Buddhist Retreat: Why I gave up on finding my religion (2003)

The author is projecting his Catholic upbringing on the religion. Buddhism is not a singular hierarchical institution in the way Catholicism is. It has evolved and changed as it migrated from India through Tibet, China, Japan, then the USA. Does it have people that take bad actions - yes. Every human institution does.

There are many flavors of buddhism. I am partial towards the Thai Forest tradition because it emphasizes practice and experience over dogma and so avoids metaphysical discussions.<p>&gt; But what troubles me most about Buddhism is its implication that detachment from ordinary life is the surest route to salvation.<p>The response from the Thai Forest would be to engage in your life skillfully while paying attention to what causes you happiness or suffering and adjusting what you’re doing based on that. Maybe you discover a certain level of detachment is optimal, maybe you find you need to be more involved in your life. You go where the practice takes you.

This was from 2003.<p>I think at the time the author(John Horgan) was a kind of a &#x27;religion debunker&#x27;, and maybe he had latched onto a few sects of Buddhism that sound kind of &#x27;Christian&#x27; and &#x27;debunkable&#x27;.<p>He has some follow up writings that indicate his views on Buddhism may have shifted.<p>From 2023<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;johnhorgan.org&#x2F;cross-check&#x2F;a-buddhism-critic-goes-on-a-buddhist-retreat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;johnhorgan.org&#x2F;cross-check&#x2F;a-buddhism-critic-goes-on...</a><p>&quot;But I’m glad I went on the retreat. The Lama, during our private chat, said Buddhism isn’t true, but it works. Something worked during the retreat, but what was it? &quot;

Using examples from disparate sects of Buddhism as if there is some kind of monolithic “Buddhism” is like saying Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and all their various sects are the same. For instance on reincarnation, Pure Land Buddhists are closer to the Christian heaven view, and many Zen Buddhists don’t believe in reincarnation at all, and that Karma is not permanent.<p>The big point that Buddhism has been stripped of the metaphysical religious aspects is true though, but the article lays that on the west misunderstanding Buddhism, but in fact it was intentional - Trungpa Rinpoche said Buddhism will come to the West as psychology, and Suzuki had a similar approach.<p>And the idea that Buddhism of any kind promotes leaving the material world is just wrong - lay practitioners are part of the original writings. Siddhartha leaving his wife and kid isn’t what brought him enlightenment, the whole point is left one extreme where he partied and lived in luxury, to another extreme, aestheticism, fasting and self denial, only to realize that neither way reduced suffering.<p>Sounds like the author was just shocked that a lot of religious BS is tied up in many types of Buddhism and threw the whole thing out. But it’s hard to find a good group to practice with that matches your outlook, and I sympathize with that

Pretty bad takes and pretty shallow. It seems rather obvious this person is at the beginning of understanding, which is good, and the skepticism necessary, but too bad they quit already. They’re missing out.

My personal feeling is that when some sort of spiritual practice succeeds I almost forget why I did it in the first place because it was so low level and tightly bound to my experiencing of reality that it couldn&#x27;t really be described (or remembered) in words.<p>And then if it succeeds in eliminating like a bad aura that envelops each moment of perception, you almost forget it ever existed and then one can throw the baby out with the bathwater, stop practicing altogether what brought one back up and then beyond to the level of pride where one can dismiss it all, only to three years later or so need to adopt a certain level of spiritual practice whether that&#x27;s contemplative or practical or community-oriented.<p>As criticism it&#x27;s completely valid on a personal plane and multiple times we can all see we&#x27;ve had to dismiss ideas as not fitting our lives anymore, but I also can&#x27;t help but notice a certain negative tint to the entire article and leaps in logic in the criticism. This is obviously indicative that maybe the author had their fair fill of fruit and on a slightly filled stomach moves on to science etc. But it&#x27;s not a debunk or a representation of the faith and practices beyond the personal journey of the author.

Some of these points are quite good. I&#x27;ve followed Buddhism quite a lot, taking the view that if you ignore the reincarnation bit (which was probably inherited from other religions in the area buddhism sprang from) then buddhism isn&#x27;t really a religion at all, its more like a philosophy.<p>I&#x27;ve seen people at buddhist retreats suggest some wilds benefits to meditation (magic powers etc). Thats clearly nonsense. But one thing I&#x27;ve noticed about meditation (and yes, it is just sitting still) is that it makes it harder to lie to yourself. And thats really important because <i>Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self</i><p>I think the author here is right to point out the problems of enlightenment (its a sortof fictional ideal that no-one ever achieves but we might as well critique it). The Buddhist point of view is that wanting leads to suffering and so the ideal is not to &#x27;want&#x27; anything. But really, if you truly achieved &#x27;not wanting anything, that wouldn&#x27;t be much different from being dead. We need wants. Its more about getting wants in balance.

This isn’t the place to go into detail, but the author mainly argues against a Western conceptualisation of Buddhism, which is sadly divorced from the original meaning. If you want to study Buddhism, don’t rely on people reinterpreting it for a Western audience; go right to the source and try to understand what the old masters and the sutras are talking about.

If there is one really weak point in this article, it would be his dismissal of no-self in favor of &quot;emergent phenomenon&quot;, which as far as I can tell is indistinguishable from &quot;codependent origination&quot; (seriously - try to name the difference). And codepedent origination is the traditional background to no-self, a phrase you&#x27;ve heard many times if you&#x27;re at all familiar with those teachings.<p>So to say &quot;this teaching isn&#x27;t true, but the traditional contextual background to this teaching (under another name) is&quot; makes you wonder if he really understands the concepts involved at the necessary depth.

This article gave me some great laughs. It&#x27;s clear that the author only studied Buddhism for four years (a very short period of time) and has some very fundamental misunderstandings of Buddhist teachings.<p>For example, this explanation of karma:<p><i>&gt; Together, these tenets imply the existence of some cosmic judge who, like Santa Claus, tallies up our naughtiness and niceness before rewarding us with rebirth as a cockroach or as a saintly lama.</i><p>That is not at all how karma should be understood. If I go give out $10,000 to the homeless, I&#x27;m a damn fool if I think I&#x27;m going to get $100,000 back in the mail!

&gt; Yes, (meditation) can reduce stress, but, as it turns out, no more so than simply sitting still does<p>That&#x27;s no surprise. If your type of meditation is just sitting still, that&#x27;s fine. You don&#x27;t need a guru voiceover to get the benefits<p>Is this a surprise? It&#x27;s not magic. You&#x27;re essentially giving your brain and mind the space and time it needs. That doesn&#x27;t make it any less helpful with regards to stress, anxiety, focus etc<p>If we start realising all it is is sitting still (as in no music, podcast, iPad), maybe meditation can become more popular and we can get our attention spans back.

&quot;... science tells us that we are incidental, accidental.&quot;<p>And nonetheless, every second, when not sleeping, the author is trying hard to make sense (... notice how close to &quot;science&quot;) of his actual space and time. Throughout the ages, most prominent scientists have managed to do this, with great success, knowing that the universe, and themselves as a part of it, were the opposite of incidental or accidental: they believed their existence had a Reason.

Anything can be done terribly wrong and misused while formally correct if approached without reason and measure.<p>Instead of judging Buddhism, just practicing the simplest form of it by just meditating daily and consciously trying to be mindful and kind throughout every day usually does a great job. The same can be considered a simple form of Christianity as well though.

Panaceas do not exist. Also, some people are pretty terrible everywhere and in all religions such as that Chögyam Trungpa in his community.<p>We all pursue our quest to understand the universe and to better ourselves. To me, this is what matters, and, fortunately, this is something often shared between religions.

There is no cosmic judge, karma works like Newtonian physics, events propagate endlessly through time and will catch up with you (don&#x27;t know about effect of black holes on karma)

(2003)

tldr: author has shocking revelation that a major religion is &quot;functionally theistic&quot;.

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The author doesn&#x27;t seem to understand Buddhism, nor I but it could be important to remember that &quot;If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him&quot;, and also the concept of Upaya [1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Upaya" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Upaya</a>

&quot;Meditation can even exacerbate depression, anxiety, and other negative emotions in certain people.&quot;<p>If the author had put enough serious time in meditation, he would notice that meditation doesn&#x27;t exacerbate negative emotions, it just makes you aware of the negative emotions that were already there and that you were ignoring by social media, alcohol, drugs, tiktok, etc. Meditation makes you aware of where the problem is and why the negative emotions come up. Think of it like a very good debugger. It&#x27;s no substitution for solving the problem. It gives you the tools to solve the problem. Imagine your boss gave you a buggy code but seemingly it seems to compile and work but he keeps saying the code has errors, it&#x27;s not supposed to work that way. You will go nuts if you don&#x27;t know where the problem is. You don&#x27;t even need the solution, just knowing the problem is enough to save you a lot of trouble. Meditation on the initial stages works that way. Later, you&#x27;ll figure out as you go. Buddha said just do it, don&#x27;t analyze l, just do it. The author here didn&#x27;t have the patience to just do it and see it for himself, instead he focussed on the philosophy too much.<p>Meditating on a cushion for hours everyday is no substitution for being kind to strangers. Meditation brings you clarity even if the clarity is something you don&#x27;t like. Hell, even Buddha was enlightened when he actually left meditation and gave up meditation altogether (which the author seems to have completely miss it here). Buddhism may not be perfect(what&#x27;s perfect anyway?) but as George Box put it &quot;All models are wrong, some are useful&quot; Buddhism tries the best to be the most right and the useful model of the world.