The Theravada Buddhist Puzzle: Why inclusionary founding doctrines and exclusionary contemporary policies?

The Theravada Buddhist Puzzle: Why inclusionary founding doctrines and exclusionary contemporary policies? 

Alfred Stepan

Hi, ought to have asked this the day you spoke at CSDS ... but before I go on, well, here’s a confession! Anybody, observing me (hope, none did ... especially Stepan!!) would have found me constantly ‘nodding away’ through most part of Stepan’s address, let me confess ‘my nodding away’ was driven by somnolence!! Wakefulness and somnolence - it is believed that contradictions are necessary to produce new knowledge – don’t ask me which does?!

‘Dialectics’ draws me ...  and so the inclusionary and exclusionary, in “The Theravada Buddhist Puzzle: Why Inclusionary founding doctrines and exclusionary contemporary policies?” led me to CSDS – Thank You and here’s to wishing you a road filled with insights!

The arguments for ‘facilely’ assuming democracy would ‘work’ ‘better’ in Buddhist Ceylon, did merit a more critical engagement!

The powerful urge to build a nation-state was made out to be the ‘villain’ against democracy with the back drop of religion, ethnicity, nation-state building and violence, not necessarily in the order mentioned. Herein, lies the paradox ...

What are the givens? Perhaps, ethnicity and religion, throw in violence if you will ... but democracy was not a given ... in the ‘nation-states’ examined yesterday. So we ask, is it the ‘external’ Janus of Democracy with two faces in opposite directions that ‘facilitated and facilitates’ both entry and exit ‘responsible’ for the democrat and despot in the examined ‘nation-states’ - it appears the despot has refused to exit!

A causal as opposed to a critical look at the instrumental role of religion, ethnicity, violence on institutions like democracy etc, often fails to address Hegel’s dialectic,  ‘transformed from an apparently arbitrary law of thought into a rule-governed means of discussing and explaining human behaviour in relation to social, political and economic contexts’. Have the ‘nation-states’ in question ‘transformed from an apparently arbitrary law of thought ...’ to embrace the ‘preconstructed, assumed and often stylized ideals of democracy’. Do we have appropriate ‘indicators’ to ‘measure’ or ‘yardsticks’ to determine movement or progress of a people from ‘arbitrary law of thought mode’ to a ‘rule governed means mode’?

Have we actually stumbled upon indicators like - religion, ethnicity, nation-state building, and violence that could serve as cause, predictors for or against democracy? Or do we with Marx and Engels take a step further and use the notion of contradiction (dialectics) of religion ... to examine concrete social and material conditions (Hammer & McLaren, 1991, pp. 26– 36) (adapted).

Power and conflicts are core issues in the radical and structural traditions of societies. But how societies coloured by religion and ethnicity view such dialectics is hard to generalize. Eastern or Asian respondents are found to be more tolerant and comfortable with the apparent inconsistency and co-existence of opposites compared with the western or Americans who are more influenced by formal logic in their reasoning. The existence of opposites and their intricate relationships have long been noticed both in the East and the West. What are the perspectives that guide us to view the ‘inclusionary and exclusionary’ dialectic?

  

Have we bitten off a bit too much to comfortably chew on ... an uncritical and facile  assumption that religion or some religion or religions ‘can’, ‘ought’  to prop, uphold, shoulder, bear, endure, withstand, tolerate, suffer, brook, stand, live with, abide,  DEMOCRACY ... well that leaves us with ‘which religions don’t?’ Inclusion or exclusion?