Published in L'Express n° 3239 – 07/31/2013 – Interview by Olivier Le Naire –
What does the expression “Asian wisdom” cover?
Such different traditions cannot be entirely equated. Some, such as Japanese Shintoism, are essentially religious, with beliefs and rituals that play a decisive role in collective identity. At the other extreme, Buddhism is more philosophical and focused on a personal spiritual journey, which justifies the term wisdom, as it refers to the idea of the quest for liberation or a happy life. Hence its universal and easily exportable character. Hinduism in India, and Confucianism and Taoism in China, lie somewhat in between. As truly national traditions with multiple rituals, they also offer universal moral rules, worldviews, and spiritual paths that can be exported beyond their cradle. These are the dimensions that Westerners seek, not their more religious or identity-based character.
In any case, we can talk about “religions”… but what is the difference with monotheisms?
If we define religion not by its content (its beliefs) but by its social function, we can apply the term "religion" to all these Asian currents, in the same way as to the great monotheistic traditions. All the world's religions have in common the proposition of collective beliefs, practices, and rituals, which create social bonds around an invisible being that takes very diverse forms or names. The difference comes from the content of what we believe in. Monotheisms affirm the existence of a creator god who organizes the universe and has a personal dimension. We can pray to him, he speaks through the voice of the prophets, he is interested in us. This results in a linear dimension of time: from creation to the end of the world willed by God. Asian traditions are closer to nature and propose a cyclical vision of time: there has never been a beginning and there will never be a definitive end to the universe... because there is no creator god outside the world. Whatever name we give it, the Absolute (Brahman, Tao) is impersonal, and present in nature as well as in man. This does not prevent these traditions from believing in a multitude of manifestations of this inexpressible divine, through gods that we venerate (there are said to be 33 million of them in India!) or spirits that we fear. Similarly, there is no notion of a single revealed Truth in wisdom, and this is one of the reasons for their success in the West: they tell us that the truth is discovered through meditation, knowledge, and spiritual experience.
So the success of Asian wisdom comes from the fact that it is often based on experience?
Yes, it's concrete, it happens in our body and in our mind. Here, we join ancient Greek philosophy. I find it quite extraordinary that all these Eastern or Western currents of wisdom were born at roughly the same time, around the 6th century BC, within very diverse civilizations that had until then been dominated by great religions of a sacrificial nature. We are suddenly witnessing the emergence of a more personal spirituality, of mystical currents that aim to achieve the union of the human and the divine, that question the meaning of life and the possibility of individual salvation or deliverance. It is the development of Zoroastrianism in Persia and prophetism in Israel, but also the golden age of the Upanishads and the birth of Buddhism in India, the advent of Taoism and Confucianism in China, and the beginning, in Greece, of philosophy, a word whose etymology also means "love of wisdom." Most philosophers of Antiquity defined their discipline as the search for a virtuous, good, happy, harmonious life... exactly the ambition of the wisdoms of Asia. How to achieve true and lasting happiness? How to maintain inner peace regardless of life's events? The questions are identical, even if the answers vary according to cultures. The Chinese, very anchored in nature, will speak more of the search for balance, of harmony between the complementary polarities of yin and yang, while Buddhists or Greeks will insist on knowledge and self-control. The Stoics, for example, aim, as in India, for the ideal of the wise man who has mastered his passions, is no longer driven by his sensitive desires and manages to order them in order to be happy. And in Epictetus, as in the Buddhist corpus, you will find this idea that there is, on the one hand, what depends on us, which we can transform and improve by working on ourselves, and, on the other hand, external events, on which we cannot act, and which require us to accept them, to let go. This is the reason why the philosophical wisdoms of Antiquity and Eastern wisdoms speak to us, moderns: they do not tell us what to believe, but they help us to live.
Don't Westerners idealize a Buddhism that, deep down, they know quite poorly?
Yes, like all Asian wisdom, moreover. Just as Christianity is idealized in Korea or Japan. What comes from elsewhere is always better! Many believe that religious violence is the preserve of monotheisms and, in fact, there have been no wars of conquest based on religion in Asia. This has not prevented internal violence and bloody rivalries. Or a certain form of proselytism, certainly not aggressive, but very effective. We must not forget either that Asian societies are still marked by strong misogyny. Many Westerners also idealize Hindu or Buddhist "spiritual masters," who are not always authentic, and who take advantage of this naivety for the purposes of enrichment or domination. But, beyond these somewhat external aspects, the main misunderstanding, for me, is something else: while Buddhism advocates self-dispossession, the modern West advocates self-fulfillment.
What does this mean, concretely?
That we will often use the techniques of Buddhism, notably meditation, as a tool for personal development: our "self" will be nourished by these methods to assert itself even more, while the goal of Buddhist practice aims at the dissolution of this "self", considered illusory. As early as 1972, the Tibetan lama Chogyam Trungpa had also denounced the "spiritual materialism" of Westerners, who "consume" spirituality instead of truly accepting to be transformed by it. But it is not so simple, because, beyond the superficial and utilitarian aspect that is easy to spot and condemn, it is not easy for a Westerner to become Buddhist, due to the fact that our entire anthropology - from ancient Greece to modernity, including Christianity - is based on the notion of "person": we are a unique and substantial being who aspires to self-realization. Buddhism, on the contrary, considers the individual as a temporary aggregate, and we must, according to it, discover that the self conceived as an autonomous personality is an illusion. This is in order to free ourselves from this illusion and attain nirvana.
So we couldn't move from one religion to another so easily?
We are all deeply conditioned by our history and culture, even if we believe ourselves to be uprooted. Michel Onfray rightly asserts that, even in the most secular West, we remain rooted in a Christian "episteme" (triple heir to the Jewish, Greek, and Roman worlds), which governs our conception of man and the world. Hence this lack of lucidity. The psychologist Carl Gustav Jung affirmed that one cannot change culture, nor therefore religion, since the two are intimately linked. This echoes what the Dalai Lama says: if you change religion, you will very often find yourself critical of the one from which you came and you will unconsciously reproduce the patterns of your culture in your new religion. It would therefore be better, according to him, to find spiritual paths that suit us in one's own culture, unless a lifelong investment is required—as is the case, for example, with Matthieu Ricard. This seems very true to me, but I also believe that one can, without necessarily becoming Buddhist, Hindu or Taoist, adopt philosophical points of view from the East, such as the conceptions of causality, the impermanence of phenomena, the interdependence or the balance of all things, points of view which are sometimes validated by contemporary science. One can also, of course, appropriate a certain number of techniques (meditation, yoga, qi gong, etc.) to find inner peace. For me, these constitute valuable contributions which can help us to broaden our conception of ourselves and the world, and to live better. Who would complain about that?