The author is projecting his Catholic upbringing on the religion. Buddhism is not a singular hierarchical institution in the way Catholicism is. It has evolved and changed as it migrated from India through Tibet, China, Japan, then the USA. Does it have people that take bad actions - yes. Every human institution does.
Exactly. This sounds like he got exposed to some esoteric branch that itself was influenced by Christian Missionaries. Back when the east was being explored by the early colonial powers. Christian Missionaries were doing their thing, and converting all the local religions to Christianity. And out of that came a few Buddhist sects that have real Christian leanings, like the metaphysical ideas, gods, heaven, hierarchy, a perverse interpretation of karma, etc...
So if this guy got into those first, then his view of Buddhism is skewed.
"What’s worse, Buddhism holds that enlightenment makes you morally infallible—like the pope, but more so"
Most everyone I’ve encountered in my personal life has been introduced to Eastern beliefs through some western reinterpretation or a “guru”.
I’d read someone, somewhere (maybe here), write about their pilgrimage to somewhere in Asia. He was very disappointed by the monks he’d met and their lack of answers and felt Hinduism or Buddhism was really no different from Christianity.
I too had been disillusioned by religion and considered myself an atheist. Later, though, I found the Dao De Jing, Bhagavad Gita, Dhammapada & Suttanipata* to be life changing. I read them on their own, without seeking further discourse or spiritual guidance, after listening to Duncan Trussel’s podcast for a long while. It’s even changed my perspective on Christian and Jewish theology.
All that to say, it’s personal. It’s my strong opinion that if you go seeking enlightenment from a person or an institution and cannot separate the art from the artist (or the message from the messenger) and do not read the source material you will always come away disappointed.
While I've never heard it put exactly that way I have been listening to a lot of Ram Dass and he has a few talks where he discusses Trungpa Rinpoche ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%B6gyam_Trungpa#Controver... ). The way I remember it for Ram Dass he saw Trungpa as enlightened so all the "bad" stuff he did was sort of ok because that was Trungpa's dharma and he did it in a detached state.
I understood it like.. just as there are people who's dharma is to reduce suffering in the world there are people who produce it and that's fine and normal.
LE: I think Ram Dass used the Hindu meaning for dharma which afaik means "path in life" not "teaching" like in Buddhism
Or maybe his brutal exile from Tibet due to Chinese invasion traumatized him in some way. I’m not a fan of rationalizing abusive behavior or hypocrisy. People can gain a lot of skill at something but it doesn’t make them a good person. Elon Musk falls in a similar category IMO.
I don't think enlightened beings can be traumatized. A better theory I've heard it's that it is easy to keep vows when you live in a temple and never been tempted.
There are many flavors of buddhism. I am partial towards the Thai Forest tradition because it emphasizes practice and experience over dogma and so avoids metaphysical discussions.
> But what troubles me most about Buddhism is its implication that detachment from ordinary life is the surest route to salvation.
The response from the Thai Forest would be to engage in your life skillfully while paying attention to what causes you happiness or suffering and adjusting what you’re doing based on that. Maybe you discover a certain level of detachment is optimal, maybe you find you need to be more involved in your life. You go where the practice takes you.
The Greeks and Indians are closer to each other culturally than people are willing to admit. They should be considered cousins in terms of their philosophy, cultural, and religion.
That there were Greek states and colonies in Norther India/Gandhara that spoke Greek for generations is not given enough scrutiny imo. The cultural impact of that transmission not always clear outside of something concrete. Like the most obvious being the Greco style Buddhist statues in Gandhara.
So Stoicism is probably similar because of some cultural link that's lost. This is especially likely considering that the rise of Stoicism coincides with Alexander's conquest and lateral cultural contact.
True! Buddha and Alexander the Great were really only 100 years apart. Greeks and Hindu deities have many similarities. The trimurthi of Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva correlates pretty closely to Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. It works the other way as well as I think Greek philosophy also got influenced by Hindu/Buddhist world view like Stocism. Both sides seem to have benefited with the ideas of the other especially along math and science.
A hundred years after Alexander the Great we have Ashoka the Great who sent Buddhist missionaries to the four winds and if you squint Christianity sort of resembles a mesh of Jewish and Buddhist philosophy.
There are some similarities. A key difference is buddhism’s emphasis on meditation and practice as a key part of learning to act skillfully which I don’t think stoicism emphasizes as much.
Stoicism has always felt more “human scale” to me. It talks in terms of human virtues, and how a good life is only found in virtue. Buddhism always felt more focused on the mechanics of the mind and how understanding can be converted into attaining happiness/enlightment.
That being said, I’m not nearly as knowledgeable about stoicism.
Using examples from disparate sects of Buddhism as if there is some kind of monolithic “Buddhism” is like saying Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and all their various sects are the same. For instance on reincarnation, Pure Land Buddhists are closer to the Christian heaven view, and many Zen Buddhists don’t believe in reincarnation at all, and that Karma is not permanent.
The big point that Buddhism has been stripped of the metaphysical religious aspects is true though, but the article lays that on the west misunderstanding Buddhism, but in fact it was intentional - Trungpa Rinpoche said Buddhism will come to the West as psychology, and Suzuki had a similar approach.
And the idea that Buddhism of any kind promotes leaving the material world is just wrong - lay practitioners are part of the original writings. Siddhartha leaving his wife and kid isn’t what brought him enlightenment, the whole point is left one extreme where he partied and lived in luxury, to another extreme, aestheticism, fasting and self denial, only to realize that neither way reduced suffering.
Sounds like the author was just shocked that a lot of religious BS is tied up in many types of Buddhism and threw the whole thing out. But it’s hard to find a good group to practice with that matches your outlook, and I sympathize with that
Pretty bad takes and pretty shallow. It seems rather obvious this person is at the beginning of understanding, which is good, and the skepticism necessary, but too bad they quit already. They’re missing out.
My personal feeling is that when some sort of spiritual practice succeeds I almost forget why I did it in the first place because it was so low level and tightly bound to my experiencing of reality that it couldn't really be described (or remembered) in words.
And then if it succeeds in eliminating like a bad aura that envelops each moment of perception, you almost forget it ever existed and then one can throw the baby out with the bathwater, stop practicing altogether what brought one back up and then beyond to the level of pride where one can dismiss it all, only to three years later or so need to adopt a certain level of spiritual practice whether that's contemplative or practical or community-oriented.
As criticism it's completely valid on a personal plane and multiple times we can all see we've had to dismiss ideas as not fitting our lives anymore, but I also can't help but notice a certain negative tint to the entire article and leaps in logic in the criticism. This is obviously indicative that maybe the author had their fair fill of fruit and on a slightly filled stomach moves on to science etc. But it's not a debunk or a representation of the faith and practices beyond the personal journey of the author.
If there is one really weak point in this article, it would be his dismissal of no-self in favor of "emergent phenomenon", which as far as I can tell is indistinguishable from "codependent origination" (seriously - try to name the difference). And codepedent origination is the traditional background to no-self, a phrase you've heard many times if you're at all familiar with those teachings.
So to say "this teaching isn't true, but the traditional contextual background to this teaching (under another name) is" makes you wonder if he really understands the concepts involved at the necessary depth.
> Yes, (meditation) can reduce stress, but,
as it turns out, no more so than simply sitting still does
That's no surprise. If your type of meditation is just sitting still, that's fine. You don't need a guru voiceover to get the benefits
Is this a surprise? It's not magic. You're essentially giving your brain and mind the space and time it needs. That doesn't make it any less helpful with regards to stress, anxiety, focus etc
If we start realising all it is is sitting still (as in no music, podcast, iPad), maybe meditation can become more popular and we can get our attention spans back.
"... science tells us that we are incidental, accidental."
And nonetheless, every second, when not sleeping, the author is trying hard to make sense (... notice how close to "science") of his actual space and time. Throughout the ages, most prominent scientists have managed to do this, with great success, knowing that the universe, and themselves as a part of it, were the opposite of incidental or accidental: they believed their existence had a Reason.
This article gave me some great laughs. It's clear that the author only studied Buddhism for four years (a very short period of time) and has some very fundamental misunderstandings of Buddhist teachings.
For example, this explanation of karma:
> Together, these tenets imply the existence of some cosmic judge who, like Santa Claus, tallies up our naughtiness and niceness before rewarding us with rebirth as a cockroach or as a saintly lama.
That is not at all how karma should be understood. If I go give out $10,000 to the homeless, I'm a damn fool if I think I'm going to get $100,000 back in the mail!
> It's clear that the author only studied Buddhism for four years (a very short period of time)
This kind of response always sounds like victim-blaming to me.
If your system of <whatever> is so complicated that someone can't even hope to get the basics right in four years of study, maybe the right thing to do is, in fact, to ditch it.
Pretty much any introductory guide to Buddhism from any of the major schools will explicitly say "karma is not a deterministic system of merit and demerit". I'm not sure how the author came to that understanding of karma, but it's radically at odds with what the vast majority of Buddhist traditions actually teach.
Up front though in every other thing I’ve read is that this is going to be hard, so that doesn’t seem like a fair argument either. I don’t tell people that the VI text editor is easy to learn or even that it’s even superior to anything at all, only that’s worked for me and that I hope everyone finds something that works for them. It’s not like we need any more barriers to helping people code and write, yet they all take a set of complex practicing to be proficient given we aren’t wired by genetics or anything do such complex activities such as language and walking upright.
Bad analogy in my opinion. Learning basic vim can be done in a couple of hours and I think would benefit literally every programmer to know the basics because it is so much nicer to even navigate a single line of code using the vi keys (w, b, f, % etc) than any other alternative I've heard of.
belief systems can take years to fully adopt, since they attempt to rewire your way of thinking about the world. it's easier for the ones that dangle clear rewards and punishments, though some might call them shallow. for the ones more focused on inner retrospection, there's no obvious short term reward they can offer.
NO, not victim blaming. Where is the victim? And where is the blame?
But it does read like someone that has just gotten into Buddhism recently, has become lost in the 1000's of different sects and writings, and his 'takeaways' after a brief exploration seem very wrong. He is arguing against Buddhism for things that aren't Buddhist, more misunderstands of something he heard once, and sounded Christian.
Since in Buddhism there is no central authority, and every monk can write up some hot take on their views. It can be very difficult for newbies to wade through it.
Some of these points are quite good. I've followed Buddhism quite a lot, taking the view that if you ignore the reincarnation bit (which was probably inherited from other religions in the area buddhism sprang from) then buddhism isn't really a religion at all, its more like a philosophy.
I've seen people at buddhist retreats suggest some wilds benefits to meditation (magic powers etc). Thats clearly nonsense. But one thing I've noticed about meditation (and yes, it is just sitting still) is that it makes it harder to lie to yourself. And thats really important because Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self
I think the author here is right to point out the problems of enlightenment (its a sortof fictional ideal that no-one ever achieves but we might as well critique it). The Buddhist point of view is that wanting leads to suffering and so the ideal is not to 'want' anything. But really, if you truly achieved 'not wanting anything, that wouldn't be much different from being dead. We need wants. Its more about getting wants in balance.
The reincarnation bit interests me. I've had a notion that reincarnation is the process of birthing. A child is going to inherent their parents DNA, genes, environment, and situation. Whatever pain the parents are burdened with will be passed on to their child, and so on and on and on. We are [adaptable] copies of our parents.
Im self aware enough to observe the traits I picked up from my parents. I've thought about all the suffering I've been through. If I dont have children, I can be the end of the thread. I can stop the cycle of suffering.
Buddhism is definitely a religion. The founder of the religion himself talked about an order of monks.
What happens with Buddhism in particular, especially in the West, is that people pick and choose what they want to believe from it to the point that whatever they're left with is hardly Buddhism at all, and it does end up being a philosophy.
For an example, ask the next white person you meet who identities as a Buddhist if they believe that there are 8 hells. They're going to tell you that's, to use your word, "nonsense".
As I understand it, a common interpretation of The Buddha's teachings is that he wanted people to find their own path and he specifically dissuaded people against dogma and organised religion.
Anything can be done terribly wrong and misused while formally correct if approached without reason and measure.
Instead of judging Buddhism, just practicing the simplest form of it by just meditating daily and consciously trying to be mindful and kind throughout every day usually does a great job. The same can be considered a simple form of Christianity as well though.
> The same can be considered a simple form of Christianity as well though.
To an uninformed external observer perhaps. But to be Christian means to accept Christ as your Lord. There is no Christianity without Christ. Not even a “simple form” of it.
Okay, why not? Then comes all stuff about what does this mean in practice and theory. And there are so many forms of Christianity arguing. The simplest one of them still is just be mindful and kind, for the sake of the Lord who was and is.
You are conflating belief systems and behavioral patterns. Christianity is a belief system populated by folks who follow Christ as Lord. Full stop.
This Kumbaya Collective you describe is a behavioral pattern that many folks take part in. Some of them may happen to be Christian, others may not.
But to observe that some Christians are part of the Kumbaya Collective and then go on to imply that being part of the collective is a “simple form” of Christianity is a categorical error.
I believe you are committing the no true Scotsman fallacy, by claiming Christianity is a belief in Christ as lord.
I myself was raised in a Christian organization that did not believe Christ was lord, but rather a person sent by god to show us by example, how to be, spiritually, in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. They also don’t believe in the holy trinity.
So do consider that you do not speak for all Christian’s and not all Christian’s hold the same beliefs.
You could define Christianity as believing in Christ, bust more and more people consider themselves somewhat Christian without any of the Bible setup.
> Although many non-practicing Christians say they do not believe in God “as described in the Bible,” they do tend to believe in some other higher power or spiritual force in the universe.
Yeah those people are just confused or simply adhering to their group by calling themselves Christians. Being a Christian and not believing in the bible is oxymoronic
That’s a rather Euro-centric view of things (you’ll find the corresponding articles for the american continents are very different), but even still it’s missing the point. The question is whether this “critical mass” you speak of seeks to be a disciple of Christ (the group of people first ever referred to as “Christians”), not whether they have a particular interpretation of “God as depicted in the bible”.
It is, for instance, rather common to believe Genesis 1 is more of an allegory than an explicit recounting of God’s work, but that does not preclude someone from accepting Christ as their Lord and choosing to live as His disciple.
"Meditation can even exacerbate depression, anxiety, and other negative emotions in certain people."
If the author had put enough serious time in meditation, he would notice that meditation doesn't exacerbate negative emotions, it just makes you aware of the negative emotions that were already there and that you were ignoring by social media, alcohol, drugs, tiktok, etc. Meditation makes you aware of where the problem is and why the negative emotions come up. Think of it like a very good debugger. It's no substitution for solving the problem. It gives you the tools to solve the problem. Imagine your boss gave you a buggy code but seemingly it seems to compile and work but he keeps saying the code has errors, it's not supposed to work that way. You will go nuts if you don't know where the problem is. You don't even need the solution, just knowing the problem is enough to save you a lot of trouble. Meditation on the initial stages works that way. Later, you'll figure out as you go. Buddha said just do it, don't analyze l, just do it. The author here didn't have the patience to just do it and see it for himself, instead he focussed on the philosophy too much.
Meditating on a cushion for hours everyday is no substitution for being kind to strangers. Meditation brings you clarity even if the clarity is something you don't like. Hell, even Buddha was enlightened when he actually left meditation and gave up meditation altogether (which the author seems to have completely miss it here). Buddhism may not be perfect(what's perfect anyway?) but as George Box put it "All models are wrong, some are useful" Buddhism tries the best to be the most right and the useful model of the world.
It's not entirely anecdotal. There's research that shows meditation can hasten the progression of mental illnesses like suicidal depression and schizophrenia. For example, suicide rates spike among neophyte practitioners of meditation, and those with latent schizophrenia are more likely (i.e. earlier than others) to experience their first psychotic break when beginning meditation. AFAIU, Buddhist teachers, pre-modern and modern, were and are taught to pay attention to warning signs of people experiencing pathological mental issues brought on by meditation. And while I haven't read of it specifically, I would think the phenomenon would also be found in, e.g., contemplative Christian communities (e.g. monastic communities or contemplative retreats). None of this implies meditation is bad, just that it's important that people learn meditation techniques in a supportive, non-isolating environment (i.e. with a well-trained teacher or experienced community) so that the small fraction of those who might respond negatively can be helped. This type of environment would indeed tend to be found within traditional religious institutions and communities, as opposed to following a YouTube video or website howto at home.
It is sort of known that meditation can be a double edged sword, it is a tool and like any tool it can be used badly which is why traditionally you would have a teacher.
Panaceas do not exist. Also, some people are pretty terrible everywhere and in all religions such as that Chögyam Trungpa in his community.
We all pursue our quest to understand the universe and to better ourselves. To me, this is what matters, and, fortunately, this is something often shared between religions.
I think at the time the author(John Horgan) was a kind of a 'religion debunker', and maybe he had latched onto a few sects of Buddhism that sound kind of 'Christian' and 'debunkable'.
He has some follow up writings that indicate his views on Buddhism may have shifted.
"But I’m glad I went on the retreat. The Lama, during our private chat, said Buddhism isn’t true, but it works. Something worked during the retreat, but what was it? "
This isn’t the place to go into detail, but the author mainly argues against a Western conceptualisation of Buddhism, which is sadly divorced from the original meaning. If you want to study Buddhism, don’t rely on people reinterpreting it for a Western audience; go right to the source and try to understand what the old masters and the sutras are talking about.
The selling point for the kind of people who read HN is probably this - the similarities between what Buddhism has been teaching for 2,500 years and the state of the art in evidence-based psychotherapies are uncanny. Long before the likes of Jon Kabat-Zinn were explicitly making the connection, Beck, Adler, Low and Ellis independently rediscovered an awful lot of Buddhist principles, with only a little help from the Stoics. It's one of those weird apparent anachronisms like the Antikythera mechanism.
It's not really anachronistic, is it? Religion and psychotherapy have been basically indistinguishable until the modern era. "Someone 2500 years ago striving to improve human mental health had some success" isn't so surprising.
The author doesn't seem to understand Buddhism, nor I but it could be important to remember that "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him", and also the concept of Upaya [1].
The author is projecting his Catholic upbringing on the religion. Buddhism is not a singular hierarchical institution in the way Catholicism is. It has evolved and changed as it migrated from India through Tibet, China, Japan, then the USA. Does it have people that take bad actions - yes. Every human institution does.
Exactly. This sounds like he got exposed to some esoteric branch that itself was influenced by Christian Missionaries. Back when the east was being explored by the early colonial powers. Christian Missionaries were doing their thing, and converting all the local religions to Christianity. And out of that came a few Buddhist sects that have real Christian leanings, like the metaphysical ideas, gods, heaven, hierarchy, a perverse interpretation of karma, etc...
So if this guy got into those first, then his view of Buddhism is skewed.
"What’s worse, Buddhism holds that enlightenment makes you morally infallible—like the pope, but more so"
-> Said no Buddhist ever.
Most everyone I’ve encountered in my personal life has been introduced to Eastern beliefs through some western reinterpretation or a “guru”.
I’d read someone, somewhere (maybe here), write about their pilgrimage to somewhere in Asia. He was very disappointed by the monks he’d met and their lack of answers and felt Hinduism or Buddhism was really no different from Christianity.
I too had been disillusioned by religion and considered myself an atheist. Later, though, I found the Dao De Jing, Bhagavad Gita, Dhammapada & Suttanipata* to be life changing. I read them on their own, without seeking further discourse or spiritual guidance, after listening to Duncan Trussel’s podcast for a long while. It’s even changed my perspective on Christian and Jewish theology.
All that to say, it’s personal. It’s my strong opinion that if you go seeking enlightenment from a person or an institution and cannot separate the art from the artist (or the message from the messenger) and do not read the source material you will always come away disappointed.
* haven’t finished the whole book yet
While I've never heard it put exactly that way I have been listening to a lot of Ram Dass and he has a few talks where he discusses Trungpa Rinpoche ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%B6gyam_Trungpa#Controver... ). The way I remember it for Ram Dass he saw Trungpa as enlightened so all the "bad" stuff he did was sort of ok because that was Trungpa's dharma and he did it in a detached state.
I understood it like.. just as there are people who's dharma is to reduce suffering in the world there are people who produce it and that's fine and normal.
LE: I think Ram Dass used the Hindu meaning for dharma which afaik means "path in life" not "teaching" like in Buddhism
Or maybe his brutal exile from Tibet due to Chinese invasion traumatized him in some way. I’m not a fan of rationalizing abusive behavior or hypocrisy. People can gain a lot of skill at something but it doesn’t make them a good person. Elon Musk falls in a similar category IMO.
I don't think enlightened beings can be traumatized. A better theory I've heard it's that it is easy to keep vows when you live in a temple and never been tempted.
There are many flavors of buddhism. I am partial towards the Thai Forest tradition because it emphasizes practice and experience over dogma and so avoids metaphysical discussions.
> But what troubles me most about Buddhism is its implication that detachment from ordinary life is the surest route to salvation.
The response from the Thai Forest would be to engage in your life skillfully while paying attention to what causes you happiness or suffering and adjusting what you’re doing based on that. Maybe you discover a certain level of detachment is optimal, maybe you find you need to be more involved in your life. You go where the practice takes you.
> But what troubles me most about Buddhism is its implication that detachment from ordinary life is the surest route to salvation.
Perhaps the author just haven't heard of Madhyamapratipada, that insignificant bit in Buddah's first sermon ever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Way
How is that different from stoicism ? Asking genuinely.
The Greeks and Indians are closer to each other culturally than people are willing to admit. They should be considered cousins in terms of their philosophy, cultural, and religion.
That there were Greek states and colonies in Norther India/Gandhara that spoke Greek for generations is not given enough scrutiny imo. The cultural impact of that transmission not always clear outside of something concrete. Like the most obvious being the Greco style Buddhist statues in Gandhara.
So Stoicism is probably similar because of some cultural link that's lost. This is especially likely considering that the rise of Stoicism coincides with Alexander's conquest and lateral cultural contact.
True! Buddha and Alexander the Great were really only 100 years apart. Greeks and Hindu deities have many similarities. The trimurthi of Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva correlates pretty closely to Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. It works the other way as well as I think Greek philosophy also got influenced by Hindu/Buddhist world view like Stocism. Both sides seem to have benefited with the ideas of the other especially along math and science.
A hundred years after Alexander the Great we have Ashoka the Great who sent Buddhist missionaries to the four winds and if you squint Christianity sort of resembles a mesh of Jewish and Buddhist philosophy.
The root for the Gods is perhaps even older than that and comes from a yet older culture.
> if you squint Christianity sort of resembles a mesh of Jewish and Buddhist philosophy.
Buddhism originated the entire concept of a "savior" and for the first time introduced the idea of conversion in religion.
There are some similarities. A key difference is buddhism’s emphasis on meditation and practice as a key part of learning to act skillfully which I don’t think stoicism emphasizes as much.
Stoicism has always felt more “human scale” to me. It talks in terms of human virtues, and how a good life is only found in virtue. Buddhism always felt more focused on the mechanics of the mind and how understanding can be converted into attaining happiness/enlightment.
That being said, I’m not nearly as knowledgeable about stoicism.
The emphasis on meditation practice with specific techniques.
Well, it's not yet monetized by YouTube hustle bros, for one thing. :D
I hate to break it to you, but Buddhism was commercialized by Western grifters decades before YouTube!
There are some theories that as ideas flowed along the silk road, that Buddhism influenced Stoicism.
There is a lot of crossover of ideas.
And of course, both have been re-interpreted a lot in the modern age. Lot of intermixing continues today.
> it emphasizes practice and experience over dogma
soto-zen emphasises something like this too.
the tl;dr in my very limited and general understanding seems to be — keep sitting zazen, try to not be an arsehole, you’ll work it out eventually.
Using examples from disparate sects of Buddhism as if there is some kind of monolithic “Buddhism” is like saying Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and all their various sects are the same. For instance on reincarnation, Pure Land Buddhists are closer to the Christian heaven view, and many Zen Buddhists don’t believe in reincarnation at all, and that Karma is not permanent.
The big point that Buddhism has been stripped of the metaphysical religious aspects is true though, but the article lays that on the west misunderstanding Buddhism, but in fact it was intentional - Trungpa Rinpoche said Buddhism will come to the West as psychology, and Suzuki had a similar approach.
And the idea that Buddhism of any kind promotes leaving the material world is just wrong - lay practitioners are part of the original writings. Siddhartha leaving his wife and kid isn’t what brought him enlightenment, the whole point is left one extreme where he partied and lived in luxury, to another extreme, aestheticism, fasting and self denial, only to realize that neither way reduced suffering.
Sounds like the author was just shocked that a lot of religious BS is tied up in many types of Buddhism and threw the whole thing out. But it’s hard to find a good group to practice with that matches your outlook, and I sympathize with that
Pretty bad takes and pretty shallow. It seems rather obvious this person is at the beginning of understanding, which is good, and the skepticism necessary, but too bad they quit already. They’re missing out.
It would be more constructive if you could point out counter arguments.
I guess a Buddhist telling you that you're unenlightened is the equivalent of a Christian telling you that you won't be saved.
My personal feeling is that when some sort of spiritual practice succeeds I almost forget why I did it in the first place because it was so low level and tightly bound to my experiencing of reality that it couldn't really be described (or remembered) in words.
And then if it succeeds in eliminating like a bad aura that envelops each moment of perception, you almost forget it ever existed and then one can throw the baby out with the bathwater, stop practicing altogether what brought one back up and then beyond to the level of pride where one can dismiss it all, only to three years later or so need to adopt a certain level of spiritual practice whether that's contemplative or practical or community-oriented.
As criticism it's completely valid on a personal plane and multiple times we can all see we've had to dismiss ideas as not fitting our lives anymore, but I also can't help but notice a certain negative tint to the entire article and leaps in logic in the criticism. This is obviously indicative that maybe the author had their fair fill of fruit and on a slightly filled stomach moves on to science etc. But it's not a debunk or a representation of the faith and practices beyond the personal journey of the author.
If there is one really weak point in this article, it would be his dismissal of no-self in favor of "emergent phenomenon", which as far as I can tell is indistinguishable from "codependent origination" (seriously - try to name the difference). And codepedent origination is the traditional background to no-self, a phrase you've heard many times if you're at all familiar with those teachings.
So to say "this teaching isn't true, but the traditional contextual background to this teaching (under another name) is" makes you wonder if he really understands the concepts involved at the necessary depth.
> Yes, (meditation) can reduce stress, but, as it turns out, no more so than simply sitting still does
That's no surprise. If your type of meditation is just sitting still, that's fine. You don't need a guru voiceover to get the benefits
Is this a surprise? It's not magic. You're essentially giving your brain and mind the space and time it needs. That doesn't make it any less helpful with regards to stress, anxiety, focus etc
If we start realising all it is is sitting still (as in no music, podcast, iPad), maybe meditation can become more popular and we can get our attention spans back.
"... science tells us that we are incidental, accidental."
And nonetheless, every second, when not sleeping, the author is trying hard to make sense (... notice how close to "science") of his actual space and time. Throughout the ages, most prominent scientists have managed to do this, with great success, knowing that the universe, and themselves as a part of it, were the opposite of incidental or accidental: they believed their existence had a Reason.
This article gave me some great laughs. It's clear that the author only studied Buddhism for four years (a very short period of time) and has some very fundamental misunderstandings of Buddhist teachings.
For example, this explanation of karma:
> Together, these tenets imply the existence of some cosmic judge who, like Santa Claus, tallies up our naughtiness and niceness before rewarding us with rebirth as a cockroach or as a saintly lama.
That is not at all how karma should be understood. If I go give out $10,000 to the homeless, I'm a damn fool if I think I'm going to get $100,000 back in the mail!
> It's clear that the author only studied Buddhism for four years (a very short period of time)
This kind of response always sounds like victim-blaming to me.
If your system of <whatever> is so complicated that someone can't even hope to get the basics right in four years of study, maybe the right thing to do is, in fact, to ditch it.
Pretty much any introductory guide to Buddhism from any of the major schools will explicitly say "karma is not a deterministic system of merit and demerit". I'm not sure how the author came to that understanding of karma, but it's radically at odds with what the vast majority of Buddhist traditions actually teach.
https://tricycle.org/magazine/thanissaro-bhikkhu-karma/
Oh you mean like Computer Science? :)
Joke aside, Buddhism is a classic "ten year study" similar to certain martial arts or plastic arts. Four years is hardly any time.
Up front though in every other thing I’ve read is that this is going to be hard, so that doesn’t seem like a fair argument either. I don’t tell people that the VI text editor is easy to learn or even that it’s even superior to anything at all, only that’s worked for me and that I hope everyone finds something that works for them. It’s not like we need any more barriers to helping people code and write, yet they all take a set of complex practicing to be proficient given we aren’t wired by genetics or anything do such complex activities such as language and walking upright.
Bad analogy in my opinion. Learning basic vim can be done in a couple of hours and I think would benefit literally every programmer to know the basics because it is so much nicer to even navigate a single line of code using the vi keys (w, b, f, % etc) than any other alternative I've heard of.
belief systems can take years to fully adopt, since they attempt to rewire your way of thinking about the world. it's easier for the ones that dangle clear rewards and punishments, though some might call them shallow. for the ones more focused on inner retrospection, there's no obvious short term reward they can offer.
NO, not victim blaming. Where is the victim? And where is the blame?
But it does read like someone that has just gotten into Buddhism recently, has become lost in the 1000's of different sects and writings, and his 'takeaways' after a brief exploration seem very wrong. He is arguing against Buddhism for things that aren't Buddhist, more misunderstands of something he heard once, and sounded Christian.
Since in Buddhism there is no central authority, and every monk can write up some hot take on their views. It can be very difficult for newbies to wade through it.
Some of these points are quite good. I've followed Buddhism quite a lot, taking the view that if you ignore the reincarnation bit (which was probably inherited from other religions in the area buddhism sprang from) then buddhism isn't really a religion at all, its more like a philosophy.
I've seen people at buddhist retreats suggest some wilds benefits to meditation (magic powers etc). Thats clearly nonsense. But one thing I've noticed about meditation (and yes, it is just sitting still) is that it makes it harder to lie to yourself. And thats really important because Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self
I think the author here is right to point out the problems of enlightenment (its a sortof fictional ideal that no-one ever achieves but we might as well critique it). The Buddhist point of view is that wanting leads to suffering and so the ideal is not to 'want' anything. But really, if you truly achieved 'not wanting anything, that wouldn't be much different from being dead. We need wants. Its more about getting wants in balance.
The reincarnation bit interests me. I've had a notion that reincarnation is the process of birthing. A child is going to inherent their parents DNA, genes, environment, and situation. Whatever pain the parents are burdened with will be passed on to their child, and so on and on and on. We are [adaptable] copies of our parents.
Im self aware enough to observe the traits I picked up from my parents. I've thought about all the suffering I've been through. If I dont have children, I can be the end of the thread. I can stop the cycle of suffering.
/armchair
Buddhism is definitely a religion. The founder of the religion himself talked about an order of monks.
What happens with Buddhism in particular, especially in the West, is that people pick and choose what they want to believe from it to the point that whatever they're left with is hardly Buddhism at all, and it does end up being a philosophy.
For an example, ask the next white person you meet who identities as a Buddhist if they believe that there are 8 hells. They're going to tell you that's, to use your word, "nonsense".
> is that people pick and choose what they want to believe
Pretty sure this is SOP for basically every religion. :)
As I understand it, a common interpretation of The Buddha's teachings is that he wanted people to find their own path and he specifically dissuaded people against dogma and organised religion.
Anything can be done terribly wrong and misused while formally correct if approached without reason and measure.
Instead of judging Buddhism, just practicing the simplest form of it by just meditating daily and consciously trying to be mindful and kind throughout every day usually does a great job. The same can be considered a simple form of Christianity as well though.
> The same can be considered a simple form of Christianity as well though.
To an uninformed external observer perhaps. But to be Christian means to accept Christ as your Lord. There is no Christianity without Christ. Not even a “simple form” of it.
> accept Christ as your Lord
Okay, why not? Then comes all stuff about what does this mean in practice and theory. And there are so many forms of Christianity arguing. The simplest one of them still is just be mindful and kind, for the sake of the Lord who was and is.
You are conflating belief systems and behavioral patterns. Christianity is a belief system populated by folks who follow Christ as Lord. Full stop.
This Kumbaya Collective you describe is a behavioral pattern that many folks take part in. Some of them may happen to be Christian, others may not.
But to observe that some Christians are part of the Kumbaya Collective and then go on to imply that being part of the collective is a “simple form” of Christianity is a categorical error.
Behaviour does not imply Faith.
I believe you are committing the no true Scotsman fallacy, by claiming Christianity is a belief in Christ as lord.
I myself was raised in a Christian organization that did not believe Christ was lord, but rather a person sent by god to show us by example, how to be, spiritually, in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. They also don’t believe in the holy trinity.
So do consider that you do not speak for all Christian’s and not all Christian’s hold the same beliefs.
You could define Christianity as believing in Christ, bust more and more people consider themselves somewhat Christian without any of the Bible setup.
> Although many non-practicing Christians say they do not believe in God “as described in the Bible,” they do tend to believe in some other higher power or spiritual force in the universe.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/05/29/10-key-fi...
Yeah those people are just confused or simply adhering to their group by calling themselves Christians. Being a Christian and not believing in the bible is oxymoronic
If a critical mass of people call themselves X, whatever previous definition of X gets adapted to that reality. That's how language/society works.
I see your point, but also think we're already past the threshold where the term's ownership has moved away from the Church.
That’s a rather Euro-centric view of things (you’ll find the corresponding articles for the american continents are very different), but even still it’s missing the point. The question is whether this “critical mass” you speak of seeks to be a disciple of Christ (the group of people first ever referred to as “Christians”), not whether they have a particular interpretation of “God as depicted in the bible”.
It is, for instance, rather common to believe Genesis 1 is more of an allegory than an explicit recounting of God’s work, but that does not preclude someone from accepting Christ as their Lord and choosing to live as His disciple.
"Meditation can even exacerbate depression, anxiety, and other negative emotions in certain people."
If the author had put enough serious time in meditation, he would notice that meditation doesn't exacerbate negative emotions, it just makes you aware of the negative emotions that were already there and that you were ignoring by social media, alcohol, drugs, tiktok, etc. Meditation makes you aware of where the problem is and why the negative emotions come up. Think of it like a very good debugger. It's no substitution for solving the problem. It gives you the tools to solve the problem. Imagine your boss gave you a buggy code but seemingly it seems to compile and work but he keeps saying the code has errors, it's not supposed to work that way. You will go nuts if you don't know where the problem is. You don't even need the solution, just knowing the problem is enough to save you a lot of trouble. Meditation on the initial stages works that way. Later, you'll figure out as you go. Buddha said just do it, don't analyze l, just do it. The author here didn't have the patience to just do it and see it for himself, instead he focussed on the philosophy too much.
Meditating on a cushion for hours everyday is no substitution for being kind to strangers. Meditation brings you clarity even if the clarity is something you don't like. Hell, even Buddha was enlightened when he actually left meditation and gave up meditation altogether (which the author seems to have completely miss it here). Buddhism may not be perfect(what's perfect anyway?) but as George Box put it "All models are wrong, some are useful" Buddhism tries the best to be the most right and the useful model of the world.
The anecdotal claims from you and the author are the sort which I'm hesitant to believe without a study of more people.
It's not entirely anecdotal. There's research that shows meditation can hasten the progression of mental illnesses like suicidal depression and schizophrenia. For example, suicide rates spike among neophyte practitioners of meditation, and those with latent schizophrenia are more likely (i.e. earlier than others) to experience their first psychotic break when beginning meditation. AFAIU, Buddhist teachers, pre-modern and modern, were and are taught to pay attention to warning signs of people experiencing pathological mental issues brought on by meditation. And while I haven't read of it specifically, I would think the phenomenon would also be found in, e.g., contemplative Christian communities (e.g. monastic communities or contemplative retreats). None of this implies meditation is bad, just that it's important that people learn meditation techniques in a supportive, non-isolating environment (i.e. with a well-trained teacher or experienced community) so that the small fraction of those who might respond negatively can be helped. This type of environment would indeed tend to be found within traditional religious institutions and communities, as opposed to following a YouTube video or website howto at home.
It is sort of known that meditation can be a double edged sword, it is a tool and like any tool it can be used badly which is why traditionally you would have a teacher.
Panaceas do not exist. Also, some people are pretty terrible everywhere and in all religions such as that Chögyam Trungpa in his community.
We all pursue our quest to understand the universe and to better ourselves. To me, this is what matters, and, fortunately, this is something often shared between religions.
This was from 2003.
I think at the time the author(John Horgan) was a kind of a 'religion debunker', and maybe he had latched onto a few sects of Buddhism that sound kind of 'Christian' and 'debunkable'.
He has some follow up writings that indicate his views on Buddhism may have shifted.
From 2023
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/a-buddhism-critic-goes-on...
"But I’m glad I went on the retreat. The Lama, during our private chat, said Buddhism isn’t true, but it works. Something worked during the retreat, but what was it? "
Thanks for sharing, that's a good follow-up. Surya Das is a well-respected teacher so he found a good one to go to retreat with.
The quote from the lama is excellent as well and a very common type of expression that Dzogchen masters make.
Thanks for posting that link. It's a must-read followup.
(2003)
This isn’t the place to go into detail, but the author mainly argues against a Western conceptualisation of Buddhism, which is sadly divorced from the original meaning. If you want to study Buddhism, don’t rely on people reinterpreting it for a Western audience; go right to the source and try to understand what the old masters and the sutras are talking about.
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I’m not making any comment about Buddhism, but the fact that something is ‘2,500 years old’ doesn’t seem to have much bearing on its validity.
There’s plenty of misguided rubbish that’s been knocking around for millennia — I would imagine Buddhism has other selling points.
The selling point for the kind of people who read HN is probably this - the similarities between what Buddhism has been teaching for 2,500 years and the state of the art in evidence-based psychotherapies are uncanny. Long before the likes of Jon Kabat-Zinn were explicitly making the connection, Beck, Adler, Low and Ellis independently rediscovered an awful lot of Buddhist principles, with only a little help from the Stoics. It's one of those weird apparent anachronisms like the Antikythera mechanism.
It's not really anachronistic, is it? Religion and psychotherapy have been basically indistinguishable until the modern era. "Someone 2500 years ago striving to improve human mental health had some success" isn't so surprising.
AND make front page on HN ftw. . . .
The author doesn't seem to understand Buddhism, nor I but it could be important to remember that "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him", and also the concept of Upaya [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upaya