Become a Buddhist is Necessary
We had already discussed how to become a Buddhist, but here we are going to discuss become a Buddhist necessary.
You're interested in Buddhism and the ideas of it the practice of perhaps, but is it necessary to become a Buddhist we'll talk about that.
In the previous article, How to become a Buddhist where I went through various options given the school and so on because there are different ways different approaches.
Whether it's important at all to become a Buddhist and what I want to do here, first of all, is to set up the question by looking at in particular uh the western religious approach.
Because I think many of us who ask this question comes from our western religious background, either ourselves or in our culture in which becoming a particular kind of thing or a person is particularly crucial after discussing religion in the west will then turn to Buddhism in the second part of this article.
So but to begin with uh within a sort of a western context with which most of us are familiar with uh this notion of the religion of a kind of religious belonging is a notion of identity of attachment in a certain way many of us may know that the word religion has the at least one etymology of the word religion is that it comes from the Latin word Religare.
Which means being bound to or attached to probably is I would say the same word as ligament I would you know its ligament is this is a contemporary word which has the same origin.
I would think in Latin, and the idea is that we have certain obligations to this divine being that bind us to that being.
So the western notion of religion is a notion of obligations of a specified kind, and in the bible where much of these ideas come from the concept of God is very proprietary, it has to do really with identity and property of one kind, and other many people misinterpret.
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The first commandment is that there's only one God; in fact, the first commandment states that you shall have no other gods before me. Within the context of where this commandment was composed back in ancient Israel, there was a notion of multiple deities: the first commandment is written that way because there was indeed a notion of numerous gods a competition between deities of different cultures.
As it were and so the deity of the Israelites was to be held above the gods from other cultures they that people who subscribed to these commandments should have no other deity before that one should be uh the highest that was the deity of their culture and in this context religions primarily function as cultural badges of belonging were to belong to a culture or one of the aspects of belonging to culture was subscribing to the religious beliefs.
Approaches of that culture so if you were an Israelite you subscribed to you, you undertook the religion of that deity which involved having that deity as your main deity and so that gave you certain obligations to that deity which were among other things to keep the commandments.
That was your obligation to keep the laws that this deity had purportedly put down, and so that was your obligation. Then the goddess again had responsibilities to you. That is, we essentially pledge allegiance to our tribe by accepting the tribe's deity. The commandments the laws that that deity purportedly laid down in response the goddess then has obligations of performing good things for us, uh giving us as initially in the uh old testament or the Jewish bible the early part of the manual these um the the the things.
The deity would provide to us were worldly goods worldly ends providing us a good life providing us success both in the battlefield and in the home giving us protection against our enemies that those are the kinds of things that we could expect to find the deity providing us that is to say if we did our part the God would do its part.
This was mostly a kind of it's been described as a kind of a contract that you had with a deity you did your part the goddess then would reciprocate this is how it was uh gen this is generally how it's found in the old testament the Jewish bible it's also interesting how it's located in the Vedas.
The Vedas are the old texts uh very, very old again many thousands of years before the common era that was the foundation of the brahminic religion into which the Buddha was born. I mean, he wasn't born into it. He was on the outskirts of it. In any event, he certainly knew of it and responded to it and also in the Vedic religion.
We have the same idea of a really this notion that you that the Brahmanas who were the priestly cast had to perform certain kinds of rituals certain kinds of sacrifices in return for worldly goods from the deities that is a long life success fertility uh health and all the rest now during these uh worldly successes.
I should say, while these successes that the deities provided to us were to begin with, worldly as these religious ideas advanced and became more sophisticated particularly.
Let's say the later books of the Jewish bible or in the case of the brahminic religion as we got into the Upanishads which were written later than the Vedas actually around the time of the Buddha a few centuries before to a few centuries after the Buddha's lifetime, then we get more of the idea that the gods or God will provide us a good afterlife.
The idea of an afterlife is a relatively later kind of thought. It wasn't original to these texts because initially, what the people who these texts were interested in was more about this life than how we gain success here and now and only in time.
These more sophisticated ideas of an afterlife come into it. Indeed, we might think of all of this as modeling the society when you have a community of small chieftainships you might say surrounded by other chieftains around them that were threatening them.
We, as lowly commoners without any real ability to vent to defend ourselves against a mighty overlord, would pledge our allegiance to the local chieftain, and there was this kind of implicit contractual obligation there we would guarantee our help in certain circumstances. The chieftain would at least nominally pledged to protect us in the case that some enemy invaded us.
There were some other kinds of a catastrophe like a flood or whatever, so there was this uh worldly uh contract between the more powerful and the less powerful, which was then modeled onto this notion of the supernatural.
The idea that the gods were sort of larger chieftains writ large in the sky who would protect us from much more grand kinds of problems and give us much more grand potential types of solutions.
Now breaking these bonds would have been a big problem that is to say just as breaking the relationship of a chief a local chieftain with you would set you up for big problems so too would breaking the bond between yourself and the religion that you happen to be belonging to that is to say this bond this Religare this attachment was the sort of thing that you only broke at your peril.
It came when it came to literal chieftains, of course, if you were to go against the local chieftain, you could be punished by them directly. Even lesser punishments such as ostracism being kicked out were very, very threatening, and very dangerous because once you were kicked out of your group, it wasn't clear who would protect you if somebody fell upon you.
You were then set up for potentially being attacked killed by anybody else there would be nobody there to be on your side, so all of this is to say that religions at the time when they were created many of these were terrible things.
Many of us nowadays they remain severe kinds of badges of identity which are which create very very strong bonds between ourselves and some idea of the supernatural and which can indeed have severe repercussions within this lifetime among our peers. Many of us take this over to Buddhism, which is to say we think of Buddhism, perhaps in a similar fashion.
So now turning to the case of Buddhism what I'm going to be discussing here is early Buddhism in particular because that's really what interests me most of all and Buddhism and become a Buddhism is such a vast topic that it would be impossible for me anyway to summarize all of it in a single article here.
But when it comes to Early Buddhism often, it's said that there wasn't a term Buddhism you know, so Buddhism is a relatively new kind of time.
So, therefore, we shouldn't think of Buddhism as a religion now I've done an earlier video on whether or not Buddhism is a religion it's my impression that its sort of both religion and not a belief but that's a sort of a separate topic here related topic but different in any event. At the same time, there wasn't a term for Buddhism back in the day there nevertheless was an idea of the buddha-dharma that is to say the teaching of the Buddha as separate from the instructions of other people around who were not the Buddha who disagreed with the Buddha or the learning of.
Let's say the Vedas the gods, whether they were Vedic gods or gods from the territory, which also, in a certain sense, was competition for the Buddha's teachings.
Now when it came to those of other belief systems, those who propounded different kinds of teachings the Buddha argued strenuously with them with some who uh argued that there was no difference between right and wrong with others who claimed for complete fatalism.
Everything that ever happened was already set up in advance, and there was nothing we could do to change anything or others still others who argued that the route to real awakening was incomplete non-action so that the best way forward was not to do anything at all these are the kinds of positions.
They may be straw men, that is to say, they're coming to a lot of them through the Buddha, so we may not have the entire picture of what they were teaching nevertheless, what is clear from these early texts is that Buddha was in a direct argument with other people.
The Buddha was also in a direct argument with this notion of deities the deities of his day as I say not mostly or at least partly from the idea of the Vedic gods and the Buddha was evident in saying that there wasn't any such thing as beings sentient beings who were all-powerful and all-knowing and uh ethically perfect.
This notion of God in the western theological sense the Buddha said didn't exist, and in particular, the Buddha didn't did believe that they were immortal beings that are to say his general position was that there were powerful beings out there.
He did believe in what we would call devas, which is a sort of a term that could be translated as gods. Still, these devas were they were not all-powerful; they were undoubtedly not all-knowing; they were mortal beings. However, they lasted they lived very very very long lives uh they were not people that we should look up to indeed the Buddha we know that that the Buddha felt himself in some competition with such ideas because in several of these early sutras the Buddha ridicules these gods as basically being ignorant blowhards as beings who although they were powerful didn't know very much.
Indeed the Buddha styled himself in these early suttas as he called he said the teacher of gods and men that is to say that it wasn't that he learned from the gods in the sense of the western religion where let's assume the deities reveal beliefs to humans instead of in Buddhism.
It's quite the reverse. The idea is that the Buddha is the wise one who knows the world's wisdom, and the deities are relatively ignorant. They come to the buddha time, and again in the suttas, at least it's presented that way they come down to the Buddha to learn about wisdom from him.
Because he was the fount of knowledge and what do these deities learn from him, what do all of us learn from him well, we learn about unbinding about non-attachment these are the kinds of things we learn.
We learn about how our desire for permanence in the world our passion for immortality is this are these desires of ours are the sorts of things that produce suffering because the world does not reciprocate. We desire permanence, but permanence is not to be found.
So in that desire, what we end up reaping is suffering or a sense of unsatisfactoriness that things are never really quite right; similarly, we want immortality. Yet, death is always before us that's the same thing now I think we may see that this is in specific ways the very opposite of the message of traditional religion that is to say it's not that we bind ourselves through some kind of contractual obligation to some uh supernatural deity who is going to be providing us with solace and success.
What we need to do become a Buddhist
But instead, we unbear ourselves from all worldly phenomena we understand that all things change that all things decay we know that even the dharma itself will pass away.
So even concerning the dharma, we're not supposed to cling to it at least in the final analysis that we understand that all of these things are not who we are that is to say from all of these phenomena we unbind our notion of self from them now in some religions this methodology.
This method that I've just mentioned concerning Buddhism this kind of way is used to unbind us from all worldly phenomena in order, therefore, to bind us to the unworldly events or aspect of the God the deity or ourselves indeed that is the strategy that's used in the Upanishads which are these group of texts that were being composed around the time of the Buddha.
The Buddha probably knew about, and in the Upanishads, we do have the idea of unbinding ourselves from all worldly phenomena.
So that we focus on the self and understand in that religion that the person is identical to brahman, which is this universal principle that could be identified with God.
We unbear ourselves for anything else except for ourselves and God or just God if you like because this is the same thing for the Buddha; however, that was not the process.
The Buddha argued against that kind of approach the Buddha's path was the exact opposite that is to say that we unbind ourselves from everything including the self that we stop binding no matter how we can conceive of something or think of it or hold to it or see it or experience it we unbind ourselves from it and in a profound kind of system like this an intense kind of approach like this.
We might well wonder what the point is of becoming a Buddhist now it's important to stress because I'm discussing early Buddhism here that in the Buddha's day people did indeed in a sense bind themselves to the Buddha because they would if they when they heard the buddhas speaking if they agreed with what he was often saying in the suttas.
It is described that they would say that they would take refuge in the Buddha as their teacher that they would take refuge in the dharma as their teaching or their practice. They would take refuge in the sangha as the group of monastics, so this taking of shelter is a kind of binding of ourselves or at least.
It was in the Buddhist day and continues down to this day among traditional Buddhists a kind of binding of ourselves to the buddha-dharma and sangha to the triple gem as it's called now why do we do this well I think it's it can be I should say a skillful means of providing us shall we say energy and confidence in our undertaking along the path.
So it's a kind of psychological move that we can do to give ourselves more confidence because we feel that we are in some sense attached. In the final analysis, that attachment will have to be let go to get to the ultimate end, but in the meanwhile.
We use this kind of skillful approach skillful means of doing something which again in the file analysis is something that may not be great for us, but right now gives us energy and confidence. I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with that the problem can come in when uh this attachment this uh feeling of belonging curdles into something harsher it curdles into something more about dogma and a strong belief these this kind of clinging to views which can lead to secure attachment.
Indeed, hostility with others to arguments and disputes to anger hatred violence are the kinds of things that can happen if we allow attachment to curdle into something uh hazardous.
I think it's because of an awareness of such dangers that many contemporary followers of the buddha-dharma or practicing people who practice the buddha-dharma don't aren't comfortable with the label Buddhist.
Because they feel that that's the sort of label any kind of name, but that particular label is a label that is bound up in the idea of religion, therefore, bound up in the sense of holding to dogmas and views and so it's a sort of thing they should set to one side.
I think also that makes a whole lot of sense because the final aim here is an aim of unbinding it's an aim of getting ourselves away from these kinds of I'd bound off by saying bounds of identity these kinds of accords to keep us attached to various ways that we see the world after all in one of the Buddha's most famous similes the Buddha compared the dharma to a raft which is meant to get us across the river of samsara across the river of sorrow.
If you like to the farther shore but that once we got to that more distant shore, we would have to leave the raft behind it wasn't the sort of thing we carried around with us now we have to use that raft across this river so there's not an idea of getting off the float in the middle of the river that wouldn't be very useful.
So we have to be balanced here in how we approach all of these things now, so the question then becomes is it necessary to become a Buddhist and what I would say is it's not necessary at all to become a Buddhist to practice the buddha-dharma to practice Buddhism many of us.
You may find it helpful to consider yourself that way, and others may consider it harmful to use that kind of term. Still, whatever you find useful, I think you should follow your advice. I don't think there's any immediate advice from Buddha on this. The labels are just labels, after all now.
I have several articles on similar kinds of topics on whether Buddhism is a religion. So on, I'll put those down below. Still, one that I think is particularly interesting in this context has to do with Buddhism and atheism or what the Buddha's views about the deities were I did an earlier article.
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