Buddha is in league with the Greeks – as are we all.Photo by: Okko Pyykkö
Q: If you came upon the Buddha in the guise of a hot dog vendor, what should you say?
A: Make me one with everything.
I love that joke today better than ever, since it provides the practical answer to this real-life question someone asked me:
May I ask what your take is on Zen?
I really like being asked questions, and I hope I don’t seem graceless or arrogant or too stupidly off-topic in my answers. Even so, my take on Zen Buddhism is that joke, since I know nothing else about it. That’s not entirely true. I know enough about Buddhism to get the joke – which is not quite nothing, but it’s close.
When I was a workaholic kid in Fun City, I would hear Alan Watts on WNEW-FM in the wee hours every Sunday morning – but I hated it all, especially Watts himself. In the world of internet radio – or even just preset buttons on boom boxes – I would never even have known his name. I don’t know that he actually knew anything about Zen Buddhism – and if he did, he was an awful ambassador – but I don’t remember anything he said, anyway.
Not that it would matter if I did. Doctrines abound, and my take is that all the other ones are wrong. People will always want to cherry-pick for notions they embrace, but a bogus map with pleasing flourishes is a bogus map. We know about Buddhists because of the Greek style of mind, not the other way around, and Buddhists thrive in the Greek world by being Greeks. Like Jews, like Catholics, like Mormons, Buddhists are religious at home and in church, living as ecumenical realists in the rest of the world.
And to there, I truly don’t care. I don’t admire undefended supernatural claims, but I don’t mind if you do – provided you behave appropriately toward me. I think every doctrine but mine is wrong – this with respect to uncontroverted ontological facts everyone else elects to ignore – but I would go one step further to argue that no two men ever agree on fundamental philosophical doctrine, anyway. Some may think they do, but I can make enemies out of allies with just a few pointed questions. We think we agree with each other, but that’s just because we don’t drill down deeply enough.
But so what? Whatever any of us says about moral philosophy, we are each one of us exclusively internally-motivated. Accordingly, everyone is an egoist just like me – the others are just bad at it from lack of study and practice – because each one of us is unavoidably his own philosopher. In that way, Zen Buddhism, alike unto every religion, seems to me to be just another self-inflicted bait-’n’-switch scheme by which marks cheat themselves out of the fullest possible expressions of the fully-human life. Many brand names, each bottle ornately labeled, same sad snake-oil.
But even then: Each man to his own saints. I reject the way almost everyone thinks, but not necessarily the way they behave. My experiences of Jews, Catholics, Mormons, Buddhists and other rigorously-religious people have been overwhelmingly positive. I can always work with honest people, and men who raise their kids right seem to get everything else that matters right, too.
There’s a reason for that: Nature, red in tooth and claw, suffers nonsense only at the margins. Dancing for rain is daft. Doing nothing but dancing for rain is suicidal. Suicidal doctrines auto-annihilate, ideally without mass casualties. Accordingly, the relative flourishing of any population of sincere adherents to a dogma will correlate with the ratio of cognitive dissonance to ontological consonance in the doctrine’s moral philosophy. But: Insofar as everyone else is wrong, per me, to one degree or another, I’m happy enough to let you choreograph your own rain-dances. Or you can walk my way, if you want. But first you have to turn around.
But do that or don’t, that’s your business. I am an atheist, an egoist, an anarchist – and many other things that everyone else insists are outrageously wrong. I don’t care about that, either. I know I’m right, I know why I’m right, and I know that the work I’ve done over the last three-and-a-half years argues very cogently for the quality of my map. If you do resolve to walk my way, your life will improve in ways that no other doctrine can promise. But other peoples’ opinions – or undefended arguments – about my ideas move me not at all.
Why should they? I know all about what I’m talking about, and, for now, but for a few dozen people around the world, no one else knows any of it. Why would I be moved by uniformed opinions?
And, logically, why would any Buddhist be swayed by my observations about Buddhism?
That’s why I don’t make any, not about Buddhism and not about any other doctrine – religious or putatively-atheist. I am not arguing with you about your ideas. I don’t go to your church, so all I am talking about are my ideas.
But beyond that, I don’t want to take anything away from you, anyway. You are the only possible driver of your life, and you are going to drive it by the map you choose for yourself – or by no map at all – regardless. I will not swap my map into your hands by trying to wrest yours away – but who knows what I might accomplish with a more-affectionate display?
So what’s my take on Zen Buddhism – and on every other idea in anyone else’s head?
Live your life, and rejoice in it. That’s what I’m doing.
