Buddhism: Beware of "Should"

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Beware of "Should" Jul 8th 2013, 06:46 The Rev. Danny Fischer has a blog post up called "Rejecting Scientistic and Post-Religious Buddhism" that is worth a read. He's pointing to two other blog posts, by Ethan Nichtern and by Lama Jampa Thaye. (Let me add quickly that Lama Jampa Thaye is not rejecting science, in spite of the title, so don't argue with it until you've read it.) These three posts together provide so much food for thought I hardly know where to begin. But one has to start somewhere -- I will start by saying I was very much bothered by this statement by Ethan Nichtern -- "I firmly believe that Buddhist meditation, philosophy and psychology should not be viewed as religious practices." I firmly believe that any time anyone talks about how Buddhism should be viewed, some bodhisattva in a referee shirt should blow a whistle and call a penalty. Beware of "should." I have written a lot already about why I think the "is Buddhism a philosophy or a religion" argument is a stupid argument. The answer is yes. Or no. Or why does it matter? It is what it is. The danger is that if you are trying to understand dharma by fitting it into some pre-formed intellectual filing system, you're putting limits on what it can teach you. When you say it should be viewed this way but not that way, it's a bit like trying to keep a growing, living thing in a small cage. The cage may be big enough at first, but in time the creature's growth will be stunted and warped. Even so, if you decide for yourself that attaching the "religion" tag to Buddhism is unhelpful, because of your own particular configuration of conditioning and bugaboos, that's your business. But I get twitchy when somebody declares what tags the rest of us should be applying. I recently reviewed (and enjoyed) Brad Warner's new book, There Is No God and He Is Always With You. Warner often says that Buddhism is not a religion, while I often say it is. And he frames his spiritual journey as a search for God, which doesn't work for me. But I don't think we're actually disagreeing. What he writes tells me he's not clinging to views or concepts -- the title of the book is a clue -- and that he's using words as a skilful means to loosen the grip of the conditioning and bugaboos. And I would argue that if one of your bugaboos is "religion," running away from it will not help. It's going to get in your way until you face it and take it in and accept it, and only then will it lose its obstructive power and drop away. But this is a personal thing. I'm not prescribing what anyone else should do. Take it as a suggestion. The other word that should draw a penalty flag is "views." Did not the Buddha warn us, over and over, to not cling to views? Any views? About anything? I believe he did. But I'll take that up in the next post.

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