Post #62: What Makes a Buddhist?

16 Sept. 2023

I started my reflections here a few months ago (in Post #1) by asking whether—or in what sense—I would qualify as a Buddhist and by expressing some uncertainties on the issue. Purists of the Vipassana school sometimes even reject the label altogether, saying that it is doing the Dhamma a disservice by making it appear a sectarian teaching, when it is meant to be unfailingly universal. (Thus S.N. Goenka: “Whoever first used the word Buddhism or Buddhist, in any language, was the biggest enemy of Buddha’s teaching, because the teaching had been universal, and now out of ignorance, he made it sectarian.”) Certainly such labels are problematic, but they have some descriptive value anyway. Accepting a label does not make one a sectarian any more than rejecting it protects one from the dangers of undue narrowness and zealotry.

There is a communal-cultural, even tribal side to the question, as we all know: you are a Buddhist if you do what others are doing who have an established claim to the name, and not if you don’t—or at least you must be prepared for others to look at it that way. What I see in the Buddha, by contrast, has little to do with what this or that group is up to, and everything with the individual human being in his existential predicament. To me the Buddha is a doctor or therapist who offers a particular diagnosis of our human condition, and to be his follower or student is to seek guidance as his patient—to accept the Buddhist diagnostic framework and apply the prescriptions that go with it. A doctor is not a tyrant, however, but someone who lends a healing hand that one is free to take, or not, without therefore giving up one’s essential freedom.

What is so special, then, about the Buddhist diagnosis of what ails us as human beings? Well, first of all it does not start with the usual unverifiable talk of salvation, with divine omnipotence and promises of paradisiacal bliss forever after, but with a sobering reality-check that can be easily put to the test: the first Noble Truth, attesting to the universality of suffering (Dukkha)—or better, ubiquitous dissatisfaction—not as an incidental flaw in the programming of sentient existence, but as its defining feature.

Second, the Teaching offers a causal account, again verifiable by personal experience, of how this universal dissatisfaction arises from the clash between our mental habits of craving and clinging, on the one hand, and the impermanence of all things (Anicca) on the other.

Third, it identifies a remedy, proposing that Dukkha can be pulled out by the very root and brought to an end by breaking the old habit-patterns and discovering experientially the insubstantiality and corelessness of what we misconstrue as an abiding self (Anatta).

And fourth, it outlines a practical way of life—an art of living, as Goenka liked to say—that leads step by step towards liberation from our miseries: the Noble Eightfold Path, incorporating a scheme of training rules (the precepts) tailored to one’s worldly responsibilities or monastic commitments.

In other words, as the Pali canon announces repeatedly, everything comes down, ultimately, to the Four Noble Truths and to gradually reorienting one’s life around this foundational set of insights into the nature of things.* To comprehend fully all that is implied when the Buddha proclaims that “This is suffering” would be tantamount to liberation itself; the depth of one’s understanding on this pivotal point is perhaps the best yardstick for the overall rightness of one’s views—marking, in their cruder forms, the entrance to the Path, and in their final consummation, the completion of the journey.

Acknowledge the validity of these Noble Truths while walking the Path to the best of your ability (including some effort at establishing a regular mindfulness or meditation practice), even if it be done haltingly or stumblingly at times, and you qualify, I think, as a Buddhist in the decisive sense. To be connected to the practice by communal ties or cultural affinity, or by personal sympathy, or by faith alone, will surely count for something too—it’s not a question of judging anyone—but makes less sense of the tenet that the most fitting way to pay one’s respect to a Buddha is to walk resolutely on the path he pointed out (Digha Nikaya 16.5.3).

The panoply of rites and rituals that organized religion tends to prescribe for the righteous are not, on this understanding, essential to the practice, and as a result, even the most committed practitioners (perhaps sometimes especially they: the Buddha ran into plenty such trouble in his life) may look quite irreligious to the self-appointed defenders of the faith at any given time or place. On the other hand, a wide range of devotional practices might be found congenial and compatible with the Buddhist path, perhaps making a devotee appear, outwardly at least, the votary of another religion altogether.

Exactly where these complex lines of compatibility and exclusion run is not for me to say. My own impression is that the likes of Thomas Merton have not often been found wanting, on the Buddhist side at least, for also being Christians under holy orders. To speak of Jubus may border on cliché, but the list of prominent Jewish scholars and teachers of Buddhism is formidable, and the emerging Western Sangha owes them an inestimable debt; so far as I know, none have felt the need to disavow their Judaism. There are many more combinations imaginable: Buddhist atheists (such as Stephen Batchelor professes himself to be in the title of his Confessions) and agnostics, no less than more traditionalist Buddhists and other followers of the Dhamma that may find themselves at the intersections with other religions and spiritual schools, big and small, old and new. Not that these can all be said to adhere to the Teaching with equal strictness, but there were several prominent instances in the Buddha’s life when he made a point of encouraging prospective students to follow the Dhamma while remaining with their respective teachers and traditions (Digha Nikaya 25:23, for example, and Majjhima Nikaya 56:17). In Vipassana circles, especially, it is axiomatic that the Dhamma neither commits one to, nor disqualifies one from, membership in any religious community. (Whether the groups in question always see it the same way is another matter.)

Buddhists do take refuge in the Triple Gem (the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha); they may say their prayers, defer to senior practitioners, and engage in other activities that look quite similar to the confessional doings of other believers. But as there is no God to exact obedience from them, no Creed to which they must subscribe before others, and no expectation that even their most serious spiritual commitments be permanent—when they take robes, for example—there is a negotiable quality to Buddhism even while the Dhamma stands as firmly as any natural law or divine commandment. The Dhamma binds its followers—so Shabdrung Rinpoche, the celebrated 17th-century unifier of Bhutan, once described it—as if by a silken knot, easy and light at first, but tightening its hold with every day. Even so, the Teaching never wavers in the primacy that it assigns to recognizing impermanence in all its forms, so that Buddhist ears need not be shocked to hear of one Bhikkhu Citta who, in the early days of the Sangha, was allowed to join and quit the monastic life no less than six times, but then on the seventh attempt persisted, prevailed, and became an arahant, no less.

The hopeful idea that Buddhists never bring religious pressure to bear on their dissident neighbors (or their own children) is, alas, a wishful fantasy. Anything that defines and distinguishes can also be used to domineer and divide. How the Buddhist track record compares in this melancholy regard with those of the theisms—particularly the monotheisms—of the past and present, let anyone judge for himself who is in a position to avail himself of the evidence and who feels competent to weigh it with a sure, an even, and a steady hand.

* The Four Noble Truths are referred to, throughout the Canon, as “the teaching special to the Buddhas,” and they are said to comprise all that it is wholesome to know—as an elephant’s footprint can contain within its contours all the smaller footprints of other walking beings (see Samyutta Nikaya 28:2).