Rick Fields believes that the current trouble with authority in American Buddhism arises in part from the attempt to transplant an oriental monastery/temple tradition into an occidental setting of laymen and women, neither monks nor priests. By analogy, the troubles in American Hinduism might be seen to emerge from the transportation of a rigid system of caste and social role (in which 'householders' cannot be sadhus) into a society based on the rejection of the validity of such roles. But what of Islam, which has neither priests nor monks, and in which the ideal Sufi remains 'in the world'—family, job, etc.—'but not of it?' In Fields's theory such institutions would be relatively easy to adapt to Western 'democratic' social structures. Perhaps, however, the problem is not at root one of incomparable social structures or inappropriate institutions, but precisely a problem of authority. The oriental religions have looked for ways to implement a theory of virtually absolute authority in a social setting based on a culture that has passed through and been deeply changed by the Protestant Reformation, bourgeois and proletarian revolution, and so-called sexual revolution. As Foucault points out, these 'revolutions' only become articulated within the discourse of history at the very moment in which they 'disappear'—so that, in his paradoxical reading, our society is in fact post-Protestant, post-revolutionary, and post-sexual. The new 'authorities' created by revolution and reformation are themselves now seen to be empty. Even the 'experts' of the sexual revolution have proven themselves false prophets: we are not dancing toward an era of liberated desire, but lurching backwards toward some dark age of plague-fear and sexual hysteria in which all desire will eventually be experienced as 'abuse' or 'sin.' Thus within the American Roman Catholic Church we have cardinals who fulminate against every form of human pleasure in language as deeply imbued with hysteria (if not literary style) as Cotton Mather's—while at the same time vast numbers of priests are in trouble for 'abusing' various orphans or parishoners. Televangelism has lost much of its political i.e., financial, power since the 1980s in a series of sexual and fiscal scandals. In the 'Orient' adulterous women and homosexuals are stoned to death. There's a great deal less sexual freedom in the world now than in medieval times, perhaps even Victorian times. All the talk talk talk about sexuality (as Foucault says) has led only to new modalities of repression/oppression. . . .
Let me be clear: personally I do not disapprove of sexual intercourse nor of 'deviant' desire and pleasure. I do, however, disapprove of hypocrisy, power-tripping, and the self-aggrandizement of self-proclaimed avatars. I can even imagine erotic love as an integral aspect of spiritual/pedagogic companionship, but only on condition of its open consensuality. I reject (for myself) the moral/sexual codes of outdated and reactionary religious ideologies, but I accept (for myself) the best ethics I can imagine, based on a perception of the other as an aspect of self, so that my desire to some extent depends on the other's desire and not on the other's loss. If I can do this for myself, then I can demand of anyone who claims to be able to teach self-realization that he too follow this minimal ethics of mutuality. . . .
I suggest that many of the Oriental traditions have fallen prey to a guru-prinzip which makes the nearness of realization a kind of commodity, promised but never delivered, since deliverance would threaten the power-monopoly of the guru. . . .
Traditional power relations are tragically out of synch with our needs for connection and conviviality. . . . Spirituality is not a master/slave relation—it is not an "Oriental despotism." Not any more. Not now. Maybe it never was. Who cares? Here and now:—we need something different.
—Peter Lamborn Wilson in Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam
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