Is Buddhism an Atheistic Religion. Comments on Paper 2, Spring 2015.

To establish whether Buddhism is an atheistic religion, we must first determine whether or not it is a religion. Some students had doubts about this:

Buddhism is mistakenly taken as a religion because, globally, people assume that Buddhists worship the statues of bald, fat entities.

This was, indeed, the way most westerners thought about Buddhism before the pioneering work of Emile Burnouf. But is everyone who thinks Buddhism is a religion guilty of this error?

The website includes a guide for writing this paper, in which I suggested reading the work of Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern sociology. If you read Durkheim's work, you will see plenty of references to Burnouf. True, we can look back today and say that Burnouf's work contains many misunderstandings of Buddhism, but neither Burnouf nor Durkheim is guilty of assuming that Buddhists worship a fat bald man. If you are going to argue that Buddhism is not a religion, I would expect a consideration of why serious scholars, people like Durkheim, had a different opinion. I pointed out the significance of Durkheim's work for a reason.

This is called the 'straw man' fallacy. You want to argue that Buddhism is not a religion. You invent a silly reason for supposing that it is a religion, and accuse people who think it is a religion of believing that silly reason. It is called the straw man fallacy because it is like setting up a boxing match in which defeat a straw man who cannot possibly fight back, and announce that you are the champion of the world. Boxers earn fame by stepping into the ring with other great boxers. In your papers, you need to step into the ring with great thinkers like Durkheim.

Some students argued that Buddhism is not a religion, but a philosophy:

I consider Buddhism to be a philosophy for two reasons: first, the fact that Buddhists can be seen as devoted to the study of the nature of existence and reality, which are key elements of the very definition of 'Philosophical'. And secondly, the way that Gautama traveled around teaching of this new way that he sees the world and how if you follow these rules you can live a happier, meaningful life, which is like the teachings of Confucianism.

If we define "Philosophy" by subject matter, and if the definition is so broad, then all religious teachers were also philosophers. What religion doesn't have something to say about the nature of reality, and the path to living a more meaningful life? We can talk about the philosophy of the Upanishads, or the philosophical content of the Book of Job. Thomas Jefferson wrote a book about The Philosophy of Jesus, and George W. Bush said that Jesus was his favorite philosopher. But establishing that Buddha was a philosopher in this sense doesn't establish that he was not a religious leader, precisely because all religious leaders have something that could be called their philosophy.

When we try to distinguish philosophy from religion, it is not because of the subject matter, but because of the manner of teaching. Socrates and Sartre offered reasons, arguments, in favor of their beliefs. In the New Testament, Jesus is presented as having supernatural authority. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna does not justify his position with logic: he gives Arjuna a supernatural vision of the true nature of things. The question then is whether Buddha's enlightenment is more like the supernatural vision of Arjuna, or more like Aristotle arriving at a conclusion by reason.

If you define philosophy by subject-matter, then showing that Buddha's teaching is philosophical does not show that it is not religious, because the two can overlap. To show that Buddha's teaching is philosophical and therefore not religious, you need to define philosophy not by its subject-matter, but by its methodology.

One student did, in fact, suggest that Buddhists follow a philosophical methodology:

...each Buddhist make their own conclusions about what they should or should not believe in and what they should or should not do to achieve Nirvana.

This is an interesting claim, but the student did not cite any evidence to back it up. In the western world, many people who have embraced Buddhism chose to do so after they engaged in a philosophical quest and reached their own conclusions. But those people are a minority in the worldwide Buddhist community. Do the majority of Buddhists in countries like Thailand, for example, arrive at their beliefs in this way? If you want to persuade me of this, you need to present some evidence.

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