Why I'm a Half-Buddhist

A half-informed, half-serious dialogue

Photo by Benjamin Balázs on Unsplash

‘I’m not completely on board with Buddhism, since you ask.’

‘I didn’t ask. You’re just so keen to talk about the subject you’ve pretended I asked for convenience and managed to convince yourself it literally happened. I don’t think normal people do that.’

‘You can’t be on board with something you don’t fully understand. I assume it takes years of research and discipline to really get a grip on the ideas. Not just reading a handful of 20th century popularisers and seeing the odd “sayings of the Buddha” tweet in your feed.’

‘Yeah, you can say a lot of things about Twitter but “I attained enlightenment through it” isn’t one of them.’

‘But if Buddhism’s that hard to grasp, how can the average person like you or me get enlightened? It’s not like we have the time or inclination for all that study. And why should we? Surely there’s a “level 1” version for us folk and a “level 2” for the orange-robed monks, same as there’s a “believe in Jesus and you’ll be saved” level of Christianity and a “ten-year course in mysticism, advanced theology and doctrinal schisms” level.’

‘Are you going somewhere with this?’

‘Yes. I Have Decided To Be A Half-Buddhist.’

‘I’ve resigned myself to the fact that you won’t stop talking, put my paper down and given you my full attention.’

‘Accepting the inevitable I see. You’d make a good Buddhist.’

‘Thank you.’

‘So first, what do I like about Buddhism? First, there’s the emphasis on meditation. Sitting and breathing seems like inaction, but how can working on your mind be inaction? Besides, it really sets you up for the day. By regularly clearing away the fog of your anxieties, resentments and distortions of reality you enable yourself to see more clearly, which means making better decisions. You become happier and more decisive, and that benefits you and everyone else.’

‘Right. By prioritising being over doing you enrich both being and doing.’

‘That’s the idea. The thing about meditation is that it scales well. Say you were thrown into solitary tomorrow and couldn’t see the people you loved or finish any of your projects. By letting go of your frustrations, accepting your lot, working on yourself and focusing on the simple beauty of breathing in and breathing out you could do a lot to ameliorate your situation. Look at Oscar Wilde — that’s what he had to go through and it brought De Profundis out of him.’

‘So what do you mean by meditation “scaling well”?’

‘I mean it enriches your life no matter what your life is. If you’re in solitary and can’t do much of anything, it helps you through that. But if you run a successful business and have a million other irons in the fire, it helps you with all of that too. Making the time for deep breathing doesn’t mean opting out of your responsibilities, it means removing the inner impediments to handling them. Remove all the things that block up your mind and what remain are the things that make your life better: your energy, your enthusiasm, your passion. Living in a state of “flow” rather than blockage is a profoundly energetic thing.’

‘So for the CEO, meditation’s basically a productivity enhancement tool.’

‘It’s a tool for enhancing themselves — ‘

‘Please, you’re not giving a TED talk here.’

‘ — which might lead to them being a better CEO, or might lead to them realising they’re not the right person for the job and quitting. Mindfulness just means getting the maximum juice out of whatever you’re doing. If you’re in a cell that means finding the beauty and creativity in the situation, if you’re a monk it means being really monk-like, if you’re a musician it means playing with full concentration and if you’re a CEO it means working really efficiently. You become more yourself.’

‘Aren’t you supposed to become less yourself?’

‘Kind of a paradox. The more you’re fully immersed in doing what you’re good at, the more you “lose yourself” in it. There’s no ego any more. Just “right action”.’

‘Doesn’t mindfulness mean constantly reminding yourself there’s more to life than what you’re doing?’

‘No. It means reminding yourself you’re not doing it right, because you’re bringing all kinds of distorted thinking to it and it’s producing all kinds of anxiety in you. Mindfulness means just doing it. There isn’t more to the activity, there’s less.’

‘Ah, just like Newman.’

‘Exactly. Your life is just like Newman. The beauty of mindful living is that it slows everything down, makes you calmer, shows you how unimportant all the stuff around you is — and the slower you do it the quicker it gets done, the more relaxed you are the more intently you concentrate on it, and the less seriously you take it the more fully you enjoy it.’

‘Festina lente.’

‘Wu wei, even.’

‘Whatever.’

‘So the freer you become the more your passions have a chance to manifest — ’

‘Hang on a second though. Isn’t this “express yourself” stuff very much a modern Western idea? Aren’t Buddhists supposed to forget their egoic dreams and resign themselves to their lot? To eliminate all desires, all cravings, all the things that the ego wants to pursue? Doesn’t sound very conducive to pursuing your passions, or…well, doing anything really.’

‘I haven’t fully sorted this one out yet. I’m not on board with eliminating all desires — just the harmful ones that trip me up. Of course, that’s most of them. But the passions that animate me at the deepest level — well, personally I find that the more I “clean house” and tackle my insecurity, self-doubt, jealousy and all the rest, the stronger they get. And they’re not fundamentally about self-glorification. They’re about…I don’t know. Themselves. Music wants to be played. Thoughts want to be articulated. Life wants to be lived.’

‘Wasn’t the Buddha down on all passion though?’

‘Well, not in the sense you mean where — I don’t know. Probably. Actually, probably not. I don’t know. I did say I was a half-Buddhist.’

Photo by Rogério Toledo on Unsplash

‘Well, the beauty of all this is that the guy told you to doubt everything he said and test it against your own experience. Maybe the best Buddhists are the ones who follow the Buddha the least slavishly. I notice you haven’t gotten to any of the loving-kindness stuff yet, by the way.’

‘Again, just going off personal experience, I’ve noticed an interesting connection between meditation and love. As I said, meditation makes you feel unblocked. If you’re unblocked then any positive, loving feelings you have down there are free to flow through you.’

‘True. I’ve found since meditating that loving others is less a matter of willing yourself into feeling specific emotions for specific other people, and more a matter of clearing away your anger, fear, pain and paranoia until what’s left is a sense of peace and openness. If you go around your day feeling peaceful and open, you stop seeing others as nuisances and threats. You’re free to enjoy your encounters with them in a simple, uncomplicated way.’

‘And yet you treat me as a nuisance whenever I start talking about my spiritual journey.’

‘You’re objectively a nuisance. There’s very little I can do about it. Anyway, I was going to say that there are a lot of ways you can look at the Buddhist doctrine of sunyata, or emptiness — but my take is that if you’re not complicating reality by overthinking it, telling yourself angry stories about it or projecting unreasonable desires onto it, what’s left is extremely simple and direct. Experiencing the emptiness of reality just means accepting it as it is, right in front of you — not filling it up with pointless distortions.’

‘Sounds more life-affirming than world-denying.’

‘In this reading anyway. Then you read all that stuff about extinguishing the fires of sensuality, passion and desire in the suffering-free nothingness of nirvana. And, well — ’

‘You may just be misinterpreting everything like you always do.’

‘Probably. But what about the idea that we’re supposed to destroy the ego and think of ourselves as “not-selves”? Doesn’t that make you nervous? What is the ego anyway?’

‘I think it’s anything that makes the world about you, anything you use to prop yourself up, anything that separates you from the rest of creation. All that stuff is designed to make you secure, but it actually perpetuates insecurity — the same way obsessive cleaning perpetuates OCD. And just like you don’t set out to crush OCD, you don’t set out to destroy the ego. You just notice it, see through it, accept it, handle it skilfully and compassionately, “wear it lightly”.’

‘You see a similar theme in the New Testament: stop grasping at things, let go of earthly ambitions, die to yourself, lose your life in order to find it, seek first God’s kingdom and all the rest will be added unto you.’

‘Right. The big question is just how Buddhist those teachings are — just how much Jesus meant to imply that the separate self is an illusion.’

‘Which brings us to “not-self”.’

‘Does indeed. The idea seems to be that your self isn’t the coherent, integrated entity you think it is but a loose collection of constantly shifting parts — something Freud also believed. There isn’t this solid soul that you take with you when you die. You’re a wave returning to the ocean.’

‘But you do believe in individuals and souls right? Isn’t the “wave realising it’s water” idea taking things a bit too far?’

‘Yes. I dunno. Maybe. I did say I was a half-Buddhist. I believe in the soul. But I believe in the oneness of everything too. Honestly, I think that words are traps and the way we normally conceive of identity, the soul and the afterlife is so misleading as to be wrong, so let’s say the truth lies somewhere between naïve egoism and the “not-self” doctrine and I’ve no idea where that “between” is and leave it at that.’

Photo by Iswanto Arif on Unsplash

‘I’ve noticed this thing with Buddhism where the doctrines are extremely counter-intuitive, uncompromising and extreme — the self is not a self! All is illusion! Abandon all concepts! — but the way you’re actually meant to behave is extremely moderate and relaxed — the “middle way”. The philosophy part’s so threatening and alienating that’s it’s easy to forget that the outworking of it is supposed to be chill. The whole point is to be happy.’

‘Yeah, that’s why I find the Taoist classics easier to read than the Buddhist sutras. I dunno, they just seem to insist on themselves a bit less. They don’t prove anything, they just say it. And they usually hint at the more radical stuff metaphorically, so you can take what you’re able to from the images and leave the rest.’

‘Right. Instead of hitting you with a long discourse on why you’re composed of emptiness, the Tao Te Ching gives you a charming series of pictures explaining how you’re empty and full at the same time. It’s not about a set of counter-intuitive propositions being true. It’s about everything being sort of true at once — a bit of masculine, a bit of feminine, a bit of duality, a bit of nonduality, a bit of action, a bit of inaction — a continual interplay — yin and yang.’

‘Hmm. Well maybe Buddhism’s saying the same thing. All I know is, it’s no wonder so many popularisers leave all the heavy stuff out and boil things down to “It’s basically about chilling out, living in the moment and being good to each other”.’

‘Maybe that is all it’s about.’

‘It is for me anyway. I did say I was a half-Buddhist.’