What with everything else going on in the world, I have no idea why Andrew Sullivan took time out to slam Buddhism. And he does it by citing a six-year-old article in Slate that was so jaw-dropping dishonest I still remember it. And I'm fairly forgiving.
The six-year-old article was written by John Horgan, who claims he had tinkered with Buddhism -- "Four years ago, I joined a Buddhist meditation class and began talking to (and reading books by) intellectuals sympathetic to Buddhism." Yet in four years he managed to learn absolutely nothing about Buddhism. Horgan's article reads like a compendium of all the Stupid Things People Believe About Buddhism That Aren't True. (Note to self: Write an article on that.)
We get the nonsense on reincarnation that the Buddha didn't teach -- "Buddhism espouses reincarnation, which holds that after death our souls are re-instantiated in new bodies" -- arghhhh! And he thinks the teachings on karma is about "the existence of some cosmic judge who, like Santa Claus, tallies up our naughtiness and niceness before rewarding us with rebirth as a cockroach or as a saintly lama."
In other words, Horgan criticizes all the stuff any authentic Buddhist teacher will tell you is not what Buddhism teaches. I think the books by "intellectuals sympathetic to Buddhism" were of the sort meant to be colored with crayons, or else Horgan didn't actually read them.
It's all there, folks, and I'm sure you've heard this before -- meditation is not always relaxing, Horgan cautions. Hey, tell me about it. The doctrine of anatta, Horgan continues, teaches that nothing exists. (I'm thinking that Horgan must've talked to my buddy Professor Paul Flesher at the University of Wyoming.) And, Horgan figures, "To someone who sees himself and others as unreal, human suffering and death may appear laughably trivial." Oh, and by the way -- Shakyamuni Buddha was a deadbeat dad.
As I said, this slander of the dharma was published six years ago, and deserves to be soundly forgotten. Yet Sully drags it up again. Surely there's some nonsense going on in the political world that deserves attention.
Well, that Andrew Sullivan for you. Sad to say that the very misconceptions Sullivan repeats are the ones that I heard growing up and kept me from Buddhism for many years. I’m sure I’m in good company. As to the flesh and blood Buddha running away from his family (though, presumably, there was a whole palace available to take care of them), then how about the example of Jesus’ rebuke to his mother–what have you to do with me? Real pro-family statement. Or the case of the great Jewish sage Rabbi Akiva, who walked away from his wife and children to study mishnaic law? Or the many other sages of great religions who started by going off alone? Even Mohammed spent a lot of time off by himself in a cave. Or, hey, what about the painter Paul Gauguin, who abandoned his family to run off to Tahiti–yet we praise his Tahiti paintings? But it’s poor Buddha who gets singled out. Life ain’t fair.
That’s unreal. One of two things must be true: 1.) He didn’t actually read any books by intellectuals sympathetic to Buddhism, or 2.) He’s incapable of learning anything by reading.
Seriously though! Even the most basic religious studies textbook (even the ones with pictures) do a better job of explaining the basic concepts of Buddhism. What an embarrassment. If you don’t know about something, don’t write about it.
Wow, I thought he’d written a diatribe but I found two short quoted paragraphs. I wonder what his motivation was. Why don’t you invite him over for a little chat?
By the by, never heard back from you on the reincarnation thing.
Tom — What reincarnation thing?
Nice post, but you might be surprised to learn that the Buddha never took a stand on the self or soul (the anatta doctrine was originally a perceptual technique that got reified into a metaphysical doctrine by the Abhidharmists):
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/notself.html
Even the “three characteristics of existence” doctrine was formed in the commentaries and doesn’t appear in the Pali Canon:
“Almost any book on Buddhism will tell you that the three characteristics—
the characteristic of inconstancy, the characteristic of stress or suffering, and the
characteristic of not-self—were one of the Buddha’s most central teachings. The
strange thing, though, is that when you look in the Pali Canon, the word for
“three characteristics,” ti-lakkhana, doesn’t appear. If you do a search on any
computerized version of the Canon and type in, say, the characteristic of
inconstancy, anicca-lakkhana, it comes up with nothing. The word’s not in the Pali
Canon at all. The same with dukkha-lakkhana and anatta-lakkhana: Those
compounds don’t appear. This is not to say that the concepts of anicca, dukkha,
and anatta don’t occur in the Canon; just that they’re not termed characteristics.
They’re not compounded with the word “characteristic.” The words they are
compounded with are perception, sañña—as in the perception of inconstancy, the
perception of stress, and the perception of not-self—and the word anupassana,
which means to contemplate or to keep track of something as it occurs. For
instance, aniccanupassana, to contemplate inconstancy, means to look for
inconstancy wherever it happens.”
http://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/CrossIndexed/Published/Meditation4/070821%20Three%20Perceptions.pdf
Mike: Although I sorta kinda see where you are coming from, you and the author of the article you link to are missing a big piece of the puzzle. And here I’m coming at it from a Mahayana view, but it’s how I understand it. A phenomenon that is empty of intrinsic self cannot have characteristics, because there is no-thing for the characteristic to cling to. There are only perceptions of characteristics, not characteristics themselves. (See the Diamond Sutra on this point.) It is because we think we have characteristics (ignorance) that we suffer. So, sorry, you haven’t proved your point. Anatta is the foundation of Buddhism; without it, Buddhism makes no sense.
Since this post has scrolled off the front page a long time ago, I’m going to take the liberty of re-posting your comment in the forum and letting the gang there have at it.
http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?tsn=1&nav=messages&webtag=ab-buddhism&tid=1559