Orange County Buddhist Church
Orange County Buddhist Church
A WAY OF SEEING (Are you a Buddhist?)
1. Can you accept that all things are impermanent and that there is no essential substance or concept that is permanent?
2. Can you accept that all emotions bring pain and suffering and that there is no emotion that is purely pleasurable?
3. Can you accept that all phenomena are illusory and empty?
4. Can you accept that enlightenment is beyond concepts; that it’s not a perfect blissful heaven, but instead a release from delusion?
5. Only when you can answer these questions with an unequivocal ‘yes,’ can you truly consider yourself a Buddhist.
Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse – What Makes You Not a Buddhist
Daryl, one of our sons, came across this book and referred me to it. The title is intriguing, wouldn’t you say? What makes you not a Buddhist. That is not a question, by the way, which is why there is no question mark, As for the author, I know only what’s on Amazon.com’s web page: he is a Tibetan Buddhist monk and the director of a film called The Cup. The film is about a group of young Tibetan Buddhist monks who love the game of soccer. As I recall, it got favorable reviews when it played here a year or two ago. I have not read the book yet, beyond the few pages that Amazon has on its site, which is where the above passage comes from.
Can you accept the four statements above? According to the author, if not, then you are not a Buddhist. If you can, and most importantly, if you do, then you are a Buddhist, whatever else you might call yourself, if anything.
Before you can answer them, each statement probably needs explanation. Since I have yet to read the book, what follows is simply my understanding of the statements.
You should have heard or read enough about impermanence by now that the first statement, “…all things are impermanent and …there is no essential substance or concept that is permanent,” should not cause too much hesitation or resistance. You might ask what is meant by “essential substance.” The words are simply pointing at the fact that there is nothing that is self-dependent, or, better, independent. Everything is dependent on every other thing. Since that is the case, everything is without a permanent essence. How can something that is dependent on some other thing be unchanging? Remember that impermanence is simply another word for change.
If you need to know just how dependent we are on things other than ourselves, recall Edward Lorenz’s research on the possibility of the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil setting off a tornado in Texas, an illustration of what became known as chaos theory. In other words, just because we do not know or are not able to know the causes and conditions that led to a change in our lives, it does not mean that those causes and conditions did not “exist.” Often, but never always, we are able to choose to change, or some choice we make changes our lives. This is the dynamic of karma, which needs to be explained. But that is another story, to be taken up at another time.
Because all of these four questions should be explained in detail, the remaining three will be treated at a different time.
In Gassho,
Donkonjaan,
Rev. John Doami
MAY 2008
