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Mindfulness of Dharma

Right Mindfulness is the part of the Eightfold Path of Buddhism, which means it is an essential part of Buddhist practice. Mindfulness is a whole-body-and-mind awareness of the present moment. To be mindful is to be fully present, not lost in daydreams, anticipation or worry.

The Buddhist practice of mindfulness has four foundations: Mindfulness of body (in Pali, kayasati), of feelings or sensations (vedanasati), of mental states (cittasati), and of mental objects or qualities (dhammasati). This article will look at the fourth foundation.

A literal translation of the Pali word dhammasati is “mindfulness (sati) of dhamma (or, in Sanskrit, dharma).” To understand this foundation, we need to begin with a look at dharma.

Dharma is a Sanskrit word that is used to mean a lot of different things. In its broadest sense it means something like “natural law.” In Buddhism, it is often used to mean “teaching of the Buddha.” It also can refer to the nature of existence or to phenomena as manifestations of reality, and these last two meanings are closest to the dhamma of dhammasati.

See “What Is Dharma in Buddhism?” for a more detailed explanation of dharma.

Expanding Our Awareness

The four foundations describe a process that begins, traditionally, with mindfulness of the breath. From there one practices mindfulness of the body, of sensations and emotions, and of mental states.

This practice is a whole-body-and-mind experience without conceptualization. In other words, mindfulness is being fully aware and present with the body or with feelings. It is not “thinking about” these frames of reference or concocting ideas about them. Further, there is not “my” body or feelings; there is just body or feelings.

The foundations are frames of reference for mindfulness — body, feelings, mind. But mindfulness of dharma suggests an awareness of everything. How do we do that?

Many teachers explain this foundation as a mindfulness of phenomena. Put another way, it is mindfulness of the experience of the phenomenal world.

The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche explained the fourth foundation as “basically the recognition of the interdependent relationship of our mind and the phenomenal world. It is working with the relationship of each individual phenomenon existing around us as the object of our experience.” What does that mean?

Me and Everything Else?

It’s important to understand that the “phenomenal world” is not something that is “out there,” separate from us. The Buddha taught that everything inter-exists. All phenomena, including us, are conditioned and defined by all other phenomena. This is because that is.

Individual things — from teapots and toasters to living beings — are experienced as mental objects. We “know” them as we know them because of how our brains and senses respond to stimuli and also because we’ve been taught from birth to recognize things in a particular way. This is the interdependent relationship of the mind and the phenomenal world.

Very basically, mindfulness of dharmas is a pure awareness of whatever there is. If there is birdsong, there is birdsong. It is not you listening to birdsong. Nor is the birdsong coming from “out there” somewhere. The experience of birdsong is right here.

The Wheel of Samsara

In the Satipatthana Sutta of the Pali Tipitika (Majjhima Nikaya 10), the Buddha begins his teaching on the fourth foundation by advising his disciples to be mindful of the Five Hindrances. Naming each of the five — sensual desire, ill will, sloth, resltnessness, and uncertainty — he counseled being aware of whether the hindrance is present, and if present how it arises, and how it ceases.

Then the Buddha spoke of the Five Skandhas, calling them the “aggregates of clinging.” He advised his disciples to be aware of the skandhas and the corresponding senses organs and objects. The monks and nuns also were taught to contemplate the factors of enlightenment and the Four Noble Truths.

Many Buddhist teachers advocate mindfulness of what binds us to samsara. In particular, be aware of the twelve links of dependent origination.

The Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says that Right Mindfulness is at the heart of the Buddha’s teaching. “When Right Mindfulness is present, the Four Noble Truths and the other seven elements of the Eightfold Path are also present” (The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, p. 59). This is particularly true of the mindfulness of dharma.

Wisdom

In Mahayana Buddhism, the fourth foundation of mindfulness is awareness of sunyata, or emptiness, which is also the basis of wisdom. This much-misunderstood doctrine teaches us that all phenomena are empty of self-essence as well as inter-existing. The distinction we see between this and that is something we are projecting; it is not intrinsic to the things and beings around us. So, in a sense, a particular phenomenon exists as a mental object, not as a thing-in-itself. See also the Two Truths.

[This is an article I wrote for the Buddhism section of About.com. However, since About.com has removed it from their servers, all rights revert to me.]

The Fetter of Views

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The Buddha spoke often of the danger of clinging to views. For example, in the Sabbasava Sutta (Pali Tipitika, Majjhima Nikaya 2), he said that a person can be lost in “a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion of views, a writhing of views, a fetter of views,” and such a person “is not freed from birth, aging, and death, from sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, and despair.”

This teaching has led to many misunderstandings, mostly because people cling to views about views. Let’s take a look.

The Metaphysical Misdirection

In several places in the Pali Tipitika, the Buddha declined to answer certain questions. Sometimes, as in the Sabbasava Sutta, he said also there were some questions that aren’t helpful to reflect upon.

Theravadin monk and scholar Thanissaro Bhikkhu says that many of these questions probably were those being hotly debated by philosophers of the Buddha’s day — “Is the cosmos eternal? Is it not eternal? Is it finite? Is it infinite? Is the body the same as the soul? Is the body one thing and the soul another? Does the Tathagata exist after death? Does he not exist after death? Both? Neither?” And after each recitation of such questions, the Buddha would explain that such questions ensnare the questioner in “a fetter of views.”

Some people have interpreted these discourses to mean that the Buddha was not interested in metaphysics. Metaphysics is a word used to mean a lot of things, but primarily it refers to philosophical inquiry into the nature of reality. But many of the Buddha’s teachings are about the nature of reality; on its face, the metaphysics argument makes no sense (see “Buddhism and Metaphysics“).

How Do We Know?

There are several other possible reasons why the Buddha had reservations about some kinds of questions. Some questions might be unanswerable because they are based on mistaken assumptions. For example, the question “is the soul the same as the body” assumes there is a soul.

“Does the Tathagata exist after death” assumes that we all understand what existence and death are, not to mention Tathagata. But usually we don’t. The master teachers tell us that when our understanding ripens, and our understanding of existence and death deepens, we see that the question is meaningless.

Throughout his teaching the Buddha urged his disciples to drop intellectual views and conjecture and instead cultivate direct insight through practice of the Eightfold Path. But for a lot of us, intellectual views and conjecture are the only way we know how to know, and the biggest challenge we face in practice is learning new ways to know.

The Trap of Certitude

Views also become a fetter when they cut off further seeking. Once we are certain we know something, we’re closed off from learning more. Indeed, we humans tend to block out new information that contradicts what we think we know.

And certitude is no guarantee of truth. There’s a saying I heard once — A man with one watch knows what time it is, but a man with two watches is never sure. In this case, wisdom lies with uncertainty.

In Zen Buddhism, teachers refer to beginner’s mind or don’t know mind as a mind that is open to new perspectives.The late Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said, “In beginner’s mind we have many possibilities, but in expert mind there is not much possibility.

Keep in mind also the first two of Thich Nhat Hanh‘s Fourteen Precepts of Engaged Buddhism:

“Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones. All systems of thought are guiding means; they are not absolute truth.

“Do not think that the knowledge you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views. Learn and practice non-attachment from views in order to be open to receive others’ viewpoints. Truth is found in life and not merely in conceptual knowledge. Be ready to learn throughout our entire life and to observe reality in yourself and in the world at all times.”

Many Forms of Clinging

Of course, as long as we live we’re going to have views, and that’s all right. Views are only a problem when we attach to them and are unwilling to let them go. (See also “Why Do Buddhists Avoid Attachment?”)

This brings us to another way “clinging to views” is misunderstood. The Buddha taught his disciples not to cling even to his teachings. He compared Buddhist doctrines to a raft that should be abandoned once the other shore is reached.

Some interpret this to mean the doctrines aren’t that important. If we’re not to cling to them, maybe it’s better to avoid them altogether, right? However, often “avoiding” is just another form of clinging.

The Theravadin monk and scholar Bhikkhu Bodhi writes, “Too often this kind of slippery reasoning provides simply a convenient excuse for adhering, at a subtle level of the mind, to ideas which are fundamentally antithetical to the Dhamma. We hang on to such ideas, not because they are truly edifying, but in order to protect ourselves from the radical challenge with which the Buddha’s message confronts us.”

To paraphrase Thich Nhat Hanh — while the written doctrines may not be absolute truth, they are an essential guiding means. Without that guidance, our old assumptions — assumptions to which we cling without realizing it — go unchallenged. Without that guidance, and the challenge to our assumptions, we are likely to remain lost in a wilderness of views.

[This is an article I wrote for the Buddhism section of About.com. However, since About.com has removed it from their servers, all rights revert to me.]

The Third Noble Truth: The Cessation of Craving

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The study of Buddhism begins with the study of the Four Noble Truths. You might think of the Four Truths as a basic outline of all the Buddha’s teaching.

The First Noble Truth is about dukkha, a word that means stressful, painful, and unable to satisfy. Life is dukkha, the Buddha said. The Second Noble Truth explains craving, the origin of dukkha.

The Third Noble Truth tells us that we don’t have to remain stuck in this unsatisfactory state. The Buddha said, “And this, monks, is the noble truth of the cessation of dukkha: the remainderless fading and cessation, renunciation, relinquishment, release, and letting go of that very craving.”

The Path of Liberation

A superficial, but common, interpretation of the Four Noble Truths is that life is awful, it is awful because we have desires, and if we can get rid of our desires we will be enlightened and happy and go to Buddha Heaven. If you have studied the first and second Truths you already know there’s more to it than that.

The first point to understand about the Third Noble Truth is that craving cannot be tossed away by force of will. You cannot just tell yourself, “Okay, from now on I won’t crave anything.” This won’t work, because the conditions that give rise to craving will still be present.

The next point is that merely believing in the Four Noble Truths won’t help you, either. You must thoroughly investigate the Truths for yourself. Contemplate them and observe them in your everyday life. Be willing to learn through experience and not just intellect. Be open to insights that might surprise you.

Renunciation

The English word renunciation means to reject or cast away something. Buddhist texts in English use the word renunciation often, for lack of a better word, but in the context of Buddhism it means something else.

Renunciation in Buddhism happens when, because of insight, the things that bind us to dukkha naturally fall away. That’s why contemplation, investigation, and insight are so important.

The Second Noble Truth tells us that we cling to things we believe will make us happy or keep us safe, but by clinging we bind ourselves to dukkha. It is only when we see this for ourselves that we can begin to let go. But when we see it, the letting go is easy. It is an act of liberation rather than penance. The craving will seem to disappear of its own accord.

The Buddha said, “If, by forsaking a limited ease, he would see an abundance of ease, the enlightened man would forsake the limited ease for the sake of the abundant.” (Dhammapada, verse 290, Thanissaro Bhikkhu translation)

Nirvana

The Buddha said that “the extinction of thirst [craving] is Nirvana.” (Or, in Pali, Nibbana.) Many newcomers to Sanskrit imagine Nirvana to be something like heaven. But the word actually means “to extinguish,” as in extinguishing a fire.

That may sound unappealing. To appreciate the meaning of the word nirvana, it’s important to understand how fire was understood in the Buddha’s time and culture. Fire was considered to be an element that was always present, but it only became visible as flames when it was attached to fuel. When not attached to fuel, fire still existed but in a transformed state.

In the same way, the Buddha taught that when attachment to craving ends, the fire of dukkha is extinguished. The state of the former sufferer is transformed. This transformed state is so different from common human experience that it cannot be imagined, the Buddha said.

Walking the Way

To review, the first three Truths tell us that life is incapable of satisfying us for very long. It is stressful, even painful, and impermanent. We feel this stress because we are attached to craving, and this attachment is the result of a delusional, self-centered perspective. If we gain insight into the nature of life and realize for ourselves how our own mental habits are causing our problems, the craving falls away.

That’s grand, you might think, but how is this transformation accomplished? The “how” is addressed in the Fourth Noble Truth.

[This is an article I wrote for the Buddhism section of About.com. However, since About.com has removed it from their servers, all rights revert to me.]

Dayi Daoxin: Fourth Patriarch of Zen

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The Six Zen Patriarchs are the first six masters of Zen Buddhism. Every Zen teacher alive today counts them as her or his dharma ancestors. Dayi Daoxin (or Tao-hsin; 580-651 CE) is recognized in all schools of Zen as the Fourth Patriarch.

Daoxin’s life as a master teacher of Zen came at the very beginning of the Tang Dynasty (618–907), a high point of Chinese civilization and a golden age for Zen. He established the first permanent monastery dedicated entirely to Zen. And he is credited with establishing the unique style of Zen monastic life, in which practice continues through everyday activities.

So, Daoxin is a very important person in Zen history. Even so, his life story comes with a big asterisk.

The wisdom of Zen is said to be directly transmitted face to face, from teacher to student. It is nothing like reading a book to get a conceptual understanding of something. Teacher and student achieve an intuitive bond, and in time the teacher recognizes that the student has realized the enlightenment of the dharma.

Zen history says the chain of teachers transmitting to the next generation of teachers has been unbroken since the time of the Buddha, and even to Buddhas before Buddha. In this way, it is said, the mind of the Buddha is kept alive through the generations.

But Daoxin’s time in Zen history was not well recorded. There is no contemporary record telling us how Daoxin received transmission from the Third Patriarch, Jianzhi Sengcan. Sengcan himself appears to have been inserted into the record as a kind of patch.

What we know about Daoxin appears to be part history and part myth, and it’s hard to know where one ends and the other begins. Here is the story from the classic Zen chronicles.

Daoxin’s Story

Daoxin was born in present day Anhui Province, China, and he began his Buddhist studies at the age of seven. According to Transmission of Light (Denkoroku; compiled in Japan by Keizan Jokin, 1300), Daoxin’s encounter with Sengcan went like this:

Daoxin: “I beg your compassion. Please give me a way of liberation.”

Sengcan: “Who is hindering you?”

Daoxin: “No one is hindering me.”

Sengcan: “Then why do you seek liberation?”

At these words, the Denkoruku says, Daoxin became greatly enlightened.

However he realized enlightenment, Daoxin had the good fortune to live at the dawn of the Tang Dynasty. The Emperor Taizong, who reigned from 626 to 649, was one of China’s greatest emperors. The political upheavals that had challenged Sengcan and the Second Patriarch, Huike, were coming to an end. Daoxin’s predecessors had spent much of their lives wandering or hiding in the mountains, but Daoxin was able to establish a permanent home for Zen.

He established East Mountain Temple / Monastery on Mount Shuangfeng, near modern-day Huangmei in Hubei Province, China. Certainly Zen teachers had taught in monasteries before; Bodhidharma, for example, established Zen in Shaolin Monastery, but even Bodhidharma was something of a visiting teacher at Shaolin. East Mountain was the first thoroughly Zen monastic community.

For thirty years, Daoxin presided over a community of 500 monks. Because alms alone could not support such a large group, East Mountain became a kind of commune, and the monks grew most of their own food. Zen practice was no longer something done in a meditation hall; gardening, cooking, administrating, cleaning, and other chores also were practice. East Mountain became a template that Zen communities have followed ever since.

Even so, for Daoxin, meditation was the most essential practice. “Sit earnestly in meditation!” he is said to have said. “The sitting in meditation is basic to all else.”

A Legend

Of the many legends about Daoxin, the most famous begins with Daoxin refusing to comply with an imperial decree. The master teacher was summoned to the court of Emperor Taizong, but Daoxin would not go. After a second summons also was refused, the Emperor told his messenger to bring back either an unharmed Daoxin or his head.

But when the messenger read the decree regarding his head, Daoxin bent down and presented his neck. “Cut it off, then!” he told the messenger. The astonished messenger left with neither Daoxin nor his head. When the Emperor heard this story, he honored Daoxin as a great Buddhist teacher.

Daoxin’s Zen

It is recorded that Daoxin taught the Prajnaparamita sutras as well as the Lankavatara, the primary sutra of early Zen. There is also a text attributed to him called the Five Gates of Daoxin:

Let it be known: Buddha is the mind. Outside of the mind there is no Buddha. In short, this includes the following five things:

First: The ground of the mind is essentially one with the Buddha.

Second: The movement of the mind brings forth the treasure of the Dharma. The mind moves yet is ever quiet; it becomes turbid and yet remains such as it is.

Third: The mind is awake and never ceasing; the awakened mind is always present; the Dharma of awakened mind is without specific form.

Fourth: The body is always empty and quiet; both within and without, it is one and the same; the body is located in the Dharma world, yet is unfettered.

Fifth: Maintaining unity without going astray — dwelling at once in movement and rest, one can see the Buddha nature clearly and enter the gate of samadhi.

[This is an article I wrote for the Buddhism section of About.com. However, since About.com has removed it from their servers, all rights revert to me.]

Do We Really Make Our Own Reality?

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The claim that “we make our own reality” pops up frequently in Buddhism, and the claim often is repeated in mind-body-spirit circles. But what does “make our own reality” really mean?

From a Buddhist perspective, it doesn’t mean that once you’re enlightened you can fly or step in front of speeding trains without harm. Whatever your spiritual status, expect to continue to be subject to the laws of physics.

So what does it mean? To a Buddhist, “we make our own reality” could be understood in different ways, and some Buddhists disagree with the statement entirely. It’s probably the case that Mahayana Buddhists are more likely to agree with it than Theravada Buddhists. And if you do find some truth in it, you may understand the phrase in different ways as your practice matures.

The Fruits of Karma

Some of those who object to the idea of making our own reality say that it’s a misunderstanding of the first verses of the Dhammapada, a collection of sayings of the Buddha found in the Pali Sutta-pitaka. One of the early translations of the Dhammapada, by F. Max Muller, begins “All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.” A more recent translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu begins “Phenomena are preceded by the heart, ruled by the heart, made of the heart.”

This verse is about karma. It is said karma is created by body, speech and mind.

But in fact mind comes first; whatever we do with body and speech begins with mind — a thought or an intention. Note that the original Pali uses variations of the word manas for “mind.”

Read More: “Manas: The Mind of Will and Delusion”

However, I think it can also be argued that karma creates our reality, or at least a lot of it. Karma is the action created by intention, and in Buddhism it’s understood that the life you have right now was built by all the choices, and the intentions, you made so far.

But when we say that karma created your reality, be clear that karma refers only to volition action. There are other natural laws in the world — such as physics — that are not affected by karma. Karma doesn’t create natural disasters, for example, but the karma of your life will affect how you handle being in one.

Projected Reality

At this point, you might be thinking this “make your own reality” thing isn’t so cool after all. But there are other ways to look at it.

One of these ways is psychological. People who are frequently angry create a lot of problems for themselves, while someone with a generous heart may inspire generosity in others. What you project out into the world is reflected back to you by the world.

The poet Walt Whitman expressed this when he wrote.,

I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete,
The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.

It is sometimes said your “outer” reality is a reflection of your “inner” reality, although the “outer” and “inner” really aren’t two separate things.

The Six Realms are sometimes interpreted to refer to personality types or mental states rather than physical places. People driven by addictions might be said to be in the Hungry Ghost realm, for example. So in this case the “realm” you are in is an allegory for your mental state.

Yogacara

The Mahayana philosophy of Yogacara is primarily concerned with the nature of experience. In particular, it analyzes how a mental function called vijnana, awareness or consciousness, connects sense objects with sense organs to create experience. For example, vijnana intersects a visible object with the eye to create the experience of sight. Vijnana also connects perception (samjna) to ideas to create thinking.

Read More: The Five Skandhas

Yogacara is a sophisticated philosophy that takes most of us a long time to comprehend. It proposes that the sense objects we see, feel, taste or hear are not “real” but are creations of vijnana.

This isn’t as off the wall as it might seem. Today’s neuroscientists say that the way we experience all the phenomena “out there” really is mostly a fabrication of our brains and nervous systems. Color, for example, is something our brains create from sensory impulses. The red in a rose is in our heads, not in the rose. This is also true of the way the rose smells and feels.

So, according to Yogacara, we really do “make our own reality”; we’re just not conscious of it.

[This article, written by me, was originally published in the Buddhism section of About.com. However, since About.com has apparently removed it from their servers, all rights revert to me.]

The Mindfulness Controversy: Work and War

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The Buddhist practice of mindfulness is popping up everywhere, from mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) programs to corporate seminars on employee productivity. New self-improvement applications for mindfulness seem to emerge every week.

This mindfulness movement does have its detractors, however, and some of those detractors are Buddhists. Let’s take a look at some of the issues surrounding mindfulness in the workplace and the military. For a look at the use of mindfulness in psychology, see The Mindfulness Controversy, Part 2: Mindfulness Therapy.

What Is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is a direct, whole-body-and-mind awareness of the present moment. This awareness is pure awareness; it is not filtered through thoughts or interpretations. This awareness includes awareness of one’s body, of sensations, of one’s mental states, and of, well, everything.

In the context of Buddhism, mindfulness is one of eight “folds” of the Eightfold Path, which is the framework of all of Buddhist practice. For now, the important point is that all parts of the Path support and affect all other parts of the Path. So, for example, our intentions and ethical conduct have an impact on our practice of mindfulness, and vice versa. For that reason, from a Buddhist perspective, when mindfulness is practiced in isolation of the rest of the Path it already becomes something different from Buddhist mindfulness.

It’s also important to understand that as a spiritual practice, stress reduction may be a pleasant side effect of mindfulness practice, but that’s not what it’s for.

However, its not being “Buddhist” is not necessarily a problem. If mindfulness exercises based on Buddhist mindfulness are helpful to people, that’s great. So what are the objections?

Mindfulness in War and Work

Buddhists practice mindfulness on the job all the time. And now businesses, especially large corporations, are being sold on mindfulness as a great productivity tool. Mindful employees are focused employees. And mindful employees are less stressed employees, which leads to happier employees and even fewer sick days. Win/win!

But some are disturbed when they hear about giant corporations or even the military sending personnel to mindfulness seminars. This is partly because beneficiaries are nearly all upper level executives or valuable production staff, such as software engineers. People assembling products in third-world factories are not invited.

I have also heard objections to mindfulness training in the military. Are we training soldiers to be more focused and effective killers? I have no opinion without knowing more specifically how mindfulness is being used. If mindfulness is being used to help soldiers cope with traumatic stress, or to be more aware of surroundings and more likely to survive and come home, then let us not withhold our compassion from soldiers because we don’t approve of war.

Mindfulness and the Self

There is real concern about making mindfulness into a way to get ahead in the corporate world, which is considerably removed from its roots in Buddhism. In Buddhism, the practice helps us see the ephemeral and evanescent nature of the self. When mindfulness is practiced to improve or enhance the self, however, that really is a very different thing.

This takes us back to separating mindfulness from the rest of the Eightfold Path. Within Buddhist practice there is always a context shaped by the Buddha’s teaching — on ethics, on compassion, on selflessness. Mindfulness practices can have a powerful and unpredictable effect on the psyche. What happens when it is completely removed from those contexts?

It’s hard to say, frankly. Many Buddhist teachers have expressed concern that mindfulness uncoupled from teachings on the release of greed and anger and cultivation of loving kindness for other beings could reinforce negative qualities instead of positive ones.

Stirring the Soup

In an article at Wired.com titled “Enlightenment Engineer,” Noah Shachtman quoted Kenneth Folk, an influential meditation teacher in Silicon Valley: “All the woo-woo mystical stuff, that’s really retrograde,” Folk said. “This is about training the brain and stirring up the chemical soup inside.”

Teachers of the many Asian meditative disciplines have centuries of experience dealing with the effects of stirring the chemical soup. For most people, spending ten minutes a day doing mindfulness exercises will have only beneficial effects, yes. But it’s also the case that most of us have some nasty stuff in that chemical soup, and for some of us it doesn’t take much stirring to bring it to the surface. One suspects many recently minted mindfulness enthusiasts lack appreciation of this.

It’s also the case that, as with anything valued, lots of people with sketchy credentials are rushing forward to supply the demand. I’ve run into articles and advertisements about meditation instructors who do not appear to know what mindfulness is. For example, mindfulness has been promoted as a way of blocking out intrusive, negative thoughts, but that’s not right at all. Genuine mindfulness requires awareness and acknowledgment of negative thoughts and anything else going on in your head or senses. “Blocking out” is, by definition, just the opposite.

Note also that in Buddhism “mindfulness” and “concentration” are not the same thing. Indeed, Right Concentration is another section of the Eightfold Path. Focusing all your attention on a dot on your monitor, as one mindfulness expert advocates, is a concentration exercise, not mindfulness. Concentration exercises can be beneficial also, but one does wonder if these so-called experts have any idea what they are talking about.

That said, if you are not a Buddhist practitioner and your employer is making mindfulness training available, I wouldn’t hesitate to check it out and give it a try. Chances are you will get some good out of it.

[This article, written by me, was originally published on About.com’s Buddhism site, but since it was removed from their servers all rights revert to me, and I am posting it here.]

Practical Zen: An Approach to Secular Ethics

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[This is a talk more or less as I gave it at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture on October 23, 2016. It is based on a chapter in Rethinking Religion: Finding a Place for Religion in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World.]

Hello. I’m so pleased to be here today. Many years ago I lived in New Jersey. And in those days I often attended lectures hosted by the Ethical Culture Society in Teaneck. So I come here with an appreciation of what you’re about.

I have been a formal student of Zen Buddhism for nearly 30 years. Zen is my spiritual path. However, let me assure you I’m not here to sell you on Buddhism, but simply to offer a perspective adapted from Buddhism for your consideration. I’m calling it “practical Zen” because I intend to avoid the enigmatic one-hand-clapping stuff and keep this talk grounded in our common experience.

Let’s begin with a quote from a Chinese text that is not Zen, but Daoist. This is paraphrased somewhat from the Dao Dejing, verse 18 in most translations. This passage describes a series of fallback positions.

When the Dao is lost, we fall back on virtue.
When virtue is lost, we fall back on humanity.
When humanity is lost, we fall back on morality.
When morality is lost, we fall back on religion.

If I could provide an executive summary of this talk, it would be that to move toward a more ethical culture we need to climb back up this ladder, at least to virtue. And if you want to go for broke and aim for the Dao, great.

So let’s talk about how we might do this.

There’s a basic Buddhist teaching that says what we might call psychological impulses, including our emotions and thoughts, are the forerunner of all actions. One aspect of that is that the way we conceptualize the world around us conditions how we relate to the world. So the first step in considering a moral course is to look very closely at how we conceptualize morality.

I looked “morality” up in an English dictionary and found “principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.” Another definition says morality is “beliefs about what is right behavior and what is wrong behavior.”

But the fact is, we don’t agree about what’s right and wrong or good and bad behavior. Especially as our communities and nations become more diverse, we more and more often are butting heads with people who have entirely different beliefs about what right and wrong, good and evil even mean.

Where do these beliefs come from? I never heard of people putting them to a vote. Some of us are stuck in the idea that morality is about following absolute rules that are eternal and unchanging because God said so, even if those rules are making everyone miserable. And to an increasing degree, that rigidity is tearing us apart.

Is there another way to define morality? The Sanskrit word found in early Buddhist scriptures that is translated into English as morality or ethics is sila. Sila has a connotation of harmony; it’s acting in a way that allows people to live in harmonious families and communities. Sila involves cultivating an atmosphere of trust, respect, and security. Rules can be useful to help with that cultivation, but by themselves they are not the be-all and end-all of morality.

Buddhism does have moral rules, of course. Monks and nuns have hundreds of rules. Laypeople have five. We call them Precepts. The Precepts for laypeople are very basic ― don’t take life; don’t take what is not given, don’t misuse sexuality, don’t deceive others, avoid intoxicants. Those are the five Precepts every school agrees on; Zen throws in a few more. The Precepts are something like training wheels. We practice the Precepts in order to cultivate morality, humanity, virtue, compassion, kindness, and all that stuff, which is where true morality originates.

There’s an American Zen master who is also a Unitarian Universalist minister named James Ford. James Ford wrote about the Precepts recently,

“Frankly, there are times we just need the rules. Much of our lives we’re wandering around in the thickets. Haven’t a clue. We’re lost. And the precepts can become a life line thrown out to us. Sometimes we just have to grab that line. Sometimes we just have to follow the rules. …

… But if we live only in the realm of rules we are strangled by dead letters. And not only are our own lives constrained, we become caricatures of our true potentiality.”

Some rules really are necessary. Rules about theft and homicide, for example. Without some rules, we humans would never have left the caves. We’d still be huddled around our little fires, guarding our flint arrowheads from those people in that other cave. Civilization wouldn’t be possible.

But we’re still left with a lot of rules that seem to serve no useful purpose. We’re fighting over who can use which public restrooms, for example, because of some people’s rigid ideas about morality. We’re fighting about reproductive rights, about who can get married, and who has to bake wedding cakes.

What’s the point? What does denying people the right to follow their hearts, or in the case of the restroom issue, their bladders, have to do with cultivating an atmosphere of trust, respect and security? In this case, rigid rule-following is having the opposite effect.

Another way to understand the religiosity-morality connection is explained in a book I bet some of you have read, which is The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt provides a rigorously tested argument that we feel before we judge. The moment we are confronted with a moral question, something in our subconscious or intuitive mind churns up feelings about the question that determine our position. Our rational mind then constructs a narrative that explains to us what we think and why we think it. This happens so quickly we usually aren’t aware that’s what we’re doing.

Haidt’s explanation of how we respond to moral questions is very similar to what many Buddhist philosophers have taught for centuries, so it’s good to see science catching up.

Anyway, according to Haidt’s hypothesis, as much as we all want to think we are rational and logical and think the way we do for serious reasons, the fact is that we all allow rudimentary emotions to dictate what we think, at least about some things.

When you understand that much of “morality” is about rudimentary emotions and biases, you might also understand why conservative and dogmatic religions of all persuasion tend to get hung up on sex and on keeping women under control. This tells me that the men in charge of things are channeling their own anxieties about sex and women and projecting them into their scriptures. In doing so, they sometimes wander quite a distance from what their scriptures actually say, revealing how pathologically deep those anxieties are. And because they have the authority of institutional religion behind them, these men are given great moral authority in our culture. But in truth, often what we’re seeing from religious authorities is plain old bigotry. And religion is just being used as an excuse for it.

I feel strongly that one of the many steps we need to take to restore some sanity to this fractured nation is to de-authorize religious authorities from dictating morality to all of us. As a diverse society, we require a secular basis for our common ethics.

While we’re on the subject of thought and actions, I want to talk about good and evil. The way we conceptualize good and evil has real-world consequences.

For example, on September 14, 2001, President George W. Bush said this at a prayer service at the National Cathedral:

“Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

Rid the world of evil? That really should have set off a lot more alarm bells than it did.

Here’s another quote: In a New York Times column published February 11, 2004, David Brooks wrote, “Some liberals have trouble grasping evil, and always think that if we could take care of the handguns or the weapons of mass destruction, our problems would be ameliorated. But I know the problem lies in the souls of our enemies.”

Now, what might we infer about “evil” from these quotations? The first suggests that “evil” is something tangible, with some sort of finite mass and material substance, and if we just work hard enough we can whittle ‘er down and be done with it.

The second suggests that evil is a quality or attribute that some people possess, and others don’t. And once evil has infected “the souls of our enemies” there is nothing to be done but to eliminate them.

Of course, it’s likely “our enemies” feel exactly the same way about us.

People are seduced into evil because they don’t recognize evil as evil. They mistake it for justice, or righteousness, or even God’s Will. And the seduction begins with the thought that “I’m a good person,” and “his hatred of me is evil, but my hatred of him is justified.” As soon as we identify ourselves as “good” and the Other, whoever they are, as “evil,” we’ve well on the way to giving ourselves a cosmic permission slip to do whatever we want to be rid of them. You see the problem.

I say this seductive impulse is at the root of most of the mass atrocities humankind has inflicted on itself through the ages. That’s why the way we conceptualize good and evil has real-world consequences.

Please understand that I’m not saying people or nations shouldn’t defend themselves from those who intend to do them harm. What gets us into trouble is thinking that we’re entitled to Holy Retribution, or that we are somehow qualified to pass judgments and inflict brutality on entire populations, because we’re the good guys.

I used to run into the words good and evil in Buddhist sutras, and these words often nagged at me as being out of place. So I had something of a breakthrough when I found out that the Sanskrit or Pali words being translated as good and evil actually mean “skillful” and “unskillful.”

I’ll give you a mindfulness exercise. Very Zen. Sometime, either now or while you’re sitting in a quiet place, think the word “evil.” Don’t contemplate what it means, just hold the word in your consciousness. And as you do that, pay close attention to the subtle emotional cues within your body that are triggered by the word “evil.”

Now, think the word “unskillful.” If you are tuned in to yourself, you might notice a different reaction. It’s very subtle, but it’s real.

At the very least, maybe we’d be less likely to bomb people for being unskillful.

Zen teachers say it’s important to appreciate that “evil” really has no substance and no independent existence. It is no-thing. It does not infect people. Evil “exists” only in intentions, actions and consequences.

If we understand that neither we nor our enemies are intrinsically good or evil, does that change how we see traumatic events? Speaking as an eyewitness, as I’m sure some of you are, the collapse of the World Trade Center towers easily was the most terrible thing I ever saw, but I honestly don’t see why hanging the label “evil” on it makes any difference. It was what it was. But my perspective enrages some people who clearly think it is vitally important to label the event as “evil,” and if we don’t we’re somehow being soft or letting the terrorists win.

There’s some kind of magical thinking lurking around in there, somewhere.

I don’t agree entirely with the postmodernist view that good and evil are purely relative or matters of subjective judgment. Skillful or unskillful are not just relative. Causing harm to another is unskillful. Wasting natural resources or adding to global climate change are unskillful, even if they aren’t covered by the Ten Commandments. That’s the problem with moral rules left over from the Bronze Age; we’ve got different problems now.

And then there’s “moral clarity.” In the U.S. many religious conservatives place great value in “moral clarity,” which I define as a state of mind achieved by staking a fixed position on a presumed moral high ground and then ignoring the details of human life that fog the view.

For example, I have read many essays arguing for criminalizing abortion that go on and on about the humanity of the fetus without mentioning the pregnant woman at all. If she is mentioned, she is considered to be a kind of niggling technicality. Or worse, she is portrayed as weak-minded or otherwise unqualified to make her own moral decisions.

The “moral clarity” crowd must never admit that the woman is a valuable and intelligent human being who may be in a terribly difficult situation, because empathy and compassion for her would block their “clarity.”

In short, moral absolutism requires ignoring genuine human life experience. This makes its rigid application anti-human and oppressive.

I want to cite the late Robert Aitken Roshi, who was one of the most revered patriarchs of American Zen. In his book The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics, he said, “The absolute position, when isolated, omits human details completely. Doctrines, including Buddhism, are meant to be used. Beware of them taking life of their own, for then they use us.”

Does moral absolutism even work? There is data showing us that rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock pregnancy are higher in conservative “Bible Belt” U.S. states than in more liberal ones, and this pattern seems to replicate itself worldwide.

Reasonable people may disagree about whether abortion is immoral, but note that rates of abortion in overwhelmingly Catholic Latin America, where abortion is nearly everywhere illegal and harshly punished, are higher than in the United States and a lot higher than in mostly liberal and allegedly decadent western Europe.

And what does his tell us? It appears that when absolutist morality is enforced, either by public shaming or by law, actual human behavior — heterosexual behavior included — is driven into the closet, leaving actual humans with no practical guidance in their actual circumstances.

I say the absolutist approach to morality gets everything backward. It creates too wide a gap between public righteousness and what people are really doing in their private lives, so that the moral rules are not really guiding anyone. And when we cede the presumed moral high ground to the absolutists, too often we squelch open and honest discussion of our real-world circumstances and behaviors.

Again, “The absolute position, when isolated, omits human details completely. Doctrines are meant to be used. Beware of them taking life of their own, for then they use us.”

Secular moralists sometimes propose a utilitarian or consequentialist approach to morality. Very broadly, utilitarianism is the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good. There are many variations of utilitarianism, however, mostly because people disagree on what constitutes “good.” Further, this approach often fails to provide an incentive for “being good.”

Author and neuroscientist Sam Harris has proposed that science can provide a basis for morality. Harris is a smart guy and he says many things worthy of consideration. But he’s written that science can “tell us what’s objectively true about morality” and “give us answers about right and wrong.” I think that’s right up there with thinking we can rid the world of evil.

I have a more radical proposal here. Some things people need to work out for themselves.

Human life is infinitely complicated and messy, and circumstances have a way of confounding application of one-size-fits-all solutions. Some things people need to work out for themselves. And that’s okay.

I propose that given the infinity of variables, no two human beings ever faced completely identical moral dilemmas. When faced with questions about ending a pregnancy, or a marriage, or when to discontinue life support, or whether to intervene in a friend’s problems or let things sort themselves out — we need to be able to apply some subjectivity to matters that will change our lives and the lives of those around us, because we’re the only ones familiar with most of the variables.

We’re the only ones who have our medical history, or our parents, or our financial or physical resources, or our marriage, or our job, or our special needs child. Etc., etc. I think that in some circumstances we need the freedom to be subjective, to consider complex moral questions not just in the abstract but in the light of our particular life and situation.

The challenge to us as a society is to distinguish between those behaviors that cannot be allowed ― such as homicide ― because allowing them would damage civilization; and those problems that people need to work out for themselves, even if we don’t all personally approve of all the solutions. And then we have to persuade the absolutists to back off.

We can, as a society, draw parameters around moral questions — medical guidelines determining when life support is futile, for example. And I agree that science can help with much of that. And then we’ll continue to do what we’ve always done, which is argue among ourselves about where the parameters should be drawn. Maybe arguing with each other is the price we pay for freedom.

If all this sounds terribly ambiguous — yeah, mostly, it is. That’s because you and the world and human life generally are very complicated, and where there is complication, there is ambiguity.

I realize people often are uncomfortable with ambiguity. They want clear rules and sharply defined boundaries. They want all phenomena to be properly sorted into their socially acceptable conceptual boxes. That’s why some people prize moral absolutism. That’s a mostly workable strategy for getting through life, but it’s not real. It’s an artificial order superimposed on the messiness of reality. And sometimes failing to accept reality causes more trouble than it solves.

One of the great humanistic philosophers of the 20^th century, Erich Fromm, wrote that people often escape into authoritarian mass movements because they fear freedom. A lot of that fear of freedom is a fear of ambiguity, a lack of clear, bright lines that make your choices for you.

I think we see a lot of that fear in America today. And notice that some of the same people who talk about how they want to protect their freedom seem hell bent on destroying everybody’s freedom to do that. It’s like they’re protecting their freedom to be not free. But those clear, bright lines are not likely to come back, so this is a situation we’re going to have to deal with for a while.

Just about any psychologist will tell you that you can’t force other people to change. We can only look to ourselves. How do we find our own moral compass in the messiness of life?

And to answer this question I want to wade a little more deeply into Zen.

Here’s a question for you. “Can you identify yourself without reference to a relationship?” This is a question I first heard in a sociology class. I’ve never heard anyone provide an answer; I don’t think it’s answerable. It’s something of a koan, because if you work with it you end up exploring the paradoxical nature of the self, which is a very Zen thing to do.

Many schools of Buddhism, including Zen, have a doctrine called the two truths. The two truths describe what seems to be a paradox. On one hand, we are all precious and unique individuals, worthy of respect and compassion.

But at the same time, we take our very uniqueness, our identities, from our relationships. From our roles in our families, from our professions, from the interests we share with others, from the arts and intellectual pursuits we enjoy, with our circle of associations. We are who we are because everyone else is who they are. We are not the entirely self-contained, stand-alone people units we think we are.

This interdependence extends to our biological existence as well. We depend on other life forms to sustain our lives and to maintain the conditions on this planet that make life possible. All beings are interdependent. All beings inter-exist. This comes directly from the teaching of the Buddha.

A metaphor used to help resolve this paradox is attributed to a Chinese master named Dushun who was born in the 6th century. This is called “Indra’s Net.” Imagine a vast net that stretches infinitely in all directions. In each “eye” of the net is a single brilliant, perfect jewel. Each jewel also reflects every other jewel, infinite in number, and each of the reflected images of the jewels bears the image of all the other jewels — infinity to infinity. Whatever affects one jewel affects all of them.

This means every jewel matters. Every person matters. You matter. And everything you do affects everyone else. This is the most essential thing to understand. Everything you feel and think, everything you do or say affects yourself and everyone else. Most effects may be extremely subtle, but they’re still effects. And sometimes even subtle effects can have big real-world consequences.

And at its most basic, an ethical life is a life that produces beneficial effects.

Now, it may seem inconsistent to say that we need to be allowed some subjectivity in our moral choices, while at the same time everything we do impacts everyone else. So let’s take this to another level.

Twenty-five centuries ago, the Buddha emphasized purifying oneself of what he called afflictions or defilements. The chief afflictions are greed, hate and ignorance. This ignorance is ignorance of the inter-existence of all beings, because most of our problems come from thinking of ourselves as separated from everything else. We think that whatever is within our skin is “me” and what’s outside our skin is “everything else.” It’s this misperception that is the chief source of our fear, our greed, our anger, our hatred.

You can follow moral rules to the letter, but if you are harboring greed, hate, and ignorance, you are not living a beneficial life. You are not living an ethical life. You are not cultivating an atmosphere of trust, respect, and security.

The Buddha taught many practices, including meditation and mindfulness, to reduce our afflictions.

There’s nothing magical or supernatural going on here; it’s all about becoming more intimate with yourself. You become more aware of what jerks you around and pulls you out of harmony. You learn to let those things go. If you don’t have some sort of meditation or mindfulness practice already, I encourage you to look into one.

Finally he encouraged us to develop four particular virtues above all others. The first is metta, goodwill, or loving kindness to all beings. The second is compassion, which is the active desire to reduce the suffering of others. The third is called “mudita,” which means “sympathetic joy.” This is joy in the good fortune of others. It’s the opposite of envy.

And, finally, equanimity. With equanimity, we are not being constantly pulled back and forth between things we want and things we want to avoid; we accept what life brings us. We learn to remain in balance in the middle of chaos. We learn to be comfortable with ambiguity. And we learn to not be pulled into one-sided views. The Buddha gave many, many sermons about all of these virtues.

Now, developing these virtues isn’t something you can do in three easy steps, and none of us is ever perfect, and that’s okay. Just making the effort, even if you fall short, makes the whole universe a better place. And while Buddhism provides a lot of tools for cultivating these virtues, it doesn’t have a patent on them.

Every day we have opportunities to actualize goodwill and compassion, and to share the joy of others. Every day, there are opportunities to develop equanimity. I propose that these virtues harmonize well with the commitment of Ethical Culture to “always act so as to elicit the best in others, and thereby yourself.”

For several years I was the student of a Zen teacher named Jion Susan Postal, who died in 2014. She founded the Zen Center in New Rochelle. Susan taught us to be grateful for these opportunities. She said,

“For all beneficent karma ever manifested through me, I am grateful. May our gratitude be expressed in our body, speech and mind, with infinite kindness to the past, infinite service to the present, and infinite responsibility to the future.”

And to all of you, metta.

The Latter-Day Dimwits of Televised Religion

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E.J. Dionne recently wrote,

Over the past several decades, those who view religion with respect regularly come back to the same question: What has happened to the religious intellectuals, the thinkers taken seriously by nonbelievers as well as believers?

You younger folks may be giggling at the very idea of religious intellectuals, but really, there are such people. And they used to make appearances in public, including getting on Time magazine covers back when that was a bigger deal than it is now. In the mid 20th century, people like W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Mortimer Adler, J. H. Oldham, C. S. Lewis and Reinhold Niebuhr were leading spokespersons for Christianity. They were published in newspapers and magazines and frequently spoke on the radio. And their commentaries often spoke to political and social issues of the time. Although these men didn’t see eye to eye in all particulars, on the whole they held a liberal view of humanity and presented a Christianity that spoke to the better angels of our nature.

This was before television, however, which makes one wonder if television is part of the problem. The people who speak for Christianity on the teevee these days are uniformly hateful and imbecilic, and chained to right-wing ideology.

If you knew nothing at all about the Gospels except what you heard on cable television, you might assume that the ministry of Jesus was primarily about stopping abortion and homosexuality. And in fact, Jesus addressed neither topic even in passing. Further, most of the Christian voices you hear in mass media these days speak of nothing but hate, or worse, how they are entitled to discriminate against women and gays and Muslims and anyone else they don’t like because they’re Christian. How did that happen?

Writing in the current issue of Harper’s (“The Watchmen: What became of the Christian intellectuals?“), Alan Jacobs traces what happened to Christianity in public discourse from 1950 on. First, the generation of Auden, Eliot et al. either died or retired, and they were replaced by intellectuals speaking for science and technology rather than Christianity. Second, in the Cold War/Red Scare age, anti-intellectualism was on the rise. “As anti-intellectualism took a greater hold over American life in general, and over Christian life in America in particular, it came to seem almost unnatural for a congregational minister also to be a deeply learned person, an intellectual with an intellectual’s voice,” Jacobs writes.

This is not to say there were no intelligent spokespeople for Christianity after the 1950s — there was Martin Luther King, after all — but as time went on they were more and more drawn into speaking for conservatism. For example, Father Richard John Neuhaus was once a prominent Catholic spokesperson for civil rights in the 1960s, but then he got sucked into the anti-abortion movement.

Jacobs claims that Christian intellectuals somehow became persona non grata in “liberal” media in the 1960s and 1970s, but he doesn’t explain how that happened. I suspect that a reason for that was that liberal Christian intellectuals tended to be against the Vietnam War at a time when antiwar statements were considered unpatriotic and controversial, never mind that most Americans were against the war.

The bigger part of the story that Jacobs misses has to do with television, and how political operatives learned to manipulate it. Let’s go back to the school desegregation fight of the 1950s and 1960s.

One of the critics of school desegregation was a young Southern Baptist minister from Lynchburg, Virginia, named Jerry Falwell. The Rev. Falwell publicly denounced the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and worked with J. Edgar Hoover to spread FBI-manufactured propaganda against him. The Rev. Falwell’s sermon’s included lines like “The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line”; and “The true Negro does not want integration,” as if the Rev. Falwell had a clue what the “true Negro” might want.

The Rev. Falwell went on to found the Lynchburg Christian Academy, advertised as a “private school for white students,” in 1966. A few years later, the name changed to Liberty Christian Academy. Meanwhile, the Rev. Falwell’s church grew to megachurch proportions. In later years he came be associated with his opposition to legal abortion and gay rights, but it was his opposition to desegregation that grew his original following.

After the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, conservative political operative Paul Weyrich, who founded the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), tried to enlist Falwell in the anti-abortion and anti-women’s rights campaigns. At first Falwell wasn’t interested, but eventually he was won over. It has been suggested that Falwell didn’t extend his “ministry” to oppressing women and gays until he was persuaded that the cause of segregation was utterly lost, and he needed a new cause to keep his career going.

Thus began the next phase of his public career, and you might remember that for a time the Rev. Jerry Falwell was a real force in U.S. politics. Promoted and supported by the political Right, the Rev. Falwell became one of mass media’s go-to “experts” on religious and moral questions. (See “Agent of Intolerance” by Max Blumenthal.)

In other words, the so-called “liberal” media that allegedly shut out liberal Christian voices was more than happy to give the likes of Falwell a megaphone. I suspect what happened is that people like Weyrich did a bang-up job of seeing to it that Falwell and his fellow travelers were well represented in the rolodexes of television producers. By the time we got to the awful Terri Schiavo episode in 2005, Christianity was entirely represented on television by the most reactionary, politicized extremists of the so-called Christian Right. I wrote about this in my book, Rethinking Religion.

Television producers booked one right-wing religious figure after another, all taking the side of Terri Schiavo’s parents, as if “religion” spoke with one voice on this issue. As I remember it, the “debate” on MSNBC featured a grid of fundamentalist ministers — plus Pat Boone, for some reason — arranged on the screen like a tic-tac-toe board. And the talking heads were all bearing false witness against Michael Schiavo as fast as they could move their lips. It was surreal.

Yes, I’m sure Fox News was even worse, but I didn’t have the stomach to watch.

But religion does not speak with one voice on this issue. Ministers, rabbis, theologians, etc., could have argued on well-founded religious grounds that removing the feeding tube was the moral thing to do, under the circumstances. And, in fact, many members of the clergy said this publicly. But from what I saw the television producers didn’t ask not-fundamentalist religious people into the studios.

And it gets worse. More recently, some of the most prominent voices speaking for Christianity on the teevee have included Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin and that guy from Duck Dynasty. This in turn has fueled the conviction that to be religious is to be an idiot. In Gallup surveys of the 1950s, over 90 percent of Americans self-identified as Christian. Today, that’s down to 75 percent, according to Gallup. Pew has it even lower — 70 percent. If this trend continues at the same rate, Christianity will become a minority religion in America in some of our lifetimes.

Catholic and Evangelical churches in particular have felt the result of a politicized clergy. See “How Evangelicals Are Losing an Entire Generation” to see how that’s going.

I have met real-live Christian intellectuals who are articulate and thoughtful — and liberal — and ought to be perfectly presentable on television. But you never see them there, outside of an occasional appearance on PBS.

So to answer E.J. Dionne’s question about what happened to Christian intellectuals — it’s the same thing that happened to genuinely progressive and liberal voices for so long. The Right succeeded in shutting them out of mass media.

Western Buddhism and Cultural Appropriation

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Brad Warner reports getting this email from somebody:

“No please white American dude tell me again what Buddhism is. He knows white Buddhism, he’s culturally appropriation, he makes money off defining a culture that does not belong to him – which he tried due to his many failed business ventures and bands – and I have no problem with his identifying as Buddhist but with any white American defining Buddhism when that culture doesn’t belong to them.”

Never mind that Warner put in years of study in Japan with Gudo Nishijima; according to some, Buddhism doesn’t belong to white people.

As Warner points out, Buddhism itself has already been established in many different cultures — the move from India to China, for example, required a huge cultural adjustment — and doesn’t belong to any one. I’d add that Buddhism itself transcends culture. I’d also like to point out many western Buddhists are not white; “white” and “western” shouldn’t be synonyms.

But this is an issue with many, many facets. “Western” Buddhists are a broad range of people, from those who have taken ordination vows and dedicated their lives to dharma, to those who are superficial practitioners and don’t know dharma from doughnuts. But you can find the same range in Asia. Somehow, superficial Asian Buddhism doesn’t raise anyone’s hackles.

Even so, I’ve seen enough people sneer at “western Buddhism” to know that in many circles, Buddhism isn’t taken seriously if it isn’t Asian. It is assumed that if a westerner, especially a white one, embraces Buddhism as his or her path, that person is not serious. Their spiritual path is just an affectation, something they’ll get over someday when they grow up.

I came to realize at one point that this perspective often is all about the presumed superiority of western civilization. From this perspective a westerner, especially a white one, who turns his back on the Default Religion of Christianity and turns to Asian philosophy and spirituality cannot possibly be serious. Some things are all right for Asians — until we get around to converting them, presumably — but if a westerner converts to an Asian religion, that person is an obvious flake. He’s just trying to get attention, or something.

I’ve also run into similar attitudes within western Buddhism, however. One finds people who cannot wait to stamp out all vestiges of Asian culture in western Buddhist practice right now, for example. And I’m not saying that Buddhism must somehow be stylistically Asian, or that there’s something wrong with expressing dharma in a western cultural context. But to me there’s often a strong whiff of western cultural arrogance, if not downright racism, behind these efforts.

Western Buddhism will evolve and develop its own ways of doing things, and already there are Buddhist centers and western teachers that have left off the traditional robes and non-English liturgy, and that’s fine. But right now mostly we’re like new piano students who need to master the old, standard scales and exercises before we get experimental with style.

And I also think that if an individual feels uncomfortable with traditional Asian forms, that discomfort usually is a symptom of clinging. Demanding that Buddhism change to become more “comfortable” is not addressing the real problem.

On the other hand, when more traditional Buddhism is practiced by westerners — robes, Asian liturgy and all — I’ve heard it derided as “orientalism.” Orientalism is a particular kind of cultural appropriation — the stereotyped representation of Asian culture, especially when it reflects a colonialist attitude. Orientalism becomes fashionable from time to time.

But in my experience, in actual dharma centers that retain Asian liturgy, robes, art and similar forms, it’s mostly because the teacher, or the teacher’s teacher, or the founder of the center, was Asian, and the Asian accoutrements are maintained because they are what the members know. Certainly, there’s a lot of frivolous use of Asian sacred art, but western Buddhists usually are not the perpetrators.

There are examples of appropriation that aren’t necessarily cultural; the mindfulness fad comes to mind.

There are the Buddhist “naturalists,” who want to change Buddhism so that it makes sense “within a thoroughgoing materialist worldview.” I’d say one of the functions of Buddhist practice is to help us stop clinging to a thoroughgoing materialist worldview; see this Brad Warner interview, for example.

The Buddhist idea is revolutionary, because if you take it to its logical conclusion, it really overturns all religions and makes materialism seem ridiculous.

The naturalists apparently are stuck in the notion that material is “real” and what isn’t material is not real, but even science doesn’t go there any more (talk to a quantum physicist about this). And Buddhism certainly doesn’t go there, especially Mahayana, which considers phenomena to be neither real nor not real. And don’t get me started on yogacara, which considers nothing to be “real” except vijnana — the level of consciousness that connects senses and sensory objects. The naturalists are not trying to “correct” Buddhism to remove its “superstitious” elements, as they imagine it. They are trying to gut it and turn it into a handbag for their own western-centric views.

And there are the infamous Buddhist Geeks, who have been called out many times for their apparent reluctance to invite ethnic Asian teachers to speak at their conferences.

When I was writing about Buddhism for About.com, I sometimes heard from ethnic Asians — some living in Asia, some not — who had been lectured by white western Buddhists that the Buddhism they had grown up with was not real Buddhism. This opinion often centered around the common misunderstanding that all Buddhists meditate, when in fact, most do not.

Part of the problem, too, is that many of us who practice within a particular tradition don’t get exposed to other traditions and have little appreciation of how different they can be. Or, they may assume “their” version of Buddhism is the correct one, although generally this attitude is discouraged. And then there are “book store Buddhists” — people who have read about Buddhism but who have never formally taken the Refuges or practiced with a teacher or sangha.

I’d say the longer one practices, and the more one is exposed to other schools of Buddhism, the more humble one gets about it. That’s certainly true for me, anyway.

For a lot of reasons, the merging of Buddhism into western life and culture is not happening all that smoothly. But it is happening. And some of us are very serious about it.

New Jersey Just Poked China

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And now for something completely different … New Jersey just released a list of approved religious holidays, meaning holidays that give a child a legitimate excuse for being out of school. A number of Buddhist holidays showed up, which of course is nice. But one jumped out at me —

April 25 The 11th Panchen Lama’s Birthday (Buddhist)

The Panchen Lama, a high lama of the Geluk school, is the second highest-ranking lama in Tibetan Buddhism. At the moment there are two, one recognized by Tibetan Buddhism and the authority of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and one recognized by the government of China.

April 25 is the birthday of the Panchen Lama recognized by Tibetan Buddhism. The other one was born in February.

Historical background: The 10th Panchen Lama, who spent a large part of his life in Chinese prisons, died in 1989 shortly after giving a speech mildly critical of Beijing. Officially, he died of a heart attack.

In May 1995, a six-year-old boy named Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, of Chinese-occupied Tibet, was recognized as the tulku, or rebirth, of the Panchen Lama. Two days later the child and his family were taken into Chinese custody. They have not been seen or heard from since.

Later that year, Beijing named another boy, Gyaltsen Norbu — the son of two Tibetan Communist Party officials — as the 11th Panchen Lama. Gyaltsen Norbu spent most of his childhood in seclusion in Beijing. But in recent years he has been given a number of functions, such as representing Tibetan Buddhism at official conferences and releasing statements praising Beijing for its wise governance of Tibet. (See also “The Panchen Lama of Tibetan Buddhism: A Lineage Hijacked by Politics.”)

You may ask, why is this a BFD? Because it relates to the 14th Dalai Lama and possibly to the 15th as well.

Beijing harbors an irrational and all-consuming hatred for the 14th Dalai Lama. Just as an example of how far Beijing will go to smack down His Holiness — back in 2009 the revered Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh expressed a wish on Italian television that the Dalai Lama might be allowed to return to Tibet. Later that year 400 nuns and monks who were followers of Thich Nhat Hanh were forcibly evicted from Bat Nha Monastery in Vietnam.

Although Hanoi gave no sensible reason for the eviction, it was understood by everyone that Beijing had ordered it. A number of U.S. presidents have carefully not met with His Holiness in the oval office for similar reasons.

Among the traditional functions of a Panchen Lama is to recognize the rebirth of a Dalai Lama. And here we come to the crux of it. Gyaltsen Norbu has been prepared his entire life to carry out one function, which is to recognize some young boy as the 15th Dalai Lama some day. Beijing has claimed sole authority to recognize all important rebirths, in fact, through a lot of historical revisionism. (See “China’s Outrageous Reincarnation Policy.”)

Beijing has made no secret that it intends to recognize and enthrone a 15th Dalai Lama once the 14th is gone. They appear to believe this will help pacify the Tibetans. The fact that Gyaltsen Norbu is not recognized by Tibetans even in China — indeed, the young man requires a substantial guard when he makes ceremonial visits to Tibetan monasteries — ought to tell the Chinese officials this might not work. But they bought into this plan years ago, and aren’t about to let go of it. (See also “Buddhism in China and Tibet today.”)

Whether New Jersey officials realized what they were getting themselves into by recognizing Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as the Panchen Lama I do not know, but bravo! Well done, somebody!

And maybe Beijing won’t notice. If they do, we could offer to let them keep Chris Christie as hostage.

A couple of other odd things about the New Jersey holiday list — It does not include the birthday of the 14th Dalai Lama himself (July 6), but it does let kids take September 7 off for His Holiness Sakya Trizin’s birthday. This lama is head of the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism, one of four to six schools depending on who’s counting. I’ve only recently become aware that there was anything of the Sakya school in the U.S. at all; most of western Tibetan Buddhism is Geluk, Kagyu or Nyingma, from what I’ve seen. Kagyu and Nyingma are not represented on the list. However, I don’t doubt Sakya Trizin is a fine fellow whose birthday deserves a day off of school.