Buddhism: Am I hip enough?
This is a continuation of my personal essay series. The last installment, on rationality and the self, can be found here.
Two articles, one in the Chicago Sun Times, and another on CNN-IBN, highlight the reasons for my personal ambivalence about Buddhism. Academically, I’m very interested in its philosophy–but that doesn’t necessarily translate into personal adherence to the eightfold path.
The first article is titled “Don’t believe in God? You might like Dalai Lama.” The reporter describes the appeal of the Dalai Lama in this way:
…his main appeal remains Americans who embrace spirituality, not organized religion. These Americans meditate and consume books about inner peace, but many of them don’t believe in God.
Like Alice Dan, 65. The Evanston woman discarded Christianity in college. She embraced Buddhism eight years ago.
“I had trouble with religion because of the male God imagery,” she said. “Buddhism didn’t require me to give up my atheism.”
Those three paragraphs are my personal hesitations with Western Buddhism in a nutshell: the dichotomy between religion and spirituality, the desire to find a religion that doesn’t require too much, and Buddhism as a less demanding version of Christian self-help.
Interestingly, despite Westerner’s love affair with the Dalai Lama, as the article points out, “The irony is that the Dalai Lama is steeped in the most scholarly and metaphysical of Tibetan Buddhism’s four major traditions. Its ceremonies, shrines and robed monks embody many of the elements that “spiritual but not religious” Americans tend to reject.”
It isn’t just Americans who are enamored of Buddhism. CNN-IBN, which is a partnership between CNN and the Indian Broadcasting Network, has an article describing how Buddhism is being used to give young Indians “inner confidence.” For young people living in this primarily Hindu country, the impetus isn’t an alternative to Christianity as it is for Americans. Still, I can’t help but wonder if there are similar motivations–to find a less traditional religion, which doesn’t push back as much as attempts to adapt Hinduism to modernity.
Now, as a humanist, it isn’t that I have an a priori reason to require religious adherence to be strict and immoveable, or to avoid syncretism like the plague. However, I do have a strong desire that my beliefs be, as much as possible, consistent with one another. There is a possibility that some primary beliefs that Westerners hold are in contradiction, or at least tension, with Buddhist tenets. Earlier in this series, I’ve alluded to one of them, which is primary: understanding of the self.
Western Buddhism is, in large part, motivated by a spiritual self-concern, a desire to find a calming method of living that results in greater compassion and less stress. Those aren’t bad goals. But I don’t think that they are entirely consistent with the Buddhist concept of anatman. This idea, which is a metaphysical claim about reality (as well as an epistemological claim about how we experience it), is that there is no underlying, unchanging “self”, but that everything which we examine with the hypothesis that it is “me” dissolves under scrutiny. Yet it is not annihilationism–I am not conversant yet with all of the nuances of anatman in the various traditions, but I think this statement is tentatively correct.
In contrast, as a humanist liberal, my stance towards reality is in a major way influenced by the role of individuals, their freedoms, their beliefs, etc. Does the doctrine of anatman require a shift in my thinking? It might, and this is why I hesitate.
Part of this is semantics. It’s easy to pick up a label of “Buddhist” because it implies I am hip, have an open mind to non-Western reality, and yet I am “spiritual.” But I am cautious about doing so, even though I find the philosophy (and practices) of Buddhism engaging. To use a Western example, if I were to convert (back) to Christianity, and at the same time deny that human beings have an eternal soul, I’d be in tension with some major strands within that religion.
This is not to say that I couldn’t find a place within liberal Christianity–but for myself, at least, it would require exploring what the “core” of Christianity is, what is necessitated by that core, and what is flexible. That’s no small task.
So, in terms of Buddhism, I can say that I find pragmatic value in the emphasis upon impermanence and flux. In a very basic way, “mindfulness” is useful–and I’ve seen my personality take on a more flexible and patient shape as I’ve scraped the very surface of this practice. When it comes to the metaphysical and epistemological implications of Buddhism, there are a number of traditions–and I am also just touching their surface. However, I find anatman to be tantalizingly close to some analytic philosophers I respect, and the idea of dependent origination similarly plausible. Yet, as I’ve said before, I haven’t worked out the inferences that ripple out from here, and so I cannot call myself Buddhist, only Buddish.
Earlier essays in this series:
Introduction
Part 1: Origins
Part 2: Humanism
Part 3: Being Human
Part 4: Freedom
Part 5: Rationality & the Self
Part 6: Buddhism
Images: From araleya, via Flickr, portrait of Nepalese monk; MC Escher, Bond of Union (1956).