Marx said religion is opium, Dawkins (“The God Delusion (TGD)” )argued that God is a delusion. The debate on TGD has been very heated, to get some idea, read The Huffington Post for a summary of Dawkins’ position and about 580 comments running across 24 pages.
Most discussions are related to Christianity, what about Buddhism?
Buddhism is regarded as Pantheistic, and sometimes agnostic, so the clash with Dawkins is not expected to be as sharp.
First thing to note, however, is that there are many schools of Buddhism, with very different views about God.
Theravada (or doctrine of the Elders) is definitely agnostic, and refuses to go into intellectual arguments about things not here and now. It focuses on the purification of the mind, which if achieved, could provide answers to the difficult questions. Discussing it now when our minds are full of mind viruses is futile.
It is told that the historical Buddha, an ordinary person, said that he can only point the way, everybody needs to tread their own paths.
This is different from Stephen Jay Gould’s ‘NOMA’ – ‘non-overlapping magisteria’. Gould claimed that science and true religion never come into conflict because they exist in completely separate dimensions of discourse.
Other schools of Buddhism believe in certain Gods and Goddesses, such as bodhisattvas, who have vowed to help all sentient being to be liberated. Such boddhisattvas are worshipped for their superpowers. These schools would be at loggerheads with Dawkins.
Other schools believe in Buddha-nature, or in Sunyata (Emptiness), which is some kind of Pantheism, similar to what Spinoza and Einstein believed.
“Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: It transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural and the spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.” Albert Einstein
Is Buddhism a meme?
Going further to Dawkins earlier work “The Selfish Gene”, where he introduced the term meme as a unit of cultural transmission, we may ask if Buddhism is a meme. Dawkins said that religions or religious practices and rituals are complexes of memes or memplexes. Some of the Buddhist rituals are definitely memes, but it is interesting to hear Susan Blackmore, the author of “The Meme Machine” about meditation:
“if a meditational system such as Buddhism is a meme, then it is actually a very peculiar one – a meme-clearing meme.”
Meditation is a tool to be aware of the viruses in our mind, including religions.
The self delusion Finally, the central tenet of Buddhism is the no self doctrine: no self, no soul, no reincarnation. It regards the Self Delusion as a much serious problem than the God delusion. I wonder if Dawkins would regard self as a delusion.
