Religion? Philosophy? Path? (part 1)
(From the January 2024 Newsletter - if you haven't signed up to receive my newsletters, you can do that on the homepage.)
As the title suggests, this article is about what label to put on Buddhism, because people just love labels!
But even if you don’t feel you need a label for Buddhism, hopefully this will bring some useful clarity. Here goes …
Whenever we encounter something new, we typically like to put it somewhere in the filing cabinet of our minds. That’s not a bad thing, of course. We take in so much information every day that if we didn’t make some attempt to file it away, our heads would be full to exploding point with stuff whizzing round and round in circles inside, all of it demanding our attention.
Sometimes, though, the new thing that we encountered ends up in the wrong file, so that when we actually might want to use it, we can’t find it.
And that means that we miss out on all the benefits it could bring.
Unfortunately, this happens a lot with Buddhism!
The first file that people usually try to put Buddhism into is Religion.
After all, pretty much everyone in the world is born into a religion, aren’t they(?), and if they don’t ever announce that they’ve bailed out into atheism or agnosticism, then surely they’re either still in their birth religion or they’ve joined another one?
Of course, lots of people are born into Buddhism, but this idea assumes that the thing all these people are born into fits neatly into the same category as the religions we’re already familiar with!
These typically include Christianity (for most of us the local variety, so our default standard), Islam (clearly also a religion), Judaism (a bit like Christianity, isn’t it? They even share the same book), and perhaps Hinduism (those pink elephant gods are a bit weird, aren’t they, but clearly something religious is going on). Surely Buddhism’s like all of them?
Well, there are certainly some similarities, yes. For example, many Buddhists in Asia do a lot of what looks to us like the praying and adoring stuff we’re so used to from “our” religion.
But there are also other things that Buddhists seem to devote a lot of time to, like meditation – what’s that all about? And why do they have so many monasteries – why aren’t those monks and nuns out doing something useful in the “real world”, like Mother Teresa?
And what about Western Buddhists? Most of them don’t even do the praying and adoring bit – aren’t they opting out of the most important part of religion?
Well no.
It turns out that the devotional practices so common in Asia weren’t even part of Buddhism in the beginning. They just sort of grew up around the core teachings until – for many people, though certainly not all - they took over from those teachings as the primary focus.
So are those devotional practices the “real Buddhism”? Or are they somehow “wrong”?
Well, Buddhists typically aren’t so keen to judge what other people are up to, so I prefer to say that that’s just one version of Buddhism.
But it’s not a version that Westerners ever normally practise.
What we in the West have usually done is to go back to the original core teachings of one Buddhist school or another, because it’s there that we can find all the juicy ideas about how to change the ways our minds behave. As we’ve (rightly) worked out, those ideas will help us to let go of our dissatisfaction and become happier in our lives.
Does that sometimes give some of us a sense of superiority over our more devotionally-oriented Asian Buddhist cousins? Yes, unfortunately it does, but of course they’re often happier and kinder than us, so their approach seems to work very well too!
So there’s this other version of Buddhism based on the original teachings – a version which never died out in Asia, and which has been attracting more and more Westerners over the past few decades. So much so, in fact, that it’s now fair to call it a pretty normal, if still minority, interest in most Western countries.
And it really doesn’t look much like any of the other things we call a religion!
So is it a philosophy, then? Well, to find the answer to that question, you’ll need to tune into the March issue of this newsletter! :-)
As the title suggests, this article is about what label to put on Buddhism, because people just love labels!
But even if you don’t feel you need a label for Buddhism, hopefully this will bring some useful clarity. Here goes …
Whenever we encounter something new, we typically like to put it somewhere in the filing cabinet of our minds. That’s not a bad thing, of course. We take in so much information every day that if we didn’t make some attempt to file it away, our heads would be full to exploding point with stuff whizzing round and round in circles inside, all of it demanding our attention.
Sometimes, though, the new thing that we encountered ends up in the wrong file, so that when we actually might want to use it, we can’t find it.
And that means that we miss out on all the benefits it could bring.
Unfortunately, this happens a lot with Buddhism!
The first file that people usually try to put Buddhism into is Religion.
After all, pretty much everyone in the world is born into a religion, aren’t they(?), and if they don’t ever announce that they’ve bailed out into atheism or agnosticism, then surely they’re either still in their birth religion or they’ve joined another one?
Of course, lots of people are born into Buddhism, but this idea assumes that the thing all these people are born into fits neatly into the same category as the religions we’re already familiar with!
These typically include Christianity (for most of us the local variety, so our default standard), Islam (clearly also a religion), Judaism (a bit like Christianity, isn’t it? They even share the same book), and perhaps Hinduism (those pink elephant gods are a bit weird, aren’t they, but clearly something religious is going on). Surely Buddhism’s like all of them?
Well, there are certainly some similarities, yes. For example, many Buddhists in Asia do a lot of what looks to us like the praying and adoring stuff we’re so used to from “our” religion.
But there are also other things that Buddhists seem to devote a lot of time to, like meditation – what’s that all about? And why do they have so many monasteries – why aren’t those monks and nuns out doing something useful in the “real world”, like Mother Teresa?
And what about Western Buddhists? Most of them don’t even do the praying and adoring bit – aren’t they opting out of the most important part of religion?
Well no.
It turns out that the devotional practices so common in Asia weren’t even part of Buddhism in the beginning. They just sort of grew up around the core teachings until – for many people, though certainly not all - they took over from those teachings as the primary focus.
So are those devotional practices the “real Buddhism”? Or are they somehow “wrong”?
Well, Buddhists typically aren’t so keen to judge what other people are up to, so I prefer to say that that’s just one version of Buddhism.
But it’s not a version that Westerners ever normally practise.
What we in the West have usually done is to go back to the original core teachings of one Buddhist school or another, because it’s there that we can find all the juicy ideas about how to change the ways our minds behave. As we’ve (rightly) worked out, those ideas will help us to let go of our dissatisfaction and become happier in our lives.
Does that sometimes give some of us a sense of superiority over our more devotionally-oriented Asian Buddhist cousins? Yes, unfortunately it does, but of course they’re often happier and kinder than us, so their approach seems to work very well too!
So there’s this other version of Buddhism based on the original teachings – a version which never died out in Asia, and which has been attracting more and more Westerners over the past few decades. So much so, in fact, that it’s now fair to call it a pretty normal, if still minority, interest in most Western countries.
And it really doesn’t look much like any of the other things we call a religion!
So is it a philosophy, then? Well, to find the answer to that question, you’ll need to tune into the March issue of this newsletter! :-)