1.

The great German theologian Adolf von Harnack was satirised by a
contemporary, George Tyrrell, who famously remarked that ‘The Christ
that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic
darkness, is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at
the bottom of a deep well.’¹

In this eloquent and provocative critique of the ‘Engaged Buddhism’
movement, Ian Kidd offers a similar satirical thought about Buddhists
who look down the well of the centuries and find just what they were
looking for reflected back at them: the Buddha as social activist,
liberal, feminist, egalitarian. Kidd’s view, by contrast, is that if we
study the early suttas we shall find that this picture not only has no
purchase but, if anything, is contradicted by the evidence. He writes:

I suspect what most people think of as ‘Buddhism’ is really shaped by
some kind of engaged Buddhist image. I think that’s a problem: the
fidelity of those images to the teachings of the Buddha is very
questionable.

By ‘the teachings’, I mean the suttas or discourses that are taken
to be the earliest statement of the Buddha’s teachings.

The question for Kidd is whether engaged Buddhism distorts those
teachings, whether it is faithful to or consistent with those teachings,
and he remarks

I only want to provoke doubts about whether the ethos of engaged
Buddhism is consistent with what the Buddha taught. We can find
perfectly good reasons to want to address racism, economic inequality,
and unsustainable abuse of the environment. But few, if any of these
will be drawn from the teachings of the Buddha.

Now, when Kidd talks of ‘consistency with’ or ‘fidelity to’ the earliest
statements of the Buddha’s teaching it may look to some as though he
endorses a traditionalism which resists the critical developments
which define a living tradition, which can both correct and be
corrected by the past. I think such a reading would be a mistake. Kidd
is asking whether or not the engaged Buddhism movement distorts the
past in order to justify its own position.

Is Buddhism essentially quietist and pessimistic about the human condition? 

Nevertheless, the questions crowd in. Is this what engaged Buddhists are
doing? Aren’t those conclusions of Nineteenth Century European scholars
and philosophers more accurate? – that Buddhism is essentially quietist,
and pessimistic about the human condition? Does an ‘engaged’ Buddhist
really have to draw on this picture of the Buddha as a ‘social
activist’ to find support for their own activism? Should …

Read the full article which is published on Daily Philosophy (external link)