You'll often hear it said that Buddhism isn't a religion, it's a philosophy.
This type of argument plays well in justifying Buddhism to a society that is
sick of traditional religion.
But even in a society celebrating the death of
God, the search for a higher meaning does not disappear; now, however, it
must be "reasonable" and "rational".
And that, for obvious reasons, creates problems.
These demands immediately rule out all the Judaeo-Christian traditions; we
are all too familiar with the irrational dogmas, the pomp, ritual and common
hypocrisy of it all.
And so, we turn our eyes to the Orient.
We look to the East - to exotic obscurities like Buddhism and Taoism, and,
because they are different to what we know, we use loopholes to justify
them not as despicable religions but as noble philosophies.
But there's a mistake in this thinking.
There's a sense that these oriental schools of thought are something superior
to their Western counterparts.
In a society growing more atheistic and reductionist, Buddhism offers people
a "scientific" religion.
It seems to entail no bullshit and to speak plain truth.
And without a doubt there is an argument to be made for this because, while
the Buddha did speak his fair share about gods as we'll see, he didn't speak
of a creator God.
This was for the prudent reason that his followers would
undoubtedly make an idol out of something they didn't understand.
This curiosity about Buddhism however has led many people to argue that
Buddhism is an atheistic religion.
It is not.
It is simply that atheism in the West evolved in response to a religion based
on a creator god.
This cultural quirk gave rise to a certain prejudice.
I've seen people protect their self-perceptions of rational atheism
from their advocacy of Buddhism by leveraging this nuance.
But if you're an atheistic lover of rationality, it's more difficult to mock
religious believers for believing in a creator God when you yourself endorse
another religion with supernatural beliefs and Gods (albeit lacking a creator
God).
From rebirth and karma to gods, titans and ghosts, from walking through
walls to telepathy and flight, Buddhism is a cornucopia of supernatural
delights.
I know I'm going to come across as if I'm going after Buddhism here and
suggesting that we should cast it into the fire but it's really the patronising
disdain of the rational atheist subculture that I'm targeting here.
This disdain for the non-rational is something we'll be
returning to in a future episode on Ken Wilber's illumination of the pre/trans
fallacy in the worldview of Modernity.
What really grinds my gears is the hypocrisy of mocking and condemning
others for their magical beliefs while justifying your own tastes.
So in this episode I want to wrest Buddhism from its
sanitised rationalised Western form and restore a bit of its historical context
and content so that we might move towards a more realistic appraisal of
Buddhism and also hopefully a more charitable attitude towards religion
in general.
Perhaps if religion has been the midwife for a toolkit of good mental health
then it shouldn't merely be discarded as a delusion or a virus but something
with true value to human life (and of course that's not to deny that religion is
responsible for a lot of evil in the world as well).
Every religion has its good and bad points.
There is something to learn from every tradition.
While there is much in religion to overcome, there is also a
lot to learn and a lot that we have lost in this age of reason.
In moving beyond the ages of Modernity and Postmodernity
there is a lot here that we will want to integrate into a broader worldview.
I've had a few arguments with people over the years where they would
adamantly argue that Buddhism isn't a religion but a philosophy.
There's books out there with titles like Confessions of a Buddhist
Atheist and Secular Buddhism and there's a whole swarm of articles
defending the point online.
Of course for succinct manifestations of this argument there's no better place
to turn than Reddit where there's plenty of fodder.
One thread titled Is Buddhism a philosophy or a religion had this
as its top comment: Its viewed as a religion today, but Siddhartha
, who was the first Buddha, would say its a philosophy.
Because the point is for every one in Buddhism is to become a Buddha which means
enlightened one...
Siddhartha saw that [Brahmanism] was too strict and mired in ritual
which takes away from the experience of reaching enlightenment and
also that only Brahmans and their sons could be a part of monastic life.
The general idea then is that Buddhism is dramatically different from the
Judaeo-Christian religions our secular culture has such disdain for.
Buddhism is different we are to believe; it's like us - atheistic, pragmatic
and devoid of bullshit.
But of course this is a complete fiction (and not just
with reference to Buddhism) and any bit of investigation into Buddhism
would quickly disabuse the investigator of this delusion.
There are plenty of ideas to pick apart here.
The first difficulty one faces with proving that Buddhism is either a religion
or a philosophy, is that Buddhism is vast.
It's a religion with two and a half millennia of history across an entire
continent.
Buddhism may have started in India but within a few centuries it
had spread south to Sri Lanka, east to the countries of Southeast Asia including
Thailand Vietnam Cambodia Malaysia and Myanmar.
It spread north to the peaks of Tibet and Nepal and into China and
from there to Japan.
In each of these countries, Buddhism took on its own local flavour.
There is a traditional divide between the greater vehicle
of Mahayana Buddhism that tends to dominate north of India while the
more southern Buddhist countries such as Sri Lanka Thailand and Myanmar stuck
with the more monastic tradition of Theravada.
But no matter which slice of Buddhism you take from, you will inevitably find a
rich vein of supernatural beliefs.
In the Pali Canon - the holy book of the Theravadin tradition (generally
considered in the West to be the more rational atheistic tradition) - we find a
wealth of rich mythology.
In the Kevatta Sutta (a treatise in the Pali Canon), a householder called
Kevatta asks the Buddha to display some magical powers.
The Buddha responds by saying that he doesn't teach this
way and such powers are not the barometer of an advanced practitioner.
Nevertheless he goes on to discuss the manifold powers of the
enlightened.
The advanced monk: goes unimpeded through walls, ramparts, and
mountains as if through space.
He dives in and out of the earth as if it were water.
He walks on water without sinking as if it were dry land.
Sitting cross-legged he flies through the air like a winged bird.
With his hand he touches and strokes even the sun and moon, so mighty and powerful.
He also has powers of telepathy: There is the case where a monk reads the minds,
the mental events, the thoughts, the ponderings of other beings,
other individuals, [saying,] 'Such is your thinking, here is where your thinking
is, thus is your mind.'
There is a whole section of the Pali Canon called Jataka tales that are dedicated
to the previous incarnations of the Gautama Buddha.
These are some of the earliest traditions we have from Buddhism
and are accepted by all branches and traditions of Buddhism.
Among these tales we find the story of his incarnation as Prince Sattva a prince
who, out of compassion, committed suicide in order to feed a starving tigress
and her cubs.
Often we will find our Western secular Buddhists wanting to dismiss this sort
of thing.
They argue that Buddhists don't actually believe these tales since the
Buddha argued that we have no self and therefore what is there to be reborn.
Rebirth simply refers to the fact that we are reborn every moment since there is
no solid self to speak of.
This line of argument has all the delicacy of a bull in a China shop.
It happily dismisses one of Buddhism's oldest traditions
as mere fictions in order to retain its idea of Buddhism being all about
breathing and mindfulness.
Pure science.
The magical thinking only gets wilder as we leave the tamer Theravada
tradition and head further north to the Mahayana Buddhism common in Tibet
China and Japan.
One would have a hard time arguing that the monks who went searching for
the rebirth of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara were acting out of pure
rationality.
And I doubt their discovered quarry who we know as the Dalai
Lama would maintain the same.
Parts of the Lotus Sutra - one of the most revered texts in the Mahayana
traditions - are nothing but long lists of Gods.
Also in this text we find even more cool superpowers of the enlightened including:
* Instant teleportation * Shapeshifting
* "the divine eyes" and "the divine ears" that make one capable of seeing
anything at any distance as well as telepathy once again and much more.
The Lotus Sutra is sacred across the Mahayana traditions from the Tendai
tradition to the Nichiren and Zen traditions.
There is one other corner of the Mahayana tradition that deserves mention and
that should remind us about this very religious nature of Buddhism.
This is an old disagreement between two schools of what is called Pure Land
Buddhism.
These sects of Buddhism believe in a Buddha called Amitabha who
has created a place that creates the perfect circumstances for enlightenment.
To be reborn there is effectively to receive a golden ticket to Nirvana.
But you can only be reborn there with the grace of Buddha Amitabha and this is
where the disagreement comes from.
One school of Pure Land argues that you must pray throughout your life to be reborn
in the Pure Land.
The other sect say that those who pray everyday believe they
have earned the right to be reborn in the Pure Land and have forgotten
that to be born in the Pure Land is a gift granted by Buddha Amitabha.
And in this sect one need only pray a single time to Buddha Amitabha asking him earnestly
and if he so chooses you will be reborn in the Pure Land.
This doctrinal disagreement reminds me a lot more of Christianity and the
squabbles in Catholicism over limbo and Purgatory and Hell.
In one way it's endearing in another way it's appalling.
Either way this is religion.
The atheistic angle is not the only reason that many proclaim the virtues of
Buddhism.
It also has a reputation for being a peaceful religion unlike the
marauding war-mongering that the Abrahamic religions gave rise to.
But this is also a myth.
There are countless examples of violence in Buddhism.
In the 1990s the Zen traditions of Japan issued public apologies
for their history of war and for the role they played in World War 2.
In Myanmar - the country that preserved Vipassana meditation and spread it
back into the world - Buddhists have started anti-Islamic Buddhist nationalist
movements.
This isn't just lay people but is led by monks.
Sri Lanka has a similarly dicey history of tensions between Buddhists and
Muslims with thousands dead and once again we find Buddhist monks actively
involved in the violence and persecution.
Of course Buddhism also has a history of peace and non-violence.
There is the famous emperor Ashoka and the self-immolation
of monks protesting against war but the bottom line is that Buddhism like
all religions has blood on its hands.
It has a history of violence that perhaps has been less prominent
because of its lower penetration of the world's population and because of
having less friction points than other world religions but where we find
Buddhism shoulder to shoulder with other religions like Islam, quite often
sparks fly just as they do further West.
In conclusion, Buddhism is not an anomaly in world history.
There is only one branch of Buddhist that can claim to be
non-religious, atheistic and rational and that is Secular Buddhism.
This recent branch is very far from being typical of Buddhism and to claim
that it is closer to the true teaching of the Buddha is not just condescending
but false.
Advocates of this "Buddhism is a philosophy" worldview cherry pick their
favourite phrases from the Buddha to justify discarding the vast majority of
the belief system he founded.
In every Buddhist tradition whether it be Theravadin or Mahayana in origin,
there are, as in every world religion, a vast array of supernatural beliefs.
Of course there is a philosophical core to Buddhism.
The same can be said for any religion and Christianity could certainly
be given the same treatment.
Nietzsche after all once referred to Christianity as Platonism for the masses.
There is a massive difference between the simple philosophy preached by
Jesus and the things that go by the name Christianity.
Seen from far enough away Christianity has a philosophical allure.
That is how it appears to many in the East and it is how it appeared to the
Romans who found in it an alternative to Stoicism and Epicureanism.
Whatever their value as philosophies these belief systems are ultimately
religions and the philosophies that they expound are just one part of a greater
context that has both sustained and oppressed their respective communities
for over two millennia.
This religious nature of Buddhism is not a cause for disappointment and
disillusion; religions are not merely glorified personal development programs
or explanations of the world.
The rich exoticism of all religious imagery serves as a grounding for morality and community
and provides a rich vein of meaning that orients its adherents towards
a certain conception of an ideal life.
The secular Buddhism of the West is vastly different to what we find in rich
Oriental history of Buddhism.
It has many benefits to offer: skills for managing stress, reducing negative emotions
and increasing focus.
Anyone who offers you more than this is trying to
have their cake and eat it too; they have ventured beyond the promises of Buddhism
into salesmanship.
That's everything for this episode of the living philosophy.
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