A Clarion Call for Buddhism
A Critique of Western Buddhism: Ruins of the Buddhist Real
by Glenn Wallis
Bloomsbury Academic, 2018 232 pages; $114
“WESTERN BUDDHISM MUST BE RUINED.” With that ringing sentence, Glenn Wallis throws down his challenge to readers. In his provocative new book, A Critique of Western Buddhism: Ruins of the Buddhist Real, Wallis takes on the complacencies and complicities of what he identifies as Western Buddhism and offers a rigorous philosophical remediation: “ruin,” in the special sense in which he uses the term. Drawing on Continental European philosophical traditions, in particular the contemporary French thinker François Laruelle, Wallis attempts to open new critical and philosophical possibilities from within Buddhism.
Wallis’ distaste at what he identifies as Western Buddhism’s neoliberal accommodations and consumerist desires clearly fuels the urgency of his mission. He skewers a range of contemporary Western Buddhist developments, ranging from the corporate mindfulness movement to timely examples of hypocrisy and violence, such as sexual predation by Buddhist teachers and genocidal attacks by Burmese Buddhists against the Rohingya in Myanmar. Yet this book aims to offer more than a simple critique of the manifestations of Buddhist malaise.
