Okay, so I think things are settling down, that's good.
Some people are coming in, some people are leaving, some people
are staying put, which is great. So now we can start this
evening's talk, and tonight I'm going to talk a little bit about
religion and secularism, and the idea on how these two things
interact, religion on the one hand, secular ideas on the
other. And in particular I'm going to
focus on where does Buddhism of course fit into this.
Is Buddhism, is it a secular thing, is it a religious thing?
And in particular there is this one trend in the Western world
that has arisen over the last few decades, perhaps called
secular Buddhism, and to have a look at that, and whether that
is, in my opinion, any need for that, is Buddhism already
secular enough, or do we need some special thing called
secular Buddhism or not? And as we go through this of
course we'll have a look at a few of the kind of crucial
Buddhist ideas and try to understand those in this
context. One of the interesting things
about the Buddhist teachings, which is always very
fascinating, which I recommend you to look at a little bit if
you have a chance, and that is to understand a little bit about
Buddhist history. When you understand Buddhist
history you understand some of the things that, how this
teaching, this Buddhist teaching, is not a static thing,
but it's something which is always changing, depending on
the time period, depending on the country where it goes, it's
always floating, always changing, always
metamorphosizing, whatever it is, from one thing into another
one, always changing, moving from one thing to something
else. And this is the history of
Buddhism, and you see that especially when it goes from one
country to another one, you see the Buddhism in China is
different from the Buddhists in Sri Lanka, which is different
from the Buddhism in Thailand, right, and then you have Japan,
and all of these things are slightly different.
And so, it's not just about that, it's also about just time
progressing, as time goes on Buddhism changes by its nature
as well. And one of the reasons for that
is simply the restlessness of the human mind, right?
We can't just accept the teachings as they are, we have
to try to figure them out in a deeper way to think about them,
systematize them in new ways, change things a little bit to
our own liking. And by doing that, what happens
is that you get these entirely new scriptures created, which
had nothing really to do with the original teachings.
And gradually as time goes by, there is a change in outlook, a
change in philosophy, a change in psychology, as time goes by,
gradually things are changing. So this is what happens to
Buddhists, this is what Buddhist history is in large part about,
that movement, that change on this thing we call Buddhism.
Because one of the great things when Buddhism comes to a new
country, like coming to Australia or coming to the
Western world more generally, is that you have a chance to
reappraise what actually is the essence of these teachings, what
are the accretions that have accumulated over the centuries
and millennia, what belong to a certain culture, but not
actually to the teachings that the Buddha gave us and
bequeathed us two and a half thousand years ago.
It's a great opportunity to do that.
It's much more difficult to do that in the Buddhist country
because of the weight of history, right?
The weight of tradition, often very, very hard to go against.
But when it starts in a new country, we have that
opportunity. And this is one of the great
things that we can actually look for as Buddhism comes to
Australia and the Western world. What actually is the essence of
this? There is one side of the coin,
right? But there is another side of
that coin. And that is the understanding,
as I just mentioned before, whenever Buddhism goes to a new
place, a new society, a new culture, a new era, Buddhism
itself gets influenced by that new society.
And of course when Buddhism comes to the West, exactly the
same thing is going to happen. Buddhism itself is going to be
formed according to our Western ideas, Western history, Western
culture is going to have an impact on that Buddhism, just as
Buddhism has an impact on us. It's a two-way street, right?
Both things working on each other.
And of course when something gets influenced like that, we
have to be very careful. Because when something gets
influenced like that, it can get influenced in the wrong way.
And if it does get influenced in the wrong way and you end up
with a teaching that is completely contradictory to the
insights the Buddha had two and a half thousand years ago, you
could end up throwing out the baby.
Okay, throw out some of the dirty bath water, but keep the
baby for goodness sake. So we have to be very careful
when we make these shifts from one historical period to
another, from one culture to another, that we don't throw out
the essence of these teachings. We don't throw out something
which is so foundational that Buddhism doesn't really function
anymore if you throw it out. And this is one of these trends
in Western society now, is precisely this thing that is
called secular Buddhism. And I think some of the ideas in
secular Buddhism are actually very good and they are
incredibly useful. But I think some of the other
ideas risk diluting Buddhism to the point where you don't really
have Buddhism at all anymore. It's not secular Buddhism, it
becomes just secular, right, with a little bit of a dash of
Buddhism on top, like a little bit of, I don't know what, a
little bit of sprinkling of something.
And that is not really enough. In that case, we end up
destroying what this is all about.
So to understand this, understand a little bit more
about the idea of secularism and religion, I think it's always
good to look a little bit at history.
There's often a lot to be learned from history.
And to understand what is the context in which the idea of
secularism actually arose. Once you understand that
context, it's much easier to see if it applies to Buddhism or
not. And of course that context, as
many of you probably will have some idea about already, is of
course, this is what arose in Europe.
In Europe, after the Middle Ages, you had the Renaissance
and you had the Enlightenment. Right?
Enlightenment. This is a pretty shallow kind of
Enlightenment compared to the Buddhist Enlightenment.
And this is one of the reasons I don't really like that word,
Enlightenment, because Enlightenment tends to refer to
that re-arising of kind of science and critical thinking in
Europe after the darkness of the Middle Ages.
In Buddhism, we should use other terms, I think, otherwise it
gets confused. So I like awakening in Buddhism.
But anyway, at that time in Europe, come through the dark
Middle Ages that were very repressive, where state and
religion were kind of completely mixed.
Where the Pope was sitting in Rome and controlling pretty much
all of Europe. When you had the Inquisition,
there were burning books and burning people at the stake and
telling people what they could think and what they couldn't
think. And then came the Renaissance,
and things started to change. Right?
You had the very first scientists of the Renaissance,
people like Copernicus, who said that actually the Earth goes
around the Sun, not the Sun going around the Earth.
And the Church, what? What are you saying?
And then of course Galileo came along, and Galileo was even more
strong about this point of view. And Galileo was actually one of
the great scientists of the modern era.
And he had, I don't know all that much about him, but he had
a lot of very scientific theories that later on proved to
be very accurate. But of course he looked through
his telescope, he saw the moons around Jupiter and Saturn and
all this kind of stuff. And he also of course supported
the Copernican idea that the Earth actually revolves around
the Sun. And the Church said, heretics,
you can't say that. And they locked Galileo up in
the house for 20 years, 30 years, whatever it was, because
he dared to say that the Earth revolved around the Sun.
And you say, wow, that is really bad, right?
How can you say that the Earth goes around the Sun?
Now it seems so obvious, but in those days it was a dramatic,
heretical teaching from the point of view of the Catholic
Church. It's pretty madness when you
look at it from a modern point of view, but that's what it was
like, that was what the atmosphere was like at that
time. And of course then, soon after
the scientific revolution started to happen, people were
saying that, well actually we don't really want to have this
interference from the Church. We want to run our state, our
countries, independent of these dogmas, these ideas that are
just handed down, that have no connection to reason, to
science, to logical thinking. Why should we be held back by
these Church ideas that actually don't have any basis in reality?
And that is where the idea of secularism arose.
We should have a state independent of the Church.
And that was one of those beginnings in Europe of the
independence of state and Church.
So what seems the most obvious thing here about secularism, the
most obvious thing that it was counteracting, was not religion
as such, but it was a particular aspect of religion.
And that aspect of religion that was problematic was the dogma,
right? The narrow mindedness, the
inability to inquire, to ask questions, to move forward.
That was really the problem. And that was where things
stopped. And I think once you understand
that, you understand why this word religion also has been so
problematic in the modern world. Because the world religion has
always been associated with dogma, with narrow mindedness,
inability to see truth when it's staring you in the face.
Instead you just close your eyes because we want the truth to be
this particular way. And that is really the problem.
And that is why the secularist movement arose.
So the question that we really need to ask as Buddhists is, is
Buddhism so dogmatic that we need this kind of secular view?
Or is it perhaps the case that Buddhist ideas are very much
aligned with some of these secular ideas?
Maybe that is the case instead. And I am going to argue and I am
going to point out to certain aspects of the Buddhist teaching
that actually, of course Buddhism can be dogmatic as
well. Just like anything in the world
can be dogmatic. But the early Buddhism, the
Buddhism of the Buddha, right? The Buddha started it all out,
was actually an inquiring teaching, looking into things,
an open mindedness, trying to find radical solutions to real
problems of human existence. I've always wondered what kind
of person was the Buddha? Obviously he was kind of a
little bit Hindu, in those days it wasn't really Hinduism the
way it is now. He grew up in that kind of
society, he was very affected by those teachings.
But if you wanted to categorize him in terms of religion, what
kind of religion did he belong to?
Sometimes I wonder, maybe the Buddha was an atheist.
Maybe he was an atheist, maybe he kind of sided with Richard
Dawkins or something in the present day.
Maybe actually that is going too far, because I don't think that
is quite true. But I think what the Buddha
really was, it's kind of nice to think of the Buddha as an
atheist. But what I think the Buddha
really was, he was the agnostic. He said, I don't know, I am
unsure, right? I have an open mind, I don't
really know what's going on, I am going to find out for myself.
And that of course, that agnosticism is something that
also is very, quite common in the present day world.
You say there is uncertainties there, there are mysteries in
the world beyond what I can understand right now, so I'm
going to keep an open mind. That I think is what the Buddha
really was. So, what about, the problem here
is then dogmatism, right? Holding onto ideas, grasping
onto things, not letting them go, not being able to be open
minded, that is the real problem.
Now, one of the interesting things about this is that
dogmatism is something that you don't just find it in religion.
Okay, religion tends often to be particularly bad perhaps when it
comes to dogma, but dogma is something you find everywhere in
society, right? Sometimes you find dogmatism,
dogmatism sometimes just expresses itself in certain fads
and trends. Sometimes you get fads within
medical science, you get fads within management, right?
You have to manage people in this way, this is the right way
of doing it. You get fads in what kind of
clothes you have to wear, and very often these fads are very
similar to dogmas. They are things that you cannot
really, it's very hard, there's a plurality of people that look
at things in a certain way and because they do that, it's very
hard to break out of that. So when you start to think like
that, when you start to look at the world, there's fads going on
anywhere, there's dogmas, and you start to see that actually
it is very pervasive, it is something that you find
everywhere. It is not just confined to
religion, you find it in politics of course, right?
Dogmatic, have holding certain views just because those views,
you always have them so you're going to keep on to them or
whatever. And of course, what is
interesting also, it is also found in science itself.
Science also, even though the idea of science is to be
open-minded, to be inquiring, always searching for the truth,
science also sometimes falls into the problem of dogma.
And there was a very interesting book that was written back in
the 1960s, it was very influential I think in the
history of science, it was called The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, and basically has been agreed upon
as a proper description how science actually develops over
time. And what this book argued is
that science gets stuck in certain ways of looking at the
world, this thing they call paradigms, a certain paradigm, a
certain way, a certain outlook. And you get stuck in that
outlook, and then evidence accumulates against this
outlook, more and more evidence accumulates, everybody just
dismisses it, doesn't want to see it, until the evidence
becomes so strong that you no longer can avoid looking at the
new evidence. And then there is what they call
a paradigm shift, and you move into another worldview, another
way of looking at things. This is how we show that science
kind of progresses. And of course, what you're
seeing there, you're seeing a degree, it's a degree of
dogmatism that happens as that certain view is accepted over
time. So even in science, which is
supposed to be the most open part of one of the most open
institutions in the human sphere.
So why is it? Why is it that we find dogmas
everywhere? What is the reason for that?
And the answer is very simple. The answer is basically because
dogmas are part of who we are. We cannot exist without dogmas.
Each one of us has views. Each one of us has certain ways
of looking at the world, and this is part of our personality,
part of who we take ourselves to be.
If somebody challenges your views, this is when you find out
whether you are attached to your views or not, right?
And sometimes you realize, I am attached to my views.
In fact, it is impossible that you should not be at least a
little bit attached to the views you have.
This is part of human experience.
And it comes from the very basic sense of self that we all carry
with us. The sense of self that you have
inside of you, that you exist, that you are a certain person,
you have a certain character, you have a certain way of doing
and looking at things. That sense of self demands a
content, it demands an identity, it demands something to fill it
up, to make it real. And part of that which makes the
sense of self real is our views, the way we look at the world.
So of course, if somebody challenges your views, and you
take them to be the very who you are, right?
You can't just give it up, because if you give it up, it is
as if you are giving up your very existence, your very sense
of self, who you actually are, your atta, we would say in Pali.
And because of that, you have to hold on to those views.
It's impossible to be completely open-minded.
It cannot be done unless you are fully awakened or something like
that, right? And you are way up there on the
spiritual path. Apart from that, it is
impossible to be completely open-minded.
You have to have some things that you hold on to.
And now, of course, you can understand why dogmatism is so
rife, why it has to exist everywhere, because it comes
from the very core, the very sense of who we are as human
beings. Right?
That's where it comes from. And of course, that is going to
infiltrate all human institutions, wherever you go,
whether it is science, as I was just saying, whether it's
religion, the Buddhist society here, right?
We are probably dogmatic. Are we dogmatic, Drew?
Probably. Yes, we are dogmatic.
So there you are. So you see, it's everywhere.
He should know he is the president.
He has kind of polled everyone, he knows what everyone is
thinking. So this is, it's everywhere, and
it is absolutely unavoidable that it should exist to some
extent. So this is the first thing to
realise. So it is no surprise that it
should also be found in religion, it is no surprise that
it should also be found in Buddhism, right?
It has to be found everywhere. So that is one side of the coin.
Now the other side of the coin, let us look at some of those
Buddha's teachings and see whether they fit in with the
idea of dogmatism. This is the other side.
And my point is going to be to show you that these basic
Buddhist teachings, these basic aspects of Buddhism, actually
are not dogmatic. They are dogmatic only because
we make them dogmatic, but as they were explained by the
Buddha himself, as we find them in the earliest discourses of
Buddhism, they are not actually dogmatic.
Now the first thing I will look at very briefly is the idea of
Buddhist ethics. If you look at the large number
of systems of ethics around the world, ethics can often be a
sphere of dogma, these are the things you have to follow, and
if you don't follow those, you will go to hell, right?
That becomes dogmatic. So ethics can very easily become
a system of, a dogmatic system, but actually that is not really
the case in the Buddhist teachings.
Of course in Buddhism too, that can happen, but if you again go
back to the root teachings, go back to what we know with a fair
amount of certainty was the word of the Buddha himself, you find
a very different approach to ethics.
In fact, I would always say that to me, the Buddhist ethics is
one of the jewels of Buddhism. It is one of the jewels because
it is incredibly flexible and very moveable.
It is not something that is rigid and fixed, but it can be
used and applied if it is done properly and used for any kind
of context, to use it for modern ethical problems etc.
It can be used for all of that, which is wonderful, because
actually that is quite rare for a religion.
And of course Buddhist ethics is also very beautiful because it
is very comprehensive, it is about how we speak, don't say
bad things, try to say kind things, it is about how we act,
act in kind ways with compassion, don't act in harsh
ways, and also it is about how we think, so incredibly
comprehensive. This is one of the beauties
about the Buddhist morality. But the other thing about
Buddhist morality, it is based on what I would consider a very
rational system. It is not based on the thou
shalt not system at all, it is based on something rational, it
is not handed down by the Buddha, this is what you should
do, this is what you shouldn't do.
No, the Buddha says there is a way of looking at ethics which
is rational, and that is to ask the very simple question, right?
What is one of the most essential aspects of the human
beings? One of the most essential
aspects of human beings, actually not just humans,
animals too, any kind of being really.
One of the things that defines us as beings is that we feel,
right? Things tend to be either
pleasurable or not pleasurable, either painful or happy,
suffering or blissful. There is this dichotomy in our
experience of the world, and this is one of the most
important aspects of human beings, because this is what
drives us in the world, this is what gives rise to cravings and
desires, this is what kind of moves us all the time, this
sense that we want to move towards greater sense of ease,
happiness, pleasure, peace, all these positive things, less
suffering, less pain, less problems, less of all this
negative stuff. So very, very essential, maybe
the most essential aspect of human beings, consciousness too
of course being very important. Actually it's hard to say what
is most important, but certainly very significant.
And from that you can derive ethics directly, because we know
that people recoil from pain, recoil from negative
experiences, and they want the positive experiences, then of
course ethics is the very simple thing that if you act to people
in such a way that they get more of the happy experiences, less
of the painful ones, then it's ethical.
If you act towards others, they get more pain and less pleasure,
it's unethical. It's very simple, it's based on
who we are as human beings, and on that framework, on that
basis, the whole edifice of Buddhist ethics is based on
that. So if you want to ask some of
those difficult ethical questions that you always hear,
things about abortion, things about euthanasia, things about
climate change, all of these things, right, you can take it
back to that, and you can base it on that, and you can answer
pretty much all of these questions based on that very
simple framework. So all of these things, they
don't have any pre-described answers in Buddhism, the answers
come out from the logical system of Buddhism itself, how it
actually works. So this is the first thing about
Buddhism, right, there's no dogma there really, it's based
on the thoroughly rational idea of how ethics is supposed to
work. So this is my first example.
Second example, so no need for secularity in ethics, there's
nothing about this ethical framework, I have said that is
really either religious or secular, it is none of those,
it's just an ethical, rational, ethical framework which
transcends the idea of religion and secularism.
This is kind of the nice thing, right, you can transcend these
things, you can kind of marry them together and go beyond,
that's when you find something larger, something greater, which
is always very nice. The second thing is the idea of
meditation. Is meditation, is that secular,
or is it religious? So what is meditation all about?
Meditation is about having some kind of inner experience, an
inner experience which makes you feel more at ease, more relaxed,
more peaceful, sometimes you can experience powerful, powerful
bliss in meditation. I know that many of you who are
here have done that, because you've been there, done those
meditation retreats, and you have had some of those
experiences, and you know how transforming it can be to have
these kind of experiences. It's as if you are lifted out of
the world, and you see something new, something different, that
you had no idea actually existed before.
Right, it's a very, very, very important part of the spiritual
path, the meditation experience, because it gives you access to
something higher, gives you access, basically, people who
have been there and done that, they say it gives you access to
what feels like the meaning of life itself.
So pretty, very, very powerful stuff.
So what is this? Is it, first of all, is it real?
Well it is real, people are obviously experiencing these
things, right? They're obviously there, not
only are they experienced in Buddhism, they are experienced
in Christianity, some of the Christian saints of the Middle
Ages, the Middle Ages again, right, it wasn't all dark, some
of the Christian saints actually experienced these blissful
experiences during those Middle Ages.
Famous Catholic nun in Spain called Teresa of Avila was very
famous for entering these inner chambers of bliss she was
talking about, and sounds very similar to the Buddhist ideas of
Samadhi, Samadhi, deep meditation experience.
So it existed in Christianity, right?
It certainly existed in Hinduism.
Hinduism is famous for the Samadhi sages, the sages that go
into Samadhi. Very famous Hindu sage, Ramana
Maharshi, who lived in the 1950s or thereabouts, very famous in
India, you can find books about him on the internet now, and he
lived in this little concrete hut, right, with a kind of
single light bulb hanging down from the ceiling, the kind of
classic kind of, I don't know, kind of outback place, which is
incredibly simple, there's a single bulb hanging down,
glaring light, everything is concrete, terrible, right?
This kind of place, nobody would ever want to live.
And he would sit there on the concrete, all he had was a
loincloth, otherwise he was completely naked apart from his
loincloth, and he would sit there all day, just smiling,
just so happy, just blissing out all the time, and all these
people would come to him and pay respects to him because he was
so special, right? And he was one, when he
occasionally talked, then it was clear that he was one of these
people who had access to very profound samadhi.
He had done some kind of death contemplation when he was young,
and through that death contemplation he was able to
access this state that was completely otherworldly, and
from then on he would just sit there, meditate in this simple
concrete hut with a single light bulb in his sat there for year
after year, decade after decade. Would you enjoy that?
There's nothing else in the world that he wanted to do,
right? Isn't that quite astonishing in
a sense? And this is the astonishing
thing about these attainments, is that you live in a way that
nobody else can comprehend, and yet you are probably one of the
very happiest people on this planet.
So these things are there, Hinduism, Christianity,
certainly very important in Buddhism, other religions too,
sometimes talk about accessing these powerful states of
ecstasy, which probably also are states of samadhi.
So again, if you are an atheist, sometimes atheists access these
things, it doesn't matter if you believe in God, or you believe
in the Buddha, you believe in whatever, believe in Thor.
I'm Norwegian by birth, sometimes I think I should have
this Thor and Odin deeply seated inside of me.
I always wondered if you pray to Thor, maybe you can actually
experience these kind of states as well, right?
Maybe you hear some thunder, fall with the thunder, bang!
And then you go into this blissful state.
I don't know, it's an interesting idea.
I think probably if you practice in the right way, right, it
doesn't really matter so much what kind of religious
background you come from. I'm not really sure if I will
ever go back to those Thor and Odin, but anyway it's an
interesting idea that even there, there may be access to
those things. Maybe the battles they had in
heaven are some kind of metaphor for deep states of meditation.
Actually I don't think so, I think it's pretty violent and
bad stuff. Anyway, it is a universal human
experience. Is it religious?
Is it secular? And the answer is neither.
Anyone can actually attain these things, right?
And of course if you ask a secular Buddhist, or rather
those people who call themselves secular Buddhists, they will
agree, they will say, well these are universal states.
Of course they are neither religious nor secular.
So that is the meditation side of things, right?
There's no dogma there. One of the beautiful things
about this is that the deeper your meditation is, the more
deep your samadhi is, the less dogmatic you tend to become.
Some of the most beautiful people you will ever meet in the
world are the people who have access to deep states of
meditation. They are so full of kindness, so
full of compassion, so full of peace.
When you get into their presence, all you want to do is
just sit down and relax, right? I can't remember whether I told
this story here before, maybe I have, but last year, actually it
was earlier this year, I went to Thailand and I went to see one
of these very famous monks in Thailand who is famous for
having a lot of this loving kindness, metta and all of these
beautiful qualities. And when I met to meet him, he
was just sitting there on his big chair like a small little
monk sitting on his big chair, and he was sitting there just
smiling, right, looking really blissed out, really, really
happy. He didn't say anything, right?
He was just sitting there. And just by sitting there, not
by saying anything, all these people would come and they would
just sit down around him as if they were sitting in this kind
of force field of kindness, just feeling the goodness of being
around this person. It's quite astonishing, isn't
it? And this is what it's like to be
in the presence of people who have this kind of samadhi thing.
And when you talk to them, you feel there is very undogmatic,
there is very little adhering to views, and there is a lot of
flexibility in the way they look at the world.
They have no sense that they have anything to defend because
they are complete in themselves. There is no external self that
they have to prove anything. They don't adhere to anything
anymore. So actually here you can start
to see that these samadhi experiences, instead of making
you dogmatic, they tend to lead you away from dogmatism.
Sometimes they can lead you to dogma, sometimes you can take
those experiences to have certain meanings, but very often
they lead you away from dogmatism into a soft and
open-minded and inquiring way of looking at the world.
Very beautiful when you meet this kind of people.
And then there is the last part of Buddhism that I wanted to
briefly talk about, and that is the insight or the wisdom
aspect, the seeing things according to reality.
We are getting more and more closer and closer here to the
core of Buddhism, what it actually really is, what the
insights of the Buddha were truly about.
So this is where we would expect to find the most dogmatic kind
of statements because it is the core, the essence of what these
teachings are about. So what is that core?
Well, one of the most important aspects, core insights of the
Buddha, is this idea of non-self.
This idea that if you look inside of yourself and you
investigate after a powerful state of samadhi, what you see
is you see an ever-changing process of mental and physical
phenomena moving on from one state to another one.
What is that? Is that religious?
Is it secular? And again, if it is an insight
into who you are as a person, because you are looking at
yourself with a powerful mind, looking at yourself in a neutral
way, and of course many modern psychiatrists and whatever will
agree with that view, although they haven't probably fully
understood it, they will say similar kind of things.
Again, it is neither secular nor religious, right?
It is just an insight into reality.
That's what it is. And as an insight into reality,
again, it is not really dogmatic.
It is similar in some ways to scientific fact-finding, by
understanding reality, understanding the world as it
actually is. And I should maybe make, maybe
this is a good opportunity to make an important distinction
here. Sometimes in the modern world,
they were here, there would be psychologists or psychiatrists,
they would say, we agree with the Buddha's teaching, when we
look at the human mind, there is no essence, there is no core,
there is no factor or personality, which is always
unchanging, moving along from moment to moment, always the
same. So we agree with Buddhism.
So does that mean that these psychiatrists and psychologists
have the same insight into the human mind as the Buddha had, or
as modern meditators occasionally may have?
Is that what it means? And the answer is, not really.
Because although you may be able to see that there is no core
inside of me, although you can see that as a psychologist and
psychiatrist, that is not the same as actually experiencing
that. As long as it is something that
you are observing from outside, it doesn't touch you in a deep
way, and your sense of self will still be the same.
The sense of self isn't challenged in a deep sense.
It is only when you see these things inside of yourself, that
is when that real sense of self is challenged, and that is why
that insight you have on the meditation cushion is what
really matters. And the intellectual view that
you have as a psychologist is only a very superficial view of
the same thing. The psychologist is not touched
on a deep psychological level. The meditator, if he sees this,
is transformed beyond recognition by having these
kinds of insights. So again, I think we can agree
at the very least that this is neither secular nor really
religious. It's just about reality.
Maybe it's not true, you might disagree with this Buddhist
view, but certainly it is not really religious or secular.
There is one other type of insight, and this is where we
are moving into the terrain that some people will call dogmatic.
Because one of the other profound insights that you
normally have on the path to awakening is the insight that
there is not just one life, but that there is such a thing as
rebirth. And this is the area which is
kind of crucial, because this is the area where the so-called
secular Buddhists will say, these are the things we need to
throw out. This is the cultural baggage of
Buddhism that has to be abandoned, and we need a more
rational view of the world. But remember that from a
Buddhist point of view, this is not a dogma, this is not
something the Buddha says, I am just putting it out there for
you to believe in. No, this is a crucial, essential
aspect of the Buddha's path to awakening itself.
This is one of the insights he had into the nature of reality.
Just like samadhi, deep meditation, is a real state.
Just like the idea of non-self is something you can investigate
and perhaps find out for yourself in exactly the same
way. The idea of rebirth is something
that has been investigated, that has been inquired into by the
Buddha, and discovered by the Buddha.
And as such, it is not neither secular nor religious.
It is, from the Buddha's point of view, just a claim about the
nature of reality, how the body and mind function over long,
long periods of time. And this is so important to
understand. And once you see it this way,
that even these things that people sometimes look upon as
dogmas, actually has nothing to do with dogma at all.
Of course, we can make it into a dogma, we can say, believe in
rebirth or else, or burn out the stake, right?
That would be something if we had to believe in rebirth or
burn out the stake, but are we going to do that, Dhrun?
But that can happen. You can make these things into
dogmas. But that, of course, is not the
point. The point is the right way of
approaching things like rebirth, is not to make it into a dogma,
but understand it. This is what the Buddha taught.
Now let me inquire into it, let me look at this, let me have an
open mind about this, and see if what the Buddha said actually
makes any sense. And that is the right attitude
to have towards it. And then you are following in
the footsteps of the Buddha, because that is exactly what he
did. He inquired into this, he asked
himself the question, is there rebirth?
He found the answer was yes. And of course, once you found
out, then you have no doubt about the issue anymore.
So this is the right way. So there are, as far as I am
concerned, there aren't really any dogmas in Buddhism.
What there is, there is a person who claims to have discovered
something extraordinarily profound.
And then what we should do is look at those claims and see if
they make any sense. Right?
And if we find that they make some sense, well then, at the
very least, we should have an open mind about these things.
If you reject outright what the Buddha said, well basically what
you are doing, you are rejecting the awakening of the Buddha.
And if you reject the awakening of the Buddha, then you cannot
really call yourself a Buddhist. Not yet anyway, until you move
maybe a little bit further here. And all of this is encapsulated
very beautifully in a very famous sutta.
The suttas are the discourses of the Buddha.
This is a sutta known as the Kalama Sutta in the Buddhist
canon. And this Kalama Sutta is very
often quoted, especially in Buddhist secular circles, right?
Because it is very similar to the way we like to look at the
world in the present day. And in this Kalama Sutta, you
see the Buddha, he is wandering around the country, this is in
the north of India, two and a half thousand years ago.
He is wandering around the Ganges Plain from place to
place, spreading his teachings, right?
This is what he did when he was still quite young.
And one day he arrives at a certain place, and this is the
country of a group of people known as the Kalamas.
So he comes to the Kalamas, and the Kalamas say to the Buddha,
Master, or Blessed One, or whatever you want to call the
Buddha, Venerable Sir, we are so confused, right?
We don't know what to believe. One day, one spiritual teacher
comes to us, and he says, A. Another day, another spiritual
teacher comes, and he says negative A, he says the exact
opposite of what the first one said.
And then a third day, a third spiritual teacher comes, and he
says B, right? So what are we to believe?
These spiritual teachers are contradicting themselves, they
are absolutely at odds with each other, we don't know what to
believe. And then the Buddha replies, and
this is one of those famous replies found in the suttas.
It's not famous because it is really a core of Buddhism, it is
famous because Western people like this kind of stuff.
That's why it's famous in the West.
In Asia, it's not so important because Asia has a very
different history, so these things don't come up quite in
the same way. But in the West, wow, it fits in
with secularism, right? And that's why it becomes so
famous. So then the Buddha says, one of
the first things the Buddha says is that, well, you have doubts
about a doubtful matter. You are right to have doubt.
Which already is like, wow, you have the right to have doubt,
wow, that's really freeing, right?
We don't actually have to kind of hold on to one dogma or
something else. Sometimes there are things that
are truly doubtful, and when things are really doubtful, it
is right to have doubt about those things.
So remember that, there's nothing to be ashamed about if
you have doubt. You have to be honest about
those things and then see what happens as you practice and you
read and you do whatever, you come here, whatever you do.
And then the second thing that Buddha says, which is kind of
the crucial part of it, he says that, don't go by tradition,
right? Forget about tradition for a
moment. Don't go by reasoning, right?
By reasoning. This is one of the things that
are very sacrosanct in the Western culture, but he says,
don't go by reasoning, at least for the moment.
Don't go by faith in the teacher, right?
If there's a teacher, don't go just because somebody is your
teacher. Don't go by faith in that.
Don't go by the competence of the teacher.
Similar thing as going by faith in the teacher.
Instead, what you should do, Kalamas, when you know that
something is right, when you know that something is wholesome
and it leads to happiness, when you know that something is
blameless and it leads you away from suffering, then you should
follow that as your leader. When you know the opposite is
true, something leads to suffering, is to be blamed and
is not considered good by wise people in the world, then you
should not hold on to that and you should move away from that.
Right? So what the Buddha is saying,
that in the final analysis, in the final reckoning, the thing
that we have to rely on in the end is our own experience.
That is the most important thing.
And of course that harks back straight to what I was saying
before, in the Buddha's own life, that's exactly what he
did. He went out searching in the
world, he found, he gave up all the teachings that were around
him. He was an agnostic, perhaps an
atheist, right? Don't tell anyone that I told
you Buddha was an atheist because they will get horrified
if I say that. Maybe not here, somewhere in
Australia, but if you go to some Asian country and say that
Buddha was an atheist, they will think, this monk, we better get
rid of him quickly, or something like that.
But the Buddha was radical, right?
And he looked at things on his own and he is telling us, well
okay, I have awakened to the truth, I have seen what is going
on, so I will tell you, but now is the time for you to
investigate by yourself and see if you also find the same truth.
So it comes back down, the final analysis, it is our own
experience that matters. But remember that the point here
is that experience is very broad.
It doesn't just mean the experience that you have when
you close your eyes and you look inside of yourself.
Sometimes that experience that you have when you close your
eyes and you look inside yourself, it's pretty, it's not
very inspiring, right? It doesn't get you anywhere.
All you see is this ramble of thoughts going on, oh no, or you
feel tired, snoring away, right? So it doesn't get you very far
in terms of insight and understanding the human mind,
because you are just seeing all this stuff happening.
So there is more to human experience than just things that
happen in meditation or looking at your mind in daily life.
Part of that experience is also listening to other teachers,
it's also listening to the Buddha, right?
When the Buddha says to the Kalamas, don't listen to the
teachers, he is kind of contradicting himself, isn't it?
He is saying, don't listen to me, he is obviously saying
listen to me. So the point is context, the
point is how this works together.
Your experience should match also the listening with the
teacher, should match also with rational thought.
Of course we have to be rational, we can't throw out
rationality, that's not what the Buddha is saying.
He is saying we should put these things together in the right
way. Sometimes rationality doesn't
work, because it's based on the wrong assumptions.
If you build up this massive philosophy, but the foundation
is weak, because the assumptions are wrong, then of course the
whole thing collapses. So rationality sometimes can be
wrong, and that's why sometimes we need to go beyond that.
And that is what the Buddha is talking about.
And when you put all of those things together, that is when
you get the system which starts to work, and when you can start
to make wise decisions about what is right and what is wrong.
So read the suttas, read the word of the Buddha, understand
what it is about. One of the things the Buddha
says is that there is such a thing as rebirth.
If you have strong confidence in the Buddha, conviction that he
knew what he was talking about, this is one of the things that I
have found in my life as a monk, been a monk for 21 years now, I
love to read the word of the Buddha.
If you have ever more confidence in the genius of this person
called the Buddha, this spiritual genius who existed two
and a half thousand years ago, if the Buddha says there is
rebirth, I can't just reject it, I can't say the Buddha was
wrong. Here is this towering figure,
right? The father, the originator of
this whole Buddhism has been going for two and a half
thousand years. Who am I to say that he got it
wrong? I don't know.
That is the right attitude. I am unsure, I am uncertain, but
at the very least I should take this teaching seriously.
And this is my challenge to those secular Buddhists.
There isn't this distinction between secularism and religion,
certainly not religion in the way the Buddha taught it.
It is an artificial distinction once you start to look to break
it down. So those secular Buddhists, the
challenge to all of those is to look at what the Buddha taught.
If you really are a Buddhist, as is implied in your name secular
Buddhist, you should take this teaching seriously.
It is a responsibility to take this teaching seriously.
And if you find, as I have found, and I can't see there is
any smidgen of doubt about it, that the Buddha said there is
rebirth, then you should have an open mind.
If you don't have an open mind, if you reject it, then you have
to ask yourself whether it really is appropriate to call
yourself a Buddhist in the first place.
It may sound a bit harsh, but really if you don't take the
Buddha, having been somebody special, have some special
insight, then really are you then a Buddhist is a very
important question to ask. So we have to be careful here.
If we are not careful, if we fashion Buddhism according to
Western values and Western ideas, we have to be careful we
don't throw out the baby. This baby is extraordinarily
valuable. It has the ability to change our
lives, move us away from suffering, give us more
happiness, right? Challenge some of the core
assumptions in our life, and along the way transform us into
human beings with compassion, with kindness, with beauty
inside, banning all those negative things in the world.
And as we do that, as we transform ourselves, we also
transform all the people that we come in contact with.
We transform the society around us, and we have this ripple
effect spreading out in society, very powerful, very beautiful.
Let's not destroy that. Let's be very careful when we
take Buddhism into the Western world that we are honest about
what the teachings of the Buddha really are.
If not, we are going to do so much harm to this very, very
powerful teaching, this wisdom teaching that was bequeathed by
the Buddha two and a half thousand years ago.
Let's be honest, let's be careful, let's be humble, and
let's take care of it in the right way.
Okay, that's it for tonight. Applause Okay, so there you are.
So that's a bit about various issues.
So, would anybody like to ask any questions or challenge me
that secular Buddhism is right, perhaps, or whatever?
We have one person over there. Let's get the microphone.
Hold on one second please. Thank you for tonight, Ajahn.
It's always beautiful. The meditation is always very
blissful and your talks are very interesting.
I have a question on touch, on human touch.
To me, that's one of the basic needs of human beings.
I'm curious why different lineages of Buddhism, like the
Tibetan Buddhists, they're actually affectionate.
They touch you when you're speaking to them, when you're
interacting with them, whether it's your lineage, does not
touch. So could you please speak about
that please? Okay, so you want me to touch
you, is that what you want? Okay, well the reason is, a lot
of it is just history, right? As always, history is very
important in this. One of the main reasons is that
according to the monastic rules, it is an offence for a monk to
touch a woman, not always, not in all circumstances, but if you
touch a woman, especially if you have some desire for that woman,
oh I really like you, so if you come up here, if I touch you,
it's a very bad thing for me to do from the monastic rules.
And it is gender equal, it's the same thing for the nuns.
The nuns cannot touch men in exactly the same way, and that's
why we do that. In many circumstances, no
problem. If I go out and somebody wants
to shake my hand, I always shake a woman's hand, because
obviously you're just doing it for shaking hands.
If there has been an accident and you need to help somebody,
of course no problem whatsoever. But you have to be careful, and
this is one of the reasons we don't do that, because it very
easily can go too far in one direction.
The reason why the Tibetans don't do that is because the
Tibetan history of Buddhism is very very different, they don't
follow those rules in the same way that we do, and that is
basically why you have that distinction.
But you know, it doesn't mean I don't like you, right, or don't
touch you, it doesn't mean I don't have compassion for you,
it doesn't mean I don't, I might even like to give you a hug, but
I don't do it, it's more like a spiritual hug rather than a
material hug. Look at it that way.
Thank you. Okay, anyone else like to ask a
question? Eddie, Eddie is always good for
a question. Ajahn Damali, don't you think
those circular Buddhists, there are people who don't know about
Buddhism, they might know a little bit this thing and they
make comments. The real Buddhist, the Buddha's
thought is, he asks us to look inside, to experience his
teaching, to awaken this thing, and to, how to say, he says, he
teach suffering, and the ending of suffering, that's the inside
mind. Those circular Buddhists, they
are just like modern age, they know a little bit this thing and
they have big mouth comments. That's what I think.
Okay, sometimes that is true, I think, sometimes that's right,
but sometimes it's not the full story.
Sometimes some of these secular Buddhists are actually very well
educated, and sometimes they know the Buddhist teachings very
well. But I think the problem with the
secular Buddhists is that they come to Buddhism with prior
views, with prior ideas about what is acceptable and what is
not. When you have already, when you
are already stuck with prior views and prior ideas, you are
not able to take on board the fact that the Buddha taught
these things, because your mind is already skewed, your mind is
already distorted in a certain direction.
We are all like that, we are all blind to a certain extent.
Whenever we come to something, we are all distorted by our
preconceptions and our pre-ideas, it has to be like
that, it can't be any different. We all have that problem, and I
think that is the main problem with the secular Buddhists.
That's why it's important, very often, they are actually very
sincere people. They love to read the suttas,
they love to read the word of the Buddha, trying to understand
it, but I think the problem is that there are certain things
they are not willing to give up, and that's why it is so hard for
them to jump that hurdle, so to speak.
The ones I read, it's only very shallow, conventional truth,
they are good at that. The Buddha teaches the ultimate
truth, the real truth. I think a lot of secular
Buddhists, that's what I read, it's just very surface.
Yes, of course that's true, most of us are on the shallow level,
very few are on the level of ultimate truth, it's pretty rare
to find that in the world. Sometimes you find people, you
find that's tingling, there's somebody, something special
about somebody, right? Sometimes you meet those monks,
you might even meet them here sometimes, and you meet those
monks, have something about them that is slightly otherworldly,
slightly different, and it kind of makes you feel, whoa, here,
maybe we are in the presence of more ultimate reality, and it's
very fascinating when that happens, because you react to
that, you can almost feel it sometimes, that is true.
Okay, anybody else, everybody happy?
Okay, so let's have one message from overseas, this is from
Dhirajupa, hello Dhirajupa, I know her quite well, from
Thailand, and I need to get old now, I need to bring back up my
glasses so I can see what is going on.
Is there a sutta in which the Buddha expressed his view
whether monks should be involved in politics?
If they are allowed to do so, where is the borderline?
That is a hard question to end the day on.
So, I think, this is my take on this, the Buddha doesn't really
say all that much about involvement in politics, I think
in those days it was obvious that if you were a monk you had
left the world, right? Leaving the world means leaving
politics behind. If you go back into politics
again, you are moving back into the world, and I think you are
losing some of that sense of being a monk or being a monastic
as a consequence. But one of the important things
is that to remember that everything is political at a
certain level, right? It's impossible to be completely
neutral about things, as soon as you open your mouth, somebody
can construe what you are saying as being political one way or
another. If I say something about
abortion, for example, right? I can give you a purely Buddhist
view on abortion, purely Buddhist, and yet some people
say, oh, you are being right-wing or you are being
left-wing or whatever, right? And you are taking political
position, no, I am just giving you the Buddhist point of view,
and you can make out of it whatever you want.
So sometimes it's very hard not to be political, in a sense,
people will read politics into what you say, even though you
are making purely Buddhist assertions about things.
So this is the first thing, the world is political, and in that
sense, it's impossible to avoid it altogether.
But at the same time, I think it is important for many reasons
that we avoid taking deliberate political positions, whatever
our personal views might be about certain issues, because
Buddhism is a very broad tent, right?
It should take in everybody, everybody should be welcome
regardless of the political position, unless they have some
really crazy view that it's okay to exterminate all people or
something like that, then it might be a bit more difficult to
accommodate them at least 100%, but maybe even then they can
come in slowly, right? And we can gradually change
their view perhaps. So it should be a broad tent,
and if I sit here and I kind of proclaim certain political
views, it's going to turn people off.
I don't really want to do that, right?
There are good people on all sides of politics, whatever kind
of position you have, and it is that goodness in people we need
to encourage, it is that goodness that can give rise to
insight and deep meditation, and this is the most important thing
here. So for that reason, I think it's
good not to be too involved in politics, because it turns a
large number of people off. All those who oppose that point
of view will be turned off if you are too involved.
And also you are really neglecting, I think, your
vocation as a monastic if you do that.
Anyway, that's just my kind of little bit on that particular
topic here. So that's it, everybody happy in
here? Everybody okay?
Okay, if that's the case, let's pay respect to Buddha Dhamma
Sangha. Buddha Dhamma Sangha Buddha
Dhamma Sangha Buddha Dhamma Sangha Buddha Dhamma Sangha
Dhamma Sangha