What Comes After Buddhism?

Last updated on: March 2, 2017 at 9:36 am by Carl Gregg

What Comes After Buddhism? 2017-03-02T09:36:43-05:00 Carl Gregg

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My tradition of Unitarian Universalism is known for seeking wisdom from all the world’s religions, balanced with the insights of modern science. But in the nineteenth century, most Unitarian and Universalist congregations were not open to the world’s religions equally. Rather, they were often among the most liberal Christian congregations of their time. Compared to most other Christian traditions, nineteenth-century Unitarian and Universalist did tend to allow congregants more room to question traditional dogma, and there was often more emphasis on following Jesus’s ethics rather than worshipping him. But within most historically Unitarian or Universalist congregations, it was well into the twentieth-century before Christianity became “one among many” world religions, rather than “the one” most important religion. And while there is plenty of room within the big tent of Unitarian Universalism to identify as a UU Christian (among many other possible dual identities), there is also a sense in which Unitarian Universalism is one example of what can come “after Christianity.” Likewise, there is a sense in which Ethical Humanism is an example of what can come “after Judaism.”

While both traditional Judaism and Christianity are also very much still around, I have been thinking recently about the various trajectories that religious traditions can take, while reading the Buddhist teacher and scholar Stephen Batchelor’s latest book After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age**.** In the spirit of full disclosure, it’s a fairly academic book, published by Yale University Press. So although there is a lot I appreciate about Batchelor’s approach, be forewarned that the book is not the most accessible for newcomers to Buddhism.

From a more positive light, Batchelor’s new book is a synthesis of the perspective he has been working out through more than thirty years of Buddhist scholarship (ix). In 1983, he published his first book, Alone With Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism. During the intervening three decades some of his other books include The Faith to Doubt: Glimpses of Buddhist Uncertainty, Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening, and Confession of a Buddhist Atheist. The driving question he has carried through his more than three decades of publications has been “What does it mean to practice the dharma of the Buddha in the context of modernity?” (ix).

And just as a modern, secular, Enlightenment perspective once led Christians on a Quest for the Historical Jesus, so too a modern, secular, Enlightenment perspective has led Batchelor and others on a Quest for the Historical Buddha. Buddha, of course, is not the birth name of a historical figure. Just as Christ is not Jesus’s last name (it’s a title meaning “anointed one”) and Gandhi’s real name is Mohandas not Mahatma (a title meaning “Great Soul”), so too Buddha is a title meaning “Awakened One.” The historical Buddha’s name was Siddhartha Gautama, who lived in ancient India c. 480 – c. 400 BCE (x). One aspect of the Quest for the Historical Buddha is seeking to remove the accretions of dogma and tradition that have evolved over the years to uncover the actual teachings of the historical Buddha (ix).

So what do you find if you go back to the earliest Buddhist texts such as the Pali Canon? Similar to early Christianity, you find some surprisingly egalitarian passages—that all people, men or women, lay or ordained, are all equal. I am not trying to say that either early Buddhism or early Christianity correspond precisely to twenty-first century understandings of gender as a social construction, but in both cases some of the most patriarchal passages seemed to have been added after the founder’s death by followers who became orthodox hardliners (12-13).

All that being said, here’s the much more radical implication that can follow from the question “What does it mean to practice the dharma of the Buddha in the context of modernity?” It can mean that although one continues to be interested in the quest for discovering what the historical Buddha actually said and did, one may decide that even if archeologists somehow discovered tomorrow that Siddhartha Gautama was an unrepentant male chauvinist, one would maintain a commitment to gender equality in one’s own contemporary Buddhist practice.

Tomorrow, I will say more in a follow-up post on “From ‘Buddhist Secularity’ to ‘Secular Buddhism.’“

The Rev. Dr. Carl Gregg is a certified spiritual director, a D.Min. graduate of San Francisco Theological Seminary, and the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick, Maryland. Follow him on Facebook (facebook.com/carlgregg) and Twitter (@carlgregg).

Learn more about Unitarian Universalism: http://www.uua.org/beliefs/principles

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