Why is buddhism not a religion

Last Name. Email Address. Finish Donation. Create a Post or Sign In. Sign up with Facebook Already have an account? Login here or. Join Here or. Sign Into Your Account. Sign in using Facebook or. No account yet? Sign up. Join the Community. Sign up using Facebook or. Have an account? Sign in. Yet a religious dimension to the Way of the Buddha is quite real and vital. As the teachings were carried beyond the homelands, it formed the first world religion. Union with the divine is best experienced rather than expressed through limited language.

Such emphasis on first-hand experience rubs against the grain of abstract theology. So Buddhism can be seen as partaking of that broad deep river known as mysticism, which inherently undercuts any neat attempts at codification. Call it a practical mysticism, if you will. And today more and more people are becoming free-lance mystics.

Indeed, Buddhism can be seen within an open secret of the past two decades, in which its played no small part: namely, more and more people are finding personal connection to the sacred, lifted up out of and beyond the Sunday pews, made real for themselves in daily life.

Well, then, since the religious front is not all cut and dry, might other categories be apt? Is it a philosophy? The Greeks had colonies in India since the time of the Buddha, so we can hear his voice resonating in the words of ancient Skeptic, Stoic, and Epicurean philosophers.

The canon of Buddhist texts Tripitaka does provide a robust body of ethics , a cornerstone of classical philosophy. The Buddha never ventured into the mind-body split which is central inWestern metaphysics and theology.

His is a physically embodied metaphysics, where body, and speech can function as one. And his concern is with practicalities, rather than free-floating metaphysical sophistries.

The Buddhist canon is also rich in teachings known as Abhidharma , with a deep, systematic psychology. I also felt an overwhelming sense of life's preciousness, but others may have very different reactions. Like an astronaut gazing at the earth through the window of his spacecraft, the mystic sees our existence against the backdrop of infinity and eternity. This perspective may not translate into compassion and empathy for others.

Far from it. Human suffering and death may appear laughably trivial. Instead of becoming a saint-like Bodhisattva, brimming with love for all things, the mystic may become a sociopathic nihilist. I suspect some bad gurus have fallen prey to mystical nihilism. They may also have been corrupted by that most insidious of all Buddhist propositions, the myth of total enlightenment. This is the notion that some rare souls achieve mystical self-transcendence so complete that they become morally infallible—like the Pope!

Belief in this myth can turn spiritual teachers into tyrants and their students into mindless slaves, who excuse even their teachers' most abusive behavior as "crazy wisdom.

I have one final misgiving about Buddhism—or rather, about Buddha himself. His path to enlightenment began with his abandonment of his wife and child. Even today, Tibetan Buddhism—again, like Catholicism—upholds male monasticism as the epitome of spirituality.

To me, "spiritual" means life-embracing, and so a path that turns away from aspects of life as essential as sexual love and parenthood is not spiritual but anti-spiritual.

Buddhists often respond to my carping by saying, "You didn't give Buddhism enough time! If you truly understood it, you wouldn't say such stupid things! String theorists and Freudian psychoanalysts employ this same tactic against their critics.

I can't fault these supposed solutions to existence until I have devoted as much time to them as true believers. Sorry, life's too short. Some of my best friends are Buddhists, and I enjoy reading and talking to Buddhist and quasi-Buddhist intellectuals, including all those I've mentioned above.

I admire the open-mindedness and pacifism of the Dalai Lama. I sometimes drag visitors to my hometown to a nearby Buddhist monastery, which features a foot statue of Buddha surrounded by thousands of mini-Buddha statuettes.

A porcelain Buddha smiles at me from atop a bookcase in my living room. I like to think he'd grok my take on the religion that he founded. Remember the old Zen aphorism: If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him. The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. For many years, he wrote the immensely popular blog Cross Check for Scientific American.

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