Dang Zang

Writing in the Guardian, Julian Baggini referred recently to the tendency of religious people to be critical of political or social wrongs, but to be jolly nice to the representatives of other religions. He repeats an anecdote (from Simon Blackburn) in which the representatives of various faiths react to each other’s presentations, saying, “Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great” to each other. Even when the Catholic priest argues that it’s not a question of whether it works for him, and that if they don’t believe they are damned to hell, they give the same response.

Baggini then argues that what may be going on is a matter of self-interest, along the lines of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, where the enemy is those who give up on religion altogether. There are a number of problems with this suggestion.
I don’t know whether it was in Blackburn’s original anecdote or only in Baggini’s retelling that the representatives are listed as “Buddhist, Hindu and so on”. Telling the story that way makes it easier for the reader to swallow the idea that almost all of them would adopt the “great if it works for you” attitude. It would perhaps be less believable (and therefore make the story less funny) if the Muslims, Southern Baptists, Evangelicals and Calvinists had been included.

It is therefore not really clear that “great if it works for you” is really a widespread attitude. What is also not clear is that, when it is adopted, it is based on a self-interested wilful blindness. No Buddhists that I know of, for instance, believe that because someone is a Christian they are incapable of achieving liberation. We believe that they are wrong in their belief, and that at some stage it could be a spiritual obstacle. But if it works for them now, especially if it helps them to be compassionate and tolerant – then, yes, well, great! And we have no problem recognising that they think we are wrong. All that we need to agree on is how to treat others with kindness, and that has only a limited relationship to any particular belief system.

“Great if it works for you” is therefore not a mealy-mouthed copout. It is an intelligent, mature and kind response to the varieties of human culture.

Baggini also suggests that it is a symptom of what Daniel Dennett calls “belief in belief”. The video linked here shows Dennett arguing that people who say they believe in God don’t really do so, they only believe that belief is a good thing. We can know this, he says, because those who say that they believe don’t, for instance, typically put their lives on the line for God.
This is a piece of shallow sleight-of-hand. Dennett pretends, and invites us to imagine, that people are primarily driven by logic and intellect. Dennett suggests that because somebody believes in God – which I don’t, let me say – they would not be mortally afraid of dying. This is either merely rhetorical or shows a startling lack of insight into the human condition. Look, I believe firmly that the safety systems at the Sydney Skywalk are quite adequate, but that does not stop me being too afraid to enjoy the experience. How much more hardwired are we to be afraid of dying?

Dennett, however, has a history of sleight of hand. Enjoyable and insightful as I felt his Consciousness Explained to be, I felt that the title lacked a third word: “Consciousness Explained Away” would have been more fitting. (I now see that this mock title has since been adopted by greater luminaries of the thinking world than me, but I do claim that I thought of it myself!) The “hard problem” of consciousness refers, simply put, to the question of why we are aware of our experiences. Questions such as why we react to sense impressions, why we talk about them and so on are, at least relatively, easy problems. Dennett claims to get around the “hard problem” of consciousness essentially by saying, “Let’s pretend it doesn’t exist – now look, the problem doesn’t exist.”

So where Baggini asks why religious people insist on presenting a united front, the answer is that they don’t. Some of them, perhaps many, disagree in very unpleasant ways. Some, being human, may adopt their position, whether admirable or not, out of self-interest. But surely some say “great if it works for you” out of genuine respect and tolerance.

It is now 20 years since, as the book itself explains, I was among the students taken by Lama Chime Rinpoche on a pilgrimage to his home monastery in Kham, eastern Tibet. We were the first group of westerners ever to have permission to enter that region. From Beijing via Xining and on to Jyekundo (Yushu) the first leg took us through to his former monastery, Benchen.

(Benchen in the last few years – I’m sorry, I forget who gave me this)

The party then went on to Lhasa and to Tsurphu, where the young 17th Karmapa was preparing for his enthronement. On the way back, Chime Rinpoche suggested that I write a book about the trip, and so I did. It is short, and I am the first to admit that the writing style could be improved. But that’s the person I was at the time, and the book is a journal of the trip.

Lorenz Dobrot put up the money to print the book, as well as a version in German, translated by Rosi Fuchs, which is included in this edition. Although there are only a few copies left, I’m still occasionally asked what happened to it. I had even quite forgotten that the text was still in an obscure corner of my hard drive! But a few weeks ago I noticed the old WordPerfect files, and now that we are in the era of e-books it seemed to be a good idea to bring out the “20-years-on digital edition”.

You can get it from Amazon.com here. If you’re in the UK you might prefer to get it from Amazon.co.uk here. If you don’t have a Kindle, don’t forget that you can download a (free) reader from Amazon, which gives you the advantage of seeing the book’s pictures in colour.

Today is losar (Tibetan new year’s day). As a result of the severely worsening repression in Tibet, as is evinced by the self-immolations (22 in the last three years, according to the International Campaign for Tibet) it has been widely suggested that this is not the year for the traditional jollity. Nevertheless, perhaps this is an auspicious day for this edition to be released, offering, as it does, a unique insight into a remarkable time and a special place.

Baroness Warsi has claimed that “intolerant secularisation has to be held back by reaffirming the religious foundations on which our societies are built”, while the Pope is reported to have recently attacked “atheist extremism” and “aggressive secularism”. I’m not at all sure that I would recognise “intolerant secularisation” if I came across it. “Intolerant atheism”, yes, but secularism is essentially tolerant. All it says is, “Look, believe what you like, but civic life is aimed at the common good, regardless of religion.”

The Pope’s comments suggest that atheism and secularism are related, perhaps even the same. He also said that the United Kingdom should “not obscure the Christian foundation that underpins its freedoms”. Would that be, I wonder, the Christian foundation that handed over Catholic priests as traitors to be hung, drawn and quartered? Or did the foundation get laid when we stopped doing that? Warsi and Benedict both seem to think that we need Christianity to tell us the difference between right and wrong. The evidence is not convincing.

In perhaps typically British style we bumble along, not worrying too much that church and state are still connected. The head of the Church of England is the country’s monarch, and must be a descendant of Sophia of Hanover but does not have to be interested or trained in religious matters of any sort. Oh, except for not being Catholic. It would be hard to make this up, wouldn’t it? Yet although some naive, extreme expressions of multiculturalism have lately come in for criticism, the fact is that Britain is home to multiple cultures. Along with the separation of parliament, government and the judiciary, a grown-up modern society needs a separation of church and state. It needs to be secular.

Now although I myself happen to be about as English as you can get, and was lucky enough to be educated in one of England’s finest schools and one of her finest universities, I am also a Buddhist. How did that happen? I don’t know where the original motive came from, but England’s traditions of free enquiry, free education, freedom of thought and free, well-stocked libraries certainly helped. Thank you, England!

So let there be no mistake – if you count yourself as a Christian, Muslim or Jew, then your god is absolutely not my god. I do not believe in him, and I could not respect him if I did. But that’s perfectly fine, isn’t it? We don’t need to agree on such matters, do we? We do, however, need to be kind to each other, we need to strive for wisdom, we need to develop compassion. We have to live together in the same society, to work together and enjoy each other’s company. That is why we need a secular society. We need a society that recognises people’s religious freedoms, acknowledges their differences, and that does not award status on the basis of any particular faith.

Freedom of religion must have a high priority in any decent society. True, religion must never be allowed to trump the standards of common goodness, or indeed the laws with which society tries to protect itself. In our secular society we are, I hope, quite clear that female genital mutilation is a crime. We do not want to cut off the hands of thieves, or behead anyone, not even for murder, let alone for failing to hold particular religious views. Some extreme forms of belief may demand those punishments, but a secular society ruled by common goodness will say “no”. Freedom of religion necessarily implies that no one religion should have a special place in schools, council chambers or indeed in parliament.

If British society is, while flawed, not really a bad one at all, what possible reason is there for thinking that this is due to Christian influence? Why can it not be due to the goodness of British people? The British are, after all, human, and it is humans who create goodness and beauty as well as horror. Cataloguing the evils that have been carried out in the name of Christianity is popular, but perhaps cheap. More interesting is the question of why we now reject those evils. Is it because we have a Christian society, or because, as humans, we are capable of compassion? Why do we now reject the idea of slaughtering all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, but accept the principle of “Do as you would be done by”? After all, Christianity has held out both of these as admirable. As humans, whether Christian or not, we can judge which of these approaches is worthy.

As a Buddhist, I want to live in a decent society. I do not want to live in a “Buddhist” society, whatever that is, and I certainly don’t want to live in a society dominated by the rules of any of the Abrahamic religions. Without secularism the state cannot help favouring one religion over another, and that would be a recipe for disaster.

My contribution to the discussion in the Guardian:

At last the catalogue project that I began so long ago has reached a sort of completion. Improvement will always be possible, through more detail and ironing out mistakes. But at least I now know what I’ve got, and will avoid that embarrassing moment when you start reading a wonderful text that you ordered from Snow Lion or from Wisdom only to realise that it is already somewhere on your shelves and that you first read it two or three years ago.

In the course of this work I stumbled across a surprise. If you like you can look at it directly at Amazon Books, but because these things change all the time, I also provide a screenshot here.

(Click to open a new window and see it the proper size.)

A number of misleading things should be cleared up. First of all, on some of the pages related to this book, you will even see that it is “by” Tenga Rinpoche and Alex Wilding. That is tosh. Even the statement that it is “by” Tenga Rinpoche and translated by Alex Wilding is a misleading exaggeration. Tenga Rinpoche was translated by Susanne Schefczyk, into German. What I did was translate Susanne’s German into English. That was when I was first finding my feet as a translator, and I did it for free, partly as an act of support to the Dharma, and partly to keep myself occupied and in practice in the trade that I was trying to develop. I seem to recall that Susanne herself took the self-effacing Buddhist line. I think she would almost have preferred her name not to be on it at all, but utmost to be in small print and an obscure corner. Since, however, I was effectively donating more than £1000 and was also trying to get myself established. My one condition was that my name, as the translator out of German, should be clearly visible. I must stress again, however, that my significance is way, way below that of either Tenga Rinpoche or of Susanne.

The astonishing thing, as you might have guessed, is the price! £60 to be sent the cheapest copy, a new one. £84 and no less than £175 to get hold of either of the used copies, while the more expensive new copy in exchange for no less than £185! Bear in mind that the book was small and not particularly well printed, and that the contents don’t include much that is not available in many other works from, for instance, Snow Lion Publishing.

I cannot say whether the explanation lies in the illustrations, which are colour plates of some moderately rare paintings of Bardo deities, but that is the only thing I can think of. Again, though, I must say that the colour balance in my copies (I have both the German and English versions) is really quite poor.

185 quid – wow!

http://learning.tergar.org/

It looks as if it might be quite helpful, depending what stage you are at. Anybody have personal experience?

I recently paid a bit more attention to the Istituto Lama Tzong Khapa, which is in Pisa, only just over an hour and a half drive from here. It’s associated with the FPMT, which scores highly in my book. It’s in fact a really important study centre. The website is clearly very much “under development”, so you might get a better idea from the Wikipedia entry.

OK, being very Gelug-oriented it’s not quite “my” tradition, but I’m hoping that from time to time they might have some kind of celebration, festival, or what-have-you for a broader Buddhist public. I’ll keep you informed!