I would expect even from my initial post my perspective would be clear, or maybe it wouldn't be. To me Buddhism starts from the teachings of the Buddha in any form; reading the versions of his own words as passed down, from personal guidance from a meditation master, from reading a popular book on the subject, or from exposure to a blog or online discussion.
Of course there are qualifications about that; some forms of Buddhism seem more valid and useful than others, and some seem essentially wrong to me. Lighter expressions of "go with the flow" do communicate some of the essence of Buddhism but generally don't get to what I see as the original ideas and practice. For me different versions are potentially more applicable for different people, so for some a lot of reading of theory may be a great place to start, and for others meditation practices, or others yet highly interpreted versions of core teachings translated to a modern context and practices. This idea of many paths to a similar goal is not limited to Buddhism; it's part of the earlier diverse Indian tradition we refer to as Hinduism, which includes pantheism, mythology, references to social role practices, and lots of other ideas.
As I see it the degree to which these ideas or practices improve ordinary every-day, momentary experience, simplify it and remove problems a person conventionally causes through errors in perspective, to that extent it is matching the original aims of Buddhism.
Learning Buddhism from a novice?
But the discussion I mentioned itself is also informative, from that friend, so I'll cite it here, in it's entirety to preserve not just the individual points but the whole context.
In response to an initial discussion of Buddhist theory she wrote:
Let me ask you something. Can you become a really good chef by studying food science?
Your approach to Buddhism is the same as tea!
You can't become a carpenter by analyzing the book of carpentry, you can't understand tea by reading about what others have said alone.
If you stick to standing outside, you will never get the feel of what's inside.
It's like someone had gone rock climbing and analysed the route for you. And by listening you think you understood the very route, but another climber tells you another route, and you thought..wait, I thought at the rock you had to use your grip instead of stretching your leg far to reach the next holding!?
It's like a carpenter practicing all his life to get his skills just right and wrote a book about it, and although after you read it you understand exactly what tools to use for which type of wood, you understood every single word in this book, but you are still not a carpenter.
There are 20 something different words for "snow or ice" for the Eskimos, but without going to the north pole you wouldn't be able to recognize the meaning of such words.
Don't you get it? If your feelings and sensations doesn't match, you'll never believe or truly understand what people are trying to say.
Experience is different to knowledge, and language can not explain experience or skill.
The limitation of language is this, for something abstract or experiencial, it can not be exact. For e.g, in meditation there are many different states,
In the beginning if I say you'd experience numbness, or pain, do you think these two words means exactly the same physical sensation to different people?
And if I had experienced this does it mean everyone else would experience the same sensation? No!
So how can you talk about Buddhism when a lot of his teaching was for really high level yogi who could do a lot of things such as controlling their breath till the extend they don't need to breath much at all!??????????? So let's see you read a text and become a yoga practitioner?
One can't even understand the terminologies of yoga unless one tries to practice it!!!!
If you've never had an ice-cream, and I try to describe it to you, do you think you'll know exactly how it taste like?
I mean well but this is already stretching what I can do with language. To be honest I am giving up.
To which I responded:
You assume I'm not a high level yogi. Do you know that? I've practiced a good bit of meditation, some guided by monks that have practiced all their lives. I've practiced some yoga, and have been an ordained monk. I have experienced some unusual effects of unusual meditative states.
But I'm not an advanced yogi, and we see the teachings and scope of Buddhism differently. The Buddha taught different paths are valid, and therefore taught in different ways, ideas that could sound contradictory or could relate to different valid approaches. All would need to tie back to personal experience, to essentially be about that, but different focus on meditation would be a part of it.
I've also drank a good bit of tea, and taught myself to cook, and done a lot of rock climbing, and built a house once. For all these things one benefits from experienced assistance but you don't need to learn from a master chef and so on. It could speed up the process and help you get further but for each if you declined to start until you had the ideal support you'd never get past frying an egg, or being able to only scramble on rocks instead of climbing 5.8 and then 5.9, and so on.
We do disagree on how valid Buddhism is for people that aren't essentially enlightened. Do you think the dalai lama is enlightened, or Thich Naht Hanh, or was Buddhadasa Bhikku? If not is what they say still valid and useful? I've attended a number of talks by senior monks here and they imply the opposite, that beginning and intermediate practice is really as much the point, and that they are speaking as fellow practitioners, not Buddhas.
Maybe your approach to tea is the same; you would only value hearing from a Master, and devalue your own experience of drinking a cup of tea, and not care to hear from others that haven't served half a lifetime as an apprentice. I suppose there could be something to that, but to me it ignores the fundamental experience, drinking tea, to focus on a higher goal, transcendent knowledge and practice of tea.
To talk more about Buddhism we would both have to assume there is some value and validity in talking about Buddhism. So even though life experience and practice is the final goal there really is no point in discussing approach, the path. It ends up quite like that for most people, for different reasons, more often due to a lack of interest.
In reading back through what you wrote I missed one interesting analogy, about Eskimos and ice. You said I'd need to go to the North Pole to experience this ice, right? But Eskimos don't live there; further South instead. The error is telling; I could go to Alaska and learn the same thing, but if I thought I needed to go to the North Pole I'd never make it.
Perhaps I never mentioned I was a snowboarder and mountaineer as well. I'm intimately familiar with different kinds of snow conditions, just in a different context. I know how they feel to snowboard or ski on, and to snowshoe through. I know how to dig an avalanche pit (a way to assess snow conditions), and although I'm not trained enough to really assess the findings, and shouldn't be in high risk areas to begin with, I know enough to identify what those areas are, and the layers of different type of snow mean something to me.
To me so it is with Buddhism. You learn by starting to learn, from whatever sources you have. Just as you'd never become an avalanche expert without expert training you'd never get to certain types of understanding, practice, and experience without guidance from the right teachers of Buddhsim, but one should be careful about how they take that limitation. Understanding of snow begins with a walk in the snow; you can start in on Buddhism by reading a book, or from a book or discussion in an online group, even when the sources are relatively uninformed.
But we have the words of the Buddha as well, right, if likely altered quite a bit by centuries of change and language transfer. Why wouldn't someone read that? It's not possible to read a good translation of the entire Buddhist cannon, and that only represents one school of thought in Buddhism anyway, but why not read what there is of it translated and widely available. Basic concepts like "self" and "suffering" will surely not match the original form but the books are there in a local library, so there is no need to go to a remote temple or mountain cave to find a yogi to begin.
There are talks by monks and open meditation centers here so there are easy intermediate sources, but as I see it one should be open to learning from different people that aren't those experts, practicioners, references, and so on. Of course Buddhism is only about immediate life experience, ordinary perception, so at some point that is the main reference point, not exotic interpretations or visions in a trance like state.
Conclusion
Hard to say to what extent either of us are really right. There is something to what she is saying; you learn certain things from experts, and to some extent the advanced teachings of the Buddha are an example of that. But she is also rejecting any value in learning from anyone but an expert, or the validity of something like reading a popular book on Buddhism, or even the words of the Buddha (to the extent we have access to them).
If someone completely agrees with her they never should have read past the first entry of this blog, or maybe even read that, so in a sense I need not be concerned about such an audience. The limitations she describes are a separate issue. It wouldn't be possible for me to assess the degree to which I've been exposed to and practiced "real Buddhism."
Based on what she is saying only certification by a Buddhist Master would determine that, and again there is probably something to that. Based only on my own experience as a monk the irony here is that very few monks would have any indication of their own status of attainment, based on this qualification. Of course such a process is referenced in certain traditions and teaching structures, and seemingly she would accept that and only that as valid. Next we should discuss her own exposure, right, to see what such a process is like. I've known people that have been through some of that but based on the forms I've experienced it myself I couldn't really judge.
