I’ve been reading into Buddhism recently. It started with an interest in meditation as something to help with the polyphasic sleep. Suby’s sister had given him a book called “Buddhism, Plain and Simple,” which he loaned to me when I first expressed the interest. I never knew how much I didn’t know about Buddhism!
First of all, many people consider Buddhism to be a religion. I used to be one of those, out of ignorance. It’s true that many forms of Buddhism are religions, including worship and rituals, but other forms are just philosophies or less. The particular form of Buddhism that I’m interested in is just a mindset from which to perceive the world. Most importantly, it doesn’t seem to be at all incompatible with atheism and rationalism. I haven’t yet figured out if there’s a particular name for this school (it’s not mentioned in the book) but it seems closest to the Theravada school of Buddhism. So when I talk about Buddhism, this is the version I mean.
Atheism does not technically imply no religion; anyone who denies the existence of supernatural beings can be called an atheist. But in the modern use of the word, atheists also reject religion and most of the hooey that comes with it. Religion, again, depends on your exact definition, but I’m going with what I call the ‘mainstream’ definition which excludes cults and philosophies.
Buddhism, at its most basic, is about seeing the world as it really is. This aligns nicely with rationalism, don’t you think? It does not conflict with science. It doesn’t offer alternate explanations for anything. It does not present a world that is at all different from the world described by science and reason. It’s just a different way of thinking about the exact same world.
Let me give an example of how to think of the same thing in two different, yet equally correct, ways. Consider a bubble. A bubble is a bunch of air and water molecules all behaving in concert. They don’t try to make a bubble; each molecule is just interacting with other nearby molecules in a fixed way. That’s how science sees the world: every detail. So is it really there? Is there such a thing as a bubble at all? Of course there is. We all know what a bubble is, how it looks, how it acts. This is Buddhism. A person can subscribe to both models at the same time. In fact, it can even help to be able to use either model.
It’s worth thinking about.
