Would you invite me to present this paper if you were Harvard? (Looking for thoughtful critiques here; not just blanket affirmation or negation.) This paper will explore how the translation of Buddhist teachings into English and their presentation to American audiences has, purposefully or inadvertently, created a bias towards cognition (mind, thinking) over affect (emotions, feeling). When Buddhism came to “the West” and America, specifically, it began a process of translation and adaptation to a largely English-speaking audience that had already undergone their own “Enlightenment” with profound cultural effects. One effect was a focus on cognition and “academic” intelligence by human scientists of the twentieth century to the neglect of emotional intelligence, which may play a large role in the ability to be successful and happy in life. This appears to conform with the teachings of the Buddha. In Buddhist psychology, feeling (emotion) precedes cognition. “Thoughts” are merely the stories we make up about our emotions, using words and concepts to explain affective reactions to the world we perceive through our senses. Yet the words “mind” and “thought” are roughly ten times more common in Buddhist books than “feeling” and “emotion.” The Pali/Sanskrit term “citta,” which means both heart and mind, is now often only translated as “mind.” Buddhism is repacked to appeal to Americans (as it was with earlier colonial powers) as an empirical philosophy or “science of mind” in order to avoid the stigma of a “dogmatic heathen religion.” I will argue that the problem is part translation and part adaptation and begin to offer some solutions. Without reflection on the issue, the limitations of language and cultural preconceptions of American Buddhist teachers will pave the way for generations of American Buddhists to forget (or never learn) the wisdom of skillfully handling emotions as well as thoughts. Buddhism must remember the full range of its own teachings and of human experience in order to remain relevant in years to come.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Jun 2013 22:10:11 +0000
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