Responsibility

Buddhism has been around seemingly forever; and is now available practically everywhere in the Western world.

That makes it easy to suppose—without thinking about it—that Buddhism falls naturally from the sky, like a gentle sweet rain. Or that it is a public utility, like water, reliably provided by a distant, faceless bureaucracy, at a minor cost. It is easy—but mistaken—to assume this will always be true.

In my opinion, once you have attended more than a few events with a Buddhist organization, over more than a few months, you have a responsibility to it. Buddhist events depend on the work of many unpaid volunteers. Typically, the fee you pay (if any) does not cover costs, and the difference is made up by donations from others.

“Responsibility” might not be an attractive word. Pompous adults use it to lecture teenagers. It sounds old-fashioned—Victorian, even.

Unfashionable Victorian virtues are vital in Vajrayana Buddhism, however. Responsibility, diligence, honor, respect, consideration, loyalty, gallantry: these are essential. They are Buddhist virtues because they are based on facing reality and accepting that we cannot take a “not my problem” attitude. They are Vajrayana virtues because they assume that we are already fine people—not hopelessly stuck in possessiveness, resentment, and ignorance.

There is no “ought” about this. “Responsibility,” in Vajrayana, is not a moral issue. It is a purely practical one.

Organized religion

Buddhism is a practical reality that cannot exist in the abstract. It exists only because local people work to produce it locally. That means holding classes, retreats, and meditation groups. It means producing books, web sites, and podcasts. This takes organization.

That is another unattractive word. Many people distrust organized religion—and rightly so. Personally, I hate organizations. I am not a “joiner” by nature, and I find that organizations usually end up mainly performing meaningless bureaucratic rituals for the benefit of the bureaucracy.

However, delivering Buddhism involves much work by many people. The scale of this is not obvious, until you look “behind the scenes.” We have to coordinate all that work. In the best case, that is all an organization is.

Time and energy

Buddhist organizations run mainly on the creativity, skills, enthusiasm, and hard work of volunteers.

Small organizations do not have the money to hire anyone. Aro, for example, currently has no employees. (We are now discussing the possibility of hiring a part-time organizer, for the first time.)

Once you are “going steady” with a Buddhist group, it is time to volunteer. Otherwise, you are taking more than you are giving. How much time you can volunteer, and what you can do, depends on your circumstances and skills. I believe all of us are responsible for doing something, however.

A group organizer may ask for volunteers for particular tasks, in which case you can just say “yes.”

you need to peek backstage

More often, to find out how you can help, you will need to “peek backstage.” You need to talk to several people to find out who in the organization does what, who is overloaded, and what tasks are not getting done. Group organizers may be somewhat reluctant to give you a backstage tour. That is not because they are hiding dark secrets, but because it takes time and energy. Also they are probably embarrassed by how chaotic and amateurish some aspects of the organization are. (This is inevitable in any volunteer organization.) You may need to be gently persistent, to persuade them that you are serious enough about wanting to help that it is worth their time to help you find something you can do.

A good start is to ask if you could help with set-up and take-down before and after an event. That is a small task, and it will give you a chance to interact with the organizers “behind the scenes.” (Advice to organizers: always say “yes,” even if you don’t really need the help. It’s a chance to size up a potential volunteer for bigger jobs.)

Some of the work done by a typical Buddhist group: organizing events; event set-up and take-down; publicity (fliers, advertising, web); newsletters (writing, layout, printing, mailing); web sites (writing, graphic design, Photoshop, systems administration); administration (bookkeeping, dealing with legal requirements on charitable organizations, keeping the contact database); arts and crafts (creating paintings, ritual objects, robes).

Volunteering shouldn’t be a burden. Realistically, much of the work is stuff no one would particularly choose. However, it should be at least somewhat enjoyable, some of the time. Mainly that is because it is an opportunity to share and be a part of a community. That is part of the meaning of sangha: we enjoy each other’s company, and we enjoy the fact that we have a shared practical commitment to serving Dharma.

Money

Buddhism should be available to everyone, regardless of how little money they have.

Most Buddhist organizations (including Aro) do not charge for teachings. Many of our events are free. There are no “special” doctrines or practices available only for a fee. The various Aro websites provide more than a thousand pages of free teachings.

Teaching events, however, have to be held somewhere. That usually means paying rent, or a mortgage. This is a main expense for Buddhist organizations, and it is the reason we have to charge for attendance (not for the teaching, as such) in many cases. Often events run at a loss, which means that part of the cost is subsidized by donations.

The other main expense for most religious organizations is the living expenses of the teachers. In the case of Aro, that comes mostly from direct donations from individuals, rather than from admission fees or through the organization.

With some exceptions, Buddhist organizations in the West are usually woefully short of money. They suffer periodic financial crises, operate on a shoestring, are distracted by the need for fundraising, and cannot make Buddhism available in ways it should be, due to lack of funds.

a strange situation

This is a strange situation. Christians in the West, and Buddhists in Asia, understand that they are responsible for donating enough money that their religious organizations can run effectively. Maybe Western Buddhists confuse “there is no charge for the teachings” with “I have no responsibility to help make them available.”

How much is “enough”? Traditionally, Jews, Christians, Sikhs, and others donate ten percent of their income. Many no longer do, but it is clearly feasible, and not unreasonable.

There is a like-it-or-not economic fact here. Any religious organization that

1. has teachers/priests who do not have other employment, and
2. holds events somewhere other than members’ own homes

needs a few percent of attendees’ income, on average, in order to function. It costs that much to provide those things. When you go through the financial math, there is no way to work around that reality. Some of the money can come from program fees; the rest must come from donations.

How much of that you feel responsible for personally will depend on your circumstances and on your level of involvement and enthusiasm.

You might ask “what fraction of the meaning or value in my life comes from Buddhism,” and consider allocating that fraction of your income to it. If Buddhism is five percent of what is good in your life, five percent of your income probably exceeds what you spend on retreats, books, and so forth. You could donate the remainder.

I would probably not recommend donating much more than ten percent of your income, no matter how important Buddhism is to you. Sometimes people make crazily big donations they later regret. You could leave a large amount in your will, though.

Of course, it is impossible to put an exact percentage number on meaningfulness. But this is a starting point for thinking about what you feel responsible for.

Endangered species

The endangered Himalayan Red Panda or “Firefox.” Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Buddhism may not survive this century.

That might sound alarmist. Buddhism has been around for 2500 years. It has three or four hundred million adherents currently—as many as the total population of the U.S. or Europe. In fact, it is unlikely that Buddhism could completely disappear in the next 90 years. But I think it could easily dwindle into irrelevance. If it exits the century with no ability to influence the global culture, it might as well be dead.

Buddhism faces three threats—two old and one new. The old ones are internal degeneration and external oppression; the new one is Buddhism’s collision with the global consumer culture.

I discuss the first two threats on this page. The new threat is probably the most serious, so I will discuss it in detail on a separate page.

Internal degeneration has been a problem for Buddhism from the beginning. According to legend, the first thing Buddha thought after attaining enlightenment was “Oh, wow.” The second thing he thought was “Everyone has always been like this.” The third thing was “Nobody is going to understand this. Trying to explain it would be a complete waste of time.”

Luckily, he changed his mind. But Buddhism has remained counter-intuitive, unappealing, difficult, and often misunderstood. There is always a danger that, as it passes from generation to generation, the heart of the matter will be lost. There are two risks: of sterile orthodoxy, and of misguided reforms. Both have happened frequently, despite best intentions; and (ironically) due to best intentions; and also due to bad intentions.

There’s many things we can do help Buddhism survive, and to resist degeneration. We can make sure that texts are translated and reproduced accurately. We can insist that teachers be qualified and accredited. We can check current teaching against historical records to make sure it does not wander. We can create institutions whose job is to make sure all those things happen. On a national scale, this requires a large, expensive bureaucracy. Its activities are likely to be resisted by enemies of the true teaching. Almost everywhere Buddhism has been successful, it has had official state support. We can work to establish Buddhism as a state religion; then we can use the state’s resources to fund institutions and stamp out wrong ideas. Usually the state will demand certain changes in what we teach, in exchange for its support, but that will be reasonable price to pay to ensure Buddhism’s survival . . .

Obviously, my last paragraph got increasingly satirical. The problem is that honest efforts to preserve Buddhism can head down a slipperly slope to rigid, sterile orthodoxy. This has happened over and over through Buddhist history. As we slide further down that slope, essential principles and functions are forgotten. Experiential understanding is replaced with scholarship; then scholarship is replaced with text-worship. Living practice turns into rote ritual performance. Yana slip occurs as explanations are watered down for mass consumption.

This pattern comes from our liking form and fearing emptiness. Our response to emptiness—the possibility that Buddhism will change or be lost—is to impose form. We try to control the situation. But often the result is that Buddhist words and forms are saved, but their meanings are lost. As religious control is imposed, Buddhism becomes useful to the state as a means for social control. After two or three hundred years, Buddhism becomes little more than a repressive ideological tool of the ruling class.

At that point, Buddhism must be revived, renewed, reformed, recreated, by a hero. A hero is required for the task of creative destruction. When form is locked into place, it must be shattered to create the empty ground on which something more dynamic can arise. This cycle of gradual slides into repressive rigidity, alternating with sudden renewals, appears throughout history, in every Buddhist culture.

Hui Neng tears up the sutras. Essential Buddhism depends on lived experience. Book-learning is useful as a tool; but when it becomes the goal, Buddhism dies.

When a hero breaks through orthodoxy and re-forms Buddhism in empty space, a new lineage begins. Usually, the founder claims to be restoring the Buddhism of the Good Old Days, before the past few centuries of degeneration. This may be partly true, but it seems that each reformation requires innovation. Even if it were possible to recreate the Buddhism of the Good Old Days, it probably wouldn’t work very well in the ambiguous present day.

Many people would like to be heroes. Not all of them are capable of producing a version of Buddhism that is genuinely helpful for their times. Some have probably been more interested in personal gain and glory than in being helpful.

Possibly the only thing all Buddhists can agree on is that most reform movements have gone astray. Of course, we Buddhists do not agree on which were accurate and which were wrong-headed. That is why there are thousands of Buddhist sects, with extremely diverse doctrines and practices.

So, in opposite ways, attempting to preserve Buddhism as it has been, and attempting to reform it to be helpful in the present, are both risky. This is the dance of form and emptiness.

Modern circumstances do not help resolve this dilemma. In fact, rapid social change makes the risks all the greater. All we can do is to try the best we can, while keeping a skeptical eye on our own motivation, whether we are engaged in preservation or renewal or both.

External threats

History is full of fanatics with some One True Religion forcing it on others. Sometimes they succeed in completely wiping out alternatives. Many religions have gone extinct this way.

Buddhism may be exceptionally vulnerable, because it is less willing than most to use violence in self-defense.

Buddhism has competed for survival with Hinduism in India, Shinto in Japan, Confucianism and Taoism in China, Bön in Tibet, and so on. In these cases, uneasy truces were formed.

However, Islam destroyed Buddhism almost completely in India. Muslims also entirely eliminated Buddhism from Central Asia. (The various –stans were Buddhist strongholds at one time.)

More recently, Communism—a religion for all practical purposes—mostly wiped out Buddhism in Russia, China, Tibet, North Korea, and elsewhere.

Currently, this seems less of a threat in the West. Buddhism benefits greatly from the liberal principles of individual religious freedom, separation of church and state, and tolerant religious co-existence.

However, these principles are themselves under constant attack. Large minorities in Western countries want to establish theocracies, and constantly agitate for restrictions of religious freedom.

We cannot be complacent about this. I make regular donations to the American Civil Liberties Union. In the U.S., it defends freedom of religion, and freedom from religion, almost single-handedly.

There is an interesting interaction between the internal and external threats. Several studies say that Christian evangelism in traditionally-Buddhist Asia works in some places and not others. It fails where Buddhism is actually practiced by lay people. In places Buddhism has sunk into irrelevant, dead institutional orthodoxy, Christianity is more appealing, and gathers many converts.

Twilight of the isms

Beihai Stupa, Beijing

The era of –isms and –ists may be over. If so, what about Buddhism, and Buddhists?

Can Buddhism survive the onslaught of global modernization? Does it matter? What can we do now to keep Buddhism alive for future generations?

We live in the new age of a global consumer culture. Not long ago, English people ate English food, listened to English music, and talked on English telephones. Now that has changed—all over the world. Malaysians eat pizza in Kuala Lumpur; Chinese dance to Björk in Shanghai; the phones sold in Buenos Aires are designed in Finland and manufactured in Taiwan. Everything is available everywhere. And we feel free to pick and choose from within offerings. I like sushi but not tempura; I love The Avalanches’ “Frontier Psychiatrist,” but not anything else they have done.

Not long ago, when it came to making sense of life, people depended on systems produced locally. If you were Chinese, you were a Communist, because that was all that was available. If you were Tibetan, you were a Buddhist. If you were European, you had a few more choices—Christianity, psychoanalysis, Existentialism—but still not many.

Increasingly, we have the same attitude to religions and philosophies that we do to food. We see no reason to restrict ourselves to those produced in our home country. We see no reason to restrict ourselves to one. We see no reason to swallow anything whole. Why not take the bits we like and leave the rest? We no longer base our identity on the system we belong to. We have no brand loyalty.

We buy, reluctantly or enthusiastically, a bit of Nike, a bit of Nokia, a bit of Pepsi—but we trust those companies just as far as we can throw them. “Question authority” is intrinsic to consumerism. We know that global corporations will do whatever they can get away with. In the wake of endless scandals, we are automatically cynical about corporate propaganda.

The consumerist attitude pulls religions and philosophies down onto the same level. We regard such systems as brands or product lines. The –isms have all had their own scandals, have been critically dissected, and are widely regarded as having failed. We no longer expect to find pure, durable replacements. We treat the grand claims of spiritual systems as worthless advertising hype.

We still have the same needs that systems once addressed. We face moral dilemmas. We rail against injustice. We want to know “why am I here?” We wonder how best to use our lives. We are sure there must be more to life than mundane consumption, achievement, reproduction—but what? We need to find some way of coping with old age, sickness, and death.

Each system was—or claimed to be—a complete, coherent, consistent solution to such problems. Consumer culture has collided with those systems—and shattered them into a million jagged shards. The systems disintegrate, but isolated fragments—concepts and practices—become individual products.

We try to assemble a working, personalized set of answers from the debris. We may combine Wiccan goddess rituals with Jewish community values and Buddhist emptiness meditation. Or we practice Kung-Fu, teach Gestalt therapy, and study postmodern deconstructionism. Or we choose voluntary simplicity, practice the Alexander Technique, and rely on a channeled spirit guide—whom we don’t exactly believe in, but who gives consistently useful advice.

The risk is that the fragments do not fit together; they cannot cohere; they contradict each other. Each fragment was once part of a system that had unifying principles; the principles of each system opposed those of the others. Each fragment may carry with it an echo of the system it once belonged to. It may not function outside that context. It may actively work against other fragments from other systems, in ways that may not be obvious.

There is no point arguing about whether the end of systems is a good or bad thing. It has good and bad aspects; but it is not something we can evaluate and decide whether to accept or reject. It is, I believe, an unstoppable, accelerating force. It doesn’t matter whether it is good or bad; it is the world we live in, and probably the world everyone will live in through this century. The realistic question is what to do, once we accept it as given.

What about Buddhism?

Buddhism is—or was—a comprehensive system, of the sort that now appear to be ending. On a previous page, I suggested that it may not survive this century. Its collision with modern consumer culture is the main reason I think this. It is already impossible to take large parts of it seriously. Buddhist scripture says that the earth is flat; we could not believe that, no matter how hard we tried. My guess is that Buddhism, as a coherent tradition, will dwindle into irrelevance within a few decades.

This guess may be too pessimistic. However, is at least a possibility we should prepare for. What, if anything, do we want to do if preserving traditions intact is impossible? If Buddhism can't survive as a complete system, but fragments are likely to survive, what is worth trying to preserve and how? Such questions are the main topic of the rest of this section.

“Buddhism is for boomers”

Buddhist organizers are severely worried. The average age of ethnically-Western Buddhists is well over 50; and ones under 40 are scarce. Unless something changes, Western Buddhism will decline drastically over the next few decades, as the baby boomers die off. There has been much discussion of why this is and what to do about it.

My guess is this is actually not a Buddhist problem, and not a Western one. I think it is mainly due to the shattering of all systems in their collision with the global consumer culture (discussed on the previous page). Younger generations are decreasingly interested in taking on any system as a whole. If that is right, the problem is even more serious than most Buddhist organizers realize.

On the other hand, I will suggest that Western Buddhism is uniquely qualified to address the underlying problem. We have an extraordinary opportunity, along with the extraordinary danger.

A bit of cultural history

The baby boom generation grew up in a world that had a coherent mainstream culture. Although more than one source of meaning was available—you could be a Marxist or Freudian—those were marginal; and anyway they were offshoots of the main Western culture.

As the boomers came of age, in the 1960s, they found the mainstream culture restrictive and wrong-headed. They set about creating a counter-culture. At first it seemed that a coherent alternative youth culture could be created in opposition to the mainstream. In the 1970s, it became obvious that inventing a new culture is difficult, and also that young people had different ideas of what was important. In a spirit of openness, many alternatives were tried. Among these were religions imported from Asia.

Becoming a Buddhist made sense to boomers, who grew up in a traditional culture, based partly on a coherent religious system (Christianity). Buddhism was an alternative religious system, from a different traditional culture. In the world in which boomers grew up, there were a small number of alternatives (Catholicism, Judaism, a few Protestant sects), and sometimes people switched. Switching to a newly imported religious system, from a different traditional culture, was an understandable move.

In the 1980s, the counter-culture split into a thousand sub-cultures. Increasingly, everyone belongs to several of them—the skateboarding subculture, the online-gaming subculture, the trance music subculture, the global expatriate subculture, the tattoo and body-mod subculture, the swing dance subculture, the vampire lovers’ subculture, and so forth. These are not just hobbies, as music or sports enthusiasms would have been in the 1950s; they are ways of life.

Meanwhile, the former mainstream culture was sidelined. Rejected by most boomers and subsequent generations, it is now a quaint little subculture of its own. No other subculture has become dominant (nor does it seem feasible that any will). The result is that, since the 1980s, the West has had no mainstream culture.

Why the post-boomer generations aren’t Buddhist

Anyone born in a modern country after 1970 has never seen an intact cultural tradition (unless they have travelled to a poor country that retains one). Those under 40 have never seen a religious system that is not falling apart at its edges.

Religious systems have shattered, under the influence of the global consumer culture. The consumer attitude is “I’ll take whatever I want and leave the rest—a bit of this, a bit of that—why should I have to commit to anything?” In the New Age, fragments of dozens of religious systems were re-combined in a spiritual stew.

For most under 40, the idea of a religious system as a total answer to life makes no sense. “Becoming a Buddhist” (or “becoming an Anything-ist”) makes no sense. Buddhism is one subculture in which you may participate, but it is not something that could have a claim on you. The perceived demand that “you have to belong to Buddhism, because we have all the answers” seems like just one more delusional boomer power-trip.

Getting clear about the problem . . .

This is not a Buddhist problem. It is a problem for every religion—certainly for every “moderate” religion. (Fundamentalist religions are currently doing well, but as I’ll explain later, I think that is temporary.)

It is also not a Western problem. As traditionally-Buddhist countries modernize, young Asians seem even less interested in Buddhism than their Western counterparts. (More about that later, too.)

If this diagnosis is right, then remedies to the perceived problem “young Westerners aren’t interested in Buddhism” won’t work—unless the problem is recast as “people who grew up without a coherent mainstream system are not interested in switching to alternative systems.”

. . . and about the opportunity

Few religions seem capable of coping with our current cultural condition. Any path forward must acknowledge what is right about the consumer culture, while also showing a way beyond consumerism’s failures.

The consumer culture continually corrodes any traditional or rigid system. The New Age—if you can call it a religion—is perfectly compatible with the consumer culture, but fails to challenge its inherent contradictions.

The understanding of the non-duality of emptiness and form is unique to Buddhism. Buddhism can point out both what is missing, and what is valuable, in both contemporary culture and in traditional absolutist religions, in terms of emptiness and form. It can point to a way of life that combines the insights of both, in non-duality.

“Buddhism” is an obstacle to Buddhism

Buddha says: Let’s all be happy!

Nowadays everyone knows what “Buddhism” is. You can find it in any upscale supermarket, gift shop, or bookstore. It will be next to the scented candles and the books on healing your inner child. “Buddhism” has incense, kitschy little statues of Hotei (the “Laughing Buddha”), and wind chimes. It also has books with cute old Asian guys on the cover. They contain saccharine sayings and simplistic stories. Their core message is that if only we were all very nice, we could be happy.

Most people know they do not want “Buddhism.” They think it is obviously stupid, unrealistic, and irrelevant. They don’t believe that being nice would make them happy; they don’t want “healing”; they don’t care about “inner peace.” They want to get on with life—the real thing, not some imported Asian fantasy. (Me too.)

“Buddhism” is not such a bad thing. If everyone were very nice, the world would be stiflingly dull, but probably overall better. This kind of “Buddhism,” though, is at most only a tiny part of actual Buddhism. (Whether it is Buddhist at all is open to question.) Mostly Buddhism is not about being nice, and is not about happiness.

I worry that the word “Buddhism” has become a main obstacle to teaching real Buddhism. As soon as you use the B-word, people think wind chimes, and you have lost anyone with a realistic attitude. Instead, you attract those who want “Buddhism,” which you do not intend to provide. Much of your teaching has to aim at correcting people’s pre-existing, wrong ideas of what Buddhism is.

This problem gets worse all the time, as more and more people learn about “Buddhism.” Forty years ago everyone knew they didn't know what Buddhism was; so they had open minds. Now many people think they know enough about Buddhism to be sure they don’t want it.

Maybe I am a worry-wart

My concern may be excessive. Most of the Aro teachers I have discussed this with think I’m wrong. They find that generally people are open to Buddhism, and not repelled by the word. Since I am not a teacher, they are probably right. (But I’m obstinate.)

What excites me about Brad Warner, and the punk dharma movement, is that they are evidence that I’m wrong. He uses the B-word, and definitely teaches Buddhism, not “Buddhism.” Yet he is popular with people whose reaction to hearing wind chimes might be to put on some nice soothing death metal and turn it up to 11, until the traumatic memory of the sound has been washed away.

Still, Brad Warner’s thousands of followers, however encouraging, are a drop in the ocean. Buddhism needs to reach tens of millions of people who hate wishful thinking, not thousands.

A thousand more gimmicks

Some serious Buddhists have dismissed “Buddhism for punks” as a gimmick. I would agree that the connections between punk and Buddhism are pretty superficial. It is an analogy that does not go very far. What’s valuable about using the word “punk” is that it proclaims that “this is a brand of Buddhism that is for people who are realistic about some things—people who hate fake niceness and moral hypocrisy and kitschy sentimentality.”

If that is a gimmick, then what I think Buddhism needs urgently is a dozen more gimmicks. A hundred more gimmicks. Buddhism should be available to everyone—and if it takes gimmicks to reach some people, let’s have thousands of them.

Buddhism for vampires

Maybe we should do some brainstorming? Here’s an example. How about “Buddhism for vampires”? Vampires dominate the best-seller lists; they are nothing if not mainstream. But they do appeal to people who are a bit off-center, and open to slightly scary new ideas. And most vampire lovers are probably not into wind chimes.

“Buddhism for vampires” is intriguing: what could that be about? Like “punk Dharma,” it makes it obvious that we are not talking about nicey-nicey New Age junk.

“Buddhism for vampires” could be strictly gimmicky—annoyingly cutesy—nothing more than a quick way to cash in on two fads.

But it could also be quite serious—for those willing to explore the razor edge of life and death, lust and aggression, monstrosity and nobility, horror and beauty, romance and madness, and the eternal moment where all these converge, in non-duality. These are main themes of Buddhist Tantra—and of vampire fiction.

In fact, the connections between Buddhism and vampirism seem to me much more pertinent than those between Buddhism and punk. I may not take this too far, but I may offer some more details at some point. 

[Update, May 2010: I have now taken it way too far, with a whole web site devoted to Buddhism for Vampires.]

Oh, hey, by the way—did you know that Garab Dorje, the founder of Dzogchen, was also named “Rolang Dewa,” which means “Blissful Vampire”? (I am not making this up . . . )

And that in the Twilight Saga (which is the best-selling fictional work in history) a particularly important vampire is named “Aro”? (Clearly, that is extremely significant.)

Thought soup

In Buddhist meditation, we discover that we do not originate our own thoughts. In meditation, we allow thoughts to come and go under their own power. They do that without our making them happen. We find that they come from empty space and return to emptiness. There is nothing personal about thoughts, when we experience them without involvement.

I find this discovery compatible with a pretty recent Western perspective: that almost all of our thoughts are taken over from our culture. Our wording may be a bit different, but almost everything we think simply repeats ideas we have heard or read or heard on TV. It is unusual and difficult to think an original thought.

We swim in a sea, or soup, of talk. These are the messages we receive from the media, and also the ways our friends explain themselves and their lives. Our thoughts mainly recycle this talk, and we propagate it when we talk ourselves.

This is not a bad thing. It is inevitable. Human beings are just not smart enough to figure everything out for ourselves. We get the benefit of centuries of millions of people figuring things out for us, each adding tiny portions to the thought-soup we live in.

Of course, some of the thoughts we take on are wrong; that is the downside of belonging to a culture. Although we can’t entirely avoid that, meditation—and other aspects of Buddhism—can help us recognize that we don’t have to believe all the thoughts that pass through our heads. We can take our thought soup with a dash of salt.

When it comes to thinking about our lives, and how to live them, there are remarkably few basic ideas available. There are innumerable isms or systems around. We might try the Enneagram or secular humanism or Mormonism or eco-activism or twelve-stepping. Or Buddhism; or any of countless others. Each of these has some peculiar ideas of its own. Mainly, though, they offer different combinations, and minor variations, of a handful of fundamental approaches to life.

In the old days, when there was such a thing as a mainstream culture, the thought-soup mainly came from that culture. Ideas from other systems were available, but only to the adventurous. Those thoughts recognizably came from somewhere other than the mainstream.

Since the mainstream culture broke down, it is no longer considered important where ideas came from. Everyone says, and thinks, things like

• “You have to honor your feelings”
• “All religions point to the same truth”
• “You have to make your own, authentic choices, and fight off the mindless messages you get from society”
• “Everyone has their own truth, because everyone has their own perspective”
• “Be in the now”

Almost no one in the West had ideas like these a hundred years ago. Almost no one now realizes that they come from (respectively) psychotherapeutic theory, Hinduism, Existentialism, post-modernism, and Buddhism. Almost no one recognizes that if you take such ideas seriously, they are seriously incompatible.

The ways that current soap opera characters talk about their lives incorporate ideas that were completely alien a century ago, and were heavy weirdness for university philosophy students only a few decades ago. What has happened is that key ideas of major systems have “escaped” into the culture at large. Their origins are forgotten. They have become part of our thought-soup.

Buddhism shattered

Here are three facts about Eckhart Tolle that, together, might shock you:

1. What he teaches is Buddhism, more than anything else; both Buddhist view and Buddhist meditation.
2. He does not call it Buddhism, and he mashes it up with bits of various other religions.
3. His books have sold more than ten million copies in the past few years. That is probably more than all explicitly Buddhist books (in Western languages) combined.

By that measure, Tolle by himself is more successful, or appealing, than all of Buddhism. Shouldn’t that bother us?

More about that in a minute. But first:

Tolle is one example of the “shattering” of Buddhism in its collision with consumer culture. Buddhism as a complete, coherent tradition is increasingly superseded by Buddhist shards entering popular culture. Pieces that do not seem appealing or understandable are ignored, or even explicitly condemned. Attractive concepts and practices are isolated and taught in new, often non-Buddhist contexts. Buddhism is broken down and re-configured in many ways:

• Even the most conservative Asian teachers of Buddhism in the West leave out much of what was taught in their home countries.
• All Buddhist teachers in the West depend on forms of organization and communication that were absent in traditional Asia.
• Buddhist doctrines are frequently re-interpreted in ways that make better sense here. A pioneering example was Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s teaching of the six realms of rebirth as a psychological metaphor. Although there is precedent for this approach in Dzogchen, Tibetan Buddhism always presented the heavens and hells as geographic locations—a difficult concept for Westerners.
• Westerners involved with Buddhism vary widely in their commitment. There are probably far fewer Buddhists than people who are “interested in Buddhism” or “into Buddhism” or “Buddhish.” Both they, and many who call themselves Buddhists, feel free to combine pieces of Buddhism with other religions, practices, or philosophies.
• There is broad, confused awareness of Buddhism among people who have no real interest. The Worst Horse chronicles distorted reflections of Buddhism in pop culture.
• Ideas and practices from Buddhism that have leaked into the general culture are often no longer recognized as Buddhist. They have “escaped” or “gone native.” They have become part of the global “thought soup” of ways of describing experience.

It is the last of these that is most interesting to me. Even in the best case, Buddhism seems likely only to be the religion of a small minority. In the worst case, I fear it may go extinct in this century. In either case, if bits of Buddhism escape into the thought soup, they may be able to benefit billions.

That brings us back to Eckhart Tolle, who teaches parts of Buddhism without calling them that. Some of his success is due to a business relationship with Oprah Winfrey. Each episode of her television show, on which he appears often, is seen by about 10 million people. My guess is that few Oprah viewers are Buddhists, or would ever consider becoming Buddhists. Eckhart Tolle is probably the closest they will ever come to Dharma.

I think that, as Buddhists, we ought to have strong, mixed feelings about this. Better Eckhart Tolle than nothing, surely. If millions of Oprah fans get a basic understanding of the kleshas, of the workings of ego, of awareness, and of meditation, that must be a good thing. Considered as Buddhism, though, his teaching is seriously distorted. (He openly presents it as a mashup, so considering it as Buddhism is unfair.)

If Tolle were a massively popular teacher of Yazidism, he would be no concern of ours. But what he teaches is almost, or mostly, Buddhism. Why can’t actual Buddhism reach as many people as he does? What is he doing right that we are doing wrong? Or is his mashup inherently more appealing—or even, more useful—than Buddhism? I don’t know. (Maybe you have ideas?) Here are some plausible answers:

The problem is “Buddhism.”

The word “Buddhism” immediately locks out many people. Some have allegiances to other religions, so they refuse to consider anything labeled with the name of a competing brand. Others have wrong ideas about what “Buddhism” is, based on the way it has been marketed in the past twenty years.

Perhaps if someone were to teach straight-up Buddhism without ever using the word, they would be as popular as Tolle.

I doubt this. I think the word “Buddhism” is a significant obstacle, but that can’t be all that is going on.

His presentation does a better job of explaining Buddhism to beginners than anyone else’s.

This may be partly right. His books are not well-written. However, they do have an actual idea on every page. (“Self-help” books, where his are classified, usually have about one idea each, or at best one idea per chapter; the rest is filler.) And, each idea is mostly self-contained. So he presents a series of bite-sized pieces that are genuinely substantial. These are ideally suited for slipping into the thought soup.

It’s about him, not what he teaches.

I’ve watched some of his videos on YouTube. His way of speaking is appealingly friendly and cheerful. He comes across as explaining things very clearly and simply, so that they seem obviously right. After a ten-minute video, however, I had only the vaguest recollection of what he had said. (“It was sort of about awareness and space, I think.”)

Perhaps he is such a skilled speaker that he could explain off-balance-sheet financial derivative accounting and make it seem fascinating, profound, and sensible. Although you might not come away with an entirely detailed understanding.

It’s an accident. He’s a TV personality. He is famous for being famous, and is about as significant as Paris Hilton.

Chance is always a factor. But I doubt it is the explanation here. Anyway, what we really want to know is not why Tolle is successful, but what we can do to make Buddhism available to more people.

The pieces he adds to Buddhism, and the ways he distorts it, are what make his teaching palatable.

This is the most interesting, and unsettling, possibility—that what he teaches, not how, is critical.

Tolle’s key differences from Buddhism, I think, are instances of “eternalism.” Eternalism is understood differently in different Buddhist yanas. Here I mean the beliefs that there is some sort of soul or “deep self,” and that there is some sort of Cosmic Plan, Higher Consciousness, God, or what-not. For eternalism, the Cosmic Plan is the source of everything truly good, and it makes everything meaningful. What is important is to get your “true self” into the proper relationship with it.

Eternalism is enormously attractive to most people, because it suggests that if only you follow the instructions, everything will come out right. That is a great comfort, as it eliminates the possibility that, despite doing our best, we will come to a bad end.

Tolle may be successful as a result of wedding the most attractive aspects of Buddhism with a comforting eternalism. His eternalism is vague enough to offend no one who is not strongly committed to another religion.

Unfortunately, eternalism produces vast suffering. Just in living, we constantly observe that most things happen for no particular reason, that most experiences have no particular meaning, and that life gives no guarantees. (These are manifestations of emptiness; eternalism is the denial of emptiness.) If we believe that goodness comes only from the Cosmic Plan, we will mistake evidence against the existence of the Cosmic Plan as evidence against goodness. That throws us into confusion, anxiety, and depression.

The understanding of emptiness as good news is, I think, the most unusual and valuable feature of Buddhism. As Buddhists we are glad that we don’t have to fuss with our souls, delighted that God is not telling us what to do, and ecstatic that we can experience things simply as they are—rather than in terms of what God meant them to be.

Unfortunately, emptiness is the aspect of basic Buddhism that, although central, is probably least initially attractive, and most difficult for outsiders to comprehend. And that may be why Tolle sells more books than all Buddhists put together.

Stealth Dharma

“Stealth Dharma,” or “stealth Buddhism,” means Buddhists teaching aspects of Buddhism to non-Buddhists, without the word “Buddhism,” without Buddhist jargon, and without presenting the entire Buddhist framework.

Why would anyone do that?

Concepts and methods from Buddhism are escaping into the “thought soup” of our global culture. Their origin in Buddhism is being forgotten. Millions of non-Buddhists now practice Buddhist meditation techniques. Non-Buddhist teachers, like Eckhart Tolle, teach fragmented Buddhist concepts to non-Buddhist students. Meanwhile, the word “Buddhism” is becoming unattractive for some, having been presented as sugary, weak, hypocritical, and unrealistic.

As Buddhists, we might prefer that everyone learn Buddhism as a complete system. And, of course, Buddhist teachers will continue to teach it that way. But, we also need to face facts. In a consumerist age, fewer and fewer people are willing to accept any system whole. Most would rather choose and combine a personal mixture of bits from here and there. We cannot stop this “shattering” of Buddhism.

What we can do is influence the process. We can actively work to introduce parts of Buddhism we consider essential to general consciousness. That may be the best hope for preserving them, if Buddhism as a system faces extinction. Distasteful as it may seem, we might be more useful in the long run by actively helping to make fragments of Buddhism available to potentially billions of non-Buddhists, than by saving Buddhism intact for perhaps only a few million.

Despite the humorous use of the word “stealth,” this is not a matter of deception. It’s always right to be upfront about where the teachings and teachers are coming from. It’s just that origins may be irrelevant to most of the audience, and emphasizing the source can be counter-productive if it sounds like proselytizing.

Correcting distortions of Dharma, as pieces enter the global culture, is another aspect of stealth Buddhism. Some misunderstandings of Buddhism are nearly universal. These can be dispelled by introducing better ideas, that can out-compete the wrong ones. This needs to be done positively. For instance, denouncing Eckhart Tolle because he mixes up Buddhist ideas with eternalism would be counter-productive. It would be better to produce popular understanding of the ways that eternalism makes you miserable.

Stealth Dharma could take many, widely varied forms, depending on the aspect of Buddhism taught, and the audience. Many of these may look nothing like religion as generally understood.

“Stealth Buddhism” is most often used to refer to teaching Buddhist meditation to non-Buddhists. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s Shambhala Training, which he described as “a secular path of meditation,” was what first made Dharma available to me. More recently, Jon Kabat-Zinn’s packaging of meditation as a medical treatment for stress has been hugely successful. On a smaller scale, Aro’s free email meditation course teaches the Dzogchen sem-dé ngöndro, but mentions Buddhism only once. It seems to have reached more people than any of the other Aro materials. As a follow-on, the Aro “Members” program supports many non-Buddhists in their meditation practice. None of these “stealth Dharma” projects are manipulative attempts to recruit potential Buddhists. Instead, they make meditation, one of the most valuable aspects of Buddhism, available to people who may not want the rest.

Consumerism, Fundamentalism, and Buddhism

Tyrannosaurus rex skull; image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

We live in a time in which the main approaches to life are empty consumerism and militant fundamentalism. These are mirror images of each other. Most people recognize, dimly at least, that neither is workable. However, alternatives are scarce. The middle position has become increasingly untenable.

Every religion faces extinction at the hands of the global consumer culture. Every religion has to figure out how to respond to the accelerating pull toward the opposing poles of fundamentalism and consumerism. This page explains three common survival strategies, and why I think they will fail—for Buddhism, at least. On the next page, I suggest that Buddhism can adopt an alternative approach—one that sidesteps these problems—one that is not available to other religions.

In traditional cultures, moderate religions need little defense. They make only moderate demands on the behavior of their members. They have reasonable-sounding answers to questions about “why do we believe that?” and “why do we have to do that?” With little competition, those answers seem adequate.

The global consumer culture makes countless competing religions available. It asks questions that are skeptical, cynical, even hostile. “Why should I buy what you are selling?” Consumerism finds the answers given by all religions unconvincing.

The response of moderate religions is to concede point after point to skeptics, in hope of finding a reasonable compromise.

“You are right—the earth does go around the sun. Scripture cannot be taken literally. Still, we can learn a lot from reading it as holy allegory.”

“You are right—we have no good explanation for why a good God would have created a world full of undeserved suffering—but we know he did.”

“You are right—sex before marriage is OK. Moral rules invented by nomadic herdsmen thousands of years ago were right for the time, but things are different now. Still, there is a core of morality that was given by God.”

“You are right—atheists, on average, are just as ethical as believers. Religion is not necessary for a just, caring society. Still, for us, God is the foundation of ethics.”

“You are right—humans evolved spontaneously from apes. It seems that our existence is an accident. But we believe God created the universe billions of years ago, and he must have foreseen that accident. Our existence is meaningful, because it is observed by God.”

“You are right—there is no evidence for the existence of God, apart from the evidence of our own hearts. Still, we know he exists, because the alternative is too grim to consider.”

religion is gradually hollowed out

The problem with this reasonable approach is that religion is gradually hollowed out. Religion concedes that its rituals are unnecessary, that its scriptures were written by ordinary people with limited understanding, that the details of its ethics are arbitrary, and that its central beliefs have no real justification.

What is left? Little more than “it is good to be good—although we can’t say in detail what counts as goodness; and we believe in a Holy Principle—although we can’t say why, or what it is.”

Most people see this weak-tea religion as useless. As a result, moderate sects have, in the past few decades, seen a dramatic loss in membership. This is confirmed in large social surveys polling, at least, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. I haven’t found statistics for other major religions, but I expect it is true for them too.

Western Buddhism is falling into this trap

I suspect mainstream Western Buddhism is falling into this trap. Having quietly abandoned most of what counted as Buddhism in Asia, it is not clear that it is sufficiently different from generic humanism to remain interesting. Sometimes there seems to be little more to it than “it is good to be good—but we have nothing distinctively Buddhist to say about goodness. And, it is good to meditate—but it is not necessary, and you don’t have to be a Buddhist for that. Also, we have some dubious folk tales that you might find inspiring. Or not.”

If moderate religion is no longer attractive, what do people choose instead? Extreme religions are growing rapidly. So are census responses like “no religion,” “spiritual but not religious,” “agnostic,” “atheist,” and “none of the above.”

Fundamentalism

You can’t compromise with consumerism. If you give an inch, it will take a mile. In fact, it will take the whole universe, chew it up, and spit it out.

Fundamentalism refuses to give the first inch. “God created the universe on October 23, 4004 B.C., with vegetarian Tyrannosauruses. They became carnivorous as a result of Adam’s original sin and they all drowned in Noah’s Flood (2348 B.C.). Also, people caught wearing wool/linen blend suits should be put to death (Leviticus 19:19).” Fundamentalism is the insistence that the absurd is true, and that something very bad will happen to you—in this life or later—if you don’t believe and obey.

Fundamentalist religions rightly see themselves as under assault from consumerist forces. Those are a dire threat to every religion’s existence. Fundamentalism wrongly sees depraved barbarism—a total collapse of the moral order—as the only alternative to its rule. Fundamentalism is motivated by fear, and it propagates fear.

Fundamentalist religions cannot defend themselves on the basis of reason and cannot compromise. Their alternative is armored hostility. From fear springs aggression. The best defense is a good offense. Absurd beliefs and abhorrent practices can be maintained only by force and ignorance. Fundamentalism accumulates political power to force religion on the reluctant, and to shut out information about alternatives.

fundamentalism
will lose

In the confrontation between fundamentalism and consumerism, I predict fundamentalism will lose. The internet and global trade make it increasingly difficult to insulate populations from forbidden knowledge.

Given a choice between Sharia and YouTube, Jesus and premarital sex, Marx and microwave ovens, I think almost everyone will take the consumerist option. That’s just as well. Buddhism’s recognition of emptiness makes fundamentalism difficult. There are versions of Buddhism with fundamentalist tendencies, but if fundamentalism were the future, Buddhism almost certainly wouldn’t survive.

Anyway, I for one would vehemently oppose fundamentalist Buddhism.

The New Age is a consumerist substitute for religion. It is a hodge-podge, taken from here and there, of superficially attractive, but mainly absurd ideas and practices.

How does the New Age escape consumerist skepticism? It has a third strategy—not compromise and not fundamentalism. The New Age has no fixed beliefs to defend—because it refuses to deal with factual reality altogether. Its view is that we all create our own realities, so whatever you believe is true—for you. You don’t believe in angelic spirit guides? No problem—they are not part of your reality—why not try quantum mysticism? It is very scientific. Crystal healing isn’t working? Try reflexology!

reality is
not negotiable

There is a grain of truth in the idea that mind creates reality. (Some Buddhist philosophies have much more sophisticated versions of it.) However, the world actually is round, not flat. This is not negotiable.

Buddhism (according to legend) began with Siddhartha Gotama’s shocked discovery of old age, sickness, and death. These are brute facts. They cannot be wished out of existence by changing your beliefs.

Much of the New Age is devoted to pretending away old age, sickness, and death; or overcoming them by spiritual means. This—pretty obviously—cannot and does not work.

For that reason, the New Age has limited appeal. And, its strategy of non-confrontation with consumerism won’t work for Buddhism.

A Dzogchen-shaped hole in the culture

God is undead

It was not Nietzsche who killed God.

He was severely bruised by Copernicus, who found that the earth revolves around the sun, and so threw God out of heaven. He was emasculated by Darwin, who found that humans evolved from apes by accident, and so made the Creator redundant. He was blinded by Heisenberg, who found that the universe is inherently random, so even God could not see the future.

But it was consumerism that killed God. God’s job, before he died, was to provide form. If you want form, consumerism has a better product: 628 channels of high-definition digital entertainment; 13 million knick-knacks you can buy on e-Bay; 373 squintillion web pages full of dubious factoids. God fed on our desire for form; when we switched to mass entertainment, he finally died of starvation and neglect.

God’s carcass walks. Fundamentalism is driven by fear of emptiness. That uncanny fear artificially animates the mindless zombie. His colossal corpse, a blind idiot god, staggers across the earth, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.

Buddhism, by celebrating the inseparability of form and emptiness, can put the corpse of God to rest, and can dissolve the twin demons of fundamentalism and consumerism into thin air.

Stop-gap gods

The death of God left a hole in the heart of Western culture. We had used God as the source of meaning, purpose, value, ethics. Consumerism can provide endless form, but it cannot provide meaning. When we look for something beyond the superficial, it is desperate to distract us—“never mind that philosophical junk, here’s the new Britney Spears video!”

Various movements have tried to plug the hole by proposing new sources of meaning. Science, Progress, Reason, the march of History, Socialism, nationalism—somehow all were supposed to do God’s job. They couldn’t.

Nietzsche’s prophesy

Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of God. Religious people responded by shooting the messenger—but Nietzsche, too, saw God’s demise as a potential disaster. He was first to face facts: God could no longer provide the ultimate source of meaning, because religion could no longer be taken seriously by educated Europeans.

Nietzsche had the courage to stare into the hole at the heart of our culture, and what he saw was emptiness. He saw that no stop-gap god, like Democracy, Compassion, or Enlightenment, could provide a replacement source of meaning. He saw that all values were ultimately null. He saw that there are no absolute truths. He saw that there can be no fundamental basis for ethics.

Nietzsche was far ahead of his time. He prophesied three possible reactions to the death of God, when the news eventually entered popular consciousness: nihilism, consumerism, and the “transvaluation of all values.”

Nihilism is the denial of form. It is the mistaken idea that because there is no ultimate truth, there is no truth at all; that because there is no ultimate purpose, our lives are pointless; that because there is no foundation for ethics, all acts are morally equal. Nihilism leads to rage or despair. If everything is meaningless, you might as well kill yourself—or everyone else. Nietzsche feared that when the death of God became generally recognized, people would fall into nihilism, which could potentially lead to total social breakdown. Western culture was built on Christian foundations, and when they fell out, there was nothing beneath: only emptiness. However, nihilism requires a perverse intellectual and moral courage that few possess. To be a nihilist, you must stare into the abyss of emptiness, and act on what you see there. Actual nihilists remain extremely rare.

safe entertainment is Nihilism Lite™

The second possible reaction Nietzsche saw was consumerism—the prophesy that has come to pass. Consumerism might be called “Nihilism Lite™.” To avoid squarely confronting the implications of emptiness, we distract ourselves with trivial entertainments. In the absence of any God who could inspire passionate commitment and acts of greatness, we accept mediocrity and are preoccupied with comfort and safety. Consumerism wrongly supposes that the death of God implies that there is no meaning beyond the mundane; it does not have the courage of true nihilism to see that the mundane is equally meaningless. Having lost the foundation for ethics, we have no motivation for moral courage. We adopt the ethics of the herd, in which one is moderately good, when not too inconvenient, because that is the way to get along with the herd—not because we are committed to coherent moral principles.

Consumerism’s insatiable hunger for novelty, for continually more form, has an edge of desperation. Consumption, like fundamentalist fervor, tries to cover up a fundamental anxiety: the fear of emptiness. We know that God is dead, but we refuse to deal with the news. Consumerism is hiding your head under the blankets in hopes that if you can’t see the nihilist zombie, it won’t eat you.

At the end of his working life, Nietzsche saw a third, hopeful possibility. He described it as the “transvaluation of all values” by a hypothetical “Superman.” Unfortunately, he did not have time to work this idea out, and it is not clear quite what he meant by it. Some of what he wrote seems clearly wrong. However, this possibility seems intriguingly similar, in some respects, to the Vajrayana Buddhist conception of enlightenment as nobility or heroism.

Philosophy at the heart of the culture

. . . philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct . . . academic scribbler of a few years back.
—Keynes (out of context)

Despite the vast proliferation of “isms,” there are only a handful of meaningfully different ways of thinking about life. Generally, they are produced—or at least first stated—by philosophers. Gradually these ideas work their way into the “thought soup” of popular culture. They become the girders and beams of the house of being. That is, we weave our lives, and the ways we experience living, around these few ideas.

Nietzsche was an academic philosopher. His ideas about the problem of nihilism are now a basic part of everyone’s way of thinking about the world—even though few people know their origin.

WOODY ALLEN: That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it?

GIRL IN MUSEUM: Yes it is.

WOODY ALLEN: What does it say to you?

GIRL IN MUSEUM: It restates the negativeness of the universe, the hideous lonely emptiness of existence, nothingness, the predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity, like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void, with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless bleak straightjacket in a black absurd cosmos.

WOODY ALLEN: What are you doing Saturday night?

GIRL IN MUSEUM: Committing suicide.

WOODY ALLEN: What about Friday night?

In the 120 years since Nietzsche’s prophesy, many philosophers have wrestled with its implications. Currently, Western philosophy is at an acknowledged dead end: it has no answer for the problem Nietzsche announced. However, its exploration of the problem’s implications is, I think, highly relevant to the possible future role of Buddhism in Western culture. I can give only a brief and oversimplified version here:

• Nietzsche’s positive possibility—the transvaluation of values—has not been pursued seriously.
• Existentialism was a philosophical movement that was mainly concerned with the problem of nihilism. It tried to develop an alternative positive possibility, which it called “authenticity.” This proved to be unworkable and was abandoned.
• Existentialism lapsed into depression, and could only counsel gloomy acceptance of what it called “the Absurd”: that both belief in God and nihilism are untenable, but that there is no third alternative. This seemed obviously wrong, and existentialism was seen to have failed.
• Existentialism was replaced with postmodernism. Postmodernism observes that nihilism has not been the catastrophe it might have been. Life has gone on; Western civilization has not collapsed. So it seems safe to adopt Nihilism Lite™. Like the New Age, postmodernism refuses to deal with factual reality, insisting that all truth-claims are just a matter of perspective. Like consumerism and the New Age, it is obsessed with the trivial and silly, because it sees no way to judge importance. These three are all manifestations of the same strategy for avoiding a serious confrontation with the same problem: the emptiness of meaning.
• Postmodernism is widely seen to be a dead end; but no successor is in sight. Any way forward would have to deal directly with the apparent contradiction of the Absurd: that God is dead, with no replacement possible, but nihilism is clearly wrong.

The failure of philosophy is the failure of our culture as a whole. Our ideas about how to live, available in our thought-soup, make sense only if there is some ultimate source of meaning; but there is none. That leaves us without a positive mode of existence. Fundamentalism and consumerism, however problematic, seem the only options.

Nihilism, eternalism, and Buddhism

Buddhism never had a God. And, it claims not to have a nihilism problem.

Instead, Buddhism claims to have a powerful analysis of why theism and nihilism are both wrong, why both are attractive in some ways, and why the third alternative—nonduality—is hard to find. And it has concrete methods that it claims allow us to actualize that third alternative.

If that is true, and if Western philosophy is right that nihilism is a gaping hole in the heart of our culture, then it seems important to fit these pieces together.

The heart of Buddhist philosophy is the recognition that form is empty, and that emptiness is also form.

• “Eternalism” is the refusal to see the emptiness of form. “Eternalism” includes both belief in God, and belief in any “stopgap God” or other supposed source of ultimate meaning. Meaning itself is always empty: insubstantial, transitory, interactive, fragmentary, and ambiguous. This gives us freedom: open space.
• But emptiness is not non-existence. Nihilism—for Buddhism—is the refusal to see that emptiness is also form. The emptiness of meaning is not a problem. The ambiguity of purpose, value, and ethics is no cause for worry, much less despair. Meanings continually arise spontaneously. Their lack of any ultimate source does not make them any less real or compelling.

Because God never existed, the hole in Western culture is not God-shaped. Nietzsche stared into that hole and saw emptiness; but where there is emptiness, there is also form. Dzogchen is the non-duality of form and emptiness. There is a Dzogchen-shaped hole in the heart of our culture. Perhaps now we can put the puzzle piece in place.

(I say “Dzogchen” because I am a Nyingmapa. You could equally well substitute “Madhyamaka” or “Mahamudra.” What matters is their shared understanding of the ways we distort our existence by trying to separate form and emptiness.)

Now what?

Nothing I have said here is new. Both Japanese Buddhist and Western philosophers have recognized the relevance of nonduality to the Western problem of nihilism for most of a century. They have written many books on the subject. Yet they have failed to influence either Buddhist or Western philosophy—much less the general culture. That is because they write in dense technical language. To understand them, you need to have studied both Buddhist and Western philosophy in depth. To be useful, the insight has to be available to people who have no interest in either.

Our culture fails to provide ways of thinking about life that do not implicitly assume an ultimate source of life-meaning. Buddhism has such tools, but they have not yet made the leap into the global thought-soup.

Perhaps we need a stealth Dharma effort, aiming particularly to resolve this problem.

Yes

The endangered but stealthy Himalayan snow leopard.
Image courtesy Wikipedia

Fundamentalism and consumerism appear to be polar opposites—but both are right. Both are also wrong—but the truth is not halfway between.

Fundamentalism claims to know the ultimate Truths of meaningfulness. It says ultimate purpose lives somewhere else—with God, the sacred, or in the future. The ordinary world has no real value.

Consumerism says nothing is sacred. There are no ultimate meanings. Nothing has a purpose beyond the ordinary obvious. The best we can do in life is to gobble as many goodies as we can—material things, and also personal gratifications like fame, relationships, and experiences.

We are torn between these approaches, because each explains some aspects of our experience, while clashing with others. Most religions try to find a mid-point between these extremes—but that does not work.

Buddhism—in some forms, at least—is a religion of methods, not Truths. It is immune to consumerism’s skeptical critique, because it has no ultimate claims to defend. The New Age, which also defends no ultimate truths, does that by abandoning reality altogether. Buddhism is realistic, and recognizes pragmatic, non-ultimate truths.

The Buddhist understanding of the non-duality of form and emptiness shows clearly what is right and wrong about both fundamentalism and consumerism.

Meaning, like everything, has inseparable aspects of emptiness and form. Meaninglessness and meaningfulness are entwined in an endless dance.

Fundamentalism recognizes the meaningfulness of the sacred, but attempts to lock it in place as form: as ultimate Truth. Fundamentalism denies the meaningfulness of ordinary enjoyments, attempting to lock it out as non-existent. Consumerism denies the sacred, and attempts to lock everyday desires into fixed forms.

Buddhism resolves this contradiction by recognizing all meanings as real but ambiguous. This is an alternative that is not a mid-point: it fully affirms what is right about both extremes, without taking on their mistaken denials.

To explain this resolution in detail would take a book. (The Aro “purpose” page—especially “The Way of Being”—might be a starting point.) Here I will offer only an allusive hint of ways in which Buddhism can affirm both meaning and meaninglessness, without mistakenly fixating either.

Yes

Yes— the meanings we find are genuine; and meaning matters. We may find anything or everything meaningful. Meanings are endlessly various; delightfully diverse. We continually uncover new aspects and levels of meaning in existence.

Yes— nothing is inherently meaningful. The world is not about us. We mostly have no relevance to it, and it has no particular relevance to us. The universe is unimaginably vast. It is mainly incomprehensible. Mostly what happens, happens for no particular reason.

Yes— meaning is not a human creation. It is not merely an individual choice, or a cultural convention. There are sources of meaning greater than us, which we do not comprehend, and may never comprehend.

Yes— meaning is neither objective, nor subjective. (Meaning arises in the interaction between subject and object.)

Yes— our lives have purposes far beyond satisfying our instinctive hungers. Creativity and compassionate activity are right uses of human being. Audacity, commitment, and generosity give our lives meaning.

Yes— we have no “true mission” in life. Ultimately, there is no purpose in living. Whatever we gain for ourselves is lost in death; whatever we accomplish will be forgotten soon after. There is no guarantee of reward or punishment in the hereafter.

Yes— we have too little time to waste it on mind-numbing entertainment or soul-destroying work. Despite endless temptations, and seeming practicalities, it is better to devote ourselves to what matters.

Yes— anything we appreciate has true value. Nothing is inherently trivial, uninteresting, or worthless. Casual enjoyment is inseparable from creative compassion. It is a proper goal in life.

Yes— we must be realistic: we are apes who have become perhaps too clever for our own good. Our brains evolved for the lives of social mammals, concerned with feeding, safety, reproduction, and social status. That’s mostly what we still care about and are good at. The world, and other animals of our species, matter mostly only when they are useful or threatening. When our brains get Big Ideas, they often lead us off a cliff. Like other animals, our destiny is to live briefly, spawn possibly, and die certainly. When we die, we die, ultimately, alone.

Yes— we must be realistic: humans are magnificent. We are brilliant at the most amazingly different activities. We can rely on each other to co-create domains of beauty and value. We are all capable of remarkable altruism, invention, and good humor; this is available to everyone, in every moment, not just special people. We live in a world that is fascinating for its own sake, beyond our hopes and fears. When we open to, and enjoy, its vastness and inherent meaninglessness—we discover awe; and glimpse the ultimate nature of being.

Three percent of the Dharma

Padmasambhava

I have been practicing Buddhist meditation, more or less half-assedly, for upwards of twenty-five years. Recently it occurred to me that this is one percent of the history of Buddhism, since Shakyamuni Buddha is supposed to have lived about 2500 years ago.

That was a shock. Buddhism seems impossibly ancient, and for my little piece of it to have been a full percent seems far too much. But if we are lucky, and last for what counts now as a normal life-span, we will see more than three percent of the history of Buddha-Dharma. That is one thirtieth.

In the first page of this section, I suggested that we are responsible to Buddhism. Here I would like to take a deeper cut. We are not only responsible to Buddhism; we are responsible for Buddhism. We are responsible for the portion of Buddhism that occurs during our lives—three percent of it. And we are responsible for a particularly critical three percent, in which Buddhism faces both extraordinary dangers and extraordinary opportunities. Buddhism could easily become effectively extinct within this century. But Buddhism also has radical transformational potential for Western society.

Buddhism should never be invented or deliberately added to. However, it also cannot survive if it is merely mechanically reproduced according to a recipe. Our job is not to alter Buddhism to suit our circumstances, but to work to make it relevant to our lives. This is a creative improvisational dance in which Buddhism, we, and our world interact.

The essential teaching of Shakyamuni, of Padmasambhava, of Yeshé Tsogyel, of Aro Lingma, is just as profound, shocking, relevant, and exciting as when they were alive.

We tend to think of Buddhism as something that happened long ago, far away. It has been passed down to us as an obscure holy relic that we are supposed to revere and study like a museum piece. But our fundamental responsibility is to live the view. That is the real meaning of refuge: to make the dusty teachings come alive—by seeing the world illuminated by Dharma, and acting on what we see.

Buddhism is us. It has always been us; it has always been seemingly ordinary people discovering its radical possibility and being transformed by it.

2500 years ago it was Shakyamuni, a confused Indian guy who discovered something useful by sitting under a tree; and his motley collection of followers. 1200 years ago, it was Padmasambhava, a ferocious Central Asian who put on his ang-ra one leg at a time, trying to pound some sense into the heads of a bunch of blood-thirsty barbarians; and his lover Yeshé Tsogyel.

Yeshé Tsogyel

It is useful also to see these pioneers as heroic demigods with shimmering bodies of light who performed miracles—but only because it is also useful to see ourselves as heroic demigods with shimmering bodies of light who can perform miracles. The message of Inner Tantra is that there is no essential difference between the yidams and ourselves. With hard work, open hearts, and lots of luck, we may be able to do what they did.

In our practice, we rely on Yeshé Tsogyel and Padmasambhava to show us dharmakaya and sambhogakaya; but they are relying on us to show nirmanakaya.

Let’s not let them down.