Meta Buddhist Inquiry

A few years ago in Halifax, Nova Scotia, I started a small dialogue group of post or ex-Buddhists. At the time it consisted of a few people who had problems with Buddhist institutions in Halifax, primarily Tibetan organizations like Shambhala and Nalandabodhi.

(Meta Buddhist Inquiry: this graphic was our logo)

We discuseed a range of topics of concern to us about Buddhist sanghas, institutions, teachings, retreats, courses, etc. But we approached everything as a process of inquiry, of speaking the truth about our experiences, and questioning what we had been taught. We called it Meta Buddhist Inquiry.

Fast forward a few years, I have been studying the Theravada tradition and the Pali canon pretty hard. I still approached the topics from the perspective of inquiry. But over time, I began to settle into a kind of dogmatism. In short, I started to believe everything that was written, and I didn’t question things so much. This was not because I didn’t have doubts and questions, but because I was still desperately looking for ‘answers.’ I wanted a dharma that made sense, where all the parts fit together in some kind of rational whole. Because I ultimately wanted answers, I stopped asking questions.

Then one day I got a tweet from a member of my Twitter sangha (yes, I have one of those). It was a quote from, I believe, Chogyam Trungpa:

“When Buddhists begin to deify their beliefs, when they start to believe in divine providence, when they revert to a primitive level of belief, they are corrupting Buddhism immensely! They are simply worshipping an external deity.” VCTR

This quote struck me like a bullet. It was a lightening moment of awakening. It made me realize that I had deified my Buddhist beliefs. The dharma had become my ‘god.’ I was trying to piece together a Buddhist worldview. Unconsciously I believed that if I found the right answers, with the right dharma interpretations, that it would all make sense, and I would be saved, liberated, enlightened, etc.

That quote really turned my head around. I reverted to process of questioning my beliefs, and questioning Buddhist dharma, but this time, without the expectation or ultimate salvation of arriving at ‘answers’. I no longer expected a coherent set of dharmas. It no longer had to ‘add up’ in a strictly rational way. I’m no longer looking for a Buddhist worldview. As the Talking Heads song goes, I had to “stop making sense”.

My approach now is what I call the Path of Inquiry. The Path of Inquiry is a simple but bold technique: turn every dharma, doctrine and practice in Buddhism from a statement into a question. For example, Buddhism teaches that there is ‘no self’. Now, you could wrack your brains reading Buddhist commentaries trying to figure out how that makes any rational sense when it blatantly contradicts your experience. Or you could dive into studies in neuroscience and philosophy that explain how the brain works and how the ‘sense of self’ is constructed. Or you could just outright ‘believe’ that there is no self and try to practice meditation in that mode.

Or you could turn the statement into a question. What is the self? How is it constructed? Why do we feel that we have a self? How is it experienced? If we have a self, where is it? (This is actually a traditional Buddhist inquiry.) Is it in my brain? Is it in my senses? my body? Is it individual or social? What if I didn’t have a self? What would happen to ‘me’? Would I be able to function? How does ‘not having a self’ change my experience of my being and the world around me? Is it ‘no self’ or ‘not self’? What is not the self? What is not self? Etc. etc.

The question is merely a jumping-off point for engaging with the world and discovering new truths from experience. The path of inquiry could run off into all the modes of study that I suggested above: traditional Buddhist commentary (see Buddhadasa for a great one), neuroscience (see Thomas Metzinger), my own life experience, philosophy, poetry, metaphysics, etc. But the difference is that with the Path of Inquiry, you do not expect to arrive at a final answer. The expectation is that there is no final answer—for anything. If you happen to find one, well ok. Most likely it will be temporary and work for a while. But the questions will always come back to haunt you. That is Meta Buddhist Inquiry.

From a social perspective, we could take the statement, ‘the Noble Eightfold path is a path of Liberation’, and we could turn it into a question: What path is truly liberating? How is one liberated on a personal level? What kind of ideas and practices really liberate me? How are we liberated collectively, socially? What kinds of collective ideas and practices liberate a particular population? What types of systems are more oppressive, what types more liberating? What historical process led to this condition of oppression, and what historical process could lead to conditions of liberation? And so on.

Again, we are not expecting to arrive at any final answers, because there aren’t any. Social scientists and philosophers have been asking these questions for centuries in the West and we still don’t have any final answers. But it’s a Path of Inquiry because the questions always make us search for more empirical facts and truths which then yield more questions. There is always a return to the path of asking questions. Thus, it is always an open question, and there are no final answers. Like the Heart Sutra, all doctrines fade into emptiness, and one relies on the wisdom that one has gathered in the process of inquiry.

Maybe one reason the Buddha refused to answer certain questions was not to avoid conflict, but because providing an answer deprived the inquirer of the benefit of asking the question, which is to set you off on a path of discovery for the truths of one’s experience, thus arriving at your own wisdom.