The Buddha took terms that were being used in Vedic times and Upanishadic cultures and flipped the meaning of them. He ironized words, such as karma, which at the time meant sacrificial rules and actions that guarantee better reincarnation. Yes, yes, he said, your actions do make a difference, but they make a difference now. This was a radical notion, which pulled the word karma out of a cosmological framework.
The Buddha played with lots of words and concepts in similarly radical ways. For instance, when people started entering the path with the Buddha, he called them Brahmins, or he called them ārya as in the Four Noble Truths: catvāry ārya satyāni. The term ārya refers to nobility. However, for the Buddha you are ārya, or noble, if your life-style is dedicated to a path of awakening. In other words, you’re not noble by what you’re born into—you’re noble by what you do. Your karma, or your actions, are what make you ārya, or noble.
So he was taking these basic cultural ideas and reclaiming them and giving them new life, kind of like how terms like queer have been reclaimed and flipped to mean something quite different from the original usage. Doing so is claiming and crafting identities that are countercultural, a subversive first step toward negotiating new social stories. The Buddha understood the power of language.
I’ve been thinking about how I can do this more. I’ve been replacing words—for instance, instead of using the word mindfulness, I’ve been calling it hacking because that’s what mindfulness does. Mindfulness is a practice of actually hacking into the momentum of our minds and our culture. This opens a space for reconstructing narratives that can portage important social change.