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I stopped reading upon seeing at the very stop this “ Silicon Valley is the latest player in a history of Western appropriation of Buddhism” I was very curious

I stopped reading upon seeing at the very stop this “ Silicon Valley is the latest player in a history of Western appropriation of Buddhism” I was very curious about the article. I am wondering if it treats ideas such as “hire fast fire fast” - In a way a concept related to the Buddhist ideas of detachment, or the opposite, “bing your whole self to work” which in a way seems contradictory - you have attachments, continue to have them even at work. But it is a genuinely off putting sensation to see someone referring to cultural exchanges and transformations as “appropriation”. Adopting and transforming ideas is the bedrock of humanity. Opposing or denigrating this seems like a fundamentally evil thing to do. It feels anti human.

md_ 4y ago
I think the key point is that it becomes "appropriation"--vs cultural mixing or exchange--when the ideas are removed of their source context and used in a way that is contrary or even disrespectful of their original intent. I'm far from an expert, but it seems like a reasonable argument to advance that the linkage of Buddhist practices with corporate and material advancement--and the removal of spiritual or ethical content--is "appropriation", and not merely respectful mixing.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  Spot on. This is a perfect example of appropriation. --- Cultural appropriation is the inappropriate or unacknowledged adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity. This can be controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from minority cultures. According to critics of the practice, cultural appropriation differs from acculturation, assimilation, or equal cultural exchange in that this appropriation is a form of colonialism. When cultural elements are copied from a minority culture by members of a dominant culture, and these elements are used outside of their original cultural context ─ sometimes even against the expressly stated wishes of members of the originating culture – the practice is often received negatively. --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_appropriation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_appropriation EDIT: instead of more stupid downvotes people could bother reading the wikipedia page.
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    Why are Americans the “majority” and Asian Buddhists the “minority” in this exchange? And what makes this “colonialism” ?
    - goodpoint 4y ago
      "majority" and "minority" are not about raw numbers but power dynamics in this context. "colonialism" refers to extracting whatever idea or artifact is seen as valuable from a culture or a land without consent and/or without respecting the moral rights of who invented or made it. Additionally, you can read the wikipedia page. (edited for clarity: different people use majority/minority differently depending on the context. In this context it's not about raw numbers.) (edit: an example of power dynamic could be a large multinational food chain that takes a lesser-known dish from some culture and sells a butchered version worldwide without clearly indicating the origin and/or that it's not the real thing. By doing this it can easily distorts the idea of the dish in the minds of millions of people.)
      - amadeuspagel 4y ago
        > "majority" and "minority" are never about raw numbers but power dynamics. So the concept "minority rule" is a contradiction in terms, since if a group rules it's per definition the majority?
        goodpoint 4y ago
        If you are talking about power, it is an oxymoron. If you are talking about numbers, it is not. In this context it's the first.
      - honkdaddy 4y ago
        I’ve heard the power dynamics argument before and admittedly it’s never held much weight for me. There are just too many edge cases for a heuristic like that to make any sense, in my mind. So culturally powerless people may extract from culturally powerful people until what point? If a Ukrainian appropriates a part of Russian culture to be their own, who is the victim here? Recently, being Ukrainian has become a much more respected cultural identity than being a Russian, does that mean the power dynamic has shifted? The more you pick away at the idea of cultural appropriation, you realize that the rules people set out for it make very little sense outside of the egregious examples of something like headdresses at Coachella, etc. My personal rule is just not to disrespect people and parts of their culture they find important. The color of my skin or the actions of either of our ancestors shouldn’t play into it, IMO.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  That’s indeed contrary and disrespectful of their original intent, but why does it matter what culture does it? If people from a traditionally Buddhist country like Nepal disrespected Buddhist ideas, it would presumably be just as disrespectful as if people from America did, so I don’t think “cultural appropriation” is the right way to analyze this. By the way, practically every religion has been transformed and warped so much over time as to be almost unrecognizable. This again is normal human behavior.
  - md_ 4y ago
    I'm not sure which is more disrespectful, but I do think the two situations are different. If I'm immersed in a culture or practice and I reject some aspects of it, from a place of familiarity, that means something different--maybe something more disrespectful!--that if I display the trappings of a culture without understanding what they mean.
    - cuteboy19 4y ago
      > removed of their source context and used in a way that is contrary or even disrespectful of their original intent. Ironically all this talk of cultural appropriation is "contrary or even disrespectful of the original intent" of Buddhism. Buddhism never belonged to Magadha, India or Asia, so it is not possible for anybody to appropriate it. It is not anyone's property to begin with
      - md_ 4y ago
        Who said anything about geographic locality?
        lolinder 4y ago
        Each of those places has a very different culture. Buddhism is not a monolithic entity. It took on vastly different forms in each of the places it landed. Chinese Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism have different scriptures, different approaches to bodhisattvas, different paths to awakening. Was it disrespectful of the Chinese to take Buddhist teachings when they arrived and transform them to fit their cultural context? Should we go eliminate Buddhism from China because it's not native there and they twisted it to fit their culture?
- throwawayacc2 4y ago
  The exact same thing can be said about anything. Judaism appropriated pre existing ideas and disrespected them by insisting on a single god. Christianity appropriated judaism and disrespected it by removing covenant practices such as circumcision and adding new ideas such as the kingdom of heaven being available to anyone not just “the chosen people”. Islam appropriated christianity and disrespected it by demoting Jesus from the son of god to a mere prophet. This is how ideas work. And it’s not just religion. Think of left wing thought. The original communist ideology was revolutionary. Social democrats appropriated ideas from them but believe working within the system. Many hard left people despise social democrats and believe they do more harm than good.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - md_ 4y ago
    In this post alone you've written, what, four times as many words as the length you read into the article? This is peak HN. Edit: I take it back. What's peak HN is that this is the top voted comment on the entire post.
    - goodpoint 4y ago
      The downvotes are only proving you right. This is what HN has become, pretty much 4chan.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    The original communist ideology wasn't original at all. The roots go back at least to the time of the Gracchi in Rome. It's clear hardly anyone commenting here has any idea what appropriation really is. It's not just disrespecting existing cultures. It's destroying them by removing the meaning from them. And then repackaging the symbols - usually with a vague implication of profundity and exoticism - as a marketable commodity. The purpose isn't to spread the original culture but to use the trappings to promote the usual Western corporate neoliberal value system. Corporate Buddhism is a perfect example. It's clearly a lot more corporate than Buddhist. The goal isn't enlightenment, detachment, or compassion, it's cultural conformity with the aim of increased productivity and a higher share price. This shouldn't be controversial. All you need to do is look at how people behave to see what motivates them.
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  "Jazz drew from ragtime, also “coded” Black, but ragtime drew from marches, drawn in great measure from white men John Philip Sousa and (eep) Wagner."[1] In your view, is this appropriation or cultural mixing or exchange? [1]: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/theres-no-alternative-to-cultural https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/theres-no-alternative-t...
  - md_ 4y ago
    I wasn't claiming to be the authority on what's "appropriation." I was pointing out that the poster--who admitted he didn't read the article past the subheadline[1]--doesn't seem to understand how people use the term "appropriation." That said, since you asked, no, it's never occurred to me that jazz is appropriation. [1] Amusingly, the folks who admit to not actually, you know, reading the thing they are debating, are the ones who claim to be defending the free exchange of ideas. I think. Or maybe they're just angry online.
deleted 4y ago
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emptysongglass 4y ago
I had a coworker recently tell me I was culturally appropriating the Buddha (I'm a Buddhist) presumably because I am "from the West". Apart from being one of the most offensive things I've ever been told (before anyone jumps on me for this: I can still observe it as offensive regardless of my attachment to the offense) it confirmed for me that whatever is going on in the US with identity politics has jumped the shark. You do not need to be of a skin color, creed, gender or class to take refuge in the Buddha's teachings. The dharma is for all.
- prox 4y ago
  Indeed. There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding on the word “appropriate” , “to make it your own.” Basically the more academic wording of “you made this? I made this.” meme. As long as you don’t pretend you created Buddhism or are an infallible authority of Buddhism it’s not appropriation. Personally I find the word not really appropriate with what we are trying to convey which I assume would be something along the lines of “disrespectful usage of other peoples cultures or practices.”
  - markdown 4y ago
    I think "appropriation" is when you take cultural ideas from colonised places of the world and use them in inappropriate ways. Cultural appreciation = wearing a chinese cheongsam in a culturally appropriate situation because you think it's beautiful and you love the dress. Cultural appropriation = wearing grass skirts and coconut shell brassiers and getting wasted at a "tiki" frat party.
    - squabbles 4y ago
      There is no inappropriate way to use clothes you own, unless you're using it to strangle someone. The people who get upset about people wearing things from "their" culture are always deracinated diaspora with no real connection to the culture. People who are healthily embedded in a culture don't get upset about foreigners "misusing" their cultural bric-a-brac, they have real lives to attend to. And if you're getting upset at a party goer wearing a grass skirt then you're in need of psychiatric help.
stared 4y ago
Ad cultural appropriation - in the US, it seems that no matter what you do (in some eyes), at the same time, you ignore another culture and appropriate its traditions. For me, there is a distinction: - Adapting, mixing, etc. is (as you said) the bedrock of humanity. It is learning from other cultures. - Claiming that one is doing "real Buddhism" (when it is a version far from any tradition) or serving pepperoni pizza as "genuinely Italian", or being a "true Christian" for having Xmas with a Coca-Cola Santa Claus. The latter is essentially a Cargo Cult of some other traditions and cultures. I asked a few Italians about "pizza as an international dish". One opinion was that there is nothing wrong with baking "bread with other ingredients". What pissed her off was when people said such a dish was similar to one food prepared by her mother or in her town.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  > What pissed her off was when people said such a dish was similar to one food prepared by her mother or in her town. Most people overestimate how old traditional recipes are, anyway. Italians didn’t have tomatoes or potatoes before Columbus; nor did Indians, Thais or Chinese people have chile peppers… is all global cuisine just a huge cultural appropriation from the Mexicans and Peruvians?
ImageXav 4y ago
I suspect you might enjoy reading the rest of the article. It goes into some depth on what Buddhism was, is and how it has been adapted in the West to mostly focus on meditation and why. Rather than a critique of "Western Buddhism" it is an exploration of it in a wider context. The term appropriation might have been off-putting due to its current cultural load, but in this context it is not wrong. For others that are curious about meditation and Buddhism, I would suggest reading the article and making up your own mind, rather than the comments here.
fredgrott 4y ago
The appropriation tone becomes apparent in the middle of the article where the author explains that its not all of Buddhism and is neither wrong or right. But then again I would not know how those of the religious tones of Buddhism might look upon my non-religious practice of the Buddhism teachings except that they might see it as neither wrong or right but hope for my future progress towards Nirvana
bsedlm 4y ago
absolutely agree, but I take it further The language of appropiation implies a sort of 'property'-like dynamic for ideas. If I learn, get to know, understand an idea from somebody else, I have not appropiated them in any way. I merely have adopted their idea. This way of copying/adopting of other's ideas is what makes a cultural society thrive. On the other hand, a society where all idea transfers are in fact an exchange of something, is exactly what I consider the essence of a market. The critical difference is that in a market, widgets are exchanged. And whenever somebody takes a widget from somebody else, only one widget remains. However when somebody adopts another's idea, the idea is now it two places (and quite possibly, with a slight difference); that it, until "the idea" becomes a digital artifact, then it's the exact same "digital" copy which exists in more than the one original instance. It's the dumbest action to try and enforce that digital artifacts (and later on, ideas themselves) behave like widgets in a market.
- PebblesRox 4y ago
  You have me thinking about the recent “Every Complex Idea Has a Million Stupid Cousins” submission. In that metaphor, maybe appropriation is when people go around selling dumbed-down or distorted copies that ignore the complexity and fullness of the original ideas. The original ideas are still out there, but for the people who only see the stupid copies, the majesty of the original idea is masked/overshadowed. And my understanding is that part of the complaint around appropriation involves outsiders profiting from their use/misuse while the originators of the culture see none of the spoils. https://apxhard.substack.com/p/every-complex-idea-has-a-million https://apxhard.substack.com/p/every-complex-idea-has-a-mill...
gumby 4y ago
> I stopped reading upon seeing at the very stop this “ Silicon Valley is the latest player in a history of Western appropriation of Buddhism” I think you jumped the gun. The extended interview with the book author showed that her position is aligned, or even the same as yours (your comment is naturally too brief to tell whether I should have used only “aligned” or “same”). And indeed it’s Buddhism we’re talking about: a belief system appropriated by other cultures to the point where its origin in India was forgotten for centuries.
- rawgabbit 4y ago
  He did jumped the gun. The author Carolyn Chen made some very compelling arguments saying corporatized Buddhism is unrecognizable. Carolyn Chen is arguing corporatized Buddhism is a new religion that celebrates 70+hour work weeks and the celebrity CEO. "What we see in American religion, even if it is practiced in a corporate setting, is often the question, “How can the group help the individual realize themselves?” Whereas in other cultures this question tends to be reversed: “How can the individual help realize the goals of the group?” Interestingly enough, I think that companies have been able to command great self-sacrifice from Americans in a way that no other institution can today. I would argue that companies or workplaces have become the new faith communities that are replacing organized religion."
  - throwawayacc2 4y ago
    > The author Carolyn Chen made some very compelling arguments saying corporatized Buddhism is unrecognizable. I agree with that. I don’t see the problem though. Why is modifying an idea a bad thing? > Carolyn Chen is arguing corporatized Buddhism is a new religion that celebrates 70+hour work weeks and the celebrity CEO. I agree with this too. I am also left asking, why is this considered bad? To clarify, I don’t refer to the ethics of working 70 hours per week, I refer to the emergence of this new religion. Why is the emergence of a new religion bad?
    - gumby 4y ago
      > I am also left asking, why is this considered bad? Who is saying it's bad? I think you're arguing against a point nobody is making. I find the most remarkable appropriation of Buddhism to have been the Tibetan, complete with the overthrow of the monarch through an alliance with the Qing and the institution of a theocratic-feudal state (Ganden Phodrang) more like revolutionary Iran than what it re-invented itself into in the 20th century. People seem fine with that; who can complain?
SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
Cultural exchange of food and clothes and such is great. I’m a lot more sympathetic to the complaint here, though, which seems to be that people have taken the surface level of Buddhist religious practice while tossing out all the parts that make it meaningful to the interviewee. I’m imagining how I would feel if my company hosted prayer sessions where you speak to your unconscious mind rather than God and the sign of the cross represents the intersection of personal and professional responsibilities, and… yeah, that’d be pretty weird. (Or maybe a better analogy would be some kind of monastic liturgy, since she mentions meditation is uncommon in traditional practice.)
- throwawayacc2 4y ago
  > which seems to be that people have taken the surface level of Buddhist religious practice while tossing out all the parts that make it meaningful to the interviewee I agree this is happening. Why is this an intrinsically bad thing? It seems to me to be just how cultural exchanges work. An idea comes, parts of it are kept, others removed, and others modified. Why is stripping an idea of it’s “original meaning” ( I don’t think that exists) and changing it, even beyond recognition an intrinsically bad this? > I’m imagining how I would feel if my company hosted prayer sessions where you speak to your unconscious mind rather than God and the sign of the cross represents the intersection of personal and professional responsibilities I’m going to assume the comment means “I imagine how I would feel experiencing a twisted version of christianity”. Under that assumption, the answer would be the same way a conservative christian feels when seeing a church displaying the gay flag. Just like you in the hypothetical scenario, they feel weird. Are you as sympathetic to the conservative christian as you are to the traditional buddhist? After all, in both cases, “surface level of religious practice while tossing out all the parts that make it meaningful to the person” seems to apply.
  - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
    I am! That specific scenario is complicated, because churches that display a gay flag never do so to the exclusion of prayer and loving Jesus and all the normal parts of the religion, and quite a few of them will tell you that they're flying it precisely because they love Jesus. With groups like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, I think conservative Christians have every right to be unhappy and I wish people wouldn't appropriate Christianity in that way.
abeppu 4y ago
I think this calls for a more nuanced distinction than I think your comment draws. Yes, cultural exchange and transformation is fundamentally how culture happens. Buddhism started from one guy in what we'd now call India, built on some ideas that were already in the area, and has shifted and changed as it moved across time and space. Buddhism isn't owned by any one people or place. But that doesn't mean that there's no such thing as appropriation, or that it doesn't occur in Silicon Valley. I've participated in multiple work-place meditation trainings. In each case, the teacher was American, spoke English as a first language, and had done teacher-trainings at American institutions, and I think they were always white. Would my company have been equally willing to hire a Thai immigrant who spoke English but not with an American accent, whose credentials were years of monastic training? Or, is there an institutional preference for hearing Buddhist practices from someone who, as Chen says, looks just like the people they are teaching? If one population is able to profit off of communicating the cultural practices of others who are not able to access the same opportunities, would you agree that could be called "appropriation"? If not, what should it be called?
- deleted 4y ago
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- throwawayacc2 4y ago
  > If one population is able to profit off of communicating the cultural practices of others who are not able to access the same opportunities, would you agree that could be called "appropriation"? No. Let me answer your second question first before formulating the answer. > If not, what should it be called? Getting lucky —- So, I don’t understand how “Buddhism isn't owned by any one people or place” can go together with “communicating the cultural practices of others”. Is buddhism “owned” by a people or not? I am going to assume the answer is no. This transforms your statement into: If one population is able to profit off of communicating an idea and another population is not able to access the same opportunity, would you agree that could be called "appropriation" Certainly you can see now why no, it is not “appropriation”. Some people have an opportunity to do something, others do not. The conversation on access to opportunities is a separate topic. Hence the answer to the second question. The first population got lucky.

md_ 4y ago

I think the key point is that it becomes "appropriation"--vs cultural mixing or exchange--when the ideas are removed of their source context and used in a way that is contrary or even disrespectful of their original intent. I'm far from an expert, but it seems like a reasonable argument to advance that the linkage of Buddhist practices with corporate and material advancement--and the removal of spiritual or ethical content--is "appropriation", and not merely respectful mixing.

goodpoint 4y ago
Spot on. This is a perfect example of appropriation. --- Cultural appropriation is the inappropriate or unacknowledged adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity. This can be controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from minority cultures. According to critics of the practice, cultural appropriation differs from acculturation, assimilation, or equal cultural exchange in that this appropriation is a form of colonialism. When cultural elements are copied from a minority culture by members of a dominant culture, and these elements are used outside of their original cultural context ─ sometimes even against the expressly stated wishes of members of the originating culture – the practice is often received negatively. --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_appropriation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_appropriation EDIT: instead of more stupid downvotes people could bother reading the wikipedia page.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  Why are Americans the “majority” and Asian Buddhists the “minority” in this exchange? And what makes this “colonialism” ?
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    "majority" and "minority" are not about raw numbers but power dynamics in this context. "colonialism" refers to extracting whatever idea or artifact is seen as valuable from a culture or a land without consent and/or without respecting the moral rights of who invented or made it. Additionally, you can read the wikipedia page. (edited for clarity: different people use majority/minority differently depending on the context. In this context it's not about raw numbers.) (edit: an example of power dynamic could be a large multinational food chain that takes a lesser-known dish from some culture and sells a butchered version worldwide without clearly indicating the origin and/or that it's not the real thing. By doing this it can easily distorts the idea of the dish in the minds of millions of people.)
    - amadeuspagel 4y ago
      > "majority" and "minority" are never about raw numbers but power dynamics. So the concept "minority rule" is a contradiction in terms, since if a group rules it's per definition the majority?
      - goodpoint 4y ago
        If you are talking about power, it is an oxymoron. If you are talking about numbers, it is not. In this context it's the first.
    - honkdaddy 4y ago
      I’ve heard the power dynamics argument before and admittedly it’s never held much weight for me. There are just too many edge cases for a heuristic like that to make any sense, in my mind. So culturally powerless people may extract from culturally powerful people until what point? If a Ukrainian appropriates a part of Russian culture to be their own, who is the victim here? Recently, being Ukrainian has become a much more respected cultural identity than being a Russian, does that mean the power dynamic has shifted? The more you pick away at the idea of cultural appropriation, you realize that the rules people set out for it make very little sense outside of the egregious examples of something like headdresses at Coachella, etc. My personal rule is just not to disrespect people and parts of their culture they find important. The color of my skin or the actions of either of our ancestors shouldn’t play into it, IMO.
School-Cotton 4y ago
That’s indeed contrary and disrespectful of their original intent, but why does it matter what culture does it? If people from a traditionally Buddhist country like Nepal disrespected Buddhist ideas, it would presumably be just as disrespectful as if people from America did, so I don’t think “cultural appropriation” is the right way to analyze this. By the way, practically every religion has been transformed and warped so much over time as to be almost unrecognizable. This again is normal human behavior.
- md_ 4y ago
  I'm not sure which is more disrespectful, but I do think the two situations are different. If I'm immersed in a culture or practice and I reject some aspects of it, from a place of familiarity, that means something different--maybe something more disrespectful!--that if I display the trappings of a culture without understanding what they mean.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    > removed of their source context and used in a way that is contrary or even disrespectful of their original intent. Ironically all this talk of cultural appropriation is "contrary or even disrespectful of the original intent" of Buddhism. Buddhism never belonged to Magadha, India or Asia, so it is not possible for anybody to appropriate it. It is not anyone's property to begin with
    - md_ 4y ago
      Who said anything about geographic locality?
      - lolinder 4y ago
        Each of those places has a very different culture. Buddhism is not a monolithic entity. It took on vastly different forms in each of the places it landed. Chinese Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism have different scriptures, different approaches to bodhisattvas, different paths to awakening. Was it disrespectful of the Chinese to take Buddhist teachings when they arrived and transform them to fit their cultural context? Should we go eliminate Buddhism from China because it's not native there and they twisted it to fit their culture?
throwawayacc2 4y ago
The exact same thing can be said about anything. Judaism appropriated pre existing ideas and disrespected them by insisting on a single god. Christianity appropriated judaism and disrespected it by removing covenant practices such as circumcision and adding new ideas such as the kingdom of heaven being available to anyone not just “the chosen people”. Islam appropriated christianity and disrespected it by demoting Jesus from the son of god to a mere prophet. This is how ideas work. And it’s not just religion. Think of left wing thought. The original communist ideology was revolutionary. Social democrats appropriated ideas from them but believe working within the system. Many hard left people despise social democrats and believe they do more harm than good.
- deleted 4y ago
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- md_ 4y ago
  In this post alone you've written, what, four times as many words as the length you read into the article? This is peak HN. Edit: I take it back. What's peak HN is that this is the top voted comment on the entire post.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    The downvotes are only proving you right. This is what HN has become, pretty much 4chan.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  The original communist ideology wasn't original at all. The roots go back at least to the time of the Gracchi in Rome. It's clear hardly anyone commenting here has any idea what appropriation really is. It's not just disrespecting existing cultures. It's destroying them by removing the meaning from them. And then repackaging the symbols - usually with a vague implication of profundity and exoticism - as a marketable commodity. The purpose isn't to spread the original culture but to use the trappings to promote the usual Western corporate neoliberal value system. Corporate Buddhism is a perfect example. It's clearly a lot more corporate than Buddhist. The goal isn't enlightenment, detachment, or compassion, it's cultural conformity with the aim of increased productivity and a higher share price. This shouldn't be controversial. All you need to do is look at how people behave to see what motivates them.
amadeuspagel 4y ago
"Jazz drew from ragtime, also “coded” Black, but ragtime drew from marches, drawn in great measure from white men John Philip Sousa and (eep) Wagner."[1] In your view, is this appropriation or cultural mixing or exchange? [1]: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/theres-no-alternative-to-cultural https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/theres-no-alternative-t...
- md_ 4y ago
  I wasn't claiming to be the authority on what's "appropriation." I was pointing out that the poster--who admitted he didn't read the article past the subheadline[1]--doesn't seem to understand how people use the term "appropriation." That said, since you asked, no, it's never occurred to me that jazz is appropriation. [1] Amusingly, the folks who admit to not actually, you know, reading the thing they are debating, are the ones who claim to be defending the free exchange of ideas. I think. Or maybe they're just angry online.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

emptysongglass 4y ago

I had a coworker recently tell me I was culturally appropriating the Buddha (I'm a Buddhist) presumably because I am "from the West". Apart from being one of the most offensive things I've ever been told (before anyone jumps on me for this: I can still observe it as offensive regardless of my attachment to the offense) it confirmed for me that whatever is going on in the US with identity politics has jumped the shark. You do not need to be of a skin color, creed, gender or class to take refuge in the Buddha's teachings. The dharma is for all.

prox 4y ago
Indeed. There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding on the word “appropriate” , “to make it your own.” Basically the more academic wording of “you made this? I made this.” meme. As long as you don’t pretend you created Buddhism or are an infallible authority of Buddhism it’s not appropriation. Personally I find the word not really appropriate with what we are trying to convey which I assume would be something along the lines of “disrespectful usage of other peoples cultures or practices.”
- markdown 4y ago
  I think "appropriation" is when you take cultural ideas from colonised places of the world and use them in inappropriate ways. Cultural appreciation = wearing a chinese cheongsam in a culturally appropriate situation because you think it's beautiful and you love the dress. Cultural appropriation = wearing grass skirts and coconut shell brassiers and getting wasted at a "tiki" frat party.
  - squabbles 4y ago
    There is no inappropriate way to use clothes you own, unless you're using it to strangle someone. The people who get upset about people wearing things from "their" culture are always deracinated diaspora with no real connection to the culture. People who are healthily embedded in a culture don't get upset about foreigners "misusing" their cultural bric-a-brac, they have real lives to attend to. And if you're getting upset at a party goer wearing a grass skirt then you're in need of psychiatric help.

stared 4y ago

Ad cultural appropriation - in the US, it seems that no matter what you do (in some eyes), at the same time, you ignore another culture and appropriate its traditions. For me, there is a distinction: - Adapting, mixing, etc. is (as you said) the bedrock of humanity. It is learning from other cultures. - Claiming that one is doing "real Buddhism" (when it is a version far from any tradition) or serving pepperoni pizza as "genuinely Italian", or being a "true Christian" for having Xmas with a Coca-Cola Santa Claus. The latter is essentially a Cargo Cult of some other traditions and cultures. I asked a few Italians about "pizza as an international dish". One opinion was that there is nothing wrong with baking "bread with other ingredients". What pissed her off was when people said such a dish was similar to one food prepared by her mother or in her town.

School-Cotton 4y ago
> What pissed her off was when people said such a dish was similar to one food prepared by her mother or in her town. Most people overestimate how old traditional recipes are, anyway. Italians didn’t have tomatoes or potatoes before Columbus; nor did Indians, Thais or Chinese people have chile peppers… is all global cuisine just a huge cultural appropriation from the Mexicans and Peruvians?

ImageXav 4y ago

I suspect you might enjoy reading the rest of the article. It goes into some depth on what Buddhism was, is and how it has been adapted in the West to mostly focus on meditation and why. Rather than a critique of "Western Buddhism" it is an exploration of it in a wider context. The term appropriation might have been off-putting due to its current cultural load, but in this context it is not wrong. For others that are curious about meditation and Buddhism, I would suggest reading the article and making up your own mind, rather than the comments here.

fredgrott 4y ago

The appropriation tone becomes apparent in the middle of the article where the author explains that its not all of Buddhism and is neither wrong or right. But then again I would not know how those of the religious tones of Buddhism might look upon my non-religious practice of the Buddhism teachings except that they might see it as neither wrong or right but hope for my future progress towards Nirvana

bsedlm 4y ago

absolutely agree, but I take it further The language of appropiation implies a sort of 'property'-like dynamic for ideas. If I learn, get to know, understand an idea from somebody else, I have not appropiated them in any way. I merely have adopted their idea. This way of copying/adopting of other's ideas is what makes a cultural society thrive. On the other hand, a society where all idea transfers are in fact an exchange of something, is exactly what I consider the essence of a market. The critical difference is that in a market, widgets are exchanged. And whenever somebody takes a widget from somebody else, only one widget remains. However when somebody adopts another's idea, the idea is now it two places (and quite possibly, with a slight difference); that it, until "the idea" becomes a digital artifact, then it's the exact same "digital" copy which exists in more than the one original instance. It's the dumbest action to try and enforce that digital artifacts (and later on, ideas themselves) behave like widgets in a market.

PebblesRox 4y ago
You have me thinking about the recent “Every Complex Idea Has a Million Stupid Cousins” submission. In that metaphor, maybe appropriation is when people go around selling dumbed-down or distorted copies that ignore the complexity and fullness of the original ideas. The original ideas are still out there, but for the people who only see the stupid copies, the majesty of the original idea is masked/overshadowed. And my understanding is that part of the complaint around appropriation involves outsiders profiting from their use/misuse while the originators of the culture see none of the spoils. https://apxhard.substack.com/p/every-complex-idea-has-a-million https://apxhard.substack.com/p/every-complex-idea-has-a-mill...

gumby 4y ago

> I stopped reading upon seeing at the very stop this “ Silicon Valley is the latest player in a history of Western appropriation of Buddhism” I think you jumped the gun. The extended interview with the book author showed that her position is aligned, or even the same as yours (your comment is naturally too brief to tell whether I should have used only “aligned” or “same”). And indeed it’s Buddhism we’re talking about: a belief system appropriated by other cultures to the point where its origin in India was forgotten for centuries.

rawgabbit 4y ago
He did jumped the gun. The author Carolyn Chen made some very compelling arguments saying corporatized Buddhism is unrecognizable. Carolyn Chen is arguing corporatized Buddhism is a new religion that celebrates 70+hour work weeks and the celebrity CEO. "What we see in American religion, even if it is practiced in a corporate setting, is often the question, “How can the group help the individual realize themselves?” Whereas in other cultures this question tends to be reversed: “How can the individual help realize the goals of the group?” Interestingly enough, I think that companies have been able to command great self-sacrifice from Americans in a way that no other institution can today. I would argue that companies or workplaces have become the new faith communities that are replacing organized religion."
- throwawayacc2 4y ago
  > The author Carolyn Chen made some very compelling arguments saying corporatized Buddhism is unrecognizable. I agree with that. I don’t see the problem though. Why is modifying an idea a bad thing? > Carolyn Chen is arguing corporatized Buddhism is a new religion that celebrates 70+hour work weeks and the celebrity CEO. I agree with this too. I am also left asking, why is this considered bad? To clarify, I don’t refer to the ethics of working 70 hours per week, I refer to the emergence of this new religion. Why is the emergence of a new religion bad?
  - gumby 4y ago
    > I am also left asking, why is this considered bad? Who is saying it's bad? I think you're arguing against a point nobody is making. I find the most remarkable appropriation of Buddhism to have been the Tibetan, complete with the overthrow of the monarch through an alliance with the Qing and the institution of a theocratic-feudal state (Ganden Phodrang) more like revolutionary Iran than what it re-invented itself into in the 20th century. People seem fine with that; who can complain?

SpicyLemonZest 4y ago

Cultural exchange of food and clothes and such is great. I’m a lot more sympathetic to the complaint here, though, which seems to be that people have taken the surface level of Buddhist religious practice while tossing out all the parts that make it meaningful to the interviewee. I’m imagining how I would feel if my company hosted prayer sessions where you speak to your unconscious mind rather than God and the sign of the cross represents the intersection of personal and professional responsibilities, and… yeah, that’d be pretty weird. (Or maybe a better analogy would be some kind of monastic liturgy, since she mentions meditation is uncommon in traditional practice.)

throwawayacc2 4y ago
> which seems to be that people have taken the surface level of Buddhist religious practice while tossing out all the parts that make it meaningful to the interviewee I agree this is happening. Why is this an intrinsically bad thing? It seems to me to be just how cultural exchanges work. An idea comes, parts of it are kept, others removed, and others modified. Why is stripping an idea of it’s “original meaning” ( I don’t think that exists) and changing it, even beyond recognition an intrinsically bad this? > I’m imagining how I would feel if my company hosted prayer sessions where you speak to your unconscious mind rather than God and the sign of the cross represents the intersection of personal and professional responsibilities I’m going to assume the comment means “I imagine how I would feel experiencing a twisted version of christianity”. Under that assumption, the answer would be the same way a conservative christian feels when seeing a church displaying the gay flag. Just like you in the hypothetical scenario, they feel weird. Are you as sympathetic to the conservative christian as you are to the traditional buddhist? After all, in both cases, “surface level of religious practice while tossing out all the parts that make it meaningful to the person” seems to apply.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  I am! That specific scenario is complicated, because churches that display a gay flag never do so to the exclusion of prayer and loving Jesus and all the normal parts of the religion, and quite a few of them will tell you that they're flying it precisely because they love Jesus. With groups like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, I think conservative Christians have every right to be unhappy and I wish people wouldn't appropriate Christianity in that way.

abeppu 4y ago

I think this calls for a more nuanced distinction than I think your comment draws. Yes, cultural exchange and transformation is fundamentally how culture happens. Buddhism started from one guy in what we'd now call India, built on some ideas that were already in the area, and has shifted and changed as it moved across time and space. Buddhism isn't owned by any one people or place. But that doesn't mean that there's no such thing as appropriation, or that it doesn't occur in Silicon Valley. I've participated in multiple work-place meditation trainings. In each case, the teacher was American, spoke English as a first language, and had done teacher-trainings at American institutions, and I think they were always white. Would my company have been equally willing to hire a Thai immigrant who spoke English but not with an American accent, whose credentials were years of monastic training? Or, is there an institutional preference for hearing Buddhist practices from someone who, as Chen says, looks just like the people they are teaching? If one population is able to profit off of communicating the cultural practices of others who are not able to access the same opportunities, would you agree that could be called "appropriation"? If not, what should it be called?

deleted 4y ago
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throwawayacc2 4y ago
> If one population is able to profit off of communicating the cultural practices of others who are not able to access the same opportunities, would you agree that could be called "appropriation"? No. Let me answer your second question first before formulating the answer. > If not, what should it be called? Getting lucky —- So, I don’t understand how “Buddhism isn't owned by any one people or place” can go together with “communicating the cultural practices of others”. Is buddhism “owned” by a people or not? I am going to assume the answer is no. This transforms your statement into: If one population is able to profit off of communicating an idea and another population is not able to access the same opportunity, would you agree that could be called "appropriation" Certainly you can see now why no, it is not “appropriation”. Some people have an opportunity to do something, others do not. The conversation on access to opportunities is a separate topic. Hence the answer to the second question. The first population got lucky.