*I had this phone taken with a Buddhist Monk when I visited the "Secrets of Buddhist Art" exhibit at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee.
What if it was possible not to suffer?
Sounds crazy, right? Hit your finger with a hammer and you have physical pain. Eat Chinese food in Nebraska, and you have stomach pain. Sometimes human suffering is devastating. Lose someone you love, you have emotional pain. You don’t have food to eat, you experience hunger pains. A tornado destroys your home, you suffer all the consequences of property loss. You get laid off from work, you experience the hardship of financial strain. You become seriously ill, and your health declines.
I’m pretty sure that suffering is just part of the lived human experience, and there’s no escaping it. Right? To claim otherwise would be absurd.
I want to introduce you to a philosopher who actually claimed it’s not necessary to suffer, and that each of us are actually the cause of our own suffering. Before you X-out of this article because of how ludicrous this sounds, let me explain what he meant by “suffering”, and his remedy for fixing it. If at the end you feel it’s hogwash, so be it.
The fact that you’ve never heard this name in conversations of philosophy is a reminder that when most people speak of philosophy, they are really meaning Western philosophy, which is the philosophical thinking of Western culture, particularly Europe and North America. It’s highly likely that every philosopher you’ve ever heard of are from Greece, Germany, and Great Britain.
But there is also this thing called the Eastern Hemisphere, which includes the likes of the Middle East, China, Japan, India, Egypt and Australia. If you’ve done some digging into Eastern philosophers, Al-Kindi, Lau Tzu, and Confucius are a few names that most commonly come up.
In the third installment of this series, “Philosophers You’ve Never Heard Of”, I want to discuss the Buddha. We’ve all heard of Buddha, just not in conversations of philosophy. Most people think of the Buddha as a religious figure. Right? We think of Buddha as the founder of Buddhism. Look on any list of “world religions” and you will find “Buddhism”. Case closed - Buddhism is a religion.
But just as the life and teachings of Jesus were later morphed into the Christian religion, the Buddha’s life and teachings were later morphed into Buddhism, which can have religion-like characteristics. Neither Jesus nor Buddha had any interest in formulating a religion. Buddha is best understood not as a religious figure, but a philosopher and a psychologist, terms that were not applicable to his time and place in history.
One could say that Buddha’s insights is a science of mind — a way of exploring how we think, feel, and act that leads us to profound truths about who we are. You could also take Buddha’s teachings as a philosophy of life — a way to live that maximizes our chances for happiness. Sometimes this philosophy is described as the “Middle Way”, which is a rejection of extremes often identified as “attachment” and “aversion”. We will discuss this later.
What Buddhism is, 2,500 years after his death, is out of the Buddha’s hands. His teachings passed into the hands of his followers in antiquity. They passed from wandering beggars to monastic institutions, from the illiterate to the learned, from the esoteric East to the outspoken West. In its travels, Buddhism has been many things to many people.
But what did the Buddha intend when he taught?
As an antidote to equating “philosophy” exclusively with Western minds, it’s important to be aware of these noteworthy distinctions:
Atheist neuroscientist, Sam Harris, says that most religions hide the path to great truths behind a maze of superstition, ritual, and dogma. But, according to Harris,
“Buddhism approaches spirituality with an almost scientific focus on experiment and observation. This opens a path for the non-religious to experience a transformation of consciousness without paying heed to any supernatural claims.”
Sam Harris and evolutionary psychologist Robert Wright have an interesting discussion about Buddhism you might find interesting.
Harris isn’t alone in noting Buddhism’s applicability outside the realm of religious belief. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari classifies Buddhism as a form of religion based on natural laws rather than the laws of a deity. Harari notes that the particular rules upon which Buddhism is founded are those of psychology—the behavior patterns of the human mind.
A word about this article. It’s fairly link-heavy in this introductory part. In virtually every Substack article I write, it requires some difficult choices about what to address and what to leave out, given the constraints of a reasonable word-count of a short essay. The following links are meant to offer resources for you to explore these topics further, which I hope you will.
If you have an interest in exploring Buddhist philosophy, here are a few useful resources:
The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy by Jan Westerhoff
Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction by Jan Westerhoff
A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy by Steven M. Emmanuel
Paving the Great Way by Jonathan C. Gold
Buddhism as Philosophy by Mark Sederits
Buddhist Psychology by Geshe Tashi Tsering
The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism by Byung-Chul Han
Secular Buddhism: Eastern Thought for Western Minds by Noah Rasheta
The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra
No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology Is Catching Up to Buddhism by Chris Niebauer PhD
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