Living in the Dash

My closest affiliation is with Zen.  There’s a simplicity and lack of distraction that I find useful.  I used to think of Tibetan – vajrayana – Buddhism as too complicated.  I’m the sort of person who wants to know everything about a given subject, and I realized that would be impossible with Tibetan Buddhism.  While there’s a lot one can study “about” Zen, there doesn’t seem to be as much to “understand.”  Once I began to study Tibetan Buddhism, however, I realized it’s the same way!  Many paths to the same point – or many rafts to the other shore.

I think of Buddhism as existing, and being able to be followed, without beliefs.  The Eightfold Path can be followed even if one believes in a creator god who will save him after death.  Buddhism can help one now, and it certainly can’t hurt after death. Even if a person didn’t believe in an afterlife at all, being a better person by practicing the Eightfold Path won’t cause any additional suffering, and at best, can lead to a happier life now.  Perhaps the only belief necessary is that the Eightfold Path can lead to the end of suffering.  But even that isn’t absolutely necessary, because the Buddha himself taught to try the Dharma for oneself.  Don’t accept what anyone else taught or wrote – even him.  Try reproducing the Buddha’s path and see if you can replicate his results.  Viewing Buddhism as a grand experiment, then, no belief is required.

Buddhism is the study and practice of the teachings of the Buddha.  One could just as easily be said to be studying the Dharma as to be studying Buddhism.  It is practicing what the Buddha taught, hoping it will accomplish in one’s own life what it did in his.  I see it as a process rather than a belief system.  It certainly doesn’t fit the Judeo-Islamic-Christian definition of a religion!  It’s more akin to a medical diagnosis: here is the problem, here is the cause, there is a cure, here is how to heal yourself.

I see two advantages to the non-uniform nature of Buddhism. First, it allows Buddhism – or any other religion – to mutate more readily when its environment changes.  Second, in this information age, it allows people to pick the branch of Buddhism that suits them best. No longer are we fated to belong to the only religion we’ve ever heard of.  Now we can “shop.”  We can choose “statues and incense” Buddhism (to borrow a phrase from Sandy Boucher) or a simple meditation practice.  And no one can say that one is more “Buddhist” than the other.

“Metaphysical neutrality” is necessary to an understanding of another’s religion.  It doesn’t matter whether what the person believes is true, only that they believe it.  This is the United States’ legal standard for allowing people to practice Freedom of Religion: not whether the believer’s god would be honored by her not working on the Sabbath – or even whether that god exists at all – but that the individual believes that to honor her god she should not work on the Sabbath. Accepting that someone else believes does not mean that we also believe.  Holding this sort of “methodological agnosticism” helps us to refrain from judging while we seek to understand.