Being a Post-Christian Buddhist
It is, of course, Christmas Eve, not just for Christians, but for many many folks in the world who don't personally practice the Christian faith. I have three days off work from my Buddhist meditation center employer even though these days are not special in Buddhism. The way Christianity has come to dominate the world is extraordinary, and while it feels like it's on the decline in my very secular California bubble, it is very much in power in much of the rest of the country, and in huge parts of the world.
I was raised Catholic, and converted to Buddhism in my early 20s as I found a far more relevant and coherent psychology for myself and my social views there, and a more effective core ritual and body of practice. Buddhism has always been full of converts, from the very beginning.
The Buddha made a point of evangelizing groups of ascetics by debating their teachers, and most of the early followers of the Buddha had previously been followers of other spiritual disciplines. And everywhere the tradition went, it competed against local faiths, creating tensions, assimilating, differentiating, and everything in between. Everywhere it went, it changed the culture as folks adopted its extraordinary perspective on life and death.
This is a religion built to convert into—the core ideas are both compatible with many different cultural perspectives and at the same time alien to all of them in similar ways. Renunciation and letting go is radical pretty much everywhere.
But being a convert Buddhist in a Christian culture creates very specific tensions. Christianity has at its heart an idea of history in which our individual lives, and the arc of our species, drives toward final judgment and an end to time. American Christianity at the moment has very strong End Times tendencies, and the officially secular nature of our democracy is belied by the fervor with which nearly everyone in our government professes passionate Christian faith. How does a Buddhist understanding of time and life as endlessly repetitive interact with this very different view of purpose and imperative?
Buddhism is an outsider religion here, as it has been many times in its history. Its core views and practices are still radical, and it takes determination to hold the radical view of the Dhamma in the face of omnipresent Christian norms. We can really see this in Buddhist meditative practice. When religions become mainstream, their practices evolve to keep them acceptable with the mainstream, even though all religions started with more extreme practices.
Contemporary Buddhism is at a hinge point in its history here, and we can see in some places that it has become so mainstream that its meditations have almost completely dissolved into conventional pop psychology. At the same time, it is still young in the Americas, and being filled with lots of converts it still has a lot of edgy, difficult practice in it, to its credit. Awakening isn't easy, and the intensity of Buddhism's deep meditations and trance rituals can still be felt, even as the surface approaches to mindfulness and emotional intelligence are seeping into every level of the culture.
I'll reflect tonight on Buddhism as an outsider faith expressing a radical perspective, and how our practices and reflections can interact with the Christian mainstream in the US in hopefully productive and enlivening ways.
