Thinking about Buddhism anew
Posted: March 13, 2008 | Author: Doug | Filed under: Buddhism, Dune, Religion, Taoism, Zen | 5 Comments »The youth peered up at him owlishly, said: You see Stil? Tradition isn’t the absolute guide you thought it was. –Children of Dune
Earlier tonight, I was pondering my recent rant against the Western Zen Buddhist movement toward reductionism. It occurred to me that although I criticize those who don’t believe in rebirth, or in study of the sutras, the truth is I really have no right to say anything in its defense. The truth is, I am just being arrogant.
Do I really know for sure whether rebirth happens as Buddhist tradition holds? Do I really know which sutras are genuine words of the Buddha and which one are apocryphal? Really, I don’t really know anything for sure. Studying and memorizing Buddhist doctrine as a means of being Buddhist is strangely counter-intuitive. I have no empirical experience to back any of this up. I don’t know what will happen when I die, nor do I know what the Buddha looked like, or what he really said.
What I do know is that Buddhist texts and traditions are an important guide, but that is all they are. The quote above comes from the third Dune book. The young Leto II is challenging the Stilgar’s belief in the Fremen tradition. Arrakis is changing and younger generations no longer observe water discipline, and yet, Leto reminds him how beautiful the young women look. This reminds Stilgar that there is more to life than dry tradition, and raw survival in the desert. His traditions fall apart around him, but he begins to see a much deeper truth.
The Theravada monk, Ajahn Sumedho, said it best when he said: “We don’t use the Pali Canon as a basis for orthodoxy, we use the Pali Canon to investigate our experience.”
So, like Stilgar, as I challenge everything I’ve learned in the last few years, I realize that I really don’t know any of this stuff for sure. Instead of memorizing doctrine and theory, I should respectfully set it aside and just observe reality, and observe myself. In the Tao Te Ching, I remember a great quote in chapter 54:
Observe other persons through your own person;
Observe other families through your own family;
Observe other villages through your own village;
Observe other states through your own state;
Observe all under heaven through all under heaven.How do I know the nature of all under heaven?
Through this.
The last two lines are by far the most important. How can I truly understand life, reality, myself? Observe!
Or to quote again from Children of Dune:
He [the Preacher] repeated it in a rolling stentorian shout: “Abandon certainty! That’s life’s deepest command. That’s what life is all about…”
Or in the words of the Diamond Sutra:
“All composed things are like a dream,
a phantom, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.
That is how to meditate on them,
that is how to observe them.”
Namo Kanzeon Bosatsu
Hello, this blog is about my life as a father, Buddhist and Japanophile. Any useful information I can pass along will hopefully make the 
Its funny. I often struggle to hold back my annoyance with the more traditionalist set and get along with the reductionist guys. But I am a noob who knows alot less about life and Buddhism than the traditionalists or the reductionists. What do I know? WHo am I to say?
I don’t know. The key, I think, is to jsut live with myself and them and stop trying to grasp at this. But thats hard, and I am lazy.
Those are great words, Erg.
Thank you.
This is great and has really got me thinking. But my take on it is this: memorizing sayings, remembering parables/stories, understanding and respecting tradition are essential beginnings. Extraordinary people like Jesus, Buddha and Lao Tzu were bestowed a gift of understanding. To become the enlightened person, it feels to me that we must (with full completeness and openness) embrace the above and bring them into our life. Once we have it instilled in mind, body and soul… we can reflect on the gentle nature of the universe in peace. This is because the passing of time has effaced our desire to question the ancient wisdom… we can just see it out of the window.
Though nominally a Hindu brahmin, I have been reading and trying to practise Buddhist ideas for a very long time now. You are quite right, we unnecessarily complicate things – and then find it unsatisfactory, or quarrel over whose complications are ‘more right’!
I have an idea the teachings of the great masters are so startling in their simplicity, and so hard to practise (at least in the early stages) that most of us prefer to hide beind ritualistic anodynes, which save us from thinking and doing things we have grown up to find unpleasant, or weird (like not wanting to shop all the time, or avoiding gossip, or trying to be happy at the good fortune of others).
May I suggest a little book titled ‘What Buddha would do’ by Franz Metcalf? I found it wonderfully lucid and contemporary, without distorting the essential message through over-simplification.
Hi Suvro,
You make some excellent comments here. It’s the simplicity of the message that often makes up trip up. We hate the idea of having to forsake our selfish lifestyle, so we hide behind rituals and absolutions to somehow make it easier. The Buddha did not compromise on this point: we have to make the effort, or we can only expect more of the same in our lives.