The Postmodern Buddha
Spirituality is as close as the nearest gift shop

Buddha at work

by Mark A. Pegrum

Sitting on the shelf above my desk is a red velvet Buddha. Not just any red, mind you - it’s so bright it’s almost fluorescent. It came from the oddly assorted shelves of a small gift shop just off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, and it’s been sitting, watching serendipitously over the room, for about six months now. A focal point for visitors to my office, it’s kitsch, it’s camp, and everyone seems to love it. A friend, herself a Western(ized) Buddhist, told me it was the most inspiring statue of the Buddha she’d ever seen. I suspect she’s now trolling the gift shops for her very own version thereof - I’ll be interested to see what she comes up with.

Yet sooner or later, of course, as the owner of a red velvet Buddha, one is bound to ask oneself: Why? Why is it that atheists, agnostics, Christians and Buddhists take to it so quickly and easily? Why is it, indeed, that I have a red velvet Buddha sitting on my shelf, and not a pink fur crucifix or a purple suede Star of David? These questions, banal as they may seem, go to the heart of a cultural transformation currently taking place, and even gaining momentum, within the spiritual landscape of Western(ized) popular culture.

We find ourselves discussing the spirituality of Star Wars, debating the desecularization of science fiction stalwarts such as Star Trek, and in an uproar over the supposedly Wiccan implications of the bestselling Harry Potter books aimed at children. We’ve seen unicorns and ghosts on Ally McBeal, witnessed the transformation of the Material Girl Madonna into the Spiritual Girl, and have become immersed in the fatalism of the film Sliding Doors, not to mention its apocalyptic younger sibling Final Destination.

It’s not so long ago, either, that academia was rushing to comment on the spiritual significance of the public outpouring of grief over Princess Diana’s death. Vaclav Havel, poet, politician and president of the Czech Republic, takes this perspective:

    Today ” we may know immeasurably more about the universe than our ancestors did, and yet, it increasingly seems they knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us.

What is that something? Where has it escaped to? George Lucas, creator of Star Wars, gives us a hint when, in 1999, the year of the release of The Phantom Menace, he describes his series thus:

    It’s designed to make people think about the larger entities and the mysteries of life. Hopefully they will question them. There definitely aren’t enough answers in Star Wars to constitute a religion and I think that the point is to go and look through the religions and find something that has some answers.

And indeed, whether or not spurred on to do so by Star Wars, Western society is turning increasingly to the faiths of past generations as it seeks what Havel describes as ‘the creation of a new model of coexistence among the various cultures, peoples, races, and religious spheres within a single interconnected civilization.” We’re seeing the triumphal return of religion as we become more involved with the majority of the not-yet-secularized world, and begin to doubt our own secularization and blind faith in science and progress.

Too hip: Monk with cell phone and cafe latte

And then there’s postmodern theology. But hang on, you say. Postmodernism, and God? Surely Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard et al. have deconstructed, undermined and generally torn apart religion? Yet the realization has slowly been dawning that there is, indeed must be, as Brian J. Walsh indicates, a “Spiritual Face of Postmodernity”, which moves beyond the “imperialist, other-denying ideology of modernity” to welcome back religion as yet another - if not the ultimate - downcast “other”. If postmodernity is to curb the damage wrought by the often sterile rationalism of modernity, then it must also seek to move beyond the ferocious and even reactionary secularism of the latter.

While it’s too late for the late Foucault and Lyotard to reconsider, the deconstructionist guru Derrida has waded into the debate to argue for ‘the possibility of religion without religion”, where God is no longer seen as a transcendent being, but essentially as the idea of our cumulative, consensual responsibility to all other living creatures. This of course dovetails neatly with the postmodern paradigms of consensual truth and mutual tolerance. At any rate, if even Derrida is feeling obliged to take religion seriously, then there really is something afoot.

While it can be argued that there is increased interest in all things religious and spiritual, what is perhaps most striking is the rediscovery of Eastern religions in recent and contemporary popular culture of the West. Speaking of the role of spirituality in his Star Wars films, Lucas notes: "People have said these films are more Eastern than Western." Meanwhile, self-help books and home decoration magazines are telling us to watch our karma, keep our yin and yang in balance, and redesign our houses according to principles of feng shui. In a quiet moment, you can read Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh or The Te of Piglet; you can watch Dharma and Greg on TV; and you can buy Samsara from the House of Guerlain, who describe it as the place “where Orient and Occident meet”.

Buddhism is given exposure through actors like Richard Gere and Steven Seagal, and airplay, as it were, through the songs of Tina Turner or interviews with Annie Lennox. Pop music, indeed, is full of references to reincarnation, the circle of life, and Hindu or Hare Krishna chants. Meanwhile, gift shops sell ” red velvet Buddhas. Can this be coincidental?

Certainly, those monotheistic faiths, which are based on exclusive truth claims, sit ill with the ideas of consensual truth and mutual tolerance propagated in postmodern culture. There seems to be a highly ambiguous attitude toward our own Christian heritage: this faith which has brought us so much, and yet cost us so dearly. It is not that religion is to be rejected per se, a point which Kevin Smith’s movie Dogma makes quite clearly in respect of Christianity or, more specifically, Catholicism; it is rather church dogma and the supposedly absolute truth in which it is grounded that we must see beyond. As yet, within the Western Church, a certain doctrinal relaxation among various Protestant denominations is far from having been matched by Catholicism. 

Meanwhile, Islam, with its requirement of submission to the will of Allah, and its prescriptive roles for humans, is incompatible with many recent developments in our culture, and Judaism, too, for all its ideological tolerance, clashes with much in the Western cultural landscape as a result of its steadfast belief in the omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience of a transcendental God.

Outside the Middle Eastern-Western pantheon, however, there are faiths of a very different ilk. While there are sometimes great variations between as well as within the major Eastern religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, there is a conspicuous parallelism in their underlying principles. All of these share, to some degree, the idea of one ultimate reality beneath appearances and the interconnectedness of all life; all manifest a lack of dogma and internal hierarchy or authority, a disinclination to proselytizing, and an at least theoretical principle of non-violence.

Most importantly, perhaps, all are tolerant of other religions, allowing that there are many paths to God. Move east from the U.S. and Western Europe, says Johan Galtung, founder of the International Peace Research Institute, and you move toward greater openness and tolerance: “Faith loosens up: rather than the occidental either-or, this faith or that, there is an Oriental both-and, this faith and that one.”

The decline in the appeal of organized religion in the West, and a concomitant increase in personal spirituality, allow for the adoption of eclectic elements from different religions. The above-mentioned aspects of the Eastern religions make them ideally suited to the West’s current cultural concerns such as environmentalism, human rights and international peace; they fit in easily with postmodern models of tolerance, decentered power and deconstruction of binarisms and hierarchies; and moreover, they also link up with the issues of community and responsibility being propagated by various branches of contemporary postsecular theology.

In addition, their popularity is doubtless advanced in no small measure by the man who is, in the West, not only the best-known spokesman for Eastern religions but is perceived to be a victim of Chinese imperialism and - not insignificantly - secularism, namely the Tibetan Dalai Lama, winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, who pleads constantly for tolerance toward others regardless of religious persuasion or lack of it, while stressing the importance of mutual responsibility and co-operation in the establishment of international peace. Small wonder that pop and rock singers have rushed to participate in concerts supporting Tibet; small wonder that Annaud’s Seven Years in Tibet and Scorsese’s Kundun were released in the same 12-month period.

In fact, it’s not just to the East that the West is looking for inspiration, but also to the pockets of resistance which have always existed within Western traditions, as well to a time long ago, before the monotheistic Western faiths first took hold. On the one hand, then, we see a vastly increased interest in mystical traditions of all kinds - Madonna is not alone in turning to the Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), and there is also a widespread fascination with the various internal and often persecuted occult traditions of the European Christian past.

On the other hand, the rise of what have been called neo-pagan religions takes us back to a pre-Christian Europe: the Wiccan faith, for example, clearly represented in the recent music of Sinead O”Connor and storylines in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, is supposedly a reconstruction of ancient Celtic beliefs, and displays astounding similarities to many Eastern religions. It is the rather loosely defined term “New Age”, a designation which has now moved beyond its limited association with Shirley MacLaine going out on a limb, that brings all these disparate threads together in a meeting of pre-Western, countercultural Western and - perhaps predominantly - Eastern traditions.

And there it sits: the red velvet Buddha on my shelf. The Friends of the Western Buddhist Order suggest that for Buddhism to take hold in the West, “it must learn to speak the language of Western culture.” Is that not what my Buddha represents, perhaps in a rather more literal and graphic way than the FWBO might have imagined? Isn’t this really a case of Andy-Warhol-goes-East, or Buddha-goes-to-the-Factory? Is this why so many Westerners take to my Buddha straight away - because the children of postmodern culture recognize, in some way, the clash of East and West which is both resolved and yet, simultaneously, remains unresolved in this single figure?

After all, as Havel reminds us, in a period like ours - one of quotation, imitation and amplification - “[n]ew meaning is gradually born from the encounter, or the intersection, of many different elements.” Is my Buddha not a symbolic recognition that postmodernism, for all its loud extravagance, apparent superficiality and materialism, is moving into a postsecular spiritual search - of which Star Wars is such a clear emblem, in which so many contemporary cultural figures are caught up, and to which even Derrida himself is bowing? And is it not equally a symbol of the potency of the East to provide us with new sources of inspiration as Western faiths seem to be flagging, or at least struggling to disentangle themselves from their own dogmas?

And yet: a word of warning. I am aware that there is, in certain respects, something faintly disturbing about my red velvet Buddha. First, in glossing over the more inconvenient aspects of Eastern religions - as indeed we do in our own homegrown faiths - and adopting only what suits us, we run the risk of betraying the integrity of the religions from which we are quoting, and interacting with them on merely the most superficial level.

Secondly, while it might be argued that the clash of serendipity and kitsch is cleverly conceived in my Buddha, and ironic in that winkwink postmodern way, and while it might even be maintained that in our late capitalist culture, irony is the only mode of critical distancing left open to us, is it not also possible that our cleverness represents a certain shying away from deeper issues we are unsure of how to confront? Thirdly, as always, commercialism rears its ugly head in the selling of spirituality in all its forms, from distorted do-it-yourself versions of the Kabbalah to the feng shui experts who come at a hefty price - not forgetting Madonna’s CDs or George Lucas’s Star Wars merchandise - ” and then there are the red velvet Buddhas in the gift shops. Is the West, in picking and choosing, in recoloring and recoding, in buying and selling, undermining the spirit of the East, enveloping its Oriental otherness in Western trappings? Is my Buddha a bright, empty, saleable shell of something that, far away and long ago, had meaning?

In fact, the current Western vogue for Eastern spirituality is, perhaps like Eastern spirituality itself, less about either-or and more about both-and. Homage, and rip-off. Superficial, and sincere. What is certain is that the Eastern religions, and Buddhism in particular, have become increasingly popular over recent decades, and that our eclectic popular culture is more and more frequently turning eastwards for inspiration.

In our “New Age” cultural search for meaning, we find that many aspects of Eastern faiths sit easily with current Western social issues and beliefs, as well as with postmodern concepts and postsecular theology - much more so than certain aspects of Western faiths. Of course, the issue here is not the intrinsic ‘truth” or “untruth” of these religions; if indeed truth is consensual, and responsibility is mutual, it’s up to us to construct the reality we want, need and ” deserve.

Whatever gaps there may be in our understanding of the East, it seems that we, in the West, can at least appreciate a red velvet Buddha on some level, and for a whole host of reasons. Those reasons are still evolving. Meanwhile, I suspect that it is going to be quite some time before I find a gift shop which sells a pink fur crucifix, or a purple suede Star of David. Then again, you never know. I’ll keep you posted.

Mark A. Pegrum, a lecturer at Queen Margaret University College in Edinburgh, Scotland, has taught in the areas of German and French language, culture and history, European Studies and English as a foreign language. He is the author of Challenging Modernity, a study of the relationship between Dadaism and postmodernism. (Click here to purchase from Politics and Prose.)

Related Sites
From Feed, The Occidental Tourist - Are spiritual expeditions the new wave in recreational travel? Erik Davis reports from India on the "Buddhist Circuit."
Spirituality Infuses the Mainstream, but Who Is Uplifted? "We are in an age or at least a prolonged season of brand names, and among them "spirituality" is one of the most prestigious …" Margo Jefferson writes in The New York Times.
Judith Shulevitz of Slate on Sally Quinn finding religion in a maze, and other new forms of religion.
Beliefnet provides information and inspiration "to help you meet your own religious and spiritual needs." There are sections on various religions, plus a site devoted to spirituality. You can also go shopping or learn how to do yoga.
Want to study Kabbalah? Here’s what you need to know.

Read the entire religion issue
click here >>>