Through the week-long sesshin Zen students had been sitting, robed and still, in

the zendo. We had kept silence, except when we were chanting. We engaged in rit
uals. We listened to talks given by ordained priests and monks. We bowed a lot.
Then sesshin was done, and we students left the zendo and spilled out into the s
unshine, chattering and hugging. The husband of a sister student arrived to take
his wife home. He approached a group of us and said, Of course, Buddhism is a p
hilosophy. It's not a religion.
No one argued. I think we were all too tired to argue. But no one agreed, either
. What we'd been doing all week certainly looked and felt like religion. Why wou
ld Buddhism not be religion?
This or That?
In my experience, people who say Buddhism is a philosophy and not a religion usu
ally mean it as a compliment. They are trying to say, I think, that Buddhism is
something other than the superstitious rubbish they believe religion to be.
In this view, religion is a jumble of primitive folklore that humankind drags th
rough the ages like a cosmic security blanket. Religion is passionate and irrati
onal and messy. But philosophy is the flower of human intellect. It is reasonabl
e and civilized. Religion inspires war and atrocity; at worst, philosophy incite
s mild arguments over coffee and dessert.
Buddhism -- some Buddhism, anyway -- is a practice of contemplation and inquiry
that doesn't depend on belief in God or a soul or anything supernatural. Therefo
re, the theory goes, it can't be a religion.
Killing the Buddha
Sam Harris expressed this view of Buddhism in his essay "Killing the Buddha" (Sh
ambhala Sun, March 2006). Harris admires Buddhism, calling it "the richest sourc
e of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced." But he thinks it
would be even better if it could be pried away from Buddhists.
"The wisdom of the Buddha is currently trapped within the religion of Buddhism,"
Harris laments. "Worse still, the continued identification of Buddhists with Bu
ddhism lends tacit support to the religious differences in our world. ... Given
the degree to which religion still inspires human conflict, and impedes genuine
inquiry, I believe that merely being a self-described 'Buddhist' is to be compli
cit in the world's violence and ignorance to an unacceptable degree."
"Killing the Buddha" is from a Zen saying -- If you meet the Buddha on the road,
kill him. Harris interprets this as a warning against turning the Buddha into a
"religious fetish" and thereby missing the essence of what he taught.
But this is Harris's interpretation of the phrase. In Zen, "killing the Buddha"
means to extinguish ideas and concepts about the Buddha in order to realize the
True Buddha. Harris is not killing the Buddha; he is merely replacing a religiou
s idea of the Buddha with a non-religious one more to his liking.
Head Boxes
In many ways, the "religion versus philosophy" argument is an artificial one. Th
e neat separation between religion and philosophy we insist on today didn't exis
t in western civilization until the 18th century or so, and there never was such
a separation in eastern civilization. To insist that Buddhism must be one thing
and not the other amounts to forcing an ancient product into modern packaging.
In Buddhism, this sort of conceptual packaging is considered to be a barrier to

enlightenment. Without
s and the world around
. One of the functions
filing cabinets in our

realizing it we use prefabricated concepts about ourselve

us to organize and interpret what we learn and experience
of Buddhist practice is to sweep away all the artificial
heads so that we see the world as-it-is.

In the same way, arguing about whether Buddhism is a philosophy or a religion is

n't an argument about Buddhism. It's an argument about our biases regarding phil
osophy and religion. Buddhism is what it is.
Dogma Versus Mysticism
The Buddhism-as-philosophy argument leans heavily on the fact that Buddhism is l
ess dogmatic than most other religions. This argument, however, ignores mysticis
m.
Mysticism is hard to define, but very basically it is the direct and intimate ex
perience of ultimate reality, or the Absolute, or God. The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy has a more detailed explanation of mysticism.
Buddhism is deeply mystical, and mysticism belongs to religion more than philoso
phy. Through meditation, Siddhartha Gautama intimately experienced Thusness beyo
nd subject and object, self and other, life and death. The enlightenment experie
nce is the sine qua non of Buddhism.
Transcendence
What is religion? Those who argue that Buddhism is not a religion tend to define
religion as a belief system, which is a western notion. Religious historian Kar
en Armstrong defines religion as a search for transcendence, going beyond the se
lf.
It's said that the only way to understand Buddhism is to practice it. Through pr
actice, one perceives its transformative power. A Buddhism that remains in the r
ealm of concepts and ideas is not Buddhism. The robes, ritual and other trapping
s of religion are not a corruption of Buddhism, as some imagine, but expressions
of it.
There's a Zen story in which a professor visited a Japanese master to inquire ab
out Zen. The master served tea. When the visitor's cup was full, the master kept
pouring. Tea spilled out of the cup and over the table.
"The cup is full!" said the professor. "No more will go in!"
"Like this cup," said the master, "You are full of your own opinions and specula
tions. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"
If you want to understand Buddhism, empty your cup.