Jonathan McHaffie
It's been a while since I filled in a census, but somewhere in there is a question about religion. And I'm betting that, alongside the various options for Christian denominations is a box for 'Buddhist'. But is that right? Spoiler alert - maybe it doesn't matter.
Here's a really good summary of what Buddhism is and isn't (you can read the whole thing at https://www.huffpost.com/entry/is-buddhism-a-religion_b_669740 - the passages below are from this article.)
A lot of people prefer to think of Buddhism as a religion. It's easy to see why, when Buddhism abounds with religious trappings: the rituals and the chants and the golden statues sitting on the shrine. Buddha himself never wanted to be deified in any kind of icons; at the beginning, he told his students no icons, no worshiping. But it's said that he had a very devoted student who kept pestering him, requesting his permission to make a statue of him, until finally the Buddha gave up and allowed the first image to be made. And now we have all these elaborate golden icons that look like they were dug out of an Egyptian pyramid. It's nice to have these reminders, but we must remember that's what they are: reminders of something, an example to be followed, not idols to be worshiped.
If our goal is to turn Buddhism into a religion, that's fine -- in America we have freedom of speech and the Bill of Rights. We can make Buddhism into a religion, or a branch of psychology, or a self-help program, or whatever we want. But if we're looking for enlightenment, we won't find it through relating to the Buddha as a religious idol. Like Siddhartha, we'll find real spiritual awakening only when we begin to leave behind our fixed ideas about religious practice. Seeing the Buddha as an example and following his example -- recreating, in our own lives, his pursuit of truth, his courage and his open mind -- that's the real power of Buddhism beyond religion.
'Buddhism' itself is a strange term, another of the multitude of 'isms' that surround us like a buffet of enticing morsels. For me, the term conjours up images of worship, of a relationship with some kind of higher being, a decidedly hierarchical relationship where that being knows, understands and sees so much more than we can and who we are invited to believe in, trust, and follow to differing degrees depending on the slant of the specific branch of the particular religion. But then, I've grown up in a Western culture infused with religious symbology and history, all pointing to just such a higher being, from whom moral authority comes, and who represents the ultimate source of truth. That's the starting point of many of us in that culture and, whether or not we buy in to that model, it's been a powerful influence on the environment we've grown up in. Every city has multiple churches (with a range of names, some of which give some clue to the particular distinguishing belief or practice or identity), some a cathedral, a mosque or a synagogue, and that's just from the three Abrahamic traditions. And in those traditions, there is at the centre an all-powerful creator God.
What we call 'Buddhism' isn't like that. There is no external source of authority, of truth, of answers. In fact, the Buddha pointedly refused to get drawn into all sort of esoteric questions like that.
As Buddhists, Siddhartha's example is the most important one for us to follow. He was a great explorer of mind and its limits. He was open-minded, seeking truth, with no preconceived agenda. He thought, "Okay, I'll do these religious practices and see if I can find the truth that way." He did the practices, he didn't find the truth, and so he left the religion. Like Siddhartha, if we really want spiritual enlightenment we have to go beyond religiosity. We have to let go of clinging to preconceived religious forms and ideas and practices.
I 'get' that. And maybe if we do that, we come back to where we started, to the faith tradition we grew up in, or convinced of the lack of validity (however we want to define that) of all of them. In which case, nothing lost. At least we know why we're back where we started. But perhaps we'll end up somewhere entirely different.
That process of exploration and experimentation isn't that different from the scientific method of enquiry in some ways. They aren't the same, but they're also not as far away as a system of belief based more on faith than evidence (I do, of course, acknowledge that many people can point to personal experiences as a form of evidence for their religious beliefs; in some ways, it's remarkable how similar those experiences sometimes are, and how they seem to confirm at an individual level not only the truth of the core belief in a divine being overseeing their life, but the truth of their particular brand of religion). But perhaps the 'problem', if there is one, isn't with religion itself, but in how we practice and apply it.
Religion, if we don't relate to it skillfully, can trap us in another set of rules. On top of all the ordinary rules we are already stuck with in this world, we pile on a second set of religious rules. I'm not saying there is anything bad about religion or rules, but you should be clear about what you're seeking. Do you want religion and a set of rules to follow, or do you want truth? Truth has no religion, no culture, no language, no head or tail. As Gandhi said, "God has no religion." The truth is just the truth.
The better name for 'Buddhism' is the dharma, which means (amongst other things) the truth, or the way things are. But not in the way we perhaps tend to think of 'religious truths' in the West, as being absolute, externally-determined claims to knowledge. Instead, it's what we looked at last time - the question we're asking here is what the world is really like, and we started to see that in the five (or two, or one) minute meditation we experienced at the outset. Our minds are doing some crazy stuff (there's a reason Tibetans call it our 'monkey mind'), and if we pay attention to our bodies, they're also not exactly doing what we 'want' them to do. Try sitting absolutely still (let your mind wander, no problem) for five minutes. It's no good, is it? There's always som ething not quite right. Something we want to change. An itch, an ache, a pain. And it's no better if we're lying down. We turn our bodies throughout the night without even being consciously aware of it. Our bodies are restless, just as our minds are. Now there's a truth. Nothing to do with the origins of the universe (we have theoretical physicists for that), but a whole lot more useful to starting to understand ourselves. Really, that's what I think it's about. Understanding ourselves. But not in a fenced-off kind of way from what we can learn from other sources - physics, yes, but also psychology, art, books, our work, family relationships... everything, really. This certainly isn't meant to be invoking that tedious old science versus religion thing. Rather, it's about looking at ourselves, deeply and over time, and perhaps for the first time seeing more clearly what's really going on. Because that's the first step in doing things differently, in seeing our programming, be it from the forces of evolution, upbringing, culture, genes or individual experiences, and perhaps next time being able to respond differently. Make a real choice. Whether or not there is a 'God' in the way the Abrahamic traditions see it has no bearing on doing that. The practice of the dharma can benefit anyone and everyone.
This is then what we're engaged in here:
If you are interested in "meeting the Buddha" and following his example, then you should realize that the path the Buddha taught is primarily a study of your own mind and a system for training your mind. This path is spiritual, not religious. Its goal is self-knowledge, not salvation; freedom, not heaven. And it is deeply personal. Without your curiosity and questions and your open mind, there is no spiritual path, no journey to be taken, even if you adopt all the forms of the tradition.
Personal exploration, curiosity, questions, they're at the heart of this search. The goal is to get to the point where we are our own teacher, where we aren't looking to anyone else, human or divine, to point us in the right direction.
Siddhartha was a truth seeker, nothing more. He wasn't looking for religion, as such -- he wasn't particularly interested in religion. He was searching for the truth. He was looking for a genuine path to freedom from suffering. Aren't all of us searching for the same thing? If we look at the life of Siddhartha, we can see that he found the truth and freedom he was seeking only after he abandoned religious practices. Isn't that significant? The one who became the Buddha, the "Awakened One," didn't find enlightenment through religion -- he found it when he began to leave religion behind.
Maybe that's the first thing we should be clear on. This man we call the Buddha, Siddhartha, was just that. A man. Yes, he seems to have developed a range of insights into the human condition which have been recorded and passed on (with the usual caveats about how much came from him directly, how much from others etc), just as others have done. He lived at around the same time as Socrates in Greece and Confucius in China. He wasn't the only person proposing new ideas and new approaches to living. And those two are good comparisons because they share one other attribute - none of them claimed to be anything more than a human being. None claimed to be any kind of god or to have any special 'powers'. The fact that we see large statues of the Buddha in some countries doesn't alter that, even if it might be hard to divorce that image from our inherited ideas in the West about idols and worshiping false gods. And none of those three men claimed to be the messenger of anybody else, divine or human, sent to reveal truths about the universe. Others did that, but not those three. That simply wasn't a part of how they viewed the world.
So let's say we 'accept' this premise, this approach. What then? Well for one thing, like with most other things worthwhile doing, it's easier said than done. And the chances are, we aren't starting this new exploration with more decades ahead of us than we can imagine. This tends to be somewhere we end up somewhat later in life, perhaps when we're tried other approaches, other traditions, and come up empty enough that we're still looking for something, and we stumble upon this Buddhism business. Time now to move onto the nitty gritty.