Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World

Human beings like us may never have evolved before and may never evolve again in this or any other universe. As far as anyone knows, we are alone in an inconceivably vast cosmos that has no interest at all in our fate. I do not believe that I existed in any meaningful sense before my birth or will exist again after my death either here on earth or in a heaven, a hell, or any other realm.

Institutionalized Buddhism throughout Asia not only has a doctrinal commitment to rebirth but also has an economic and political one. In contrast to most Tibetan lamas, for whom the belief in the doctrine of rebirth is essential to the continuing authority of their institutions in exile, other Asian Buddhists in the West have felt freer to adapt their teachings to suit the needs of a secular and skeptical audience whose interest in the dharma is as a way of finding meaning here and now rather than after death. One will search in vain for any discussion of rebirth in the numerous writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, for example. Although he comes from a country (Vietnam) in which the belief is deeply rooted, he now seems to be moving toward a view that equates karma with some form of genetic inheritance and transmissioṇ

Within the last hundred years the teachings of the Buddha have confirmed the views of theosophists, fascists, environmentalists, and quantum physicists alike.

The great difference is that this version relies on the work of W. W. Rockhill. Rockhill was an American diplomat who lived in China in the nineteenth century, a linguistic genius—he must have been the first American to know Tibetan; he also produced a Chinese-English dictionary. And in 1884 he published a life of the Buddha according to the Tibetan canoṇ It draws from material of equivalent antiquity to that of the Pali Canon, from a source called the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya. He went through it in the 1870s and pulled out of it a story that is almost identical to the story that I reconstructed from the Pali materials. Somewhat embarrassingly, I hadn’t actually read Rockhill until quite recently. I didn’t think the Tibetan material would be relevant. But I was wrong. The Tibetan Vinaya, from the Mūlasarvāstivāda school, gives us the same story, with the same characters, and the same relationships. The two versions don’t agree in every detail, but they’re remarkably similar.

Both photography and meditation require an ability to focus steadily on what is happening in order to see more clearly. To see in this way involves shifting to a frame of mind in which the habitual view of a familiar and self-evident world is replaced by a keen sense of the unprecedented and unrepeatable configuration of each moment. Whether you are paying mindful attention to the breath as you sit in meditation or whether you are composing an image in a viewfinder, you find yourself hovering before a fleeting, tantalizing reality.

But how does one square this with the idea of rebirth, of something distinct from that which dies but which is somehow reborn and so passes from life to life? To answer this question, more or less every Buddhist school has come up with a different explanation—a fact that in itself suggests that their answers are based on speculatioṇ Most schools claim that what is reborn is some kind of consciousness. Some say that this is simply the sixth sense (manovijñāṇa); others speak of a special existence-generating mind (bhavangacitta); still others propose the presence of an underlying foundation consciousness (ālayavijñāṇa); while the tantric traditions talk of a combination of extremely subtle energy and mind. But as soon as one hypothesizes the presence of some kind of subtle stuff, no matter how sophisticated the technical term one invents to denote it, one has already reintroduced the notion of some kind of esoteric self-substance.

Addressing people who were similarly confused as to what path in life to follow, the Buddha once suggested to the Kālāma people: “Do not be satisfied with hearsay or with tradition or with legendary lore or with what has come down in scriptures or with conjecture or with logical inference or with weighing evidence or with liking for a view after pondering over it or with someone else’s ability or with the thought: ‘the monk is our guru.’ When you know in yourselves: ‘these things are wholesome, blameless, commended by the wise, and being adopted and put into effect they lead to welfare and happiness,’ then you should practice and abide in them.

The emptiness of self, for instance, is not the denial of individual uniqueness but the denial of any permanent, partless, and transcendent basis for individuality. The anguish and uncertainty of human existence are only exacerbated by the preconceptual, spasm-like grip in which such assumptions of transcendence hold us.

For certain people, an unintended consequence of such mindfulness practice is the experience of a still, vivid, and detached awareness that does more than just deal with a specific pain; it opens a new perspective on how to come to terms with the totality of one’s existence, that is, birth, sickness, aging, death, and everything else that falls under the broad heading of what the Buddha called dukkha. The simple (though not necessarily easy) step of standing back and mindfully attending to one’s experience rather than being uncritically overwhelmed with the imperatives of habitual thoughts and emotions can allow a glimpse of an inner freedom not to react to what one’s mind is insisting that one do. The experience of such inner freedom, I would argue, is a taste of nirvana itself.

All believers, by definition, must be agnostics. The moment you declare that you believe in God or the law of karma, you are acknowledging that you do not know whether they exist or not. For if you did know, you would have no need to believe. Only fools, fanatics, and omniscient beings would claim to know such things.

Feuerbach argued that the function of religion was to project the essential human qualities of reason, love, and will onto the nonhuman and transcendent figure of God, who then becomes an object of worship.

As a result of this transference: “In proportion as God becomes more ideally human, the greater becomes the apparent difference between God and man. To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must become nothing.”23 Since God is merely “the projected essence of man,”24 if people are to recover their true humanity, Feuerbach maintains that they need to reclaim their essential nature from the God onto whom they have projected it. In the words of Karl Marx: “[Feuerbach’s] work consists in the dissolution of the religious world into its secular basis. . . . Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human.

This deep not-knowing, in this case the Second Patriarch’s inability to find his anguished mind, takes the notion of agnosticism down to another depth. One might call it a contemplative depth. Such deep agnostic metaphors are likewise found in such terms as wu hsin (no mind), and wu nien (no thought), as well as in the more popular “don’t know mind” of the Korean Zen master Seung Sahṇ

Translating this text as a practitioner rather than a scholar involved interfusing different strands of my own life with that of the author. The linguistic strands, of course, were crucial. For all that remains of Śāntideva are his words. Apart from dubious fragments of legend, we know nothing else about him. Yet reading Śāntideva means to converse with Śāntideva: to agree and sympathize with him but also to argue and dispute. In this way, I slowly came to know him. And what mattered most in forging this acquaintance with an invisible stranger were the threads of shared concern, which bound us together as practitioners of the dharma across the twelve hundred years that separated us in time. As a sympathetic reader, I absorbed his understanding in a way that changed me: I came to share his spiritual and literary aspirations, I assumed a similar stance to my own life and death, my yearnings were affirmed and strengthened by his, even my delight in the natural world was enhanced by his praising the opportunities it afforded for contemplative solitude. Like other key relationships in my life, getting to know Śāntideva transformed me.

To take photographs,” wrote Henri Cartier-Bresson, “is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeing reality. . . . It is putting one’s head, one’s eyes and one’s heart on the same axis. . . . It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one’s originality. It is a way of life.” These words of the renowned French photographer define photography as an ongoing meditative relationship to the world. For Cartier-Bresson, photography is not merely a profession but a liberating engagement with life itself, the camera not just a machine for recording images but “an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.”1 To be moved to take photographs, like being inspired to practice meditation, is to embark on a path. In both cases you follow an intuitive hunch rather than a carefully considered decisioṇ Something about “photography” or “meditation” draws you irresistibly. While you may initially justify your interest in these pursuits with clear and compelling reasons, the further you proceed along their respective paths, the less you need to explain yourself. The very act of taking a photograph or sitting in meditation is sufficient justification in itself. The notion of an end result to be attained at some point in the future is replaced by an understanding of how

A Buddhist community—a sangha—is not something one is merely born into or chooses to join but something one is challenged to create. A sangha provides a matrix of communal support for people to realize their commitment to a common vision or concerṇ Yet it is always in danger of deteriorating into an institution intent on preserving the power of a minority of professionals.

the whole discourse around enlightenment becomes about being cognitively correct or incorrect.

Emptiness” is a singularly unappetizing term. I don’t think it was ever meant to be attractive. The Tibetan Buddhist scholar Herbert V. Guenther once translated it as “the open dimension of being,” which sounds a lot more appealing than “emptiness.” “Transparency” was a term I played with for a while, which also makes emptiness sound more palatable. Yet we have to remember that even two thousand years ago Nāgārjuna was having to defend himself against the nihilistic implications of emptiness.

Thus awakening is not a state but a process: an ethical way of life and commitment that enables human flourishing.

an agnostic Buddhist would not be a believer with claims to revealed information about supernatural or paranormal phenomena and in this sense would not be religious. I’ve recently started saying to myself “I’m not a religious person” and finding that to be strangely liberating. You don’t have to self-identify as a religious person in order to practice the dharma.

And the Buddha was not interested in them. But if we look at Buddhism historically, we’ll see that it has continuously tended to lose this agnostic dimension through becoming institutionalized as a religion, with all of the usual dogmatic belief systems that religions tend to have. So, ironically, if you were to go to many Asian countries today, you would find that the monks and priests who control the institutional bodies of Buddhism would have quite clear views on whether the world is eternal or not, what happens to the Buddha after death, the status of the mind in relation to the body, and so oṇ This

We do not have to believe in magic spells for this to work. We only have to be able to enjoy a film. The same elements are at work: cinematic technology, suspension of disbelief, the director’s skill in organizing a compelling narrative. The result is the same. Life, too, is like this. What appears to us through the senses seems real and solid enough, but once we submit it to deeper scrutiny (whether through physics, postmodern philosophy, or Buddhist meditation), that out-thereness-in-its-own-right of the thing starts to dissolve. Once we notice its utter contingency, the gut feeling that there must be something solid and unchanging at its core weakens. The thing is seen not only to emerge from a complex set of causes and conditions but also to depend on a vast number of parts, attributes, and components. If we look closer still, we find that it is what it is because of the way we talk and think about it, because of the peculiar way in which our culture perceptually organizes it so that it makes sense. Nothing else, no extra metaphysical essence, is necessary. While language forces us to use the word “it,” ultimately there is nothing to which it refers. Life

Any examined human life involves the realization that we have been thrown into this world, without any choice, only to look forward to the prospect of being expelled at death. The sheer sense of bafflement and perplexity at this situation is crucial to spiritual awareness. To opt for a comforting, even a discomforting, explanation of what brought us here or what awaits us after death severely limits that very rare sense of mystery with which religion is essentially concerned. We thereby obscure with consoling man-made concepts that which most deeply terrifies and fascinates us.

these practices began to yield unorthodox results. Meditation on impermanence, suffering, and no-self, for example, did not—as the Buddha insisted it would—lead me to disenchantment, dispassion, and a resolve not to be born again but to an ever-deepening awareness of life’s infinitely poignant beauty.

I like to think of dharma practice today as venturing into a world of imagination, one in which each individual seeks to articulate a vision in terms of the particular needs of his or her own situatioṇ Buddhism would then become less and less the preserve of an institution, and more and more an experience that is owned by ordinary people in ordinary communities.

The Four are presented in that order because that is the order in which they occur as tasks to be performed: fully knowing suffering leads to the letting go of craving, which leads to experiencing its cessation, which leads to the cultivation of the path.

In the Sangīti Sutta, Sāriputta mentions three kinds of intelligence (paññā).1 It is also a model I learned in the Tibetan traditioṇ There is intelligence that arises from hearing (sutamaya paññā), intelligence that arises from thinking (cintāmaya paññā), and intelligence that arises from cultivation or training (bhāvanāmaya paññā). In other words, you start by hearing the teachings, thereby acquiring informatioṇ But information alone is inadequate. You then have to think about it. You need to reflect upon what you have heard in a way that allows you to internalize it, so that it becomes part of a coherent and consistent view of oneself and the world. But this rational, conceptual exercise is still not enough. Whatever insights and understanding you have gained through such reflection need to be translated into actual felt experience.

In many cases we find ourselves drawn to doctrines such as rebirth not out of a genuine existential insight or concern, but rather out of a need for consolatioṇ At the level of popular religion, Buddhism, as much as any other tradition, has provided such consolatioṇ Yet if we take an agnostic position, we will find ourselves facing death as a moment of our existential encounter with life. Any examined human life involves the realization that we have been thrown into this world, without any choice, only to look forward to the prospect of being expelled at death. The sheer sense of bafflement and perplexity at this situation is crucial to spiritual awareness. To opt for a comforting, even a discomforting, explanation of what brought us here or what awaits us after death severely limits that very rare sense of mystery with which religion is essentially concerned. We thereby obscure with consoling man-made concepts that which most deeply terrifies and fascinates us.

By paying mindful attention to the sensory immediacy of experience, we realize how we are created, molded, formed by a bewildering matrix of contingencies that continually arise and vanish. On reflection, we see how we are formed from the patterning of the DNA derived from our parents, the firing of a hundred billion neurons in our brains, the cultural and historical conditioning of our times, the education and upbringing given us, all the experiences we have ever had and choices we have ever made.

be done if we are to make the shift from a belief-based Buddhism (version 1.0) to a praxis-based Buddhism (version 2.0). We have to train ourselves to the point where on hearing or reading a text from the canon our initial response is no longer “Is that true?” but “Does this work?