Twenty years ago, my daughter, Mia, had a shattering revelation at the age of 4. We were watching one of those nature movies about sea life. Out of the blue, a school of tunas appeared. These were of the massive, bulky, ten-foot-long, 2,000-pound variety. Mia’s mouth dropped. She looked over at me with an expression of disgust. “Tuna is a fish?” she half asked, half exclaimed. 

Mia’s experience offers an entry into a hypothesis and an argument I will try to weave together. The hypothesis, “non-buddhism,” will help me formulate the difficult argument. The argument is that Buddhists should commit to advancing animal liberation, which necessarily entails an anti-speciesist or vegan stance. This is a difficult argument to make to Buddhists because Buddhism has struggled mightily with the issue for millennia and, as a result, has formulated many arguments against my contention. 

To say that Buddhism rejects animal liberation is, of course, only half of the story. For every prohibition the Buddha makes against, say, “strict vegetarianism,” in one text (typically from the Pali canon associated with Theravada Buddhism), we get an offsetting proclamation in another text (typically from the Mahayana canon) that “meat-eating I have not permitted to anyone, I do not permit, I will not permit.” Buddhism, taken as a whole, suggests too many variegated and often contradictory positions on the issue to offer us unambiguous guidance. Indeed, even the seemingly univocal lay precept “I undertake to observe the rule to abstain from taking life” and the bodhisattva pledge “sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them” are, in actual practice, filled with loopholes.

My sense, derived from forty-some years of participation in American Buddhism, is that intra-Buddhist rumination about what counts as a sentient being, what role intention and motivation play in moral responsibility, the karmic repercussions of killing unawares, the argument from ultimate emptiness, and so on have contributed to the contemporary Buddhist culture of technicality around ethics generally, including the topic of animal liberation. Given Buddhism’s divided path on such a momentous topic—after all, the lives of trillions of beings are at stake annually—where do we go from here? Do we leave it as an intractable “personal choice” matter, or might Buddhism contain the goods unequivocally to clarify the issue?

The Tuna Heretic

To view the argument of advancing animal liberation—or any argument—through the lens of non-buddhism, you must take a heretical stance within Buddhism. 

A heretic is typically a devoted practitioner whom the authorities of their tradition deem dangerous. Think of the beloved Dominican prior Meister Eckhart (1260–1328), who was condemned for notions such as you are “the creator of the eternal word, and without you, God would not know what to do”; or the magnificent Sufi mystic Al-Hallaj (858–922), who was executed for proclaiming, in the grand nondualist tradition of ego-dissolution, “I am the truth.” As the fates of these two figures show, a heretic’s devotion invariably takes a form that appears wickedly mistaken to the status quo, so mistaken to warrant condemnation and even death. So why should you want to take such a position? Our two mystics already gave the short answer—namely, that you and not “God,” or indeed “Buddhism” or “the dharma,” abide at the heart of value, meaning, and truth. A heretic, in short, remains committed, albeit in a complicated way, to their tradition and, crucially, takes on the responsibility for transforming it. 

What made Mia’s revelation so shattering was that it rendered her a heretic. She had loved spooning tuna out of the can, spreading it on warm toast swathed in creamy mayonnaise. Yummy! Her image of tuna was formed by Madison Avenue. Some readers might recall Charlie the Tuna, the hip mascot of StarKist, with his thick Buddy Holly glasses and Beatnik red beret. Charlie’s pleas that his impeccable “good taste” made him a prime candidate for a can of StarKist were met with rejection: “Sorry, Charlie!” With cute cartoon Charlie’s benign assurance, Mia believed tuna was just some delicious flaky stuff in a can. And now “the Real” of the matter was starkly revealed: she was eating the mutilated flesh of a once majestic living being. She was eating a once-living, feeling animal whose exquisite head and tail had been chopped off, whose silver iridescent body had been gutted, boiled, fileted, minced, and stuffed into a tin can for human consumption. Not yummy. 

From that moment on, Mia was a tuna heretic. For, on the matter of eating it, she was now in a position—indeed, unavoidably compelled—to decide, or like the original meaning of the Greek word hairetikos, heretical: “to be able to choose; to be able to have a distinct opinion.” My argument is that with the aid of non-buddhism, you will similarly find yourself standing at the starkly forked pathway of animal suffering and liberation.

Why non-buddhism?

The original impetus for my conception of non-buddhism came from the work of the contemporary French thinker François Laruelle. He calls his work “non-philosophy” or, more recently, “non-standard philosophy.” I came across Laruelle over ten years ago while working on a critique of Buddhism. I wanted my critique to avoid being just another reformist corrective to Buddhism. So I set out to emulate, in one crucial manner at least, a rigorous scientific method: it must leave its object, Buddhism, just as it is.

No one practices Buddhism, only a variation of Buddhism.

Like a scientific investigation, my critique would not determine what postulates or assumptions properly constitute “Buddhism,” or the value, truth, or relevance of any of the claims made in the name of “Buddhism.” Instead, I would ask: how does “Buddhism” work? What does it do? Who is its subject, its ideal person?  How does it go about creating its subject in the real world? What does the proliferation of so many plural Buddhisms reveal about the principle singular formation, “Buddhism?” (My neologism, “x-buddhism,” is intended to index the relation of the many to the one. No one practices Buddhism, only a variation of Buddhism.) These were the questions driving my critique. 

Such an approach would open the possibility of speculative applications of Buddhist material. So the “non” is not a negation of or an anything-but Buddhism. It means “Buddhism,” but not under the “punctilious gaze” of the masters, as Laruelle puts it. The “non” indicates Buddhism mutated through certain operations. In short, non-buddhism does things with x-buddhist materials. My idea was that the speculations enabled by these operations would, in turn, ensure Buddhism’s vitality and relevance in the face of what I was increasingly coming to see as its diminished role at The Great Feast of Knowledge.

The Great Feast of Knowledge

So let’s begin here, where it all began, at The Great Feast of Knowledge. This is a non-buddhist trope intended to accomplish two related aims. First, it aims to provide a realistic picture of x-buddhism’s place in the larger world of thought and practice. Second, it aims to remove a significant hindrance to x-buddhism’s diminished place within that larger world, namely, the principle of sufficient Buddhism.

The trope of the Great Feast asks you to imagine a colossal medieval-type hall crammed with massive wooden rectangular tables, around which are sitting, standing, pacing, gesticulating, and arguing the motliest throng of human beings you can imagine. These are the representatives of Knowledge—philosophy, psychology, history, physics, biology, politics, literature, religion, law, and so on ad infinitum. The Feast is a place where x-buddhism’s ideas—its various concepts, beliefs, myths, truths, fantasies, hopes, and dreams—are subjected to the invigorating ordeal of being debated, contested, complicated, contradicted, refuted, maybe ridiculed, and maybe embraced by other traditions.  

A crucial feature of the Great Feast is a guard standing at the entrance. The guard’s task is to collect the weapons from the various authorities that seek access to the Feast. Anyone may enter but shorn of sword and insignia. So imagine “Buddhism” arriving, arrayed with its battery of dharmic concepts; its inexhaustible treasures illuminating the darkness of the world; its bodhisattva field marshals armed with seductively confident arguments; its Buddha, glowing with the sovereign nimbus of the thaumaturge. Stripped down, deprived of their authority, and bereft of their institutional robes, titles, lineages, publishing houses, and PhDs, the Buddhist agents enter the hall indistinguishable from everyone else. They take their seats amid the chaotic swarm. The Feast begins.

Biology comes over to Buddhism’s table. Is it true that you find desire a problem? 

The Buddha responds: I don’t envision even one other fetter—fettered by which beings wander and transmigrate for a long time—like the fetter of desire. 

Biology is dumbfounded. But we are animals driven by self-preservation. Desire (craving, thirst, attachment) is precisely the mechanism to ensure our biological reproduction. In what sense can it be considered a “fetter”? 

Philosophy overhears the conversation and chimes in: Buddhism, you seem to assume another world beyond this one. Can you offer us any proof for this quite incredible transcendental assumption?

Psychology’s ears perk up: You also seem to denigrate the human being, its very body full of craving, its mind full of dreams, its emotions full of loving attachments. Does Buddhism exist for the person or the person for Buddhism?    

The Principle of Sufficient Buddhism

What might physics, neuroscience, poetry, sports, or love say to Buddhism about the value of desire? The trope of the Great Feast of Knowledge asks you to subject your x-buddhist concepts, beliefs, and theories to the vast perspective opened by the world of ideas. How does your concept fare? A non-buddhist analysis predicts that one result will be particularly far-reaching. This result is the revocation of the principle of sufficient Buddhism. 

This principle holds that all things are “Buddhistizable,” to coin an ungainly but apt term. Buddhism possesses assumptions and concepts that may be applied to virtually any other domain of inquiry, thereby bringing that domain into Buddhism’s field of vision. From everyday issues like relationship troubles and job woes to problems with addiction and depression, to the nature of consciousness and quantum reality, Buddhism, the principle holds, can provide a sufficient explanation and solution. From the perspective of non-buddhism, the price that Buddhism must pay for this sufficiency is too high. As long as Buddhism remains regulated by this principle, it will remain unable to “think” beyond its self-reflection. It will thus be incapable of offering the rigorous account of reality that it purports to provide. Instead, it can only offer us a circularity in which Buddhism gazes into a matter only to see its image reflected back.

If the reader doubts the massive load-bearing function of the principle of sufficient Buddhism, ask yourself what happens once it is dismantled. On the negative side, Buddhism loses its preeminent status as an enlightened wisdom. For, in dialogue at the Feast, its assumptions, such as karma and rebirth, will rarely, if ever, prove incontrovertibly sufficient. Let’s focus on the positive side. Laruelle likens the move to that of non-Euclidean geometry. The decisive difference between Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry concerns the behavior of a line. Euclid’s fifth postulate assumes parallelism. In upholding this postulate, along with the other four, Euclideans radically limit the field of possible forms. Rejecting this postulate, though preserving the other four, non-Euclidean geometry, by contrast, envisions radical new possibilities; namely, it permits elliptical and hyperbolic curvature. In removing a postulate that was not self-evident, non-Euclidean geometry can describe actual reality more accurately. Might removing the principle of sufficient Buddhism similarly enable us to envision radically new and eminently practical—and as such, more realistic and rigorous—possibilities for ourselves?

The Real

One matter above all occupies Buddhism’s specular gaze and needs to be discussed before presenting an argument for animal liberation. I mentioned earlier that the shattering aspect of Mia’s tuna revelation was that “the Real” burst through an otherwise benign moment. Her disturbing realization was that she was not eating happy little nuggets endorsed by an innocuous cartoon fish; she was eating the mutilated flesh of a brutally eviscerated animal. The idea of “the Real” allows us to talk about disavowed features of reality that threaten to undo our constructions of goodness, order, sense, and meaning. 

For instance, anthropomorphic cartoon mascots like Charlie the Tuna and the Chick-fil-A “Eat Mor Chikin” rebel cows enable us to hold at bay the Real of fifty-six billion horrifically tortured, maimed, mutilated, and slaughtered land and aquatic animals every year in the United States. Such disavowal allows us to maintain our sense of ourselves as good people committed to justice and anti-oppression. But when reality fractures and the Real breaks through, as in Mia’s case, what then?

The concept of the Real is taken most recently from Lacanian psychoanalysis, but it is an ancient element of thought about reality that spans philosophy (Plato’s forms, Kant’s a priori, for example), science (laws, forces, empirical realism), psychology (the unconscious), religion (God, the Absolute), even art (the sublime, the true and beautiful). Buddhism’s version is expressed in several similar “first names.” First names are those terms that I put in parentheses that symbolize the Real. Candidates for Buddhist first names are, for instance: no-self (anātman), emptiness (śūnyatā), dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), pain (dukkha), and the dharma. I emphasize that these names symbolize the Real because they can never adequately represent it, much less capture it. And this is where non-buddhism can help. 

Buddhism, like all other sufficient systems, believes that, through its concepts, it does capture the Real. When Buddhism adduces the existential priority of pain, it is confident that it is thinking the Real. That is, Buddhism identifies the Real of human pain as dukkha. By contrast, non-buddhism sees such a move not as a thinking of the Real of pain, but precisely as resistance to the Real of pain. How so? Just ask yourself whether a phenomenon as colossal, monstrous, or immense (no word is big enough) as “the existential priority of pain” can be adequately represented by a concept such as dukkha. Buddhism, in short, aims to teach us what there is and how it all hangs together. 

Discovering such a principle is a timeless human yearning if the history of ideas is any indication. It is the yearning to know, to embrace intimately, or even to be consumed by, that which is fundamentally real. It is a yearning born from the lived human experience that involvement with the things of this world—its objects, people, events—does not produce abiding pleasure and, indeed, is too often the very source of pain. 

Recognizing the problematic, often hallucinatory, role that such yearning plays in the ideological production of meaning, non-buddhism aims to suspend Buddhism’s claim over the Real. It does so by “foreclosing the Real.” The idea here is that the Real of human pain can never be adequately articulated in a given thought system, and so is ultimately foreclosed to that system. A related idea is that it is precisely the Real that nonetheless causes the ruminations on pain that we call Buddhism, and Buddhism itself encapsulates these ruminations as the quite particular idea it terms “dukkha.” So, in short, while x-buddhism thinks the breached, Real, non-buddhism thinks from the foreclosed Real. Readers would not be wrong to hear echoes of the Buddhist idea of “abandoning the raft” here. 

By revoking the principle of sufficient Buddhism, foreclosing the Real, and positioning ourselves as heretics, we can now fashion innovative usages of Buddhism.

Axiomatic Animal Liberation

We can fashion “more real” usages out of Buddhist materials (concepts, texts, practices, texts, etc.) because the strictly Buddhist sense of the material is suspended. It is important to note that we do so by interrupting, not revoking, the Buddhist usage. This move allows non-buddhism to create experimental axioms for itself of the nature, “If we assume that x…” It is from these axioms that we create new usages of Buddhism.

I can now state the non-buddhist argument for animal liberation. The argument holds that Buddhism and animal liberation are inseparable. Consequently, a Buddhist practitioner must actively eliminate the exploitation of nonhuman animals for any purpose, meaning committing to an anti-speciesist or vegan stance. At a minimum, this engagement must take the form of refraining from using animal products and includes veganism. 

I realize that nobody wants to hear such musts, but recall that non-buddhism aims to be inventive, experimental, speculative, and rigorous using axiomatized and abstracted Buddhist ideas. So let’s try it out. First, I will state three theorems. As you read them, please ask yourself what it would mean for a Buddhist to reject the theorem. Then, I will frame the argument using the four noble truths: pain as an innate characteristic of sentient existence; pain’s origin in craving (desire, thirst/hunger, want); craving’s interruption; the way to do it.

Three Non-Negotiable Theorems

Theorem 1. The animals whose products you use and consume are sentient beings who perceive and feel pain. In 2012, “The Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness” was signed by “a prominent international group of cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists, and computational neuroscientists.” The declaration concludes that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.” 

Theorem 2. Every sentient being is an inalienable One indisputably deserving of dignity, freedom from exploitation, and protection from unnecessary pain. Being fellow sentient beings, nonhuman animals are not categorically distinct from Homo sapiens. The human-derived “animal” category permits the “othering” that invariably leads to exploitation, enslavement, cruelty, and death. 

Theorem 3. Buddhism is a rare force for compassion in the world. Subtract its compassion imperative, and Buddhism’s value as an agent of betterment is fatally compromised. More than ever, the world needs the robust, unambiguous displays of compassion that Buddhist training can offer.   

Four Truths to Make You Noble

First ennobling truth: Pain is inevitable, but you can contribute to its diminishment. You actively participate in the animal-industrial complex when you use and consume animal products. Among the countless horrific actions of this complex that you will be disassociating from as a Buddhist animal liberationist, let’s look at pigs alone (figures from 2020). Crammed shoulder to shoulder in stifling hot trucks, deprived of food or water over distances that might take days, these highly intelligent animals experience terror, sadness, and despair to a degree inconceivable to most humans. Some 330,000 of them will die during this inhumane transport. The other 131,563,000 will arrive, terrified, at the slaughterhouse. There, it is not unlikely that the males will have their testicles ripped off without anesthesia. Piglets are sometimes killed by having their heads slammed against the ground. Eventually, all the “viable” pigs are stunned into unconsciousness. The most common methods of stunning are done with a penetrating captive bolt (a metal bolt is shot into the brain), gassing (typically with carbon dioxide), and electricity (an electrical current pierces the animal’s brain via tongs). After stunning, the hind legs of the still-living pig are tied, and the pig is lifted upside down while a slaughterhouse employee cuts its neck arteries, causing it to bleed to death. An emotionally animated, socially attuned, deeply feeling, loving pig went into the slaughterhouse. A ghastly human commodity called “pork” came out. 

A truth is ennobling only when it is lived.

Second ennobling truth: Craving. The root cause of killings every ten hours equaling the “deadliest conflict in human history” (60 million during World War II) is our craving for animal flesh, eggs, milk, leather, etc.

Third ennobling truth: Cessation. That needless slaughter will cease with the cessation of our craving for animal products.

Fourth ennobling truth: The Way. Stop using and consuming animal products.

It’s as simple as that.

A truth is ennobling only when it is lived.

Regarding nonhuman-animal justice, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously said, “The question is not can they reason, but can they suffer?” Regarding Buddhists today, the question is not, “Can they reason their way out of this and other such anti-speciesist arguments,” but “Shouldn’t they do whatever they can to reduce suffering in the world?”

The post A Non-Buddhist Argument for Animal Liberation appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

My first encounter with non-philosophy was through the work of Glenn Wallis, an academic of Buddhist studies turned radical educator with a claim to being American Buddhism’s enfant terrible. Wallis originally started the Speculative Non-Buddhism project as a website producing intelligent critique of Western Buddhism when very little genuine discourse was to be found, with many Western Buddhists employing science to justify their readings of Buddhism and others striving to turn Buddhist meditation into a commodity to sell to the masses. The site was built around his work and that of two primary collaborators, with occasional input from others, including myself. While some of the contributors explored Alain Badiou and other assorted French philosophers in a searing critique of the American Buddhist landscape and its tolerance of anti-intellectualism, Wallis’s work often centered on his experimentation and application of his new concept of non-buddhism.

Initially a heuristic rooted in the work of living French philosopher François Laruelle, non-buddhism developed into several different book projects by Wallis: Cruel Theory, Sublime Practice, a collaboration with Tom Pepper and Matthias Steingass; A Critique of Western Buddhism, his more mature, academic work on non-buddhism; and his most recent book Non Buddhist Mysticism. Each of Wallis’s books builds on the work of Laruelle and represents an artistic endeavor, a genuine exploration of the possibility of thought in action. For folks like me, the Speculative Non-Buddhism website was a revelation—a place for intelligent critique with no taboos or off-limits topics. It provided fertile ground for those seeking an intellectual refill after spending too much time absorbed in spiritually enamored Western Buddhist spaces and their reverence for exotic others or promises of salvation if one meditates enough. It challenged spiritual myths such as “Don’t think too hard!” and “All that exists is the present moment.”

For me, non-philosophy and non-buddhism are exceptional practices for avoiding the excesses of unthinking Buddhists or Buddhism as ideological formation. Non-buddhism and non-philosophy are not replacement belief systems but forms of practice. Though identity formation may be a consequence of practicing anything seriously, I would never claim the title of non-buddhist. 

The “non-” in each should denote why. To be a practitioner of either is to be an allusive participant in the world of philosophy or Buddhism with no intentions of becoming whatever passes for a good philosopher or proper Buddhist. Non-buddhism is denoted without capitalization, and this small but important symbolic gesture indicates that non-buddhism is not yet another reformulation of Buddhism. Through Laruelle’s and Wallis’s descriptors of non-thought and non-practice as applications for critically taking part in different analytical traditions, we get a set of working tools for engaging with Buddhism, spirituality, philosophy, and systems of thought more broadly in an original and ultimately disruptive manner. 

The origins of non-buddhism

The French philosopher François Laruelle was born in the 1930s and has lived and worked through many of the ups and downs of 20th- and 21st-century philosophy. He has gone through various phases, his most famous work being non-philosophy, or non-standard philosophy, something that he describes as a science of philosophy, which could be considered as meta-philosophy, though Laurelle would dispute this. Laruelle’s non-philosophy emerges from recognizing that there was and continues to be a flaw at the heart of philosophy that keeps reproducing itself across geographical and temporal divides. This flaw he defines as a prior decision, a form of commitment that leads to the overlay of a system of thought or practice onto the world that is then confused for the reality it purports to describe. This could also be described as a dialectical split enacted through philosophy (or religion, think Buddhism) to make the world an object that can be grasped.

His insight is not exactly new, but his attempt to construct a heuristic for unpacking this process is. His insistence that this process is unrecognized by those performing this split is also important, especially as it pertains to practice. It need not be limited to philosophy, either. It can be applied to any complex system that includes beliefs and practices, especially those that lead to explicit identity adoption or formation, whether Buddhist or the more extreme ends of the political spectrum.

We can consider both Wallis’s and Laruelle’s works as fundamentally concerned with how we become blinded by an inability to see beyond any system of practice or group we become absorbed into or identify with and how we counter such a process. There is no claim that such a process can be eliminated entirely or fully transcended. To participate meaningfully in any group is not a sign of this mechanism being problematic per se, for a degree of assimilation is always a feature of committed social participation. Rather, the degree to which we commit to, identify with, and speak from a given system of thought and practice is the degree to which that system captures us with our capacity to see the world in its variety and complexity beyond that system’s meaning-making apparatus being reduced and, in the worst-case scenario, lost. Cults are perhaps the stand-out example of this process at the extreme. 

Just because such groups provide stark examples of this mechanism, we should not be complacent. This mechanism is at the heart of the tension in all groups, from workplace culture to mainstream political parties, from assorted clubs and educational institutes to the military. There is a tension inherent in moving into groups between increasing absorption into that group and maintaining some form of individuality, autonomy, and space for critique. The world of Western Buddhism does not escape this process.

As a surface recognition, this may all seem obvious to many of you. Still, when we look underneath that surface and dig into the mechanisms of identification, we discover a whole world of hidden challenges and habits that run through our myriad social enclaves, Buddhist or otherwise. This picks up on Louis Althusser’s recognition that ideology is not merely the product of a dominant or hegemonic political or religious system operating in a given time and place but is the inculcation of individuals into the social performance of norms through the internalization of the values and modes of thought, feeling, and being of that ideology. From this understanding, we are concerned about the formation of individuals into alien ways of inhuman practices and the overbearing nature of conformity. From a Buddhist perspective, we have a piece of the puzzle of what causes so much human ignorance and suffering.

Though we may want to avoid discussing true or authentic selves being screwed over by external forces, we can see how the more authoritarian an ideology, the less room there is for diversity in thought, practice, behavior, and belief. From this recognition, we can imagine a scale of the ideological determination of individuals and subjectivity, and question the degree to which systems produce behavioral conformity and inculcate subjective or inner conformity on that scale. To what degree is it simply a case of being complicit because the payoffs of group assimilation are highly desirable? To what degree is the extreme coercion of manipulative and dehumanizing forces at play? It is not always clear. The recognition of this process in the ‘other’ seems to make far too many complacent about the in-group conditions they are also subject to. 

Buddhism is no different in this regard. Buddhist traditions have long been at odds over who has got it wrong, who are the better Buddhists, and who are wasting their time in wrong-headed beliefs and practices, i.e., ideologies.

This acquiescence to authority is unconscious and reproduced within subjects that see their ideological capture as natural so that even the question of critiquing that naturalness and normality does not arise, summed up in the ever-present phrase “this is just how it is.” Such folks are often shocked and outraged when an outsider or insider critiques what has been held to be transparently right, good, or true. Laruelle defined this as participants being constitutively blind to the operations of decisions. This mechanism explains how so many support the worst human atrocities throughout history or put up with manipulative or abusive teachers. Though not condoning those who do, to envision them as captured by a form of collective hallucination does go some way in pointing to something we should all be far more attentive to, especially in a polarized and troubled age as our own, where it is far too easy to make enemies and ignore one’s own shortcomings.

Dismantling an ideological commitment

As a practice item, it is worth returning to the key first concept in both men’s work: decision, otherwise known as commitment. In committing meaningfully to something like Buddhism or a specific ideological position, we inevitably pick up habits of thinking, feeling, and even being, which intensify the deeper we commit to or identify with the system or position. The power of religion is that its practices are designed to produce precisely what Laruelle critiques: subject transformation in line with doctrinal norms, adoption of powerful beliefs, and commitment to a journey of salvation. Powerful absorption into group meaning-making is extremely rewarding. Where one may feel revulsion, skepticism, and something akin to an allergic reaction, another will experience a return home, mystical union, the power of far deeper human connection and clarity of purpose. We all desire such things, and they mirror in many ways our tribal roots.

The problem, or the benefit for the true believer, is that strong identification leads to a person becoming increasingly captured by that system. With some imagination, we can entertain the idea that they are becoming a part of its collective sentience. Then, what is perceived and experienced through that system is taken as a complete, self-contained system that solves the endemic problem of understanding our complex world and how to live in it. The individual loses a part of their capacity to think, perceive, and feel beyond the system of capture as they move more fully into it. As this is covered up by gains in certainty, clarity, and shared meaning, what is lost is often forgotten. This can be evidenced through the perversion of the world’s inherent complexity and its division into narratives of oversimplification and us versus them. From Jehovah’s Witnesses to conspiracy theorists, the same mechanism plays out.

Almost every ideology—even sophisticated, historically aware ones—oversimplifies the world. Simplification is part and parcel of commitment (decision) becoming the unconscious pillars supporting the subjective reality of the group and its individuals. In the case of Buddhists, a simple example is that the world is seen as samsara—a world divided between the suffering and the liberated. 

Philosophically, it goes deeper than mere ethics. The person becomes a performer of a recognized identity in the group and a participant in the meaning-making and co-forming that is integral to the group’s stability and survival. Therefore, the epistemological framework and metaphysical assumptions rooted in the ideology become a source of necessary alignment and needed adoption. Hierarchies within groups are typically built around deepening degrees of alignment and enforcement, with the head of the ideology being the master assimilator and representative of the original decisional act.

To highlight this process of meaning-making and identification with the system, Laruelle utilizes the French term scission, meaning a cutting away or separation from. This amplifies the question of commitment, separating it from the broader world of meaning or reality. An enclosure of sorts is created through this separation, and the wider world becomes acted upon through and from that enclosure. Laruelle speaks of philosophers ‘philosophizing the world’ from their philosophical stance. Wallis speaks of Buddhists ‘buddhifying’ the world through their talk of samsara, karma, emptiness, meditation, and enlightenment. Thus, even systems of knowledge or liberation become means for overlaying the world with a kind of collective imagination, narrative, or fantasy. You could call it a story or a telling, but identity formation and the calibration of the subjective to new ways of being, feeling, and thinking go far deeper than mere narration. 

The well-educated may be under the illusion that they could not possibly fall for such a mechanism. Yet a quick rundown of the assumptions they hold to and the decisional forms of commitment implicit in their lives would begin to show how they, and we, are all absorbed into shared acts of meaning-making and overly simplistic binaries. We are all works in progress, after all, and no final resolution to these issues exists. Though the absorption may be minor, we are participants in ideologies, nonetheless. Those ideologies, when unquestioned, always appear as natural, as given, as right, and in possession of the truth. A natural response to all this may be a return to practices of liberation. Yet the question of freedom remains deeply problematic, and the divisions between freedom and escape, knowledge and delusion, and other assorted goodies are hardly easily resolvable. They require sustained thought, analysis, reflection, and investigation, and that’s just the entry price.

The aftermath of recognizing this mechanism in group and individual identity formation and performance could also be seen as the recognition of entrapment. As a species rooted in the physical—the body, the Earth, histories, the confines of birth and death—entrapment or restriction are part and parcel of the human condition. We would do well to build a more nuanced and mature appreciation for our physical limits as a species. Instead of returning to a simplistic dichotomy, or scission, of freedom and entrapment, immanence and transcendence, escape and imprisonment, liberalism or conservatism, we could perhaps start to explore more fully the reality of embodied entrapment and social commitment and reevaluate what it means to foster, protect, and build ideologies of freedom and commitment to our physical reality, messy human history, and imperfect methods of making sense of each other.

A practice that can emerge from the kind of insight offered up by non-buddhism is rich. 

There is ripe ground for taking apart and deconstructing the assumptions we hold, the beliefs we nurture, and the behaviors we exhibit. Tracing history, unpacking inconsistencies, and seeing just how superficial our grasp of a core idea or belief we have long held is a form of practice and liberation. The difficulty for many Buddhists, spiritual types, and philosophers is that they too often hold to the idea that they are already practicing Liberation when often their liberation is a performance of an idea of liberation that is, in truth, subverting the world into a hallucination, and is, in practice, a form of entrapment and absorption into group meaning-making and identity assertions. To them, I would suggest that the confines that capture and entrap can be divided between the negotiable and non-negotiable, with much decision and commitment being the basis for a practice of liberation not from but, rather, into the world at large.

The post Waking Up to Non-Buddhism appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The late Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, one of the great Tibetan teachers of our time, said that as we travel on the spiritual path, we go through four stages of faith. Developed gradually and somewhat sequentially (“somewhat,” because nothing is really sequential on the spiritual journey), these four characteristics round out the qualities upon which all religious traditions rely. In Buddhism, these stages are: clear, longing, confident, and irreversible faith.

The first, clear faith, arises when we see the wonderful qualities of the Buddha in a teacher or in any person we admire. More broadly, it blooms when we recognize in another the possibility of living a free, happy, peaceful life, and this recognition compels us to look for a way to get there ourselves.

In a 1st-century text called The Questions of King Milinda, or Milindapañha, a senior monk called Nagasena is questioned by King Milinda on a range of philosophical subjects. Speaking of faith, the king says to Nagasena, “How is aspiration a mark of faith?” In response, Nagasena says, “Your Majesty, imagine a group of people gathered at the edge of an overflowing stream. They want to go to the other side, but they’re afraid, so they just stare at each other and at the rushing water and are afraid to move. After a while, one of them approaches the edge of the river, assesses the situation, takes a running leap, and jumps to the other shore.” 

This shore is the world of delusion, the place where we struggle and long for rest without finding it. The other shore is the shore of liberation. It’s the place where we find ease and contentment with ourselves and the world. “Seeing the first person jump,” Nagasena continues, “the others say, ‘Oh, it can be done,’ and they, too, jump.” He then finishes his teaching with a verse:

By faith they cross over the stream,
By earnestness the sea of life;
By steadfastness all grief they still,
By wisdom they are purified.

“Oh, it can be done,” we realize when we see others’ examples, and we set about doing it ourselves. This is faith by proxy. 

The second type of faith is longing faith, and it is a direct result of clear faith. Seeing in another the virtues of wisdom and compassion, seeing their clarity and kindness, we long for those qualities in ourselves. 

Shortly after meeting my first teacher, Daido Roshi, I was walking behind him one morning as we were returning to the monastery’s main building from his studio, where we’d been answering correspondence. Daidoshi was a tall man, gangly and slightly stooped, as many tall men are, and as we walked, he just ambled along, loose jeans sliding down his butt, cigarette dangling from his hand, utterly at ease with himself. I remember looking at him and thinking, “I want that.” At a time in my life when I felt deeply ill at ease in my own skin, I yearned to have the same self-assurance, that utter lack of self-consciousness. That’s when I decided Daidoshi would be my teacher. Even though it was far from the mystical encounter so many people describe when first seeing their teacher, it worked for me. This is faith by aspiration.

Then there’s confident faith. Gradually, as we become more familiar with the workings of our mind—more attuned to our particular, quirky thoughts—we develop the confidence to live from the good qualities we’ve begun to cultivate. We begin to accept that despite—or because of—our quirkiness, we can wake up, because awakening is already present in us. We see that we can be clear and kind, because from the beginning—or, to use a Buddhist phrase, from the beginningless beginning—we’ve always been clear and kind. 

Thirteenth-century Zen master Dogen said that if we weren’t already a person of suchness (if we weren’t already fully ourselves, fully perfect and complete), we wouldn’t be able to realize suchness. No matter how much we try, how hard we work, we cannot become what we’re not. I’m not going to turn into a panther or a stream or an astrophysicist or a concert pianist—not in this lifetime. But I can be Zuisei, Vanessa, fully. I can completely inhabit my own being. How? By slowly seeing and working through that which gets in the way of my completeness. By slowly seeing and working through that which affirms Zuisei—what gives Zuisei life.

Confident faith assures us that wisdom is within our reach. It lets us know that we can practice, realize, and live the dharma. And the more we practice, the more we know this, the truer it is. This is renewable faith.

Finally, there’s irreversible faith. No matter how long the path, no matter how difficult it may seem, we know we’re going to travel it because we can’t imagine living any other way. Daido Roshi also taught me about this kind of faith. He used to say that if a group of anthropologists proved irrefutably that the historical Buddha—Siddhartha Gautama—never existed, this wouldn’t shake his faith in the dharma even one bit. “I have my own practice and experience to go by,” he’d say. “That’s all I need.”

Having this type of faith, however, doesn’t preclude any doubts we might have about ourselves or our capacity to practice the teachings. At some point, we will be unsure. That’s natural. But by then, we’ve also seen that we don’t have to let worry or insecurity or fear of failure stop us. Having come this far, we’re no longer daunted by the challenge of what lies ahead, because we know what we have to do, and we know how to do it. We know it’s just a matter of time, and we have all the patience and determination necessary. This is unstoppable faith.

In the end, however, there’s really only one kind of faith we need, and that’s good enough faith. This is faith enough to get us going on the path. It’s enough trust in our capacity to see more and more deeply, to live more fully, knowing that if we just start and then take the next step and the one after that, the rest takes care of itself.

The post Good Enough Faith appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Ritual is a foundational component of many Buddhist traditions, yet Western Buddhists are often reluctant to engage in ritual practice. According to Buddhist teacher and professor Anne C. Klein (Lama Rigzin Drolma), this resistance can actually be generative. In fact, Klein believes that working with our resistance to ritual can open us to spaces of wonder, liberation, and belonging.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle editor-in-chief James Shaheen sat down with Klein to discuss why so many of us are resistant to ritual, the types of freedom that ritual makes possible, and how ritual practices can support us in the face of loneliness and alienation. Read excerpts from their conversation below, and listen to the full episode here.

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Why rituals can feel threatening

Ritual can be threatening on two levels. On one level, it is a certain kind of undermining, at least for certain periods on a daily basis, of the agenda of being a modern 21st-century person with a profession, family, obligations, and talents to display and hone. I think these pressures are very real for us. It would be foolish to deny that. That’s why I feel that resistance is not a bad thing. It’s speaking some kind of truth. On another level, the intention of practice is to unpack and then undo the way we ordinarily manage ourselves or see ourselves or live our me-ness in this life. No wonder we feel threatened. Even without the cultural contrasts or contradictions, we are meant to recognize that the same old habits are indeed coming under scrutiny. And that’s going to feel threatening to the habitual self. There’s no way around that. That’s widely recognized in the tradition.

How rituals can invite creativity

Rituals can bring about a surrendering of the baggage of being me. And that’s a relief. Perhaps the resentment toward ritual is because we feel like it stifles our exuberance and creativity and in-the-momentness, which are things that we value—and which our society crushes in certain ways. I feel like there’s a natural creativity that everyone has, and that creativity is actually invited into the ritual. Traditional instructions on ritual don’t exactly say to bring forth the creativity. But they do say to relax: relax thought, relax your whole body, let your attention be with your breath. What happens? On the way to calming down and being able to stay with your breath, incredible creativity arises. We call it distraction. But it may be very fruitful. I don’t think I’m alone in keeping a notepad by my meditation cushion because you can get all kinds of ideas. Something is let loose. Something is actually set free. Of course, it’s not the purpose of the meditation, traditionally, to capture those ideas. But the teachings do suggest that one purpose of meditation is to use that energy, which is also an energy of creativity. It’s creative to arrange your attention in a different way than we do habitually. Imagine just resting on your breath. That sounds insane to a lot of people—maybe impossible, maybe attractive. People usually like it. They may even have a few moments of respite and tremendous gratitude.

“Perhaps the resentment toward ritual is because we feel like it stifles our exuberance and creativity and in-the-momentness.”

How rituals can help us get out of our heads

Ritual gives every part of you something to do. Your body is positioned a certain way. Your energy has something to do. If you’re sitting silently, your energy is invited to settle. Your mind is intent on whatever the focus of the practice is. You’re being fed in body, speech, and mind, and you’re engaged in a different way than you were before. Posture is bringing attention to body. It seems so important. I always start with that. Tradition starts with that. You take your seat, and you feel your seat. And that is a through line to the present moment right there. You don’t have to do anything complicated. You don’t have to finish your thought. Just feel your cushion. Feel your seat holding you. Any sensation is in the present, is in this moment, and it’s not in your head. It’s an actual felt sense experience. That’s hugely significant. And it’s very important to me personally. I was a practitioner within the Theravada and Tibetan traditions for 17 years before I discovered that I had a body. Even though I was doing the sweeping meditation with S. N. Goenka, there was still some way in which I felt that what was important was my understanding and nothing else. And that really was a big flaw. I thought it meant that I was smart, but it was actually a tremendous obstacle. Attending to the body in whatever way, whether in terms of posture or sweeping or turning into light, is a great antidote to being in your head.

How rituals give rise to love

In Buddhism, love is the ultimate solvent of what obstructs and also the culminating fruition of what evolves. In a real sense, every gesture of ritual is animated toward a fruitional state of love. If we start with the act of sitting in a certain posture, there’s a certain attention to this frail and physical body. That’s already a beginning of love, a seed of love. We place our attention somewhere, usually on the breath. Attention is the start of love. There can be no love without attention. In cultivating attention, we’re cultivating a possibility for intention and a possibility for connection. Connection is all about love.

Then perhaps we go on to take refuge, and in Tibetan traditions, we imagine that the whole universe is taking refuge with us, all of us. We recognize our common need for support, for help, for refuge, for protection. It’s a very genuine, poignant recognition: I can drop my mannerisms of being good enough and smart enough and acknowledge that I need something larger. With one gesture, I’m recognizing that honestly for myself—and acknowledging that everyone else is in the same situation. We all need refuge, however we understand that. We need protection; we need help; we can’t do it ourselves. That’s an opening to love. 

“Attention is the start of love.”

And then we can recognize the delicate situation we find ourselves in: we’re all going to die. If the Buddhists are right, we’ve been being born and dying for infinite time, and even if they’re not exactly right, it feels that way metaphorically. In light of the vastness of spacetime in this cosmos, what proper response could there be other than a kind of compassion for oneself and for all beings? Nothing else really meets the situation.

Then we go forward with that. Maybe we send out light, or we give rise to a wish that we could transform everything into an awakened state because that’s the only place where we can be really free of suffering. We have that aspiration, and whether we believe it’s literally possible or not, we allow ourselves to bathe in that aspiration. What culminates? Everything of suffering vanishes in our imaginaire, which at that moment is of the whole cosmos. Everything is filled with light, which means knowing, which means awareness and wisdom.

And then what? Then it all dissolves back into some groundless ground that is itself perfect. That groundless ground is what the Dzogchen tradition calls bodhicitta, the awakened mind. The tender, wise, loving mind is most subtly expressed in that reality itself. It’s not something that you make up out of wanting to be good. It’s nakedly there in reality just as it is, and that’s considered a fruitional recognition. Everything is opening to that awakened mind; in the end, everything is either love or a distortion of it.

♦

Listen to the full podcast with Anne C. Klein here:

The post Ritual as an Opening to Love appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I first met God when I entered grade one at Holy Rosary, a Catholic elementary school, where the classes were so packed we had to crawl over one another to get to our seats. Towering black-robed nuns patrolled the aisles with rulers ready to smack naughty hands, and priests, who were known to be next to God, bestowed their blessings upon our little bowed heads. Obsequiousness was paid off in holy cards. 

It was in that environment, edged with fear and awe, that I learned I was marked with original sin from birth, and my vocabulary expanded to include words like sin, devil, penance, judgment, hell, virgin birth, and fallen from grace. These ideas, plus a whole raft of dichotomies like “good and evil’ and “blessed and condemned,” were presented as a guide for my future development, which was understandably erratic as a result.

While training to receive our First Holy Communion, we were all given our own copy of a small, moss-green handbook called a catechism to memorize. We were told it was filled with all the questions and answers we would ever need to know about God, starting with:

Q. Who is God?

A. God is the Supreme Being.

You have to realize that at this point I am just a tiny little girl fascinated by the color yellow. 

God, on the other hand, is an enormous concept that has confounded the best of the world’s thinkers. Socrates, Hume, Nietzsche, Foucault… all would have rolled over at such an easy assumption! But at Holy Rosary, it was not open to discussion. Some of my friends seemed to latch onto the God-thing right away, but I didn’t. And I spent the next 30 years of my life asking the same question over and over again: Who is God?

I want to make clear to those whose belief in God is incontrovertible, and this includes many dear friends: I tried. I went to Mass, I took Communion, I mastered the art of folding my hands and looking holy, but the rapture just never came.

The real fault line appeared with the budding of my female consciousness. Why did my brothers get to be altar boys and I didn’t? Why did the nuns teach us girls how to clean furniture while the boys did secret sacrament stuff in the sacristy? Was this really God’s plan? These glaring omissions in His apparent “guardianship of all beings” created even more bewilderment in me. But I finally drew the line at confession. One day I was on my way to church to admit to my paltry list of 13-year-old sins when suddenly it dawned on me: Why do I need to confess through a priest? 

I needed a personal relationship with my budding spirituality, and from that moment on I decided to talk to God directly. But it never became a two-way street. After a while, my end of it started to sound distinctly whiny. I always seemed to be asking God for things. Could God get me a boyfriend? Give me a sign that I was doing ok? Or at least make my hair better? Apparently not… 

So, as I got older I gradually stopped trying. But my habit of God continued. After all, I had been trained from a very impressionable age to believe that the answer to all my spiritual and existential questions was somewhere “out there.” I spent the next years of my life trying to attach myself to some savior-substitute: therapy, gurus, success, money, politics, sex, drugs…whatever. The list goes on. I wasn’t even sure what the questions were. I just had a perpetual and profound sense that I was living in the dark and it made me anxious. But no matter how hard I tried, I never found “it.” Nothing ever came down, landed on my head, and saved me from my confusion.

And then something happened.

After several adventurous moves I found myself as far away from home as I could possibly get and still be on the same planet; at the junction between two great deserts deep inside the Western Australian Outback. I was working for the government teaching art workshops to the Aboriginal people of the area who, I discovered, had their own spiritual and artistic traditions honed over approximately 30,000 years. I was a bit out of my depth. 

One day I walked out into the bush and sat on the edge of a cliff. My mind was jumping from one thing to the next like a grasshopper on speed. However, as I raised my eyes and looked out, the sharp contrast between what was happening internally and what I saw before me hit me like a blow. I had never in my life seen such an empty landscape. In front of me was a seemingly endless expanse of pure flat desert. I could see for miles and miles and miles. There was not a tree, a road, a rise, or speck to catch the eye. Below was a haze of milky beige and above a cloudless opalescent sky, the two melding together ad infinitum.

I thought, “What would it be like to have all that space in my head?” 

And suddenly my mind stopped. Boom.
Everything went still.
The air moved. The dry grass rustled.
The sun beat on my skin. 
And I was quiet.
My mind was quiet… and wide open.

This lasted for an incalculable moment. When it passed, thoughts began to arise again, but this time they were crystal clear: 

1. I wanted to learn how to extend this experience.
2. This must be what meditation is about. 
3. And I needed a teacher. Not just any teacher. An authentic teacher.

This realization moved me deeply and became a tsunami that swept me along until I found that teacher. But the first thing I had to do when I set foot on the Buddhist path was check my old habits at the door, and that included any notion of being saved. Instead of getting raised up toward some happy union with perfection, I got set down on my bottom and instructed to experience my own psychological mess. I found so much anger, jealousy, pride, unsolved hurts, and revengeful black goop that it’s no wonder I was loath to give up on being saved. God help me! 

This early stage of meditation was tough and lonely. It involved unraveling all the sticky threads of my thought processes strand by strand, including the big knot that had hope written on it. The hope I had carried with me from first grade that some all-powerful being or thing was magically going to relieve me of my existential angst. I discovered a finely honed, philosophically rich spiritual path that relies solely on direct personal experience. Through progressive stages of meditation practice and study, I began to realize that underneath all the confusion is a natural, inherent, and intuitive wisdom. No one is bestowing anything on anyone. It is already there. 

As Chögyam Trungpa explains in Crazy Wisdom, “There is a certain kind of intelligence that is connected with totality, and is very precise. It is not verbal; it is not conceptualized at all; it is not thinking in the ordinary sense. It is thinking without scheming. And it is something more than that. It is a self-existing intelligence of its own.” This is what the Buddha, who was definitely not a god, taught: that the fundamental nature of our mind is peace. But even he could only point the way. Uncovering the full depth of this truth is a completely personal process.

No one is bestowing anything on anyone. It is already there.

Discovering Buddhism brought my spiritual journey into focus. It is nontheistic, which means that a belief in God is not part of the teachings. However, God can be a habit, as it was in my case. It took me many years of meditation to actually stop sitting with my face tilted ever so slightly toward heaven, subconsciously waiting for an external, superior, and all-knowing being to land. I even tried to deify my teacher, but he refused to fit any mold. Eventually, I began to understand that reliance on a deity of any kind is an impediment to experiencing my own life directly. And then one day I realized that my habit of God was gone. Poof! And a new lighthearted confidence has taken its place. 

God had been in my life for a long time, but I never knew him, or her, or them. Not even close. But I can know my mind, and the more deeply I look, the more remarkable the journey is. The confusion that dogged me throughout my life has gradually lessened under the gentle touch of meditative awareness. It’s been a path full of pitfalls and ego trips, but I now know the absolute honesty of the practice. No tricks. No shortcuts. No escape. No savior. Just the experience of innate, intelligent awareness and an overwhelming compassion for all of us who suffer. It is the kind of hands-on spirituality that I yearned for, and will continue to practice for the rest of my life.

The post Goodbye God appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

If you watch television documentaries or visit airport bookshops, you’ll have noticed that the “view-from-nowhere” brigade is still hard at work debating their opposing truth-claims. The “view-from-nowhere” reduces religions, spiritualities, philosophies, and sciences down to their propositions–their truth-claims–and argues the toss over whose story is the “right” one, that is, has the most defensible truth-claims. In doing so, they’re missing the point: all these schools of thought are human artifacts designed to serve human needs and interests, just as the Buddha’s discourses patently did. The real issues in the debate should be: whose and what needs and interests are being served, and how effectively? So let’s follow the Buddha’s advice and not get sidetracked into metaphysical claims and arguments. 

Going by what we now know about the history and variety of religions and spiritualities–all those social practices–they’ve served a variety of practical purposes. These purposes include bolstering group cohesion; providing community-building moral codes and rituals; staging ceremonies for seasonal and personal transitions and life events; holding communal memory; and serving as a platform for aesthetic practices, a language for existential solace and reflection, and working hypotheses to satisfy humanity’s relentless curiosity.

Religions are thus no different from other human innovations, like plows and buildings. Even religious ritual fits the mold. As philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once noted, humans are “ceremonial animals,” and this trait seems to constitute an evolutionary factor. Rituals help us to cohere in our communities. 

The ability of religious social practices to serve their purposes does not depend on their myths being literally “true,” or even being believed. In the light of this usefulness, secularists might respect religion, even practice it in some sense, even though these days there are also non-religious ways of meeting these needs. 

So what is Buddhist mindfulness-based meditation for, and what modus operandi does it propose to serve its purpose? Meditation keeps us focused on the fine grain of our experience, not least our bodily experience, and in this way leads us to “fully know” and embrace what it means to be a vulnerable, mortal but aware being. What it means to be-in-the-world in this guise, in this way. To come to terms with our actual condition, instead of fleeing into fantasies of another set of preconditions than the ones we actually confront. That is, to ground ourselves in our real lives without “craving.” This is the first of the Buddha’s four great tasks. 

We can find the modus operandi for meditation readily enough in the Satipatthana sutta, among many other places in the Pali canon. Essentially it’s about opening up the totality of our experience as it unfolds–in all its freshness and complexity–to awareness (sati); and over time coming to understand it (sati-sampajanna). It’s not about being drilled to generate already-prefigured experiences while rejecting those that don’t fit the template–which is the inherited agenda of formulaic meditation techniques. 

Among other things, then, secular Buddhism aims to reinstate meditation to its earliest role as a major vehicle for tackling the four great tasks. To do so it promotes non-formulaic, non-technical insight meditation, in which one invites the senses and the mind to disclose their entire contents in all their layered complexity, so we come to see the whole picture, and gradually discern the patterns in our experience, in our individual way of being-in-the-world. We need an approach to meditation appropriate to our actual way of life, not one appropriate to the way of life of institutionalized male renunciants. 

To meditate effectively, all we need to put forward is our effort in following our immediate experience, and our honesty in acknowledging it. It makes no sense in this meditative environment to congratulate ourselves on being a “good” meditator who can follow the instructions, or to despair and declare ourselves “unable to meditate” because we don’t experience what the textbooks prescribe. So many people quickly get a sense of lostness, inadequacy, and failure when introduced to formulaic meditation that’s touted as “the one true way.” 

The only real failure to note here is the failure to live like institutionalized celibates! And we’re certainly not “good meditators” by dint of often finding ourselves in blissful states, nor bad ones for sometimes seeing into the abyss when we’re meditating. All lives contain tragic elements, and we have to receive them in our sits as we would any other experience. 

We’re all responsible for nurturing our own meditation practice, and the major issue we face is whether our approach is fit for purpose. The only true indications of meditative effectiveness are often subtle, off-the-cushion ones. Am I gradually strengthening positive qualities, such as friendliness (including to myself), empathy, generosity, clarity, self-reflectiveness, and equanimity? And am I seeing more clearly–and overcoming–my reactivity, immaturity, and narcissism? 

*** 

Already in the Buddha’s own lifetime, some of his followers fetishized his teaching, his dharma, seeing it as a supreme value in itself, as the Holy Grail (we might say in our culture), instead of just as a means to an end. He tackled this problem in a teaching in which he compared the dharma to a raft that someone might throw together, out of any materials that just happened to be lying around, in order to get across a body of water. Having arrived safely to the other shore, what should the traveler do with the raft–leave it on the shore, or carry it overland on her/his head as something of great value? The ever-pragmatic Buddha strongly recommended leaving the raft on the shore. It has already served its purpose, and that’s its only value. 

Stephen Batchelor suggests that secular Buddhists take this teaching to heart. We should throw together a raft out of what we have to hand in our own time and culture. The question then is not whether this is “really Buddhism”; the only sensible question would be: Does it float?

⧫

Adapted from Revamp: Writings on Secular Buddhism by Winton Higgins, The Tuwhiri Project, April 2021

The post Ask Whether It Works, Not Whether It’s True  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Do you have to believe in rebirth to be a Buddhist? Roger Jackson, emeritus professor of Asian studies and religion at Carleton College and author of Is Enlightenment Possible? Dharmakirti and Rgyal Tshab Rje on Knowledge, Rebirth, No-Self and Liberation, explored the question with Tibetan Buddhist scholar Jay Garfield in a recent discussion on modern Buddhism. The discussion was part of a recent Live@Tricycle event series around the new anthology Secularizing Buddhism: New Perspectives on a Dynamic Tradition.

To answer the question, Jackson suggests that what you practice may be more important than what you believe. He categorizes belief in rebirth as “a matter of working within what I would call a particular aesthetic, a Buddhist aesthetic, in which many of these, if you will, metaphysical or cosmological questions are either shunted aside or put in suspension, and you participate in the life of the tradition, uncertain about certain aspects of it.” 

For Jackson, the question, “do you have to believe in rebirth to be a Buddhist?” is “a good one,” but not “the essential” one. Rather, “the glue that’s held [him] together as a Buddhist has been the doctrine of emptiness.” And it’s that very “glue” that he uses to reconcile the doctrine of no-self with that of rebirth—a compatibility that was questioned in this recent discussion. In the process, Jackson shows why, despite the concepts of no-self and emptiness, Buddhism is not nihilistic. 

***

There are many presentations of [no-self versus reincarnation] in early Buddhist tradition, but in some ways, the classic presentation of it is by Nagarjuna, the great philosopher of the Madhyamaka school and great philosopher of emptiness. In the 18th verse of the 24th chapter of his fundamental stances on the middle way (a verse I’ve heard His Holiness the Dalai Lama discourse on for two hours at a time), he makes an equation between emptiness and dependent origination. 

Dependent origination is another way of talking about how causes and conditions bring about events in the world and it’s all impermanent. In the context of that chapter, Nagarjuna’s opponent says if everything is empty—and Nagarjuna has spent 23 chapters showing this is empty, that is empty, time is empty, motion is empty, causation is empty, to the point of seeming utterly nihilistic—then basic items of the Buddhist path and cosmology are empty too, and they’re annihilated. Then Nagarjuna says, you’ve totally misunderstood what I’m doing. I’m talking from the ultimate standpoint. 

From the ultimate standpoint, there is no substantially existent causation or time or motion, or Buddha for that matter. But, in fact, conventionally all these things are reasonable and exist. And in fact, in one of the great jujitsu moves in Indian philosophical history, he says it’s not only that emptiness does not annihilate rebirth and the path and Buddhahood and arhatship. It’s that if things were not empty, none of this could actually be the case because the world is a changing, shifting, impermanent world. Dependent arising is simply the term that describes that, and things cannot dependently arise if they are not empty, because the opposite of being empty is being permanent, independent, and partless. It’s a brilliant move.

I would say that emptiness does, as Nagarjuna brilliantly argues, establish the validity of the conventional world, but what the conventional world actually consists of—whether there’s rebirth or not, whether the sky is blue, whether there’s Mount Meru—all these are matters for conventional philosophical debate. 

But the key thing is the harmony between dependent arising and emptiness, such that to say things are empty is to say that they arise dependently. To say that they arise dependently is to say that they are empty. This is a point that Nagarjuna makes, Tsongkhapa in the Tibetan tradition has made very powerfully, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama makes repeatedly. It’s a key to showing that the doctrines of emptiness and no-self are not nihilistic. 

♦

Click here to watch the full discussion with Roger Jackson and Jay Garfield, part of Secularizing Buddhism—a week-long conversation series with Tricycle and Shambhala Publications celebrating the launch of the new anthology, Secularizing Buddhism: New Perspectives on a Dynamic Tradition. 

The post Why the Doctrine of No-Self Is Not Nihilistic appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

To tell the truth, I have no idea which element of my hyphenated identity as a Buddhist practitioner and a scholar of comparative religions is more prominent in my conviction that religious diversity, which also includes indifference to organized religions, is simply a normal, natural aspect of life. Yet I was brought up to think that it was a huge problem. At some point, fairly early in my life, it just became ludicrous to me to think that of all the people on earth, only a relatively small group of very conservative German Lutherans had their heads on straight and had all the correct answers to every difficult problem or existential issue. Truly, how much sense could that make! I did not have many resources with which to come to that conclusion—very little lived experience encountering much diversity, no like-thinking friends or mentors, and few books or other intellectual stimulation. But it just didn’t make sense to think that the group into which I was born was so superior to every other group on earth, or that other people didn’t feel affection for their own lifeways, whatever they might be. Given the ease with which I thought past the indoctrination I was given, I am somewhat impatient with people who buy into religious chauvinism—or chauvinisms of any kind.

John Hick is fond of talking about adopting a pluralist outlook regarding religious diversity as a Copernican revolution regarding religion that is necessary in our time. While I basically accept his idea, I would add that overcoming our discomfort with that diversity is critical in that Copernican revolution required for religious believers at this time. There are two parts to my claim. The first is that religious diversity is a fact, and it is also a fact that religious diversity is here to stay. There simply are no grounds to dispute those facts. The second part of my claim is that we need to find the resources and means to become comfortable with and untroubled by the fact of that diversity.

Related: One Way to Nirvana 

The sun does not revolve around the earth, and one’s own religion cannot be declared the One True Faith. These are equivalent statements, of equal obviousness and clarity, no matter what previous religious dogmas may have declared. It is as useless to hang on to the dogma that one’s own religion is the best because that is what one was previously taught as it would be to hang on to the dogma that the sun literally rises and sets because it appears to and because the Bible seems to say so. Religions always get into the most trouble when their dogmas lead them to deny facts on the basis of authority; but dogmas die slowly. I was amazed in the fall of 2011 to discover that some Jain pundits still declare that the earth is flat because that’s what Jain scriptures state. When empirical evidence is presented to them, they respond that some day science will catch up with their scriptures.

Exclusive truth claims and religious diversity are mutually exclusive; they cannot survive together in any harmonious, peaceful, and respectful way. Surviving religious diversity involves coming to a deep and profound realization that religious diversity is not a mistake or a problem. It does not have to be overcome, and there is no need to suggest that other traditions may have partial truth or to try to find some deeper, overarching or underlying truth that encompasses the many religious traditions. To accept this truth often requires profound inner adjustments, but they are not very hard to make in the face of obvious evidence.

What is such incontrovertible evidence regarding the naturalness of religious diversity? From the comparative study of religion, we learn that, no matter where or when we look in the history of humanity, people have devised a great variety of religious practices and beliefs. This diversity is both internal and external. That is to say, not only are there many religions around the world; each religion also contains a great deal of internal diversity. Even those religions that proclaim they are the One True Faith are internally very diverse. How could they imagine that someday there will be one universal global religion to which all people will adhere when they cannot even secure internal agreement about their own religion’s essentials? Why should we expect that in the future, such diversity would disappear and the religious outlook of one group of people would prevail over all others? That has the same cogency as expecting that most people would give up their native tongue to adopt another language for the sake of an ability to communicate universally. And, as I have argued in the past, having a universal language would actually be very helpful and make communication easier, whereas having a universal, common religion would not significantly improve anything. In fact, it would rob us of a lot of interesting religious and spiritual alternatives, a lot of material that is good to think with, in the felicitous phrasing of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. It would be helpful if we could all talk about all those alternatives in a language we could all understand. It does not seem that we are likely to have that common language anytime soon. But diminishing the number of religious alternatives, per the vision of religious exclusivists, does nothing to enrich our human community.

Related: Dialogue Across Difference

However, the vast variety of data available from the cross-cultural comparative study of religion does not provide theologically the incontrovertible proof regarding the normality and naturalness of religious diversity that I am seeking. Those data are simply a fascinating kaleidoscope. They present us with facts but say little about how to value those facts. There would seem to be an obvious, simple theological justification for religious diversity available to theists and monotheists. I used to suggest to my Christian and theistic students that the deity they believed in had obviously created a world in which religious diversity rather than uniformity prevailed. One would think that for those to whom belief in a creator deity is important, the manifest world that the deity had created would be acceptable. But my students objected to that logic, saying they knew that God wanted them to stamp out religious diversity. Factual information is often unconvincing to those with settled theological opinions. Unfortunately for them, one of the most famous monotheistic justifications of religious diversity was from the wrong revealed scripture, so it didn’t matter to them. The Quran states:

To every one of you we have appointed a [sacred] law and a course to follow. For, had God so wished, He would have made you all one community. Rather He wished to try you by means of what He had given you; who among you is of the best action. Compete therefore with one another as if in a race in the performance of good deeds. To God shall be your return, and He will inform you concerning the things in which you had differed. (Q. 5:48)

Take out the theistic language, and this advice is not too different from what I propose.

On the other hand, what I propose is quite different from what the Quran says in one significant way; for we need to locate the rationale and need for religious diversity, not in what unseen and unknowable metaphysical entities such as deities might decree, but in how human consciousness operates. If we are to speak of Copernican revolutions in how we view religious diversity, I would suggest that we shift our focus from how we think of God and instead put much more emphasis in thinking about how and why we construct and accept the theologies we do. In other words, shift the gaze from theology to spirituality. Shift from looking to something external, even an external as abstract as Ultimate Reality, as the source of our religious ideas. Instead look to our own quest for meaning and coherence. As I am fond of telling my follow Buddhists who want to believe in strange, nonhuman origins for some of their texts, sacred books do not fall from some other world into our sphere, neatly bound between two covers. They are the products of cultural evolution and are accepted only because they seem coherent and helpful to humans. For those who are or want to remain theists, such a move does not jeopardize their belief system. Belief in an external deity is such an attractive alternative that most people prefer it to nontheism. In fact, in some forms of Buddhism, it can be hard to detect how Buddhists have remained true to the nontheistic origins, though more sophisticated exegesis of such forms of Buddhism can always rescue a nontheistic core. However, thinking there could be an unmediated text, creed, or religious practice—something independent of human agency—is not only a strange idea but also an idea that is devastating to flourishing with religious diversity.

Moving from theology to spirituality and human consciousness would be a realistic and very helpful move. It is also a typical nontheistic and Buddhist move. According to Buddhism, human minds create our worlds, both their problems and their possibilities. This is probably the biggest difference in the claims made by theistic and nontheistic religious, though a nontheist Buddhist would argue that theistic religions are actually created by their adherents, not by the deities they worship. (Interesting is that both Buddhists and students of comparative religions agree on the point that religions are products of human history and culture, not of direct divine intervention into history.) We have created our problems, and only we can solve them. That becomes something of a bottom line for Buddhists. We need to train our minds to be less attached, less mistaken, less shortsighted, and, most of all, less self-centered. After all, discomfort with religious others is a form of self-centeredness.

How do we take that perspective into solving the “problem” of religious diversity? First, I would argue that religious diversity exists because it is psychologically and spiritually impossible for all human beings to follow one theological outlook or spiritual path. We are not built that way. That’s just not how we are. Religious diversity, which is inevitable, natural, and normal, flows from our different spiritual and psychological inclinations. Therefore, inevitably, we will encounter religious others. Second, I would argue that the acid test of a religion’s worth lies with what kind of tools it provides its adherents for coping gracefully and kindly with their worlds and the other beings who inhabit them. Discomfort with religious diversity and the wish to abolish it is a psychological and spiritual deficiency arising in an untrained human mind, a mind that does not know how to relax and be at ease with what is, with things as they are, as Buddhists like to say. Solving the “problem” of religious diversity has much more to do with human beings’ attitudes toward one another than with somehow adjudicating their rather different theological and metaphysical views. Thus, I am suggesting that we should start, not with religious creeds and questions about religions or metaphysical truth, but with questions about how people are—different from one another—and about how well religions function to help them live with how they are.

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From Religious Diversity, What’s the Problem? Buddhist Advice for Flourishing with Religious Diversity, by Rita M. Gross. Reprinted with permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers. 

[This article was first published in 2015.]

The post The “Problem” of Religious Diversity appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Once a month, Tricycle features an article from the Inquiring Mind archive. Inquiring Mind, a Buddhist journal that was in print from 1984–2015, has a growing number of articles from its back issues available at www.inquiringmind.com. In this holiday season when many Westerners who practice Buddhism also celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah—some returning for services at the churches and temples of their childhoods—we present a Buddhist’s reflections on God. This month’s selection, “God is a Three Letter Word: Interview with Norman Fischer” by Susan Moon, originally appeared in the The God Issue (Inquiring Mind, Fall 2013).

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Norman Fischer is a poet and writer and the guiding teacher of the Everyday Zen community, with sanghas in the US, Canada, and Mexico. He was a resident of Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery and Green Gulch Farm, and for several years he served as abbot of San Francisco Zen Center. One of the signatures of his teaching is his interest in different religious traditions and his valuing of the very idea of religion. He lives with his wife in Muir Beach, California. Fischer’s most recent books are What Is Zen?: Plain Talk for a Beginner’s Mind (University of Alabama Press, February 2016), Untitled Series: Life As It Is (Talisman House Publishers, May 2018), and the upcoming The World Could Be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path (Shambhala, April 2019). Susan Moon interviewed him via email.

When you were a child growing up in an observant Jewish home, did you believe in God?
My impression of “belief in God” in Judaism—at least the way I grew up Jewish—is that it isn’t a question. It was never discussed, because it wouldn’t have made sense to discuss it. It was just assumed—deeply assumed. The ideas of “belief” and “faith” seem to be inherently Christian concepts. But growing up we had no such idea. You were Jewish whether you liked it or not: if you tried to escape being Jewish, eventually you’d be found out, so there was no use denying it. It was for better or worse a fact of life. Like being a man or a woman. And then if you were Jewish you did Jewish—that is, you went to synagogue, observed kashrut [dietary laws], and so on. So God wasn’t an issue; God was just a basic assumption that had to do with being Jewish. You were you, ergo God was God. To tell the truth, this still seems true to me.I do believe in the benevolent protection of God . . . in the sense that something always happens, and that what happens is what it is and not something else, and that therefore there is a special virtue in it.

As a child the way it seemed true to me had to do with the strangeness of the experience of being alive: literally perceiving, feeling, thinking, and so on. The world just seemed strange. This must have to do with God—that was the reasoning. So, for instance, walking to synagogue holding my dad’s hand and seeing the sparkling substance in the sidewalk as we glided by: how else would that be possible if not for God?

In Judaism as I knew it, there was no theology; there were just stories. You read stories in the Torah every week—stories about people trying to engage God—not because they believed but because God was involved in their lives as a fact: experientially. Clearly these were stories. Not exactly historically true: more true than that. I remember being very small and listening to a recording of Bible stories. God spoke in a booming baritone male voice—very intimidating, very frightening. I used to hide under the table. On the other hand, it was thrilling, and I listened to this record again and again.

How did your sense of God change when you were a young man?
As I grew up, my sense of God didn’t particularly change. I studied religion and philosophy and became more sophisticated in my way of thinking and speaking about God. I no longer believed (but I don’t think I ever did) that God was watching over and protecting us in some anthropomorphic way. But this increased sophistication did not change my earliest ideas about God. I was just learning more and more developed ways of thinking about what I knew all along.

Related: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Now I do believe in the benevolent protection of God. Not in the sense that good things will always come to good people whom God loves, but in the sense that something always happens, and that what happens is what it is and not something else, and that therefore there is a special virtue in it. Whether or not we discover the virtue is our problem. That seems to me to be ample evidence of God’s tremendous compassion and grace. We can absolutely depend on it!

When you began to practice Zen, did you think about God? Did you miss God?
When I started to practice Zen, I was just going on to the next thing that naturally called to me, assuming that the religion stuff was still relevant and would still be there when I needed it. I guess I had an enormous confidence in my sense of Jewish identity, backed up by God. I didn’t think I needed to tend to it; I could move on to whatever was next and it would all be okay. When I started to practice Zen, it was like that: my explorations had led me to Zen naturally and this is what I was going to give myself to, with the same kind of full-on hysteria with which I’d given myself to the great American triumvirate of baseball, football, basketball—and to girls.

Now it was Zen. But I didn’t miss God or wonder whether I was abandoning God or God was abandoning me. I assumed that God would always be around. Because if God is simply embedded in the strange fact of existence, then how could God not always be part of the equation? The fact that God is officially not an issue in Buddhism—or is, in some forms of Buddhism, apparently denied—didn’t trouble me at all. Different language game. No problem. Anyway, Zen seems not to be invested in denying the idea of God. [Shunryu] Suzuki Roshi mentions God several times in his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind with apparent approval.

Did you return to your Jewish practice after you were a Zen practitioner and teacher, or was it always there?
I didn’t practice Judaism much when I began doing Zen. I was living in a Zen temple and it was a very full life, no time for it. But when our kids were old enough we did [Passover] seders and other stuff, and then when my mother died in 1985, I wanted to say Kaddish [prayer for the dead] for her. So I went to the nearest synagogue and told the rabbi who I was (a Zen priest by then) and why I wanted to be there. He said OK; he was a very nice man. I got involved with regular attendance there, with my mother in mind.

Related: The Meditation Mitzvah

Then in 1990, my dear and now-departed friend Rabbi Alan Lew returned to the Bay Area, and from then on I began doing a lot of Jewish practice with him. We started a Jewish meditation center, Makor Or, that I still direct and teach at [as of 2013]. I learned a lot from him, and he got me to study a lot, which I still enjoy. Judaism is fascinating. So I actually have quite a lot to do with Judaism.

How does your Jewish meditation practice frame the idea of God?
Our Jewish meditation theory is that God is presence—presence both within and beyond your life (within and beyond turn out to be completely mutually implicated, when you look closely). And that while Judaism knows this and Jewish practice is meant to foster it, in fact, most contemporary Jews do not have access to the richness of God-encounter that Judaism contains, because a major motivation for Jewish observance is to strengthen the community—which is not only reasonable and salutary, it is also self-protective conditioning from a long history of oppression. So this is where the meditation comes in: it is easy access to God-encounter, through encountering your own body, breath, mind, and presence. I speak of God all the time at Makor Or—and sometimes at Everyday Zen, too.

What, if anything, did you tell your children about God?
I communicated to my children what my parents communicated to me—God is obvious, necessary, and ubiquitous. It is not a matter of belief or faith. And you don’t need the word God if it seems to cause you problems. After all, does it make sense that God would be limited to positive feelings about a three-letter word in the English language, and that if you had a problem somehow with that word (because maybe where you live it is socially unacceptable) that God would cease to exist for you? No, this makes no sense! There is no doubt there is more to life than meets the eye, more to being alive than the material world. In fact, there is more to the material world than the material world! What is this “more” if not God? It’s also fine to call it something else. As to the question of God as personal: as [philosopher Emmanuel] Levinas (1906–1995) says somewhere, of course God is personal, because we are persons.

Do you pray? If so, to whom?
I pray all the time. To God. I am asking God to help out with this and that, mostly friends who are ill, people who have died, the crazy messed-up sad and foolish world. Please help with all of this, God, as I know you will. I am never disappointed with God’s active response. Because I know what to expect. And I am thanking God a lot for almost everything.

Have you had moments of feeling directly connected to God?
I usually feel directly connected to God. I’m alive, and I can tell I am alive.

What is God like?
God is like life, like being, which of necessity involves death and not being—and this is where the God part comes into it.

What is your responsibility as a Zen teacher, in talking to Zen students (like me) who yearn for God, or to other students who come to Zen relieved that at last they don’t have to “believe in God”?
As you know, I resist the idea of myself as a Zen teacher. There are roles to occupy, and I have mine; everyone has his or hers. I am interested in responding honestly to anyone I meet, as far as I can understand that person. I hope it helps, but I never really know. If it does help, the reason is not my wisdom and brilliance, it is the luck (you could also call it karma) that produces a fruitful encounter between two people meeting in the middle of a dazzlingly complicated world. Since I am sensitive to language because of my long-standing poetry habit, I don’t get caught up in debating with someone about their choice of words. I think useful truth is in the meaning, not the words. The art is to find the words to indicate something to this person now. Speaking of which, I’ll close with a poem from my 2004 collection Slowly But Dearly.

How God Gets Into It

God arrives in the transitions—
the times between before and after
the shatterings, bendings, breakings
moments of devilment and blasted pose—
The feeling then arises,
a draft in the system
tiny shaft of light in the visual field
which, when noticed and affirmed,
opens out to an aura on the screen of eclectic ineffability—
One’s arms open in quietude and perplexity
There’s nothing to say, do, or think

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The post Seeing God in What Is appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When I was a monk in the Thai Forest tradition, I took a meditative camping trip to the mesas of Southwestern Utah along with a group of mostly Thai monks. This occasioned a drive through Las Vegas, where we passed a billboard advertising a sushi restaurant called Buddha Bar, whose ad campaign featured an image of the Buddha along with lingerie-clad waitresses offering trays of drinks. “Ai!” cried one of the Thai monks, followed by several other exclamations of discomfort and indignation. It wasn’t the presence of the erotic that disturbed us (nude or erotic imagery can be found in Thai temples, too), but rather the use of Buddhist imagery for such crass commercial purposes.   

In the Thai tradition, Buddha images, along with other embodiments of the dharma like stupas, relics, and sacred texts, are treated with the utmost respect. They are always placed highest in the room. One does not point one’s feet toward them. And one should never sit on them, put their images on secular clothing, or use them for commercial purposes. Yet such “profane” uses of sacred Buddhist objects or imagery have become common in North America and Europe. And Asian Buddhists have noticed.

The Knowing Buddha Organization (KBO) was formed in Thailand in 2012 to combat global disrespect toward Buddhist imagery. The KBO—which boasted 5,000 members in 2016, according to a study by religious studies scholar Michael Jerryson—has been rapidly growing and is now even receiving support from the Thai government. The group has pressured manufacturers in France and the Netherlands to remove decorative Buddha images from toilets and caused Maxim magazine to cancel a photo shoot in the US that featured buddhas. They have also created an online guide to avoid showing disrespecting to Buddha images, making such suggestions as greeting one with a wai (hands pressed together in respect), not placing Buddha images on the lower part of the body or in the low parts of a room, not decorating mundane objects with them, not featuring them in tattoos, and not selling them as merchandise.

“We speak out to protect Buddhism by giving correct knowledge on proper treatments [sic] to Buddha images and symbols,” reads the KBO website. “In recent years, Buddha images and statues have been used as ‘Buddhist Art’ for decorations—such as furniture, rather than as a remembrance of his compassion with respect and gratitude.”

But are such concerns with the way people treat Buddha statues Buddhist? In the Brahma Net Sutta (DN 1), the Buddha says, “Monks, if others were to speak in dispraise of me, in dispraise of the dhamma, or in dispraise of the sangha, neither hatred nor antagonism nor displeasure of mind would be proper. If others were to speak in dispraise of me . . . and at that you would be upset and angered, that would be an obstruction for you yourselves.”

In other words, being upset about or monitoring others’ respect toward the Triple Gem can interfere with our practice.

In addition to concerns over the obstacles that our anger can create, the KBO’s campaigns may strike some people as uncomfortably reminiscent of violent protests over cartoons of Mohammed or Hindu riots in India against perceptions of Muslims disrespecting sacred sites or religious rules. Although KBO is explicitly nonviolent, at their annual thousand-strong marches down Khaosan Road in Bangkok, they identify themselves as a “Dharma Army” (kawngtaptham)—which is likely to provoke unease in some observers. 

Related: The War on Words and Images

On the other hand, it is admittedly curious that in a time when there is a passionate debate about cultural appropriation and someone can get mobbed online for wearing a Chinese dress to a prom, no concern over the insensitive appropriation of Buddhist imagery seems to have arisen in the public sphere. There may be several factors behind this: a more laissez-faire attitude toward religious imagery in the largely secular West, an ignorance of the vocabulary of respect with which traditional Buddhists treat such images, or a perception that Buddhists would be easygoing about such things.

Although customs about what constitutes respect and disrespect will differ among cultures and lineages, traditions around the world believe in the importance of showing respect for the Triple Gem—the Buddha, the dharma [Buddhist teachings], and the sangha [the community of practitioners]. In this view, disrespect of the Triple Gem has negative spiritual consequences—it creates bad karma. In most cases, however, Buddhists trust the law of karma to work out the consequences of disrespect, and don’t police others’ respect themselves.

Nothing in the Brahma Net Sutta mitigates against the KBO’s campaign to educate people in how to respect Buddhist sentiments and avoid cultural appropriation and insensitivity, although it also suggests such activities carry dangers for those pursuing them. The sutta reminds us that such activities should always be carried out without anger or ill-feeling, and in ways that don’t pose obstacles to our actual practice of the dharma. According to the study by the religious studies scholar Jerryson, Acharavadee Wongsakon, the Thai entrepreneur who founded KBO, made the following reassuring statement at a 2016 march: “With a campaign of over a thousand people, this army does not possess guns or swords. It has no malice or any hidden ill-intent.”

Nevertheless, the secretariat of KBO in 2016, Sayan Chueyuksorn, remarked to Jerryson that he agreed with Sri Lanka’s deportation of tourists for having Buddha tattoos as well as Myanmar’s jailing a bar owner and manager for featuring a Buddha wearing headphones, saying that KBO hoped and expected Thai laws to move in that direction. Faced with the prospect of people facing the real world violence of jail time or deportation for conceptual violence against mere symbols, it would seem wiser for Buddhists to lean err on the side of tolerance as a prophylaxis against sliding into strong-arming others in the name of Buddha.

The last time I was in Vegas, no longer a monk but passing through with my wife and son, Buddha Bar and its like-minded confrere, Little Buddha Restaurant, were both gone. The Buddha warned us not to speculate over the specific workings of karma, so I’ll refrain, but the law of impermanence was clearly manifest.

The post Does Buddhism Need a Blasphemy “Army”? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.