A Critique of Buddhism

by John Corbaley

I was doing some searching on Google recently and came across a piece in the online magazine Slate. It was titled “Why I gave up on Zen.” I paused, and before I hit the ‘back’ button, thought about the concept of the difficult people in our lives being our greatest teachers…so I said to myself, let’s see what he has to say; maybe I can learn something.

Rather than learning much of value and that I might find useful, most of what I found in the article was disappointing. It contained a few misperceptions about Buddhist concepts and misunderstanding of Buddhist teaching. Actually, more than a few, and it’s these misperceptions I want to talk about this morning.

The article was written by a gentleman named John Horgan. A visit to his web site finds that he is a science journalist and Director of the Center for Science Writing at the Stevens Institute of Technology. On his web site I discovered there that Mr. Horgan has written extensively on the convergence of science and spirituality with such books as Rational Mysticism and The Undiscovered Mind.

My struggle is that Mr. Horgan is neither a scientist nor a philosopher. He is a journalist, and I always thought a journalist should try to find and thoroughly research the facts before writing about them.

Much of what he says in the article misinterprets essential Buddhist teaching or shows an indifference to delve more deeply into it. According to Horgan, rebirth and Karma function to make Buddhism “functionally theistic” because, according to him, they imply a “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.”

Horgan’s view here looks at Buddhism through a very Euro-centric monotheistic perspective, linking any kind of ethics to some divine justice-giver, as if truth itself is not sufficiently legitimate to exist for its own sake, and a simple idea like the law of cause and effect, is so intelligent, it begs for some kind of anthropomorphic supreme being to author it. Here, Mr. Horgan introduces the Christian idea of intelligent design into the conversation without giving any real justification, proof, or evidence.

He reserves special criticism for meditation. After recounting some of the difficulties he experienced in the practice: the mind wandering, the distracting noises, the physical discomforts we are all quite familiar with, he decides that mindfulness meditation is simply not for him. So far, so good. Meditation is not for everyone. The problem comes in when he starts talking about its dangers for everyone.

He ignores, or worse, dangerously misinterprets decades of peer reviewed scientific research by claiming meditative practice is no more effective than simply sitting quietly, and that meditation can actually exacerbate depression and anxiety and other negative emotions in certain people. While I am sure it is true that there are some poor folks so mentally disturbed that meditation may be of very limited help to them, warning of its dangers to these few while ignoring the millions it has benefited hardly seems fair.

Not content to savage the Buddhist principles of cause and effect and the usefulness of mindfulness practice, he then turns to anatta, the doctrine of the selfless nature of reality. This, Hargan claims, is sure to create distressing sensations of unreality similar to those induced by drugs, fatigue, trauma, and mental illness. He concludes that this can lead people to see themselves as unreal and to whom human suffering and death may appear, in his words, ‘laughably trivial.’

I can only draw from my own meditative experiences to reply that this view is definitely akin to the opinion of the food critic who is reading the menu and not eating the meal. The appreciation of the selfless nature of reality is one of the most liberating concepts in Buddhist teaching, and the inability to conceive and appreciate it is one of the surest ways to keep oneself locked onto the wheel of samsara, the wandering of human existence weighed down with the imaginings of the ego, as it is relentlessly pushed and pulled by desire and aversion in the desperate struggle to prove its own existence.

No critique of Buddhism would be complete without an expose of problematic teachers like Chogyam Trungpa, whom Mr. Horgan naturally includes in his narrative, describing him as a promiscuous drunk and bully. Which, of course, he was. Yes, we have our share of teachers who have failed to live up to their own teaching. No lack of these, even here in Kansas City.

It is difficult to find any spiritual tradition in which some of the practitioners fall short of the teaching. We are human, after all. The recent revelations of priestly abuse in the Roman Catholic Church exemplify that no spiritual tradition is exempt from these kinds of missteps.

Mr. Horgan closes his piece with the view that Buddhism, like all religions, stems from our narcissistic wish to believe that the universe was created for our benefit, as a stage for our spiritual quests. He never reconciles this conclusion of his with the view that to a Buddhist, the self is an illusion.

The idea that what the Buddha saw on the night of his enlightenment was the universe as a ‘stage for his personal spiritual quest,’ is just silly. The Buddha saw the universe as a vast, eternal flux of energy and intention in which human activity was a tiny, ignorance-bound part. I guess this idea was just too hard for Mr. Horgan to get his head around.

Why is a discussion of Mr. Horgan’s piece important? I think for a couple of reasons. Because when we sit down on the cushion to meditate, we should know not only how to sit, but also why we are sitting.

It is important for everyone in this room to understand that when I say at the beginning of the service, ‘the dharma is the truth which is written in the structure of existence’; that those words have relevance to our practice, to our world view, and to our daily lives.

In the end, Mr. Horgan’s piece calls to mind one issue which is central not only to Buddhism, but to the spiritual quest of any tradition: namely that it is about the experience, not some intellectual effort to understand it by reading a book, or going to a couple of classes: reading the ‘menu’ instead of eating the meal.

I would invite Mr. Horgan to actually try eating our meal sometime. He might find something worth consuming. But it might not make for as interesting an article in an online magazine. Too bad. His loss. May he, like all beings, achieve enlightenment.

I would like to close by reciting a prayer that talks about the primacy of experience in the spiritual quest. It was written about 250 years ago by the 7th Dalai Lama, and translated by the Tibetan Scholar Glenn Mullin.

The marigolds blooming the gardens,
Embellishing the entire estate,
To dust are reduced
When come winter’s piercing storms.
Now, while radiantly beautiful,
They should be offered to the objects of refuge.
One may cherish property and wealth
Gained by cunning means,
But one day all one’s possessions
Will fall to others’ hands.
Now, while I have power over them,
May I use them to benefit the world


The river so sparklingly clear,
Meanders lazily over the plains;
One day it will disappear,
Leaving behind not a drop of water.
Now, while it flows with strength,
It should be used to irrigate the fields.
They work, the various magical crafts
For harming others and benefiting oneself;
But one day these methods are forgotten
And even their names are lost to darkness.
Now, while my mind burns clear and strong,
May I meditate on the teachings vast and profound

Nothing real stands
Behind an echoed sound; still,
When one’s voice unexpectedly echoes
In the stomach of a cave,
The mind jumps
With great strength.
Similarly this string of empty words
Has no final essence
No ultimate power or meaning;
Yet maybe it will affect my mind,
Whose nature also
In illusion is bound.