WHAT IS HINDUISM?
Constitution, yet which are denied in practice by the de facto
power of the wealthy over the poor and the blatant,
money-buys-power corporate plutocracy that is the true
reality of U.S. ‘democracy’.
Thurman’s view of history is as naïve as his political
‘platform’ – opposing a Buddhistically Enlightened “inner
modernity” in the form of Tibet’s spiritual and religiously-
motivated, monastic society^3 , with the “outer modernity”
of those secular, materialistically-driven and militaristic
states that evolved in the West after the European
Reformation and its ‘Enlightenment’.
Thurman’s vision of the future seeks only to combine
the old Buddhist principle of “emptiness of self” with a
revival of traditional monasticism. Yet no form of monastic
education narrowed solely to the confines of any Eastern
religious traditions, scriptures and philosophies can do
them true service – revealing both the complexities of their
inner relation to the history of Western philosophy, science
and social relations – and their profound relevance for a
revolutionary transformation of the latter. And “emptiness of
self” is no recipe for what I have termed relational
revolution. Only if ‘emptiness’ is understood as a pure,
non-attached awareness of our own human self can it give
rise to deep empathic resonance with others – and thus
fulfil the much-vaunted Buddhist principle of ‘compassion’.
Otherwise, the sole uniting factor between ‘self and other’