There are three rational positions that secularists can take with regards to the teaching of rebirth in the suttas. Yet its very first rhetorical move is to dismiss plain facts based on uncritical faith in its own ideology. Secular Buddhism snorts out the gate roaring that it’s based on reality not faith. These things are not difficult, they are not things that can be interpreted away: they are bleeding obvious. It doesn’t just get the points above wrong-it gets them catastrophically wrong. I won’t go into the details of the latter project suffice to say, it’s a failure. Secularists either ignore these inconveniences by dealing rather vaguely with “Buddhism” (by which they usually mean Buddhism as interpreted by moderns like themselves) or by trying to explain away the references to rebirth in the EBTs. Placed this reality at the core of his teaching.Accepted the reality of rebirth based on his own meditative experience.
The core problem to this is that the Buddha: The key to secularist Buddhism is, of course, that it dismisses “religious” and “supernatural” ideas, most importantly rebirth, and addresses only what is claims are scientific and observable truths. But prominent in all the reviews and interviews are some of the stock secular Buddhism ideas, and I wanted to take the chance to address these head on. I haven’t read the book, so I won’t comment on it. In doing so, they don’t just misrepresent the Dhamma, they undermine its transformative potential.
The problem is not that the secularists present only a small part of Buddhism it’s that they, implicitly or explicitly, regard their own small viewpoint as better.
This is, of course, normal, and happens every time Buddhism goes to a new land: it is not assimilated all-at-once, but bit by bit, with people swallowing what they can digest. Sure, it’s problematic, but, as the success of this book shows, it reaches people in ways that normative Buddhism, so far, has failed to do. It’s fairly standard in early Buddhism circles to dismiss the central claims of secular Buddhism, but I am not one of those who thinks secular Buddhism is a Bad Thing.
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