There’s a River Flowing Deep and Wide

As Buddhists, I find we’re often not good at expressing the depth and breadth of Buddhist teachings. Quite often I hear people say “This is what the Buddha actually taught” or even worse just completely avoid saying that other traditions and teachings exist at all.

I’ve mentioned before that pinning down what the Buddha “actually taught” let alone whether or not there was an actual Shakyamuni Buddha is much harder than many people would have us believe. And the teachings, quite frankly, can be contradictory and incongruent between various sutras, etc.

Buddhist masters have been trying to fix that for millennia. In fact, most denominations of Buddhism came out of one school to become another not because their founder said that he wanted to create a divisive teaching, but because he said he wanted to unify all the teachings.

The truth is there is no one true Buddhism that conforms to what a one true Shakyamuni taught. And that’s important, I think, for more Buddhist groups to bring up early in the conversation with new Buddhists.

Many of the groups I’ve visited present their Buddhism as Buddhism. Little to no mention is made of the fact that Buddhism has per capita as many denominations as Christianity. Each group’s glossaries and instructional material define key terms such as enlightenment and meditation one way—as if their own definition were the definition.

That’s disingenuous to me. Enlightenment has no one meaning across all Buddhist groups. The goal, or lack thereof, isn’t universal across all those groups. Exoteric or esoteric, what we term “Buddhism” varies greatly across the spectrum of denominations.

Sometimes people try to strip it down to just meditation. Oddly enough, on a global scale, meditation is not the defining practice of Buddhism. Chanting is. The nembutsu in its various regional forms is the most widely performed Buddhist practice not counting meditation divorced from any Buddhism. Meditation exists outside of and prior to Buddhism. Shakyamuni, in fact, practiced, studied, and mastered many different forms of meditation before his enlightenment. Meditating arguably wasn’t what led the Buddha to enlightenment. The Jataka tales certainly make no mention of the Buddha sitting around for kalpas upon kalpas of lifetimes staring at his navel.

That’s not to say that meditation is bad or entirely divorced from Buddhism by any means. Or that presenting one’s own school as the best school is wrong or bad either. It’s just to say that I think Western Buddhism could do with a little more openness. Methodists don’t deny the fact that there are Catholics. Not all Christianity is created equal and neither is all Buddhism.