I’m quite familiar really

My final category is of ideas that seem familiar from Western culture, and when encountered in Buddhist teaching immediately get Westerners running in familiar grooves. These friends are false in the sense that they can obscure what is useful about themselves. If Buddhists are really to get the benefit of what is different in these Buddhist teachings, they need to understand that they are different, or at least that they should be interpreted differently to be compatible with the Middle Way.

One example is the idea of self-denying love. One can read in the Pali Canon about the disciple who, to be a true disciple of the Buddha, should allow himself to be beaten up, robbed, or even sawed limb from limb by bandits without a word of reproach or a moment of ill-will[1]. Those many Buddhists with Christian backgrounds could hardly refrain from thinking of the crucifixion of Christ here. The implication seems to be that true compassion, like true Christian love, is indifferent to bodily suffering and self-defence, and consists primarily in a masochistic passivity.

This is the gross version, and I have never encountered Buddhists (though I have met Christians) who actually attempted to practice such “love”. The subtle version, however, which I think I have detected even in quite experienced Buddhists, is the cultural idea that love is “unselfish” and involves doing one’s duty to others even to the extent of denying oneself. There is more discussion of this point in chapter 3. Again, the Buddhist teaching may just spark a pre-existent set of ideas, and seem familiar when it really isn’t.

My second example is that of nature. In the West there is a long tradition of alternately exploiting and sentimentalising “nature”. It is either a resource given to us by God, or a source of cuddly bunny-rabbits peacefully grazing on our favourite patch of down. More recent environmental concerns have created a third view of nature, as a set of interrelationships which is a source of meaning and value. Western Buddhists hearing the idea of dependent origination, especially when interpreted in terms of mutual causality, have read this concept in terms of nature – again this is discussed in chapter 6.

This is another false friend, because dependent origination is in no way the source of the values that have been attributed to “nature” in the West. If anything, it is a process of suffering and hence a source of dread, and its interrelationships are ones that we suffer through our ignorance of. In traditional Buddhism dependent origination is a doctrinal concept explaining the processes of samsara – in my view, as I said in chapter 5, an empty one which makes it all the easier to project onto – but it is neither a mother goddess nor a source of Wordsworthian nature-mysticism.

Western Buddhism is a situation where many people have imperfectly grasped and digested concepts. It often does not take long poking a “Buddhist” idea to find a Western one underneath, the lines of which have been mysteriously taken by the “Buddhist” one on top. It is a strangely deracinated society, in which ideas that have often not been held very long can be held with as much stubbornness as those held for a lifetime. It is often those Buddhists who are most deeply conservative whose conservatism has its roots in something completely non-Buddhist, such as Platonism, or romantic ideas about traditional societies. Those who are most radical, less afraid of outward western influences, and do not feel much at home in the “Buddhist” group, on the other hand, may in some respects be more Buddhist than the Buddhists.

Whatever Buddhism may be – at its best – it is not all that familiar really. It is those who keep moving into uncharted territory, and are ready to give up the places they already occupy to the savages, who have most closely absorbed the finest insights of Buddhism.