How to be a Buddhist
(these days)
Buddha's Teachings work. They show us how to overcome suffering. But Buddhism has to be applied to our specific circumstances.
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Find people who have studied algebra, and ask them what 'X' equals. Watch carefully the expression on their face. Then you will understand the facial expression of a Buddhist teacher who has just been asked the meaning of life.
Just like Algebra, Buddhism does not give you the answer. Buddhism gives you ways to find the answers. They both help you understand the problem.Many people approach Buddhism (and other religions like Vegetarianism, the Democratic Party, Oprah, etc.) looking for 'The Answer.' (I loved Douglas Adams' answer, "42"!) That's like a student driver trying to learn the 'right' position to hold the steering wheel, so he can stop this moving it around all the time.
There may be 84,000 positions a steering wheel can be in, but the art of steering consists of seeing the situation you're in and THEN deciding in response how to hold the wheel at that particular moment. And constantly updating it. Much like the Dharma.
In every Buddhist culture, Buddhism has been expressed differently, and different Buddhist practices have developed. Now that Buddhism is reaching the West, we will have to adapt or lose the meaning of the Dharma.
Ignorance, the first stage of the Twelvefold Chain of Causation, consists of obscuring our experience of reality with assumed patterns. Rev. Ken O'Neill once refered to it as "gnosis defficiency disorder". Many of the strongest of these patterns are from our culture and language.When Buddhism is taught in a highly traditional form, it often amounts to taking a system that can cure certain problems and teaching people those problems so they can use the system. In the old Pogo comics, there was a pelican who sold a cure for snake-bite. As a free service, he also had a snake available to bite people.
Picture an Eskimo teaching a Californian how to avoid freezing. Eskimos have something like 15 words for different kinds of snow. So this Eskimo teacher proceeds to teach the Californian all these different kinds of snow, so he can then explain 'Stay out of pirtuk. Stay out of natquik. Stay out of kanevvluk. Stay out of aniu....'
It would make more sense to just say 'Stay out of the snow!'.
Learning a traditional Buddhist culture, memorizing the six of this and the twelve of that, sometimes seems like learning 15 kinds of snow. Or like being offered a free snake-bite with every bottle of snake-bite medicine.
The opposite extreme, which is becoming very popular these days, consists of dumping the old practices as "unresponsive to today's concerns", without figuring out what their function was, and without finding a substitute to perform that same function in our more modern setting.Throwing out the baby with the bath water is worse than preserving the bath water after the baby has grown up and moved away.
To follow the Middle Path, you have to be able to see where the extremes are. If someone falsely accused you of oweing them $300, but you couldn't prove you didn't owe it to them, there are some people who would think it fair for you to split the difference and pay them $150. There are groups today, particularly some political groups, who use this method.The Buddha said we should avoid the extremes of asceticism and self-indulgence. But if someone considers asceticism to mean things like having the wrong wine with the desert course, is that person practicing the Middle way? Or if they think self-indulgence includes using a thicker sheet anytime the weather dips below freezing? We must be sure that the "extremes" we are avoiding are really extremes.
We need to understand what Buddhism does and how it did it in other circumstances, then figure out how to get the same effect in our own lives.
I personally get a lot out of tradition. Chanting Shoshinge or Junirai, for example, gives me a reassuring awareness of the many generations of dedicated, intelligent people who studied it before me. It feels more solid than some idea I myself came up with. But I prefer to chant it in English, so I can understand it.
In China and Japan, maybe the children would get together and approach their parents each morning and bow, so doing the same to the image of the Buddha built up the proper associations. But we didn't do that in my family. Placing the first portion of the daily rice on the altar likewise forged connections in the oriental practitioners' minds. You know how often I eat rice? And when I do, it's just filler. Now, putting chocolate chip cookies on the altar, that might work for me. That would connote gratitude! If you're in the military (and happy there), you might try saluting instead of bowing.
The need for keeping Buddhism connected to our modern daily lives applies to how the teachings are expressed as well as to ritual. As an example, Nagarjuna showed the fallacy of depending on logic, on thinking the categories of thought had independent existence. He had to write a whole book to do it, because Indian logic was a looser system than western logic. We could get the same result with the 'class of classes' paradox.
The 'class of classes' points out that the class of all dogs is not a dog. Dogs belong to that class, but the class itself, not being a dog, does not. On the other hand, the class of all classes IS a class, so is a member of itself. Therefore we can classify all classes into either 'classes that are members of themselves' and 'classes that are NOT members of themselves'.The paradox is this: Is the class of 'classes that are NOT members of themselves' a member of itself? If it is, then it doesn't qualify, but if it isn't, then it does.
Contemplating this one simple philosopher's joke will make westerners aware of the limitations of mental grasping after categories, the provisional nature of names, much more immediately and pertinently than studying Nagarjuna.
It is important to study the texts from olden times and foreign cultures. But, as the Buddha said in The Snake Simile, if you get the wrong grasp on the Teachings, they can cause problems. We would certainly benefit from seeing what sorts of problems the ancients worked to overcome, and how they went about it. But to neglect to adapt that understanding and those methods to our own situation would constitute trying to solve their problems instead of the problems we actually have.
Likewise, using patterns no longer current in modern minds as teaching methods is ineffective and makes the Dharma look like quaint, outmoded superstition. We can overcome attachment to everyday ideas of 'things' in modern minds by contemplating the atomic structure (small whirling particles, mostly empty space, having either a position or a vector, but not both at the same time, etc.) as well as these revered teachers did by referring to the four elements (or five, in China). But instead of harnessing the much over-used but still powerful spectre of The Bomb to create a sense of urgency, we continue to prattle about the old Hindu superstition of time degenerating. (the 'age of mapo', the age of extinct Dharma).
I am not suggesting that we weed out the old practices. We need them intact as a control. That way we can tell if we lose something important.Besides, there are still a lot of people for whom the old methods are appropriate. We certainly don't want to deprive them. We are indebted to them for our own access to the Dharma.
There is a book called the Anjin Rondai (Topics for Discussion on Peace of Mind). The late Rev. Philipp Karl Eidmann did a translation for his classes at the Institute of Buddhist Studies, which is now being prepared for publication.When someone showed signs of Awakening, of being a "myokonin", the Hongwanji often wanted to check to make sure they were not self-deluded and spreading pernicious doctrines. They would send someone to chat with the myokonin and see what he or she had studied. When they found a subject that the myokonin had no training in, they would question him/her about it to see what understanding had arisen spontaneously. The Anjin Rondai was the list of subjects they used.
One Myokonin, after being thus questioned, was told "You seem to be all right except for the requirement of 'one moment of complete reliance'."
He answered "Well, I'm just a simple man and don't know any methods of relying, but if I need to rely, I'm sure Amida will come up with something."
The teachings are said to be like a finger pointing to the moon. The finger is NOT the moon itself. Buddhists look away from the finger to see what it is pointing toward. Scholars, on the other hand, check the finger carefully, list all warts and hangnails, and discuss learnedly the history of pointing.
The Buddha's first sermon mentioned the Middle Way. It explained the Four Noble Truths. It enumerated the Eightfold Path. When the Buddha had finished all that, one monk, Añña Kodañña, said that whatever is subject to origination is subject to cessation. The Buddha then said that Añña Kodañña had understood his teachings.But, notice! The Buddha hadn't mentioned impermanence! If Añña Kodañña had been writing a paper for publication in a journal, it would have been rejected as unscholarly, unfounded, and unproven.
Añña Kodañña was able to describe a portion of the truth that the Buddha had not specifically mentioned. That is the proof that he understood what the Buddha was talking about.
Here's an analogy. Four men were discussing the duckbilled platypus. One was a photographer, and mentioned that there was a photograph of a platypus in the next room, on the brown chair. The second man went into the next room and looked around at all the photos on all the furniture. Then he saw the brown chair. When he came back, he mentioned that the photo was on a wooden chair, in the corner. The third man went to look, and reported that the picture was on the chair with a torn seat.
The fourth man was a scholar. He was upset by the disagreement between the first three, who were saying entirely different things and were not even scholarly enough to recognize the differences. He was so busy trying to explain this lack of scholastic rigor to his friends that he never got into the other room to see the brown wooden chair with a torn seat. He said, "Now we'll never know what a platypus looks like!"
This is pertinent to a lot of the arguments between schools of Buddhism. I have heard Theravadans claiming Vajrayana does not follow the Buddha's words, for example. This attachment to words over meaning shows up within schools, too. There has been much written about whether Shinran Shonin's "shinjin" is the same as Rennyo's "anjin," or whether Rennyo "changed" the teachings.
Naturally, we should be careful not to let random changes weaken the Dharma, so I'm not asking that everyone accept any doctrine anyone comes up with. Just that we should check it against reality before accepting or rejecting.
Others can argue over whether a chair being brown proves it has a torn seat. Let's us go see what a platypus looks like.
The aforementioned Rev. Philipp Karl Eidmann, in a class at the Institute of Buddhist Studies, once told us the story of a Chinese monk, the abbot of a well-known Temple, who received a translation of a Sutra. After reading it, he pointed out one statement in it and said, "This is wrong."All the other monks were aghast at his contradicting the words of the Buddha. His reputation suffered. People made fun of him. He was about as popular as a cane bottomed chair in a nudist colony. Then a better translation came out, and the part he had disagreed with was translated differently.
This monk was not interested in "being Buddhist." He was trying to be right. I hope to have that same attitude.
Buddhism has no axe to grind. It is unique among religions in this respect. That's why it can fit in almost anywhere. Where there has been conflict, it seems because the other systems have a lot of doctrinal baggage. Hinduism with its caste system, for example. In this country we have a tradition of science (which holds that if the evidence contradicts your belief, you change the belief), existentialism (the details are primary, our lumping them into categories is secondary -- existence precedes essence), General Semantics (the map is not the territory), etc. Our tradition is open-mindedness (not that we always achieve or even understand it). Buddhism should fit us like cream cheese fits a bagel.
I remember the two ladies overheard shopping for a thermometer, "Let's get this Fahrenheit one - we know that's a good brand." Being attached to a particular scale for measuring an effect doesn't change the effect. Counting out different numbers of types of grasping can help us watch for it in more places, but only seeing what they all have in common can help us understand and deal with it.
How many truths are there? How many divisions to the path? There used to be a law of conservation of matter, and another law of conservation of energy. Then they found out how to convert matter to energy, and now there is just the law of conservation of matter/energy. The more we know, the fewer laws there will be. Perhaps an enlightened Homo Erectus once taught the Twelve Noble Truths and the sixteenfold Path, but we've progressed beyond that. Eventually we'll understand it all as one law. I wouldn't be too surprised if it could be stated "Namu Amida Buddha".
