Abstract
Since Asian Buddhism first appeared on the horizon of Western intellectual culture during the European Enlightenment, it has frequently faced the charge of promoting passivity, if not outright nihilism. Nineteenth-century German thinker Arthur Schopenhauer’s attempt to employ Buddhistic concepts, while sympathetic, only exacerbated this common charge, since Schopenhauer’s own ideas of the extinction of the will faced similar criticism. And while Friedrich Nietzsche also had a soft spot for the teachings of the Buddha among the world’s religions, he too concluded that the Dharma was ultimately an enervating doctrine ill-suited to ‘overcoming’ men of the future. Even while accepting the beauty of Buddhism’s ethical ideal, prominent Scottish theologian A. B. Bruce, Nietzsche’s exact contemporary but ideological opposite, picks up on the same quasi-Marxist charge against the Dharma as an anodyne, one that has ‘produced the effect of a mild dose of opium’ on the people of ‘weary-hearted Asia.’1
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Notes
Bruce, A. B. (1899) The Moral Order of the World in Ancient and Modern Thought (London: Hodder and Stoughton).
Weber, M. (1958) The Religion of India (New York: The Free Press), p. 206.
Stone, J. I. (1999) ‘Placing Nichiren in the “Big Picture”,’ Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 26, 385.
See MacIntyre, A. (1966) ‘Aristotle’s Ethics,’ in MacIntyre (ed.) A Short History of Ethics (New York: Collier), p. 57:
Critchley, P. (1995) Aristotle and the Public Good, p. 1.
Cited in Kolakowski, L. (2008) Main Currents of Marxism (London: Norton), pp. 103–4.
See Birnbaum, M. (1973) ‘Beyond Marx in the Sociology of Religion,’ in C. Clock and P. Hammond (eds.) Beyond the Classics? (New York: Harper & Row), p. 9.
see Hershock, P. (2012) Valuing Diversity (Albany: SUNY), p. 41.
from Shields, J. M. (2013) ‘Political Interpretations of the Lotus Sutra,’ in S. Emmanuel (ed.) A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy (London: John Wiley & Sons), pp. 516–17.
Machacek, D. and B. Wilson, eds. (2000) Global Citizens (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 103;
see also Habito, R. (2002) ‘Buddha-body Theory and the Lotus Sutra,’ in G. Reeves (ed.) A Buddhist Kaleidscope (Tokyo: Kōsei), p. 315;
and Stone, J. (2009) ‘Realizing This World as the Buddha Land,’ in S. Teiser and J. Stone (eds.) Readings of the Lotus Sutra (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 221.
Stone, J. (2002) ‘When Disobedience Is Filial and Resistance Is Loyal,’ in G. Reeves (ed.) A Buddhist Kaleidscope, pp. 262–63.
See, for example, Keown, D. (1992) The Nature of Buddhist Ethics (London: Macmillan), p. 151;
Morgan, P. (2002) ‘Ethics and the Lotus Sutra,’ in A Buddhist Kaleidscope, p. 358;
Keown, (2002) ‘Paternalism in the Lotus Sutra,’ in A Buddhist Kaleidscope, p. 377.
from Shields, J. M. (2012) ‘A Blueprint for Buddhist Revolution,’ Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 39, 333–51.
Seno’o, G. (1975), Seno’o Girō Shūkyō Ronshū (Tokyo: Daizō Shuppan), p. 325.
Rathmore, A. S. and Verma, A. (2011) ‘Editor’s Introduction,’ in Rathmore and Verma (eds.) The Buddhism and His Dhamma (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), p. xi.
Ambedkar, B. R. (2011) The Buddha and His Dhamma, p. xxxi.
See Mungekar, B. (2007), ‘Dr. Ambedkar’s Interpretation of Buddhism and Its Contemporary Relevance,’ in B. Mungekar and A. S. Rathmore (eds.) Buddhism and the Contemporary World (New Delhi: Bookwell), p. 50.
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Shields, J.M. (2016). Opium Eaters: Buddhism as Revolutionary Politics. In: Kawanami, H. (eds) Buddhism and the Political Process. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-57400-8_11
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