I was just talking with a friend about the differences and similarities between Judaism and Buddhism. It makes for an interesting starting point in explaining what Buddhism is. It's too broad, but narrowing back to the points one might cover in such a discussion works. We spent about half an hour talking about that theme, related to him leaving town (Bangkok) soon after; that's about right for how long such a thing would take.
No matter what writing or other channel one uses setting up an audience perspective, who you are talking to, is very important. Before you do much writing it seems like talking to everyone, adopting a general listener perspective, would be completely workable. In actual practice that doesn't work very well. We are accustomed to communicating things to people in different ways, and "talking out into the world" only works for some subjects. You have to assume what people already know, for example, or match use of language to what people can relate to. Doing that "in general" is problematic, especially related to narrowing down a very broad set of ideas to what one might be able to say in 10 minutes or so. We had a great discussion, and already had a feel for what each other might already understand, so all that worked out.
I'll start with a bit he told me about Judaism, but cut that part short, because it's interesting and somewhat related but not the main part of what I'm trying to share here. Then I'll cover passing on a short take on what the Christian perspective is. Odd, right; everyone knows that, don't they? Maybe not. I live in a Buddhist country, for example, in Thailand, and for people here it's a foreign religion.
Judaism
It's far from intended as a summary of what Judaism is all about but that friend made some interesting points, which I'll share an abbreviated version of. The obvious qualifications apply: I won't get what he meant completely right in my own summary, and he was only breaking off a part of the broad set of ideas that comprise Judaism to share them, based within a fairly limited scope conversation. I'm not saying this is inaccurate, but a lot more is being left out than included. Framing these ideas properly within the rest of what hasn't been expressed wouldn't be possible using only assumptions and extrapolation. It's still interesting though. I cut the material detail back even further to avoid making mistakes in interpretation, since I'm sure I didn't completely "get" what he was saying, only hearing part of a broad set of related ideas.
A main theme was that it's within basic human nature to desire things, and it's seen as ok within Judaism. This was framed as a response to his take that Buddhism is really about cutting off all desires, simply eliminating wanting anything to achieve a very unusual form of inner peace. That's not right, really, but I'll get to that part. It's partly right.
Of course Judaism sets up plenty of limitations about what you shouldn't want, or shouldn't do, or experience (eating pork, murder, and so on). We didn't get into all that. The idea was that an interesting and novel form is set up for framing desires, and for satisfying them. It's fine to want things, if they aren't prohibited, and fine to experience the things you want to experience, but you have to be thankful and receptive in very specific ways. It's a form of communion with God and the rest of reality to be given things (with "given" here used in the broad sense, including earning them, in a conventional sense, or granted potential to experiences by chance). Acceptance of positive things is responded to with a form of prayer, a step that occurs before you have the experience. Like saying the blessing, right? Just extended a lot further, across a lot of the scope of human experience. It almost sounded more like a mindfulness related take on life, to keep track of all positive things as they happen to you, to emphasize self awareness and conscious experience of momentary reality.
To me this is interesting because it frames human experience in a different way. Prohibitions and ethical guidelines, what you should do, are different kinds of things, and this enters into a different kind of experiential space. It makes a lot of life experience a holy sort of undertaking. Not just eating, as I took it many kinds of experiences, or as I took it all positive kinds. Adjusting the form and perspective of routine activities, or special events and circumstances, frames much more of life experience within the scope of religious practice than occurs within Christianity. Everything one experiences throughout their lives relates to God's setting things up, in Christianity, but the moment to moment experience isn't framed within religious practices, as it's commonly taken. Christian teachings are much more active related to telling you what not to do and what general perspective to take up, then moment to moment you take it from there yourself, the form is a bit open.
This has been barely a shell of what I understood him to be saying, but I'll move onto the difference between that and Christianity, as I interpret it, and try to clarify this a little further through contrast.
Christianity
He asked me about the Christian worldview, how it works out, moral guidelines and restrictions, adjustment of ordinary perspective. People in the US just assume that everyone knows that, right? There they kind of do. Even someone raised to reject it would have some idea what they are rejecting, even if everyone isn't really on the same page about how it all maps out.
I just saw a fragment of an interview with Richard Dawkins, this one, which I may or may not get around to finishing, and it's strange to me how modern atheists seem to take on and reject relatively unsophisticated takes on Christianity. The most literal forms are a bit absurd: God looks like Zeus, he lives in the sky, Jesus is his son, you are following rules in order to gain admission to heaven, angels are related in some way, the Devil is out to get you, you can sin all you want, you just have to ask for the slate to be wiped clean and it's all good again. Dropping out the most absurd half still leaves lots of relatively absurd parts.
To back up, I studied religion in a university program, or in two of them, really. The second focused only on interpreting limited religious scope as philosophy but the first included actual religion classes, not philosophy-context versions. To put details to that I studied religion and philosophy, focusing on Buddhism, in an undergrad program at the University of Colorado, and comparative philosophy for an MA at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. And I'm an industrial engineer, which I studied at Penn State, but that doesn't relate. I've considered different forms of religion a good bit. Study of Islam came up more than Judaism, but I covered quite a bit on Christianity and focused most on Buddhism.
This gets odd because what I accept as the most sophisticated form of Christianity and that answer to how it defines a standard American's worldview are two completely different things. Funny how that goes. The same comes up in Buddhism; the core message and practices I don't see as overlapping much at all with a conventional take or worldview here in Thailand. Even among monks, to some extent, but I probably won't fill that part in much here. I was ordained as a monk here once, for two months, with an earlier post here on how that went. Let's break all that apart then. I'll start with how I see Christianity as two different things, how people tend to take it, what I see as a more mature and developed form.
I can't do justice here to the range of how religions are interpreted; that's too long a subject for a 1500 word blog post only about that. We reviewed a relatively old work on that theme, from 1979, that mapped out some interesting ideas on that, James Fowler's Stages of Faith, described in summary form in this related reference.
In a basic form Christianity is interpreted as a set of rules, an afterlife scheme, and an explanation for things people couldn't otherwise know (who started the world, what the earlier form of it was, what happens after death, is there a soul or spiritual form of people). Those parts should be familiar to most. You can pick and choose which parts to take up or leave aside, of course.
In answering my friend's question this was more or less what I focused on, about how Christianity tends to define an American worldview. Rules stand out; you should or shouldn't do a lot of things. Stay within those bounds and in general the more prescriptive parts, about what you should do, or general approach, can be a bit flexible. It doesn't necessarily relate to momentary perspective all that much. Ideally of course I think it should; I'll get into more of that related to what a more sophisticated take might be.
Jesus taught about being more compassionate, about seeing yourself as connected to others, as here to help others as much as to help yourself (or more, one might reasonably interpret). All this works well from a practical standpoint, and not just as a set of rules to follow, when you consider that your connection with your family, friends, co-workers, employment context, country, social groups, and so on really do define you.
The more you consider all of those ties and demands as important the better a person you turn out to be. Your own longer term good follows.
Beyond just being external rules to follow, or break, all the different ethical short-cuts also limit your support of and connection to those around you (lying, stealing, treating people unfairly, failing to be empathetic and supportive to others, etc.). Benefiting others benefits you. To the extent you are reliable, consistent, supportive, and so on you are a good friend, family member, employee, and social group member and all those connections will be stronger. Only following a list of 10 or more restrictions doesn't help to highlight that. Of course that's not exactly where the Old Testament left off, but that is a main difference in the two sets of ideas.
The most mature perspectives on religion develop this, and set aside the mythology. Jesus was a person but it's not necessary to believe that he performed miracles, or was a divine being in some way, or that he talked to the Devil like my friend and I conversed.
The mythology is what people like Richard Dawkins tend to attack. They want to accept that you can just assume the ethics and social connections are important, and take them up and leave aside all the rest. What they don't realize is that this also works as a mature interpretation of Christianity, that it is really the point, or also the point of any other religion.
I've taken ethics classes, about the study of morality, and another part they miss is that it's not so easy to derive what Jesus taught as what we should do, as a positive approach to ethics and reality in general. I'm not getting into all that here, just suffice it to say that it really doesn't work to use a standard approach to get to the same general context (eg. accept Kantian ethics derivation, or Utilitarian / Consequentialist versions instead). Those approaches take the short-cut of heading for an end point they already accept, basic Christian and Buddhist morality, more or less. They gloss over that what seems to be a complete and independent derivation really isn't that at all. You already know what "doing the right thing" is because it's in the air; all that has been an underlying theme in every organized society since prior to known history. If it wasn't people couldn't collect into an organized society; there would be chaos instead. That does come up in places from time to time but there's a function in order; it tends to spread.
In the end I told that friend that Christianity asks us to put others above ourselves, to focus on the interests and needs of other people. To me that is completely consistent with everything else I've said here, even though if what I mean by that isn't clear then it wouldn't seem so. In the end that's really a pursuit of our own highest good, our own self-interest, because we really are linked in with other people in countless ways.
Jordan Peterson gets all this; the people who reject what he says about religion don't get him. An example: he admits that there is an appeal for successful men to have many physical or relationship partners, since they can. An example like Tiger Woods might come up. It's obvious enough why that doesn't work out in his own case; that typically prevents a successful monogamous relationship from succeeding. Someone like Donald Trump might seem to be able to cheat the system, to have a wife and experiences outside that relationship. But then he has two ex-wives now, and others end up identifying people for who they really are related to their values, as in his case. It's atypical for an incriminating voice tape to turn up but that would come up in different ways. It's not an isolated example; practicing generosity or empathy pays similar returns, and so on.
Buddhism
One mistaken take on Buddhism is that it suggests that people should cut off all desire, get rid of attachments of all forms, which will result in achieving an unconventional neutral perspective, and "inner peace." Taken the right way all that sort of works but it's just as wrong as it is right, and it's much more incomplete than it is descriptive. I'll pass on how I explained it.
Buddhism is about limiting attachments, about examining parts of a worldview and personal perspective and discarding what doesn't work. What makes the cut-off or fails to is problematic to describe in broad terms. The introspection / review process is a methodology, not a form of external mapping of that sort. There is a good bit of ethical guidance in the core teachings, but that's only one part of a set of 8 main types of teachings. I have a graphic about that handy:
Ok, maybe it touches on a couple branches. That's only one broad, general model of what Buddhism is, so relying on that as a complete description only goes so far. And it only breaks teachings and subject scope into 8 parts, which is of limited helpfulness, since detailed review follows or else it's meaningless.
A more detailed idea mapping makes things worse than they might really be, since there are a lot of different starting points and relatively equivalent explanations for different parts:
In the end for me Buddhism is really a system of introspection and adjustment of self-definition and worldview, a set of ideas I'll get back to developing just a little more.
Thais don't necessarily take it that way, even though 90% of them are Buddhist. They take it as explanations for supernatural reality, as ethical guidance, and so on, all a close parallel to how Christianity is most commonly interpreted in the US. Go figure. People get it that meditation is a part of it but even their take on meditation and mindfulness practices (two related but different things) tend to not be mature, in my experience.
They think meditation helps you accumulate spiritual good credit, karma or merit. Sort of, maybe, but there is also an introspective aspect, which is probably more of the main point. It's not an ordinary form of introspection, and I can't really do justice to describing how it's different in a short space. Mindfulness is about staying calm and consistent, being able to apply rules in different circumstances, but it's also a practical tool for clearly observing a layer of reality that usually goes completely unnoticed. It helps you unpack what is typically only included as subconscious experience. That should ring a bell, for students of psychology. Being present in the moment isn't nearly as simple as it seems, and the inputs in how we interpret reality and what we react to aren't simple at all.
One might wonder what parts of self, normal experience, or reaction should be "cut out of" normal perspective and life practices, or at least what I'm claiming. If Buddhism doesn't reject desire and does reject some view of self what is being retained, and what is left aside? It's not so simple, but engaging such ideas is critical. You drop what doesn't work, and keep what does. There's not really as much clear, external, well-defined guidance for that as one might think. In a developed conventional religion it might seem that there definitely would be, but to me that's not really what Buddhism is. The starting point is your own perspective, life experience, and momentary experience of reality--only that. As you delve into what you think you are, and what you really are, you untangle the knots of all sorts of assumptions.
An example: it would be easy to define yourself based on what you own, in a consumer oriented society. It's relatively low-hanging fruit, but examining the role of that within your own worldview could turn up that you've accepted the assumed importance of this as an external assumption, and you could later also drop it.
An example: that friend I started out mentioning talking to was moving without owning much; this is a very practical approach to experienced reality. For some it would be natural to own a lot of clothing, furniture, electronics, collections of goods, and so on, but keeping all that limited simplifies your life. The desire to always own more only complicates it. This kind of realization would only work so well in the form of external guidance: "don't own a lot of things." If someone could unpack what they think about a lot instead, what causes them stress, what goals they serve that can be cut back or simply eliminated, then giving themselves this advice works much, much better.
I'm into tea, and write more about that subject than Buddhism (here), and it comes up a lot related to people collecting teaware (or even tea itself). Part of that is functional, but it also seems to become just a normal way of relating to things, that you mark out how much you enjoy a subject by how much you own related to it. It can be a habit to collect things. It's not exactly a vice but examining why it happens could be informative, and dropping it could free up space for working on something else. You can only make tea in one device at a time; owning dozens of devices isn't necessarily functional, it's closer to collecting artworks.
Of course that's just an example. In different individual cases different coarse findings would turn up earlier on, then more and more subtle levels of understanding and adjustment could occur. The past and future are particularly fruitful areas to consider. Regrets, worry, and even anticipation can cause people a lot of stress. It's easier to say "just live in the moment" than it is to let the past and future go, and only deal with what is actually occurring in the present. The tools of meditation and mindfulness help with this; they turn up what is simmering beneath the surface in your mind, and what is weighing down present moment perspective, in two different but related sets of ways.
I could keep going in lots of directions from there but that covers the main point, fleshing out what a friend and I talked about over the course of a half an hour or so. Buddhism isn't about rejecting any normal view of reality, just uncovering what goes into one and improving it, little by little. It's a negative process in the sense that things are removed or dropped, instead of added. The end point is kind of a funny thing; eventually one gets to a purer form of more direct experience. I'm not so sure about "enlightenment" or that process ever being completely finished; I guess that has to be a real thing. It's generally as well to not worry too much about that.
So a Buddhist could definitely have a family, or own things, take up hobbies, exercise, and so on. They would generally try to be positive and helpful to others, and take a leaner approach to material things, to not focus on them. Really it's more about perspective than it is material ownership or following rules though. It would be better to have more stuff and keep the perspective lighter, or really to do both, to focus more on positive forms of experience and less on piling up things and accumulating status.
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