Buddhism the Religion of No-Religion. Alan Watts
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like Judaism than Christianity, because a person is still recognizable as a Jew even though they don’t go to synagogue. Jewish people, coming from a line of Jewish parents and ancestors who have been practicing Jews, still continue certain cultural ways of doing things, certain mannerisms and attitudes, so they are cultural Jews instead of religious Jews. Hinduism is the same sort of thing; it is a religious culture. Being a Hindu really involves living in India. Because of the differences of climate, of arts, crafts, and technology, you cannot be a Hindu in the full sense in Japan or in the United States.
Buddhism is Hinduism stripped for export. The Buddha was a reformer in the highest sense: someone who wants to go to the original form, or to re-form it for the needs of a certain time. The word buddha is a title, not a proper name, in the same way as Christ means “the anointed” and is not the surname of Jesus. “Buddha” is not the surname of Gautama, but means “the one who is awakened” (from the root in Sanskrit budh, to know); Buddha is the man who woke up, who discovered who he really was.
The crucial issue wherein Buddhism differs from Hinduism is that it doesn’t say who you are; it has no idea, no concept. I emphasize the words idea and concept. It has no idea and no concept of God because Buddhism is not interested in concepts, it is interested in direct experience only. From the Buddhist standpoint all concepts are wrong, in the same way that nothing is really what you say it is. Is this a stool? When I turn it over—now it’s a wastebasket. When I beat on it, it’s a drum. So this thing is what it does. Anything you can use it for is what it is. If you have a rigid idea that it is a stool and you can only sit on it, you’re kind of stuck. But if you see all these other things as well, then you suddenly see that anything can be everything. In the same way, Buddhism does not say that what you really are is something definable, because if you believe that, you are stuck with an idea and cling to it for spiritual security.
A lot of people say they want a religion as something to hold on to. A Buddhist would say to cut that out. As long as you hold on to something, you do not have religion. You are only really there when you let go of everything and do not depend on any fixed idea or belief for your sanity or happiness. You might think Buddhism is very destructive, because it breaks down or does not believe in God. It does not believe in an immortal soul or seek any solace in any idea of life after death. It absolutely faces the fact of the transiency of life. There is nothing you can hold on to, so let go. There is no one to hold on to anything, anyway. Buddhism is the discipline of doing that. But if you do that, you see, you discover something much better than any belief, because you have got the real thing, only you cannot say what it is.
They say in Zen that if you are enlightened you are like a dumb man who has had a wonderful dream. When you have had a wonderful dream you want to tell everybody what it is, but you cannot if you are dumb, if you cannot speak. The real thing in Buddhism, which they call nirvana, is sort of equivalent to moksha, or liberation. Nirvana means “to blow out”—the sigh of relief—because if you hold your breath, you lose it. If you hold on to yourself, you hold on to life or the breath or spirit; you hold on to God. Then it is all dead; it becomes just a rock, just an idol. But let go, breathe out, and you get your breath back. That’s nirvana.
The Buddhists’ doctrine is the highest negativism. They characterize the ultimate reality as sunyata, which means emptiness; in Japanese this is ku, the character used for the sky or the air. When you get an airmail envelope to write home, the second character is ku, air, which means emptiness. They use this character to translate sunyata, emptiness; the fundamental nature of reality, the sky. But the sky is not negative emptiness; it contains all of us. It is full of everything that is happening, but you cannot put a nail in the sky and pin it down. In the same way, Buddhism is saying that you do not need any gizmos to be in the know. You do not need a religion. You do not need any Buddha statues, temples, Buddhist rosaries, and all that jazz. But when you get to the point that you know you do not need any of those things, you do not need a religion at all; then it is fun to have one. Then you can be trusted to use rosaries, ring bells, hit drums and clappers, and chant sutras. But those things will not help you a bit. They will just tie you up in knots if you use them as methods of catching hold of something. So every teacher of Buddhism is a debunker, not to be a smart aleck and show how clever he is, but out of compassion. Just as when a surgeon chops off a bad growth or a dentist pulls out a rotten tooth, so the Buddhist teacher is getting rid of your crazy ideas for you, which you use to cling to life and make it dead.
There are two kinds of Buddhism, the first called Mahayana; maha is Sanskrit for “great”; yana means a vehicle or conveyance. The other is Hinayana, meaning the little vehicle; hina in Sanskrit means “little.” That term was invented by the Mahayanists for the other people, who don’t like it. They call themselves Theravada, which means: vada, the way; thera, of the elders. Theravada Buddhism you find now in Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and generally South Asia. Mahayana you find in Nepal and northern India, where it originated, and in Tibet, China, Mongolia, Japan, and, to some extent, Indonesia. All the sects of Japanese Buddhism are Mahayana.
What is the great difference between these two schools? The Theravada is very strict. It is a way for monks, essentially, rather than laymen. There are many ways of living Buddhism. The Theravada Buddhists are trying to live without desires: to have no need for wives or girlfriends, husbands or boyfriends; not to kill anything at all; living the strictest vegetarian way; and even straining their water so that they do not eat any little insects with it. Also in this very strict way, they meditate all the time and eventually attain nirvana, which involves total disappearance from the manifested world.
Mahayana feels that that is a dualistic point of view. You do not need to get away from this world to experience nirvana, because nirvana is what there is. It is here; it is now. The ideal person of Mahayana is called a bodhisattva. This originally meant somebody on the way to becoming a buddha, but in Mahayana it means somebody who has become a buddha but has gone back into the world, in the spirit of compassion, in order to help all other beings to become awakened. And that is an endless task, like filling a well with snow. Putting snow into a well, it never fills up. At the Zen monastery, after they have said their homage to the Buddha, the dharma, which is the Buddha’s doctrine or method, and the sangha, the order of followers of the Buddha, then they take four vows, and one of them is “However innumerable sentient beings are, I vow to liberate them all.” So there is no end to that; there never comes a time when all sentient beings are liberated. But from the standpoint of one who is a buddha, everybody is liberated. In other words, a buddha would not say, “Look everybody, I’m a buddha. I’m more experienced than you, and I know more than you, and you owe me respect on that account.” On the other hand, a buddha would see you all as being exactly right; just where you are, all of you are buddhas. Even for those of you who do not know it, it is right for you not to know it at this moment.
It is absolutely fundamental to an understanding of Buddhism to recognize that its whole method of teaching is dialectical. It consists of a dialogue between a teacher and a student. The method of this dialogue is called upaya, or “skillful means” used by the teacher to bring about the enlightenment of the student. Upaya implies expert pedagogy in teaching, but “deceit,” when used in a political context. Since Buddhism is a dialogue, what you ordinarily understand as the teachings of Buddhism are not the teachings of Buddhism, they are simply the opening gambit or process of this dialogue. The point is that Buddhism is not a teaching. Its essence consists in a certain kind of experience, a transformation of consciousness, which is called awakening or enlightenment, that involves our seeing through or transcending the hoax of being a separate ego. A Buddhist does not have the same tendency that a Christian has to want to find out what his faith is by going back to the most original sources. There has always been a tendency in Christianity to ask, “What did Jesus really teach? What is the pure New Testament, uncorrupted by theologians and by scribes who inserted things into the mouth of the master?”
It does not occur to Buddhists to have this attitude because of this dialectic pattern. When you have an acorn, if it is a lively acorn it grows into an oak. That is the way it should be, it should develop into something. And just so Buddhism, as it has developed since the days of the Buddha, has gone a long way. It has become sometimes more complex, sometimes more simple, but it has changed radically because the seed that the Buddha planted was alive. For example, when we ask what the Buddhist