Buddhism: A Religion or "Evolving Culture of Awakening"?
By Arthur Wells Roshi (Zen Teacher)
Stephen Batchelor calls himself a “secular Buddhist,” which means “nonreligious” Buddhist. He says: “Buddhism is a constantly evolving culture of awakening rather than a religious system.” Let’s look critically at this claim. Imagination made us human. Because we very early developed the power of imagination, religion appeared close on the heels of language, maybe 80,000 years ago, and its great value and power was to ease our fears and give us the protection of invisible beings we pictured as being in charge of everything. If the ocean waves became destructive we thought the spirit of the ocean was angry. If the winds blew down trees and homes we assumed the wind-spirit was angry. It was the same with floods, famines and diseases—all caused by angry spirits. We believed that sometimes catastrophic divine anger produces tsunamis or devastating earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.
But this raised a new difficulty. How can feeble humans influence these mighty invisible beings? The answer we devised was wonderfully inventive -- do it by manipulation! Use praise, flattery, cunning, deception, spells, magic, ritual sacrifices, gifts, bargaining, apologies and pleading. The next great step forward in religion was huge, going beyond manipulation to the idea of loving relationship. This enabled us to imagine the source of the universe as being like an ideal parent, with whom we can relate on loving terms. I myself grew up with this idea as the central fact about the world, so it was very painful to have to let it go.
The last great step of the human imagination since religion has been science. Science of course remains fundamentally imaginative -- first imagine what non-supernatural cause there might be for whatever we observe, then test the idea. Our discoveries have progressed to the point where we are now only stuck for a non-supernatural cause of the universe itself. We know that our universe formed 14 billion years ago, and the first living things appeared 550 million years ago, first as a single cell that was able to subdivide its nucleus and form clusters of cells. This process, occurring trillions of times, brought about complex life-forms. Egg-laying sea creatures slowly evolved into egg-laying amphibious creatures and finally into egg-laying reptiles that could live on the dry land and breathe air to supply their oxygen. Great dinosaurs dominated this planet for 185 million years. Then 65 million years ago a giant comet hit the earth and extinguished the dinosaurs, except for crocodiles and birds. Human beings eventually appeared because of this chance collision. Sixty million years ago our first mammalian ancestor was a furry mouse-like creature crawling around the grasslands of East Africa.
At some point in this evolving process consciousness appeared, beginning as little more than a physical response to the environment -- responding to sight, touch and smell, etc. In most animals, birds and fishes, awareness does not generate any worries about the past of future, so they live in an endless present, responding to the opportunity or threat of each moment. Self-consciousness is a dramatically new thing. With it came the awareness of transience. No longer able to live like animals in a one-dimensional present, humans acquired the painful new insight that we live between a beginning and an ending. Dying looks like a kind of sleep, so we inferred that we might be able to awaken from this sleep. If death isn’t the end for us, this solves the fairness question of why some people prosper and others don’t. Don’t worry, says religion, it’s sorted out later. Those who have been good will be rewarded and the wicked will be punished, so accept the injustices on earth. Our life on this earth is merely a testing ground for how we shall spend eternity. Yeah, right! This is painful to let go of too.
Coming to terms with the role of chance in our lives has been part of the pain of letting go of the religious outlook. The religious view is that there is no such thing as a chance event – it’s all planned from on high. Earthquakes and tsunamis are a punishment. HIV and Ebola are punishments for sexual sinning, etc., etc. Science instead shows us the accidental quality of life right down to the micro level, as hundreds of millions of spermatozoa, each carrying a genetic code arrived at by the meiosis/mitosis roulette, attempt to fertilise an egg. Which sperm and egg gave rise to each of us was a matter of chance.
We now live in a post-religious world. What shall we do with our consciousness and imagination now? The Buddhist answer, as Stephen Batchelor says, is to further develop a culture of awakening. “Awakening” implies emerging from a condition of dream or delusion, but about what? From its beginning 2,500 years ago Buddhism was very clear -- our challenge is to awaken from being mistaken about the nature of the self. In the branch of Buddhism that is Zen, coming down to us from China, Korea and Japan, from a period beginning 1500 years ago, the delusion of self is defined as the belief in a separate self. In Zen the self is composed entirely of the flow of the universe through us in each moment, coalescing momentarily as us. Awakening is simply to see this clearly. How should we cultivate this awakening? How shall we live in the light of it?
© Arthur Wells, Christchurch, New Zealand.
Arthur Wells Roshi is a Zen Teacher in the Diamond Sangha Zen tradition.
Stephen Batchelor calls himself a “secular Buddhist,” which means “nonreligious” Buddhist. He says: “Buddhism is a constantly evolving culture of awakening rather than a religious system.” Let’s look critically at this claim. Imagination made us human. Because we very early developed the power of imagination, religion appeared close on the heels of language, maybe 80,000 years ago, and its great value and power was to ease our fears and give us the protection of invisible beings we pictured as being in charge of everything. If the ocean waves became destructive we thought the spirit of the ocean was angry. If the winds blew down trees and homes we assumed the wind-spirit was angry. It was the same with floods, famines and diseases—all caused by angry spirits. We believed that sometimes catastrophic divine anger produces tsunamis or devastating earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.
But this raised a new difficulty. How can feeble humans influence these mighty invisible beings? The answer we devised was wonderfully inventive -- do it by manipulation! Use praise, flattery, cunning, deception, spells, magic, ritual sacrifices, gifts, bargaining, apologies and pleading. The next great step forward in religion was huge, going beyond manipulation to the idea of loving relationship. This enabled us to imagine the source of the universe as being like an ideal parent, with whom we can relate on loving terms. I myself grew up with this idea as the central fact about the world, so it was very painful to have to let it go.
The last great step of the human imagination since religion has been science. Science of course remains fundamentally imaginative -- first imagine what non-supernatural cause there might be for whatever we observe, then test the idea. Our discoveries have progressed to the point where we are now only stuck for a non-supernatural cause of the universe itself. We know that our universe formed 14 billion years ago, and the first living things appeared 550 million years ago, first as a single cell that was able to subdivide its nucleus and form clusters of cells. This process, occurring trillions of times, brought about complex life-forms. Egg-laying sea creatures slowly evolved into egg-laying amphibious creatures and finally into egg-laying reptiles that could live on the dry land and breathe air to supply their oxygen. Great dinosaurs dominated this planet for 185 million years. Then 65 million years ago a giant comet hit the earth and extinguished the dinosaurs, except for crocodiles and birds. Human beings eventually appeared because of this chance collision. Sixty million years ago our first mammalian ancestor was a furry mouse-like creature crawling around the grasslands of East Africa.
At some point in this evolving process consciousness appeared, beginning as little more than a physical response to the environment -- responding to sight, touch and smell, etc. In most animals, birds and fishes, awareness does not generate any worries about the past of future, so they live in an endless present, responding to the opportunity or threat of each moment. Self-consciousness is a dramatically new thing. With it came the awareness of transience. No longer able to live like animals in a one-dimensional present, humans acquired the painful new insight that we live between a beginning and an ending. Dying looks like a kind of sleep, so we inferred that we might be able to awaken from this sleep. If death isn’t the end for us, this solves the fairness question of why some people prosper and others don’t. Don’t worry, says religion, it’s sorted out later. Those who have been good will be rewarded and the wicked will be punished, so accept the injustices on earth. Our life on this earth is merely a testing ground for how we shall spend eternity. Yeah, right! This is painful to let go of too.
Coming to terms with the role of chance in our lives has been part of the pain of letting go of the religious outlook. The religious view is that there is no such thing as a chance event – it’s all planned from on high. Earthquakes and tsunamis are a punishment. HIV and Ebola are punishments for sexual sinning, etc., etc. Science instead shows us the accidental quality of life right down to the micro level, as hundreds of millions of spermatozoa, each carrying a genetic code arrived at by the meiosis/mitosis roulette, attempt to fertilise an egg. Which sperm and egg gave rise to each of us was a matter of chance.
We now live in a post-religious world. What shall we do with our consciousness and imagination now? The Buddhist answer, as Stephen Batchelor says, is to further develop a culture of awakening. “Awakening” implies emerging from a condition of dream or delusion, but about what? From its beginning 2,500 years ago Buddhism was very clear -- our challenge is to awaken from being mistaken about the nature of the self. In the branch of Buddhism that is Zen, coming down to us from China, Korea and Japan, from a period beginning 1500 years ago, the delusion of self is defined as the belief in a separate self. In Zen the self is composed entirely of the flow of the universe through us in each moment, coalescing momentarily as us. Awakening is simply to see this clearly. How should we cultivate this awakening? How shall we live in the light of it?
© Arthur Wells, Christchurch, New Zealand.
Arthur Wells Roshi is a Zen Teacher in the Diamond Sangha Zen tradition.