Before continuing, a moment of shameless self-promotion. Tonight (Wednesday, September 10th) at 10PM Eastern a project I am very proud of premieres on SoapNet, a channel many of you may receive on your cable or satellite subscription. The show is called Bank of Mom and Dad and takes a look at over-consumption, financial advice, and getting real about life situations through the window of young women in debt. I co-adapted the format from the UK and produced tonight's episode along with a great team of fellow storytellers. It's quite compelling and transformational.
Now....before getting back to our conversation about why Buddhism is not a religion, let me reiterate that I am not proposing that the practice of what the Buddha taught is superior to any other religion, nor that there is anything inherently "wrong" with religion. I am advocating the non-religiousness of Buddhism because I have seen the benefit of the practices of meditation, the study of interdependence and the Buddha's teachings, and participation in a community of like-minded individuals, without anything that resembles what we commonly refer to as religion.
The potential ramifications of this are profound and game changing, because Buddhist practice as an adjunct to a religious life, or on its own, is astonishingly effective at making you aware of how your behavior both fits in to the "big picture" and how you can become a more awake and responsible human. And while Buddhism CAN be practiced as a religion, there are a tremendous number of people who are practicing Christians, Jews, or otherwise who have also found the Buddha's teachings have a place in their life. Thank you to all of you who took the time to share your stories of how the teachings of Buddha co-exist with your religious practice, and please continue to do so.
The converse side to the fact that a growing number of people are turning to Buddhism either on its own or as an adjunct to a religious practice is that there is not a similar movement of people turning to the teachings of Jesus Christ outside the context of religion. This is not proof of anything other than the fact that many people following Buddha's teachings (which, for lack of a better word, I refer to as Buddhists) have discovered for themselves that the core of the teachings - a relentless pursuit of the truth, i.e. present moment awareness - is a path to liberating oneself from the tyranny of ego-domination, self-inflicted suffering, and a path to liberating a great deal of energy to assist others who so desire, without the need to codify it into a religion.
Yes, the end result of a Buddhist practice bears a resemblance to what happens if you truly devote yourself to the teachings of Jesus, Allah, or the God of Abraham, but with the fundamental difference that there is not a huge community of people who follow those teachings in a way that does not require a belief in a higher power to whom your efforts are dedicated. There is not a growing community of people following the teachings of Jesus,Allah, or Judaism outside the context of religion, as there is with Buddhism.
The only salvation in Buddhism is your own ability to salvage your own mind from its relentless assault on itself, and in so doing slowly reveal the truth that lies beneath. It's not always pretty, or blissful, but this is the truth that the Buddha proposed will set you
free. Whether you pursue this truth with or without also having a devotional practice to a religion is irrelevant to the efficacy of the teachings. As has been brought up on this forum over the last few weeks (both in defense of and in opposition to my position), it is possible that pursuing the teachings of the Buddha may lead you to a deeper or different understanding of your religion, be it Christianity, Muslim, Judaism or whatever - or it may not - and so
what if it does?
Yet the same cannot be said of simultaneously pursuing a belief in Christianity or Judaism, or Judaism or Muslim - it's a bit more all-or-nothing and involves a conversion process before you are "officially" in the religion. While Buddhism CAN be practiced as a religion, it does not HAVE to be - and that makes it not a religion. Something that can be something some of the time, and something else the rest of the time, cannot be said to be one or the other all of the time.
Again, this only matters because the teachings of the Buddha can be an absurdly helpful non-denominational way to explore the profound implications of being an interdependent being on an overstuffed planet. If the core teachings of Jesus, Allah, or the God of Abraham
included not only the "ideas for living" that are the foundations of the religions and rule books that have been built upon them, but also included a specific set of tools for transcending the obstacles to actually implementing those ideas in your life, we might be here discussing "Christianity is not a Religion".
Buddha, in his core teachings, proposed a specific set of techniques for overcoming dissatisfaction in pursuit of greater service to oneself and others, techniques that work whether you believe in salvation by Jesus Christ or a coming Apocalypse or the Messiah or nothing at all, and with no need for judgment, guilt, or exultation of your belief or non-belief.
While Love Your Neighbor as you Love Yourself is an incredible idea about how to live your life, it runs up against practical limits when your neighbor is bonking his boyfriend at 2 AM with "Single Ladies" blaring at full volume. Buddhist practice allows you to make a choice between conditioned or habitual responses and one that is correct for the present moment - based on contemplative practice, study of the four noble truths, and the eightfold path. Even when you choose the conditioned response, you are aware (maybe right then, maybe later) that you did so, and eventually will have to deal with the effect.
Put another way, a Buddhist could be a gas-guzzling environment destroying money-grubbing asshole, but it's unlikely that if they actually practice they can remain that way for long. Behavior that increases suffering crumples under the harsh light of interdependent reality. In Buddhism, there's no one to offer you forgiveness, unless you go and ask someone for it yourself. It's a shift from unburdening to an external god or authority figure to taking full responsibility for your own actions. There's no reason you can't simultaneously be deeply responsible for your self (or non-self) as you are in Buddhism, and also have a religious practice with external god authority (Christianity, Judaism et al). Please, no one propose that you cannot simultaneously have an externally devoted religious practice, and engage in a practice that encourages personal responsibility. This would not be fair to the religions of the world.
To those Buddhists who don't agree, I suggest you consider that ultimately all religious constructs have to manifest as concepts and beliefs, no different than any other, and to separate out the belief in Jesus Christ, Allah, or G-d into a special category of concept that
is some sort of electrified fence around Buddhist practice, to create a magic land called Religious Faith where Buddhist practice suddenly fails, is to say "Buddhism goes THIS far but no further," which is to deny the eternal unfolding of the practice. In other words, if a Buddhist practice cannot also encompass a Jewish, Mormon, Muslim or other practice, then you have decreed that Buddhist the Buddhist path and practice has limits that are considerably more limited than what I believe.
Less conceptually, look at some of what's been shared in this forum - many people have told us how following Buddhist teachings has been an amazing adjunct to their religious practice, and imagine how many more people might explore this possibility if Buddhism wasn't labeled as ALWAYS a religion.
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Abby -
I say those things in that way on this blog for a very specific reason. Jerry et al need to get past whatever it is they have against religion, as much as they say otherwise. Outside, in the real world, you would find me calm, gentle, pastoral, and with a bit of a quirky sense of humor. What you would expect from a minister in training. I am trying to show them what they are doing, and pulling the chair out from under them so they wake up. They refuse to see past the secular liberal bubble (as is evidenced by Ethan's consistent posts recently about health care and Obama) that they live in and in that way limit Buddhism to what they have seen, thinking it will work better to spread it the way they have seen it work in the bubble. Buddhism is not a liberal plaything that they can use to justify their secular thoughts and words. I have no troth with conservatives, but I have no troth with liberals, either. Both sides of that debate lack the Eightfold Path. Unfortunately Jerry et al live in a world where that fact is ignored. I live in reality, outside of that bubble, and anyone who takes any real look at the history of Buddhism sees that what they are saying is both false and slanderous of the teachings of the Buddha that they say they are promoting. Also, if you take a look at the numbers - and this is borne out by recent research and evidence - the total number and percentage of (religious) Buddhists in the US alone says that the religious way works better. If estimates of those answering that their religion was Buddhism from 1990, (1995), and 2000 are accurate, over the last 15 years, Buddhism has seen a jump from ~1 million in the US to a current estimate of 5 million, meaning a four-fold jump. The numbers for "secular" Buddhism? 40 years of so after the Peace Corps started bringing back their adulterated form of Buddhism, counting all the retreats that have been done by these groups, you still probably get less than 100,000 active practitioners of Buddhist meditation or "Insight Meditation" as they call it. There's your proof in the pudding. I have no real problem with Buddhist teachings being utilized by the secular community, but I do have a problem when the teachings themselves are then declared to be secular and that therefore Buddhism is secular. It isn't and never was. From the moment Gautama left the royal palace, he gave up on secular life. the six years he spent wandering from samana to samana, seeking the answer were years spent forging a faith centered around the mind's capacities and how to utilize those. During that time, he encountered devas and devils, demons and gods, all the while saying that even they are subject to the laws of the universe, rather than the omnipotent beings of the ancient near east. He is shown throughout the Scriptures (both the Pali Canon and the Mahayana writings) as both encountering and possessing supernatural powers, setting up and organizing into an institution the Sangha as a community of monastic renunciates who left their secular life to become contemplatives who followed what the Buddha called Dhamma-Vinaya - meaning the Teachings (or Law, which is a better translation for dhamma) and the Discipline. The simple fact that he set up both communities for lay followers (male and female) who remained "householders" and engaged in secular life, and monastic followers (and eventually, but *grudgingly* female monastic communities) who gave up everything and lived a religious life, as separate orders shows that his teachings were not meant to be strictly secular. They could be used by the Laity, but they were designed around the principle of religious discipline, which holds to this very day. That is why I have to show them the quick way to the floor, deliberately using inflammatory (but true) words, so they wake up and see reality, just as it is. I utilize this approach for them as a form of upaya, or skillful means. And unfortunately for them, that mens seeing Buddhism as a religion, which it very much is, by any definition, even the ones they chose. I showed them using their own definition why they are wrong, and i know they don't like it. Reality is that way.
Now, if they were to call themselves "Friends of Buddhism" or "Buddhist-inspired" only, or even call themselves a lay branch of the Buddhist religion, I'd have no problems with that. That is what they are. That is reality, just as it is. But to claim that they are Buddhists and what they represent is ALL of Buddhism, and therefore Buddhism isn't a religion is false at best. For these IDP-ers to claim that other Buddhists are not Buddhists because they don't follow the exact same meditation practices as Jerry et al is deliberately excluding somewhere between 500 million and 1.3 billion Buddhists (depending on how you count the Chinese Buddhists who are not "oficially" counted because China doesn't keep records on religoius practice, being atheist officially) who practice the Buddha's teachings in a different way more suited to the realities of the world that they live in. That is cultural imperialism, saying, we have learned this tradition, and now we're going to tell you what you are because we know it better than you.
Until Jerry gives up everything (renounces his secular life) to follow the holy life (which the Buddha himself said was the only way to fully practice the Buddhist path), and actually takes the time to read the Suttas and Sutras and follow every proscription in the Vinaya (all said and done, more than 200 major and minor rules for monks found in the Patimokkha, 227 for nuns), he has no right to say who is and is not a Buddhist. That is why I countered them so forcefully - to get them to stop thinking with the arrogance that they present, and start working on some humility. Did I go a bit overboard? Yes, absolutely. And, without any question, deliberately. It was necessary. Sometimes, Skillful Means are not what is nice and happy. Sometimes, they require going over the top.
In gassho,
Christopher A Mohr
2LT, SS, CAARNG (as of last week)
Chaplain Candidate
Christopher - you are making a TON of assumptions about Jerry, Ethan, and IDP.
I don't really know Jerry, but Ethan has said in class that he definitely believes in God.
Also, nobody is saying others aren't true Buddhists...except..well..you...when you claim that Buddhism MUST be practiced as a religion. You are saying I'm not practicing true Buddhism. You are saying Ethan, who is one of the most highly regarding young Buddhist teachers in the country, is not practicing true Buddhism. Ethan and Jerry never said that about people who do view it as a religion. Do what you want. You are ascribing views to them that they don't hold.
I think you aren't arguing in good faith, operating on assumptions about the people you have issues with. This whole liberal-bubble thing is just a strawman. You have NO idea who you are talking to. I have no idea who you are and wouldn't presume to.
Again, if your way is better, then just do it. No need to diss people who are doing great things if you can do greater things. There doesn't have to be a conflict. Do what you do, and let others have their opinions and practice, and we'll see whose is more skillful.
Nobody's stopping you from writing a "Buddhism is a Religion" blog. Go for it. Nobody's stopping you from starting a Religious Buddhist Org that helps thousands of people. If you can do it, go for it.
Perhaps, just maybe, however, the fact that this blog is so popular reflects the accessibility of IDP's approach.
Good luck!
Abby - look back at parts one and two of this series. BOTH Ethan AND Jerry claim that if you don't regularly practice meditation, a teacher, and a community you aren't Buddhist. Look before you leap. And I wasn't saying that they aren't practicing Buddhism. Rather the opposite, that they are practicing, but that they are leaving central elements out. That's why I threw that "lay Buddhist" bone out there. I think that even in most Buddhist communities, they would be considered a part of the Lay community.
If I am to be judged by my words, then so are Jerry and Ethan. You don't technically know me, either, yet you are judging me as well...and I'm okay with it. I realize that your opinion of me does not matter. They post consistently to the far left of center, and I call them on that. more on that later.
The reason I constantly bring up the liberal bubble thing is because it is true. Outside of liberal-heavy areas, in places such as the midwest, the deep south, and the mountain west (excepting enclaves on the west coast), the statistics show strongly that people are more religious and that they tend to be more open to religion. Jerry et al are speaking to the choir in the less-religious and less open to religion regions of the country: the Northeast, portions of the West Coast, and occasionally you get Austin, TX thrown in there, as an up and coming liberal hotspot. In these liberal areas, Jerry is right that religious, traditional Buddhism won't spread as well. What I'm getting at is that most people don't live in those areas. Most people don't have the hang-ups about religion that cause problems in the rich, liberal, and educated hot spots that breed the classically defined "yuppie". And most places are growing religious converts to a religious form of Buddhism.
As for religious Buddhist ogranizations in the US, there are already 1013 of them according to the IRS. Why start another one when I am already connected (at least tangentially, and supporting) three others?
As for why this blog appears to have a modicum of popularity...In terms of page counts and numbers, I don't know that it actually is. If it were not connected to Beliefnet (which does have a fairly large base and gets clicks from the curious), it would probably still be one of those tiny backwater blogs on a list serve somewhere. The majority of people who read it are already either A) IDP people or b) beliefnet people. That the IDP had the sense to put this blog on a religious network, but say it what they practice isn't a religion (which I've proven time and again that it is), is some pretty good irony or cold, calculating marketing to drive up revenue for the IDP. And there's nothing wrong with that, that's what marketers do.
What I am concerned with is that Jerry is deliberately trying to stir up the pot, rather than utilizing his skills in better ways.
You put to much stock in your teacher. He is neither widely known in the Buddhist community nor is he one of the most respected young teachers. A decent teacher perhaps, but not more respected that the young Venerables at any temple or monastery. The reality is that most teachers of Buddhism, young and old are equally respected in their communities. If you're talking about those who are not Buddhists respecting him, I don't see that either, and now we're back to the bubble again. There is this bubble that exists around the IDP that no other religious group has successfully managed to completely avoid, mine included, in which the members of the group think of themselves as the only group in the world that matters. Did you know that there are already three other "interdependence" charities out there (according to the IRS)?
Seriously, All of them are out of California except one in Philadelphia. And since the IRS says the IDP exists in california, under open records laws, they should have filed a 990. I would be very interested in seeing that document, and seeing how much of IDP's funding really goes to its charitable programs versus administrative expenses. But there I go on a tangent. Back to the root of the matter. The fact that you hold Ethan in high regard does not mean that he a well-known or respected teacher outside of your tradition. Until I stumbled across this blog by happenstance on Beliefnet, I, like most Buddhists, had never heard of the guy. Why because we don't do social activism. We do things like Engaged Buddhism instead. We don't taint the Dhamma with the filth of the political world, but we do work to relieve suffering in the ground in communities. My Order, for example, despite being a Japanese order, does things like provide medicine and vaccinations to children in Cambodia, in addition to funding research and translations (and nice fellowships) at prestigous universities and providing funds for poverty initiatives, disaster relief, and the restoration of temples and cultural artifacts. All that from a small Buddhist order. Why aren't we publicizing that kind of social outreach, strutting and puffing out our feathers? Because we don't need the egoic suffering that would entail.
I can already see your argument, so we'll kill it off here. I am NOT using those examples to strut about. they are merely examples, nothing to be proud of, nothing to deny. They are simple facts, on the ground realities, and should be regarded that way. So don't bother thinking that I think because we do that we are special. I know we are not. We are just doing what the Buddha's teachings tell us we should do - practicing the Paramis and paramitas (esp. dana, or making joyous altruistic offerings to others for the sake of letting go of attachments). Nothing special, nothing overt.
The entire concept of rising up against the man, which is what most reasonable people will instantly think of when they hear "rise up" in itself is egoic, no matter the intention. We just do what we do quietly, and no one hears about it, but it works. People see our good works and they come to us with open minds. You don't hear about us pulling stunts like the "sit down, rise up" style bits of activism with a hint of Buddhism. Maybe it was just a bad choice in terms on the IDP's part, but that sort of marketing is the very thing I'm talking about when I say they are doing more harm than good to the very Buddhist causes they think they are helping. That terminology instantly alienates (most) independents and all conservatives and yes, even some liberals. So they want the Buddha's teachigns to be accessible? Give up the politics and the activism, and it will be. That's what we offer, and that is why our approach is more accessible. Conservatives see in us a force which, as my conservative friends would say and have said, "would be really great, but they can't shake off those damn hippies".
How to appeal to those people? Keep the gravitas, the traditionalism, and the authority from the religion of Buddhism (an umbrella under which Buddhist Philosophy, Buddhist Psychology, and Buddhist Art, etc. exist), and ditch the activism of the secular side. The former most non-yuppies respect, the latter, they hate. They will not listen so long as we espouse causes they despise. I see this especially in my soldiers (of whom, less than 10% are liberal). Start spouting off about "rise up" against (insert whatever perceived inequality or injustice here) being how Buddhists think, and you have already lost the entirety of them. You're done. You're just plain done. They will not listen to you after that. It is the activism that dooms things like the IDP to the waste bin of the Big City social elite, who make of it their darling plaything when they want to show off their "open minds" or their "sensitivities".
I don't say this to put you and the IDP off of working to stop suffering. I agree that that is a noble goal. I do say this to show you and them that, by and large, the style and methods that they are using to make Buddhism "more accessible" (i.e. stripping it bare like a prostitute so it sells better) don't work where it matters, where it could actually have a lasting, positive impact because that approach has already become a dirty word. Activism is a dirty word in America. It is Ethan and Jerry's misconception that they can better help people by activism and "accessibility" than by real accessibility which entails giving more of yourself and leaving the door open. That's the reality.
I second Abby's message to Christopher.
Good Luck!
Whether Buddhism constitutes a "religion" depends on your definition of religion. In my (admittedly limited) understanding, Buddhism is more concerned with practicing to alleviate suffering than with answering the "eternal" questions (god, afterlife, etc.) that typically defines religion. And are we not to measure the Buddha's teachings against our own experience, rather than assume they are "divine" and therefore infallible? The argument in the comments seems to stem more from political posturing than from a legitimate attempt to discuss whether Buddhism fits the definition of religion. While some may argue that politics have no place, others feel that our political opinions and actions should/must reflect our practice. Room for debate here, but irrelevant to the discussion of whether Buddhism is a religion.
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