A GODLESS FAITH Kulananda This lecture on Buddhism was given by the Liaison Officer of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, who adopted the name Kulananda on his conversion to Buddhism. The first half of the lecture offered an historical introduction to Buddhism. What follows (under our own title) is an edited version of the second half, in which Kulananda suggests what a faith tradition born in the ancient East can offer the modern West.
Perhaps the biggest challenge that Buddhism offers the Modern West is the idea that we can have an effective religion which has no need for a god. There is no god in Buddhism. No-one who created this world and no-one who stands in any position of supreme authority over the world: demanding praise, worship and good behaviour upon threat of eternal damnation. Buddhism shows that one can have an effective, transformative religion completely without such a demagogue, and for many people that's a great relief.
But it offers us a massive challenge. Buddhism removes authoritarianism from the ethical arena and it replaces it with individual responsibility. Buddhism challenges us to take responsibility for our own lives. It challenges us to recognise that our actions have consequences: for ourselves and for others. According to Buddhism, as we do, so we become. This is sometimes known as the Law of Karma. By our voluntary actions, of body, speech and mind, we constantly re-create ourselves. We can re-create ourselves as we are now - we can stay circling at this level of awareness, this level of being, or we can try to reach new levels of awareness, new levels of being. The choice is ours.
We make ourselves. We live in a culture which constantly wants to put the responsibility for how we are onto others. We blame our parents, our schools, our siblings, our friends. We blame nature or we blame nurture. We may even, consciously or unconsciously, blame God. But Buddhism suggests that rather than blame anyone or anything we should just recognise the position we are in and then set about trying to improve it.
And the most effective tool Buddhism offers us to help us to get on with trying to change ourselves for the better is the systematic practice of meditation.
By meditation I mean this: the methodical attempt to work directly on the mind itself to bring about sustained positive changes in our level of consciousness. In the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO), we teach two basic, traditional meditation practices. Both of these practices are mentioned in the oldest Buddhist canonical literature and they go back to the Buddha himself (if not before). These practices have been undertaken, as effective spiritual exercises, by hundreds of thousands of people throughout the ages. Now they are arriving in the West and I believe that if they are adopted by enough people then they will have a very positive effect on the well-being of Western society and the world at large.
Here is a little Buddhist experiment for non-meditators.
Go to your room tonight, sit down - quietly and comfortably - and close your eyes. And just sit there for five minutes, without trying to do anything in particular, and watch what happens. Are you happy to do this? Can you just sit quietly, without trying to think of anything in particular and just face the contents of your own mind for five minutes? Can you do this and be happy? What do you encounter when you do this? Are you in control of it?
When I tried that little exercise for the first time I was really shocked to see how active my mind was. And not only active. It was randomly active. All sorts of thoughts and feelings seemed to just swim across my field of consciousness, all in a crazy, higgledy-piggeldy kind of way. I'd have thought about what I did the day before, then a quick thought about dinner, then a dash of anger about what someone said to me, then remember a scene from a film I saw the week before, then notice a sense of physical discomfort in my shoulder, then feel a little burst of warmth for the funny fellow who runs the vegetable stall on the market, then wonder whether coffee really was bad for me, then wonder whether language really did delineate experience, then hope tomorrow would be sunny...And all in less than five minutes.
Chaos. And I don't think I'm alone in this. Most people I speak to report this sort of experience when they first try to meditate. And the really sobering realisation is that this is how our minds are working all the time. Our minds don't work like this only when we try to look at what is happening in them. They look like this when we're not looking as well. No wonder we sometimes wonder what on earth we are doing with our lives. No wonder so many of us reach old age with a hollow sense of not really having achieved anything.
So in the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order we first of all teach a meditation practice in which we learn to focus the scattered energies of our minds and to keep them in a single, calm, relaxed focus. And when people have gained some experience of that practice they find that they have learned how to control their own minds much more effectively. They become calmer, gentler, We have no god, no central authority, checking out your behaviour, making sure you come up to scratch' more focused and more aware of themselves and their environment. This is not something which is enormously difficult to do, but you have the choice - you can try to learn to bring your own mind under control or you can leave it to go its own giddy way. The choice is yours, but only by deciding to make a conscious effort to work directly on the mind itself can we expect to make very much progress in this area. It won't happen simply by chance.
The second meditation practice that we teach focuses on the development of universal loving-kindness. Many of the major religions insist that we should love others as much as ourselves but few of them seem to give us any guidance about how we go about achieving this.
Buddhism suggests that you should learn to love others to such an extent that the difference between self and other is entirely eliminated, and it goes on to teach a whole range of practical methods for bringing such a change of consciousness about.
And it is central to Buddhist thinking that we can change ourselves. We are not like this because 'that is the way God made us'. We are not the fixed products of a divine and fore-ordained plan. We have become what we are in dependence on all the myriad conditions which preceded us. And by directly effecting some of the conditions in our present we can bring about different outcomes in the future. We can change how we are. We can even bring about sustained positive changes in the way we feel. We can develop an intense and continuous experience of loving-kindness. And to do this would change our lives radically for the better. And this brings us to the huge areas of ethics and life-style.
Buddhist ethics is not commandment based. There is no god, no central authority figure in Buddhism, checking your behaviour out, making sure you come up to scratch.
The Buddhist approach to ethics is entirely voluntarist. It is based on the idea that all our voluntary actions inevitably have consequences for us and for others. And if we act from a positive, helpful, wise intention, that action will have, for us and for others, a positive, helpful consequence: it will reinforce the positive tendencies within us. If we act from a negative, unhelpful, hateful intention, then that will have a negative consequence for us and for others - and it will reinforce our negative tendencies.
So it is up to us. We, alone, are ultimately responsible for our fate. As we do, so we become. The choice is ours and ours alone. We can act so as to become friendlier, wiser, more effective, happier, freer... Or we can act so as to become unhelpful, depressed, hate-ridden, resentful, negative... It is up to us. We alone can decide the future direction of our lives - from this moment on. We are free to decide and only we can decide, Buddhism challenges us to take control of our own lives. To assume responsibility for who we are. And to take responsibility for who we become.
But Buddhism doesn't just abandon us here. It goes on to offer a set of precepts, or guidelines for conduct, against which we can check our behaviour if we choose.
These are the five precepts that many Buddhists have chosen to adopt: 1, Don't cause any unnecessary harm to living beings. Instead cultivate care and kindness. 2. Don't take what hasn't been given to you. Instead cultivate generosity. 3. Don't involve yourself in untruth. Instead cultivate the truth. 4. Don't harm others through your sexual behaviour.
Instead cultivate contentment. 5. Avoid behaviour which clouds the mind. Instead cultivate clarity.
Taking these precepts as our guidelines, members of the FWBO have spent the past twentyfive years working out what it means to live as a Buddhist, here in the modern West. Buddhism, by its very nature, challenges the status quo at every turn. I want now to look at how Buddhism is beginning to challenge some of our modern Western beliefs and attitudes, and I am going to talk about the experience of the FWBO because that is the Buddhist organisation with which I am most familiar.
Many people in our Western society suffer from a sense of irrational guilt. Many of us suffer from a sense of not being up to scratch, of not being worthy, of having always to prove ourselves or of having always to hide one or another aspect of ourselves, because somewhere, somehow, we are stained and unclean. No matter what we do we can never really match up.
This sense of generalised guilt affects many of us across the whole spectrum of our lives. But in most people it finds its most acute expression in the area of sexual behaviour. So many people in our culture feel furtive and shameful about this very ordinary, very mundane area of human behaviour. So many of us feel guilty about our sexuality itself. So much is this the case, in fact, that nowadays when one speaks of 'morality' many people assume you mean sexual morality. Sexual behaviour seems to have been singled out within our culture for very particular attention.
This is not the case in Buddhism, and the dreadful and destructive idea that sex somehow intrinsically feels 'dirty' has absolutely no place in Buddhist thinking.
What we do is discriminate between people on the basis of their sexual preferences. You can be heterosexual, homosexual, onanistic, transvestite or celibate. You can practise monogamy, serial monogamy, polygamy, polyandry or promiscuity. The important thing is that you don't harm other people by your sexual behaviour and that you don't place a disproportionate emphasis on the value of sex itself. We live in a culture which places a massively disproportionate emphasis on sex - it is at the centre of so many people's lives. In the FWBO we speak of the need to keep sex at the periphery, not at the centre of your system of values. And we encourage people to learn to feel at ease with themselves in this particularly overloaded area.
And we encourage them to form a wider network of relationships in their lives. Now it is very interesting that when people speak of 'relationships' these days, they often seem to mean their relationship with their sexual partner. They mean their particular, usually monogamous, sexual relationship.
They don't mean their relationship with their parents, children, teacher, students, brother, sister, aunts, uncles.
They don't mean their relationship with their friends or their workmates or with their local priest (unless, of course, they happen to be in a sexual relationship with any of the above).
The word relationship has come to be synonymous with sexual relationship. Why is this? It is because these days the sexual relationship has come to be seen as the relationship par excellence. Perhaps following from the fragmentation of society attendant on modern industrial- 'Get rid of irrational guilt. It is corrosive and damaging and entirely unproductive. Have nothing to do with it' ism, all the complex network of relationships that used to make up a functioning society have broken down. We live in increasingly anonymous isolation from one another and our poor old sexual partners have to bear the brunt of our entire need for human relationships. And that puts far too much emphasis and too much strain on the other party to that relationship.
Our partner cannot be our father and mother and teacher and boss and buddy and brother and sister and companion and counsellor and guide and sexual partner all at the same time. The sexual relationship cannot take the strain - witness the rising divorce rate. We expect far, far too much from the isolated nuclear couple - especially when that isolated nuclear couple is temporarily co-operating in the bringing up of one or two offspring.
So in the FWBO we encourage people to broaden out their network of relationships. We encourage people to develop and maintain warm and strong relationships with their parents and with their children (if they have them), with their work-mates and with their friends. And we encourage people to develop and maintain strong personal friendships. Friendships which are based in shared ideals and mutual aspirations.
Buddhism has never ennobled the nuclear couple.
Marriage is not a sacrament in Buddhism - it is simply a social contract - and if one looks at the various Buddhist cultures around the world one finds instances of monogamy, polygamy and polyandry. These are just different ways of arranging your life.
So in the FWBO we don't believe you should look to get all your emotional needs met by your sexual partner, if you have one. And many of us have elected to remain single - many of us have chosen to keep ourselves free from family responsibilities in order to be free to get on with the business of leading the spiritual life. Dedicating ourselves to changing ourselves for the better - for our own sakes as well as for the sakes of others, so that we can become, in time, effectively able to help others to change themselves too.
So here are three Buddhist challenges: firstly, get rid of irrational guilt in yourself altogether. There is no place for it. It is corrosive and damaging and entirely unproductive. Have nothing to do with it. And don't allow anyone to try to manipulate you by means of it.
Secondly, get sex into proportion.
And thirdly, try to cultivate a wider network of meaningful relationships. In Buddhism the ideal of Sangha, spiritual community, spiritual fellowship, spiritual friendship, is given an absolutely central place in the scheme of things.
In the FWBO we believe that each of us can always become wiser and more spiritually mature. But one needs role models, as it were. Young, or spiritually immature men need opportunities to spend time with more spiritually mature men. They need opportunities to learn how a man becomes more caring, more gentle, more tender and concerned for others. He also needs to learn how to harness his naturally competitive and aggressive energies and put these energies to work for the good of all. A man cannot learn all this from a woman.
Women need to learn how to be materially self-sufficient - how to get by, independently, in the world, without becoming brittle and losing touch with their emotional lives. Men and women need more opportunities to spend time alone with members of their own sex and also to spend time with more spiritually mature members of their own sex.
So there is another Buddhist challenge. Consider the idea of spiritual friendship. Is it effective in your life?
I hope you will think a bit more about some of these things and I hope you might test a few of these ideas in your own experience.
In the discussion which followed, Kulananda was asked about supernatural aspects of Buddhism, such as reincarnation doctrine. Kulananda said he had not mentioned reincarnation because the FWBO regarded it as optional. You didn't have to believe in reincarnation to practise Buddhism.
He was also pressed on repeated references in the first half of his lecture to Buddhism as 'the Truth', which he defined as 'a deep, a profound realisation of the way things are'. Did he think Buddhism corresponded to some notion of objective truth and reality, or did he recognise it as a human creation? He answered that Buddhism seemed to him to correspond more closely to 'the way things are' than any other system he knew - an answer which suggested that he saw Buddhism from the old realist rather than the new non-realist perspective. Kulananda subsequently told us that had he been more aware of SoF's commitment to non-realism and the centrality of human imagination in the making of religious and ethical systems, he would have engaged with these questions more fully.
Our pages are open to him and to others to explore further.