Rescuing the Dharma from Fundamentalists

© Sidney Harris
sciencecartoons.com

MY TITLE THIS WEEK is taken from a book by Bishop Shelby Spong, who, apart from having a delightfully resonant surname, wrote Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, a book I read long before converting to Buddhism. I no longer recall much about Bishop Spong's opus other than the title, but that phrase has popped into my head a number of times recently as I have been confronted by fundamentalist Buddhists. Surely the phrase 'Buddhist fundamentalist' should be redundant, at least if I am referring to the colloquially pejorative use of fundamentalist, but sadly it is not. Over the years I've met many fundamentalist Buddhists online, but have also met one or two in person.

Buddhists will often tell you that Buddhism is not a religion of blind faith. I think this is at best a misconception. Buddhists take many things on faith, most of them blindly, and many of us have spent a good part of our lives searching for confirmation of those articles of faith, usually without ever finding it. To keep believing, after decades of seeking and not finding, requires a great deal of faith. (Though I should add it's not that we've found nothing at all, just not what we were told to seek) Amongst the articles of faith that characterise Buddhism are beliefs in ideas such as karma, rebirth and nirvāṇa. For many years I myself accepted the notion of some kind of Absolute Reality, some reality above and beyond the one I currently experience - in philosophical terms this kind of thinking is called Idealism. This Absolute Reality has many names: nirvāṇa, dharmakāya, amṛta. Sometimes it is described in terms of paramārthasatya - ultimate truth, or ultimate reality, or Even Ultimate Reality! Talking to Buddhists it rapidly becomes clear that the belief in such views is not supported by personal experience, though personal experiences have been interpreted to fit these dogmas. These truly are articles of faith in the sense of beliefs unsupported by any evidence, only ancient, scriptural testimony. And what's more, when one presumes to question the validity of such beliefs the believer can become upset and even aggressive.

The basic problem of fundamentalism seems to be that if you question the articles of faith, then the faith disappears, and the person is left with nothing. I do not believe that this faith is Buddhism in the first place, or that it harms Buddhism to set aside views, or that we cannot dispense with the Iron Age Indian worldview that underpins traditional Buddhism and the Indic language terminology that comes with it. If Buddhism is not a religion of blind faith (and I am saying that for the majority this is a moot point), then relinquishing articles of faith should present no problems at all.

Because I'm in the habit of reinterpreting scripture, and questioning traditional authorities, I often find that fundamentalists are upset by what I write. For instance some time ago a chap going by the name of 'Namdrol' on the E-Sangha bulletin board, in a discussion of the Theravāda three lifetimes model of the nidāna chain - for which there is no Pāli Canonical authority - declared: "to reject the three lifetimes model is harming the dharma". I mentioned back then that I thought this a fundamentalist view, but was told that the word "fundamentalist" was banned in that forum (along with any reference to the New Kadampa Tradition which was a bit of a give away). E-Sangha died not long afterwards, but not before I realised that online forums, and arguing with strangers on the internet generally, were a waste of my time and started focussing on writing this blog.

When I first discovered the Dharma I fell in love with it. I just took the whole thing on, accepted everything I heard uncritically for a long honeymoon period. When you're in love you don't see the flaws in your lover. I read quite widely, but mostly at the level of popular Buddhism, and certainly nothing very scholarly or critical (in the sense of critical thinking). And I ended up getting into arguments. I've always learned through intellectual disputation, and I wanted to test this new found belief system. But as I got older, and I got interested in Buddhist scholarship, I found myself becoming less sure, more doubtful about what was now more obviously dogma at best, and often rank superstition.

As time has gone on I have come to see that the traditional accounts of Buddhism are not entirely coherent, that certain key terms and concepts are very, very difficult to understand, though talked about incessantly. [1] Indeed some dogmas which seem reasonable at a level of popular simplification, are positively incoherent when considered in detail. At the same time I became more interested in practice and what actually happens because my own experience of doing Buddhist practice was exciting and revealing. I began to have insights into my own character and the dynamics of my personality that I don't think I could have gained except through intensive practice. These insights changed my life, in some cases dramatically, and mostly positively. I don't claim that these were Insights in the technical Buddhist sense, but they were significant breakthroughs for me personally, and as a result I suffer considerably less than I used to, though still a lot more than I would prefer.

Where a dogma is incoherent or inconsistent I think we have a duty to say so. Where history or archaeology is at odds with tradition, we must not sweep it under the carpet. And where the Iron Age Indian world view conflicts with the modern scientific world view then I think we must accept the findings of science and adapt our presentation of Buddhism. The Dalai Lama has said something similar [2], though I've found his followers more the usually ready to accept dogma - with one or two exceptions (see e.g. the blog Buddhism Sucks).

I've written a number of posts exploring the philosophical problems of belief in karma and rebirth [3]. Intellectual honesty says that at best we can be agnostic about rebirth, but it's the kind of strict agnosticism associated with the Tooth Fairy (this is cited from Richard Dawkin's book Unweaving the Rainbow). Tooth Fairy agnosticism acknowledges that we cannot know for certain that there is no tooth fairy - after all how would one disprove such a proposition? It would be much easier to disprove the opposite proposition - that the tooth fairy doesn't exist - simply by producing the Tooth Fairy. Equally the Tooth Fairy is not something we need to take seriously, or spend a lot of time agonising over. Rebirth is a pre-scientific afterlife belief with very little to distinguish it from other afterlife beliefs, at least there is no more evidence for or against it than any of the others. The so-called proof of such beliefs is merely that at some time in the past, some people appeared to believe it, though the argument over whether the Buddha himself believed in rebirth continues to bubble away 2500 year later. The same people appear to have believed in gods, demons, and animistic spirits. The same people believed that a person could possess magical powers to fly though the air, hear conversations at a distance, and multiply their body so as to be in many places at once. If we accept rebirth as 'true' then why not all these others things? And of course there are some credulous folk who do believe every story the ancients told as having a basis in fact. They may also believe in bigfoot, the yeti, visitors from another planet living amongst us, that economics will solve the world's problems, and no doubt the tooth fairy. But what people believe is not as important as how they behave as a result of what they believe!

In a recent comment on this blog, one person asked what was left if we stripped away all of the articles of faith. I suggest we are left with some simple propositions. We suffer. We can gain insights into the conditions for, and workings of, suffering, and thereby suffer less (and help those around us to suffer less also). We gain insights into suffering through examining the arising and passing away of suffering. That we suffer is a simple observation, and I do not think any one can argue against this. Sangharakshita has proposed that the Buddha starts with an experience because it cannot be argued with (A Survey of Buddhism, p.145f.). The problem of suffering is not incidental or accidental: suffering is the central problem of Buddhism. I do maintain that there is a distinction between pain and suffering on more or less traditional Buddhist lines, and that suffering is a mental response to physical pain. The early Buddhist tradition was talking about suffering in this sense (c.f. my commentary on the Salla Sutta).

The proposition that we can gain insights into why we suffer, and thereby lessen our suffering, is one I can vouch for from personal experience and without resorting to mysticism, or obscure Indian jargon, or a world-view alien to the one I grew up with. The one article of faith that I maintain is that there is, so far as I can see, no limit to the extent of the insight which is possible; and therefore no limit on the extent to which we can reduce suffering in the world. Pain is inherent to sentient existence, suffering is not. One can be in pain, for instance and be happy. I can see no reason that the insights gained could not make permanent and irreversible changes in the way we perceive pain. After all we've probably all had an experience which has forever changed us.

And what I find is that the methods of Buddhist practice, and even more so the fundamental principles of Buddhist practices, are very conducive to understanding and relieving suffering. There are also methods not traditionally associated with Buddhism - tai chi, yoga, psychotherapy etc - which can help. Clearly the idea that anything that helps is part of 'the method' is one that is very attractive to some, but threatening to the fundamentalist. Fundamentalists are not simply conservative, they don't just resist innovation and change, they are opposed to any change - in direct contradiction of the dictum that everything changes.

In the last year of so I have had a little contact with varieties of so-called 'secular' Buddhist, 'atheist' Buddhists and even 'non-Buddhist' Buddhists, and while I have some sympathy with them I think we differ in some ways. To me religious Buddhism is fine. I have no problem with bells and smells, and devotional practices, or even idol worship. Because my criteria is not ideological or philosophical, it is pragmatic. I think religious Buddhism, with some caveats, is a good thing.

Buddhism has near enemies and far enemies. A near enemy is something we mistake for the true quality, while a far enemy is the polar opposite.

One near enemy of Buddhism is that instead of disinterestedly investigating our minds for insights into suffering, we tendentiously try to prove a dogma, to achieve a certain state, and see every experience in an elaborate sectarian ideological framework. It is a delicious irony that the great figures of Buddhism, from the Buddha onwards, have been the one's that said - "no, my experience does not fit the traditional narratives" and developed their own ways of making sense of the experience of doing Buddhist practices. In this respect I must say I find the new crop of arahants, who appear to confirm the traditional narratives, intriguingly old school.

One of the great problems of Buddhist fundamentalism is the way we Buddhists speak of our beliefs as Reality (always capitalised). Our dogmas are different because they are "the way things are". But are they? How do we know this? The knowledge that our dogmas are Reality, if it comes at all, only comes with Awakening (which we also capitalise). So logically if we are not awakened, we do not know the truth - so why do we believe? The best the unawakened can do is to have faith in the awakened - who ever they are. But few Buddhists really make this distinction, and many argue as if they personally know the truth. I've done this. It seems plausible partly because paṭicca-samuppāda is superficially a theory of cause and effect. Cause and effect is how we experience the world, so a doctrine which proclaims cause and effect must be true. But paṭicca-samuppāda was not originally a doctrine of cause and effect, it was an idea about how the experience of suffering arises, and used the language of conditionality, not of cause and effect. There's no real evidence that the originator(s) of this doctrine intended it to be a theory of cause and effect, let alone a Theory of Everything. And there's every evidence that the Western Intellectual tradition has understood cause and effect for at least as long as the East has - at least since the Buddha's Greek contemporaries, but throughout the intervening period we find quotes to the effect that "everything changes". If cause and effect, or even conditionality, was all the Buddha was talking about then we are all awakened, because in fact this is all rather easy to understand, and is covered in high-school physics. The fact that we do not appear to be awakened, in the sense that we still suffer, suggests very strongly that in focusing on cause and effect we are looking in the wrong place!

When a doctrine is Reality, when it is the Truth, when it is just "how things are", then to question it is not really possible. Indeed to question Reality is seen not merely as heresy, but as insanity. Buddhists will happily tell you that we don't have a sin called heresy; but they are also fond of the apocryphal quotation "all pṛthagjanas are crazy". The pṛthagjanas are you and me, the hoi polloi, the unawakened, and usually this statement includes the people citing it (and after 17 years of looking I've yet to find the source). So if I question the notion of karma, I'm not simply a heretic, I'm not offending anybody (because we Buddhists don't get offended) I'm just expressing my insane "views".

Most of the time this delusion of knowing Reality is actually pretty benign. Buddhists, on the whole, are tolerant of lunatics like me (See the case of the mad monk). Buddhists don't tend to coerce, manipulate, bully or injure unbelievers. It's been known to happen, including amongst our clergy, but it's rare. We are mostly harmless, as one would expect. We spout incomprehensible jargon a lot of the time, and are often a slightly edgy combination of zealous and defensive. But Buddhism, on the whole, is not a cult that is going to damage you. The main problem is confirmation bias -- if you already know what Reality is, you will dismiss everything else.

A far enemy of Buddhism, which we are seeing more and more, is militant nihilistic iconoclasm which strikes down any and all manifestations of religion. Perhaps we need to reflect on why some people are so violently opposed to religion per se - after all religion in some form is a feature of all human cultures, and to hate religion seems to me to be tantamount to hating our humanity. Many people appear to be appalled by their humanity. The sociality, irrationality, emotionality, and fragility of all humans appears to be deeply problematic to some. Is it a symptom of the widespread alienation that characterises the post-industrial world?

Buddhism proceeds by many ways and means to illuminate the way that suffering arises, but the focus is always on the arising and passing away of mental states. I would say that even those who "merely" offer generosity to monks are at least potentially fully participating in this exploration since to be truly generous one must find a deep empathetic connection with another being and give them what they truly need, to make them happy at whatever the cost to ourselves (the very opposite of the philosophy of Ayn Rand which has been so very influential on Wall St and in The City, as well as in Silicon Valley). Poor traditional Buddhists assiduously feeding and caring for monks are in some ways more admirable than middle-class Western Buddhists with desultory meditation practices and still driven by their own selfishness. Though we so often scoff at them as merely 'ethnic Buddhists'.

So, yes, I think we can dispense with the vast bulk of traditional Buddhist narratives, worldviews and terminology, and yet still consider ourselves to be Buddhist if we pursue Buddhist practices. I define a Buddhist in terms of what they do, not what they profess to believe. A Buddhist is someone who explicitly and purposefully pursues some form, any form, of practice whose purpose is ultimately to identify and ameliorate the causes of suffering; and who calls themselves as a Buddhist in the process. The last bit is relatively inconsequential. I personally know Buddhists with beliefs ranging from outright materialism, through the wackiest aliens-amongst-us conspiracy theories, to the most esoteric mysticism, whom I know to be good people, sincerely pursuing a Buddhist path, and even finding some success upon it, at least in the sense of manifesting Buddhist virtues like friendliness and generosity. I also know plenty of people who share values I hold dear, and even express them in virtues I admire, but who have no inclination to call themselves Buddhist.

Karma and rebirth as traditionally taught are just dogmas. Buddhists are afraid that if we dispense with karma and rebirth no one will be moral, and freedom from suffering will not be possible - after all it takes many lifetimes to practice the perfections. Christians expressed a similar fear about the death of God - without God, they said, people will be immoral, and the world will turn to chaos. Are we more or less moral than our 17th century pre-European-Enlightenment forebears? Probably about the same on average. Probably about the same, on average, as individuals anyway, as anyone anywhere, any time. Because morality is not determined by profession of belief. Even the faithful can sin; even the heathen can be moral. To find what makes us moral we need to look deeper than belief and religion. To find out what causes us to suffer we need to look at our own minds, and set aside our preconceived ideas.

Buddhists, of all people, should recognise that our traditions have sprung from centuries of cultural change, that our narratives and doctrines are not "original" and haven't been for more than 2000 years. Buddhists, of all people, have nothing to fear from change, should embrace change, should initiate change. Fundamentalism just seems out of place amongst us.

"What can we take on trust in this uncertain life?
Happiness, greatness, pride - nothing is secure, nothing keeps."

Euripides (ca. 480 BC – 406 BC), Hecuba. [4]

~~oOo~~

Notes

1. See for instance: Confessions.
2. "If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview." The New York Times (12 November 2005) [via Wikiquote]
3. see e.e. Rebirth and the Scientific Method; and Hierarchies of Values.
4. Note that Euripides's estimated dates coincide exactly with the most recent estimations for the dates of the Buddha.

The Buddha's Biography

I'VE ALREADY WRITTEN quite a lot on the confusion surrounding the name of the Buddha, and concluded that we don't really know what his name was. More recently I was pondering the Buddha's biography and considering the two different accounts of his going forth: the familiar elaborate version in which a princely man aged 29 who leaves behind wealth, status, wife, child, and family; and the shorter, less detailed, and probably less familiar story found in the Ariyapariyesanā Sutta [MN 26], but corroborated in other places. Scholars seem to agree that the biography found in the Ariyapariyesanā represents a more primitive version of the story which is likely to predate the more elaborate version. It's a given that the life stories of famous people tend to become more elaborate with time, not less, especially post-mortem. I'm sure many Buddhists will be surprised to discover that there are two different stories, as the more elaborate version is usually presented as a more or less factual, historical account.

Whether or not the Ariyapariyesanā version is the original story we will probably never know. But it provides a valuable insight into how the legend of the Buddha grew after his death. The process is no different from other saintly figures in other cultures and times. It's a case of the medium is the message: the common outlines of hagiographies tell us more about human nature than the content of such stories tell us about the historical Buddha. I want to look at just one paragraph from this earlier, less elaborate biography and draw out the implications it has for our stories about the Buddha.

So kho ahaṃ, bhikkhave, aparena samayena daharova samāno susukāḷakeso, bhadrena yobbanena samannāgato paṭhamena vayasā akāmakānaṃ mātāpitūnaṃ assumukhānaṃ rudantānaṃ kesamassuṃ ohāretvā kāsāyāni vatthāni acchādetvā agārasmā anagāriyaṃ pabbajiṃ. [M i.163]

At a later time, though still only a boy, with much black hair, in the first stage of life, and endowed with youth and good fortune; with my mother and father unwilling, tearful and wailing, I cut off my hair and beard, donned brown robes, and went forth from home, into homelessness.

I don't think it's overstating things to say that this is one of the most important biographical passages in the whole canon, because here much of what we think we know about the Buddha is contradicted.

Let's begin with his age. The text reinforces his young age with several terms: dahara, yobbana and paṭhama vaya. The word dahara means 'little, a young boy, a youth'. Buddhaghosa glosses it with taruṇa 'a tender young age, esp. a young calf'. The second word, yobbana, also means 'a youth'. The phrase paṭhama vaya means in 'the first stage of life', as opposed to middle age and old age. However the text also says he shaves off hair and beard (kesa-massuṃ ohāretvā) and this is common to all of the various narratives of the Buddha's going forth. Unless this is simply a stock phrase the youth must have passed puberty, and had a year or two to grow a beard. But not much more: if we were to describe a grown man as 'a boy' or 'a youth' it would seem awkward at best. I think we could say that this is describing a youth of 15 or 16. The tradition later made him 29, which is into middle-age by the standards of the day. Why 29? I don't think anyone knows, but it is interesting that the Jain leader, Mahāvīra, an elder contemporary of the Buddha, is described as a prince of Magadha who left home aged 30.

Something which is noticeable for being absent here is any mention of wife and child. The youth here is apparently not married. His parents weep and wail as he leaves, but not his wife. In my opinion the whole story of a wife and child is a later fiction, as is everything associated with them, including stories about Rāhula (who calls their child 'fetter'?). Many people are disturbed by the idea that the young bodhisatta left behind a wife and child. Of course had they existed they would not have been trapped in a neurotic nuclear family like most of us, but would have been part of a large extended family, and if we believe the stories they were wealthy and privileged. They were certainly not alone, nor destitute, and Gotama's role in the raising of his infant, and in the day to day life of his wife would most likely have been minimal in any case. I've never had a problem with young aspirant leaving wealth and family to pursue the deathless, because in the story he returns liberated and frees his family from suffering forever. One must take the story as a whole. But this whole story is a probably a fiction anyway.

Another interesting thing about this passage is that his mother and father -- mātāpita -- are unwilling witnesses to his leaving. He doesn't sneak out at night, there is no servant, no horse, none of the rich symbolism of later times. Notice in particular that his mother is present. The Buddha's mother seems not to have died in childbirth in this account. The stories of her death were presumably part of some important legendary strand that is not unlike the sanctity attached to Mary, the mother of Jesus. Though early Buddhists rejected most notions of Brahmanical ritual purity this is not true of later Buddhists. For example in the eighth century Śāntideva wrote:

If you have no passion for what is foul, why do you embrace another, born in a field of filth, seeded by filth, nourished by filth? [Bodhicaryāvatā ch8 8 v.59; translation by Skilton & Crosby]

This reflects Brahmanical notions of the polluting nature of bodily fluids, which with the Brahmanisation of the subcontinent, became pan-Indian concerns. The Buddha himself is shown to mock the Brahmins for this attitude in the Agañña Sutta (DN 27.4). He says their creation myth (Ṛgveda 10.90) which tells that the Brahmins were born from the mouth of Brahmā is a lie, since they were born in the usual way -- with all the implications of ritual pollution that entailed in the Brahmins own belief system. So in the later stories the Buddha is not born from his mother's (polluted and polluting) vagina covered in amniotic fluid and other nasty substances, but miraculously and pollution free from her side. And then she, rather too conveniently, dies and is transported to heaven where she can not cast any doubt on the sanctity of the Buddha himself. One is reminded of those 1950's and 60's American sitcoms that featured a family without a mother, ostensibly to play down the subject of where children come from. If indeed this represents a Brahmanical spin, then we can observe that the Brahmanisation of India was not completed until after the reign of Aśoka, ca. 2nd century BCE, about 150 years after the most likely date Buddha's death, which may give us a limit for dating these stories.

Finally observe that when he leaves the bodhisatta dons robes (vatthāni) which are brown (kāyāsa). It's well known that the wanderers of the day would stain the cloth of their simple robes with dirt to make them unattractive to bandits. The samaṇas who didn't go naked did not originally wear elaborate robes, or use expensive fabrics (unlike many Buddhist monks these days) but the cheapest cloth, or even rags, stained with dirt. The word kāyāsa means 'brown', but is often interpreted as 'yellow'. I think the latter is because of the brightly coloured robes that many modern Theravādins wear. PED links kāyāsa to Sanskrit śyāma 'dark' which can mean anything from black to dark blue or green; or śyāva 'dark brown, brown'. Neither of which suggest yellow, orange or red! There is a direct cognate kāṣāya but PED says this is a Sanskritisation of a Pāli word, and in any case it also means 'brown, or reddish-brown'. So the word means 'brown, dark', except in the context of bhikkhu's robes. Which suggests that changes in the colour of the robes lead to the change in meaning of the word in this specific context.

Though it is not related to this particular text, there is another little oddity about the way we see the Buddha. All of the early literature describes the Buddha as having a shaved head, and cutting of his hair and beard, as I have already mentioned is a central part of all of the Buddhist biographies of the Buddha. And yet more or less all images of the Buddha show him with tightly curled hair. Eisel Mazard goes into this puzzling discontinuity in some depth in an essay entitled The Buddha was Bald. I think Mazard makes a mountain from a mole hill (he seems to see depicting the Buddha with hair as a sinister conspiracy to defraud us), but it does confirm that the popular conception of the Buddha has changed over time, and that earlier versions of his life story get over-written.

So this 'man', who's name we are unsure of, was probably a 16 year old, unmarried youth when he left his (still living) mother and father, against their wishes. And this is not so far fetched really. Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950), with whom there are other biographical parallels, was this age when he left his home to go forth. Sangharakshita was about this age when he had his first mystical experiences also, and had be been living in India at the time might have wandered off at that point (as it was he had to wait 6 years to go forth aged 22.).

It's probably meaningless to talk about the "historical Buddha". I forget now where I first came across the distinction, but I like to see the information we do have as pertaining to the traditional or legendary Buddha. The historical Buddha is lost in the mists of time, though it seems very likely that the traditional Buddha is based on an historical person. Another important character, the mythic Buddha, is a product of our imaginations - which is not a criticism, or a pejorative. I think myth -- a word I use in the same spirit as Joseph Campbell -- is very important and significant aspect of our traditions. Myths are vital for a living spiritual tradition. I've written about how a much later figure went from being an historical figure, to a legendary one, and finally attained to the mythic dimension as a kind of Avalokiteśvara-like figure who intercedes to ensure one gets into the pureland. (see: Kūkai: Buddhist Hero of Japan.)

Reginald Ray's book Buddhist Saints in India documents the way that the Buddha's life story became the archetype for stories of later Buddhist saints, with the biographical details being recapitulated throughout history. And indeed the same thing has happened in other world religions. There is no reason to think this process began with the Buddha, or that the biographies that have come down to us are not influenced by his predecessors even if they are even less clearly visible than he himself is.

Across cultures saints often share common features. It would be interesting for instance to compare the Buddha with St. Francis of Assisi. This is not to devalue the methods of Buddhism, or of religion generally. Though I am not in favour of superstition, I think there are remarkable people who rise above the ordinary concerns of the rest of us: saints, for want of a better word. And these people leave us with a legacy of alternatives to: "the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." (Hobbes. Leviathan. Chap. 13, para. 9).

In writing on this subject, critically and even polemically, I ask readers to opt for an honest confrontation with history, rather than a dishonest collusion with either tradition or secular humanism. The former blinds us and leaves us mired in eternalistic superstition, and the latter urges us to lives of nihilistic mediocrity. One of the main ideas communicated by the biography of the Buddha is that we do not have to accept either common superstitions or the general consensus; nor do we have to accept ourselves as we are, as limited and earth bound. We can be free. However the confrontation with history can be painful as it challenges our beliefs and calls into question aspects of our religious faith. I think in the end this makes us stronger, and forces us to focus less on belief and ideology, and more on practical matters, i.e. on doing the practices. Everything changes, and it seems very likely indeed that the stories we tell of the Buddha have changed too.

~~oOo~~