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non-theism in buddhism
when larry king interviewed his holiness the dalia lama just a few weeks ago, he opened with a question about hurricane katrina: if such devastation shook his faith in god.
but buddhism is non-theistic. there are beliefs that allow gods, demigods, ghosts, hell beings, heavens, mermaids, dragons, and other beings that are unseen or unprovable. though it’s not essential to believe those things to be buddhist. one can even pray to beings like these if you find it helpful to do so. but what makes buddhism non-theistic is that these beings are not essential to one’s salvation.
in fact those unseen beings may not care one bit about you. buddhism is a self-help path. there may be a god or gods, buddhism might say, but belief in them and supplication to them is not essential nor necessary to one’s progress.
in my mind theism in contrast involves relating to someone else’s opinion, or judgment of you, and their help. perhaps independent of belief in one god or many gods, or just native spirits, a theistic approach is one where one must be helped by these other beings in order to reach heaven, liberation, well-being, happiness, or what have you. it’s like living with your parents, who cook for you and do the dishes, and even wash your clothes for you. as long as you’re a good boy or girl, the theistic approach seems to involve some amount of poverty. that we can’t clean up after ourselves. that we can’t wash our own clothes.
so non-theism, and buddhism at it’s core, is about making your own way. taking responsibility for your development and change. relating to cause and effect directly. cleaning up after yourself. doing your own dishes. washing your own clothes. no one is going to do it for you. it’s up to you.
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21. October 2005 at 9:21 am :
That’s interesting. Then, what do Buddhists believe happens to consciousness after death? Is the idea of an afterlife different for everybody? If so, what do you believe is waiting for you?
21. October 2005 at 11:13 am :
i think most denominations of buddhism believe in reincarnation, but it’s not quite the popular form most think of in the west. the memories, the personality, the identity of a person does not reincarnate, only the conscious awareness and karmic seeds or propensities. and it’s not a given that one will be reborn as a human being, that’s considered rare. so it’s more likely that you’ll come back as an animal without any memory of being male, female, blonde, or anything from the previous lives.
but buddhism also is all about only believing what you can verify and experience yourself, so those teachings may be metaphoric more than accurate. they have logics that basically argue that if you can’t prove your consciousness didn’t start before birth or before conception, than how can you prove that consciousness ceases at the death of the body. and something should only stop if there is an obstacle to impede it. and the only obstacle to rebirth is enlightenment.
i should also note that buddhist cosmology has heaven and hell, as other realms one can be born into, but that one never lives there forever. in each extreme, you are stuck there for much longer than a human birth. but even being born a god in a heaven realm only lasts so long. or being born in hell and dying in agony there though repetitive one can eventually plant seeds of karma for a more fortunate birth and climb out to an animal realm or similar. the basic idea is that everything is impermanent, but also just an expression of cause and effect. so consciousness and one’s rebirths would similarly not stop for no reason and one’s conditions would be the result of karmic seeds planted in previous births.
anyway, i’m not sure what happens after death. in the very same way i’m not sure what happened to my consciousness before my birth.
30. July 2006 at 4:49 pm :
Hi, do Buddhists believe that animals can achieve re-incarnation as a human, or even to Nirvana state? If so, how can they do this? How does the propensity to live a good/bad life exist in the animal world?
31. July 2006 at 11:15 pm :
To answer your question, yes, animals and humans are both considered “sentient beings” who have the ability to be enlightened. In the teachings on the six realms it’s even said that it’s possible to become enlightened in the animal realm, but it’s easier if one is reincarnated into the human realm. That’s because the humans are fickle, we are never satisfied, and therefore it’s easier to see that true satisfaction requires a different approach than the materialism that we keep trying and failing with. Animals on the other hand have a habit of just doing the same thing over and over and don’t see the futility as easily. So it’s harder incarnated that way.
But obtaining enlightenment “as an animal” in this current lifetime would probably be considered extremely, extremely rare. I suspect a mahayana school would say it would only happen if one attained a very high level of realization and then as one’s last lifetime reincarnated as an animal that naturally helped others. Then those final acts of kindness would put one over the edge into complete enlightenment. But I’m dubious personally, since for most of us a path is about insight into the nature of mind. Do animals have insight into the nature of their own minds? Maybe so but it doesn’t seem like they care for much more than eating and sleeping and sex as far as I can tell.
Buddhists would also say that we have spend countless lifetimes as animals and humans and as other kinds of beings, stretching back through time.
5. October 2007 at 12:56 pm :
Yes, that’s exactly my point, what one of you above asked: When you’re enlightened, and then die, you stop being reincarnated. You stop being reborn. And you don’t go to heaven. So, you just stop existing. (Or, in Mahayana, you may have the option of becoming a Bodhisattva, basically a sort of guardian angel that helps others be enlightened.)
But, what fun is it to be enlightened and stop existing for eternity? It’s total non-existence! So, the end-game is similar to the atheist, only Buddhists have to fight for it. Not much of a deal!
However, I have had a Buddhist say that if he was presented with 3 choices about what he could say about what happens after enlightenment and then death — 1) total cessation of experience 2) experience of something pleasant 3) unanswerable — he chose 2) as being the finger which points most closely to the correct moon.
This is a very important question (i.e. if Buddhists are right about samsara and how to escape it, WHY do I WANT to escape it — that is, what’s waiting for me if I do escape it!!!) but I can’t seem to get a straight answer about this, or I should say, I can’t get consistent answers!
What say the Buddhists here? What happens once you’re enlightened and you die?
5. October 2007 at 2:04 pm :
not sure there’s the kind of straight answer you’re looking for, but i’ll try.
first let me say that buddhism contains two kind of teachings according to the tibetans: definitive (tib: ngedon) and provisional (tib: trangdon). the former are teachings that discuss the ultimate truth and realization. the latter are teachings that do not, but are still handy to lead us from our current viewpoint to one that is closer to the ultimate. from there we can finally understand the ultimate. you could describe the buddhist path as one that moves us from a confused viewpoint to a more accurate viewpoint of mind and reality.
yet in studying the provisional teachings and practicing them, we are preparing to understand the ultimate. Without those, it would be too much of a leap to jump right into the definitive. BUT, those provisional teachings are not quite true. They’re just approximations that are helpful to contemplate, meditate on, and work with. In some cases, they’re just about living a decent life without strife, so we have more time to meditate. whereas the ultimate teachings discuss seeing things beyond the labels of good and evil, the provisional teachings discuss ethical conduct and renunciation. the buddha taught these provisional teachings because in our current viewpoint, going directly to the ultimate understanding would not be possible or would lead us astray - into nihilism or fixation.
the different tibetan schools all consider the teachings on reincarnation part of the provisional teachings, not definitive. therefore, they are not really true. but still useful to contemplate and work with. they are contained within the teachings on karma, or how the current moment is the result of a multiplicity of causes and conditions. cause and effect basically. reincarnation is simply an expression of cause and effect. in other words, how could we be “born” if there was not a series of causes that created birth? and how could a consciousness arise except out of the causes of consciousness? The buddhist philosophers dignaga and dharmakirti argued that consciousness cannot arise out of merely physical arrangements. modern science might say just that, mind arises from the physical construct of brain. but those philosophers felt that they were a different form. that consciousness must come from causes that are similar, that it must exist previously in some form and can’t come out of nothing. nothing in this world really comes from elsewhere and goes somewhere. there’s conservation of mass. things don’t “just happen”. so how could we be “born” into this world from somewhere else and then “leave” this world? does that make any sense really? so how could we “die” exactly?
speaking more definitively, however, the viewpoint that we exist at all may be simply the misunderstanding of mind. the viewpoint that we are separate from the world to begin with might be an error. to say that we are born and die is the question. what if we were always part of and inseparable from this world? then the realization of truth might lead us to realize that we were never born, we never die. we’re always part of this beautiful display, completely a part of the infinite possibility, always here - not just a small, scared, being created and coming from another place, here briefly, and then going to some heaven or hell. what if it was all just a misunderstanding?
then what does cessation of samsara mean? you could say that samara is not ‘this place’, and we leave to go to ‘nirvana’. it’s more accurate i think to say that samsara is our misunderstanding that causes us to suffer. samsara is seeing the world as separate from ourselves. then struggling to protect ourselves, to attain gain and increase our territory, etc. then the cessation of that is merely realizing our inseparability from it. cessation is not a nihilistic void. it is that we cannot be born nor die. it is freedom from pointless fear and anxiety. that we could live without fear entirely. instead of being that small, scared, separate being we are really the infinite richness of the world, the “all seeing, all dancing, crap of the universe” as tyler durden said in “fight club”. we do not exist as this ego viewpoint. we don’t exist and at the same time we are infinitely rich. in fact, that is what non-existence must mean.
Did that help at all? or did I just add to the confusion?
26. November 2007 at 1:41 pm :
you suck poo!
26. November 2007 at 1:53 pm :
hee hee. well, thank you for your insightful comment!
3. December 2007 at 8:22 pm :
I find it interesting that your post is dated 10/2005, yet the comments span to 11/2007. Well, now they span to 12/2007.
Anyway, just wanted to say I stumbled upon this post and comment thread. Wanted to thank you for putting it out there as I found it really interesting. One thing that I struggle with is the idea that defilements and illusions veil the nature of mind. Really, these things are themselves the result of evolution and physiology, so why is it that they themselves are not part of the dharma path. And if they are, then why did they evolve to begin with? If you accept the idea that evolution plays a role in the nature and origin of consciousness, doesn’t this sort of “cut against” the notion that the reactive mind is a defilement (it is, after all, part of the brain)? I realize that I am asking many different questions and have some pretty weighty assumptions underlying some of the questions. But, please, try to unravel it for me, if you do not mind.
Thank you for your efforts, stama
30. December 2007 at 12:13 pm :
thank you for the comment!
30. December 2007 at 12:30 pm :
my take on the term ‘defilement’ is not that we’ve done something wrong, particularly. as you suggest, we are who we are a perfectly reasonable multiplicity of causes and conditions. yet those my be leading us to suffer needlessly. i think by ‘defilement’ the tibetans are making a provisional statement and a judgement statement about some of those causes and conditions and hoping to get us riled up about them. but even they would say ultimately the defilements don’t exist. we just perceive them to exist and they have a tremendous hold on us.
In getting us riled up we can then start making better discernment in our choices, meditate some more perhaps, and head in a direction of less suffering. But yes fundamentally they’re just causes and conditions, neutral, not good or bad, beyond any judgements we have about them. not sure i’m adding anything to your contemplation though. that’s the first thing that popped to my mind.
also, there is a tradition in the vajrayana that the defilements we have are crucial to our path. without them there is nothing to work with. so they’re really good news. the vajrayana path uses the textures and sensation of the emotional content as part of the path. so we need the hangups and confusion in that vehicle to fuel the process. but the vajrayana methods that use those are distinct from many other techniques in buddhism (though perhaps having something in common with advanced theravadan techniques of body meditation). Or so I hear…