I can’t believe it’s July already, and that means it’s been 1.5 months since I returned from Nepal. I’ve had a lot of time to read some of the books I brought back from there as well as new books that I’ve bought since returning.
What fascinates me about Buddhism is its rich textual history. This is very similar to what originally fascinated me about the ancient Near East, from which the Biblical corpus originates. Buddhism is not well understood by most Americans, and those who do understand it well are usually low-level practitioners who have cherry-picked what they believe about it while largely discarding the rest. As such, what we see of Buddhism here is usually a pale reflection of the true cultural milieu that is encompassed within it.
Lest church-goers get up-in-arms about this, I’m not interested in being a Buddhist practitioner, but I simply can’t seem to stop my fascination with the overall history.
It’s important to note that Catholic Christians use a Bible that contains many additional texts that are not included in the Protestant Christian Bible. There are slight variants among other sects, too, as I understand it. Moreover, Mormons claim to be Christians, but accept a whole corpus of additional texts that everybody else rejects. And Judaism gets pretty annoyed with all of that, adhering strictly to the Hebrew Bible, or what Christians call the “Old Testament”.
This isn’t tremendously unlike Buddhist sects. Hinduism acts something like Judaism in this respect, providing much of the foundation on which Buddhism was originally built, being the religion that Siddhartha Gautama was born into. Moreover, while Theravada Buddhism tries to adhere to a more strict tradition that (supposedly) closely follows the original Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism incorporates much more esoteric and syncretic traditions. Then you have American Buddhism, which isn’t a specific sect, but more of a tradition here, which largely borrows what it likes and discards the rest. This, amazingly, is actually quite like modern Christianity among the populace, in which a person might attend a holiday service once or twice a year, sets a foundation for belief in God, but doesn’t really go farther than that (not that there aren’t serious adherents of the other sects of Buddhism in the United States, only that this is the general thrust).
I’ve long been drawn to the Himalayas because of their enormousness and beauty, but also because of their mystery, the foreign cultures around them, their distant realms. It’s like I have these core memories of far away places I saw in library books when I was a kid, which took root and proved a valuable source of fascination for me. I’ve been there now, but I know there is still so much more out there.
A lot of Christians are afraid to engage with other cultures. I think this is largely because we do so much in the Church here to think of everything as “us vs. them”. Atheists vs. Christians. Democrats vs. Christians (lol). Evolution vs. Creationism. Muslims vs. America. It’s awful, it’s truly terrible, but it infects almost everyone who grows up in the church, so it’s no surprise there is so much belligerence against ideas that are seen as even slightly antithetical to Sunday School values. It’s amazing we have democracy at all, but there is a strange religious worship of the founding fathers, which I guess is not all bad since the end result of general, if not grudging tolerance, is still foundational.
One of the great challenges of studying any religion academically is finding good, objective sources. People tend to think in historically-determined paradigms about their faith, so simply going to the nearest church/temple/mosque and hoping to find objective opinions is asking a bit too much sometimes. And going to those places is not bad, since that is where you can build relationships with people, but it’s not always the best place for objective study. In that “Seven Types of Atheism” book I’ve mentioned, the author at one point states that it was around the late 1700s and early 1800s that hyper-literal interpretation of the Bible became common. I don’t have any background on that history specifically, but if the author is correct, that might actually explain why churches these days are so obsessed with a 6-day creation of the universe, not because the Bible purports to be explicitly literal in every aspect, but because this was popularized several hundred years ago. (It’s also exceptionally funny how the whole “one day is like a thousand years to God” passage has come to be specifically applied to creation, for whatever reason, such that quite a number of people believe the earth was created 6000 years before the time of the Bible)
It wasn’t until I got to college that I learned how to really study these things. I was devastated in high school to realize – fully realize – that Hebrew was not the oldest language. Which is funny, because the Bible never even claims this, it’s just one of those default beliefs born from the ignorance of Sunday school.
Sorry, soapbox time.
First of all, Hebrew as we know it is written in Aramaic script, which wasn’t adopted for the language until the time of the Assyrian captivity. Before that, they used a script known as Paleo-Hebrew [in which we have many fascinating inscriptions], but, from what I’ve read, early traces of Hebrew, regardless of the script, don’t really appear before 1200-1400 BC or so, and the language itself likely originated from some version of Old Canaanite (and we know that Ugaritic is very similar to Hebrew, too). Sure, people like Moses and Abraham were likely still people, but they probably didn’t speak Hebrew, which is actually pretty consistent with the Bible, and few people seem to understand this. So yeah, young me learns that Hebrew isn’t the oldest language and has a slight crisis of faith before getting my head around it all, but that’s how bad education in the church is, so…yeah, that’s why churches are not great sources of objective information. Among many, many other reasons. [Some pastors are quite knowledgeable, though, but it’s important to realize that seminary degrees emphasize theology over history and archaeology]
When it comes to Buddhism, though, there is an added element of mystery, since not even half of the Buddhist corpus of texts has been translated into English. Not to mention, these are harder to understand because they originate in unfamiliar cultural contexts, such that much of the symbology and language are lost on those of us who grew up in the West. So when you first see something like “tripitaka”, it’s kind of intimidating until you realize that it has that good old Aryan root of “tri” that means “three”, and then you just need to know that “pitaka” means “basket”, this being a term used to refer to a tripartite scriptural collection known as the “three baskets”, if only people would simply call it that instead of insisting on using the original!
It’s kind of like Latin and Greek terminology used for medical reference. “Encephalon” is an intimidating word if you keep coming across it, until you realize it literally means “in the head”, what we call the brain. But it’s way more intimidating when it appears in the original, since we don’t typically use that word. You start doing that for every single religious concept, and it gets hard to understand anything until you become familiar with the terms. I’m finally able to remember things like “dharma” and “sangha”, but it didn’t necessarily come easily. Imagine if, instead of using the term “righteousness” in church services, we insisted on using the original Greek “dikaiosune”. Ugh. But that’s exactly what’s happening when some of these more distant religions are translated into English, as the concepts aren’t always easy to translate and don’t have an established history of being translated in a specific way.
[Did you know that “Lucifer” is not in the Bible? The name Lucifer is the Latin translation given to the Hebrew name Satan, because it means something like “light bringer”, which apparently seemed an adequate translation for the Greek “morning star”, associated with Satan purely by tradition]
When I started digging into the history of the region of Tibet, I also stumbled across a fascinating religion known as Bon. Supposedly, it was the religion that preceded Buddhism in Tibet, and incorporates many animistic traditions. But it’s also potentially a strange hybrid that claims a Buddha-like founder not all too long before Buddhism actually arrived. It’s still practiced in far off places, but was widely replaced by Buddhism otherwise, with some hints of animosity between the two. The artistic styles appear to be very similar, and both use the Tibetan language, so it’s a very interesting religion that has really captured my attention. I can’t help but wonder, “What, then, was before Bon?” And that’s where history starts to go cold and the archaeological record begins to dry up. I’m deeply curious to learn.
I need this level of study in my life. See, ancient texts can be very mysterious, but that doesn’t mean they need to be a mystery. This is why I’ve started learning the Tibetan script, with the hopes of learning the language itself, with the hopes of studying these mysteries in greater detail.
People get twitchy over things like this, so I want to be clear I’m not interested in Buddhism from a spiritual perspective, though I do want to understand what it actually says and why it says it. But I do want to be able to engage more closely with its practitioners, to understand their world view, their cosmology, how this shapes their daily lives and to discover what can really be learned about its origins and the trajectory of history in that region. How does it shape their lives, help them live? Does it possibly introduce any problems for them at the same time? I simply can’t shake my curiosity.
For what it’s worth though, my curiosity is pretty insatiable. I’d still like to read the Apocrypha of the Catholic canon, when I find the time, which I believe includes some of the inter-testamental literature that greatly explains the Judaism of Jesus’ time. I wouldn’t mind understanding Zoroastrianism a bit better, too. Hinduism is still on the backburner for now, especially while I’m reading through Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible, which is excellent. Wasn’t I going to read William Dever’s magnum opus, too?
Sigh. One step at a time.