Recently, I started several books, among them “Christian Philosophy and Presuppositional Apologetics Examine Buddhism: Refuting the Religion of Buddha at its foundation” by Mike Robinson.
Since the subject is one of interest to this blog, I’ve decided to take notes and respond, with an intent of correction done out loving-kindness, to the book.
In addition to correcting misinformation (cf AN 2.23), this is a wonderful opportunity to review the teachings, provide clarity, and hopefully foster a discussion for anyone interested as I review the book and respond, section by section.
A final prefatory note:
This book, though it is approximately 150 pages in length, contains only 50 pages of material at the core of it, and while it contains a number of other things (glossary, several appendices, a lengthy essay on why the author believes in God, a short explication of the four noble truths lifted directly from another website, miscellaneous additional essays, recommended reading, and a shocking 45 pages or so of advertisements for other books), a look through the foot notes showed not a single reference to, or citation of, the Pali Canon.
There are alarmingly few quotes from the Pali Canon.
-=Introduction=-
We start with this declaration “To understand Buddhism clearly, you must do two things.”
The first of those two is an odd one: to resist the urge to venerate a being which is claimed to be God.
I say this is an odd one as, when I began my journey, this was not a requirement of me. Having been an atheist my life until that point (and, in truth an atheist still, though this is not a useful term since “atheism” doesn’t tell you what someone believes, only what they don’t).
Mine began with seeking to understand my suffering. As the Buddha said, “Simply that I am beset by birth, aging, & death; by sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs; beset by stress, overcome with stress, [and I hope,] "Perhaps the end of this entire mass of suffering & stress might be known!" (AN 3.40).
He goes further with this, “for the first time, we have a worldwide religion of whom God is silent, with universal aspirations, and each person’s goal is nothingness.”
This point is bolstered by, what looks to be the only quotation from the Pali Canon: Dhammapada 200.
It is here given as “Let us live most happily, possessing nothing…”
This looks to be, from what I can tell, a translation given in “Jesus and Buddha: the Parallel Sayings,” and is fairly similar to the one given by Buddharakkhita.
Having read multiple copies of the Dhammapada (I keep two different translations as part of my regular reading), this struck me as an odd thing to say.
To start, I grabbed my copy translated by Ananda Maitreya.
It reads “having no obstacles at all.”
Next, here is the translation given by Narada Thera, “We who have no impediments.”
Noted in this copy is that the word in question is “kiñcana,” impediments in question being such as the three root poisons.
This is stated likewise in Nyanatiloka’s manual of terms and doctrines, “‘something’, i.e. something evil that sticks or adheres to character.” [ie the three unwholesome roots]
So it would seem the “possessing nothing” means just that: possessing no habitual defect in character and thus living happily.
Another way this freedom expresses (‘possessing nothing’) is in the eradication of wrong views on the self, being free of perceptions like “I” and “mine” which lead to clinging and suffering (living unhappily).
See also MN 22 and AN 4.173.
There is no second thing that one must do.
The second item reads, in full, “Second, there actually may be hope in the hopeless idea of becoming nothing in Nirvana. Perhaps, nothing is truly everything, or at least something. Oh my! This is confusing. Good thing Buddhism is false and impossible.”
He makes a number of elementary mistakes. Nibbana, of course, isn’t “nothing.” If it were nothing, it wouldn’t be nibbana. The idea of everything being in unity or multifarious is addressed in SN 12.48.
There are other errors here, but to document them all would take more time than I have for this.
Before moving on to the next chapter, I’d like to address three further things.
The first is to note that he repeatedly imputes throughout this chapter, and elsewhere that Buddhism teaches that everything is an illusion or that nothing exists. Both are false.
Second, on page 7 he asserts that the Buddha, and by extension buddhadhamma, taught and holds that there is no self. This is a wrong view rejected in a number of places. For example, MN 2 teaches that the views “I have a self” and “I have no self” are both considered wrong views. Further, in SN 44.10 when asked point blank to confirm or deny a self, the Buddha remained silent.
Third, is a brief explanation of the author’s approach.
He’s coming from the presuppositional school of apologetics which is closely connected to Reformed theology.
In a greatly simplified way, the presuppositional method is to show that to even attack the concept of god, one must, unknowingly, make use of the very facts one is trying to dispute.
There is going to be significantly more discussion of this through out our reading of the book.
This concludes an examination of the introduction.
Chapter One will follow soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment