DHUM 25A22 - Critical Approaches to Buddhism: Politics, Ethics, Psychology

This course functions as a critical introduction to Buddhism and seeks to interrogate the origins and trans-historical resonances of Buddhist thought, practice, and praxis. Yet, albeit an introductory course, it also has a more ambitious (and decidedly interdisciplinary) orientation: on the one hand, we examine the possibility of “the Buddhist turn in critical theory,” one which must be irreverent and far reaching in its approach, and engage with a polyphony of voices ranging from lamas and practitioners to psychoanalysts and philosophers. Buddhism must be historicized, but a post-modern Buddhism will not hesitate to radically reconstruct Buddhism through evoking the “Buddhist theoretical spirit” across a vast array of traditions, epochs, and entanglements. On the other hand, we ask whether Buddhism can function as a comprehensive framework for rethinking philosophy, politics, psychology, and the aesthetic in our current moment. And should such a framework exist, can it bring us to imagine new forms of subjective and social transformation that may provide alternatives to the crises that typify our times? This also entails rethinking debates concerning “what it really is” – religion, psychology, empiricism, spirituality, tools for living etc.? Moreover, any critical approach to Buddhism will destabilize the efficacy of those antinomies that we take for granted as given: we thus explore how Buddhism problematizes commonplace understandings of belief and reason, mind and body, idealism and materialism, immanence and transcendence, ontology and anti-foundationalism, dream and reality, desire and gratification, and pain and pleasure. Following from this, we seek to rediscover the “radical Buddha,” both a person and allegorical nexus for rethinking the condition of the world and the condition of being in the world.

General Background in the Humanities and/or Social Sciences

Participation 15 percent

Midterm Paper 42.5 percent

Final Paper 42.5 percent.