Buddhist Philosophy, The Fundamental Flaw.
15 November 2016 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
hey what's up I'm a former scholar of
Buddhism I was especially known for my work on poly the written form of philosophy the most ancient form of Buddhist philosophy that still exists today in the Tara vada tradition but I'm also very well-versed in my Ana Buddhism I have lived in and worked in Mahayana countries as well as tera vaada countries blah blah blah this video is not coming from the perspective of a hostile outsider to Buddhism it's coming from the perspective of an insider if you know everyone the guys who become scholars of Buddhism they normally get asked in one context or another to what extent they believe in Buddhism to what extent they support Buddhism as opposed to merely studying it and it's an interesting question people phrase the question different way and and people define the answer in different ways - I remember one time a famous scholar of Buddhism was asked at a Buddhist monastery why he never became a Buddhist why he never actually joined the religion despite spending decades and decades as a scholar of Buddhism I got this anecdote from someone who was there and was an eyewitness to his answer and he just sat there awkwardly for a while and then said into the microphone well you know reincarnation I just couldn't really believe oh it's a weak answer because it is possible to be a Buddhist and not believe in reincarnation and it's possible to support and believe in Buddhist philosophy as a really positive thing in the world and not believe Makran nation it's possible to reject all of the superstitious elements of Buddhism and still really believe that Buddhist philosophy is important or even the Buddhism as a religion is a good thing now I have a separate video on my channel which is called why I am NOT a Buddhist why I'm not a member of the religion today you can go back and watch that video I encourage you I guess I'll give a link below this video but that is really a separate topic when I'm addressing in this video now instead is the question of what's wrong with Buddhism as a philosophy because my reasons for not being a member of the religion today have to do with the people who comprise the religion a the reality institutionally culturally and even on a human scale personally of what the religion is and what it's doing today the ways in which I'm disappoint with it the ways in which I don't think it has the potential to make a positive difference in the world anymore whereas before when I was a member of the religion I did believe in those things I thought Buddhism had that kind of potential and I was so to speak optimistic about what could happen next 50 years the prism am as a philosophy I think what nobody is willing to come out and say or what nobody's want to come out and deal with is Nirvana itself is the Nirvana experience and this is interesting I can only compare it to the status of hell and heaven in Buddhism the fact that Buddhists both true believers and secular scholars they tend to really want to avoid the fact that this is a religion that was traditionally based on belief in in hell they asked its reincarnation in hell but hell is still hell hell still involves demons torturing people it still involves fire and it's somewhat different from the Christian and Muslim idea of hell but hell is still hell people there's a great reluctance to face up to what the ancient texts actually say about that and what traditional Buddhist belief really is about that Nirvana is even more taboo for the most part whether people are openly religiously Buddhist or if they're covertly religiously Buddhist which is mostly the case for scholars of Buddhism they mostly don't want to admit to what extent they've lost their objectivity to what extent they have become true believers in the religion the Nirvana experience itself as it is set down in the text is really I would say fundamentally wrong and misleading and bad and precludes the development of Buddhism as a philosophy it prevented Buddhism from developing as a philosophy in the ancient period when the Canon was written within that period of time and it prevents any progress until today what do I mean okay uh the Pali Canon the most ancient collection of Buddhist philosophy one of things it's famous for is that it contains real debate and that is something to be celebrated in contrast to the Christian Bible the Jewish Bible or the Muslim Koran which are more or less dogmatic which tell you what you ought to believe and tell you the consequences for not believing it the Buddhist Canon the Pali Canon records debates that really do show you dissent they showed disagreements between Buddhism and its rival religions in that period of India genuinely philosophical disagreements sometimes of course disagreements about discipline or other elements of the religion um disagreements about magic disagreements about the gods disagreements about the heavens but still it's debate including real philosophical debate and it shows dissent and disagreement dissatisfaction within Buddhism it shows criticism of the Buddha it shows criticism of the Buddha by other monks shows criticism of the Buddha by people who haven't yet converted to Buddhism so non Buddhist but it also shows some disaffected and disillusioned monks monks who became X Buddhists monks who converted back to another religion or who left Buddhism you know who really harshly criticized the Buddha and the Buddhist teaching so that is a huge advantage over Christianity Judaism Islam over over Hinduism also to be frank and it does very fundamentally make their religion more philosophical more open-minded etc however the nature and purpose of the those debates is very much stunted by Nirvana itself the purpose of all of the debates is merely to get you to believe enough it's merely to convince you up to a certain point that you should try this Buddhist method of meditation that you should try experiencing the jhanas and then once you have experienced the jhanas that are on the road to Nirvana itself then you're convinced that this whole religion is completely true that the Buddha's teaching is the most important thing in the world and you in a sense have no more questions or you have no more questions of this fundamental type so the jhana experience is not only irrational it really frustrates rational debate it stymies it puts an end to the construction of rational philosophy it stymies the progress of rational inquiry and pardon me of rational inquiry and the experience of jhana if you're willing to just read what the original texts say is hallucinatory so we have a religion that from day one was embracing the experience of hallucination as a real and important source of data so it's not merely I mean like in ancient Greece you can say there's a failure to distinguish between hallucination and real experience people see the gods and talk to the gods sometimes in circumstances that explain why they're hallucinating I remember I think this is in Thucydides there's a story it sure could be Herodotus but in ancient in the ancient Greek source there's a guy who was a messenger running through the high altitude mountains as fast as he could to deliver a message and not surprisingly he started hallucinating in this circumstance and he saw one of the ancient Greek gods and spoke to him and so on now anybody can also in Tibet at high altitudes you can get oxygen deprivation and you can loosen it even more even easily in the ancient world disease and illness itself is enough to get you hallucinating with no use of drugs and with no other susceptibility still today if you've just experienced tropical fever many many forms of illness partly just due to the exhaustion that cause you will have hallucination as a side effect but in ancient Greece you might say there's this failure to distinguish between hallucination and real experience in Buddhism it's worse because the religion is very fundamentally based on embracing hallucinatory experience and that is there as part of the bedrock of the religion is that people talk to the gods people see they have visions of their own prior incarnations or their own future incarnations they have visions of demons of yetis of talking to gods like Indra of teleportation to other realms and all of this is taken deadly seriously they have visions of you know the departed souls soul is not correct in but it's but we're using being which language share the departed souls of people they knew floating through the air and going to hell and being tortured the torments of these spirits and so on and every indication in the Pala Canon is that the Buddha himself takes this very seriously that he regards this as real and he regards these things as increasing faith in the community so yes you have an open philosophical you know there's a lot of so-called critical thinking and debate in the in the Pali Canon but in terms of the core tenets of the religion the purpose of that debate is only to bring you up to the point where you sit down and have that meditative experience you experience the jhanas and whether or not you experience Nirvana you get up to those levels in the jhanas you have these hallucinatory experiences and then this confirms your faith in the religion and the religion carries on and now suddenly you're quite willing to pay taxes that support Buddhism another thing so this you know gives the the basis for the whole development of the the institutionalized religion now of course there are other ways in which the religion is stymied on the religion was never trying to solve the kinds of problems that modern Western philosophy is trying to solve it was never trying to solve social or political problems though there's tons of really interesting material reflecting on discussing social and political problems in ancient India so look bottom line people make excuses for Buddhism because Buddhism is better than Christianity it is better than Islam if you're depressed as hell by studying the situation in Muslim politics or Islamic jurisprudence or Islamic you know Islamic philosophy and you suddenly turn to the situation in ancient India with Buddhism or even today in modern Thailand and there's a reason why tourists want to go to Thailand and they don't want to go to Saudi Arabia being in a you know tera vaada Buddhist culture it is much more comfortable for your vacation even though Thailand has its own political problems currently they have a military dictatorship ruling the country Thailand is not paradise but it's paradise for some there are many ways in which modern Thailand is much more appealing than modern Saudi Arabia and there are many ways in which the ancient philosophy of Buddhism is much more appealing than the medieval philosophies of Christianity or Islam or Judaism or what-have-you so in some ways Buddhism I think gets an easy ride because we're making those comparative statements but at some point the comparisons have to stop and we have to evaluate Buddhism for what it really is on its own terms and for what it can and cannot contribute to the modern world what can it contribute questions but not answers I think that the same way that we can read Aristotle talking about social political and metaphysical questions the same way we can read in ancient Greece two different philosophers debating whether the earth is flat or shaped like a drum these bizarre you know debates about the nature of reality nature of the atom the nature of the Sun the nature of the earth the cosmology of ancient Greece it is interesting it is intellectually stimulating for us in the modern world but in a sense we are really just reading this stuff because it has the right questions in those pages you will not find the right answers
Buddhism I was especially known for my work on poly the written form of philosophy the most ancient form of Buddhist philosophy that still exists today in the Tara vada tradition but I'm also very well-versed in my Ana Buddhism I have lived in and worked in Mahayana countries as well as tera vaada countries blah blah blah this video is not coming from the perspective of a hostile outsider to Buddhism it's coming from the perspective of an insider if you know everyone the guys who become scholars of Buddhism they normally get asked in one context or another to what extent they believe in Buddhism to what extent they support Buddhism as opposed to merely studying it and it's an interesting question people phrase the question different way and and people define the answer in different ways - I remember one time a famous scholar of Buddhism was asked at a Buddhist monastery why he never became a Buddhist why he never actually joined the religion despite spending decades and decades as a scholar of Buddhism I got this anecdote from someone who was there and was an eyewitness to his answer and he just sat there awkwardly for a while and then said into the microphone well you know reincarnation I just couldn't really believe oh it's a weak answer because it is possible to be a Buddhist and not believe in reincarnation and it's possible to support and believe in Buddhist philosophy as a really positive thing in the world and not believe Makran nation it's possible to reject all of the superstitious elements of Buddhism and still really believe that Buddhist philosophy is important or even the Buddhism as a religion is a good thing now I have a separate video on my channel which is called why I am NOT a Buddhist why I'm not a member of the religion today you can go back and watch that video I encourage you I guess I'll give a link below this video but that is really a separate topic when I'm addressing in this video now instead is the question of what's wrong with Buddhism as a philosophy because my reasons for not being a member of the religion today have to do with the people who comprise the religion a the reality institutionally culturally and even on a human scale personally of what the religion is and what it's doing today the ways in which I'm disappoint with it the ways in which I don't think it has the potential to make a positive difference in the world anymore whereas before when I was a member of the religion I did believe in those things I thought Buddhism had that kind of potential and I was so to speak optimistic about what could happen next 50 years the prism am as a philosophy I think what nobody is willing to come out and say or what nobody's want to come out and deal with is Nirvana itself is the Nirvana experience and this is interesting I can only compare it to the status of hell and heaven in Buddhism the fact that Buddhists both true believers and secular scholars they tend to really want to avoid the fact that this is a religion that was traditionally based on belief in in hell they asked its reincarnation in hell but hell is still hell hell still involves demons torturing people it still involves fire and it's somewhat different from the Christian and Muslim idea of hell but hell is still hell people there's a great reluctance to face up to what the ancient texts actually say about that and what traditional Buddhist belief really is about that Nirvana is even more taboo for the most part whether people are openly religiously Buddhist or if they're covertly religiously Buddhist which is mostly the case for scholars of Buddhism they mostly don't want to admit to what extent they've lost their objectivity to what extent they have become true believers in the religion the Nirvana experience itself as it is set down in the text is really I would say fundamentally wrong and misleading and bad and precludes the development of Buddhism as a philosophy it prevented Buddhism from developing as a philosophy in the ancient period when the Canon was written within that period of time and it prevents any progress until today what do I mean okay uh the Pali Canon the most ancient collection of Buddhist philosophy one of things it's famous for is that it contains real debate and that is something to be celebrated in contrast to the Christian Bible the Jewish Bible or the Muslim Koran which are more or less dogmatic which tell you what you ought to believe and tell you the consequences for not believing it the Buddhist Canon the Pali Canon records debates that really do show you dissent they showed disagreements between Buddhism and its rival religions in that period of India genuinely philosophical disagreements sometimes of course disagreements about discipline or other elements of the religion um disagreements about magic disagreements about the gods disagreements about the heavens but still it's debate including real philosophical debate and it shows dissent and disagreement dissatisfaction within Buddhism it shows criticism of the Buddha it shows criticism of the Buddha by other monks shows criticism of the Buddha by people who haven't yet converted to Buddhism so non Buddhist but it also shows some disaffected and disillusioned monks monks who became X Buddhists monks who converted back to another religion or who left Buddhism you know who really harshly criticized the Buddha and the Buddhist teaching so that is a huge advantage over Christianity Judaism Islam over over Hinduism also to be frank and it does very fundamentally make their religion more philosophical more open-minded etc however the nature and purpose of the those debates is very much stunted by Nirvana itself the purpose of all of the debates is merely to get you to believe enough it's merely to convince you up to a certain point that you should try this Buddhist method of meditation that you should try experiencing the jhanas and then once you have experienced the jhanas that are on the road to Nirvana itself then you're convinced that this whole religion is completely true that the Buddha's teaching is the most important thing in the world and you in a sense have no more questions or you have no more questions of this fundamental type so the jhana experience is not only irrational it really frustrates rational debate it stymies it puts an end to the construction of rational philosophy it stymies the progress of rational inquiry and pardon me of rational inquiry and the experience of jhana if you're willing to just read what the original texts say is hallucinatory so we have a religion that from day one was embracing the experience of hallucination as a real and important source of data so it's not merely I mean like in ancient Greece you can say there's a failure to distinguish between hallucination and real experience people see the gods and talk to the gods sometimes in circumstances that explain why they're hallucinating I remember I think this is in Thucydides there's a story it sure could be Herodotus but in ancient in the ancient Greek source there's a guy who was a messenger running through the high altitude mountains as fast as he could to deliver a message and not surprisingly he started hallucinating in this circumstance and he saw one of the ancient Greek gods and spoke to him and so on now anybody can also in Tibet at high altitudes you can get oxygen deprivation and you can loosen it even more even easily in the ancient world disease and illness itself is enough to get you hallucinating with no use of drugs and with no other susceptibility still today if you've just experienced tropical fever many many forms of illness partly just due to the exhaustion that cause you will have hallucination as a side effect but in ancient Greece you might say there's this failure to distinguish between hallucination and real experience in Buddhism it's worse because the religion is very fundamentally based on embracing hallucinatory experience and that is there as part of the bedrock of the religion is that people talk to the gods people see they have visions of their own prior incarnations or their own future incarnations they have visions of demons of yetis of talking to gods like Indra of teleportation to other realms and all of this is taken deadly seriously they have visions of you know the departed souls soul is not correct in but it's but we're using being which language share the departed souls of people they knew floating through the air and going to hell and being tortured the torments of these spirits and so on and every indication in the Pala Canon is that the Buddha himself takes this very seriously that he regards this as real and he regards these things as increasing faith in the community so yes you have an open philosophical you know there's a lot of so-called critical thinking and debate in the in the Pali Canon but in terms of the core tenets of the religion the purpose of that debate is only to bring you up to the point where you sit down and have that meditative experience you experience the jhanas and whether or not you experience Nirvana you get up to those levels in the jhanas you have these hallucinatory experiences and then this confirms your faith in the religion and the religion carries on and now suddenly you're quite willing to pay taxes that support Buddhism another thing so this you know gives the the basis for the whole development of the the institutionalized religion now of course there are other ways in which the religion is stymied on the religion was never trying to solve the kinds of problems that modern Western philosophy is trying to solve it was never trying to solve social or political problems though there's tons of really interesting material reflecting on discussing social and political problems in ancient India so look bottom line people make excuses for Buddhism because Buddhism is better than Christianity it is better than Islam if you're depressed as hell by studying the situation in Muslim politics or Islamic jurisprudence or Islamic you know Islamic philosophy and you suddenly turn to the situation in ancient India with Buddhism or even today in modern Thailand and there's a reason why tourists want to go to Thailand and they don't want to go to Saudi Arabia being in a you know tera vaada Buddhist culture it is much more comfortable for your vacation even though Thailand has its own political problems currently they have a military dictatorship ruling the country Thailand is not paradise but it's paradise for some there are many ways in which modern Thailand is much more appealing than modern Saudi Arabia and there are many ways in which the ancient philosophy of Buddhism is much more appealing than the medieval philosophies of Christianity or Islam or Judaism or what-have-you so in some ways Buddhism I think gets an easy ride because we're making those comparative statements but at some point the comparisons have to stop and we have to evaluate Buddhism for what it really is on its own terms and for what it can and cannot contribute to the modern world what can it contribute questions but not answers I think that the same way that we can read Aristotle talking about social political and metaphysical questions the same way we can read in ancient Greece two different philosophers debating whether the earth is flat or shaped like a drum these bizarre you know debates about the nature of reality nature of the atom the nature of the Sun the nature of the earth the cosmology of ancient Greece it is interesting it is intellectually stimulating for us in the modern world but in a sense we are really just reading this stuff because it has the right questions in those pages you will not find the right answers