Thoughts on Buddhism
The texts published on this page reflect my own journey in Buddhism.
Critical reflections as well as more technical or comparative essays will be found.
This page opens with a letter sent to the IEB which allows you to understand what my itinerary was in Buddhism and the reasons for my disengagement.
The place of the sacred in Buddhism.
A revealing oversight.
For Buddhist followers and monks, as well as for Western public opinion, Buddhism is the wisdom or religion of compassion and non-violence. In doing so, Buddhism would not be a religion like the others, and could even represent a kind of agnostic, modern and rational wisdom.
However, the analysis of certain accounts such as that of the death and funeral of the Buddha, or the crucial episode of his Awakening, show on the contrary that the religious and the sacrificial dimension are at the very heart of Buddhism, which attempted in vain to eradicate them. Even more, because these accounts reveal that the origin of this religion does not lie in itself.
This reality, difficult to admit, must nevertheless be exhumed, in order to confer on Buddhism its true nature, far from its pragmatic precepts of wisdom and its practice of meditation.
Does the thought of Nâgârjuna incline towards nihilism?
Nothing more difficult, philosophically, and undoubtedly more daring, than to discuss or to want to refute the nâgârjunian thought which seems beyond all the attempts of this kind. But if we want to understand how this thought represents a deviation from original Buddhism, this exercise, as perilous as it is, is absolutely essential.
This is what the first part of this reflection sets out to do.
The second explores the inconsistencies of the nâgârjunian logic, which is essentially nihilistic and idealistic.
She insists on technical notions such as emptiness and causality, wrongly confused by the master of Madhyamaka , whose teaching is still in force in Zen and Tibetan Buddhism .
The problem of ego and moral responsibility in Zen and Tibetan Tantrism.
These two currents constitute today, in the West, the heart of the phenomenon of neo-Buddhism.
This short article analyzes the points of view of each current on the question of the ego and individual responsibility, in particular to identify contradictions and dead ends.
Buddhism in the face of its contradictions.
Conservatism, intellectualism and vestiges of archaic mentality in Buddhism.
It seems generally accepted today that Buddhism would be a rational wisdom perfectly adapted to our contemporary world. And that he would thus escape the archaisms of other religions, condemned to remain frozen in their backwardness.
However, it is not.
Not only is Buddhism a religion like any other, with a comparable religious conservatism, but it is not free from faults in its doctrine, most of which stem from its inability to have evolved over the centuries. And this, whatever the currents through which it was crossed.
This article takes stock of these critical issues.
The ambiguities of the practice of meditation.
In this in-depth article, I analyze several aspects of the practice of meditation, hitherto unknown.
Anthropology and psychoanalysis have provided me with the means to deepen what is meant by such a practice which is not a praxis , in the Greek sense, and produces nothing specific. However, meditation contains within it vestiges of archaic rituals and ancient sacrifice of which most adepts are totally ignorant. How can such a practice, which is supposed to illuminate the consciousness of the one who adopts it and lead him to Awakening, incidentally produce such effects of ignorance? This is the question that these followers should one day ask themselves and which I am trying to answer here ...
In a second part, I started from a simple observation: that of the ineffectiveness of meditation, and even of certain harmful aspects which are inherent to it and which few people until now have recognized.
I thus explore the practice of meditation known as "full consciousness" which seemed to me to be an oxymoron, in particular with regard to the phenomena which can occur during meditation, and which are ignored by this same consciousness as well as by the meditator who is book there.
And thanks once again to psychoanalysis, it was possible for me to identify ambiguous and problematic aspects generally neglected by Buddhist texts and traditions, and to grasp their deeper meaning.
The Buddha and Christ.
Two figures of spiritual sons in opposition to the paternal authority.
If one submits to analysis the biographies as well as the personalities of these two great founders of religion, they reveal a characteristic which is common to them: namely, their opposition to paternal authority and to the Law, that it is that of their time or even Natural Law.
This is both what distinguishes them from other religious figures, and what conferred a unique aura and a sacral and religious power unlike any other, both to their person and their teaching.
This article tries to understand these hidden and mysterious springs ...
The drifts of Buddhist wisdom:
from hypertrophy of compassion to breaking the Law.
Among moral sentiments, compassion has enjoyed unprecedented media promotion in recent years. To the point of having even supplanted the Christian virtue which preceded it and which for a long time prepared the way for it: love-charity. On the strength of its media aura, reinforced by the success of Tibetan Buddhism in the West, compassion nonetheless involves ambiguities that I think it necessary to identify and analyze. It is from a few passages in M. Ricard's book that I undertake this critical analysis and which opens this reflection on the excesses of Buddhism.
In the second part, I question compassion and benevolent love which, like altruism, are among the virtues recommended by Buddhism. Surprisingly, they find no place in the ancient texts which describe or relate the Awakening of the Buddha. I try to understand this absence that few authors and commentators have noted. And I emphasize the ethical and spiritual limits of compassion.
Finally, not the least of paradoxes, yet loves cultivate Buddhism as the Mahayana, that whoever opposes Wisdom or Prajna, the Act, the Dharma.
So that it is possible, from the texts themselves, not only to understand what constitutes such an opposition which goes as far as incompatibility, but also to grasp the exact stake of the presence, always exalted in the sutras , of this Wisdom, in truth, very little virtuous. It is the notion of jouissance, both in the sense given by phenomenology and by psychoanalysis, but which we also find in Buddhist practices, which makes it possible to understand the borderline nature of this prajnâ ...
The ambiguity of Hindu and Buddhist Dharma.
Its sacrificial nature.
This reflection was born from an observation about the definitions of the term dharma in Sanskrit, or dhamma in Pali, which designate the Law or the law, but which offer definitions of this notion at the very least vague where we would have expected, on the contrary, to a solid and reliable whole.
By analyzing these two overlapping notions, the second following on from the first, I was able to identify a deep ambiguity which was inherent in them, and which would tend to discredit the idea of Law and denote. In doing so, it is the very importance of the idea of morality which, in these two great religions, is incidentally called into question.
In addition, rereading a number of texts allowed me to make a major discovery about dharma .
Namely that this one, at its origins, did not designate a religious or political notion, even less a neutral metaphysical concept to which religions like Hinduism and Buddhism are still attached. But it comes, in fact, from the lexical field of sacrifice and ritual present throughout the Indo-Iranian religious area.
This changes everything and gives Dharma its religious truth, today totally buried under centuries of speculation and extrapolations ...
The moral law in Buddhism.
Comment to the letter of D. Treutenaere.
This article follows on from the previous one, and deals with the question of morality in Buddhism, which must be distinguished from ethics.
It is from an exchange of letters with a specialist in the Theravâda tradition, D. Treutenaere, that I develop my criticisms.
I end this article by leaning on the question of the division of Buddhisms - classified according to the currents of Theravâda and Mahâyâna - which is in fact a Western conception.
In the second part, I have grouped together some of the letters that we exchanged with D. Treutenaere.
Finally, I added a short reflection on the question of the ethics of virtues which is at the basis of the doctrine and methods of wisdom of all Buddhisms, and which I question from a morality of obligation.
The question of the philosophy of language in Buddhism.
The aporias of Buddhist thought.
With its psychology, which has spread in the West with the practice of meditation, or its logic that the speculative currents of the Mahayana have developed, Buddhism has strangely ignored certain fundamental aspects of the human psyche.
Language, which he has never managed to identify as such, and which must be distinguished from speech and its uses, is one of them.
It is this major oversight, and which has burdened the thought of Buddhism by locking it in particular in a psychologism today at least obsolete, that I try to analyze in this article from an exchange of letters with a specialist in the Theravâda tradition.
Karma.
From the philosophical notion to religious belief.
After the notion of Dharma that I analyzed above, it is on that of karma that I am considering in this article.
A victim of its success in the West, this term karma connotes disparate and often contradictory realities. By putting it back in its original context, this reflection questions what makes it so specific, and brings out the content of this polysemous term. in doing so, I also come to express serious doubts about the rationality and relevance of this catch-all term.
And I am trying to give it back a certain credibility by associating it with another equally fundamental religious notion which completes it, but which Buddhism, in the impetus of its cultural and spiritual revolution, has eliminated: debt.
The history of the origins of Buddhism and Christianity:
An operation to conceal historical reality.
These two great religions share common elements, even beyond their obsession with ethics.
On the surface, nothing is more foreign to Buddhist wisdom than the Christian faith, and vice versa. But the accounts of their origins betray the same movement of occultation of the historical reality which has been repressed in the myth and the legendary. The theological distinction between Jesus of Nazareth and Christ, for Christianity, and that between Sakyamuni and the Buddha, for Buddhism, already provides in itself a remarkable clue. I endeavor, in this reflection, to demystify the origin stories of these two great religions and to propose another conception of this one which must, in my opinion, be thought in a plural mode.
Death - Nirvana - Immortality
How is it possible to recognize Nirvana?
A flaw in Buddhist thought.
It would have been regrettable, after the analysis of the notions of dharma and karma, not to wonder about that ofnirvana.
My mode of approach differs slightly in this article in that I question not only the notion itself, which has been done many times in scholarly studies, but the claim of Buddhism to access and above all to be able to know and recognize this state beyond all states.
Indeed, it appeared to me that the Buddhist doctrine was content to note that the Buddha, like the awakened beings, reached nirvana. But without specifying how such knowledge or recognition was possible on the part of human subjects doomed by definition to finitude, and therefore ignorant of what surpasses them.
Les conséquences des apories du Bouddhisme ancien
Impasses et limites d'une doctrine religieuse
Rares sont les auteurs qui se sont penchés sérieusement sur la doctrine du Bouddhisme ancien et qui en ont relevé les failles ou les impasses philosophiques.
La plupart on loué celle-ci en estimant qu'elle pouvait même devenir la nouvelle religion de l'Occident, avec la disparition du Christianisme.
Mais une fois que le regard ébloui par cette sagesse se dessille, il est enfin possible d'en discerner les limites et les erreurs.
C'est que je tente de faire à partir d'échanges de courriers avec Didier Treutenaere, spécialiste du Bouddhisme therâvâda.