.
A primary difficulty of receiving Buddhism into the West (as
a psycho-social cultural context) is due to the peculiarity that Buddhism has
nothing to teach, or to be more accurate, Buddhism is an un-teaching, not a
teaching and not a non-teaching.
Buddhism, as a terminology, is a word created within the Western
psycho-social context that adds the suffix “ism” to the core word “Buddha,” and
that very process is among the first moves by the Western worldview to
Westernize, appropriate, acclimate and accommodate the Buddha Dharma. This
process of adaptation is human, normal, and indeed, inevitable, and took place
on every occasion that the Buddha Dharma expanded outside its original context
of Brahmanical culture in the India of 5th century BCE.
The Sanskrit word dharma
(Pali, dhamma) is very interesting
and very difficult to translate into a single English word. It has meanings that range from the minute to
the all encompassing. At one end of the
spectrum, “a dharma” refers to a quantum of thingness, i.e., to that which
makes a thing a thing, or in other words, to the fundamental pattern of a
thing’s thinginess. At the other end of
the spectrum of connotations, “the Dharma” refers to the worldview or Weltanschauung
of the person or context being
described. In the time of the Buddha,
when two wandering spiritual mendicants (sramana)
met each other on the road, they would inquire “Whose Dharma do you follow?” by
way of sizing up and knowing where each other “was coming from” spiritually and
intellectually. A follower of Siddhartha
Gautama, known by the two titles Shakyamuni Buddha, or simply the Buddha, would
say, “I follow the Buddha Dharma.” It is because this is the widest and most
inclusive connotation that it is conventionally capitalized in English. Between these two ends of the spectrum,
dharma can refer to a specific method of religious or skillful practice, to a
teaching, to the law or duty of an individual, to the laws and duties of a
society or culture, to a truth, to the Truth, to real things, to Reality, etc.
In English, the myriad difficulties of translating the
affective idea complex of “the Buddha Dharma” into English are dodged by simply
using the suffix “ism” and saying Buddhism. While this has utility and is
within lexicological validity, it creates some acculturation problems, because
“ism” includes the two connotations of “a distinctive doctrine, cause, or
theory” and “an oppressive and especially discriminatory attitude,” both of which
are erroneous when applied to Buddha Dharma.
Thus from the get go, the term Buddhism has problematic and mistaken
connotations as the English word for the Buddha Dharma. For example, some Christians believe that
Buddhism is not even a religion because it is an “ism,” without understanding
that their term Christianity is simply a fancy way of saying ‘Christism’.
Most importantly for understanding Buddhism in the West, is
the awareness that Buddhism, as an “ism,” is not “a distinctive doctrine,
cause, or theory.” This is immanently
hard for Westerners to grok. The best
way to get this is to know that Buddhism is more like a mental medicine, a
prescription for what ails us spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically
(known by the term dukkha), and is
not a doctrine or theory to be asserted, grasped onto, and promoted as a
standard of belief. The medicine of
Buddhism requires a certain degree of faith in its efficacy, but it does not
require any degree of belief in it as if it were a doctrine or dogma of tenets. In other words, Buddhism does espouse a
distinctive diagnosis of the cause of our suffering, dissatisfaction, and sense
of imbalance in life (again, all coming under the term dukkha) and a prescription (which can be taken as a theory or hypothesis
until personally proven to oneself) for the treatment and cure of that
experience of off-centeredness. In this
sense, Buddhism does include a distinctive cause and theory to be put
personally to the test of one’s own practice, proof, and realization, but
without a doctrine or dogma to be taken merely on belief. It is only in this
way that “ism” may be applied to the Buddha Dharma which is the .
This is the main source of the Western misunderstanding of
how Buddhism relates to the stories of karma and reincarnation. Many Westerners
feel some immediate, direct, and inherent affinity toward Buddhism, but are
appalled, more or less specifically or vaguely, by the teachings of karma and
reincarnation (or its synonym rebith) found in Buddhism. What is not appreciated in the West is that
the Buddhist views of karma and reincarnation are not truth assertions in
themselves, but are truth responses to the Brahmanical doctrines about karma
and reincarnation. The Buddha’s
awakening, for which he earned the title Buddha or Awakened One, gave him
insight into the true workings of karma and rebirth, functions that the
Brahmanical culture and doctrines were mistaken about.
Brahmanical teachings on karma and rebirth emphasized the
roles of atman, our essential or true
self, and Brahman, the Universal Self
of True Reality, and held that our psycho-spiritual liberation from what ails
us is achieved when we personally realize that atman and Brahman are
identical. This was defined as the
insight into the true nature of reality.
Buddha agreed with the frame of reference that our liberation is
achieved when we realize an accurate apprehension and correct comprehension of
the true nature of the universe, but based on his own insight into this true
nature, he had to respond to the Brahmanical conceptual errors about the notion
of self, both personal and cosmic, and therefore the Buddha taught the idea anatman, no-self, as the antidote to
that mistaken idea of self. Similarly,
in response to mistaken Vedic and non-Vedic ideas about causation (including
such views as a first cause similar to the ‘Big Bang’ and causation by a
supreme being) , the Buddha taught the idea of dependent-origination (pratitya-samutpada) and that this was
another aspect of the liberation arising upon viewing true nature of the
universe accurately.
Thus, the Buddhist response to the binding characteristics
of the religions and philosophies of his day was to acknowledge the
phenomenological basis of the worldviews he encountered, but to provide corrective
analyses of the observed phenomena.
Integral to his analysis was the inquiry and examination of the mental
constructs by which phenomena are observed, categorized, and analyzed. That is, the Buddha Dharma is based on an
approach to experience that inquires into its basis and an appreciation of that
the phenomenological basis of reality lies in the phenomena of cognition and
awareness.
So when Buddhism teaches about karma and rebirth, it is not
positing a dogmatic assertion, but a corrective treatment for the
misunderstandings about karma and rebirth. To the extent that someone holds a wrong view
of karma and rebirth, then the Buddha Dharma addresses that mistaken
notion. But we should remember that a
view that denies there is any phenomenological basis for the ideas of karma and
rebirth is just as mistaken as the Brahmanical or Christian views of karma and
rebirth that depend on the literalization or essentialization of a self. However, and this is the nuanced and subtle
point that Westerners almost always miss, if a person has no view at all about
karma and rebirth and neither denies their workings nor asserts a mistaken view
of their workings, then Buddhism has no need “to correct” that person’s views
on karma and rebirth because there are none and so Buddhism is able to leave
well enough alone. But in truth, it
rarely happens that a person genuinely has no view of karma and rebirth, and
the Christian idea of a cul-de-sac heaven or the atheist idea of nothing
continuing after death both need correction by the Buddha Dharma.
So when Buddha Dharma comes to the West and presents its
ideas, we should remember that it is presenting responses to the ideas that are
encountered in the West in terms of the Buddha’s awakening. At least that is the ideal. But of course, in
practice, Buddhist teachers and students have a wide range of personal insights
and degrees of awakening, and therefore, many things get said and transmitted
about Buddhism that are either merely fuzzy or downright inaccurate.
The goal of Buddhism is liberation from what produces our
psycho-spiritual ills and ailments.
Fundamentally, it is our own bifurcated and polarized consciousness that
is the trunk of the branches and leaves of those ills. As Buddhism comes to the West, Buddhism does
not need to impose any specific set of dogmas onto Westerners because the whole
project of Buddhism is to free Westerners from our own presuppositions, not to
inculcated a new and foreign set of presuppositions. This is the only very narrow seed or grain of
truth in the secular Westerner’s doubts about karma and rebirth. And since many new students or converts to
Buddhism don’t fully understand the Buddhist view of karma and rebirth there
has been much confusion sown. Likewise,
some foreign teachers of Buddhism have come to the West and mistakenly
attempted to teach karma and rebirth as if they were speaking to members of
their own culture and have thus muddied the waters unnecessarily and
inappropriately.
When Buddhism came to China China
Likewise, with Buddhism coming to the West, its goal is not
to inculcate foreign ideas like karma and rebirth where they have not already
arisen. But actually, many if not most
Westerners do not themselves know how deeply the ideas of karma and rebirth are
already embedded in Western culture through Greek, Pagan, Jewish, and Christian
sources just to name a few. The Christian idea of “you reap what you sow” is
basic karma, and the idea of going to hell or heaven after we die is a teaching
of rebirth. But much of modern Western
culture is a stream that flows away from religious views and embraces a secular
view of materialist science, and this current of modernism dismisses all views
that hint of religion as mere superstition.
So Buddhism has two main rivers of Western culture that it must
simultaneously address: Western religion and Western science.
It is the Western stream of secular scientism that gives
rise to the voices proclaiming and advocating an anti-karma and anti-rebirth
secularization or normalization of Buddhism. That’s okay, and these voices need to be
responded to, but we should not neglect or forget that the voices of Western
religion must just as necessarily be responded to by Buddhists if Buddhism is
to acclimate and acculturate in the West. Buddhism must respond to and address both
Western science’s mistaken views of materialism and consciousness as well as
Western religions’ mistaken views of God and spiritual salvation. But in order to do so, Buddhism does not deny
God and salvation and does not deny science.
Buddhism addresses both God and science by acknowledging that they are
each systems of conceptual response to experienced phenomenological reality.
Buddhism then adds the nuances of its perspective that arise in the light of
Buddha’s awakening.
As Buddhism comes to the West, it provides a revisioned approach
to both science and God. In a sense,
Buddhism will “blow up” the preconceptions of both God and science as it
accustoms itself to the West. As for God, Buddhism sees God without
anthropomorphism in the same way that it sees both the individual person and
the cosmic personage of Brahma without a self (anatman). As for science,
Buddhism asks what is “matter” and how can matter be maintained as a substance
or a thing in light of the relationship between energy, mass, and light in the
same way that it asked how can karmic energies and influences be reborn when
there is no self or substance to carry them? And of course Buddhism asks
science how does consciousness arise if there is only brain matter and no
mind? In these ways, Buddhism does not
deny science and instead encourages science to delve deeply into its own
assumptions and premises and to not stop short by clinging to comfortable
notions of matter as if the fundamental questions have been resolved. The answer to the questions of karma and
rebirth lie exactly in this questioning of science’s own presumptions of matter
and materialism by using the scientific method itself.
The preeminent psychologist Carl G. Jung pointed out that
some variety of the notion of reincarnation and rebirth appears in every
culture and therefore should be taken as a universal psychological phenomenon
worthy of study. This is the view of a
Western scientist who takes psychology as an empirical science based on the
psyche, not on matter. In Western
culture, the inquiry of the universe can be done in two modes: that of matter
or mind, i.e., physics or psyche.
Aristotle called the first physics and the other metaphysics, or what
was beyond physics. Sadly for Western
science, scientific inquiry in the 20th century became dominated by
the first, and scientific study via the second was usurped and almost entirely
atrophied by disuse. This conceptualization of metaphysics as the study of the
non-physical obfuscated and relegated the field of psychology away from
empirical scientific inquiry because it was not physical and created for
psychology the guilt by association with religion and superstition which were
metaphysical. That is, Western
materialists who studied natural phenomenon as “matter” denigrated and despised
the study of natural phenomenon as mind and psyche. The term psychology as the scientific study
of the psyche as mind has been nearly entirely usurped by the study of the mindless
but measurable physical reactions of a material body and brain matter. This is one of the core problems of Western
science and materialist secularization that Buddhism is and will address in
order to liberate people from the bondage that Western materialism has imposed
on its own Western science and the Western worldview.
Western secular Buddhists may be skeptical about what they
imagine that Buddhism is asking them to believe about karma and rebirth (when
in fact Buddhism is not asking them to believe anything), but as yet, those who
are vociferous about this skepticism have not seemed to glimpse that the real
danger that Buddhism poses for their Western worldview has nothing at all to do
with karma or rebirth but with their own closely and dearly held beliefs about
matter and mind. Buddhism asks that they
inquire into their own materialistic worldview along with its presumptions and
its assumptions of observer and the observed that their science utilizes in
forming its dominant and domineering relationship to the universe as matter and
energy. Whether they know it yet or not,
this is the genuine difficulty that secularists face with receiving Buddhism in
the West.
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