sustainability dharma

Theory (or postmodern theory) will only make sense when we look at the definitions of Modernity, Modernism and Postmodernism because theory can be said to be interchangeable with the term “postmodernism”.

Modernity (also the Modern) is the development of Western history of, say, the last five centuries. Characterized by the rise of capitalism, science and technology, and rational thought, it challenged traditional authority, that of the Christian Church and legitimacy of political power. It can be seen as the beginning of liberalism. But from it also came even more brutal forms of power, like the absolutism of Louis XIV, XV and XVI. And countries such as England and the Netherlands saw political instability but saw the gains through capitalism and Imperial expansionism. And during the Enlightenment the very notion of “Modernity” becomes self-aware, defining itself against previous traditional ways of lifes, Christian dogma and superstition. So by the 19th century transformation and upheaval was seen as the rule.

Modernity can be seen as beginning of the ideas of progress and evolution, and of ideas as different as capitalism and communism. And even today the technological progress is still a place of much of our misplaced hopes. Modernity is now no longer something we celebrate but rather it is something to which we feel we are condemned.

Modernism (also Modernist) which moved on from the novelty, the “scandal and challenge”, of Modernity is a constellation of intellectual and artistic Western ideals from the mid-nineteenth century. And it is a late development of Modernity. Modernism is an awareness of Modernity’s conflict and upheaval. But it also thoroughly believed, perhaps more than Modernity, in progress and evolution. And it had hoped to solve problems brought about by Modernity with more radical and absolute forms of Modernity, creating even more absolute answers. An example of Modernism in politics is Marxism. And Expression, Symbolism, Cubism, Futurism and Art Nouveau are further examples of Modernist art movements.

Postmodernism (also, Postmodernity, the Postmodern and Postmodernist) can be defined as the dismantling of the ideas and beliefs of Modernism, and does not replace the latter. Postmodernism maintains a relationship with and relativism to Modernism. It returns with rigour to older ideals but in renewed fashion. In art and literature figure painting and realism respectively becomes important once again. Irony and pastiche – rather than metaphysics and parody – become the main vehicles for expression. And with its borrowing of styles it becomes clear that Postmodernism is both anti-authoritarian and anti-foundational in outlook.

Examples of Postmodernism are Deconstruction, Psychoanalytic Criticism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminist Criticism, Queer Theory, Poststructualism, Neo-Marxist Criticism, Post-colonial Theory, Reader Response Theory, Postmodernism (as a self-aware position), New Pragmatism, etc. Names associated with Postmodernism are Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, Kristeva, Said, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, Deleuze, Lacan, etc.

In Buddhism, the understanding is that there is no-self (anatman), or rather, what we believe as the self is not what it seems to be. Put in another way, there is no concept of Soul as in the Western sense. And also because there is no belief in a soul there is no final resting place like Heaven. Life just extinguishes (nirvana). The Buddha came to this conclusion through thorough analysis of the conditions of life.

But if there is no Soul and Heaven then who or what is it that gives us our identity and purpose? It is a loaded assumption, of course, that there needs to be either or both in order to exist, much like the meaning of a word.

Jacques Derrida, that Deconstructionist, in his study of the structural linguistics of Saussure came up with the concept of differance. The spelling is not a mistake but an invented word to describe something which had no construction until then (Deconstructionists will tell you it is a non-concept). It is pronounced (in French at least) the same as ‘difference’, the word it relates, but also differs, to it at the same time. It is also related to ‘defer’ in meaning. Playful was this man.

Saussure had brought to light two important properties of language. First, is that a word (signifier) and the thing it represents (signified) are completely arbitrary (see sign). There is no reason why any word should represent any object. If that be the case then the name of an object would be same in all languages. But there is no such determination in language. Some may argue that certain words are imitations of the object or concept (eg. gong, bang) but even then this does not determine that it will be the same across languages.

The second property is that a word gains its identity from its difference to other words. A symbol, therefore, only means something because it is in a system of signs. So, for example, to add an extra letter to English alphabet would mean nothing unless it plays a role within the system of the English language. Similarly to introduce a new word into a language doesn’t guarantee its use. That can only be done through agreement by at least two people of the language in question.

What Derrida did with this structural linguistic concept was to take it to its logical conclusion. So if there is nothing but differences within the system, it must necessarily mean that they do not have an inherit meaning or definition. And this is what is meant by Derrida when he says meaning is ‘deferred’, that words cannot come to full and independent meaning. He says words are forever partially marked by absence.

But, as far as I can tell, the Derrida’s concept of differance was only limited to the study of signifiers, or words. It seems logical, to me, to extent this also to the entire system of signifieds, to see meaning as created from the difference between all objects.

And so, if we extend this to the concept of No-self and see it is like the concept of differance, we will see they are similar in that they both believe that no internal meaning is possible. Or to go by the deconstruction logic, what we call the self relies on everything else for its definition.

And in a similar vein interconnectedness in ecology works in the same way, that nothing independently exists, but that everything is part of the intricate web of life. All three areas of thought seem to have a commonality. They dif(f)er only by their choice of words or path to the conclusion.

My mother is retired. She surfs the net daily for things to read. Before the advent of the internet she would read from the “dead tree media”. Her favourite magazines were Time and Fortune. While these two magazines had some worthwhile things to say they were somewhat biased and popular in their opinion. And being young and stupid back then (instead of now being old and stupid) I read them and was persuaded by their arguments. We all have a time or an age when we do not question.

Recently she sent me this article. In it the author had wanted to point out that there are other arguments for the cause of global warming. One of these arguments is that the sun’s natural fluctuation is the main cause of our present situation. She had wanted me to read this and be convinced by its argument. But as a son who knows his parents all too well I understood her agenda.

Sure, the IPCC has made some pretty “solid” claims, and that the article I have mentioned here points out its decision making and presentation of the report have been somewhat unorthodox. The article continues by presenting a number of scientists whose views differ from the mainstream sustainability critics.

It has a point, but I do not completely agree.

I have no doubt that the sun’s natural fluctuation can be a cause of global warming. But in all probability it may not be the only cause. This argument again works exactly the same way as in the opponent’s argument. To say that our own actions are the only cause to global warming may be as shortsighted as saying the sun is the only cause. So, to me, both camps are in the wrong.

I can understand why the “blame human activity” camp feel they need to make it so black and white – to make the problem seem more urgent. But also the “it could be the sun” camp may want to highlight that its cause may be elsewhere.

Coming back to my mother’s agenda I mentioned earlier, I have to say that she has never been very green. She brought me up to be also not very green. But as I began to live my own life I realized just what and how exactly the non-green crowd works. In taking up this article my mother had wanted me to believe that it really all the sun’s fault, that the IPCC are lying, hiding an agenda of their own. But need it be this black and white?

Sure the IPCC may have failed in taking into account of the sun, and that they may have deceived us in believing it is all us. But equally people who think they can (mis)quote the article to absolve themselves of responsibility are wrong. That is not to say my mother was irresponsible. She and most of her generation had been persuaded to believe that they were doing right by progress. They use the argument to convince themselves their actions had nothing to do the problem, by becoming sceptical optimists or do-nothing optimists.

Personally, I think the article is a good reminder of the types of hidden agendas each group puts forward to “defend the utter fragility of [their] delicately constituted fiction” as Earnest Becker put it. And because we live in an age of information overload learning to filter and make sense of it all is not quite so easy. And that sometimes living away from loved ones and seeing them or talking to them again after a break may help us see the real picture which may be not be black and white at all but colourful and confusing.

In my last post I had neglected to mention another article in the Daily Yomiuri on the same page and day about how the spread of disease can be slowed simply by opening the windows. I had so much ground to cover (I covered too much) that I didn’t feel I could put that in. But I think it is important.

Technology – if you consider our literally rock-solid housing techniques as technology – runs counter to our desire to live. This, of course, is how the human species is today. We have chosen to live as far apart from the nature, to segregate “us” from “them”. Yet life’s four billion years in the making can end within our lifetime. Of course, it won’t. Humans are more resilient than we think, as are the “other animals” we share the planet with. But many will suffer unnecessarily for our lifestyle.

So open a window. Open the windows of your home, of your car, the bus, the train, the place where you work. Reconnect with the outside world again, not just to slow disease. Go beyond the city limits and remember the way man had lived for more than a hundred thousand years. Go beyond the forest and try to find a place where no human traces exist. It may feel “foreign” at first, but then again we must ask why it should feel foreign in the first place.

No, I am not trying to be mystical here. I am not trying on flower power. But neither am I saying we should take the other extreme and live so far from the reality that we forget how much of our life depends – has depended – on the entire fabric of the biosphere.

Stop this senselessness before it causes any more suffering. Say “less to technology” and more to living. Open a window instead of opening your browser.

If you have been following this blog then you would know I dislike technology. You may be saying, “Well, if you dislike it so much then why are you using the internet?” A good question and one I will have to answer.

For me technology and science are not the same thing. You might be here thinking I am stating the obvious but I am not. Technology and science, of course, has a lot to do with each other. Many, if not all, of the great scientific discoveries have gone on to change our lives. But changing our lives can be done in many ways. A scientific discovery may help our understanding of our world. But there is a definite push, today, towards applying what we have learned and know to manipulate the world.

A while back I had read an excellent biography on Isaac Newton (of that title) by James Gleick. The feeling I get from this biography about the man (and the period) was that our concerns were – largely – about the knowledge and understanding of the nature of the world. While, of course, Newton was worried about credit due to him (he was a very secretive person) it was the knowledge that was important.

But this all seemed to have changed with the Industrial Revolution. Today in our concerns are on “how we can make the most everything”. Whether it is the money in our pockets, the time on our hands (or sometimes even the love that we receive). The word we use is efficiency. But our usage of it is misleading. We used to use the word to indicate little wastage. But before we can understand what we had meant by efficiency we will have to look at this word, waste, because this word also has metamorphosed over time.

It seems waste once had meant not using more than we need to. While we still use it in this sense we apply it to different values. The question is what? Not really that hard. I do not need to do an Z-score corpus analysis of the word to guess that “waste” these days collocates with “time”, “money” and “energy” (as in “a waste of time”). Otherwise it collocates with adjectives like “toxic”, disposal” and “radioactive” (as in “radioactive waste”). This second usage is interesting because it is now a product, a noun, and cannot be made into a verb. It no longer is an action but a thing.

I am just amused that no one actually has come out and say something like “All this waste is a waste”.

But coming back to efficiency. Waste and efficiency are not the same thing, though they are seen confusingly as such. Efficiency is about getting the most out of use. Waste (as a verb) is about using less of what is there. The philosophy is like the “half empty or half full” glass question. And the assumption with efficiency is that what is there is for us to use. And this way of thinking has rubbed off onto waste also. We can only see waste as mostly being about one’s time, money or energy.

No, the world around us is not there to be used indiscriminately by us. It may seem that way. But that is what the old fashioned capitalists, neo-liberalists and cultural imperialists want you to believe. Because it is about the money and the power to make the money.

I’ve strayed from the topic here a little.

If we use science to learn and understand the world we live in and how we should relate to it then we are on a safe and wise path. But we turn science into technology for profit and manipulation then we are losing our grip on the reality and respect for our home. The more I think about it the more that it is for money. The ability to manipulate the inanimate and animate world is for money.

Yes, with what I say, the livelihood of millions are at stake here. No, technology is not the answer. It is not even the real cause of all our woes (though it is the direct physical cause of the environmental problems). The origin is in the philosophy of technology which is manipulated by the philosophy of economics. This in turn has to do with our attitude. The story is complex and beyond a one thousand word post.

But let’s take a quick look at one recent article on technology and the environment. I found this in last week’s Daily Yomiuri – recordings of endangered species to use as cell phone ring tones to spread awareness. The creators of the ring tones, Center for Biological Diversity, believes that if people hear more of these sounds they will be inspired to do something about the environment.

But no, this isn’t the answer either. There are enough people out there, including me, who are getting people to notice. I wouldn’t say the message is falling on deaf ears. But rather we have dug ourselves so deep into this rely-on-technology hole that we cannot get out of it even if we want to.

That we have done without the mobile phones for a million years until now of human history, I think we can go without it for at least a day. And I certainly do not need a ring tone to know that the planet is in trouble.

So coming back to the internet. What am I doing online if I am so against it? Again, I am not against the internet as such but its indiscriminate use. I choose to use it not for entertainment but for learning and teaching (I can see the abuses coming in from this post now). Every person has a choice. I choose not to waste the tremendous energy required to run the internet for wasteful games, cheap laughs or loveless porn (no, there is no such thing as porn with love).

I choose to use it for the environment.

This month David Suzuki has kicked off a year’s schedule of talks across Canada. If you are fortunate enough to be able to get to one of the venues and hear him talk it is well worth the while. I saw a televised speech of his in Australia and I was changed by it. It is statements like this following one by him that made me understand what is wrong with the way we are living:

The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are our biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity – then we will treat each one with greater respect. That is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective. (From A David Suzuki Collection)

I think respect is the key word here. We simply do not treat the world with respect. He mentioned earlier in the same piece I quoted from that if we could see how the world has changed in four billion years to become a life sustaining planet for all life including ours then we will be humbled by what we have, and understand that is not for us to indiscriminately take as though we own it, but to share with all other life.

This week I also saw An Inconvenient Truth. It was a little late in coming to Japan (early this month, to my neck of the woods). I was also too busy with final reports to make the seventy minute drive to see it in town.

The film had stated much of what I already knew. So I do not think the film is there to convince people like me. But rather it was a film to preach to those yet to be convinced or have not heard the message yet. In that sense it is a necessary film. But why does it have to be from a former politician before we will listen? Anyone could have said it with the same evidence in hand. People are already saying it. People like David Suzuki have already said it. So it must necessarily say something about the culture of America, to whom much of it was aimed, that they will only listen if it is from someone important.

Mr Gore did make one point which I have always harped about here – that disinformation and deliberately confusing the public by false talk has prolonged the problem. We have not been playing on a level field when it comes to information dissemination. By scare tactics and other means the public has been split into two or more minds. And it comes back to the concepts of propaganda, advertising and commercialism.

So how do we deal with the agenda of others which are not the best for sustainability? In the West that is dominated by advertising, a kind of capitalist propaganda if you will, the highest bidder gets to persuade us that buying is good, not just their product but any product. This idea is therefore not about just one producer but about producers as a collective. I don’t want to sound Marxist but Karl Marx had a point. What scares me is not the fact we don’t have choices, but that we are only seemingly making free choices when we are not. So Capitalism is no better than Communism, if you look at it this way. Personally both systems fail. There are only two choices in our current paradigm so we must only choose between the two evils.

The pseudo-choice concept isn’t new of course, but it needs to be remembered or recalled. Those studies of the 1970s and 1980s on advertising have all but been forgotten. My favourite books from that period have to be Ways of Seeing by John Berger and On Photography by Susan Sontag. It has a lot to say about our use of images and imagery still relevant (if not more) to today’s advertising-polluted world.

And just a final note: the strategies used in Mr Gore’s “award winning” documentary also come from this same well-honed philosophical logo-technology (as in “logos” or “word”). It is slick, almost too slick, but you can notice its agenda if you look hard enough.

You are what you speak.

We have come to understand in our postmodern age very well that words can betray your ideology. For example, Hegelian view on history on as a series of thesis, antithesis and synthesis reveals a preference to the idea of progress as something unidirectional and upward, when it is that goes both ways and possibly more. The very word ‘progress’ shows this. Or the Structuralists’s liking for concrete descriptions and fixity. Roland Barthes try as he may to go beyond the the restrictions of talking about things in terms of codes only gets stuck in the terminology which lack freedom.

This understanding is nothing new, of course. We have stuggled with this problem, seen through it, and returned to blindness by forgetfulness by being swept up in the heat of the moment. Our attention had been distracted for one moment and we have lost sight of the task at hand.

The rigor with which Derrida took to task was a guiding example of how language refuses to stop to deceive us. And his passing is also an example how we revert back to the norm all because of the nature of language – that things do not last forever. It hides its very nature like an entity which cannot perceive itself from where it stands. We must simply speak outside of language.

And in the same way the Buddha showed us that we must be mindful of what we do and what we say at all times simply because we are prone to inattentativeness.

So why am I not happy about Bhutan’s King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuk’s philosophy of Gross National Happiness? If language was a guide to our internal beliefs then this term says a lot about where its ideas come from. Having studied in Oxford the King has an “understanding” of the Western culture and ideas. But the choice of the term necessarily betrays that he may not understand the power of language.

Right speech is one of the basic beliefs of the Buddha and Buddhism. And in choosing to continue to use the psuedo-economic terms, to dress it in the langauge of money, is to fall into the linguistic trap. The idea has the potential to become a wolf in sleep’s clothing.

And this months signing of a new and “updated” treaty between India and Bhutan has, in my opinion, taken the country “three steps back”. In it Bhutan now has more freedom to control its own foreign policies and, in particular, the freedom to purchase non-lethal military arms means the country is ever moving closer to the Western ideals of nationhood, and moving away from the Buddhist ideals of self-control and vigilance. That the Pandora’s box had been open by the introduction of television and the internet in the last decade has caused unprecedented changes within the nation, its people and its thinking.

Some have called this a bold experiment but really I think this is just the beginning of a mistake. When people start to talk differently, talk like they are businessmen, then you know there is a problem. Again, it is not easy to see where careless wording can lead. Democracy is not about freedom of choice, it is really about the ability to sell you something you do not need. Democracy has been tied to capitalism more than liberalism. Freedom is only an excuse for opening up potential markets. And if the King cannot see this how can the nation.

Perhaps some have seen this and are hoping to profit. But that is only because they – the West – are “poorer spiritually” or “morally bankrupt” to use economic metaphors. It should be clear by now that finance, money and economics dominates our (Western) culture and it is “on the march” (military metaphor) globally.

Enough said. I think I’ll end all this metaphoric mumbo jumbo here.

My father came to visit recently. As a habit we try to see each other once a year. As he works for a multinational company he is always on the move flying around globetrotting to meetings. So getting together for a couple of days is usually all we can manage.

This also means he is very much a person who believes in business as a way of life. His business life is something I am not particularly fond of. Personally I want to be a teacher or academic even though these jobs are not without its own politics. It is really a pick from a bad bunch of livelihoods.

So it is during these couples of days that I get to talk to (read: argue with) him about business ethics and philosophy. This time we talked about the relationship between science and sustainability. We agreed that global warming that is happening right now and that something needs to give. However he believed science will create new technologies which have less impact on the environment, that it will eventually save the planet from death by consumerism.

And it is this belief in science that we differ.

To me there are two types of scientists – Observers and Manipulators. To the Observer science is a tool for investigating the nature of the universe. Observers want to know the fundamental laws of motion. So they invent things like calculus and telescopes to gain this knowledge. The object of their investigation is the world. It is to be looked at, to be learned from and to be understood. Observers do not touch the object that is under investigation. By contrast to the Manipulator science is a tool for tampering with the very nature of the universe. The Manipulator wants to know how much they can get out of the world. So they create things like machines for mass production and the electric light bulb for personal, and often short-term, gain. The objective of their investigation is to find ways to apply their knowledge for gain and to see how efficiently something can be produced for consumption. To the Manipulator the world is to be played with, to be harnessed and harvested, to be made a slave of its technological master.

Observers are the astronomers, the oceanographers, the meteorologists of this world; Manipulators are the research scientists, the inventors, the designers of this same world. So it is really a choice as to how we want to relate to the environment, what we choose to do with it or to do to it.

I believe that much of our problems are from the application of science in the form of technology, and that it has snowballed into something bigger because we have tried to use more science to solve these problems. So the advent of science is akin to opening Pandora’s Box or starting a vicous circle. While both seem to imply we cannot reverse the course, I do not believe science’s blunders are irreversible. It may be difficult but not impossible. And certainly using less technology and reverting to a simpler lifestyle will help.

So whether science will save the environment really depends on when we will listen to the Observers over the Manipulators. By nature Observers are the silent type and Manipulators are the loud type, and so their seems to be only ever one discourse – that of the Manipulator. This seems to mean it is not only important for the Observers to scream their silent scream as loudly as they can, but also for us to be listening for it.

Recently I had to evaluate a writing textbook for my Teaching Writing class. It was a textbook for teaching English writing to second language students for academic purposes. So the articles were all social related.

The chapter I chose to examine was called Our Earth, Our Resources, Our Environment., a chapter obviously about sustainability issues. Yet the title struck me as problematic. Not that the Earth the resources and the environment are unimportant words (they are undoubtedly “trend words” for today) but it was how they were determined. The other three words or to be exact the other word repeated three times – our – was just begging for criticism.

Of the three possessive cases that occurred in this short “punchy” title resources stood out for me. What are resources and who owns them? These are questions I would like to answer here. The Oxford English Minidictionary on my desk defines resource as “a supply of an asset to be used when needed”. A fair and straightforward definition. But what about the assumptions of the word. The use of the words supply and asset are interesting here because they are not words usually associated with the environment, especially the protection of it.

And what about the verb form? It is in the passive. Passive sentences have a feature which make it a favourite of some writers because of what it can hide or ignore – the doer. To complete the definition it omits the doer partly because it is assumed and partly because it wants to obscure its negative impact. Let me put it another way: I do not know of too many animals that see the trees and mountains as “supply”, “asset” or “resource”. These are wholly human terms.

Habitat may be a better word to describe the areas we term resource. But that too has its problems. It is always “the dwarf mongooses’ habitat” or simply “their habitat”. usually it is not an area human inhabit but always a step removed from, or to look at from the outside. In other words, it is the The Other world or place and not ours.

About five minutes drive from my home is a quarry. I literally drive through it almost everyday to get to and from college. Every time I do so I shudder. Slowly what once was a mountain, a forest and habitat for animals is now bare yellow sandy rock. The huge bulldozers power shovels and dump trucks that sit by the roadside has gradually been transported away to some factory somewhere for use, for human consumption. The mountain face that once dominated my peripheral vision as I drive now opens up to a dusty sky. How sad. I wonder if the workers don’t feel any loss by this. I do. But I guess it represents food on the table for them.

Last year I wrote a very short piece about Proudon’s famous statement “property is theft”. In this piece I deconstructed the term property and turned it on to itself, saying we are really stealing from ourselves. I still feel the same way now but I must qualify it. Not that I am an anarchist or believe in anarchy (not in the popular meaning of the word anyway), rather the things in the environment do not belong solely to us, the human species.

Animals, I feel, have the right to the use and protect their home and the place which feeds them. This may be a mountain or a forest, the very place we call a resource, our resource. Yet they literally do not have representation. Animal rights groups may attempt to speak for them but it may seem – to the other on the other side of the fence – futile and naive to try to protect them.

It reminds me of the scene in Seven Years in Tibet where the monks were shown spending an entire week removing all the worms they could find from a plot of land being prepared for a new building. This was so they do not harm life or kill. Jainism, another religion that developed in India practices similarly.

And it is this fundamental respect for life – that is lacking in Western thinking, economy, politics, philosophy, etc – that I would like to point out.

When I was in 21 I became a monk. In preparation for my move I sold everything I had. At first the lack of possession was rather unsettling but I slowly felt liberated by the loss of the burden toward my things. I do not know when but I had come to understand why Buddha taught this way of living and what it means to be living as a monk.

Once I had renounced possessions once I felt I did not need to have more. Nor do I feel nowadays the sense of loss when something is taken or given away. I now question whether it is really necessary for me to have something before I buy or receive it. And I look at the mountains not as something for me to enjoy but that the joy given to me is by its grace and its non-possession of me.

Right now I am readng Paul Baker’s excellent book Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. A corpus or corpora are linguists’ tool to uncover hidden agendas within language use. I was particularly interested in the chapter about collocation where Baker focused on the use in English of the words bachelor and spinster. But it wasn’t so much how these words are used but rather who uses these terms that caught my attention.

Spinster is almost always used by someone else who is usually not a “spinster” to refer to someone who is. An unmarried person would almost never use this term to refer to herself. The same could be said of bachelor but it has a more positive meaning. Depending on factors like age and social status being referred to as a bachelor does not necessarily have a negative connotation. But the term spinster invariably is negative.

So you may be wondering what does Hinayana Buddhism has to do with the term spinster? Bare with me for a moment. My introduction into Buddhism was through Zen. I actually became a lay monk. Zen has some very good aspects about it. But like most religions or sects it constructs itself to be the norm. It was years later before I would take a step back and look at Zen from the “outside”.

When one looks at Buddhist history one will definitely come across the terms Hinayana and Mahayana. Hinayana literally is the “lesser vehicle” and Mahayana is the “greater vehicle”. The type of Buddhism practiced in Japan comes under the umbrella term of Mahayana. Historically it is a kind of Buddhism developed later. As the term suggests it is “superior” to the Hinayana.

But this is really strange. Why would anyone – the Hinayana – want to make derogatory their own practice. This is fact is not the case. The Hinayana Buddhists never use the term to refer to themselves. They usually use the term Theravada. Theravada Buddhism is the only surviving Buddhism of the early form. They pride themselves in being the closest to the original teaching of the Buddha (and whether this is a necessarily a good thing or not is another debate). So like spinster it is a term used to refer to The Other. This of course has a lot to do with power play and legitimation of one’s own discourse. The term Mahayana really has no meaning other than in contrast to its binary – Hinayana.

I have had dialogues with Zen Buddhists who think these terms are not an issue. But I believe they are and they need to be looked at in order to understand what their own beliefs are because to not question one’s position is to be blinded by it. I would hate to think what would a spinster Hinayana Buddhist would think of all this?