- inated in the year 1916 when, on 28 April, its founder Pak Chung-Bin (Park Chungbin) experienced an awakening to "the truth." Pak came to be known to his followers as the Venerable Sot'aesan, and the re- Of course, it also means collusion with the political and economic status quo that, like it, places the blame for success or failure, happiness or misery on the degree to which the individual is able to recognize his or her vulnerability, adapt to the circumstances, and master resilience through an internalized practice of mindful letting go. Randy Rosenthal is a alumnus of the Divinity School and is currently teaching writing here at the Harvard Extension School. Become skilled. It involves, rather, an attempt to answer the question posed at the very beginning of the book. Does a statement like this differ all that much from nonsense famous teaching to the wandering Joshu that while "not knowing its most intimate," ultimately the way is not a matter of knowing or not knowing. It has power. So the Great Feast of Knowledge is another way of talking about the stripping of sufficiency. They've been given by court order that they have-- they have a right to the water in this well. That's already plenty. The other parts were hard too. When I told him I have laryngitis by email, he said I remember you getting it. As Lloyd highlighted, the Western Buddhist result does indeed follow from a paravritti, from a reversion or turning around. You're not worth it. It is crucial to bear in mind, however, that this form of thought is not a new iteration of Buddhism. All right. Varvaloucas, E., "The Grace of This World: An Interview with Venerable Chwasan, Former Head Dharma Master of the Won Buddhist Order,". And they all discuss it from the different perspectives. And so looking at someone who's trying to take seriously and think through stuff and always assuming, oh, this stuff makes sense, even if I haven't made sense of it yet is a-- I would say it was an inspiration to us all. GLENN WALLIS: OK, x-Buddhism is a term I came up with to identify a plurality within a single set or a consistency, a singularity that takes on numerous plural forms-- that is, Buddhism, as many scholars have also often noted, it has certain-- all different forms of Buddhism have certain family resemblances, things that identified as Buddhist, as opposed to as something else. And then all sudden, Buddhism starts telling us the nature of the self. [37], The Won Buddhist order has formed schools and social welfare centers in Korea and medical missions to other parts of the world. This story comes from one of the primary books of a Buddhist canon you've probably never heard of: that of Won Buddhism, a 100-year-old Korean Buddhist order that sprang from the individual enlightenment of a modern-day Siddhartha. [13], He then attracted a small group of followers and selected nine disciples. Now, people like me, and I taught you, I make a living talking about the people who said, yes, sir. It's a neologism that means Buddhism that has gone through-- has been run through, minus the decision and sufficiency and so forth. The Fourfold Grace: Won Buddhists express gratitude to the Fourfold Grace, or Four Beneficences defining what one cannot live without. These are the ramifications of desire. And anyone who's taken Charles Hallisey's class knows what that means. It's how these systems of thought operate and hold together is they claim a kind of sufficiency that they are what you need to attain this mastery, this wisdom, this all-important knowledge about the consciousness, the self, the person, the cosmos, life and death. I mean, you won't know what the real is because-- I will say this last thing. 239th Conference of the Supreme Dharma Council, https://tricycle.org/magazine/the-grace-in-this-world/, "Won Buddhism: A synthesis of the moral systems of Confucianism and Buddhism", Basic points unifying Theravda and Mahyna, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Won_Buddhism&oldid=1160038602, Buddhist organizations based in South Korea, All Wikipedia articles written in American English, Articles needing examples from January 2023, Articles with Korean-language sources (ko), Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0, The original source of all beings in the universe, The original nature of all sentient beings, Practical Application of the Buddha-dharma, Developing Self Power for fulfilling personal duties and responsibilities, The Primacy of the Wise Seeking teachers whose moral conduct, governance of human affairs, knowledge and scholarship, and common sense are superior to one's own, Educating Others' Children, regardless of gender, class, or wealth, for the sake of advancing world civilization, Venerating the Public Spirited In keeping with the primary goal of serving others, actively engaging in public service, Everywhere a Buddha Image All things in the universe are considered a transformation of the spirit of the Dharmakaya Buddha, Every Act a Buddha Offering Therefore, every act is the dharma (truth, reality) of buddha offerings, Cultivating the Spirit Right mindfulness and right meditation, Inquiry into Human Affairs and Universal Principles Right views and right thoughts, including preparation for clarity and ready judgment in everyday life, Choice in Action Right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, The Threefold Study requires: Belief, Zeal, Questioning, Dedication; removal of Unbelief, Greed, Laziness, and Foolishness, Timeless Seon, Placeless Seon When the six sense organs are free from activity, distracted thoughts and nurture the one mind. OK, this is from the chapter called non buddhism. Presented as a rational, scientific, and practical religion, modern Buddhism appears to have all the answers. CHARLIE HALLISEY: I would say that's not going to happen, in part because I just have a tremendous amount of admiration for what Glenn is doing. The turning along with its result, however, is of the nature of a power praxis because it constitutes a recoiling that includes a reversal of judgment, such that the original state of affairs does not take effect. As he writes, the history of Western Buddhism is one of evading the consequences of its own thought. So in that, to say those two aspects, one is how do we prepare ourselves to set aside all that irritable reaching after fact and reason, to prepare ourselves to listen to the call of the real? GLENN WALLIS: I'm not-- you think I get any royalties with these things? But it makes sense. I mean, it's hard to say. And I just want to say that I use those tools for a kind of decimation or dismantling of Buddhism. Therefore, the name Won Buddhism means the path to the enlightenment to our true nature. Chung, Bongkil, "Sot'aesan's Creation of Won Buddhism through the Reformation of Korean Buddhism," in. Won Buddhism: Is it a New Religion? And I would say those two parts of the title are equally significant. Pye, Michael, "Won Buddhism as a Korean New Religion," 140141. You pause and say, ohwell, I need to say something. But another way to think about non-Buddhism is Buddhism, minus sufficiency. And all this stuff about capitalism and print capitalism, what? He's been thinking about that encounter, and he hasn't gone the way of all the other people that the Buddha went on to teach-- the gang of five, all the other disciples, the historical edifice of Buddhism. CHARLES STANG: My name is Charles Stang, and I am the Director here at the CSWR. 5 mo. But it's some moment that always is the initial one to extend to something further. And I just want to read the first paragraph of that book review, because when I went back to it I would say what he's saying about Keats and about Melville sounds like Glenn Wallis to me as well. Olson is pushing the English language. Early in the book, I made several points about this perversion or reversal, and I'll review those here. Where Buddhism flinches and shores up against the full implications of its thought, psychoanalysis follows the evidence farther into its murky circuit. I just want to emphasize the word with the encounter. So let me just begin with an observation that one of the most curious parts of those accounts of the life of the Buddha that I never get away from is that after the Buddha's enlightenment, the first person that he meets on the road, he goes up to the person and says I'm enlightened. He is the founder and director of Incite Seminars, in Philadelphia. | Photograph by Rob Deslongchamps At the Cincinnati Art Museum, a rare Buddhist "magic mirror" was found hiding in plain sight this past summer. For 40 plus years, Glenn Wallis has been actively surveying the Buddhist landscape. With Won Buddhism, as you wrote, they replaced the teachings of the Buddha with the teachings of this Sotesan; that right there means they're not Buddhist.
won buddhism controversy
