Equanimity
Equanimity is characterized as promoting the aspect of neutrality towards beings. Its function is to see equality in beings. It is manifested as the quieting of resentment and approval.[1]
1968, Winter, Canada
In March of 1967 I left the United States and became a resident of Canada. My reason for making the move was to avoid military service during the war in Vietnam, a war that I saw as pointlessly destructive. During my first year in Canada I was cultivating anger and resentment toward the country of my birth. The winter months of early 1968 were especially difficult. I was living alone in a small apartment in the basement of a modest house in Lethbridge, Alberta, a town in which I had few acquaintances and even fewer friends—one friend to be exact. I did a lot of writing that winter on a green Hermes typewriter. I wrote a novel, a one-act play, a few short stories, and some poetry. Writing was an emotional outlet, and it gave me something to do while I was smoking unfiltered Player cigarettes, but what I wrote was unreadable. Even I didn’t like reading what I had written. It was too angry, too didactic, too preachy, too dogmatic even for my unrefined tastes. Who wants to read the bellicose raving of a bitter and inexperienced twenty-two-year-old draft-dodger?
Fortunately for me, there was a decent bookstore in Lethbridge, and when I wasn’t banging out substandard literature on my Hermes, I went to the bookstore to purchase novels by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. On one of those visits to the bookstore, I happened to see a thin volume called Buddhist Meditation, published in 1956. Reading Conze’s Buddhism: Its Essence and Development in the previous year had piqued my interest in Buddhism. So I bought Buddhist Meditation, read it, and even began to try some of the contemplative exercises described in it. One set of exercises in particular that caught my attention was the four brahma-vihāras, often known in English as abiding with the divine or the divine abidings. That set of exercises consists in cultivating loving kindness (mettā), compassion (karuṇā), sympathetic joy (muditā), and equanimity (upekkhā), which are antidotes to respectively hatred, cruelty, envy, and resentment. This post is about the fourth of those abidings: equanimity.
I was amazed to learn that there were actually tools available for reducing the painful mental states of anger and resentment, that loving kindness and equanimity are skills that one can develop by putting those tools to regular use.
Brahma-vihāra: abiding with the divine
In traditional accounts it is said that the Buddha once came upon a mendicant whose religious practice was done for the purpose of seeing the god Brahmā face to face. The Buddha asked the mendicant how his devotional practice was working for him. Had he seen Brahmā face to face? The mendicant said he had not yet succeeded. On being questioned further, the mendicant admitted that he had never known anyone who had succeeded in seeing Brahmā face to face. The Buddha then asked what qualities a devotee expected to find in Brahmā. The mendicant replied that he expected Brahmā to have unconditional love toward all beings, to be actively responsive to those experiencing hardships, to be full of joy when beings have good fortune, and to pass no negative judgment on beings. The Buddha then said that he could not help the mendicant see Brahmā face to face, but he could teach him how to have unconditional love (mettā), compassionate responsiveness (karuṇā), sympathetic joy (muditā), and equanimity (upekkhā). Having those qualities would be tantamount to abiding with or even in Brahmā (brahmavihāra).
Many centuries after the Buddha lived and taught, the Theravādin monk Buddhaghose wrote a comprehensive manual of Buddhist practice called Visuddhimaggo, which has been translated into English under the titles The Path of Purification and the Path of Purity. The first section of that manual is dedicated to the development of good habits (sīla), the second section to mental concentration (samādhi), and the third to cultivating wisdom (paññā). In the second section a wide range of contemplative exercises are outlined in detail, one of them being the set of four exercises known collectively as abiding with the divine (brahma-vihāra). Buddhaghosa’s instructions on contemplative exercises were in fact the basis of much of Conze’s Buddhist Meditation.
What is equanimity, and how does it relate to the other divine abidings?
The quotation at the beginning of this blog post is Buddhaghosa’s concise description of uppekkhā.
Equanimity (upekkhā) has the defining characteristic (lakkhaṇa) of generating (pavatti) the mode (ākāra) of impartiality (majjhatta) toward sentient beings (sattesu); it has the essential property (rasa) of seeing (dassana) the similarity (samabhāva) in sentient beings; its manifestation (paccupaṭṭhānā) is the quelling (vūpasama) of aversion (paṭigha) and favoritism (anumaya).
The flagship of the divine abidings is the cultivation of friendship or loving kindness (mettā-bhāvanā). That exercise consists in learning to regard all beings as one regards oneself by acknowledging that all beings desire for themselves happiness and well-being. The other three divine abidings are particular expressions of friendship. Compassion is acting in response to a friend’s misfortune, that is, doing whatever one can to help reverse the misfortune. Sympathetic joy is the delight one feels when a friend experiences good fortune. Equanimity consists in accepting all one’s friends as they are rather than resisting them or being annoyed by them. It also consists in not playing favorites among one’s friends but rather loving them all equally. Buddhaghosa says that equanimity (or even-mindedness as Pe Maung Tin translated upekkhā) is the most refined expression of friendship
What are the obvious opposites of and the subtle obstacles to equanimity?
Buddhaghosa uses the expression “far enemy” to characterize a mentality that is obviously the opposite of the mode of friendship under consideration. For example, hatred, envy, and cruelty are the respective far enemies of loving kindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy. He uses the term “near enemy” to characterize a mentality close enough that an unwise person might mistake it for the mode of friendship that one is aiming for. Lust is the near enemy of loving kindness, since both lust and loving kindness are based on seeing the desirable qualities in another. Grief at not having one’s own personal aims fulfilled is the near enemy of compassion, since both such grief and compassion are occasioned by recognizing a misfortune. Worldly joy based on attachment to one’s own good fortune is the near enemy of sympathetic joy, since it shares with sympathetic joy an appreciation of prosperity.
As for equanimity, its near enemy is indifference, or simply being oblivious of another person’s conditions and thus not caring at all for another sentient being. What indifference and equanimity have in common is an absence of condemnation of another’s shortcomings. Equanimity involves ignoring another’s faults, while indifference involves being ignorant of them.
Equanimity’s far enemy is resentment or disapproval of others due to their perceived shortcomings. True equanimity consists in being aware of another’s qualities without passing negative judgment of the person but rather seeing that personal qualities are conditioned, often by conditions beyond a person’s control.
Why equanimity?
It seems to me that blaming others has been on the ascendency in the past decade, as have shaming others for their real or imagined flaws, passing negative moral judgment on others for their perceived imperfections, and assuming the worst of those whose words and deeds are deemed unacceptable. The sort of equanimity described by Buddhaghosa may not entirely eradicate those trends—I would be the first to admit that those tendencies have not been eradicated it myself—but the cultivation of equanimity is likely to have the effect of reducing those tendencies in oneself.
I have a feeling that in some quarters equanimity may be perceived as a weakness or as a kind of permissiveness that accelerates moral degeneracy. I would ask those who feel that way to ask themselves what problems, real or imagined, have ever been solved by resenting, blaming, shaming, and accusing others. Those who are struggling in various ways are more likely to ocercome their obstacles by being shown kindness and a helping hand than by being condemned or shunned or villified.
There is much more to say on this topic, but rather than saying more I have more important work to do. I have a mentality that could use more cultivation of loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.
-
Sattesu majjhattākārappavatti-lakkhaṇā upekkhā, sattesu
samabhāvadassanarasā; paṭighānumayavūpasamapaccupaṭṭhānā… Visuddhimaggo, Pali Text Society editon, p. 318. The translation is that of Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli, The Path of Purification, p.344. An alternative translation is offered by Pe Maung Tin (The Path of Purity, p. 366): “Even-mindedness has the characteristic of evolving the mode of centrality as regards beings; its function is seeing the equality of beings; its manifestation is suppressing aversion and sycophancy.” I provide yet another translation in what follows. ↩
A call for secular spirituality
What does it mean to be secular?
The word “secular” derives from the calsssical Latin saeculum, which means the period of one human generation. The adjectival form of the word, saecularis, means pertaining to a generation, especially to the current generation. In medieval Latin the word saecularis came to refer to those concerns of the current era, which meant those concerns of life in this world, as opposed to the heavenly realm or the afterlife in general. During the time of the European Enlightenment, there was in some circles a celebration of political secularism, that is, government not dominated by the religious establishment. When the United States of America was being formed, several of the most influential founding fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and others strongly influenced by Enlightenment thinkers, favored a form of government that was free of the influence of religious dogmas of all kinds. Government was to be guided by moral principles, so long as that morality was secular and humanistic in nature. Their thinking was reflected in The First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which reads:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Congress is prohibited by that amendment from making any religion the established religion of the United States, and it is also prohibited from outlawing any religion or prohibiting people from practicing the religion of their choice. The United States, in other words, was meant to be a secular nation. There is, however, more to secularism than that. It is to those further dimensions of secularism that we now turn.
The generations now living and those to come
The need for secularism in the original sense of a focus on concerns facing our times has never been more urgent. The human race is collectively undermining the ability of its planet to sustain not only human life but the life of countless other species that live on the land and in rivers, ponds, lakes, lagoons, and oceans. This is a time in which human beings, the species doing the most to degrade biological habitats, must take stock of the consequences of habits they have cultivated during the past few centuries. Many, if not most, of those habits must be changed dramatically, and many must be abandoned altogether. Knowing which of those habits must be changed or abandoned requires the guidance of unbiased evidence-based thinking. Many of the traditional religions around the world are of little use in coming to terms with what must be done; some traditonal religions are actually obstacles to the kind of thinking that is required to solve the problems the human race has created for itself and for other species of plant and animal life. In recent human history there has never been a time in which there was a greater urgency to be secular. Being secular in that sense may be aided by having a poetic spirit.
What does it mean to be spiritual?
As with the word “secular,” it may be instructive to look at how the word was used in classical languages. The Latin word spiritus is derived from the verb spirare (to breathe, to blow). Spiritus, therefore, means breath. Spiritus was the word the Latin-speaking world used to translate the Greek πνευμα, which also means breath, or the vital principle that dwells within the soul (ψυχή, anima) and therefore distinguishes animate from inanimate beings. In the works of some of the Stoics, πνευμα (pneuma) was seen as the organizing principle of both the human ψυχή (psyché) and of the entire cosmos. It is in the latter sense that I like to use the word “spirit”; it is that which indwells and organizes everything in the universe and therefore that which unites the human being with all other beings, both animate and inanimate. It is that which Quakers call that of God in everyone (and I would add in everything), or what Hindus call ātman, or what Buddhists call Buddha-nature.[1]
Secular spirituality
The call to be secular in the sense of tending to the most urgent concerns of the present and future generations can of course be answered without any reference to being spiritual. One can study physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering and apply that knowledge to living sustainably on our planet. There are plenty of people who do that, and we all benefit from their commitment. What is gained by thinking in terms of spiritual secularism or secular spirituality is, for those who need it, a sense of personal engagement based on the realization that what is good for other living beings (and also for such inanimate beings as marshlands, rivers, prairies, and other ecosystems) is also ultimately good for oneself.[2] Caring for the well-being of the planet is a way of caring for one’s one physical health, one’s psychological health, and one’s character. Conversely, caring for one’s one physical health, one’s psychological health, and one’s character—in other words, living spiritually—entails caring for other human beings, for all animals, for all plants, and for the soil, the landbound waterways, and the oceans.
No one can tell another exactly how to be spiritually secular, but the more people learn for themselves how to be spiritually secular, the better off we, and those who have yet to come into this world after us, will be.
-
I am not sure that there actually exists any single thing that indwells and organizes everything in the universe, but I do find it helpful to think and act as if there is such a thing. In other words, I think of the words “spirit” and “spiritual” not as metaphysical terms but as invitations to put one’s poetic imagination to good use. ↩
-
There is a saying in Buddhism that everything that is parārtha (good for others) is also svārtha (good for oneself), and everything that is svārtha is also parārtha. The good news is that one never has to make a choice between serving otrhers and serving oneself, since the two services amount to the same thing. This idea is by no means unique to Buddhism. ↩
Self-reliance means being helpless
There is a persistent funny form of suspicion in most of us that we can solve our own problems and be the masters of our own ships of life, but the fact of the matter is that by ourselves we can only be consumed by our problems and suffer the shipwreck.
—Harry Stack Sullivan (February 21, 1892–January 14, 1949)
Like most high-school students in in the early 1960s, I had an assignment to read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay called “Self-reliance.” So much time has passed since then that I no longer recall what impression that essay made on me, aside from recalling what is perhaps the best-known quotation from that essay: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” That’s as much of the quotation as I have remembered for most of my life. The passage in which it occurs provides more context:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Over the decades I have encountered several people who took false comfort in the last line of that passage by reasoning, fallaciously, that if to be great is to be misunderstood, then to be misunderstood is to be great. Such people usually assure themselves, without evidence, that they are misunderstood.
As much as I admire Emerson’s writing style—what writer has not wished he or she could have written any number of Emerson’s beautifully crafted sentences?—being little-minded as I am, I find myself in fundamental disagreement with not only that famous quotation but also with the very idea of self-reliance.
Emerson wrote “Self-reliance” in 1841, a time when many Americans were caught up in the myth of self-reliance and staunch individualism. That myth became especially strong after the Civil War as people of European descent became preoccupied with colonizing the American West by wresting lands away from Native Americans and imposing their values upon the peoples who had lived there for millennia. The romantic heroes of that mythology were the pioneers and the cowboys. According to that fanciful narrative, the pioneers and cowboys were independent-minded freedom-loving white men, and their obedient women, whose sole desire was to be left alone, especially by anything resembling Government. That mythology is still alive among many Americans who show their self-reliant individualism by driving pickup trucks and wearing cowboy hats, even if they are bankers or real-estate agents living in downtown Denver or Phoenix. To prove one’s rugged individualism, it is important to dress and behave and talk like all the other rugged individualists in one’s neighborhood.
As an aside, I should make it clear that although I went to high school in a suburb of Denver, I never wore cowboy boots until I went to college in Wisconsin and had to prove to those midwesterners that I was a true son of the Wild West. During my high school years I was in hot pursuit of a different fantasy, namely, that I was a beatnik, which I proved by wearing huarache sandals, a beret and shades. My body was in a suburb of Denver, but my soul was in Greenwich Village, a place I could not find on a map of Manhattan. But I digress, as is my wont.
As the decades have rolled by, the idea of self-reliance has increasingly revealed to me its fraudulent nature. Simply put, there is no such thing as self-reliance. There may be a few—a very few—people who live as solitary hermits far from the madding crowd whose reliance is only to a small degree on their fellow human beings. They are not, however, so much self-reliant as reliant on the natural world that surrounds them—the plants, animals, rivers, waterholes, caves and canyons that form the network of interdependent entities that nowadays we call a habitat. Who knows what such hermits think, but my guess is that in order to survive at all, they must form habits based on their experiences of what works and what does not. In short, their thought patterns are for the most part habitual and therefore consistent from one day to the next. Hermits such as those cannot afford the luxury of thinking today what contradicts everything they thought yesterday. If they cannot do so, how much less can we who live within any kind of human society do so?
Emerson had many intriguing and even a few useful ideas. His notion of self-reliance was not one of them. Perhaps tomorrow I will think differently.
Meditation without beliefs
If anyone is interested in seeing me become uncomfortable in a hurry, the surest method of achieving that goal is to ask me my opinion about something. Anything. Perhaps some of the discomfort arises because of uncertainty about why my opinion is being solicited. Is the inquirer looking to pick a quarrel? Is the inquirer seeking my advice? If so, will the advice be followed? If it is, will I be held responsible for the consequences?
Perhaps most of the discomfort stems from my own uncertainty about what my opinion is. Over the decades I have learned that most of my opinions are liable to change, so there is really not much point in anyone learning what my opinion on anything at any given moment is. Often enough, the moment I have expressed what I think my opinion may be, the shortcomings of the opinion become so obvious that I feel foolish for having expressed it.
Enough of this pointless speculation about why being asked my opinion makes me uncomfortable. Like most things in life, it really does not matter.
Doxastic minimalism
In 1988 I wrote a book about the Indian Buddhist philosopher Dignāga. At the time I was writing the book I was intrigued in some of the points of commonality between Dignāga and an earlier Indian Buddhist philosopher, Nāgārjuna. Both of these authors seemed to me to represent a philosophical attitude that I called doxastic minimalism, that is, the preference to keep speculating and personal opinions to a minimum. (The English word “doxastic” is derived from the Greek δοχαστικοσ, meaning conjectural, which is derived from the verb δοχαζειν, meaning to conjecture, to guess.) Whether it was accurate to portray these Buddhists from long ago as doxastic minimalists is for others to ponder. All I know is that the idea of doxastic minimalism appealed to me personally for some reason—perhaps for no good reason—and that I was bold enough to project my own attitudinal preferences onto two ancient philosophers whom I happened to be studying at that moment.
One very good way to achieve doxastic minimalism is to study logic and epistemology. This, it seems to me was the strategy preferred by the Dignāga, or at least of the Dignāga of my fantasy world. What Dignāga did in his principal work, Pramāṇasamuccaya (Collected writings on the means of acquiring knowledge), was to lay out the criteria that would have to be met for a thought or belief to be established as truthful. Without going into details here, the upshot is that remarkably few of the propositions running around inside our heads meet these criteria. That is not to say that the propositions in our heads are false; rather, it is to say that the vast majority of our beliefs, thoughts, and propositions are indeterminate. They are beliefs that cannot be established as either truths or falsehoods. Realizing that tends to make a person feel a bit more humble and less prone to being intoxicated by a sense of certainty.
As I imagined Nāgārjuna, his strategy was to examine the very idea of what it means to establish a belief as true. The examination, articulated in his work Vigrahavyāvarttanī (Averting disputes), goes approximately as follows. Any belief in order to be deemed established as a truth, must be warranted by observed data or by another belief that has itself been established as a truth. But the belief that a given observed datum or another established belief is an adequate warrant is itself a belief that requires a warrant, and that gives rise to an infinite regress. A belief needs a warrant. The belief that a belief needs a warrant needs a warrant. The belief that the belief that a belief needs a warrant needs a warrant needs a warrant. No matter how far one pursues this chain of warrants, one arrives at a putative warrant that is itself unwarranted. This strategy seems more radical than Dignāga’s, in that Dignāga’s method shows that astonishingly few of our beliefs are grounded in a warrant, whereas Nāgārjuna’s method leaves us with the sense that there are, in the final analysis, no warranted beliefs. Note that this can only be a sense; if it were an established truth, then it would be a counterexample to the claim that there are no warranted beliefs.
Meditation without beliefs
I have no idea whether meditation is a good way to achieve anything. That question does not even interest me very much, because I am not in the business of promoting meditation. It is something that I started doing because I thought it would result in changes that I regarded at the time as potentially positive, but eventually I was not sure what it means for a change to be positive. Perhaps change is nothing more nor less than just change.
By now I meditate only because it is a habit that is, so far as I have been able to tell, relatively harmless. One could say I do it for aesthetic, or perhaps hedonistic, reasons. I enjoy it. Usually. To be more accurate, I usually enjoy the things I do that I call meditation. There are plenty of things that people do that they call meditation that I do not enjoy at all. Guided meditations, for example, tend to irritate me. Being told to relax tends to make me tense. Being told to focus on my breath tends to make me want to solve algebra problems in my head or see how far I can get in recalling Bach’s second Brandenburg Concerto.
By far the least satisfying modes of meditation to me are those that have a hidden or explicit agenda of reinforcing some dogma or other. (The English word “dogma” comes from the Greek δογμα, which is derived from the verb δοκειν, meaning to think or to seem good.) For example, Buddhist vipaśyanā (insight) exercises have the agenda of reinforcing the Buddhist dogma that every experience is ultimately unsatisfactory because it is transitory and neither one’s self or one’s property. Other forms of meditation are meant to reinforce the dogma that God (or Buddha nature, or Brahman, or Awareness, or Spirit, or Unconditional Love) is the fundamental core of every living and sometimes even every non-living being and that because this ineffable entity is the true self (ātman) of all beings, all beings are in a sense one. There are people who seem to thrive on meditative exercises rooted in such ways of talking. I am not among them. I do not like being told what I will believe after doing the meditative exercise properly, nor do I thrive on being assured that if I emerge without embracing the dogma, then I must be doing the meditative exercise improperly.
Fortunately, there are meditative exercises for people with temperaments unfortunately like mine. Not surprisingly, the exercises that are conducive to doxastic minimalism are themselves minimalist in nature. One example is the exercise (if one can call it that) called shikantaza (just sitting). Although it is called just sitting, it can just as well be done standing, walking or reclining. The instructions are admirably simple. 1. Just sit. 2. Eventually stop sitting. No need for a timer, a bell, a set of robes, a special mat and cushion, or a guy creeping around the room with a cricket bat ready to hit you if you move a muscle or begin to slouch. Just sit. And then do something else.
There is another meditative protocol that has become popular during the past few decades, one that I find satisfactory. It is called Centering Prayer, but I must confess I have no idea why it is called that. It is similar in many ways to shikantaza, except that one is encouraged to use an anchor of some kind to keep one’s chain of thoughts from growing too long. This anchor can be a single word, but it can just as well be a visualized image, or one’s breath. The purpose of the anchor is not to focus single-pointedly on it, but rather to return to it momentarily if one catches oneself pursuing a train of thoughts, feelings, or emotions. Some Centering Prayer practitioners guide themselves by what are called the four R’s. They are:
- Resist no thought.
- Retain no thought.
- React to no thought.
- Return gently to the anchor. (Some versions refer to the anchor as the sacred word.)
In Centering Prayer parlance, the word “thought” refers to anything that comes into the mind, whether it be a verbally articulated idea, a bodily sensation, an emotion, a fantasy, a vision, or a fleeting conviction that one has attained unsurpassed supreme enlightenment. Retain no thought. Let it go.
That’s enough words.
The puzzle of religious identity
A while back a clinic at which I had an upcoming appointment called me to ask questions in preparation for my visit. One of the questions was “What is your religious preference?” The question took me by surprise—of what medical relevance could that possibly be to an otorhinolaryngologist? Do the nostrils of an evangelical Christian look different from the nostrils of a Zen Buddhist?
What took me even more by surprise than the question was that I answered it quickly and without hesitation. More surprising yet was my answer: “Quaker,” said I. After the call ended, I reflected on the fact that for several decades my response to that question, on the rare occasions it has arisen, has always been “Buddhist.” Why, after decades of identifying as a Buddhist, did I spontaneously have a different answer?
As I began to think about this, I began by reflecting on the fact that I have dual citizenship, being a citizen of the United States by birth and a citizen of Canada by naturalization. For years I carried two passports. When entering the United States I always showed my U.S. passport, and when entering any other country I showed the Canadian passport. When traveling outside North America, I always thought of myself and identified myself to others as Canadian. Now that both passports have expired, I don’t travel outside North America. I now live in the United States again and vote in local and federal elections whenever the opportunity arises, but despite exercising the rights of a citizen, I cannot easily think of myself as a citizen of the United States or any other country. I have ceased to believe in countries; they are at best a conventional conceptual structure that I reject but to which practical life requires some degree of acknowledgement, however reluctant.
My attitude toward religions that have names is parallel to my attitude toward countries that have names and borders. The most emotionally honest answer to the question “What is your religious preference?” would be the same as the most emotionally honest answer to the question “What is your citizenship?” The answer to both questions would be “None.” And yet, I do have membership in two religious organizations, both of which I maintain. I have no preference of one over the other. It has mostly been through force of habit that when asked I tend to tell people I’m a Buddhist.
So why did I recently answer the question of religious preference differently? As I thought about this further, it occurred to me that I have always seen myself as a pretty substandard Buddhist, at lest by traditional criteria. I don’t particularly like or get any inspiration from Buddhist rituals. I don’t really believe anyone has ever attained nirvana, which is traditionally said to be the complete eradication of the afflictions of greed, hatred, and delusion. Nirvana is also traditionally said to be the cessation of rebirth, but I have never believed in rebirth in the first place. As far as I am concerned, everyone who manages to die has attained the end of consciousness and has no worry of being born as an animal or a ghost or a denizen of any of the hells or paradises cooked up by the common human reluctance to face oblivion; it follows from my convictions, if they are true, that either everyone attains nirvana, or no one does.
I find it impossible to believe that anyone has ever existed who can accurately be described by the fulsome praise embedded in the formulaic description of the Buddha: “noble, fully awakened, perfect in knowledge and conduct, knower of the world, unmatched teacher of gods and people” and “the best teacher on two feet.” Are there any gods to be taught? Can anyone who is a teacher of people be called unmatched or the best? Surely there are countless thousands of very good teachers, people whose advice it would benefit almost anyone to follow. Why single out one good teacher as the best? None of the traditional praise of the Buddha makes much sense to me.
All told, if being a Buddhist entails going for refuge to the Buddha and the Dharma (which, as an item of refuge is understood as the ultimate goal of nirvana) and the Community, I fail to go for refuge to at least two out of three of the traditional Buddhist refuges. Truth be told, I don’t even believe in the community as it is traditionally understood by Buddhists, namely, as the community of noble persons, those being the people who have eradicated various false views, sexual desires, anger, pride and various other afflictions. My belief is that if one is born human, one dies human and is human every moment in between birth and death, and being human inevitably involves having an amygdala and all the “base” and “animalistic” mental states that originate in that part of the brain that human beings share with other deuterostomes.
By now it must be clear that I fall short of all traditional expectations of what it means to be a Buddhist. So how could I ever have thought of myself as a Buddhist at all? The answer to that is that one key teaching of Buddhism has made more sense to me than any other teaching anywhere, and that is that all internal and external turmoil arises from the presence of greed, hatred and delusion, and the more those afflictions are subdued, the greater the odds of feeling some degree of comfort while alive. While it is true that many philosophies incorporate that same key teaching in one way or another, it just happens that I first heard that teaching clearly articulated by Buddhists, so it is to Buddhism that I habitually give credit, even while acknowledging that Stoicism, along with most if not all of the world religions, and humanism deserve equal credit.
I suppose I thought of myself as a Buddhist because in my own mind it was the standards of Buddhism of which I was most conscious of falling short. I’m quite confident that I am equally far below the standards of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Daoism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Sikhism, but what stood out in my mind, because of the accidents of who got to me first to shape my thinking, was my being below the standards of Buddhism.
What changed recently, I think, is that I have been reading quite a bit in recent months about the Quaker notion that one’s life—the way one lives—is the only real testimony to one’s faith. I admit to being very weak in any kind of faith, but if I did have any of it to give testimony to, I think I’d prefer to give testimony to it in the specific ways that liberal Quakers do, namely, by manifesting integrity, simplicity, peace, equality and community (or at least as much of community as an introvert like me can face). As I look at the reality of how my life has unfolded, I stand convicted of having manifested those ways of testimony rather poorly. And it is, I submit, because lately I have been far more conscious of being a substandard Quaker than of being a substandard Buddhist that I blurted out that my religious preference on that day was Quakerism.
I still do not see what possible relevance my or anyone else’s religious preference has to an ear, nose and throat specialist. Perhaps I should have answered that I am a secular humanist with a deviated septum.
Out of a living silence 