Trying Not to Start a Religion

“The Buddha tried really hard not to start a religion and failed spectacularly.”

Imagine you’re mysteriously transported back in time to the Stone Age. You manage to survive by joining a local tribe. You notice them dying left and right from poor hygiene, so you decide to teach them about things like washing their hands and maybe not pooping in the same water they drink. 

You try explaining germ theory, but it’s hopeless. All they can hear is that there are invisible bad things called ‘germs’ which must be purified through the rituals of ‘hygiene’. As invisible sources of badness, germs are obviously in the same category as evil spirits.

If you jumped forward a few hundred years and what you taught them had survived it would almost certainly have become a religion. 

You’d find the descendants of your tribe following the ‘ritual of ablution’ where before every meal the oldest male would first wash their hands up to the elbows, followed by the younger males, and finally the womenfolk. For some reason they’d wear a funny hat while doing this. 

Inevitably you’d discover multiple schisms into splinter groups who’d had violent disagreements about things like whether it was correct to wash from fingers to elbows or elbows to fingers.

Even once germ theory was discovered, they would be careful to maintain their traditions against secular practices. What was once practical would have become identity. 

Now imagine that instead of being from the future, you’re just an unusually smart and methodical guy born around 560 BC. You notice people suffering left and right which inspires you to spend seven years studying the causes of suffering. You know that some people have this mysterious thing happen to them that seems to reduce or even eliminate suffering, but no one seems to know how to reproduce it. You pay really close attention to your experience to see what causes suffering, and try all sorts of extreme practices that nearly kill you. 

Eventually you succeed and being the smart and methodical person you are, you think you can reproduce your success and decide to try and teach as many people as you can. 

It will be around 1700 years until the notion of ‘science’ is invented, and no one, including you, understands much of anything about how the natural, physical world works. People think you’re magical and try asking you all sorts of questions about the nature of the universe. You refuse to answer most of them, sitting quietly until they go away. Sometimes people get obnoxious by insisting on answers and you school them on how silly this is.

Most of the people you teach believe in magic in one form or another and you have to constantly remind them that your teachings are not magical rituals. To drive the point home, you make not ‘clinging to rites and rituals’ or relying on a god for ‘non-causal delivery’ some of the criteria for the first stage of enlightenment. 

You tell them that blind faith is not helpful and that they shouldn’t believe things just because someone tells them to or because of tradition or scripture. You repeatedly emphasize that everything you’re saying can be discovered for themselves in their own direct experience.

And you’re successful. People suffer less and boy when it works it really works. Many people stop suffering and tell others what’s possible. These people have an incredible reverence for your teachings. This is great, but unfortunately it also reinforces your reputation as some kind of magical being. 

Eventually you die after many decades of teaching. Unfortunately, your native language is only spoken with no writing system and the natural language to translate to has weird grammatical properties that you know will create endless confusion, so you warn your students not to write things down. This advice is followed for about two hundred years, after which they decide to create translations after all.

In other words, this business of not being a fully literate society really does confound things quite a bit, as no one has any direct record of what you actually said. The best they get are oral history, often in the form of bizarrely repetitive chants handed down through ten generations before finally being translated into a language with a completely different grammar.

But your students do keep your teachings alive in one form or another and they spread across the world. In every culture they adapt and change, branching into thousands of different schools of thought. Naturally, people interpret them in terms of things they already understand. It’s not uncommon for the teachings to blend with whatever religion locals practice.

Since religions are the only framework people have for bodies of knowledge related to living well, your teachings are turned into religion again and again. When people come across your nth generation students practicing, they look at their practices and chalk them up as just another set of rites and rituals done for obscure reasons. After all, sometimes ritual is just the fossilized remains of practical knowledge.

Unfortunately it’s difficult for nonpractitioners to directly see the effects of the teachings. When your followers talk about their incredible effects they’re lost among the outlandish claims made by most religions. While most of your students don’t consider you a god, they often treat you like one, and many still ascribe supernatural powers to you, which only makes people more certain that the teachings are just another religion full of strange, unfounded beliefs. 

The truth is they have accrued their share of strange, unfounded beliefs.

This is unfortunate, since what you discovered is just how things are. It doesn’t belong to you or any of your followers. It doesn’t require belief in any supernatural forces. It’s not an identity or an affiliation.

Unfortunately, this fact is seldom noticed. It’s easier to notice that, at the next temple over, they wash their hands differently. Or argue about which of seventeen kinds of Buddhism fully captures the original message, which is now completely lost. Ironically, this kind of noticing creates the suffering it was supposed to be addressing in the first place. 

It just turns out that under the noise and confusion of people’s minds is a natural state of absolute perfection. It turns out that it’s possible to suffer much less than people do. It’s not trivial, but it’s possible. It’s possible for anyone.

NB: I am not a Buddhist scholar. I imagine there are details I’ve misunderstood, but the overall picture looks pretty clear to me.