No Picking and Choosing

I enjoy Ed Halliwell's posts on Buddhism at The Guardian's Comment Is Free blog. But his most recent post is a tad off, I think.

Halliwell notes that crusading atheists Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris tend to go easy on Buddhism, mostly because they insist it isn't really a religion but a philosophy. Harris has actually written that Buddhism would be so much better if only Buddhists would stop mucking it up to make it seem like a religion. Halliwell seems to be OK with Dawkins and Harris, But then he says,

On Radio 3, Martin Palmer accused western Buddhists of creating their own version based on "the religion we don't want, which is Judeo-Christian, and the religion we would love to have, which isn't quite religion, which … doesn't have too many rules, and the rules it does have, like the Tibetan ban on homosexuality, are conveniently forgotten."

It is unfortunately true that many westerners do approach Buddhism this way. But this differs from the Dawkins-Harris approach how, exactly?

Then Halliwell writes,

Does that make western Buddhism a pick 'n' mix religion? Perhaps it does – but if we pick and mix well, we might create something good. Indeed, if we pick wise insights from the past and mix them with the ever-accumulating knowledge from our own cultural heritage, then what we might have a viable model for 21st-century spirituality. It needn't even be called Buddhism, which is, after all, just a word.

Which for me sets off all manner of red flags and alarm bells. It is true that Buddhism has changed and adapted as it has moved into new cultures. But these changes happened over time and under the influence of enlightened teachers. For example, I understand that after the Indian sage Bodhidharma established Chan in China in the early 6th century, for a time it retained some of the trappings of Indian Buddhism. Chan, I have read, finally became thoroughly Chinese under the influence of the Sixth Patriarch, Hui Neng, almost two centuries later.

Let's talk about "pick and mix"; an American might say "pick and choose." The Zen literature contains warnings about picking and choosing. For example, the opening of the Hsin Hsin Ming -- "Verses on the Faith Mind," by Seng-ts'an, the Third Patriarch -- is sometimes translated "The Great Way is not difficult for those who avoid picking and choosing."

Buddhism can be approached on several levels, and if some adopt it merely as a benevolent philosophy that's fine with me. But for some of us, it's a religion. And though it may be short on commandments and dogmas that must be believed, it is exacting in its own way. Whole-hearted practice requires giving yourself to it. If you are standing apart from it and judging it, thinking, hmm, this part suits me, but this part doesn't -- you're not doing it. No picking and choosing.

Do you really have to check your critical thinking skills at the door, suspending all judgments? That sounds a bit dangerous. There are frauds who present themselves as teachers, and a few teachers have turned out to be frauds. Buddhists aren't supposed to be blind followers, either.

This may seem a fine distinction, but it seems to me there's a difference between judging by a standard (such as what I like and don't like) and seeing the truth of a thing in itself. A mature practitioner can be open to the value or the flaws of a person, a teaching, a situation without holding it up next to his personal likes and dislikes.

Often dharma requires not running away from something that upsets us, and often it requires letting go of something that attracts us. A practice made up only of the parts one likes is no practice at all.

Western Buddhism already is adapting, and perhaps someday Western Buddhism will drop all trappings of Asia. But this adaptation needs to be guided by those whose practice has matured beyond the pick-and-choose phase. It so often happens that the very part of practice that you find most odious and pointless at first is the very thing that opens a door for you later.

Halliwell speaks of "anachronisms that have been protected from critical thinking, and that needed cutting away," and I appreciate that religion is encrusted with such anachronisms. But too much injudicious cutting can leave one in a very leaky boat.