ABSTRACT
What does it mean to be Buddhist in the midst of postmodernity? The preposition notwithstanding, “postmodernity” is certainly not a place, and, despite the singular noun, it is not one thing, or even a thing at all. Rather, it is a complex spiritual condition, a range of attitudes, a set of perspectives shaped by the acute hermeneutical self-consciousness that has come, at the turn of the second millennium, to frame nearly every field of human inquiry. Indeed, one of the characteristics of postmodernity is precisely that those subjected to it are in certain respects placeless, without a fixed or final abode in which to secure themselves, without a “thing” to which to cling. In postmodernity, the ancient cosmological and social certainties provided by traditional world-views are left behind, but so, too, are the more recent complacencies of modernism: perpetual social and intellectual progress, the triumph of rationality, the apotheosis of science – that is why it is postmodernity. Postmodernity is marked above all by a loss of stable identity, and by the concurrent recognition that the world, and human life, are irreducibly characterized, to use David Tracy’s terminology, by plurality and ambiguity (see, e.g., Tracy; Lyotard; Lakeland). The more we learn about the varieties of human culture, the idiosyncrasies of our fields of inquiry, the structures of our languages, and the complexity of our self-awareness, the greater becomes our appreciation for the essential plurality of the world and our perspectives upon it. And, when we recognize that each perspective developed within a particular culture or field of inquiry is itself historically situated, grounded in temporally contingent assumptions and purposes, then we are forced to concede that our attitudes and efforts, our words, perhaps our very identities, however certain and compelling they may seem to us, are ultimately relative, provisional, and quite ambiguous: as T. S. Eliot puts it in “East Coker,” they “slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision, will not stay in place” (121). In a world fundamentally plural and ambiguous, there is no Archimedian point: “reality,” “truth,” “goodness,” “self,” “happiness” – all the classic absolutes – fall under suspicion, and the Son of Man, or the Daughter of the Buddha, has no place to lay her head.
