buddha, ishmael, and said

Many of the principals articulated in the passages about Jainism were reminiscent of the perspectives advocated in Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. Rather than logically justifying an environmental sensibility due to our mutual dependence on the environment, Jainism makes a moral argument. One should treat the environment with respect because of our “moral obligation toward nonhuman creation” (178). The reading of Jainism stretches to challenging dominant Western epistemologies, with the claim that “the most urgent task of both science and religion is to assert the unity and sacredness of creation, and to reconsider the role of humans in it” (178). This is similar to Ishmael’s altered reading of Genesis in order to advance a more inclusive world-vision. Science has also been critiqued in the Earthlings documentary, with scientific testing being responsible for the justification of inflicting pain on animals within our own University of Texas. Perhaps the most striking similarity between Jainism and Ishmael is the focus on confronting the “psychological pollution within ourselves” (178). This is reminiscent of Ishmael’s claim that we are “captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live” (Quinn 25). In this way, the explanation for environmental destruction is located in our own micro-relations with consumption practices instead of in macro-institutions such as corporations.

jainism

While the Jainism passages were engaging, I was apprehensive about the NeoConfucian Manifesto text. I couldn’t help but recall Edward Said’s criticism of essentializing portrayals of the Orient in his landmark book Orientalism. This association is more than textual, considering the piece uses the terminology of the Orient itself. I found the establishment of static categories of the West and East and extrapolating broad cultural differences between these two societies to be abstracted beyond usefulness. The author argues, “This is the prime cause of the West’s difficulty in achieving communion with the East. Authentic communication is possible only if the participant parties present an “empty mind” ready to identify with one another” (206). Moreover, the text argues that the West can learn a “feeling of mildness and compassion” from the Orient (207). Modernization and globalization have rendered many of these more traditional understandings of Eastern culture (China is specifically prominent in the text) largely obsolete. Secular forces are extremely prominent in China, and these representations of the Orient could propagate stereotypical dispositions towards other cultures. The text even goes so far to make the claim that Western modes of compassion through social services is one which its “oriental counterparts cannot measure up” (207). This claim is rendered questionable by the robust welfare state of Japan, an image of the Orient which is foreclosed by this more essentializing perspective. Rey Chow argues that through this “browsing through different "local" cultures, we produce an infinite number of "natives," all with predictably automaton-like features that do not so much de-universalize Western hegemony as they confirm its protean capacity for infinite displacement. The "authentic" native, like the aura in a kind of mise-en-abime, keeps receding from our grasp” (Chow 46). Rather than allowing this analysis to recreate an “authentic” native in the Orient who celebrates mysticism and calls for (what could be perceived as) pagan lifestyles, we must contextualize these historical beliefs of Buddhism with modern forces in order to paint a more complicated picture of the cultural practices in the Orient.

homogenizing the Orient under these representations is problematic

Rey Chow. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. 1993.