A Critique of Don Cupitt’s Christian Buddhism

Abstract

Numerous references in his recent writings indicate the sense of kinship which Theravada Buddhism has for Don Cupitt. It is not only in the Buddha’s hostility to metaphysics that Cupitt finds a kindred anti-realism. In Life Lines Cupitt remarks that realism has ‘an itch of egoism about it whereas the non-realist easily learns a Buddhist lightness and good-humour’.¹ This alleged link between realism and egoism is to be contrasted with the Buddhist ‘no-self doctrine, compared by Cupitt to the deconstructed, decentred, hyper-relativism of those forms of ‘post-modern’ philosophy which he embraces as cognate with his own view of religion. Moreover, the sequence of images, myths, constructed ‘life-worlds’, between which we have to choose, is like an album of photographs, and ‘there is something very Buddhist about a photograph’, says Cupitt.² The comparison between early Buddhism and post-modern French philosophy is pursued further in The Long-Legged Fly,³ where Cupitt takes the Buddhist quest for the cessation of desire to be a matter of rooting out erroneous conceptions of the self and of combating possessive individualism.