While this was an absolutely fascinating lecture on Tibetan Buddhism and iconoclasm, there wasn’t much in it that I would truly consider “crazy” even though one of the Awakened Buddhists himself (Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche) coined the phrase “crazy wisdom” in the West. Much of the “crazy” parts simply sounded to me like a cultural disconnect between East and West.
Perhaps it’s because I’m pretty liberal and into philosophy, and had to read a lot of Nietzsche in the past, but a lot of the ideas behind Buddhism in the lecture given made sense to me, and didn’t seem crazy at all (e.g. that the “self doesn’t exist the way it appears” – that nothing really exists simply as it appears on the surface, and that everything, even negative/harmful emotions can be harnessed for the benefit of others and transmuted into a positive/constructive force if done correctly and one has the knowledge and skill to do such a thing. Anger for the sake of anger doesn’t get anything done, and only leads to more anger, for example).
There were one or two individuals that were eyebrow raising in their level of inappropriate behavior and general “craziness” (probably because of near perpetual intoxication, since most “), but for most of the lecture I felt that the “Crazy Wisdom” aspect of the lecture was more of a cultural disconnect than anything else. To Westerners, a lot of East/Southeast Asian cultural norms seem “crazy” and “weird” but mostly because their cultural norms aren’t Western cultural norms and most everyday people’s kneejerk reaction is to go “That’s so crazy/weird” when encountering something from another culture that’s different than our own. If you were to take a step back and think about it, consider it from another person’s perspective/culture, then perhaps you wouldn’t think it so crazy at all.
Outside of only a handful of individual practitioners/leaders, who seemed to be outliers and eccentrics, they seemed very not-crazy at all. Normal by their own culture’s standards. Trying to normalize them Western standards would be ignorant at best and racist at worst – eccentric outliers not considered. Hirshberg’s lecture was fascinating and enlightening – and I don’t think I could consider practitioners of the iconoclastic Tibetan Buddhism as crazy. It’s simply a different religious culture than I’m used to seeing, and while I’m ignorant on a great many things, I’m not ignorant enough to write them off as certifiably insane.
