Why I am Not a Buddhist

Where I think the main point of disagreement lies between Buddhism and Christianity

Note: I recognize that this essay has a provocative title, and that certain parts might come off poorly. So right off the bat I want to clarify that the title is “Why I am Not a Buddhist,” not, “The Final Word on on Whether or Not Buddhism is True” or “Why I am Smarter than You.” I originally wrote this for my seminary metaphysics class a few years ago. I would have written it differently today, and I did consider making some changes before posting. After making a few minor changes, I’ve decided that I wouldn’t be able to bring the same creative energy to the project, and at a certain point I need to decide that a piece is done. So I present this as a window into what I consider a productive stage in my thinking on the topic where I discovered what is probably the most important disagreement I have with a religion which I otherwise have great interest in and admiration for. If I have the honor of an actual Buddhist reading this and taking it seriously, I humbly ask them to overlook any sentences with a condescending ring. I eagerly invite their feedback and engagement, especially corrections to any errors I may have made.

In his comparative study of Zen Buddhism and Christianity titled Zen Way Jesus Way, missionary and academic Tucker Callaway argues that Buddhism, and its core metaphysical assumption that things do not have inherent existence; is logically consistent, not empirically falsifiable, and is a genuinely effective remedy for suffering. Is he correct, and if so, is an evangelist left with any foothold that would supply positive reasons to reject Buddhism? In this paper I will explore this question while drawing from Callaway’s analysis, and from Fr. W. Norris Clarke SJ’s presentation of Thomistic metaphysics found in his book The One and the Many. I will first introduce Buddhism’s doctrine of emptiness. I will then show that logic is indeed an inadequate level of analysis to reject Buddhism from. But I will ultimately conclude that the empirical deficiencies of Buddhism give us rational and pragmatic reasons for rejecting it.

Many, perhaps most especially Buddhists, might question whether a single definition could encompass and fully define Buddhism. But Tibetan lama Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche argues that the innumerable varieties of Buddhism can be summarized in their essence by a list of precepts known as The Four Dharma Seals. He writes,

…if all these four seals are found in a path or a philosophy, it doesn’t matter whether you call it Buddhist or not. […] you could have a surfer giving you teachings on how to sit on a beach watching a sunset: if what he says contains all these four seals, it would be Buddhism. The Tibetans, the Chinese, or the Japanese might not like it, but teaching doesn’t have to be in a “traditional” form (Khyentse).

What are these seals? They are:

1) All compounded things are impermanent

2) All emotions are painful

3) All phenomena are empty; they are without inherent existence

4) Nirvana is beyond extremes

Khyentse claims that these four seals can be distilled further still down to one: All phenomena are empty: “This is actually the ultimate view of Buddhism; the other three are grounded on this third seal.” Whether this is true of all forms of Buddhism, this principle does carry over to Zen Buddhism, which Tucker Callaway specialized in. Callaway states it thusly: “Everything is No-Thing” This is one fundamental presupposition of Zen” (Callaway 28).

Is all of this logically consistent? Callaway believes that it is. He formulates the Zen doctrine of emptiness propositionally in this way:

…let “x” be any religion, any theological system, any philosophical position you choose. X= Only-Mind = I = Buddha-Mind = Each thing = Nothing […] the “tolerance” of Zen and of all monistic or nondualistic religions, is the acceptance of the absolute qualitative identity of all things (Callaway 158-159).

A western mind may be tempted to dismiss this formulation out of hand on the grounds that it violates the law of non-contradiction (i.e. something cannot be and not be at the same time and in the same respect). Fr. Clarke says that, “It would indeed be a logical contradiction to say, ‘Being is non-being’” (Clarke 21). But there are two considerations which show this to be a premature reaction:

First, Buddhism discusses being interchangeably between a variety of technical, mystical, and paradoxical modes which do not easily map onto the concept as westerners understand it. Callaway writes of this phenomenon and the difficulty it poses for dialogue:

  ….one reason why students of Buddhism […] are easily led astray is that […] Buddhists themselves easily slip from one form to the other and back again a dozen times during a single conversation. One gradually gets an intuitive feel for these shifts just as one gets a sense of the balance necessary to ride a bicycle (Callaway 127).

Callaway laments the lack of substance in many Western works on Buddhism, and his diagnosis is the fact that many “have not […] gotten the knack of threading their way through this tricky ground” (Callaway 129). Fr. Clarke identifies a similar phenomenon in the radically monistic Hindu school of Advaita Vedanta:

But caution: for many of this school, if you push them hard, it seems that "unreal" does not mean totally unreal in our sense of the term (Clarke 75).

Accordingly, while some formulations of the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness seem to imply total unreality, other definitions seem to suggest actual existence in some sense; here is another formulation Callaway gives:

“Zen says your mind alone exists. Everything of which you are conscious through your senses, all your reasoning, your emotions are, like dreams, completely nonspatial, non- pluralistic, non-material, and subjective (Callaway 31).

And so, at least in the space, and for the purposes of this paper, we can provisionally conclude that, while some may find Callaway’s formulation dubious and disconcertingly ambiguous, it does not obviously violate the law of non-contradiction. A vast amount of further work would need to be done to answer this question one way or another.

Secondly, even if one were able to pin Buddhism down metaphysically in such a way that it could be shown to entail a violation of the law of non-contradiction, this seems to be a bullet many Buddhists would be willing to bite for the sake of pragmatism. Khyentse writes:

Buddhists are very slippery. You’re right. You can never talk about absolute emptiness, but you can talk about an “image” of emptiness […] Ultimately speaking, the path is irrational, but relatively speaking, it’s very rational because it uses the relative conventions of our world (Khyentse).

What motivates the radical ambivalence toward classical reason found in Khyentse’s writing and the writings of other Buddhists? Callaway, who claims to have personally attained Zen enlightenment, may have something of an answer to this question when he explains the appeal of Zen Buddhism in light of his own experience:

If what I wanted was sheer, uninterrupted delight, freedom forevermore from tensions, struggles, the frustrations of failure, the aching load of responsibility, the agony of grief, the ache of guilt—if that is all I wanted, I would go Zen. Zen works, you know. It really works. Such benefits as these it does truly bring. Why would anyone having discovered a road to this sort of paradise decide to pass it by? (Callaway 227).

Why indeed. Giving up these benefits would be a heavy price to pay for the sake of being right. What good is reason if it cannot offer anything better? Even Fr. Clarke, a staunch proponent of Thomistic realism, concedes that logic is a dead end for our purposes. He instead argues that we must affirm reality and meaning on the grounds that their denial would entail a lived contradiction:

Note that no strictly logical compulsion can ever force me under pain of logical contradiction to opt for the total meaningfulness of my life, since it is difficult to show that there is any direct logical contradiction in affirming that I or the universe is absurd. It can be shown, however, that there is a lived contradiction between affirming theoretically that the universe or myself is unintelligible and continuing to live and use my mind as though it were intelligible-which we cannot help but do (Clarke 228).

Thus a critique of Buddhism, in addition to being internally consistent, and an accurate reflection of what Buddhists actually believe, must be able to also show that it is not engaging in pedantic navel gazing and intellectual martyrdom. It must be rational as well as pragmatic, able to overcome the profound appeal and practical value of Buddhism.

The beginning of such a critique can be found in examining the empirical validity of Zen Buddhism. At first glance, as with our analysis at the level of logic, Westerners are prone to making a knee jerk rejection of Buddhist non-dualism on the grounds that it denies an obviously observable phenomenon: the multiplicity of real things in nature. But Callaway demonstrates that on second glance this is not so obvious. The data we receive from our senses is wholly consistent with the “non dualistic idealism or nondualistic monism of Zen.” (Callaway 162). He writes,

You cannot see your brain. You can never see those nerve-wires themselves. You can never see your eyes. If you cannot even see your own brain, or the wires which run from it to your world-window eyes, if you can never see own eyes, how can you possibly get a direct look at whatever might be in a world somewhere beyond them? Sorry, it simply cannot be done (Callaway 214-215).

But a third glance shows us that in the end, while Zen Buddhism is a possible explanation of our experience, the most significant gap in Zen’s armor (and the grounds for Callaway and Fr. Clarke’s rejection of it), appears when we ask ourselves whether it is the best explanation. Callaway explains that this removes the possibility of Buddhism being a live option for him personally.

…although I understand well that my conscious experience of the world could be explained logically on Zen presuppositions, I myself cannot explain the belief that in truth I am a real individual living in a world external to my mind. […] This too is a faith- choice, but I believe it is a faith which explains the facts of experience. I do not choose it because I like it; I choose it because I am convinced it is true (Callaway 228-229).

This cannot be dismissed as simply an incorrigible subjective perception of dualism. That indeed would be no proof at all of dualism. The argument is that this perception, in addition to not being voluntary, best explains the facts of existence. Callaway does not go into depth about why he believes that dualism better explains reality, but Fr. Clarke emphatically and extensively explains why we ought to prefer it:

Both radical monism and radical pluralism are cop-outs; they leave out too much of what is undeniable in our human experience, what should not be left out, lest the philosophical explanation eliminate or distort the very data of experience it is supposed to explain. The diversity and multiplicity cannot be denied as illusory without contradicting an essential dimension of my experience, more certain than any theory that tries to explain it away: I experience myself-and so do most other adult human persons-as a free responsible center and initiator of action, in interaction with other such independent centers… (Clarke 78).

The consequences of this are not limited to mere intellectual dissatisfaction. According to Fr. Clarke, the lack of distinct and real individuality in being ultimately undermines morality, love and human dignity:

I would have no moral responsibility for either evil or good, since a part is governed by the whole in which it is and not independent in its action: my hand cannot be blamed for stabbing someone to death, or my sexual organs for raping someone. Also genuine, freely given love would be impossible for a mere part of a whole. All this is destructive of my whole dignity and responsibility as a moral person and unacceptable as an explanation of what it is to be a person with other real persons in our world (Clarke 79).

Recalling an interview of his with the world renowned Buddhist priest Suzuki Daisetz, in which the topic of Christian moral activism was raised in contrast to Buddhism, Callaway gives a striking and poignant real world example of a lived contradiction between Buddhist attitudes and rhetoric, and Buddhist metaphysical assumptions:

To this end Suzuki surprisingly replied, “Yes, that’s the good side of Christianity. Buddhists accept everything as it is, perhaps.  That is bad. They don’t go out of their way to do good.” […] It seemed to me that at that moment he departed from his Zen presuppositions and expressed a genuine value judgement […] From the Zen point of view, not going out of one’s way to do good is evidence of Enlightenment, as also would be not going out of one’s way not to do good (Callaway 239).

Callaway acknowledges the possibility that Suzuki maintained his worldview during the entirety of the interview, but hopefully concludes that:

But if he did mean it seriously he, at least for the moment, was off the Zen Way and perilously close to the Jesus Way (Callaway 239).

In observing this lived contradiction, we can share Callaway’s hope for common ground with, and eventual conversion of Buddhists.

According to what we have read from Callaway and Fr. Clarke, we have good reason to suppose that Buddhism’s metaphysical assumptions entail conclusions which are both intellectually unsatisfying, and morally unsavory. But we are again confronted with the question of whether these are unbitable bullets for the sake of achieving a life of tranquility and bliss?  What can clinch a rejection of Buddhism is that, in spite of the romantic and pragmatic commendation of Zen by Callaway, Fr. Clarke demonstrates that, over and above what we have discussed previously, Zen and other non-dualistic philosophies are not capable of satisfying the human spirit, even in principle. For they deny our inherent orientation toward the infinite good, and they stifle our pursuit of it. Fr. Clarke summarizes the human predicament thusly:

…my intellect and will are such by nature that they can never be completely satisfied or fulfilled by any finite being or good. I must always implicitly refer each one to a wider, richer horizon beyond, to which I then spontaneously tend. It follows that only an unqualified infinity, or unlimited fullness of being and goodness could ever satisfy this innate drive (Clarke 227).

This desire for unlimited fullness of being and goodness leads to a stark dilemma:

I am now faced with a radical intellectual choice between two ultimate alternatives on the meaning of my life: Either there exists a positive Infinite Fullness of being and goodness, […] and then my human nature becomes luminously and completely meaningful, intelligible, sense-making, and my life is suffused with hope of fulfillment. Or in fact, there exists no such real Infinite at all. And then my nature conceals in its depth a radical defect of meaningfulness, of coherence, an unfillable void of unintelligibility, a kind of tragic emptiness: a natural desire that defines my nature as a dynamic unity, but is in principle unfulfillable, incurably frustrated, "a useless passion," as Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist atheist puts it, oriented by its very nature toward a non-existent void, toward nothing real, kept going only by an ineradicable illusion (Clarke 227).

In this analysis a Buddhist might very well hear echoes of their own philosophy, for Buddhism entails and extolls an embrace of the second horn of Fr. Clarke’s dilemma. A heroic, ethical, and serene embrace, but an embrace nonetheless, and, Fr. Clarke argues, an unreasonable one:

But what good reason can one have for choosing darkness over light, illusion over meaning, for not choosing the light? Only if the darkness is more intelligible? But this does not make sense! Why not then accept my nature as a meaningful gift, pointing the way to what is, rather than to what is not? […] This unique kind of "argument," based on my own inner experience, can lead me to a profoundly reasonable affirmation that a real Infinite must exist as my final end… (Clarke 228).

This is one of Clarke’s principal arguments for God; it is an argument which formidably raises the burden of proof for the Buddhist.

And so in the end we can see from what has been discussed that the grounds for rejecting Buddhism lie not in an easy syllogism, nor do they lie in appeals to “common sense,” which are often nothing more than subtly disguised restatements of one’s worldview. In reflecting on the empirical deficiencies of the Buddhist worldview, Callaway and Fr. Clarke push us beyond complacent intellectual disputation. They challenge us to squarely face the choice between the radical meaninglessness Buddhism offers solace from, and the invitation to a life of inexhaustible meaningfulness that Christianity offers. We cannot have mathematical certainty of either way, but we can make a “profoundly reasonable” bet on the Jesus Way.