It seems only fair to sketch out the ground upon which I stand. I’m writing reflections on practice, but practice doesn’t float in a vacuum. I have no manifesto, and I’m not trying to convince anyone that I have any special insights. Nevertheless, I write from a position. I have an orientation. If I’m explicit about it now, I don’t have to keep hinting about it. For better or worse, I have set out my stall. That’s all.
If I didn’t consider that I was a Buddhist (in my own understanding of what that entails), I’d describe myself as a naturalistic secular humanist. I don’t set science on a pedestal, but recognise its importance in understanding the natural world. If better knowledge or understanding emerges, my expectation is that the scientific method will have played its part. I don’t demote Buddhism to be a branch of neuroscience. But it shouldn’t be in conflict with it, either.
Science depends on conceptual frameworks, which may place it at odds with the kind of direct perception advanced meditation is said to uncover. I can’t speak from that level of experience, so this remains a tentative thought. But if the Mahāyāna two truths — conventional and ultimate — don’t eventually resolve into one another, then the structure doesn’t hold. And if it doesn’t hold, secular humanism remains a perfectly serviceable refuge.
So, without sounding defensive, I’m neither swallowing tradition whole nor rejecting it. I have no wish to reinvent Buddhism (nor, hopefully, the arrogance to believe I could). I’m not offering a new school, nor claiming advanced attainments.
I take my practice seriously. I take the teachings seriously. I take some metaphysical claims lightly, but accept that they can’t all be reduced to metaphors just because they are uncomfortable or inconvenient. I take experience as primary, and I treat logic as a strong safeguard against nonsense. My understanding is unfolding, and I don’t try to force the pace.
Like anyone, I’m a practitioner of my time. No one is going to confuse me with a monk from the 5th century BCE. In this saeculum (the only one I can inhabit), I’m shaped by modernity whether I like it or not.
I sit in the middle of the range. I’m not a traditionalist. Karma and literal rebirth trouble me, as they do many a modern mind. I’m not a Buddhist modernist because that seems to be code for playing down tradition without a coherent alternative. And for me, secular Buddhism has gone too far by abandoning awakening. It has thrown out the baby with the bathwater. It dresses up Aristotelian eudaimonia, but won’t relinquish its Buddhist moniker.
Does any of this matter? Well, it does to me. It does no harm to state your own position, if only to reflect, later, that it has been changed through continued practice. And to the extent that anyone is coming along with me on my own journey, they can see where I’m coming from.
I am a rationalist who respects the mystery, and a modernist who respects the lineage (without being part of it). This is the ground I stand on. The rest will unfold from here.
Two – Reflections
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