God Is Not One

by Prothero, Stephen

  But the most astonishing thing about Buddhism, and perhaps its greatest contribution to the conversation among the great religions, is its teaching that the thing we are most certain of—the self—is actually a figment of the imagination. Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” Buddhists say if you think carefully enough you will see that you are not. According to Buddhists, the self (Cartesian or otherwise) does not actually exist.

  You can take these words as a philosophical proposition to be proved (or disproved), but that wouldn’t be very Buddhist of you, since Buddhists have insisted since the time of their founder that their teachings are true only insofar as they are useful. In other words, the point of Buddhist teachings is to reduce and eliminate suffering. So these teachings are aptly likened to vehicles—ferryboats or rafts intended to take you from this island of suffering to the far shore of nirvana. If they can’t do that, then we should throw them away, however “true” they may or may not be in theory.

  Because it tends to analyze the human problem in terms of the individual, and to aim to solve that problem through withdrawal from society, Buddhism has long been viewed by sociologists as pessimistic, apolitical, socially apathetic, and ethically inert—perhaps the most powerful evidence of Karl Marx’s claim that religion is “the opiate of the masses.” And there is some merit to this charge. Buddhists have traditionally focused on the individual more than society. I suffer because of how I view the world, not because of political or economic structures that oppress or impoverish me. At least until the twentieth century, Buddhists have been revolutionaries only in the realm of the individual mind.

  Over the last generation, however, Buddhists have responded to such criticisms with “Engaged Buddhism,” a term coined by the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (b. 1926) to refer to efforts to apply the Buddhist principle of compassion to social and economic problems such as poverty, war, injustice, discrimination, and environmental degradation. Engaged Buddhists in France and the United States, Vietnam and India are working to address the social roots of suffering through collective action. After 9/11, one of the most outspoken groups denouncing racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims were engaged Japanese-American Buddhists who, recalling the internment of almost all American Buddhists in internment camps during World War II, wanted to be sure that nothing like that happened to American Muslims. The Buddhist tradition, these Engaged Buddhists argue, is by no means just about personal spiritual growth.

  Buddha, Dharma, Sangha

  Like Christianity and Islam, Buddhism is a missionary religion. And converting is easy. All you have to do is recite the Three Refuges (or Three Jewels):

  I take refuge in the Buddha.

  I take refuge in the Dharma.

  I take refuge in the Sangha.

  The term sangha means community. In early Buddhism this community was restricted to celibate monks and nuns. Laypeople did their thing at the margins, chiefly by giving food and clothing to monastics and receiving good karma in return. But they were not part of the sangha. Instead of reaching for the ultimate aim of nirvana, they hoped only for the proximate aim of a better rebirth. More recently, however, the notion of sangha has expanded to include nonmonastics. Today, if a Buddhist friend tells you she is going to her sangha, she means she is going to a meeting with her Buddhist friends. The Cape Sangha, near my Cape Cod home, is made up entirely of lay Buddhists.

  The Buddha is just a human being in the earliest forms of Buddhism. Because of his vast storehouse of merit, he may be able to work wonders of clairvoyance and clairaudience, and even to fly, but he does not claim to be a god or savior. He is simply a pathfinder—someone who has experienced what Kerouac called “the Great Awakening from the dream of existence” and lived (for a while) to tell the tale.13 So all he can show us is how to be human.

  While other religious communities work hard to build up the authority of their founders, early Buddhists undercut the Buddha’s authority. Their Buddha taught his listeners not to be seduced by the authority of any text, tradition, or teacher (even himself), but to discover for themselves how to live an authentically human life. Their Buddha also refused to designate a successor. After he died, he said, the teachings would be in charge. So there never would be a Buddhist pope.

  The second of the Three Jewels, dharma, requires more explanation. In Hinduism, dharma means duty. Here it refers primarily to teaching (as in a “Dharma talk”). But dharma has also been translated as “the way it is,” since Buddhist teachings aim at nothing grander than “to know things as they are.”14

  Buddhist teachings vary of course, but they often begin with the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path. Though widely considered to be the simplest doctrinal distillation of Buddhist teaching, the Four Noble Truths are anything but simple. In fact, I never feel more challenged as a professor than I am when I am trying to explain these teachings.

  The First Noble Truth observes that human existence is characterized by dukkha, or suffering. According to the European Values Survey, reincarnation belief is rising rapidly in the West: 29 percent of adults in the United Kingdom believe in reincarnation, as do 19 percent in western Germany, 21 percent in France, and 32 percent in Russia.15 Many Westerners today welcome reincarnation as an opportunity to experience in the next life things they were unable to experience in this one. But for Buddhists reincarnation is literally a drag—a wheel full of friction and frustration. Yes, we can be happy. We can even be ecstatic. And there is joy along the way. Yet each of us, no matter how rich or poor or powerful or weak, is going to get sick, grow old, and die. Because nothing is permanent, nothing can permanently satisfy us. Because things change and pass away, everything and everyone we love will someday be no more. The happiness we experience is fleeting, and buried inside much of it is the sort of deep sadness that the Portuguese refer to as saudade.

  The Second Noble Truth is more hopeful: suffering has an origin. Everything in this world is interdependent, linked in a great chain of cause and effect, so suffering must come from somewhere. Buddhists identify twelve links in this chain of “dependent origination” (pratitya-samutpada) but the key links are ignorance, thirst, and grasping. We suffer because we close our eyes to the way the world really is. We pretend we are independent when we are really interdependent. We pretend that changing things are unchanging. And we desperately desire the world and the people who populate it to be as we imagine it (and them) to be. And so we suffer when our spouses take up new interests, or when our favorite (and perfect just as it was) old-fashioned ice cream store puts up a ridiculous Web site with a stupid new logo, or when the brand new T-bird we are proudly driving home from the Ford dealership is hit by a rock thrown by a six-year-old kid who would go on to write this book (true story). We suffer because we desperately grasp after people, places, and things, as if they can redeem us from our suffering. We suffer because we cling to beliefs and judgments, not least beliefs in gods, and judgments that this friend or that enemy is morally bankrupt. Today “you have changed” is an explanation one lover gives to another as she is walking out the door. In Buddhism, “you have changed” is a description of what is happening every moment of every day.

  The Third Noble Truth observes that, since suffering has a cause, it can be eliminated. If we wake up to the way the world really is, in all its flux and flow, and stop clinging to things that are by their nature running through our fingers, then we can achieve nirvana. But what is this “blowing out”? Nirvana is often described in negative terms as the extinguishing of thirst, grasping, suffering, greed, hate, delusion, and rebirth. More positively it is said to be bliss, though a bliss that is beyond description, and peace, though a peace that is beyond our ken. But nirvana is not some static place you go to after death. It can be achieved in this lifetime.

  The Fourth Noble Truth observes that there is a path to the goal of nirvana. Like Confucianism’s Doctrine of the Mean, this Middle Path steers clear of the extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification
. Also known as the Eightfold Path, it comprises “right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.”16 Because this path has ethical, experiential, and doctrinal dimensions, it is traditionally divided into three disciplines: ethical conduct (right speech, right action, and right livelihood); mental discipline (right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration); and wisdom (right understanding and right thought). In short, be kind, be wise, be mindful.

  Although all of the Four Noble Truths are described as teachings, it is more faithful to the tradition to refer to them as observations, because none of this is dogma. Buddhism is a come-and-see tradition. More than believers, its adherents are practitioners. Its dharma is not divine revelation. And we are not supposed to accept it just on faith. We are challenged to experiment with its teachings, to see for ourselves whether what the Buddha said accurately describes the world and (more to the point) whether its practices reduce our suffering.

  No Soul, No Self

  Of all the observations made by the Buddha, one is particularly vexing: we have no soul. Mormons say our souls existed before we were born, and almost all religions promise to preserve our souls after death. According to Buddhists, Hindus are wrong to locate the essence of the human person in the Atman, because the Atman does not exist. This core Buddhist teaching is called anatta (in the Buddhist language of Pali) or anatman (in Sanskrit), which in either case means “no soul.” But that is only half of it (and the easy half), because according to Buddhists we have no self either. What we habitually refer to as “I” or “you,” as if it were some unchanging essence, is actually nothing more than a conventional name attached to an ever-changing combination of separate parts called the five skandhas. When mixed together, these five “aggregates”—matter, sensations, perceptions, thoughts, and consciousness—create the illusion of “I” and “me.” But this illusion is all there is to “myself.”

  One core text for this difficult teaching is a dialogue between the Buddhist sage Nagasena and a king named Menander. Like the rest of us, the king sees no reason to question anything as obvious as his own existence, but Nagasena is not so easily seduced by appearances. His argument for anatta hangs on an analysis of the king’s chariot, whose existence the king sees no reason to question either. So Nagasena asks him, “Is the axle the chariot?” “No.” “Are the wheels?” “No.” “The frame?” “No.” The chariot, Nagasena observes, is a composite made up of various things, just as a car today is composed of its frame and wheels and axles. The terms chariot and car are conventional designations, agreed-upon names for the coming together of various objects. So, too, is I a conventional designation for the coming together of this jangle of hair, head, hands, ideas, and emotions. Outside of such conventions, however, no essence of “me” is to be found. The self is a charlatan; all memoir is fiction.

  This may sound overly philosophical, and perhaps absurd, as if we have stumbled upon a metaphysics seminar for hypercaffeinated graduate students. Why should we care about this mumbo jumbo? Isn’t the dharma supposed to be useful? Is there any practical payoff for denying something as undeniable as myself? Yes, Buddhists say. The false belief that “I” am some permanent, unchanging, independent essence unleashes all sorts of untold suffering. It gives rise to the ego, and then it gives the ego the reins, so we are dragged through each day by thoughts of “I” and “mine,” obsessing over satiating the ego’s insatiable cravings.

  A few years ago an academic journal devoted an entire issue to one of my books. I was flattered, but when the issue arrived I had no desire to read it. I emailed a friend about my disinterest, which surprised me. “Of course!” she responded. “The only thing your ego does is say ‘you’re great’ and ‘you stink,’ over and over again, in internally referential and self-perpetuating loops… . Any form of criticism is a version of ‘you stink,’ and any form of praise is another version of the same message, since ‘you’re great’ implies you would stink if you weren’t great in that way.” The ego does more than tell baseball players they can’t hit and professors they can’t think, however. It endlessly trumpets its own existence—an activity toward which something that actually existed might not devote so much energy.

  Confucianism says no to “I, me, mine” by denying the self’s independence. We are not isolated atoms, Confucians say; we are interdependent webs of social relations. Buddhism goes a step further by denying any real self of any sort. Put an end to ignorance and grasping and suffering by putting the lie to the false self, it says. Or, as a poet put it:

  Do

  Not

  Act

  From

  Ego.

  It is a sticky little

  Mouse trap that

  Begins

  With

  A

  Wheel

  Running us in

  Circles.

  Get off.17

  Theravada and Mahayana

  There is some question about whether Buddhism is a religion, but as with Confucianism this question reveals more about our own assumptions about religion than it does about Buddhism itself. Some who find Confucianism lacking on the God front try to reduce it from religion to ethics. With Buddhism the temptation is to reduce it to psychology, or therapy.

  The earliest forms of Buddhism did not speak of God or stress the supernatural. They saw the Buddha as a human being. So if religion is about “belief in Spiritual Beings,” as the classic definition by British anthropologist E. B. Tylor puts it, Buddhism was not in the religion family.18 It wouldn’t be very Buddhist of Buddhism to remain forever the same, however. And it did not. As a child of India, Buddhism inherited Hinduism’s absorptive strategy. In India, it picked up most of the typical trappings of its religious kin, not least an elaborate pantheon of Buddhas and other spiritual beings with all the supernatural powers of Kali and Shiva. In Tibet it picked up some of the magic of the indigenous shamanism of Bon. And in China it adopted some of the naturalness, spontaneity, and simplicity of Daoism.

  There was an early effort to fossilize the tradition, to set it in stone. At its First Council, held hard by the Buddha’s death in the fifth century B.C.E. or so, his followers agreed on a canon of the Buddha’s teachings known as the Tripitaka, or “Three Baskets.” At the Second Council, held about a century later, Buddhists split over a variety of matters, including how strictly monastic rules should be interpreted and enforced. This was Buddhism’s Reformation, in the sense that it opened the door to the mad diversity that characterizes Buddhism (and Protestantism) today. This diversity is likely endemic to any tradition that subordinates “Is it true?” to “Does it work?” When new teachings or scriptures come along—and this tradition has produced both at a dizzying pace—Buddhists, rather than rejecting them as bastard children, adopt them as long-lost kin (assuming they can pass the pragmatic test of eliminating suffering).

  The beginning of the Common Era was a period of extraordinary religious activity that saw the birth of Christianity, rabbinic Judaism, and bhakti-style Hinduism. This period also gave the world bhakti-style Buddhism, known today as Mahayana. Maha means “great” and yana means “vehicle” so Mahayana means “greater vehicle,” and today it is the most popular Buddhist school. But in the beginning this name was a boast rather than a demographic observation. “I am the greatest,” bragged heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali. Mahayana Buddhists said the same thing. Much as Ali taunted Joe Frazier, they referred to their opponents as Hinayana, or “lesser vehicle.” These opponents, however, disagreed, and one group that survives today is Theravada (“Way of the Elders”).

  Mahayana Buddhists claimed they were greater than Theravada Buddhists and their kin for many reasons, but one of their biggest claims to fame was their egalitarian bent. Theravada Buddhism was a monastic tradition. For Theravadins, the only way to achieve nirvana was to withdraw from the worlds of family, work, sex, and money into the celibate life of a monk or nun. For this re
ason, some refer to the Theravada path as “Monastic Buddhism.”19 The Mahayana branch also had its monastics, but here renunciation was optional. Ordinary husbands and wives, employees and bosses expressed their devotion to new Buddhas by visiting new stupas and reading new scriptures. And though many of these laypeople contented themselves with the proximate goal of a better rebirth, some now began to hope for the ultimate goal of nirvana, without giving up on either love or worldly success.

  Mahayanists attacked Theravadins on many grounds, but the blow that hit hardest was the accusation that their predecessors were selfish. Theravada Buddhism was all about individual enlightenment, Mahayanists argued. The Theravada exemplar was the arhat, who distinguished himself from the rest of humanity by wisdom (prajna) alone. So Mahayanists disparaged the arhat as smug, self-seeking, and self-centered. How could he cling to his own spiritual advancement when there was so much suffering among those he was leaving behind?

  In a series of new scriptures, which they attributed to the Buddha but their opponents attacked as fakes and forgeries, the Mahayanists championed a new exemplar called the bodhisattva. This term literally means “awakening being,” but the key virtue of this Mahayana hero is compassion (karuna). Instead of focusing selfishly on his own private nirvana, the bodhisattva uses his huge storehouse of merit to assist others. “All the suffering in the world comes from the desire for happiness for oneself,” writes the eighth-century Indian poet-philosopher Shantideva in his Guide to the Bodhisattva Path. “All happiness in the world comes from the desire for happiness for others.”20