Special Issue: Cognitive Science of Religion (Guest-editor: Ilkka Pyysiäinen)
Author Affiliations: Department of Interdisciplinary Studies , Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University , 209 Major Williams, Blacksburg, VA, 24061, USA E-mail:
摘要
(If an abstract can ever be ‘abstract’?) Buddhism (and, more generally, religion) has never been thought as a question ‐ that is, as a question inseparable from the question of the political. The academic study of Buddhism continues to be dominated by an empiricist, humanist, and even humanitarian project, shackled by modes of knowledge production, within the garrisons of colonialist area studies. No textualizing, anthropologizing, historicizing approach ‐ however, critical it may be ‐ can avoid the trap of humanism. To think the question of religion, one must begin to think it and its heritage as an aporia, an irreducible contradiction. In reading Qadri Ismail's Abiding by Sri Lanka, I argue that reflecting on the aporia of religion ‐ whose legacy is not a ‘problem’ to be solved, inherited, or abandoned ‐ might well enable us to imagine a notion of the political hitherto unheard of.
