Finding Linkages

  I have noticed that recently, I have been caught up in a lot of planning events for the Buddhist organization of which I am an active volunteer. One of the interesting things about it is that I observe throughout the process how I can participate or often fail to participate, either through insufficient knowledge of simply a lack of incentive. Without a knowledge base in traditional Chinese culture which undergirds the Chan Buddhist group, I often find myself in the role of a kind of solitary observer, who doesn't have too many valuable insights to contribute to the discussion on hand. During those times, being able to link the new traditions to what I know or understand can be quite tricky, and often requires a kind of complex parallel processing which moves between different ways of looking or thinking. I believe this is perhaps one of the reasons why I am not only reading books from Chan Buddhism itself. In order to delve into what I am experiencing, I often find myself drawing from sociological texts as well (Peter Berger and Sara Ahmed's books being among my favorites), as well as anthropological studies on Buddhist customs or teachings.
   I wonder if perhaps anthropology and sociology are not so much 'hard sciences' per se as they are valuable ways of seeing the world which lie somewhere midway between a 'purist' observational stance and the knowledge that comes from deep participation in a process or a community. What makes both perspectives unique lies in the way they approach things from a constructivist slant, where they are exploring the self and social identity as something that is continually constructed and moulded, rather than as something fixed and transcendental. Such a perspective can enrich one's spiritual life by giving her or him the space to explore what happens in a person's thinking patterns relative to the interpersonal and cultural dynamics that happen around and through them. I think this perspective is a kind of necessity to Buddhism, because Buddhists do not uphold the view of a fixed soul, and are more bound to suggest that self is the ongoing dynamic of inter-being rather than a kind of fixed and predictable progression within. Without the balancing processes of looking at things sociologically, it's sometimes possible to trick oneself into believing that everyone's experience of a spiritual community is going to be exactly the same, or bounded by the same rules or progression.