Why I am a Buddhist… and Why I’m Not
This essay is part of a series where I look at various faiths and explore where they have inspired me and where I have issues. Although I am a Christian, I believe that God wants us to explore and learn from other traditions as part of our spiritual journey. This is my journey, no one else’s, and the articles merely record how I see things. They are not intended to offend or convert, nor do I expect you to agree with me. I do however, appreciate feedback, friendship and further learning.
Other essays in the series:
Why I Am A Sikh… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Sufi… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Catholic… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am An Orthodox Christian… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Pagan… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Hindu… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Jew… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am an Atheist… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am an Anglican… and Why I’m Not
Brand Buddha
The lighting was dark and the music soft, rhythmic, relaxing. Ambient they call it. The drinks were overpriced and the seating comfortable. Fashionable people lounged about, chatting, caressing, kissing, whilst the large sign depicted a serene man deep in meditation. This was Buddha Bar.
It was not my kind of place.
Buddhism must be unique in the west in that it has become more a brand than a religion. Can you imagine a Jesus pub for a Mohammed café? Yet Buddha has bars, chillout lounges and a statue (or ten) in every massage parlour, reiki specialist or wellness centre. Buddha means relaxation, destressing, inner peace, meditation, basically just chilling out dude… at a price.
And that was all Buddhism ever was to me until I headed east.
Japan
Japan is a strange country. It has around 126 million people of whom around 80% of the population, follow Shinto, the native religion based around the worship of kami (spirits). People have Shinto weddings, attend Shinto festivals and pray at their local Shinto shrine. Yet around 84 million Japanese are Buddhist (67% of the population). Which is strange, since the numbers don’t add up.
Japan was my first real introduction to a radically different religious world view. The major faiths of the world are often delineated between the Abrahamic (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and the Dharmic (Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism) and Buddhism was my first dive into this other hemisphere of human spirituality. And it is different, the first lesson being that it is not exclusive. In Japan you can be a Buddhist and a follower of Shinto. There’s no issue with it. All those people who marry in a Shinto ceremony; most of them are buried in a Buddhist funeral. Confronted with an extremely alien culture for the first time, and diving into my own faith deeply through my engagement with the Catholic church in Toyama, I also started looking into the majority faiths of the land that I was living in. And so, for the first time in my life, Buddha became more than just a brand.
One of the first books I read was The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery by Janwillem van de Wetering. It was a compelling although confusing book. The author was a Dutch convert who joined a Japanese monastery hoping to find the inner peace and calm that the Buddha Bar boasts you’ll find in its establishments. He did not, but he did find something. The descriptions of the spiritual exercises he undertook intrigued me, as too did the abbot’s comment upon reading the Sermon on the Mount. He had not come across Jesus before, but declared firmly, “Whoever this man is, he is most definitely a Buddha.”
A Buddha. Prior to Japan I’d thought that Buddha was a name. the name of the founder and God of Buddhism. But it is a title, meaning an “enlightened being”. A being who is so spiritually complete that he has managed to get off the Wheel of Samsara, that cycle of death and rebirth that, according to Buddhism, we are all trapped in, and enter nirvana. The Buddha was an Indian prince named Siddhartha Gautama.
He lived in South Asia in the 5th to 6th centuries BC. He was a prince with everything that a man could desire until one night he sneaked out of the palace and encountered the Four Sights. The first three — old age, disease, and death — made him realise that the good times do not last forever, whilst the fourth — a holy man who was meditating to attain release — showed him another path.
So, he left the palace and followed various religious traditions, such as studying under Hindu and Jain masters. At one point he practiced austerities so severe that he almost starved himself to death. But then, one day, whilst sat under the bodhi tree, it came to him in an instant. He achieved enlightenment, nirvana, and so was realised from the cycle of death and rebirth. He became a Buddha, but he was only one of many. And, with the right meditation and living, Buddhahood is something that all of us can attain.
Yes, even me.
I was learning a lot. Rebirth and karma were alien concepts to my Christian mind, whilst nirvana no one seemed to be able to explain except by saying what it wasn’t, (it is an absence of suffering, etc). What is more, whenever someone entered into a discussion on Buddhism, it seems to be necessary to use a whole different language to talk about it. Samsara, karma, nirvana, dharma, and so on. It literally was a foreign tongue and that pushed me away.
Nonetheless, I persisted, and one great help was Neil. I met Neil in Tokyo on the day I arrived in Japan. He was a fellow English teacher and a fellow native of Stoke. He also lived two provinces away and was a Buddhist convert. We became friends and indeed, still are.
Neil explained Buddhism in terms I could understand. He could navigate some of the different sects and approaches. What was most interesting though, was that Neil, despite being a convert, was, well… normal. Unlike many converts to different faiths, he did not change his name, grow masses of facial hair, wear weird outfits, and feel obliged to marry one of his faith. Instead, he was just, well… Neil. And I liked that. A religion that accepted him as he was rather than trying to make him wear a mask. True, he was vegetarian, which was stranger then than now, but he didn’t have to be. He could still be Buddhist and eat meat. It was a choice, not an obligation.
And so, I read on. I became acquainted with the basics, the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and I visited temples, most notably with Neil, the incredible 13th century temple at Eiheiji, the headquarters of the Sōtō Zen School. However, the next stage of my Buddhist pilgrimage was not under his tutelage but instead, that of Thao.
Vietnam
I met Thao in Japan. She was living in the same town as me and she spoke English. She was also Vietnamese and Buddhist. Pretty soon, on top of all that, she was my girlfriend, and we were engaged to be married.
It wasn’t that Neil’s influence finished and Thao’s began. The two overlapped, but when I moved to Vietnam to live with her, Buddhism entered my world in a whole different way: it became part of daily life.
I awoke to the smell of incense smoke burning on the family altar and every Sunday we visited temples with her mum and brother. Festivals were a big thing, every so often there was a twenty-four hour fast when they only ate vegetarian, and we once went on a neighbourhood pilgrimage to a number of far-flung shrines. Buddhism dictated a lot of life in a quiet, non-invasive way.
Yet it was a curious Buddhism, a world away from Neil’s practices. Neither Thao nor any of her family ever meditated, and they rarely attended a service in the temple. Instead, their devotions involved going in to somewhere particularly auspicious, lighting incense and giving money for a particular prayer (her mum’s always seemed to include a lottery win) and then going out for a meal.
And there was that home altar. Weirdly, Buddha was nowhere to be seen. Instead, deceased ancestors and Quan Am took pride of place.
Quan Am is the Vietnamese rendering of Kwan Yin (Chinese) or Kannon (Japanese). She is the Goddess of Mercy, a Bodhisattva of Compassion who appears Mother Mary-like to devotees and helps them.
Bodhisattvas are interesting. They are, like buddhas, extremely holy human beings who reach the brink of enlightenment. However, unlike the buddhas, they forego that enlightenment so that they may stay on the Wheel of Samsara and help other people on their journey by being reborn again and again.
Thao saw Quan Am as the mother she always wished she’d had. Coming from a very male tradition, I struggled to relate to her, but as my Marian devotion grew through contact with Catholicism, she became clearer. Years later I read a wonderful book on her entitled ‘Bodhisattva of Compassion: The Mystical Tradition of Kuan Yin’ by John Blofeld, which really brought her alive to a Western reader. I now find her powerful and inspiring.
What struck me though was how divorced all these Vietnamese lay Buddhism was from the academic Buddhism Neil had spoken about. Gone was the contemplation, meditation, quiet non-attachment and in its place a hectic frenzy of ancestor worship, lucky numbers, and demands to win the jackpot. In an effort to understand, I asked a Buddhism friend of mine, and she directed me to the tiny Chùa Tường Quang Vam Thuat by the Saigon River.
The Chùa Tường Quang Vam Thuat would have been an idyllic oasis of peace and serenity were it not located directly under the flightpath of Ho Chi Minh City’s Airport. It was a humble, unremarkable place, but I liked both its ambience and the solitary monk who lived there and spoke with me for hours in halting English about his faith. He explained how the lay people did not know the sutras, how traditional Chinese religions and local cultural practices had got mixed up with it all, yet how they could all still be helped towards enlightenment. I left feeling content yet also even more aware of the gulf between Buddhism the philosophy and Buddhism the religion.
Back in Britain, I continued my journey. I talked with Neil, read books and completed a meditation course with the Kadampa tradition. But when Thao and I separated, and Buddhism faded. The home altar was converted to Christianity although the incense that I still light leaves the lingering fragrance in my home of the faith that introduced me to it as a practice, whilst a statue of Quan Am looks kindly down upon my living room from the top of a bookcase. And the things that I have learnt — the Four Noble Truths, the reality of impermeance and much more — seer through my spiritual life. When I walk a pilgrim, I enjoy each village or town knowing that I will move on and, if I ever return one day, they will have changed too.
So, have I become a Buddhist?
Erm… no.
There are essentially two reasons why I have never considered becoming a Buddhist and I’ll outline them now.
The first is the obvious one. As I said before, I see Buddhism as an incredible philosophy but an awful religion. That sounds harsh but I shall try to justify it. The philosophy is powerful, life-changing, inspirational. But the average Buddhist receives a garbled version of it at best. The gulf between lay followers and monastics is huge and it is often just left to the monastics to pray for the rest of us, with the passive acts of offering money and incense being enough to salve the gods. Whatever their faults may be (and they are manifold) the Abrahamic traditions teach their faiths to their adherents. In the madrassah, Sunday School and yeshiva, but also, the very act of sitting through a weekly service and hearing the liturgy and a sermon imparts at least the basics. Buddhism fails to do this to many of its faithful which is why, I believe, as a religion it fails. Whatever the truth and brilliance of its teachings may be, if no one hears them, then there is an issue.
The second reason is opaquer, so opaque in fact, that I struggle to articulate it clearly, but here goes.
Over the years I’ve known numerous people who have chosen a Buddhist path as their spiritual journey. I’m not talking about the cultural Buddhists like Thao and her family, but those who have come from outside the tradition and have either converted or adopted Buddhist philosophy as their guiding light. And by and large, with them (Neil is a notable exception here), I have noticed something.
Part of the approach taken by Western Buddhists is to view non-attachment in a very literal way. That is, I see friends who follow this path to withdraw more and more from the world. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I am a huge admirer of the early Celtic saints who did the same. However, it is not necessarily a good thing either. We are in this world and part of it and through it we can create positive change. However, the people that I have known — and I appreciate that they may not be typical and the way they follow things might not be as intended — seem to become more passive, observers rather than participants. “I used to get involved in things like that, but I realised it was negative and so now I do not.” Hmm… again, not necessarily bad but when I witness this, I am reminded of the words of the Pink Floyd song:
There is no pain you are receding
A distant ship smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying
When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown
The dream is gone
I have become comfortably numb
They have become comfortably numb.
Again, this can be healthy. On a macro level I think there are now very few people (Tony Blair notwithstanding) who would see Western interference in the affairs of Afghanistan in the noughties as positive. Now, putting aside the fact that a lot of it was motivated by oil money and power politics, there were those who genuinely wanted to bring “freedom” (whatever that might be) and better the lot of Afghani women. They failed and, if anything, only made things worse. If the Afghani woman is going to have a better lot, she shall have to fight for it herself.
Similarly, on a micro level, the village busybody who wants to know everyone’s business and has advice to dish out to all (save herself) is not a positive character. Conversely though, total non-attachment and passivity can be just as damaging. Live and let live means to let abuse and suffering continue, to not get involved as it could affect your own energies, to never step outside of your spiritual safe place because the world beyond might challenge you. A good position to take when dealing with trauma perhaps, but when stable and well, far less so.
At least for me. A friend of mine once said that I was more Protestant than I realised, and he was entirely correct. Protestantism, at its best, is a faith of social justice, of helping the oppressed and righting wrongs. It is building a New Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. And that speaks to me. It guides my politics, my work with the trade union movement, my charity work with the WEA and my faith. I am, by my nature, active not passive. That is not right or wrong, it just is. It is me, how I was created, and should not be repressed. Whatever path or paths I choose to follow, activism must be within them. I am not saying that Buddhism cannot be an activist faith — we have ample evidence of when it has been — but that strain does not seem to be central to it.
And I do not wish to be comfortably numb.
I’d prefer to be painfully alive.
Yet Buddhism still has an immense influence on my life. The Four Noble Truths form the heart of my spiritual thinking and so too does the recognition of the impermanence of everything. The Abrahamic traditions do not stress this enough. I recall a church advert for Easter showing the Cross and declaring how that sacrifice redeemed mankind forever. So too in Islam, where the Prophet Mohammed is declared to be the final one, no more will ever come, no more are needed. Indeed, some schools of Islamic thought declare that, after the age of the Four Rightly-Guided Caliphs, the Gates of Learning were closed forever. Both positions smack of a desire for permanence and certainty. Yet nothing is permanent. I will die tonight in my sleep and be reborn in a slightly different form and fashion tomorrow. The experiences and ideas that I had at twenty-six were totally different to those of me at forty-six and in twenty years’ time — but a pin-prick in the vast eternity of existence — they will change again. And thus, the spiritual solutions that we require must also change, whether we like it or not.
And so, in one key way, I believe I am a Buddhist, or at least, like the Buddha. Controversially, perhaps even more so than many Buddhists are. For Siddhartha Gautama set off from his palace on a journey. He explored the various traditions of his world, not staying with one master or another. He tried ascetism, meditation, and a myriad of other paths. And in the end, he found his own path and that is what brought him enlightenment. That exploration of various paths is, I believe, what I am attempting through these essays and my life although, of course, the same end result is far from guaranteed.
For there is one more element that I have not yet discussed, and it is summed up by this famous Zen koan:
“If you meet the Buddha upon the road, kill him.”[1]
What does that mean? Well, my understanding is this: Buddha left his home and explored. He found his path and it brought him enlightenment. But it was a path unique to him. He exhorts us to do the same, find our path. Which does not mean to ape him and enshrine him. His path is not yours. He is not God. So, if you do meet him on the road, do not follow him at all, but kill him, for by doing so you can guarantee that you will not fall into the error of copying him and swapping your purpose as a pilgrim or an explorer into that of an obedient disciple or follower.
Which is something that he never was.
Written 25/09/2023–06/10/2023 Smallthorne, Coventry to Stoke-on-Trent, UK
Copyright © 2023, Matthew E. Pointon
[1] Attributed to Linji Yixuan (also spelled Lin-chi I-hsuan, d. 866), one of the most prominent masters of Zen history. Popularised in the West as being the title of a famous work on psychology.