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WillowOne's Positions

Buddhism

My Positions

  1. Buddhism receives the gentlest treatment of any religion from Western atheists and does not deserve the exemption. Rebirth, karma, hell realms, hungry ghosts, miraculous relics, and a founder who walked at birth are as unsupported as any other religion's furniture.
  2. Its core psychological observations (that suffering arises from craving, that the self is a process rather than a thing, that attention can be trained) are genuine insights, compatible with naturalism, and the techniques built on them work as described under Meditation and Mindfulness.
  3. Buddhist societies are not the pacifist utopia of the brochure. Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, and Zen's enthusiastic support for Japanese militarism, show that the religion restrains violence exactly as well as the others, which is to say when it suits.

Notes

  1. What it claims. The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path are a reasonable, if pessimistic, piece of practical psychology. They come packaged with six realms of rebirth, thirty-one planes of existence, hells of elaborate and lengthy torment, gods, demons, the tempter Mara, past lives of the Buddha as animals, and the doctrine that one's circumstances are the earned result of conduct in lives one cannot remember (Reincarnation and Karma). The Buddha of the texts is born from his mother's side, takes seven steps and announces his supremacy; he performs miracles, reads minds and recalls his previous lives. Most of the world's Buddhists practise a devotional religion of merit, chanting and offerings to statues, and would not recognise the philosophy-seminar version sold in the West.
  2. The reincarnation industry. The Tibetan tradition identifies reborn lamas in children, who are then raised to office. The Chinese government has declared that it will choose the next Dalai Lama; the current one has said he may not be reborn at all, or may be reborn outside China. A dispute between an atheist state and a theocracy over who controls a reincarnation is as clear a demonstration of what reincarnation claims are for as one could ask.
  3. What it gets right. The doctrine of anatta, no fixed self, is close to what the neuroscience and philosophy of Consciousness now say: the self is a model the brain constructs, not a thing the brain contains, and sustained attention to one's own mind makes this observable. Dependent origination is a decent early statement of universal causation. The Kalama Sutta's advice to test teachings against experience rather than authority is usually quoted beyond its context but is good advice wherever it came from. These are the parts worth keeping, and they can be kept without the cosmology; secular Buddhism has been doing so for thirty years.
  4. The "scientific religion" myth. Buddhism is often presented as the religion that science confirms, a claim encouraged by the current Dalai Lama's genuine interest in neuroscience. The confirmation extends to meditation's effects on attention and mood. It does not extend to rebirth, karma or the realms, and the Buddhist modernists who present the tradition as a psychology are performing the same selective reading that liberal Christians perform on the Bible.
  5. The record on violence. In Myanmar the monk-led 969 movement supplied the ideology for the expulsion and massacre of the Rohingya in 2017. In Sri Lanka the Bodu Bala Sena has organised anti-Muslim riots. In the 1930s and 1940s, Japanese Zen masters taught that killing for the Emperor was an expression of compassion and that the sword was the Buddha's; D. T. Suzuki, who introduced Zen to the West, was among them. Buddhism's reputation for peace is a Western artefact, produced by distance.
  6. Women. Nuns are subordinate to monks in every traditional ordination lineage, in several of which full ordination for women died out and has only recently and controversially been restored. The religion is not unusual in this; it is unusual only in being thought to be.

Sources

  • Batchelor, S., Buddhism Without Beliefs (1997), the secular case
  • Lopez, D. S., Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed (2008), on the "scientific Buddhism" claim
  • Victoria, B. D., Zen at War (1997; 2nd ed. 2006)
  • UN Human Rights Council, Report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar (2018)
  • Sam Harris, Waking Up (2014), chapter 1, on what to keep

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