The purpose for this essay is as a narrative about a trip to Nepal in 2018 that is discussed in a reflexive manner. Defined by Mann (2016) as being "focused on the self and ongoing intersubjectivities”, self-reflexivity is here being used as a tool for analytical awareness focused on how my positionality influences assumptions, frameworks and representations of other cultural realities, knowledges and practices (Kapoor, 2004).
Starting in August 2018, I was travelling for 3 months; it was the first time I left Europe. Nepal was the first country I went to on my own on this trip. The key experience in Nepal that I will be reflexively recounting – as much as I can – is about the ten days I spent at Kopan Monastery.
Kopan Monastery is located just outside Kathmandu, and the monks there have been teaching Buddhism to westerners since the 1970s. The nun that thought us most of our classes, Ani Karen, had in fact been a Swedish “hippie” who studied at Kopan in the 70s and shortly after became a Buddhist nun.
During the Introductory to Buddhism course, we started the day with meditations, had a silent breakfast, teachings, lunch, reflective breaks and meditated some more. It was the most peaceful and content I ever felt in my life and there was nowhere else I wanted to be and nothing (too much) that I wanted. At Kopan, we were being taught about a spiritual philosophy of life that seemed like it was logical, reasoned out and made sense.
What really stood out during our lessons was that the undertone and direct communication about what we were being thought did not exclude other religions, philosophies, ways of life and worldviews. I remember Ani Karen, calm and insightful, instructing us on how even a little Buddhism is ok and practicing what resonates with us was good enough.
There was patience and understanding and there was a compassionate explanation to everything (or most things) even to concepts which in the end could not be explained – only felt. There was a kind, receptive and inter-cultural attitude towards us attending the course who didn’t know much about these Buddhist practices. We were made to feel at home by these people who led very different lives to us. There was a sense of community through a series of warm relationships (Williams, 1983) with and between our teachers, other monks and people who supported the monastery.
Through this experience, I remember comparing learning Buddhism to growing up catholic: attending ‘mużew’1 twice a week after school until the age of 11, having religious studies (all catholic) once a week at primary and secondary school and getting my Holy Communion and Confirmation. These learnings hardly ever presented me with such open, kind, compassionate and invigorating responses as Ani Karen and the Kopan Monastery did. At home, curiosity and an inquisitive attitude was not usually appreciated in religious classes. In my parents’ generation, this was even more so. Asking about why we do certain things and why they are so was not useful or effective. We just had to believe, and the usual response to such questions would be “because it is”. This common attitude embodied a certain aspect that the Colombian philosopher Castro-Gomez calls the ‘point zero’ (2003). Learning religion was not something that allowed for questioning or flexibility, almost as if it was beyond a particular point of view, as Grosfoguel (2007) recounts: “that is, the point of view that represents itself as being without a point of view”.
In contrast to religion at home, Buddhist philosophy struck me more open, kind, compassionate to all beings and nature. It was not beyond questioning (as a matter of fact, ‘arguments’ and discussions are a big part of how monks learn) and it had a particular more-than-human cosmology to it; Buddhist philosophy considers our connection to the earth and life of all other sentient beings as a natural part of our being.
In light of and despite this many teachings and deep learning, this hadn’t yet altered my ‘looking down’ on my home religion. In this situation, while I gained a lot and it rang true, the comparison that I created in my mind between religion at home to philosophy of Buddhism that I learned at Kopan was not necessarily beneficial. While a certain type of Christianity that I practiced is part of what Escobar (2016) labels as the One-World World (OWW), and uses colonial power structures as part of its practice and propagation, I unconsciously used this same OWW mechanisms with Buddhist philosophy because it affected me so deeply – or so I thought. I thought it was amazing and why didn’t everyone see it?
By reflexively thinking back about this experience, I might describe it as a part of my subjective positioning, a characteristic of my worldview. Though my ideas in life and self had started to shift, the way I fixed these ideas and mechanisms within the world were still part of the same OWW and colonialist ways that we are trying to unravel through inter-cultural practices. The colonial power relations that I was embedded in were still part of my being in the world (and to a certain extent, they will take hard work to shake off).
Positioning my self sociologically (Nadarajah, 2007) in this experience has been allowing me to understand some of the social-cultural aspects that affect how I process and receive new knowledge. This receiving goes beyond liking or disliking something. Our social-cultural aspects also affect the attitude we take on with the knowledge that we learn, how we create knowledge, how (and whether) we allow other knowledges to exist. The process we need to engage in as well is what Grosfoguel (2007) and Hira (2012) call ‘decolonising the mind’: “analyzing the mechanisms that have been used to imprint this [colonizing] concept in our mind and finding ways to remove it from our consciousness” (Hira, 2012, pg. 63). These colonizing concepts include that of ‘inferiority’, which I was still subject to thinking from in this inter-cultural experience, showing, as Mignolo (2000) reminds us, how we always act from a particular location in power structures, as I positioned my new point of view as ‘above’ that of my religion at home.
This aspect of worldviews and our attitude towards the co-existence of multiple worlds has been a significant concept to realize. I am finding that the most crucial importance lies in recognizing that we all have our subjective positioning which re-propagates the power dynamics that are inherent in the socio-cultural frameworks that we are embedded within.
Unless we learn and also unravel and unlearn and then reconstruct our preconceived frameworks, our inter-cultural practices will be far from what we may desire. Despite our efforts, if we are not proactive about unlearning, we will be carrying forward coloniality even without realizing and meaning to at all – even when we mean well. In the end we must also keep in mind, this is not something that one person does on one’s own. While we work on our own geo-political frameworks we need to make room for the contribution and pluriversal consideration of epistemic perspectives, cosmologies and thinkers from the Global South (Grosfoguel, 2007) in order to enter into truly start practicing from an inter-cultural positioning.
Figure 1 (left): Monk studying at the Kathmandu monastery where I completed a Buddhist Philosophy and Meditation course. Source: Photo taken by the author.
Figure 2 (right): Monks at assembly at the Kathmandu monastery.
Notes:
1 Tal-Mużew is The Society of Christian Doctrine that teaches catechism to children and adults i
n Malta.
Thumbnail Image:
Author's own, taken at the Kathmandu monastery where I completed a Buddhist Philosophy and Meditation course. Source: Photo taken by the author.
References:
Castro-Gomez, Santiago (2003) ‘La Hybris del Punto Cero: Biopolı´ticas imperials y colonialidad del poder en la Nueva Granada (1750_ 1810)’. Unpublished manuscript. Bogota´, Colombia: Instituto Pensar, Universidad Javeriana.
Escobar, A. (2016). Thinking-Feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimension of the Epistemologies of the South. In Knowledges Born in the Struggle (pp. 41-57). Routledge
Grosfoguel, R. (2007). The epistemic decolonial turn: Beyond political-economy paradigms. Cultural studies, 21(2-3), 211-223.
Hira, Sandew. (2012). Decolonizing the Mind: The Case of The Netherlands. Human Architecture. 10.
Kapoor, I. (2004). Hyper‐self‐reflexive development? Spivak on representing the Third World ‘Other’. Third world quarterly, 25(4), 627-647.
Mann, S. (2016). The research review: Reflective practice and reflexivity in research processes. London: Palgrave and Macmillan.
Mignolo, W. (2000). Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. PRINCETON; OXFORD: Princeton University Press. Retrieved September 3, 2021
Nadarajah, Y 2007, 'The outsider within: Commencing fieldwork in the Kuala Lumpur/Petaling Jaya corridor, Malaysia', International Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 109-132.
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