A few words in defense of Buddhism

Last weekend Andrew Sullivan’s blog brought to my attention a 2003 Slate article by John Horgan and some additional commentary by Daniel Florien, both of whom take a rather negative (and, I think, dismissive) view of Buddhism. It has been with some interest that I have read the many follow-ups throughout the week, mostly consisting of reader emails to Sullivan (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). I am not a Buddhist, and my acquaintance with Buddhism is only recent, but I believe that Horgan’s and Florien’s criticisms suggest nothing so much as the unseriousness of their engagement with Buddhism, and though several objections have already been raised by others of Sullivan’s readers, it seems to me worthwhile to formulate and offer to the Internet why I should think as I do — if for no other reason than the opportunity to formulate for myself some of the things I find compelling about the tradition.

First, and as much a disclaimer for what I write here as a point of contention with Horgan and Florien, “Buddhism” is a pretty big tent. I have not read any of the (quite recent) books or writers Horgan mentions — and perhaps his criticisms would be apt if directed at the formulations of those authors — but from having read and taken seriously some hundreds (out of the thousands) of pages of the Pāli Canon, some Nāgārjuna, some Mahāyāna sutras and some early Zen, it is clear that despite some reassurances that underlying principles are the same, not everything called “Buddhism” presents the same character. The contrast is especially stark between the relatively sober Pāli Canon — which represents the oldest surviving (and allegedly original) strand of Buddhism — and some of the much more fantastical Mahāyāna sutras. Horgan’s and Florien’s respective characterizations (and rejections) of, for instance, reincarnation, even if they accurately reflect the positions of some schools of Buddhism (and I am not at all sure that they do), are therefore not accurately reflective of “Buddhism” taken generically.

One of Horgan’s concerns seems to be the role of the supernatural in Buddhism, and it may be especially easy to be confused about this point. It is not at all clear to me what the role of the supernatural in Buddhism is, and my sense is that it is not the same for all buddhisms. To understand why it would be this way, it is helpful to understand something that seems fairly common in Indian religion that may seem peculiar from the perspective of the Abrahamic ones.

I’ve been told a story that might well be exaggerated or apocryphal, but the continued telling of which is nevertheless illustrative. It goes like this: When the Buddhists first arrived in Japan, they went around building stūpas next to the old Shinto shrines. The Shinto priesthood, tolerant though they were, were taken aback by this audacity, but were reassured by the Buddhists that there was no conflict: the Shinto deities were all Buddhists now.

Though it is quite unlike the treatment of idols and false gods by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, this feature is not wholly peculiar to Buddhism. In fact, despite Buddhism’s being a “heterodox” (nāstika) teaching — it does not accept the authority of the Vedas, and even denies the Upaniṣadic permanent Self, or Ātman — the Buddha is named in the Gītagovinda and elsewhere within Hinduism as one of the incarnations of Kṛṣṇa, who is an avatar of Viśnu, God-made-flesh.

In addition to Horgan’s suggested reason for the rising popularity of Buddhism in West — that it seems at first blush to be compatible with our “scientifically oriented culture” — this tendency not only to tolerate but to welcome or incorporate other traditions may offer another (and a reason for the rising popularity in the West of Eastern religion generally): people want a spiritual tradition, preferably with the accompanying authority of great antiquity and influence over the culture of a continent, that endorses our attitudes toward diversity. (Even one with sacred scriptures that don’t seem to condemn homosexuality; imagine that!)

It also helps explain the difficult relationship to the supernatural. In some of the oldest Buddhist texts, the Buddha doesn’t seem to have much use for the traditional supernatural ordering of the cosmos, or in fact for “idle speculation” of any sort, but neither does he go out of his way to deny it. And as different schools of Buddhism arose and made their way through Asia, some of them seem to have picked up more and more.

Horgan’s early view that Buddhism is surprisingly compatible with a scientific outlook, or to go further than he, that it is largely naturalistic, is not at all crazy. The Buddha presents himself as a man, not a deity. When nearing death, he chides some of his followers for their attachment to his decaying body, telling them that the Buddha is the Dhamma (or dharma— which is to say law, or teaching, or way-things-are). He arrived at the teaching through careful observation, and calls it a come-and-see-thing. He allows that acceptance of dogma can have some utility, but not that it is sufficient for liberation, and he asserts that one must finally know the truth for oneself. To this end he compares his teaching to a raft, which one must use to reach the other shore, but must not then cling to and drag along forever. (A later Zen exhortation: if you should ever meet the Buddha in the road, slay him.)

Perhaps the central metaphysical claim of Buddhism is that of impermanence, or of conditioned and dependently-arisen nature. Take the life-span of a table: you have dirt, then tree, then lumber, then table, then scrap and firewood or termite food and dust. The start- and end-points here are functional, but otherwise arbitrary, the “transformation” being basically continuous and infinite in both directions. It is for practical considerations that we draw a box around part of that span, take it to be a discrete unity, and call it a table. But this is a purely conventional assertion and not a reflection of the most fundamental reality.

To put it another way: You can give the river a name, but the water is always moving, the banks always eroding, the path and boundaries always shifting, with no permanent substratum giving it unity through time. In the language of Buddhism, to assert that there is thus no river is nihilism (the same term is sometimes translated as annihilationism); to assert that there really is a river, a permanent unity, is eternalism. For the Buddha, the truth of his teaching is neither nihilism nor eternalism, but the “middle way.”

And both nihilism and eternalism are manifestations of clinging — of attempting to reify and make permanent what is conditioned, dependently-arisen, impermanent — and lead to suffering.

It is this understanding that leads to the so-called “denial of the self,” which is more a denial of the permanent substratum, the unity of the Self. I am an aggregate, too, like the table or the river. I am a heap of cells and tissues and desires and cravings and habits and so on. And it is quite easy to deny that the person in a childhood photograph is the same me. I’ve inherited a lot from him, to be sure, but it’s not hard to say that the “I” is different. And though it’s much harder to say this of myself yesterday, the line is arbitrary.

But then what of reincarnation? Horgan has a problem with the idea of a reincarnating “soul,” and also with the notion that “the self is an illusion,” but apparently doesn’t notice that these two doctrines would appear to contradict one another. What is reborn if not a permanent, unifying self?

The answer is not clear, and I suspect it is understood differently by different schools. What is clear is that it is not “me” in the sense I would ordinarily mean. In one book of the Pāli Canon (the Mahātaṇhāsankhaya), when one of the Buddha’s disciples says that it is “this same consciousness” that goes through the round of death and rebirth, the others are scandalized and try to disabuse him of the notion. Finally the Buddha himself says that holding such a view means having “not even a glimmer” of his teaching.

(The notion that reincarnation represents a kind of wishful thinking, or a means of attaining immortality, is a distinctly Western projection. Despite many doctrinal differences amongst the various Indian religionists, the one thing they all agree on is that the round of rebirths is terrible, and the ultimate goal is always some sort of liberation from it, whether understood as permanent transcendent unity with an underlying principle of the cosmos, or simple extinguishment — which is the most literal suggestion of the word nirvaṇa. And even for the orthodox Hindu who does posit a permanent Self, it is not like the popular conception of “soul” in Abrahamic religion, which is a kind of individuality. The Self is a witness, what remains the same in me even if everything about me that can change does. Mine thus looks quite a lot like yours. And indeed, for some schools it is the very same thing.)

There are suggestions that “death” and “rebirth” are happening all the time, within what we would call one human life — always becoming, never being. Of course there may still be a mystical or supernatural component to rebirth, especially within some schools; but when the government of China, in an effort to control Tibetan religion, claims the authority to require approval for reincarnations, and when the Dalai Lama himself suggests holding a public referendum to decide whether or not to reincarnate or perhaps to reincarnate without having died first, one wonders how far off it would be to suggest that Barack Obama is the 43rd incarnation of George Washington. (Or 44th? Some weird metaphysics with Grover Cleveland.)

(And hell, as long as we’re not talking about a real, permanent self, a consciousness, a “soul” in the Christian sense, the worldview would not seem to me altogether mad that saw some sort of “karmic inertia” manifested in Lincoln that is today become incarnate in Obama. Remember that the primary meaning of “karma” is action or deed. But maybe I’m just talking about poetry, now.)

Lastly, I want to acknowledge that Horgan’s concern about holding monasticism as an ideal is, to my mind, his most compelling point. He says, “It seems legitimate to ask whether a path that turns away from aspects of life as essential as sexuality and parenthood is truly spiritual.” And I suppose I agree with him, though I’m not sure what the path’s being “spiritual” would mean to the Buddha (or what it should mean to me). If this concern is the same as to wonder whether monasticism isn’t a mere fleeing from the richness of life, or if the best life doesn’t rely on some of the very things monasticism precludes, then I suppose I share it.

Nevertheless, though I am not about to leave for Thailand to don the yellow robes, it is not obvious to me as it seems to be for Horgan that the highest station of man requires sex and family. The call of monasticism seems to me neither novel nor shallow. The Buddha claims that he has deeply and thoroughly understood suffering, and also liberation from suffering. He says that the whole of his teaching is in service to this liberation. He says that sex and family life make liberation very difficult to achieve — which seems likely enough — though he does have lay followers; and later tradition does include “householders” who attain buddhahood. I’m not sold, but I am absolutely persuaded that he is worth my time and my careful consideration.