Killing the Buddha Softly
It might not seem like it but I've worked hard on this essay; I even handed it over for criticism by a Buddhist, who said I got "The Four Noble Truths" wrong, and by a programmer, who said his eyes glazed over with jargon. I responded to both and hopefully the resultant additions and removals help and do not hinder. My purpose in writing this is part of my spiritual seeking, I suppose, but there's a lot of ego involved too: I appear to encapsulate a system hundreds of years old and with millions of followers, say "ok this is what doesn't work here," and then discard it, which is incredibly hubristic. But, writing is always this way, and big topics like love or God end up the same as classification of viruses or owners' manuals. What I'm trying to say is, it's not my fault! I think there's something in Buddhism and I'm trying to find it for myself, and for readers.
Like many in the liberally educated middle class, I was friendly to Buddhism as an emerging sophont, and thought there might be -- or even must be -- something about it that mirrors some intuitive sense of the great whole, or whatever other grand concept you like. For a birthday in my 20s, my mom gave me a Buddha statue, sitting cross legged, head in hands, "absorbing the sorrows of the world." A girl with whom I attended both high school and college, and then attempted friendship with as a real adult, is a Nichiren Buddhist, along with her husband. She introduced me to her religion and I came back at her with some contradictions, or perhaps just one that I remember -- "compassion vs. remaining detached." Buddhists are historically used to these types of challenges, although some don't deal with them well or with their supposedly cultivated equanimity and non-attachment (in this case, to Buddhism; "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him" - Zen master Linji Yixuan).
I visited some nuns in 2021, some Theravada nuns, and they were not particularly wise, I didn't think. One of them seemed quite angry, reactive, sensitive, and teenagery. Maybe people compelled to monasticism tend to be a little crazy. Another nun said she was "still addicted to experience," as if this were a bad thing, which bothered me and still does. I read up on Buddhism then and discovered another conflict: the ol' Anatta vs. Samsara bug. I refer to it this way because it comes up a lot. Buddhism teaches there is no eternal soul or "self" -- no Atman, which is an ancient Indian concept predating both Hinduism and Buddhism. Additionally, Buddhism teaches that something immaterial is recycled after death into new bodies-of-beings. I suspect this was an error and Buddhists have been trying to wiggle around it for centuries. Apologists say that Karma or Mindstream is what is recycled since the Atman does not exist, but they are on thin ice, which I will talk about more.
Finally, in 2024, I visited a Zen convent offering something like Sangha (church). I read up more on Buddhism and my biggest problem moved from Anatta/Samsara to Samsara/Nirvana. Now my biggest problem, which includes the previous two, is a more general "supernatural elements of Buddhism" (see issues 3 and 4, below), but that may change again.
Here are my issues, in order of least problematic to most problematic (turns out there are Four of them, Noble or not):
Buddhism is on some level very simple, the core behavior being dualistically (A) not doing or thinking or saying things that cause you or others to suffer, while simultaneously (B) doing and thinking and saying things that cause you and others equanimity, or joy, or satisfaction -- whatever the opposite of Dukkha might be. There are some real world, physical or verbal guidelines, like not stealing, drinking, or gossipping, but when it comes to controling your own mind they say not to think anything "that causes unwholesome states to arise." Then if you look up "unwholesome" in the context of Buddhism, you redundantly find "that which causes suffering."
The cognitive-behavioral life coach part of Buddhism often rings true for modern intellectuals and psychotherapists, whereas Samsara, Nirvana, and Karma remain problematic. A good writer on a forum told me the sticking point for me and people like me, when they try to parse these three, is materialism or physicalism -- if you believe there is nothing to the universe at the root level but elementary particles or perhaps energy in some pure unknown form, then these more magical-seeming components of Buddhism won't ever fly because they rely on some ineffable, undetectable, immaterial self-like thing being transmitted from creature to creature. Here Buddhism may be in disagreement with science although it is often purported to be in agreement (see: books like "Why Buddhism is True" by Robert Wright).
If I or someone like me allows their theology to become very liberal, they can interpret samsaric rebirth, the great recycler, not so much as being-to-being "stuff"-transfer but rather as the law of conservation of energy. Some more traditional Buddhists assure me this is wrong, but I suspect any interpretation of Buddhism will be called wrong (especially on the internet), as if I or someone like me were trying to discover a weak beam in Buddhism that when kicked will cause the whole superstructure to come crashing down. Buddhism is built to evade textual attack, as we read in the Pali Canon:
"This Dhamma that I have attained is deep, hard to see, hard to realize, peaceful, refined, beyond the scope of conjecture, subtle, to be experienced by the wise." - MN 26
"Do not go by oral tradition, nor by a lineage of teachings, nor by hearsay, nor by speculation, nor by a logical inference, nor by an analogy, nor by the consideration of reasons, nor by a teacher’s authority." - AN 3.65
Buddha lived in his own time and place and so had to operate within those philosophical and cosmological confines. In spite of this Buddhism does offer some pushback on reincarnation, and corrects it to "rebirth." Reincarnation involves a soul moving from body to body. But since Buddha said there is no soul (which I nod my head along with), then buddhistic "reincarnation" is a different thing he termed "rebirth." There is no "soul" but there are "beings." When one being dies there is one-to-one transfer of that being's "essence" or mindstream or karma, into a specific other being. I believe this is how most Buddhists think, and I find it incoherent because it describes Atman in the face of outward denial of Atman. I agree that there's no soul. I disagree that some non-soul inner essence is transmitted from specific being to specific being, between lives; this is supernaturalism and places Buddhism outside of scientific truth.
How might Mindstream be transmitted from one life to another? You would need to dumb "Mindstream" down into modern liberal concepts, or believe in magic: either people simply influence each other via culture (oral tradition, books, movies, art, etc), or there is something like a soul you just don't want to call a soul because Buddha said there is no soul, but then forgot about that and kept Rebirth from its pre-Hinduism and pre-Buddhism origins to build his self help system around. Remaining in materialism, how might Karma be transmitted from one life to another? That's easy: if you punch someone they get mad. But how does Karma universally end up transfered from being to being, even if they don't interact? Grasshopper is confused, but instead of looping in further samsaric rumination, he will hop along to the big one:
Why would you want to stop Samsara, whether it's interpreted as persistence of energy, one ineffable spiritual object moving from body to body, or somewhere in between? Because it is Dukkha, answer the Buddhists. Problem is, there's already a method to stop Dukkha: stop attachments, via minding your P's and Q's (a lot of the points end up in agreeance with general wisdom on being a good person -- don't lie, cheat, steal, get drunk, etc, and be sure to meditate and drink your Ovaltine). We don't need to stop the universe from happening, if we have already resolved its inherent pain via some allowed method. Samsara and Nirvana seem to lift easily out of Buddhism, and I suspect Buddha only referenced them because he simply couldn't see around them, since they amounted to the pervasive view in his world. I read that Theravada does not stress Samsara or Nirvana as much as other sects, and is more focsed on the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and Anatta, which I can get behind. I imagine an apologist would say something like "if you have stopped Dukkha you have stopped Samsara and achieved Nirvana, all via Karma," and a skeptic might counter with "are you taking these things to be, at least in part, supernatural phenomena?"
How can we define Samsara such that 1) it resides in the material world, and 2) its cessation would be desirable? Let's assume that Buddhism is Good -- that it doesn't have any tricks up its sleeve, and its metaphysics and cosmology exist to benefit the practitioner. If we do, then we can throw away the nihilistic death cult accusations, and go on to say that Samsara amounts to the painful cyclic attributes of existence that are, or would be, commonly agreed upon to be undesirable. Take it as a fait accompli: Buddha said Samsara is Dukkha, so if we believe he does not in fact want to end the universe but just wants to make you feel better, then whatever it is, Samsara must be bad. Making the same mistake over and over, a boring weekly routine that eats at you, etc -- these are samsaric. Keeping the focus on the spiritual or "spiritual" (psychological), and on my Advaitic intellectual roots, the ego is samsaric because it is self perpetuating; it feeds itself with stories and thoughts so that it might stay alive. History repeats itself, energy can't be destroyed or created, and Garfield hates Mondays.
Spiritual matters can't really stand up to logical criticism, and reliance on a postmodernistic antitextual trope of "you are thinking about it wrong" is their only way out. But who am I (or anyone else) to think I've discovered irresolvable problems in a system that clearly works or else it would not have stuck around so long? Buddhism does what all religions do: provides a calming exercise to help brains, which evolved to hunt mammoths, to write TPS reports instead. "Modernity is hard," maybe should be the first Noble Truth. Modernity is hard, and the way through this is to be aware of and challenge your built-in instincts, although maybe cavemen experienced Dukkha as well and Dukkha has more to do with evolved human neurology than modern culture being unsuitable; we remember the bad times because this motivates us to avoid them, a practice that kept us alive long enough to produce and rear children. Maybe it's somewhere in between (things have always been hard, but now they're harder than ever).
Vedantic Hinduism seems to take consciousness to be Atman, which according to the "great realization" is the same as Brahman, or the godhead, or the encapsulation of all that is; basically there is only consciousness. Buddhism on the other hand diminishes consciousness into merely one of the components of buddhistic proto-neurology, which are somehow passed as Mindstream from being to being. I think the first part of that is correct, in that what people generally think of as "consiousness" is really just sensory impressions, thoughts, and the "I" sense, which amount to parts of the brain buzzing to other parts. Maybe the claustrum, or the cerebral cortex, or the hindbrain could be the seat of conscsiouness, but neuroplasticity teaches that the brain in itself with its numerous connections functions as a whole. Furthermore, my guess would be that if you had a "General Grievous from Star Wars" cyborg-type situation where you installed a central nervous system in a robot body, that poor thing would have a very different experience of self, if it had it at all. So I think Buddhism is correct to diminish (small "c") consciousness into mere psychology, but Hinduism is also correct to valorize (big "C") Consciousness as the one big important thing.
If you had to declare a god-object in Buddhism -- some ultimate or absolute -- then I suppose it would paradoxically be the non-absolute of Nirvana. Buddhist apologists rely on a rehearsed position on theism: that Buddhism allows for gods or even God, and is fully compatible with Christianity or any other theistic system. However, I think in the case of big "G" God, Buddhists tend to misunderstand the panentheistic all-importance of this concept and its incompatibility with the all-importance of the "achievement" of Nirvana: Buddhism is a nihilistic system, by definition having no absolute (or having an absolute of no-absolute); you can't just add "God" to Buddhism and make both systems happy. Minor Asian pantheons are unimportant, to Buddhism and to a theoretically functional syncretism, and those gods are not in the same category as large Brahmanistic or even Abrahamic conceptions of God; "God" stopped being "Yahweh" a long time ago. Obviously nothing is stoping you from following the Eightfold Path while attending mass, but faith in a monotheistic, panentheistic God as the one big thing -- as an absolute -- is at odds with Buddhism.
Nirvana, Samsara, and Karma are philosophically problematic concepts that get in the way of non-attachment to outcomes, to mental pain, and to materiality, which I see as the core function of Buddhism. Buddhism seems to be strong on practicum, but weak on ideology, whereas Vedantic Hinduism seems strong on ideology but weak on practicum. Buddhism has a lot of holes in it but maps out a fairly clear path that seems to really help a lot of practitioners. Advaita Vedanta makes a lot of sense but doesn't really seem to guide you beyond "just realize the self."
Hinduism, and in fact Buddhism although the focus there is more on misperception or "wrong understanding," purport that the physical world in front of our faces is illusory, and in the case of Hinduism that it is something like a mere reflection of Brahman, the transcendent true nature of reality. Holographic gravity, a theory proposed by Gerard 't Hooft in 1993, suggests that "our universe's 4-D spacetime could be a holographic projection of a lower-dimensional reality." In string theory, what are traditionally thought of as a variety of particles are taken to be different frequencies of the vibration of the same string. Both scientific theories seem hinduistic inasmuch as they set up a fundamental, which then projects what appears to be a complex reality.
I briefly worried that the existence of 1) Brahman, plus 2) an illusory physical reality, violated monism and made Advaita Vedanta self-contradictory, but now I don't think it does; the world of form is a minor reflective ghost and not a big "other side of the Tao" type of thing that counter-weighs Brahman. Regardless, there's something to be said for a system (Buddhism) that mostly ignores the absolute as just another thing to cling to; Nirvana could be an absolute but if it is, then it's the absolute of no absolutes -- somewhat like calling zero a number. I still have my Buddha statue, on my shelf of tchotchkes. He's behind me, still absorbing the sorrows of the world.