the buddha and the barcode

Cover artwork by Bernadette Acht

What if anything does a 25-century-old Asian philosophy have to do with the contemporary west? (How) is it possible to start thinking from a different place, not just in superficial ways but working on the structure of our mental and emotional processes?

In the 1990s and 2000s, teaching meditation and Buddhism around Ireland was a very concrete way of supporting people’s attempts to get free of abusively patriarchal upbringings and challenging the structures of religious power in Irish society (it took 35 years of struggle for abortion to finally become legal in 2018, and most schools and hospitals are still in religious hands). This kind of teaching – with no resources, little time, very different and wide-ranging learners and a very practical orientation – was also a really interesting pedagogical problem.

At the same time, a publisher who will remain nameless commissioned a short introduction to Buddhism for young, educated newcomes – and wanted it in two months. I duly wrote the book, only for them to cancel the whole series… More than a decade later, the Finnish NGO publisher into-ebooks published it as a free e-book, now available here:

The Buddha and the barcode: understanding Buddhism in the twenty-first century (Helsinki / Dublin: into-ebooks / Dublin Buddhist Centre, 2011)

The book is very much shaped by that experience of small meditation groups in borrowed venues and people’s homes around Ireland. Two decades later, I’ve learned a lot more and would probably write a rather different book – except that what I write about Buddhism today falls into the non-confessional academic study of religions, which is focussed on what human beings actually do with religions (not what religions are supposed to be or what religious officials want people to do).

In a world where theologians keep trying to slide their religious commitments into academia, and are busy trying to remake themselves as experts on everything under the sun and beyond it, it’s really important to distinguish between the two activities of writing to serve a pre-existing religious commitment, and honest research on religions as they actually are. In Ireland, like many western countries, there is still an old institutional base of theologians and philosophers whose jobs were tied to specific Christian denominations but who – since the collapse of religious vocations – are now rebranding themselves as specialists in religious studies without rethinking their personal or institutional relationship to the subject.

As Brian Bocking commented, the difference between theologians and religious studies researchers is that theologians don’t realise there is a difference. Religious studies works with research that anyone can verify independent of their own religious position – and it is much more about what people do with religion than what they are supposed to do with it. Not to mention the minor intellectual fact that our jobs aren’t dependent on toeing a particular denominational line – freedom is no small thing in this area.

Put another way, I’m still a practising Buddhist, but I don’t write as a Buddhist for Buddhists. My research in the area is about what people do under that heading (which in Ireland is often … quite idiosyncratic), not about what Buddhism “really is”.

Still, westerners who are interested in decolonising their own thinking, what Michael Yellow Bird rather wonderfully calls neurodecolonization, could do a lot worse than engage seriously with some (non-Orientalist) Buddhist thought and practices. You can find a very large proportion of the Pali Canon in English translation free online here. The (much larger) Mahayana canon is not yet so well served, but this site is a start. I don’t recommend learning meditation from books though!

Joining the circle back to social movements, the activist US Buddhist Peace Fellowship does some excellent work. The Catalunya-based Ecodharma centre, also very much practising engaged Buddhism, isn’t currently running events but their website still has some useful material.

You can find more on the maverick Irish sailor, hobo, Buddhist monk and anti-colonial activist U Dhammaloka on this page, and more about Buddhism and Ireland here.