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03/10/2001 Archived Entry: "Buddhism Without Beliefs?"

Today, I attended a "Celebration of Queer Dharma" at Fort Mason in San Francisco. It marked me moving beyond a barrier that I'd placed between myself and any gathering together of people for "organized religious" purposes. The gathering together of a couple of dozen queer, bay area buddhists from different traditions began around 9:30 this morning and lasted until around 4PM. Several things struck me very early on in the day. First, there were men and women in attendance. Second, I was there even though I had uncertainty about whether I was buddhist enough or had practiced enough or had engaged a teacher or a sangha enough to identify myself as buddhist. Third, we were invited to introduce ourselves as we built the "alter" with items that each of us had brought. As people introduced themselves, I discovered that a significant number of the other people in the room did not practice in a sangha and perhaps shared many of the same concerns as I.

Thus, my experience today began with a considerable amount support for me and evidence that diminished the many anxieties and fears I had brought with me. It was a good morning.

I recently began reading Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor. I'd seen the book, but had dismissed it as not being of interest to me until I read a recent article in Salon online. The article criticized the emergence of "Boomer Buddhism" as having made Buddhism "banal" and stripping it of all of it's religiosity in order to make it attractive to baby boomers in the West.

I felt somehow personally threatened (or troubled) by the comments of Stephen Prothero. It was precisely the non-dogmatic teachings of people like Thich Nhat Hanh and Shunryu Suzuki that allowed me to embrace their message of living mindfully. It was precisely the non-religious nature of the gathering today that had created the space for me to get myself their. I felt sure that no one was going to whack me with a stick, if I didn't sit straight during meditation. When I saw the number of lesbians there, I was certain that I had not been tricked into some cultish indoctrination in to some organized religious body.

What then if I find comfort in the very things that S. Prothero says are ruining Buddhism in the West? That is the point of reading Stephen Batchelor's book. (I'm not sure Stephen Prothero did.) I've only begun reading the book, yet I find resonance in the message the author is trying to communicate. His working thesis appears to be the opposite of Mr. Prothero's. Batchelor suggests that the complex experience of Gautama was reduced to simplified statements of absolute truth (dogma) and thus Buddhism as a relgiion was created created and Siddhartha Gautama was deified and recast in the tradition of other religions' saviors, prophets and deities. Batchelor contends that Buddhism was made into a religion when it in fact is not. In the effort to make the complex into a set of simple religious doctrines the teaching and example of Siddhartha is lost. This is my belief about Christianity as well. In an effort to make Christianity clear, it has become about belief in things like the Apostolic Creed (Father, Son and Holy Ghost) rather than about the meaning and example of the life of Christ.

"Such a question is a mystery, not a problem. It cannot be 'solved' by meditation techniques, through the authority of a text, upon submission to the will of a guru. Such strategies merely replace the question with beliefs in an answer." - Stephen Batchelor