Misconceptions About Buddhism

That lonely fragment of the West that is still relatively alien to Buddhist thought has a tendency to see in Buddhism the epitome of self-denying religions. Nietzsche himself pronounces Buddhism to be a nihilist religion whose foundational assertion, "I suffer", is adjusted to by avowing the ultimate negating principle, that is, the annihilation of the "I". Others would further state that Buddhism is not a religion at all, because it recognizes no gods. This last is the Christian measure of other religions. Christianity is taken as the centre of truth, around which other religions revolve in varying proximities to its truth. Apart from this arrogance, however, they are not correct in saying that Buddhism is atheistic. The original teachings of the Buddha certainly has a particularly existentialist relation to the gods, that is, it understands the gods as irrelevant to the human quest that Buddha engages in. The gods are entities outside us, whereas Buddhism is concerned primarily with what is inner. In the Pali texts, moreover, Buddha not only does not deny the existence of gods, but in fact proclaims himself as superior to all gods since he is awakened, that is, he claims that an awakened human does not need to refer to gods or any other entities external to oneself. To refer outside oneself is a mistake, a simple mistake of imprecision, not a doctrinal heresy, and the reason for it will be seen below. It would be a further mistake to make too much of the difference between "inner" and "outer", but at any rate, we are here referring to one's own dealings in psychological life, rather than any expectancy that we will be saved by the grace of some higher entity.

It is nevertheless correct to say that the original Buddhism was not a religion, if by religion we mean an institution that possesses a creed, a cult, a community and some form of code. Of course, all this emerges later on. Theravada Buddhism already shows signs of religious encrustations growing onto its original teachings, and even though they preserved a lot of the original spirit, they became conservatives concerned mostly with dogmatizing Buddha's words and teachings. It can be said that the original spirit of Buddhism was lost with the Buddha's death. He refused to appoint a successor precisely because he was founding no religion or dynasty, but an inner exercise, and all that was necessary for his disciples was to work out their path to enlightenment with his teachings, his discoveries as guiding principles. As soon as the community of disciples sought to maintain its unity and purity on a doctrinal basis, the shift towards a popular religion was irreversible. Like other religions, Buddhism held its councils to determine dogmatic views. Expelling monks who were false, attracted by Buddhism's royal benefaction, was well-intentioned but ill-judged. Ultimately, false monks had to be seen as being false unto themselves. Just as one of the strengths of Hinduism is its lack of a one centre, and being polycentric, it could preserve its initial traditions for long ages, the one weakness of Buddhist thought was that it was a personal reaction to the lifeless husk that Hinduism had become, and based as it was on the quality of the person who initiated it, it could not, after his death, survive wholly, even though anyone today can return not without difficulty to the original teachings in the oldest part of the Tipitaka, that is in the Sutta-piţaka.

The later Mahayana Buddhist overreaction to the Theravadin conventionalism proceeded to incorporate several popular cults and gods, and to propose that even laity could gain salvation without asceticism, thus acquiring its name Mahayana meaning "Greater Vehicle". Mahayana Buddhists lost much of the original spirit of Buddhism. They no longer understood Buddha as a human teacher who found a path to awakening but as a supernatural being who was incarnated in human form, and deified him as a Universal Being. Whereas Buddha stressed that salvation, if so it can be called, is something that one must achieve for oneself, the Mahayana Buddhists posited him as a god that busied himself with human salvation. Buddha thus became equated with the bodhisattvas, an infinite number of divine beings who are worshipped and who through compassion, suspend their final passage to the transcendent state of nirvana in order to incarnate themselves in numerous worlds to labour on behalf of universal salvation. A bodhisattva, again in direct opposition to the earlier teachings, could transfer its merit to others, a sort of saintly intercession.

The Mahayana religion presents us with a good instance of how an original philosophy can become a religion. It is interesting to note that through its democratisation, Mahayana Buddhism becomes very similar to Western Christianity, complete with an influential priesthood. Suffice it to say that Nietzsche would have had a field day.

This coincides with another view that Westerners who are fairly familiar with Buddhism have, that is, as a teaching that says nothing different from modern secular liberal democratic prejudices. This unwitting approach is taken with regards to most ancient doctrines, and it is not solely to be attributed to the West. If unwitting, this approach can be charged with half-ignorance, but it is also ingenuous. More frequently, intellectuals judge ancient doctrines according to modern values, and there is a lot more conceit here. Like Christianity, modernity imagines it is at the centre of truth and rationality, and that all that came before it was obfuscation and superstition.

The Western reinterpretation of Buddhist and other ancient Oriental thought runs deep. For example, the peace of a warrior who is no longer possessed by the desire to kill is taken as a doctrinal pacifism, even though the peace is clearly described as a lack of desire, rather than any actual retirement from warfare. Herein is found the ancient aversion to the bloodthirsty and vicious warrior, and the upholding of the warrior who could fight an adversary without hating or disrespecting him, but we do not find the modern aversion to general warfare. Further, the fact that throughout their history most ancient doctrines, including Buddhism, co-existed unperturbed with a royal and a warrior class is blithely ignored. Some even go to the extent of saying that the co-existence, for example, of Zen Buddhism and the Samurai class was an inconsistency resultant of ignorance. Nevertheless, the principle found here is the same principle expounded in the Bhagavad-Gita, that beyond the moral precepts that Christianity and modernity both revel in, action conforms to one's inner self, and that a complete mastery of such traditional skills such as archery, swordsmanship, or even tea-drinking, and an inner transformation are concurrently realized. The ignorance therefore is ours, and the chasm is not between such ancient Oriental doctrines and the kind of persons who lived them, but between our crypto-Christian mentality and the ancient mentality. Buddha himself was of the kshatriya caste, descendant of a high and noble family, the Sakya, and the path that he chose was not a renunciation of this nobility but rather a distinct expression of it. In the Sutta-piţaka, it is written that Sakyamuni (the sage of the Sakya) was endowed with the thirty-two attributes that were, according to Brahmanic tradition, the mark of the superior man, or mahāpurisa-lakkhana, for whom existed only two paths. The first was to become cakkavatti, a king of kings, to become high-in-the-world, and the second was to become sambuddha, one who lets fall the veil from his eyes and becomes higher-than-the-world. Sakyamuni chose the second path, and in so doing did not renounce his nobility. Many have fantasies of the Buddha that make him closer to a Christian saint like St. Francis of Assisi, rather than to the noble warrior he was. Even Buddha's funeral was, following his instructions, that of an imperial sovereign.

Buddhism is also sometimes described as a psychological practice, and this would not be different from a Jungian psychology that seeks to unite the fragmented Self and to burn away all the remaining excess. Jung declared in fact that only psychotherapy could understand Zen Buddhism. If such were the case, the only difference between Buddhism and Jungian psychology would be that the former is much older, mature and in a sense, more comprehensive, since it does not deal exclusively with symbolic suggestions to the unconscious but directly and consciously with psychological phenomena. This is the viewpoint that is taken by most Western Orientalists such as Rhys Davids as well as Buddhist popularizers such as Daisetz Suzuki, and it is probably more than a coincidence that it suits well the post-Christian Western view of spiritual experience as a psychological phenomenon. The traditionalists I will mention below were extremely critical to Jungian psychology because, they say, it pretends to be of the same level as certain ancient teachings, and thus devalue them. I find their judgement hard to understand, since whenever they try to describe what should happen or what an awakening is, they invariably use familiar Jungian language.

We have to be aware, however, of this viewpoint that is, to some extent, antithetical to the Buddhism-as-psychology view. A number of traditionalists, Westerners who overcame the bigotry and insularity of Christianity, and took upon themselves the study of a universal and transcendental tradition that they believed was expressed in all the particular human traditions, saw this practice, the unifying of the self or the recognition of self-divinity, as a universal and esoteric practice of royalty across the traditional world. This universality among particular traditions is factual in the sense that it can be observed through study of various historical and disparate traditions, and, speaking from experience, fascinates even the most skeptical mind. This view tends towards the approximate contrary of the abovementioned Christian one. Whereas Christianity viewed itself as being at the centre of truth, these traditionalists understand this universal tradition to be at the centre of truth, and understand Christianity, other popular religions and esoteric doctrines as revolving around this universal tradition in varying proximity. They did not see any human tradition as the one that coincides perfectly with this universal tradition, because practical necessities necessarily cause digressions from universal principles. Particularly relevant here is the Italian esotericist Julius Evola who thought that Christianity was one of the religions furthermost from this central truth, its tendency to claim sole access to truth and to repudiate other traditions being one of the main features that earns it its distance. He further thought that the original Buddhism was one of the purest esoteric doctrines, that emerged self-consciously and with as few idiosyncrasies as possible.

As opposed to the view of Buddhism-as-psychology, the traditionalists posit the view of Buddhism-as-ontology. In this sense, the transformation that Buddhism and other initiatic traditions bring about is not merely psychological, but ontological. By virtue of this transformation, the human is no longer human, but is something higher and the psychological events are corollaries of this ontological transformation. This is comparable to the Neoplatonist idea of the human "remembering" that he is God, that the differentiation between the One and the multifarious world is an illusion.

It is not easy to decide between either interpretation, but perhaps a decision is not necessary. At the outset, one must note that we are prejudiced in favour of the first view, and this is because we belong to the post-Christian West. The second view is more difficult to accept, but has richer implications. Nevertheless, what is necessary is the path, not one's expectations of it, so maybe a decision either way is not needed. Experience will teach.