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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