The Buddha Said That Desire Leads To Suffering

Desire and ignorance.

Pete Townshend said: "I waaaaant it, I waaaaant it, I waaaant it, I waaaaaant it[...]" That's from the lyrics to his song "Magic Bus." I take the Townshend approach. I certainly don't deny that desire can lead to suffering, but it can also lead to getting what you want, which can be awesome. (Or so I've heard.) Overcoming desire may be serene, but it also sounds a bit boring to me. I'll take the downs to get the ups. No decaf for me, please. I'll take the pain which comes with the greed.

It may be that Townshend himself, years after having written "Magic Bus," embraced the Buddhist teaching of the overcoming of desire. After he'd made millions and millions of British pounds. It seems to be much easier to renounce desire after you've gotten everything you always wanted, and are sitting in a mansion or flat which cost you millions and millions of British pounds, but was a real bargain at that price coz it's amazing, with a car that costs more than most houses parked outside next to your many other cars which cost even more, wearing one of your watches each of which costs more than most cars.

I might do it that way, too. Give me everything I've ever wanted first, and then we'll see what I want to renounce.

Maybe Townshend has not embraced that Buddhist teaching. I don't actually know. I'm just saying that I listen to Buddhists and I'm all meh, and I listen to "Magic Bus" and I'm all fired up. The one speaks to me, as the saying goes. The other does not.

I'm not knocking Buddhism if that's what you like, and obviously, many people do. If it gives you what you want -- good! But I wonder if there's anything that everyone would like. You very well might not want much of anything that I want. Rich tapestry.

More On My Problems With Buddhism

Either Buddhism has been erroneously called a religion by very many people for a very, very long time, or it is a religion which recently has been very successfully marketed to atheists.

Just today in an online discussion, I was saying Yu-huh it is too a religion, and this other person, possibly a Buddhist, I don't know for sure, was saying no it's a philosophy, and I indicated that I was tired of the discussion, and the other person said Okay if you don't want to discuss religion...

*sigh* I pointed out that -- *sigh*

I'm so sick of them. "Buddhism is not a religion. We don't worship deities or preach any sort of metaphysics. Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for me to go to a temple and kneel in front of a statue of the Buddha alongside some Buddhist monks, and chant and meditate in my quest to attain eternal bliss."

This little tiff started off with a quote from the Dalai Lama: "I believe that the only true religion consists in having a good heart." I replied: "I don't think you need any religion to be a nice person."

The other person tossed me an LOL and said that that was exactly what the quote meant, because Buddhism isn't a religion, and we were off.

It's one thing if you think that the Dalai Lama is a great person and a powerful force for good in the world. Maybe he is. I admit that I can't really judge his personality or his effect on the world objectively, because all of this it's-not-a-religion sticks in my craw.

I happen to like Pope Francis very much. (I didn't right at first, as you can see by reading what I wrote about him in this blog immediately after he was elected Pope. But part of that, of course, was just my own personal disappointment because I hadn't been elected Pope.) I like him more and more.

I'm not sure whether I would like him if he and/or some of his followers started to claim that Catholicism is not a religion and never has been. If, for example, Catholics suddenly started to claim that the belief in the Resurrection isn't really a belief in the Resurrection and never was such a belief, the way that some Buddhists have suddenly begun to claim that Buddhists beliefs in reincarnation -- reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, for example -- are not actually beliefs in reincarnation and never have been.

If you're a Catholic and also an atheist, that's fine with me. Just don't try to tell me that no Catholics believe in anything supernatural and that none ever have.

If you're a Buddhist and you don't believe in reincarnation, I have no problem with that.

If you're trying to tell me that "Buddhists don't believe that the Dali Lama has been reincarnated, they believe that aspects of one Dali Lama are transferred to the next, because they all share one heart," and that I'm just silly for thinking this is a religion and not a philosophy, and for thinking that what you just said has anything to do with reincarnation, then I don't want to talk to you any more.

Not about Buddhism, not right now anyway.

Why? Because I'm always struggling to make sense, and that struggle is difficult for me under the best of conditions. Maybe it's actually much harder for me personally because I'm autistic. Perhaps if I were neurologically-typical I wouldn't loath theology so because it wouldn't pose such a threat to me. Perhaps if I were neurologically-typical and someone were to say to me: "Buddhists don't believe that the Dali Lama has been reincarnated per se, they believe that the ideals of the last Dali Lama have been transferred to the new one. The one who owns the heart," I'd find it fascinating, and we'd be able to discuss it all day and all night and I'd find it all ever so delightful. I seem to remember a line from a poem by Jack Kerouac about Buddhism being delightfully empty baloney any way you slice it. I'm sorry, I can't find that line right now. And often I remember lines completely wrong. (Is that also because I'm autistic?) But assuming that Kerouac did actually write something more or less like that -- is this a matter of some people finding a perfectly good and healthy sort of nonsense in religion?

Is it possible that it's similar to the wonderful stuff I find in Gertrude Stein, which so many people have had to explain so laboriously to each other but which no one ever had to explain to me, which I loved from the first instant?

Maybe. Or maybe I simply have a very good point here and I'm right to call some Buddhists on their nonsense.

[PS, 20. March 2016: Another thing has occurred to me lately: how seldom anyone seems to wonder whether the feats of archery described by Eugen Herrigel in his famous book Zen in the Art of Archery were faked. (Herrigel tells of a Zen master shooting an arrow at a faraway target in the dark and hitting the center of the bulls-eye, and then shooting a second arrow which splits the first one right up the middle.)]

Jack Reacher Fans Are Outraged That Tom Cruise Is Playing Reacher, And No-One Cares. At All.

Jack Reacher fans are pushing back hard against my mockery of their outrage at Tom Cruise playing Jack Reacher. (Their main objection: he's too short. Some also feel that he sucks as an actor and/or as a human being.) The outraged Jack Reacher fans seem not to realize, one, that there are many more of us who have never heard of Jack Reacher before this than there are of them, and that we come to the new Tom Cruise movie with none of their neuroses about it, and two, that even if we did, if a movie is being made with a hero thought of up until then as huge and hulking, and Tom Cruise expresses an interest in playing that hero, then all of a sudden, and quite rightly, the moviemakers will get much more flexible about the hero's height. Lestat de Lioncourt describes himself in Anne Rice's novel's as six feet tall, and Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was probably well over six feet tall, and Cruise played both of them and both of those movies were hits. Once again -- remember all the silly outrage back in the early 90's among Anne Rice fans when the word got out that Cruise was going to play Lestat? -- I'm betting on the huge (although short) movie star, and against the whiny readers of mass-market paperbacks.

Also, a whole bunch of dopey Buddhists are patiently lecturing me about how modern science does not stand in conflict with the doctrine of the re-incarnation of the Dalai Lama. The occasion for these lectures is the news that His Holiness is pushing science education among his exiled Tibetan followers in northern India, causing Buddhists the world over to ooh and ah as they do at His every move. (I think He's silly at best, but there's no denying that his PR machine is extraordinary.)

Now if I could just get the angry Jack Reacher fans and the earnestly lecturing Buddhists to argue with each other and leave me alone...

I've Figured Out Why Buddhists Are So Annoying

It's because they're agnostic, and as we all know, agnostics are the worst people in the history of the Earth.

Ask Buddhists what's up with this business about the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, for example, and you will receive long replies which, to be sure, in no way answer your question or are good for anything else either, but point out how you supposedly don't understand something -- could be reincarnation, could be the concept of reincarnation, could, be Tibet, could be all sorts of things. This is the essence of agnosticism: insisting that everyone else doesn't understand, and being useless.

And nasty. For example, read this. I'm sorry. I promise I won't link that bad man again. (He's agnostic.)

PS, 16. September 2012: Actually, he's an atheist, and agnostic on the question of Jesus' historicity, although leaning recently more to the historicist side. And he's actually not so bad. He was severely provoked when he wrote that. You should check out some other things he's written.

PPS, 22. October, 2014: Actually, I've heard that, although he doesn't believe that God exists, he doesn't consider himself an atheist, but rather a skeptic. Yeah, that doesn't make sense to me either, but apparently he's not the only one. Just as I consider people who call themselves spiritual but not religious to be religious and confused about what the term means and/or in denial, so I consider people who don't believe that God exists but to be atheists, and to be tiresome when they deny that they are. I still think think his writing is very much worth reading.