Of late I’ve been revising a significant portion of my thinking about the Buddhadhamma. This has been partly triggered by nothing more than the inevitable change and growth that happens during the course of a long practice. However, a second, and very precise, trigger came about during a discussion by a monastic regarding animal euthanasia–i.e., “putting down” a pet who is suffering with a terminal illness.
This is far more than just a philosophical discussion for me. I have a dearly-loved kitty who is well into her 20th year; her health continues good but the unmistakable signs of old age abound, in the form of weight loss, bladder infections, and the like. She is pushing up against the upper limits for housecat lifespans and no wishful thinking on my part is going to change that. Parting is inevitable, and the time will come within the next few years in all likelihood.
This monk’s attitude is that you don’t euthanize a pet, period. The stance comes as much from doctrines of karma as it does from dependant origination. In short, the notion is that April’s practically infinite collection of conditionality, from past lives as well as present, (maybe even future?) is not something I can know. Thus to have her put down is interfering with karma playing out.
At least that’s what the monk says–to put it crudely, if she’s suffering into her death, that’s karma playing itself out.
I don’t really care if I understand the monk’s argument perfectly, or whether I understand the nuances of karma or not. What I clearly understand, however, is this:
My cat, April, is real. If she suffers as her death approaches, that suffering will be real.
Doctrines like karma and dependant origination, while beautiful ideas and subtly worked out, are just things in words and paper that somebody made up. They aren’t absolute truth; they are neither proveable nor disproveable, and are in fact no more “true” than Christian/Islamic/Jewish notions of heaven/hell, or anything else. They are religious notions, philosophies if you will. They aren’t real.
When it comes to something REAL — i.e., my cat April — that’s where I draw the line. I can *play* with Buddhist ideas all I want to, but if I put them before my cat’s happiness, if I allow a *notion* to lead me into being neglectfully cruel, then I’m absolutely no better than those horribly misguided people who bomb abortion clinics or murder abortion doctors, or maniacs like Fred Phelps who rant that AIDS is deserved.
In short, it becomes very, very clear to me that I part company with Buddhism as a religion, nor have I ever been in company with the religious aspects of Buddhism. I embrace a number of Buddhist practices–but the ones I embrace the most emphatically are the ones that have absolutely no taint of doctrine or acceptance of a worldview about them. I think this probably accounts for my lack of interest in Tibetan Buddhism with its panoply of mythological figures, or Soto Zen with its near-slavish adherence to the words of Dogen. The practices I embrace could have come from a good therapist as much as from a Buddhist teacher. Nor do I have any highfalutin’ notions about liberation or nirvana; I’m willing to keep on practicing for the simple improvement it brings to my life and to the life of those around me. I’m a much, much better person because of dhamma practice–but NOT because of Buddhism.
Here are a few areas in which I really, really depart from Buddhism:
1) Misogynism. I don’t care how hard the apologists try to spin things; Buddhism is a misogynistic religion, in its own little way just as bad as Islam or medieval Christianity. And don’t tell me about Western softening of the misogynism; it’s only lip service. I was at a long retreat in an ultra-modern center in my oh-so-liberal tradition, when a celebrated Burmese teacher arrived, a thoroughly non-modern Burmese sayadaw. Without so much as a single peep of protest, the center allowed his ridiculous prejudices to govern the entire retreat. Gender segregation was the norm, women were not allowed to wear short-sleeved shirts, the male monks were always ahead of the female nuns at the cafeteria lines. Male superiority permeated the entire proceedings in ways blatant and subtle. This was at Forest Refuge in 2005, right in the heart of Massachusetts, a state which is liberal enough to allow same-sex marriage, but where a cranky old Burmese monk was concerned, we were back in the stone ages. His notions on women and their place in society were absolutely repugnant and should have been denounced by every person in that institution, nor should any of the women put up with any of it for one second. But because it was *religion*, somehow that made it OK.
2) Cosmology. Teachers will tell you that Buddhism doesn’t have much in the way of its own cosmology in that it picks up the cosmology of the surrounding culture. To some extent that’s true, but only a little bit. Scratch the surface and you find out otherwise. A Buddhist monk of my acquaintance–a Canadian who was a history professor in a university prior to taking precepts–seems to actually accept the old Vedic cosmology that got ensnared in the Pali Canon, complete with a flat earth, hell realms, heavenly realms, various kinds of mythic beings, and the like. In fact, Buddhism is as cosmologically backwards as your basic fundamentalist assembly deep in the wilds of the south. Too much of the teaching depends on features of that cosmology. Trying to cherry-pick the suttas for passages devoid of problems stemming from pre-literate cosmology is rather like trying to cherry-pick the Bible; it’s fundamentally hypocritical and renders the teachings worthless. (Ignoring the parts you don’t like is sort of like ignoring those aspects of mathematics you find uncongenial–maybe you’ll please yourself, but you’ll remain ignorant of mathematics.)
3) Rebirth. The entire notion of rebirth is illogical from top to bottom and betrays its irrationality when well-meaning teachers try to explain it. (So far I have yet to hear an explanation that doesn’t lead into an infinite regression of contradition.) The usual metaphor is passing a flame from one candle to another; the idea is that the flame somehow “continues”. But of course the flame doesn’t “continue” because fire is a process. They then go onto say that beings are like that flame–i.e., process. However, you can’t then turn around and have people “remembering” past lives. Either this stuff is demonstrable or it isn’t, and nobody has any evidence to support it–at least no evidence that would stand up to even the weakest experimental scrutiny. They made it up.
4) Culture Implants. The Vipassana movement is mostly free of this, but other traditions typically aren’t. I can happily go through the rest of my life without ever seeing another idiot dolled up like a fake medieval Japanese. The few times I’ve been at SF Zen Center I always feel like I’ve wandered into a community theater production of The Mikado. What exactly is being promoted here–liberation, or Japanese ethnocentricity/xenophobia?
5) Monastic culture in general. Buddhist monasticism is the grandaddy of many other forms, and it shares many of the same problems. Just the rules about celibacy alone are daunting, not to mention everything else. And why? Buddhist monks wind up as thoroughly psychotic about sex as do monks of every other stripe. One thing I’ve noticed very clearly is that a lot of Western monks are repressed homosexuals; gaydar never fails, you know. Get over it, guys: come out, come out, wherever you are. The monastery isn’t going to help; you’re just going to wind up twisted, or else you’re going to break your precepts with dependable regularity.
One more remark about this: I’ve met monks from a number of Buddhist traditions. As we have become better acquainted, about half of them have eventually propositioned me. Enough said.
So there’s a bit of frustration off the chest–probably more to come…