Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

To say “I don’t know” is not an admission of weakness or ignorance, but an act of truthfulness: an honest acceptance of the limits of the human condition when faced with “the great matter of birth and death.”

The depth of any understanding is intimately correlated with the depth of one’s confusion. Great awakening resonates at the same “pitch” as great doubt. So rather than negate such doubt by replacing it with belief, which is the standard religious procedure, Zen encourages you to cultivate that doubt until it “coagulates” into a vivid mass of perplexity.

Despite all the emphasis Buddhism gave to the importance of cultivating inner qualities of mind as the only genuine source of well-being, this outward recognition of my worth—in the form of a flimsily bound Indian paperback—gave me a sense of self-worth and fulfillment that meditation alone had so far failed to provide.

As a boy Krishnamurti had been declared the new “World Teacher” by Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society and was duly groomed for this role. In 1929, at the age of thirty-four, he formally severed his ties with the Society by announcing that “Truth is a pathless land,” which, by its very nature, cannot be organized into a system or controlled by a church. Since then he had tirelessly traveled around the world, preaching this message with the sole concern “to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.”

And by removing death’s finality, you deprive it of its greatest power to affect your life here and now.

It made me realize that belief in rebirth was a denial of death.

The crisis humanity now faces, according to Husserl, is that we have taken this living world for granted and unthinkingly erected upon it the conceptual edifices of logic, mathematics, and science. As science and technology have advanced, human beings have lost touch with the foundations of the lifeworld and become enthralled by technical achievements

I had no interest at all in future lifetimes or liberation from the cycle of birth and death. Yet Tibetan Buddhism taught that one could not even consider oneself a Buddhist if one valued this life more than one’s destiny after death. But I did. No matter how hard I tried, I was incapable of giving more importance to a hypothetical, post-mortem existence than to this very life here and now. Moreover, the Buddhist teachings and practices that had the most impact upon me did so precisely because they heightened my sense of being fully alive in and responsive to this world.

Geshe encouraged us to keep inquiring into these matters, but as long as we did not arrive at the same conclusion as the tradition, then clearly we had not inquired enough. “Do not accept [my words] just out of faith in me,” said the Buddha, but in reality we were expected to do just that. I realized then that to pursue my vocation as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, belief in rebirth was not optional but obligatory.

The more you valorize mind and spirit, the more you will be prone to denigrate matter. Before long, mind starts to become Mind with a capital M, while matter becomes the illusory sludge of the world. The next thing you know, Mind starts to play the role of God: it becomes the ground and origin of all things, the cosmic intelligence that animates all forms of life.