NASCENT SPECULATIVE NON-BUDDHISM

Abstract: The present article is a contribution to a particularly urgent issue that is unfolding in Buddhist circles in North America and Europe. Although this issue is framed in various ways, it revolves around a single question; namely, what form will contemporary reconfigurations of Buddhism take in the twenty-first century West? The most influential groups in this discussion to date are those that style themselves secular-, progressive-, atheist-, agnostic-, liberal-, and post-traditional Buddhist. As these groups gain adherents in the West, traditional organizations, such as the various Zens, Tibetans, Vipassanas, etc., are stating their claim to “Buddhism ” with increasingly vehement proprietorship. The present article, however, is not yet another attempt to reformulate or reform (in any sense of the term) “Buddhism. ” Neither is it concerned with ameliorating traditional Buddhism's relationship with contemporary western secular values. In performing its first task, however, my emerging theory, called “speculative non-buddhism, ” can contribute to the current debate in a decisive way by showing that all forms of Buddhism are identical. What makes them so is that they are all governed by what I call “buddhistic decision: ” the syntactical structure that constitutes all things, discourse, and people, “Buddhist. ” Decision thus constitutes both the ideological nature, and the ideological constant, of “Buddhism.