Better Late than Never...

So I know it's a bit late, but finals week had me a bit busier than I thought I would be, so I didn't have the time to put up the results of my Eastern Religions and Philosophies project.

I'll start with a brief description for those who weren't directly involved. I sent out a quick questionnaire to a lot of Buddhist bloggers and also posted the same questionnaire on the Buddhist community over on my sidebar ( --> ). The questionnaire had four pretty easy questions:

1. How did you get acquainted with the teachings of the Buddha?
a. If you weren’t a Buddhist your whole life, which tradition did you grow up in? Why did you leave that tradition (if you did)?
2. What, if any, religion or philosophy do you associate yourself with currently? Could you describe your faith a bit?
3. Which of the Buddhist teachings do you find most valuable in your everyday life? Why?
4. Describe your interaction in the Buddhist community. Why do you participate, what brought you to the site, etc.

I ended up getting 20 solid responses which I built my paper upon. Here's a description of the results I synthesized from the responses.

1) Interestingly enough, fourteen of the responses said they came to Buddhism from some Catholic or Anglican background. This statistic is waaay off the demographic statistic for these two faiths. What this says to me is that of all the Westerners who leave a tradition to become Buddhist, Catholics/Anglicans are the most likely to do so. I think this is because of the fact that those traditions (which are very similar) both emphasize suffering, but it is in a helpless, dogmatic way. Instead of saying that we are all suffering but we can take steps to fix it (Buddhism), the Catholic/Anglican tradition says that we are all suffering but it is because we are inherently tainted by original sin. Buddhism offers a more action oriented, less helpless solution which appears to attract Westerners.

2) Most of the people who responded mentioned the Buddha's last words, "Be ye lamps unto yourselves," in one way or another. I think this fits in well with the previous point. People aren't looking for dogma or solutions fed to them that says something to the effect of, "this is the truth, and if you don't believe it you're going to hell," which is the vibe that a lot of Christian traditions tend to give off (there is evidence in monotheistic texts that pluralism is a viable option, by the way, but most churches lean more towards exclusivism).

3) In following point 2, most of the Buddhists who responded call themselves some form of "atheist Buddhist," which tells me they shy away from any mystical, speculative form of the religion. Concepts like reincarnation, the five skandhas, store consciousness, etc, are thrown out the window. What is kept are the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path (though this point is arguable), and the deep rooted sense of compassion instilled in the tradition.

4) I think all of these points put together lend itself to the fact that through globalization and the ecumenical blog-o-sphere, we're seeing the development of a new philosophy. The responses people gave were not Buddhism, but some form of Buddhism-influenced secular humanism. People aren't interested in finding their way out of Samsara and entering into Nirvana, but rather using Buddhism's truths as an ethical system to make themselves and the world around them better. The voice I heard in the surveys was a voice of a developing idea based on impermanence, compassion, and suffering, but it is circling more around social justice, equality, and reason than towards the actual religion of Buddhism, which has a lot of mysticism and speculative faith-based parts to it.

I think it was a really cool project, and it showed me a lot. I hope to keep up with everyone's blogs to see how this trend develops and what comes out of it.

The Yin and the Yang...

In my Eastern Religion and Philosophy course (the one I'm doing my Blogging Buddhism project for, which should be done this weekend), we've been discussing Taoism this week. On Monday, we discussed the yin-yang, which is a very interesting concept. Essentially, there are diametric dualities in the world (light and dark, male and female, hot and cold, etc) but none of them exist independently of each other. More importantly, none of them are purely one thing. They are dependent upon each other and circle around to meet each other through the natural Tao of things. This is just the concept as far as I understand it, which obviously isn't that sophisticated for only having studied it for less than a week.

In class, I asked the question about whether or not these terms are value laden. Is one side inherently good and the other bad? Is anything inherently good or bad in Taoism? I believe that the answer is "no," and I think there are some evidences to support that.

Firstly, there is the old Taoist story of the farmer who's horse ran away. "His neighbor commiserated, only to be told, 'Who knows what's good or bad?' It was true, for the next day the horse returned, bringing with it a drove of wild horses it had befriended. The neighbor reappeared, this time with congratulations for the windfall. He received the same response: 'Who knows what is good or bad?' Again this proved true, for the next day the farmer's son tried to mount one of the wild horses and fell, breaking his leg. More commiserations from the neighbor, which elicited the question: 'Who knows what is good or bad?' And for a fourth time the farmer's point prevailed, for the following day soldiers came by commandeering for the army, and the son was exempted because of his injury." I quoted Houston Smith's version of the story there because I knew I couldn't have put it better.

Who knows what is good or bad? I think that the Taoist approach is very existentialist in that it is up to the person experiencing to decide whether something is good or bad, and ultimately "good" and "bad" circle around to meet each other. There is nothing that is purely good and nothing purely bad. Everything is part of a process.

This was all fine with me until my friend Max (a solid utilitarian) said to me, "What about suffering?" I have to admit that I was a bit caught off guard. Is suffering value neutral? I tend to think that it is not a good thing on its own, but that's just the thing. Nothing is ever on its own. Everything is part of something else and fits into a context. Perhaps suffering seems bad at the time, but in the end who knows what is good or bad? What looks like a broken leg today could turn out to be a ticket out of the draft tomorrow.

Is Max right? Is suffering inherently evil? Is everything value neutral? I think that detachment and wu-wei certainly play a role here, but I suppose that is another post for another day.

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via FoxyTunes

Nirvana...

I think I've figured something out that I was struggling with. For a while I believed that I had found a hole in Buddhism; that it was wanting to have its cake and eat it too. I think I'm wrong. What am I talking about?! Of course I'm wrong! I'm 19! I'm always wrong! Anywho, I learned something today that made me think about things in a different way metaphysically. First I have to preface this post with two seemingly unrelated ideas that I've been pushing around in my head.

Thought one:
In my Modern Philosophy class, we've been talking about John Locke. Locke started talking about substratum. The easiest way to understand this is to think about an object (a cup, say). Okay, so this cup is metallic, shiny, has shape, extension, etc. It has a myriad of properties. What holds these properties together? Whatever that mysterious substance is is the substratum of that object. Philosophers have struggled for a while with substratum. Locke thinks that substratum is a mental process of assimilating these properties into a single object. We learn it through experiencing the world. I'm not sure, but it's a cool thing to think about.

Thought two:
In my Eastern Religions and Philosophies course, we've been discussing Buddhism. The thing I've been struggling with is the idea of reincarnation, specifically in relation to the skandhas. Buddhism has this belief that a person is made up of five skandhas. When you die, these skandhas break apart and come back together to recreate you in a new form. They are essentially what carries your personality and traits from life to life. The problem I was having is this: What is the substratum of the skandhas? What holds them together after you die? It isn't the self (like a soul or something) because Buddhism rejects the notion of the self. It just felt to me like Buddhism was saying, "It just works! It's magic!" Without resolving this notion, it didn't seem like reincarnation would work for Buddhism in my eyes. It seemed like you had to have some central self, like the Atman for Hinduism, in order to hold all of this stuff together.

Tonight the two issues collided while I was reading for Eastern. The Buddha says, "There is, monks, an unborn, not become, not made, uncompounded, and were it not, monks, for this unborn, not become, not made, uncompounded, no escape could be shown here for what is born, has become, is made, is compounded." When I pair that with the idea that instead of an Atman, Buddhism claims we have Nirvana at our core, and with the idea that Locke says substratum cannot be explained because it has no properties at all, it makes a lot of sense. It seems like Nirvana is the substratum for things in the world. It has no qualities, yet it is at the core of everything. It holds our skandhas together, yet does not add to anything since it is essentially "not existing." It cannot be claimed to exist since it has no qualities at all. Kinda cool.

What I find myself doing, even still, is using the name "nirvana" to describe nothing. I think it's strange that in my mind I imagine "nirvana" holding these things together, when in reality it is nothing. What I wonder is whether nirvana truly is nothing, or whether it is something which cannot be described or have attributes and qualities ascribed to it. Perhaps it is not "nothing," but only an "indescribable something." Another interesting though.

Today's lesson is brought to you by the word, "Headache!"

That, my friends, is a picture of my homeboy, Rene Descartes. He is the one who brought the philosophy I'm about to discuss into the mainstream. So, I figured I'd pay my homage to this renaissance philosopher. Whether or not I agree with him is up in the air, but let's have a chat.

What am "I"? I am not my arm, or my nose, or my legs. No, I am a consciousness that controls, is connected to, and yet is somehow outside of these bodily constraints. Right? This is a very Western view of reality. We are separate from our bodies, and if you extrapolate that theory, you can create an extremist philosophy that enables humans to morally justify the way we treat animals and other non-human entities. ("They can't think, so we're obviously better, right?")

I know that most Eastern philosophers would say that we are our bodies. There is no separation. I don't really know where I stand. They both make sense in certain contexts to me. The question I want to discuss in particular today is the afterlife.

Doesn't any form of afterlife require that our existence is a duality? Don't we have to have a mind, or soul at least, that exists outside of our bodies? If we don't, than we just die with our bodies. Granted, I'm probably trying to extremely oversimplify a very intricate and in-depth idea, but I'm also just trying to create good conversation. :)

In my eyes, that separation is necessary for Eastern and Western afterlife. Heaven cannot exist if we don't have a separate soul from our bodies. Likewise, if we don't have some form of a soul, there will be nothing to carry our Karma and reincarnation wouldn't exist. Am I wrong? Am I missing something? Am I misunderstanding something?