There has been some discussion on /r/atheism recently about Buddhism. Specifically, why Buddhism gets a free pass compared to Christianity, which seems to be the butt of so much criticism. The crux of the argument is that Buddhism is just as much a spiritual belief as Christianity, it’s not just a philosophy to live by.
And that’s absolutely true. Buddhism does have just as many crazy beliefs as Christianity. Also, it can be argued that Christianity is just as much about compassion, acceptance and kindness as Buddhism. So why aren’t the crazy Buddhists copping a barrage of animosity and ridicule?
I mean, come on – we can all agree that reincarnation is a bunch of bullshit, right? So what’s up? Why does Buddhism get a free pass?
Well, there’s the obvious geographic argument. We are English-speaking Westerners, whose culture evolved around the Judeo-Christian faiths. Christians are in our collective sights on a daily basis, knocking on our doors, pamphleting our cars, yelling at us on street corners and campuses. We see them on our TVs and we are forced to live under threat of their outrage. They don’t like abortions, and they vote. They don’t like gay marriage, and they vote… They are highly mobilized, and should they manage to gain a majority on these issues, our lives are going to change.
So Christianity is the current battle. It’s the ideology that’s most likely to have an affect on our lives.
But it’s more than that.
A Christian will tell you that Jesus was all about love and compassion. So why is it then, that we don’t associate these traits with the average Christian? Why are they yelling at me all the time? Why do they feel the need to tell me I’m going to hell for my apparent sins? Even the moderate Christian will passive-aggressively tell you that they will pray for you. I mean, who’s that helping?
Christianity, like most religions, sets up an us-vs-them paradigm. There’s the good and the bad, the saved and the sinners, if you’re not with us, you’re against us. And that’s a dangerous place to start. It’s an argument that assumes that they have an absolute truth that we heathens just haven’t cottoned onto yet. Even though Christians may have the best of intentions when trying to convert us to their religion – they genuinely don’t want us to burn in hell for all eternity – we’re not part of the group yet.
That’s where Buddhism differs. Within Buddhism, there is no room for blind faith. It sets out a clear path for spiritual and personal development that anyone can undertake according to their own understanding and ability. Buddhism actually suggests its adherents think, question and develop acceptance based on understanding.
In the Dalai Lama’s own words:
“We must conduct research and then accept the results. If they don’t stand up to experimentation, Buddha’s own words must be rejected.”
Can you imagine a priest or bishop saying that about the Bible? But perhaps most telling of all is this:
When he noticed American author John Perkins reading a book about Buddhism, the Dalai Lama told him:
“Don’t become a Buddhist. The world doesn’t need more Buddhists. Do practice compassion. The world needs more compassion.”
The Dalai Lama – the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism – actually publicly advised someone not to become a Buddhist, but to try and make a difference in the world by simply practice compassion toward his fellow man.
Buddhism is a truly peaceful religion, it doesn’t prosthelytize, it’s is very much in harmony with modern science and it preaches independent thought. In fact, some argue that Buddhism’s philosophical teachings are more relevant today then they were thousands of years ago because we have more stresses in our lives than Buddhism’s original followers.
At the end of the day, Buddhists don’t seek to force their worldview on anybody, but they are willing to teach you if you are willing to learn.
And that’s why Buddhism gets a free pass when it comes to criticizing religion.
You’re spot on your analysis; thanks for your article
We could debate the “crazy ideas” on the cartoon you posted, but over 400 people have done so, and I think it’s not worth the trouble
All I can say here is: beware of oversimplification. The cartoonist’s only flaw is believing that, by oversimplifying things, he can discard ideas as crazy, because he cannot fit them inside reason.
Imagine a similar cartoon, oversimplifying quantum mechanics, and what science “believes” how the universe works. It is, after all, a rather weird place we live in: mostly vacuum, with a few scattered particles here and there (but which have dimension zero!), following probabilities, not certainties. And we are supposed to “believe” that all this creates an universe of solid matter with completely different properties!
In fact, anyone who is a trained scientist can replicate all proof required to validate quantum mechanics. It is, after all, one of the most validated scientific theories that Humankind has come up with. But if it gets oversimplified, it seems meaningless. It cannot be fully understood without adequate training — a training which is hard, takes years, and a high degree of specialization. Still, dozens of thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands of scientists can successfully replicate the results and validate them on their own, independently. That’s why science works so well: anyone can validate it. If one has the adequate training.
Buddhism is quite the same thing. It doesn’t “postulate” anything, it just presents methods and techniques. If you follow them, you will reach the same results — it’s totally predictable and able to be validated. Yes, the strange world-view might seem strange for someone who comes across it the first time; but so does quantum mechanics.
There is actually also no “transmigration” as illustrated in the cartoon; again, it suffers from oversimplification and generalisation, and using words that have specific meanings in Western philosophy which, however, have different meanings in the context of Buddhist teachings. Since the core of Buddhism is about the non-intrinsic existence of things (including the self), but co-emerging interdependence, there is truly “nothing” that can logically “transmigrate” from one birth to another. The illustration is closer to Hinduism than to Buddhism; most forms of Hinduism do indeed believe that there is “something” that goes from one life to another (call it a “soul”, an “essence”, a “mind”, a “conscience”, whatever — “something” that persists across lives). Buddhism utterly rejects that, because it fails any objective method of evidence or reasoning — you simply have to way to validate (or falsify) that assumption. So it has to be taken as “dogma”.
Buddhism proposes a different idea. Suppose you have a sequence of candles, all unlit except the first one. Just before that candle goes out, you take a stick, light it, and light the next candle in line. Now you continue to have pretty much the same light. But the second candle is not the same as the first. It might be just microscopically different, but there will be differences. The light might look similar, too, but in truth, there will be differences — it might burn slightly brighter now and then. But, ultimately, and this is the whole point, it’s not the same light and it’s not the same candle.
What happened was that the first candle light was the cause of the second one (illustrated by the stick bringing the flame from the first candle to the second). Now this example has many flaws, of course, because one might think there is a Benevolent Candle-lighter somewhere, which is not the case. The whole point is to understand that the two candles are in a relationship of causal dependency — if there weren’t a first light, there wouldn’t be a second, third, fourth one, etc. A secondary, but essential, point is to understand that all candles share the same nature: they’re made of wax (even if their shape is always slightly different, even if we have to descend at the atom level to spot those differences), and they emit light (through the same physical process).
What the Buddhist teachings say is that each successive “rebirth” has a causal relationship of dependency — but this is not stated as “dogma”. It follows from observing the universal law of cause and effect in the whole universe. A birth always has causes — it doesn’t happen spontaneously — like, for instance, a male and a female having sex together. All actions have consequences, and this is the basis for explaining why, even though “nothing is carried over” to the next life, our actions in this life will influence a future life depending on them. Note also that to be more accurate, even this apparent “succession of lives” in a linear way is a gross oversimplification of the process (or one might claim that the “succession of lives”, by itself, had some kind of intrinsic existence — we’d drop into Hinduism doctrine again). Causation is not linear (not even in time, as quantum mechanics has already found out), and it’s only from the perspective of the macrocosmic world that things appear to have a sense of continuity. As a simple explanation this is enough for beginners; like Rutherford’s or Bohr’s atom model are good starting explanations, but are oversimplifications, for the purposes of introducing the idea to new students of physics.
At this point you might ask, very correctly and wisely, “who cares?”
And I’d have to agree with you: those subtle points are not meaningful, if you look at the most visible aspects of Buddhism. I just point them out to make your audience understand that Buddist thought, when oversimplified, seems as meaningless as any other “crazy belief system”. But so does quantum mechanics. It’s only when one delves deeper in either of them that things actually start to click into place. I personally just find it very funny that the basic principles of quantum mechanics — albeit not with the complex maths! — were proposed by very early Buddhist schools around the years 100 BCE and 100 CE and subsequently refuted. I’m curious to see how quantum mechanics will evolve, in the next few centuries, and if this evolution will replicate the reasoning used by Buddhists two millenia ago 
This is why it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that the Dalai Lama is able to discuss things with eminent quantum mechanic specialists. Of course Indian mathematics was not so advanced as ours, two thousand years ago; but the philosophic implications of the nature of the universe based on zero-dimension fundamental particles was definitely thoroughly discussed back then. It’s still part of the accumulated knowledge of Buddhism we have today, and anyone willing to study Buddhism seriously enough, will need to tackle the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics — and, perhaps most interestingly, how it can be easily demonstrated that there cannot be any “fundamental particles” like the ones proposed by the Standard Model of particle physics. Western science still has a few centuries to catch up with that
But, in the mean time, the simplification has lots of benefits, thanks to a thorough understanding of particle physics. This is why Buddhism does not reject “simplifications” — they make things easier to grasp for many people, who would be completely lost otherwise. Siddharta wanted to give everyone a different method, appropriate for one’s abilities, to progress in their training successfully; many realized practitioners were completely illiterate, and forcing everybody to take a PhD in advanced philosophy and quantum mechanics would exclude the majority of humankind from benefitting from Siddharta’s teachings. So there are simplifications at many, many levels.
But arguing that the simplifications are the core of Buddhism is a misrepresentation; it would be like claiming that Bohr’s model of the atom is the “truth” about how the universe works at the quantum level. It’s a useful simplification to engage students, let them break free of misconceptions, and encourage them to study further.
Good article, but you really need a proofreader for spelling, and to correct things like whose/who’s and your/you’re.