Why Buddhism is Silly

Sorry to everyone for the lack of posts recently. I've now got furniture (including a bookshelf!) which is making me much more productive, so I will hopefully be back up to an article a week shortly. Despite my newfound productivity, I think this article could do with a bit more of an edit, but I'm too preoccupied with writing some journal articles at the moment. I hope it is still stimulating...

I’ve noticed recently that many Americans and others living in consumerist, capitalist, materialist cultures are frequently turning to Buddhism in an attempt to fill in the existential void that these superficial belief systems tend to leave. The appeal of Buddhism in this case seems obvious enough – it is effectively the opposite of materialism. I assume that many of those people turning towards this oriental religion are doing so on the presumption that if materialism is shit, then it’s opposite will probably work quite well. Unfortunately I simply don’t think this is the case, and the shift to Buddhism, to my eyes at least, seems very similar to the other half-arsed attempts people make at finding meaning, when a little more rigor would help them arrive at a far more effective solution.

Let’s examine Buddhism for a second. The first principle of Buddhism is that “all life is suffering”. Excuse me? I happen to think life is pretty awesome thank you very much. On a common sense level, this statement must be bollocks in a western context. We have a plentiful quantity of food in various forms, good shelter, and access to clean water; quality health care, and free education through high school; a high minimum wage, and beautiful green cities with plenty of space, sunshine, lollypops and rainbows. In Australia, most people can take a holiday every year, and work only 35 hours a week, often in occupations that they enjoy, but which are at least safe and well paid. Taken at face value, this statement that forms the foundation of Buddhist belief is just wrong.

But obviously this statement does not refer to material suffering, or if it did at some point in history, it was a time when typhoid was a common occurrence and mortality was up around 50%, where people lived in the gutter, crapped in chamber-pots and ate bread 365 days a year. Things are a little different now, and I assume that the statement defines suffering more in terms of angst and anxiety rather than actual pain or grievance. Specifically, if the myth of Siddharta is anything to go by, the Buddhist definition of suffering refers to the unquenchable thirst of desire. We always want something, and until that want is satisfied, we suffer. When it is satisfied, we have a momentary respite (perhaps a momentary feeling of ‘happiness’) and then we return to suffering because we desire something else. All life then, is suffering.

The Buddhist solution to this situation is to attempt to annihilate desire – to gain ascetic control over the body and the mind to the point where we become free from desire. This is the notion of Nirvana, a state in from which desire is absent, and we are at ‘peace’. We become one with the ‘om’.        

Nirvana is achieved through a long process of self-annihilation. Everything we do we do for others. We attempt to negate our own self-interest as an aspect of our desire. This is the origin of Buddhist notions of tolerance, pity, piety, respect for others, charity etc. In addition, the monk will undertake an ascetic mode of living, subsisting off charitable offerings of food, living in harsh conditions with minimal shelter, meditating extensively, traveling extensively, often barefoot, wearing only a robe and exposing oneself to nature. Through this process the monk hopes to free himself from the demands of the will, and attune himself to the natural rhythm of the universe.

Buddhism then, is another example of a system that attempts to place the will and the conscious mind in opposition to each other. In my view, this is a surefire route to dissatisfaction and unhappiness, rather than ‘peace’. In Buddhism, the conscious mind is utilized to overcome the desires and yearnings of the will. But does this really seem sensible? Why do we always fight ourselves? In Buddhism, in Christianity, in Kantian ethics, in utilitarianism, in the very notion that someone acts good or evil rather than being good or evil, we repeatedly ignore our base natures. Why is it that we feel that the will does not have our best interests at heart? At what point in human history did we decide that the spirit of man was vile, wretched, corrupt and not to be trusted? When and why did we decide that we must use our conscious minds, that brilliant faculty that sets us apart from the animals, to impose ‘order’ on ourselves (we did it with Socrates, but I’ll leave that for another essay)?

 At the end of the day, I simply don’t think you can kill the will, but more importantly, I don’t know why you would want to. Why can’t we live in harmony with the will? My suspicion, in fact, is that the holy grail of satisfaction lies precisely in coinciding the conscious mind with the will. This is what Nietzsche means when he instructs us to “become your own necessity.” In Nietzsche’s philosophy, satisfaction, happiness, meaning, lie entirely in satisfying the will, in quenching our desires, as often and with as much totality as possible. We must accept that occasionally, we will not be able to satisfy our desires, and thus we must ‘become hard’ in order to face the strange beast that is life, but we must also affirm ourselves and become what we are.

But I’ll leave Nietzsche and my broader philosophy for another article, for now, I want to return to the issue of people reaching for Buddhism as a solution. This move concerns me because it just seems so soft. It appears to me, to be another example of this pathological desire of the Western world for happiness, here defined as tranquility. The Buddhist notion of Nirvana is very far removed from the intense, strong, difficult satisfaction that comes from transcendence. It is almost the opposite – a feeling of nothing. Now of course Nirvana also includes an absence of the intense negative feelings that come with existential failure, but this is precisely why I see turning towards Buddhism as a high level cop-out. Life is hard, but it’s also potentially awesome. Don’t run from, embrace it. For the west and America in particular, Buddhism is, in some sense, reverse materialism. If material comfort doesn’t bring you tranquility and an end to a restless spirit, perhaps a complete absence of material comfort will. This kind of thinking seems somewhat brainless to me. We need to face up to the situation we are dealing with. Life will always kick you the face occasionally. It will always be comprised, in significant part, by shit stuff. But in order to get at the really good stuff – the hard-won achievements, the intense feelings of satisfaction and personal triumph, the unique opportunities and brilliant memories, you need that shit stuff.

The Western move to Buddhism and the popularity of other simplistic notions like “living in the now” and “the purpose driven life” are often all good and well, but they lack the rigorous scholarly backing to allow them to become total systems that you can ‘know’, and end up relying on that old load of bullshit – ‘faith’. Having to rely on faith is just not good enough as far as I’m concerned. A system must be able to stand on its own two legs to some extent, and generally speaking, in order to arrive at such a situation we must either rely on logic or on personal conviction. In the case of personal conviction however, you are often left with a situation in which the evidence is adequate, rather than total, and this can lead to problems. For me, personal conviction is more about things like whether or not I accept that reality is real or not, and that I am not, in fact, living in the matrix, or in a dream. Frankly, it doesn’t matter. The world is real enough, I don’t care whether it’s a dream or the matrix, especially because I am too busy trying to live well here to bother looking for signs of reality or falsehood.

What I would like to arrive at is a system that is sufficiently self-evident in its truthfulness. Much of what I have read about ‘The Purpose Driven Life’ seems quite solid, but it is not self-evidently true. You can practice it and you might find that it works, but you will probably also find yourself seeking guidance when holes in the philosophy and questions with its underlying theories start popping up over the course of a lifetime. I would like something a bit more total than that.