Category Archives: Buddhism

Notes on the Other Shore

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A little more on the raft parable — I occasionally bump into someone saying the raft parable tells us we can ignore dharma teachings as we like, because we’re supposed to ditch them, anyway. This is an un-serious interpretation, seems to me.

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However, in his comments on this parable, Thanissaro Bhikkhu said something that I don’t believe is true —

“Many a casual reader has concluded from the simile of the raft simply that the Dhamma is to be let go. In fact, one major Mahayana text — the Diamond Sutra — interprets the raft simile as meaning that one has to let go of the raft in order to cross the river.”

Let’s look at this —

Mention of the raft parable is in the sixth chapter of the Diamond Sutra. This is from Red Pine’s translation:

“…if these fearless bodhisattvas created a perception of a dharma, they would be attached to a self, a being, a life, and a soul. Likewise, if they created the perception of no dharma,  they would be attached to a self, a being, a life, and a soul.

“And why not? Because, Subhuti, fearless bodhisattvas do not cling to a dharma, much less to no dharma.  This is the meaning behind the Tathagata’s saying, ‘A dharma teaching is like a raft. If you should let go of dharmas, how much more so no dharmas.'”

From this, I can see how the Bikkhu came to his interpretation. But one must always be careful with the Diamond. It’s a subtle text, and its deeper meaning isn’t found in a literal reading, I don’t think. My stab at this is that reaching the other shore requires dropping away ideas about dharma. But that’s not the same thing as dropping dharma.

In his book on the Diamond Sutra, Red Pine quotes a number of distinguished Mahayana sages who interpret this passage in the conventional way — that the “raft” of the Buddha’s teaching can abandoned on the other shore. I think it’ s safe to say that the author of the Diamond expected his readers to be familiar with the original raft simile and how it is traditionally interpreted.

Something else to remember about the Diamond is that the translations of it are all over the map. The oldest versions we have are in an antique form of Chinese that, I am told, is just about untranslatable. And the early Chinese translators, who may or may  not have been working from a now-lost Sanskrit original, don’t agree with each other.

For example, one of the early translators was an Indian monk named Paramartha (499-569 CE). Red Pine says that in Paramartha’s version, the raft becomes a metaphor for the sutras, not the dharma. That puts a sightly different spin on the text.

As usual, Thich Nhat Hanh finds a clear way to explain things.

“The Buddha is saying that the truth he has realized is not what we generally think it is. It lies in the middle way, which is beyond the idea of graspable and the idea of deceptive. We should understand this in light of the teaching of the raft given earlier. The raft is to help us cross over to the other shore. It is a wonderful, even necessary instrument. But we should use the raft in an intelligent way. We should not cling to it or carry it on our back when we are done with it. The teaching is to help us, not to be possessed by us. It is not meant to deceive us, but we may be deceived by it because of our own way of clinging to it.” [from The Diamond that Cuts Through Illusion]

[This post originally was posted on About.com Buddhism on November 27, 2013]

The Raft Parable

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Most of you probably know the Buddha’s raft simile — that the dharma is like a raft that you can abandon once you are on the other shore. Recently I decided to check out exactly where the raft story originated.

The search led me to the Alagaddupama Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 22),  also called the Water Snake Simile Sutta. There’s a water snake parable that comes right before the raft parable, and apparently the organizers of the Sutta-pitaka found the water snake story more compelling and named the sutta after the snake and not the raft. Go figure.

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It turns out there is some disagreement as to exactly what the raft parable is trying to tell us, and the water snake story ties into that. In the snake story, a man picks up a water snake by the tail instead of by the proper way, by the  head, the way the wildlife experts on the Discovery Channel always do.  Of course, the snake gives the man a venomous bite, and he was very sorry and probably died. The moral of this story is that if we “grasp” the dharma improperly, we could fall into all kinds of spiritual dangers.

The raft story immediately follows the snake story.  As you probably know, in the raft story a man needs to cross a large body of water to reach the other shore, which is much nicer than the shore he is standing on.  There were no bridges or ferries, so he ties together twigs and grass and whatever else he could find to make a raft, which he then uses as a floatation device as he paddles with hands and feet across the water.

At the end of this story, the Buddha asked his monks what the man should do with the raft. And the sensible answer, of course, is that, since a raft serves no purpose on dry land, he would leave the raft on the shore and continue his journey without it. Then the Buddha said,

“In the same way, monks, I have taught the Dhamma [dharma] compared to a raft, for the purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of holding onto. Understanding the Dhamma as taught compared to a raft, you should let go even of Dhammas, to say nothing of non-Dhammas.” [Thanissaro Bhikkhu translation]

Most of the time, this story is interpreted to mean that once one is enlightened, there is no more need for dharma teachings. But some scholars argue that when one connects the two stories, it appears the raft parable is more about how to “grasp” or understand the teachings. In the second interpretation, the other shore represents correct understanding, and the abandoned raft represents provisional or imperfect understanding.

Which interpretation works for you? I could go either way, frankly.

[This blog post originally was published on About.com Buddhism November 26, 2013.]

Silence, Noble and Ignoble

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A couple of days ago I published a post called “How Evil Happens,” cross-posted from The Mahablog.  The post commented on the violence in Gaza and the episodes of Israeli bombs hitting UN schools in which Palestinian civilians were taking shelter.

The bare facts of the situation indicate that while the schools probably were not being targeted, neither had Israel shown much concern about not bombing the schools. And Israel had been informed the schools were being used as refuges. Israel was unable to provide a verifiable reason for the bombing; Israeli forces seem to think that whatever they do is justified, period.

I quoted Rethinking Religion:

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 I said the same admonishment no doubt applies to Palestinian terrorists as well.

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.

The United States has fallen into the same error, many times.

A comment was left on my other site, which said —

The Fourth Mindfulness Training: I will not spread news that I do not know to be certain and will not criticize or condemn things of which I am not sure. I am wondering whether you can quote these sources with the certainty that they are true?

We can’t always know for certain what goes on out of our sight. For that matter, we’re often confused about what’s going on within our sight. But in the case of the bombed UN schools, even Israel is not denying that the bombings occurred as news sources reported. What’s in dispute is whether other circumstances justified the bombings. Since I wrote the original post, no new information has come to light that makes Israel’s arguments any stronger.

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Buddhist “right speech” teachings are sometimes interpreted to mean that one cannot criticize anyone else, ever, for any reason, and I don’t see it that way. Certainly one does not spread lies or gossip, and one does not use speech in an ego-centered way, tearing others down to build ourselves up.

However, if we don’t at least offer what insight or wisdom we may have to the suffering world, what good are we?

Most of the mass atrocities of human history were carried out by people who believed their actions were completely justified. This has been true of followers of all the world’s great religions and no doubt any nation that’s been in existence for at least a few years. Things are done that the descendents of the perpetrators try to erase from history or eventually acknowledge in sorrow when enough time has passed. Yet generation after generation, we never seem to learn from this.

I don’t see any group of people, including nations, as intrinsically good or evil. This is just what humans do, and have always done.

Did the Buddha actually intend for us to keep silence in the face of atrocity? Or to wait to speak until the verdict of history has been issued, which usually takes a generation or two? I don’t think so. The Buddha himself could be unsparing in his words when somebody did something completely out of bounds.

In the Patimokkha, a section of the Vinaya-pitaka, or rules for monks and nuns, the Buddha discussed the correct way for one monk or nun to admonish another. If the criticism is timely, factual, not unnecessarily harsh, and offered with a kind heart, this is skillful admonishment. And while I don’t always live up to that, in this situation I believe I did.

Taking the Path of Woo: Jesus in Tibet?

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Recently an intelligent and thoughtful person of my acquaintance posted on Facebook about some new and exciting connection between science and spirituality. I followed the link to this wondrous new thing, and it took me to a page about … Edgar Cayce?

You young folks may not have heard of him, but many people — usually the same people who took chain letters seriously —  still believed in Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) when I was a young ‘un. Cayce was, basically, an upscale circus sideshow act. His shtick was to go into trances where he issued predictions for the future . Be advised that someday the earth’s poles will shift to somewhere along the equator. And 1933 will be a great year for the economy! Oh, wait …

I take it Cayce is making something of a comeback in New Age circles. Or perhaps he never really left. So much of what he went on about, such as the healing properties of crystals, out-of-body experiences, channeling knowledge from the dead and legends about the Lost Continent of Atlantis was the stuff 1960s and 1970s-era New Age was made of.

It can be argued that maybe crystals do have healing properties, and maybe someday we’ll find the remains of the Lost Continent of Atlantis. OK. But what would that have to do with spirituality? A grab bag of random beliefs is not a path, or a process, no matter how much those beliefs tickle our imagination.

Beliefs about mysterious happenings, ancient and recent, are shiny, sparkly things that are hard to ignore. I don’t know why that’s true. In Rethinking Religion I wrote a chapter called “True Believers and Mass Movements” that discusses why people cling so tightly to beliefs, including ridiculous ones, and can’t be talked out of them.

Our brains are wired to look for connections and meaning, and so we see connections and meaning whether they are there or not. Our experiences are framed by our personal, mythical (and usually self-flattering) narratives, not data. We feel emotions and impulses, generated in the subconscious, that we cannot explain, so we make up stories to explain them. We create our stories from our biases, however, not from objective fact, and that’s how we interpret the world. And we all do this, religious or not.

But why some fantastical stories are more shiny and sparkly than others, I can’t say.

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One of the most persistent shiny, sparkly stories that people take seriously is that Jesus studied Buddhism in Tibet, or maybe China, or maybe India, during the years of his youth that were not recorded in the Bible. Possible?

James Ford discusses the origins of the Jesus-in-Tibet story on his blog, Monkey Mind. In the late 19th century a book titled The Life of Saint Issa was claimed to have been found in a monastery in Tibet. The book was about the life of Jesus — Saint Issa — and claimed that from the ages of 13 to 29 Jesus had gone off to India to study religions. He studied with the Jains and with the Hindus, but apparently he wasn’t satisfied until he found the Buddhists, and he spent his last six years before returning home learning the Pali Canon. And for many reasons that James Ford presents on his blog, the book clearly is a work of fiction.

Over the years I’ve run into a lot of people who fervently believe that Jesus studied Buddhism. The standard arguments for this claim are (a) Jesus taught things he could only have learned from Buddhism; and (b) some variation of the Life of Saint Issa story — somebody found a book or a scroll or an engraving in some temple or monastery, usually in Tibet or India, that proved Jesus had been there. A third argument that pops up occasionally is that some of Jesus’ parables were taken from older Buddhist sutras.

None of these claims holds water. In order:

First, if we assume Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels accurately reflect what he taught — and if they don’t, I don’t know what else might — there’s nothing in there that he only could have gotten from Buddhism. As James Ford (Unitarian Universalist minister, Zen priest and lineage holder, MA in religion) says,

While it would be an absolute delight for me to learn that Jesus studied Buddhism, the fact remains there was nothing in his teachings, as best a cool read of the normative texts give us, that wasn’t already contained within the Judaism of his day. Well, okay, that very late text John does offer a non-traditionally Jewish Jesus, but even that Jesus is easily contained with a rather more boring and obviously already there gnostic influence or reaction.

Indeed, the one incontrovertible thing you can say about Jesus is that he was a monotheist, through and through. Even a little Buddhist influence would have muted that, I think.

Second, the rumored archeological evidence of Jesus’ travels in the Much Further East can never be traced back to anything real. And as far as Tibet is concerned, Buddhism didn’t reach Tibet until the 7th century CE. Jesus would have had to wait.

One of the most inventive variations on the Jesus-in-Tibet story I ever heard was that the Three Wise Men were Tibetan monks who declared that Jesus was a reborn high lama. Not only were there no Tibetan Buddhists in Jesus’ day; the tradition of identifying the rebirths of high lamas didn’t begin until the 12th century.

Third, there are a few places in Buddhist scripture and commentary that seem to resemble something in the Gospels (such as the prodigal son story from the Lotus Sutra), but in every example I know of the Buddhist text was written at least a century or two after the life of Christ (including the Lotus Sutra).

There may have been some scriptural cross-pollination going on, but remember, the Silk Road was wide open. Merchants were traveling from the Far East to the Roman Empire all the time, and some of those routes went through places where early Christians lived.

For that matter, if Jesus had been so all-fired eager to study Buddhism, he only had to go as far as present-day Afghanistan. That was a Buddhist kingdom in his day.  But I see no reason to think he did.

Postscript: Someone once asked Edgar Cayce, who was in a trance, if a reincarnation of Jesus was influential in the development of Buddhism and other religions. The answer, which you can read yourself, was word salad.

Deluded About Enlightenment

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This is a follow up to the post before last, about the death of Joshu Sasaki. The New York Times published an article about it, and apparently not all of the Roshi’s former students acknowledge that what he did was wrong.

“The idea that he was a predator is mistaken,” said Harold D. Roth, a professor of religious studies at Brown University and a former student of Mr. Sasaki’s. “Everything he did was in the devoted service of awakening enlightenment in his students.”

Oh, please. He was hitting on women students in freakin’ sanzen.

They said he would tell them that sexual contact with a Zen master, or roshi, like him, would help them attain new levels of “non-attachment,” one of Zen’s central objectives. If they resisted, they said, he used intimidation and threats of expulsion.

The Roshi was particularly devoted to the service of enlightening women, apparently, since by all accounts male students didn’t get the same opportunity to attain new levels of non-attachment.

An independent panel of Buddhist leaders concluded in 2013 that the allegations were essentially indisputable. The panel report said that students had complained to Mr. Sasaki’s staff about his behavior since the early 1970s, and that those “who chose to speak out were silenced, exiled, ridiculed or otherwise punished.”

Some of the senior students who make excuses for the Roshi note that no rape charge was ever filed. That’s not unusual, however. Women probably figured it was futile to file charges, considering the Roshi’s seniors students obviously were going to shield him from accountability.

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I would say to Professor Roth that nobody is absolutely bad or absolutely good. Nobody is absolutely anything. I don’t doubt a lot of people who studied with the Roshi and learned Zen practice from him feel the experience was worthwhile. But just as it is delusion to assume a person who has done something wrong is evil, it’s also a delusion to assume a person whose life has otherwise been beneficial is good. This proposes a permanent essence of Sasaki Roshi upon which attributes may be hung — good, bad, enlightened, deluded.

That’s not how it works.

Zennies must affirm that there is no excuse for sexual predation, and that the Roshi’s acts were harmful and wrong. This is not about punishing him, but about giving affirmation to the women he abused while also saying loudly and clearly that this is not what Zen does.

Flaws and Zen Teachers

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The death of Joshu Sasaki Roshi at the age of 107 was noted in several major U.S. newspapers, but I haven’t heard much about it in the U.S. Zen community, possibly because many would like to forget him entirely.

James Ford, a Soto Zen lineage holder, did post on his blog Monkey Mind about the Roshi, and wrote,

By all accounts a great teacher.

By all accounts a sexual predator.

A great sadness for the Dharma come west.

There is no question flawed people can still be great teachers. Were it not so, there would be no great teachers. But there are flaws, and then there are other flaws. Christine Mai-Duc wrote in the Los Angeles Times,

Decades later, allegations from dozens of former students that he had sexually abused them surfaced. The allegations included molestation and rape, and some had been reported to the Rinzai-ji board, which never took effective action, according to an investigation by an independent council of Buddhist leaders.

The council’s report suggested he may have abused hundreds. “We see how, knowingly and unknowingly, the community was drawn into an open secret,” the council wrote. “We have reports that those who chose to speak out were silenced, exiled, ridiculed, or otherwise punished.”

A council of senior Zen teachers ordained under Roshi later responded with an apology, acknowledging that it failed to address the teacher’s alleged sexual misconduct.

The community was drawn into an open secret … those who chose to speak out were silenced, exiled, ridiculed, or otherwise punished. To me, this is the most critical issue. There is no group of people immune to herd mentality, including scientists, self-described skeptics — and Zen students. And I feel compelled to point out that “great teachers” don’t haul their students into co-dependency and complicity.

His senior students, quoted in the news stories, still speak of him with gushing reverence.  Apparently he had great presence, even charisma. But in Zen, genuinely great teachers are praised for their ordinariness. Genuinely great teachers don’t encourage emotional dependency.

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (1904-1971), who founded the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC) in the late 1960s, once compared working with one’s own delusions to climbing a stepladder. Then he added,

Sometimes I may be a delusion. You may overestimate me: “He is a good teacher!” That is already a kind of delusion. I am your friend. I am just practicing with you as your friend who has many stepladders.”

Shunryu Suzuki was a great teacher. I’ve never heard even a hint of a scandalous thing about him. However, as he was dying he rushed transmission of his senior student Richard Baker, who apparently was not ready, and Baker became embroiled in scandals that nearly destroyed SFZC. But SFZC survived, partly through the guidance of Shunryu Suzuki’s son Hoitsu Suzuki. My second Zen teacher, Jion Susan Postal (1940-2014)  received transmission from a teacher in Suzuki Roshi’s lineage through Hoitsu Suzuki. Susan was a great teacher.

(If you are unfamiliar with the Zen lineage tradition, see the explanation beneath the asterisks below.)

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American Zen has done a lot of soul-searching, so to speak, in recent years. A relative handful of Japanese and Korean teachers came to the U.S. in the 1950s through 1970s to teach Zen, and out of that small group several were accused of sexual impropriety eventually. The first generation of American-born teachers, almost all men, also included some teachers who arguably allowed their sexual choices to compromise their roles as teachers, which doesn’t mean they were all predators. Japanese Buddhism is not celibate, and I know of at least a couple of teachers who engaged in publicly acknowledged, serially monogamous relationships with students who were old enough to know what they were getting into. Whether this was detrimental to either the students or the community is a matter of opinion, I suppose.

However, I sense a consensus is growing that teachers shouldn’t be messing with their own students, period. Also, more and more American lineage holders are women, so western Zen is not nearly as much of a boy’s club as it was in the 1970s. More importantly, as western Zen matures students are less likely to think of Zen masters as people with magic powers. They provide essential guidance in the process that is Zen, but ultimately they are just people with flaws and stepladders.

*   *   *

Joshu Sasaki Roshi established a network of Zen centers called Rinzai-ji but left no dharma heirs, in spite of being a teacher for more than 60 years, which throws the future of those centers into doubt.

The news stories and articles about the Roshi persistently confuse terms like “priest” and “teacher,” so let me explain. Rinzai and Soto Zen (the two primary schools in Japan) operate a bit differently, but generally priest ordination roughly is equivalent to novice nun or monk ordination, and “dharma transmission” is equivalent to full ordination. Usually the term “Zen teacher” is limited to the transmitted and is not used to describe priests without transmission, even if the priest is filling the function of a teacher. However, I don’t know if that’s a hard-and-fast rule everywhere.

Someone who has received transmission is also called a “lineage holder,” “dharma heir” or even “Zen master,” although within American Zen it’s unusual to hear the title “Zen master.” The lineage tradition is the primary container that has maintained the integrity of Zen lo these 15 centuries, since Bodhidharma sat in the cave at Shaolin. Zen defines itself as the “face to face transmission of the dharma outside the sutras,” and “dharma” in this case is understood to be the Buddha’s own enlightenment, kept alive by students and teachers working together, person-to-person, mind-to-mind, through the generations. It’s not a matter of learning stuff from books, in other words. Obviously the system doesn’t guarantee anything, but it’s the only system Zen has. Without it, no Zen.

There are many functions only a lineage holder is supposed to be able to do, such as give formal private spiritual interviews (called dokusan or sanzen) and confer ordinations at any level. Zen centers that have no affiliation with a transmitted teacher have limited functionality and, I would argue, are not really “Zen centers.” The Rinzai-ji centers will have to recruit teachers from outside Rinzai-ji to remain “Zen.” But if they can do that, they should be able to survive.

Why Law Shouldn’t Be Based on Morality

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There’s a common argument that law ought to be based on morality, but I disagree. While there is a huge amount of overlap, law and morality operate on slightly different planes. I wrote about this in Rethinking Religion, but I feel like elaborating on it a bit more.

I think law should not be based on opinions of what is right or wrong, but on the objective needs of civil society, local and national. Morality is more about interpersonal relations and how each of us as individuals relate to other living beings and the planet generally. But not everything we might think is immoral needs to be illegal.

Put another way, if there is an evidence-based argument that regulation of X would make an empirically measurable improvement in a community or nation — data that show regulation of X will reduce pollution or crime or enhance property values or something — then by all means, regulate X. But if the only reason for regulating X is that some people think it’s just morally wrong, then I say leave it alone. And I would say that even if I agree that X is morally wrong.

For example, most of us might agree that marital infidelity is morally wrong. But many of us might also agree that enforcing faithfulness is not the government’s business.  However much unfaithfulness might damage a marriage, this is something the people in the marriage need to work out for themselves.  Marital faithfulness cops would be uncomfortably intrusive into our personal lives, I would think.

It also tends to be the case that where infidelity is illegal, somehow only women are prosecuted and punished. Bleep that.

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There are some behaviors that we might agree are morally wrong but which can’t be stopped by banning it. I’m thinking now of abortion.  I’ve been arguing for years that even if there were a broad consensus to create policy to stop or reduce abortion, criminalizing it doesn’t work.

How so? There is all kinds of hard, real-world data showing that abortion law has no impact on abortion rates. Some of the highest abortion rates on the planet are in places where abortion is illegal. Some of the lowest abortion rates are in places where it is legal. I understand that when a country changes its abortion laws, whether to legalize or criminalize, any subsequent change in the rate of abortions is temporary. Eventually the rate settles back to what it had been before the law changed.

People who succeed in criminalizing abortion may congratulate themselves for standing up for morality, but they aren’t saving babies. And where abortion is criminal, it’s also much more dangerous for women. Around the world, the enormous majority of deaths of women from botched abortions occur where abortion is illegal.

I was reminded of this when I found an old blog post written by a former anti-abortion conservative Christian who is now a pro-reproduction rights atheist. “How I Lost Faith in the ‘Pro-Life’ Movement” lays out all the arguments I’ve been making for years, clearly and logically.  The author, Libby Anne, also was shocked to learn that the one thing proven by copious data to reduce abortion rates is use of birth control.

Do read the whole thing. Libby Anne concluded that the tactics of the abortion criminalization movement are utterly illogical if their goal was to reduce abortions and save babies. However, it makes perfect sense if their goal is to punish women for their sexuality. See also “What If Banks, Not Abortion Clinics, Needed Buffer Zones?,” which is a short excerpt from Rethinking Religion.

I’m not happy with the pro-reproductive rights side, either. I have felt for years they should be broadcasting the fact that criminalizing abortion doesn’t stop it as loudly and as broadly as possible, and I am ignored. Arguments purely based on a concept of rights are not persuasive to people who are uncomfortable with women having rights, especially sexual rights. I wrote about morality last week,

Notice that most of our hot-button and never-ending public squabbles about what’s moral and what isn’t touches on the same two issues — sex and death. That’s because these are two issues most of us are really emotional — and often conflicted — about. Lying, stealing and cheating, by contrast, are not nearly so controversial.

But regarding sex, it’s really women and sex that set off everybody’s crazy alarms. There are all kinds of ancient taboos about women and purity and whatnot ground into us that are still jerking us around, whether we admit to it or not. Male sexuality doesn’t trigger anywhere near the same degree of angst.

A few years ago I wrote an article for About.com on Buddhism and Abortion. I still get comments on it sometimes, mostly from people who don’t seem to have read it carefully. Yes, most schools of Buddhism consider “a life” to begin with conception, and terminating a pregnancy is a violation of the First Precept.

However, Buddhism takes a more situationist than absolutist  approach to moral questions. Instead of rigidly applying one-size-fits-all rules, individuals are encouraged to weigh the possible consequences of their actions, taking in all the people affected. We are encouraged to reflect on our own intentions and motivations. And then we consider all that in light of the Buddha’s teaching. That said, I can think of a great many circumstances in which abortion may be a morally justifiable decision.

And, in any event, we have real-world evidence that the many nations with legal abortion are not suffering catastrophes because of it. Even if we agree abortion is immoral, there is no civil purpose to be served by making it broadly illegal.

Not only does criminalizing abortion push women into risking their lives to terminate pregnancies, I understand there are places in Latin America where women avoid getting medical care after a naturally occurring miscarriage because they fear being prosecuted for getting an abortion. Abortion may be immoral, but criminalizing it also leads to a kind of immorality, seems to me.

Empty Your Cup

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Someone asked this question,  and I decided to discuss it in a post because the question itself reflects the kinds of barriers we face trying to understand other religions:

“I am a Christian but, having lived in India for quite a while, am interested in all religions. (By the way: I am also an anti-religionist.) My question is this: is Buddhism centered upon improving one’s self by doing good to others? Or, to put it another way, is Buddhism essentially self-centered and atheistic?”

From a Buddhist perspective, the question is based on a false dichotomy — that our only choices are “improving one’s self by doing good for others” or “essentially self-centered and atheistic.” The short answer, of course, is “none of the above.” But I’m not taking offense because I realize the question is not coming from a Buddhist perspective.

I started to reply to the comment, and then I decided to write the answer in a blog post, and eventually what came out was an essay, which I’m calling “How to Understand Buddhism: Tips for the Spiritual Seeker.” The answer begins with the observation that often questions about Buddhism are not answerable, because they come with assumptions that don’t apply. The “answer” then becomes an attempt to guide the questioner away from his assumptions.

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The bigger problem is, of course, that much of Buddhism makes no sense until you’ve worked with it for awhile.  If you just read some books about it your brain will try to make sense of it, because that’s what brains do. But without some personal experience and expert guidance nearly always your brain will be crafting “what makes sense” from assumptions that don’t apply.

The results often are ghastly. The Internet is well larded with essays and videos about what’s wrong with Buddhism, mostly made by people who don’t know dharma from doughnuts. And I’m not saying Buddhism is beyond criticism, especially since the practice does often fall short of the ideal. But too often people draw conclusions about Buddhism more from the clutter in their own heads and not from Buddhism itself. It’s frustrating.

There’s an old Zen saying, “empty your cup.” This is from a story about Master Nan-in (1868-1912), who one day was visited by a scholar with many questions about Zen. Without replying, Nan-in poured tea into the scholar’s cup. And when the cup was full, he kept pouring. As tea spread across the table, the scholar said, The cup is full! No more tea will go in!

Indeed, Nan-in said. Just as you are full of views and opinions. No more will go in until you empty your cup.

Ritual, Modernity and Citta

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One of the arguments I make in my book Rethinking Religion is that religion is not about adopting supernatural belief systems. Instead, religion is about changing the way we experience and understand our lives and our selves, especially as part of everything else — the whole universe throughout time.

I realize western monotheists may struggle with that definition, but I think if you look beyond the specifics of doctrine and understand religion’s effects, I say that’s what it is. Those effects are achieved in many different ways, and in many religions belief in an actual God is essential to those ways. But in many other religions gods often are more like learning aids; just believing in them or praying to them isn’t the point.

In trying to come up with a definition of religion that is inclusive of the whole world’s religious traditions and not just the Big Three of monotheism, the great underlying commonality I could see was was this: Religions are about engaging in many kinds of practices that help us experience and connect to something beyond the confines of the limited self. That something may be God, but not necessarily.

It’s important to understand that this connection is not primarily intellectual or conceptual, and again, I think this is common to all religious traditions, and it also sets religion apart from philosophy, as westerners usually use the word.  Both religion and philosophy address questions of how we humans relate to life and death, time and being, but they address these questions in entirely different ways. Philosophy gives us conceptual and theoretical answers that engage the intellect. Religion primarily engages what Buddhists call citta — the mind of subjective experience, sometimes described as an awareness that is more emotive than intellectual, or something like what westerners call “heart.”

And, personally, I think the reason large parts of the Abrahamic religions are going through an identity crisis now is that they have no concept of citta.  The parts of monotheism that are not fundamentalist seem especially unsure about what it is they actually are doing, or why. They may still believe in God and have high regard for the Bible, but then what? If religion is not just about believing things, then what is it?

Many practices can engage citta, from praying to meditating to yoga and martial arts. But right now I just want to say something about ritual.

In many religious traditions there was a time that laypeople weren’t expected to know much about doctrine. Instead, religion was all about ritual. Through ritual, people reenacted and actualized the myths and symbols of their traditions and thereby came to “know” them on an intuitive level. This in turn made the myths and symbols feel relevant and the mysteries they represented seem immanent. They may not have been able to explain original sin in any coherent way, but religion still had an impact on their experiences and perceptions.

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Possibly because it has no concept of citta, much of Christianity has downplayed ritual in modern times.  If one does not believe literally in evoking spirits or whatever the ritual claims to be doing, then what is the point? Rituals are not rational. They seem to be about performing some kind of magic — we light a candle and say the magic words and everything will be better. People today often are uncomfortable with ritual.

But I found a great quote by Carl Jung —

Offerings are made to the invisible powers, formidable blessings are pronounced, and all kinds of solemn rites are performed. Everywhere and at all times there have been rites d’entrée et de sortie whose magical efficacy is denied and which are impugned as magic and superstition by rationalists incapable of psychological insight. But magic has above all a psychological effect whose importance should not be underestimated. [Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 1957]

Put another way: The myths and rituals of religion are meant to transform citta. They are not (necessarily) meant to evoke magic powers. They are not intended to supplant reason and intellect. Mindfully done, however, a ritual can affect citta and thereby have a real impact on how a person experiences himself and everything else. And that’s no small thing.

The Misuse of Mindfulness

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button-nowBack in the Jurassic Age when I was a college student, a boyfriend decided he was going to live a completely spontaneous life. He would make no plans but simply do what he felt like doing at the moment, he said.

And overnight he went from being a fun, if sometimes aggravating, boyfriend to being an utter pain in the ass.

Instead of calling ahead to make dates, for example, he would inform me where he was about to go and that he would drop by my dorm — in five minutes — to take me along if I wanted to go, too. If I was in the middle of doing laundry and couldn’t leave, that was too bad. The final straw came when he remarked that at least his dog was always happy to go anywhere and didn’t need time to get ready.

And yes, he was being a self-centered jerk even by college-age standards. But after all these many years I still think of him — not fondly — whenever I hear someone talk of “living for the moment.”

At the New Statesman, Steven Poole writes that somebody who actually lives a completely spontaneous life would have to be some kind of sociopath. “Truly living in the moment and embracing utter spontaneity would render you, for instance, unable to make and keep promises, or to formulate any kind of plan for helping yourself or others,” Poole writes.

It also makes it impossible to be in any but the most impersonal and casual relationships. You would always just be that guy who shows up sometimes. You’d never be part of anything beyond yourself.

Poole writes that “living for the moment” has become something of a cult, and spontaneity the highest virtue du jour.  And behind this, he says, is the trendy fad of mindfulness.

 Breath-centred mindfulness meditation is no doubt beneficial for many individuals, sharing as it does certain aspects with similar practices such as yoga and qigong. But it is tempting to suspect that official attempts to impose it on employees or schoolchildren have as one unspoken motivation the desire to create a more pliant individual. The more able you become to concentrate blissfully in the moment, the less troubled you will be by intrusive negative thoughts about your employer or government policy. And so mindfulness can become a counsel of passivity, as well as a mental medication to distract our attention from underlying problems. An institutional population may be offered the anti-stress benefits of mindfulness rather than the removal of the stressors that have made it stressed in the first place.

However, the Buddhist practice of  mindfulness meditation has nothing to do with blocking out intrusive negative thoughts. Just the opposite, actually. Mindfulness is being mindful of everything, including pain, stress, and negative thoughts. Blocking anything out, ignoring what’s actually going on in your body, emotions, and thoughts is the opposite of mindfulness.

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Mindfulness often is described as a whole body-and-mind awareness of the present moment. Sometimes people ask how they can be mindful and also make plans and schedules. But one can make plans and schedules mindfully.

Consider that Buddhist monastic life tends to be rigidly scheduled. All day long bells and drums signal when it’s time to get up, to assemble for meditation, to cook the next meal or begin alms rounds. But within that container of scheduling one can remain fully mindful, fully embodying the moment and the activity.

On the other hand, you can be as spontaneous as a leaf in the wind and still be oblivious to yourself and everything else. Living for the moment is not the same thing as living in the moment.

See also “The Four Foundations of Mindfuless.”