Audio recorded at Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 67-minute session, Ilya Djurovic dismantles the material refuges—wealth, relationships, the state—that modern Westerners depend on, using charts and research: happiness indexes show wealthy nations less happy than poor ones; Australian debt spirals as satisfaction collapses; divorce and substance epidemics expose their fragility. He then critiques the Christian God (theodicy, scriptural contradiction, causality paradoxes), arguing Buddhism stands apart as the only refuge rooted in reason rather than faith. Yet a darker current runs through the talk: Western Buddhist conversion is deeply unstable. Most students claiming refuge still believe in God, view Buddhism as optional alongside other religions, and abandon practice within years. Directed at practitioners seriously questioning what Buddhism actually offers.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2013-04-20 – KR.mp3
UUID: fb770655-7855-4fba-8d54-cb019c3e9348
Teacher: Kyabje Rinpoche
Collection: Refuge
Date: 2013-04-20
Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide
Words: ~8,805
You might need to grab a couple of more chairs just to bring into the circle. There are some handouts here that perhaps Do you what? There are a couple of people here. Would you mind just hanging them around? There’s a bibliography for today’s seminar and some notes as well.
And then there are a couple of articles or an article that you’re welcome to have a look at as well. So as we’re settling in, a very warm welcome to another of Ilya Djurovic’s very stimulating and challenging seminars here at Tibetan Buddhist Institute. My name is Chris Ridley, it’s my privilege to welcome you here this afternoon. Apologies for the banging. We’re having the roof repaired and replaced partially in preparation for His Holiness’s visit to us in June when he comes to Adelaide, is a very auspicious event for us.
So there’s a lot to do. But, of course, it’s not just the physical preparations that are necessary, but it’s also preparing our minds. And we’re very privileged to have Ilya here to assist us in this process speaking to perhaps the foundation of what it means to be a Buddhist that is taking refuge. Ilya is a great benefactor supporter here of Tibetan Buddhist Institute, student of Kyabje Khensur Rinpoche, whose picture is behind us up here on the right, who himself is one of the last of the great lamas who fled the Chinese invasion into Tibet and was foremost in the reestablishing of the Sera Je Monastery in South India. Ilya has been ordained in the tradition for a period there entering at the high Geshe level and has been highly commended by Geshe Jampa Gyaltsen who was here recently as, you know, as a very fine student and quoted Khensur Rinpoche as a yogi of yogis.
Ilya has a bifocal view, east and west, bringing it together for us so that we can get the essence of what it means to be Buddhist and particularly for us as Westerners. So without any further ado, I’d like to hand over to you, Ilya. Thank you. Thank you very much. Then I’m delighted to see many old acquaintances among you today as well as a couple new friends of the center whom we hope we shall be seeing again frequently in the future.
Our topic for today as Chris Ridley so cogently put it is the very foundation stone of all Buddhist practice, it is refuge. It is a boundary between being a Buddhist and being a non-Buddhist. It is to Buddhism what a baptism is to Christianity. If you have refuge, you are a Buddhist. If you do not have refuge, you are not a Buddhist.
Likewise, if you are baptized, you are a Christian without baptism or for the evangelicals, a second baptism, one is not a true Christian. The question which arises for us is what is refuge? In general, what do we mean when we speak of taking a refuge? Now, a refuge is actually a protection. Quite strikingly in Tibetan, the term means to be to go for protection, to go for refuge to somebody.
Literally, a refuge is a fortress. Then Austrian Australia you are lucky, you don’t have to think as we used to in Europe in terms of fortresses and defenses and what not. But if you have to think in those terms, you want to be sure that your fortifications are strong enough. Strong enough in real life to fight a war, to repel an enemy. In the context of spiritual practice, strong enough to sustain you in the great vagaries of human existence and particularly to sustain you at the time of your own death.
So the measure of the strength of your refuge is whether it does the job or not at the time of your own death. Everything else is irrelevant. Then there are and there have been as many refuges as there are human beings in societies. So we shall cover the various refuges which have existed throughout history, religious and non religious, before focusing on the Buddhist refuge and its uncommon features. And I must apologize today’s conference will be as usual quite a bit longer than the allotted two hours.
If you have to leave, please feel free to do so quietly. And at the desperate insistence of Chris Ridley, our Director, you will have a ten minute pause. But it will be ten minutes. So what are the general characteristics of any refuge for it to function as a refuge? A refuge first must exist.
If it doesn’t exist, it cannot act as a refuge. And generally speaking, a refuge to help us must have three broad features and these are three features which are presented in the light of the Buddhist tradition but I think they apply really to all refuges. Wisdom, power and empathy. In other words, wisdom, power and compassion. If one of these three features are missing, the object of refuge, whatever it is, will not protect us.
Now if we enter into somewhat greater detail in the types of refuges there are, we can see first that we have to divide refuges between those which exist and those which don’t. Clearly those which don’t are not real refuges. And those which exist include those which have the three characteristics, which from a Buddhist standpoint would include the traditional three Buddhist refuges, the Dharma, in other words the teachings, which is the first refuge, the Buddha who is a teacher of the Dharma, and the Sangha, those who practice this. And refuges which exist but which do not have these three characteristics and these are material refuges. We shall be talking a fair bit about these today because they are the main refuges in which Westerners in general and I think most people in the world nowadays look for protection.
Then we have what from a Buddhist standpoint and I apologize to those of you who are practicing Christians, Jews or Muslims, but from a Buddhist standpoint we do not acknowledge the existence of a God. We consider that God is actually a God which creates the universe is incompatible with logic and with reality. So from our standpoint taking refuge as the Christians or Jews or the Muslims do in God is taking refuge in a non existent refuge. It may be very sincere and profound refuge of great benefit for the person, but if one applies a criteria of logic and analysis, it seems at least from a Buddhist standpoint, it does not withstand such analysis. So I would like to focus initially on material refuges which I think are perhaps the refuges of most of you in this room, certainly those of all Westerners out of this room.
It is basically money which is perhaps the foremost refuge we have at present since it’s a source of all happiness. Money enables one certainly in Australia to buy the house one wants and if there is not enough money then one appeals to the banks and incurs debt. And the money enables one eventually to settle down in the relationship one wishes for. Whereas lack of money and this is, if you’ll forgive me, someone with great life experience who is speaking, lack of money signals the end of most marriages or relationships. Then if we analyze in greater detail material refuges, what do we take refuge in?
In other words, what do we go to for ultimate protection and hope in this life? Other ordinary beings is one of the main category of refuge we go to. In other words, when we are young, our family, when we are middle aged, young and middle aged relationships, and at a certain age when we don’t interest anybody pets. Now I think if you go for walks in the parks you will see that people’s refugees are directly contingent on their age group. The children look to their father and mother.
Those between, let’s say, 15 and 40 hold hands and look at each other as if the other party will give meaning to their life. And above 40, the bitter age of looking at a dog for meaning don’ts. The second category of refuge we have is one social situation, which is more prevalent in strong market economies. I myself am American. Then we could really see this in The States when Switzerland where I was raised.
That is profession, money, and power. These are refugees which are perhaps a bit less prevalent in Australia because yours is a welfare state and we will talk about refuge in the welfare state shortly. But these refuges are identical really in terms of what one is looking for to taking refuge in a relationship. You are looking for protection against the problems of life either in money or in your job or in power. Finally, there’s a variety of other refuges I haven’t been exhaustive in my listing.
It includes intoxicants, many people take refuge in the bottle, Drugs, it has become the plague of a generation. Some people actually do take refuge in their own body, the fitness addicts. And finally, and this is quite characteristic of welfare states and of socialist and communist states, the state is an object of refuge. One sees an extraordinary degree of confidence among Australians. I am a new immigrant to this country.
An extraordinary degree of confidence in their own future based on the fact that they are Australian. This is refuge in the state. The state is there and if you are sick, the state will provide. If you are unemployed, the state will provide. If you become, let us say, invalid, the state will provide as well.
The state is an object of refuge. So these material refuges must be assessed to see whether they are valid refuges or not. Then if they are valid refuges, I think we would all spend our time better going at liquid espresso for a cup of coffee. But if they are not valid refuges, then we have to find a valid refuge because life will not always be easy. So the first question we have to ask is, is the basic premise which underlies all material refuges true?
The idea behind all material refuges is that material welfare is directly correlated to happy, to happiness. If you have what you need materially, you will be happy. And there have been a surprising number of studies on this topic where societies worldwide have been examined to check if there’s a correlation between happiness and material welfare. This work is typically done by economists who have awakened to a certain reality which is that money does not make happiness. Now this is a study which was made around 2006 over a period of ten years studying what is known as a human development index which covers all of the aspects of material development, not just money but the stability of a society, the welfare system and what not on the one hand.
And the self assessment of happiness by the subjects on the other hand. Now we do find indeed that there is a broad correlation. In other words, as you move towards societies with a high human development index, which typically are European societies, Australia, North America, you have high levels of self described happiness. But what is very puzzling is that you have societies which are at the very bottom of the human development index. In other words, where there is nothing materially.
And which are at the maximum of self described happiness, specifically Tanzania and Nigeria. These are societies where one is destitute, where one’s life expectancy is very small, where there is no welfare of any type, society is driven by civil strife and yet people are more happy, and I am sorry to say this to you, than in Australia. Then one has a huge block of societies in red here, which are very highly placed on the Human Development Index. It oddly includes most of the societies of the former Soviet Bloc and Eastern Europe and in which people are profoundly unhappy. So it is very clear there is no automatic correlation between material development on the one hand and happiness on the other.
Therefore, just on the basis of this chart, one can see that material development is not a refuge in and of itself. It cannot guarantee happiness. It’s a great contributor to happiness. We all agree. But it is not sufficient nor is it even necessary since we have at least two societies in which material development is basically non existent and which are at the top of the chart in terms of the happiness index.
So how is or how are the issues of happiness and unhappiness addressed in our society? These are fundamental challenges to material societies because clearly if the mass of the population is encouraged to try to earn ever more money and money and generally speaking material happiness do not really cause enduring happiness, how does society address unhappiness? Typically, viewing unhappiness as a form of mental disease and this is what we see with the data which has come out from The United States which clearly demonstrates the psychiatrist of unhappiness and this has spread to Europe and to Australia. We live in societies in which there are an ever greater number of so called mental diseases which in many cases are not mental diseases but simply forms of un adaptation or what we would call in French mal-être. Being ill at ease with one’s lot.
Now if we look at this chart, this chart indicates the total number of inpatient days over in The US by 100 thousands and shows them for three categories of patients, children from ages five to 13, teenagers ages 14 to 19 and the elderly. You can see that in ten year the number of inpatient days, in other words basically internment in a mental institution for children has been multiplied by two and a half in ten years in The US. And for teenagers it has increased I would say by 25%. It is only for the elderly it has decreased. Now how can we explain this?
02/2007 is before the global financial crisis. It’s actually the peak of material success in The US yet we have an explosion in the number of psychiatric internments of children and teenagers. A one of the societies in which children and teenagers are among the most spoiled in the world. Clearly, material success is not sufficient for happiness. Let us now take a case which concerns us specifically, the case of Australia.
What is refuge in a society like Australia, in a welfare society? And I think with your permission, will cast a rather dry eye on what I see as a very complacent Australian model of a welfare state. You know it far better than I do. I apology apologize for any mistakes I make in the presentation and I encourage you to reflect on it by yourselves later. So if we look at Australian society over time, we find that there is in the last fifty years a sharp decline of stated religious allegiance.
You can see this very clearly here where the number of unstated persons who have no stated religion basically trebles in fifty years. Whereas the number of practicing Christians, Catholics, Anglican and other Christian Christians decreases sharply. So it is very clear that Australian society as a whole has moved away from non material refuges. It has moved away from non material refuges to what? Man needs a refuge.
So what is a refuge which has replaced, let us say Christianity in Australia? First and foremost, would say it is wealth. The Australian love affair with real estate in the stock market. And then, we have to analyze the situation and see whether or not wealth can function as a refuge. If wealth can protect us against the vagaries of life and can give us some type of durable happiness.
And in this matter the data is quite clear. I have plotted on one chart data from two different sources. At the top of the chart, the black line which is declining is the mean happiness in Australia based on self assessment between 1945 and 2010. You can see that it has dropped steadily since the end of World War II. The lower part of the chart I have plotted what is known as GDP per capita.
It’s basically the gross domestic product of a society, the amount of wealth the society produces if you wish, divided by the number of inhabitants. Now you see that this drops first after World War II, then increases sharply, drops once again and has been increasing steadily since 1975. However, it has no effect whatsoever on happiness. Happiness has been decreasing steadily all along. Then one might wonder what exactly this is due to.
How is it that Australians who have left the non material refuges for the material refuges of wealth and some of the others we shall address are so unhappy and steadily becoming more so? One of the main issues is that the non material refuges, in other words the great religions, without exception teach simplicity and contentment. Once one opts for a material refuge, one is in the situation of someone trying to slake his thirst by drinking salt water. It is inexhaustible. And if one looks at this chart which shows Australian private debt between 1990 and 2010, you can see a chronicle of dissatisfaction.
In green you have housing debt which I’m sorry it was very difficult to reproduce this chart correctly has been multiplied by a factor of three in twenty years. In Brown, you have total private debt which has been multiplied by what? A factor of maybe four in twenty years. Now what does debt signify? Debt is an indicator of dissatisfaction.
It is an indicator of having wishes one cannot afford to have And to have these wishes, one mortgages one’s future. Debt is nothing else than mortgaging one’s future, selling oneself into slavery if you prefer. So what is very striking is that as the Australians have moved away from the non material refuges and the religions and have chosen wealth as a refuge, far from gaining freedom, they have lost freedom. Far from gaining happiness, they seem to become steadily less happy. And some of the reasons become very clear when you look at the ratio of household debt to income in Australia.
Debt ratio was of 20, a bit more 30 in 1977 and at present it is of 160. In other words, the average Australian household owes 1.6 yearly income. In this room every one of you owes on average almost two times their annual income. You will have to pay this before you leave this life. That means your freedom will be curtailed.
There are decisions you will not be able to take, you will not be able to opt out of society, you will not be able to lead the lives you wish to lead precisely because you have chosen wealth as your refuge and your desires outpace your means. My wife and I have just purchased a house here and, it has been a very interesting experience. I saw firsthand how people can’t afford their desires in Australia. It is very striking. We purchased cash inherently and we were competing against people who needed multiple mortgages and who were simply unable to get the finance together.
They would have been perfectly able to get something simple had they chosen to do so. Their eyes, to use an American expression, were bigger than their stomach. And the person we purchased the house to was a lady who had bought this house in an apartment, with her husband. They had borrowed everything they could. I think they borrowed against the house to buy the apartment.
Then, and we will talk about relationships within the next couple of minutes, their marriage collapsed. With the divorce, they had to renegotiate their loans because obviously the situation changes dramatically. When it is no longer a couple earning let’s say 150,000 a year which is borrowing, but an individual in this case the wife earning at present $40.50 60,000. As a result, she was forced to sell and we bought she lost approximately 2020% on the object which she had purchased a short three years ago. I could have put a lot more pressure on her but it’s not something I like to do.
Now this is a direct result of debt. Debt leads to poverty and the source of debt is dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction is rooted in material refuges. So if we now look at the following material refuge which many people opt for in developed societies and certainly in Australia, it’s relationships and marriage as refuge. Then I have nothing to add on the topic except this chart.
This is the number of divorces and the crude divorce rate since 1900. At 1900, in 1900 for practical purposes it is zero as you can see. Between 1970 and 1980 it has been multiplied by what? 60,000. There were basically no divorces one century ago.
It has now stabilized but you can see clearly that to take refuge in a relationship, whether it is a so called partnership or a marriage, is foolishness incarnate. With this type of statistic, someone who takes refugees in relationships and in wealth is someone who does not have his or her own well-being at heart. Then when all goes bad in all the societies in the world and I’m afraid Australians are particularly addicted to this, one turns to the broad category of intoxicating substances ranging from tobacco and alcohol through to drugs. Then I saw a chart in the age, it’s a very recent, study which probably will make you gasp just as I did. It’s drug use in Australia and this in dark blue is drug use in the last twelve months, prevalence of drug use.
Ninety three percent of all Australians have used alcohol in last year. Forty three percent have used cannabis. Tobacco is actually less widely used than cannabis. And then you have a dizzying assortment of drugs. MDMA, skunk, cocaine, amphetamines, you name it which are used by huge swathes of the population.
These are the refuges of last resort. Having taken refuge in wealth and lost your wealth, your refuge in your relationship collapses because when you are poor your husband or your wife leaves you. Once your husband or your wife has left you, the refuge you can have on the cheap is the bottle or if you have a little bit more money it is cocaine. Just for the record, there is a study which appeared in The Buddhas newspaper The Guardian less than a week ago intimating that the financial crisis of two zero eight was largely due to the fact that most of the decision makers in the crisis were cocaine users. You may not know this but the banking industry is one of the industries in which cocaine usage is the most widespread.
And one of the side effects of cocaine is megalomania, inflation of the ego. Then what other refuges are there as refuges of last resort? The state. And certainly in Australia, there is a naive and very touching belief in the state as a refuge of last resort. It leads to levels of complacency which frankly I have never encountered in another developed society.
Then to understand whether this is a viable refuge or not, let us look at the government revenues for the period 02/2013. You can see that within Australia’s government revenues, the so called company and resources rent taxes which includes a mining tax is a gigantic sways of Australia’s I would say looking at the chart, a solid 35%. Now as you know, this mining tax is an extraordinary tax contingent on the performance of the mining industry. The precise amount of the mining tax which the government is hoping to engrain this year is close to a state secret but all the evidence indicates that there will be very little if any such extraordinary taxes available this year. If that is the state the case, how will it be possible to afford a social security, social security expenditures which are approximately 40% of the total government budget.
Now keep in mind that these social security expenditures were not considered legitimate government expenditures until after World War II. Before World War two, no developed government in a developed country which I know of dedicated a significant portion of government revenue to any type of social security. So this gigantic block of spendings are spendings for which revenues will have to be found. And it is far from clear how they can be found apart from debt. Then should Australia go the path of indebtedness which the European nations and The United States have followed, you will experience exactly the same results we did: poverty.
Because at a certain point nobody wants to lend you to you anymore. Then the only way out is what’s happening right now in Europe and The US, you have to print more money, increase the monetary mass. As a result, you are dealing with widespread impoverishment of the country since the actual value of money decreases. So if this is the state, the case, you can see clearly that the state, and by this we mean the welfare state, is far from a legitimate object of refuge and those of you who view to this view the state as a way to guarantee, your pension, and your livelihood when you grow older would do well to think carefully about it. Then if these material refuges are not sound, in other words if wealth is not a reliable object of refuge because it does not lead to happiness and we have the data.
If relationships are not a legitimate object of refuge because they are not stable and we have the data. And if the state which has replaced God in the western psyche is not a legitimate object of refuge because we will not be able to afford a welfare state within your lifetimes, what is a legitimate object of refuge? Is there one? If there isn’t, we can just sit back and say as Julius Caesar said, the dice are thrown. We can’t do anything about it.
So as you can see it is not a minor topic. Who will you go to, who will you turn to when things get difficult? You think you know who you will turn to but it is quite obvious that these objects of refuges which are widely accepted are unstable. Is there a stable object of refuge? If there is, it would have to be non material.
Does such a thing exist? And this is where there’s a surprising amount of data which is coming oddly enough from operating theatres regarding some type of survival of the mind after physical death. Now this data has been collected, it is what is known as the near death experiences. I’ve presented this last year here, I won’t re present it. Chris Ridley has kindly offered some articles which you may find of interest on the topic.
One of the foremost researchers in the field is, Sam Parnia who was at the University of Southampton and, who is now, I think it’s at Stony Brook in New York. In other words, These are some of our biggest hospitals in The States. And Sam Parnia who is technically called a resuscitologist, a specialist in the death process but whose background is in cardiology makes the most interesting comment in a recent interview in The Guardian just a couple days ago. We always assume that all scientists believe the brain produces the mind but in fact there are plenty who are not certain of that. It seems that the brain is acting as an intermediary to manifest your idea of soul or self.
As Buddhists we would say consciousness. We should keep our minds open to the possibility that memory or obviously a scientific entity is not your own. Then I shall not enter in this material in detail. We talked about it a lot last year. I gave you one presentation on near death experiences in which I drew on Sam Parnia’s work and several presentations on Professor Stevenson’s work on reincarnation.
In other words, children who have verified memories of past lives. Clearly, if the mind is non material, if in other words the mind can pass beyond death, then we have new gateways which open to us new possibilities for refuge which are much more meaningful than these trite and fragile material refuges which we have been relying upon so far. So I would strongly encourage you to study the data on near death experiences, the work by Raymond Moody but more recent work by Grayson, work by Sam Parnia and so forth to see whether or not indeed there is a survival of the mind after death. This work is very interesting because it is typically work which is undertaken by cardiologists who have to deal with cardiac arrest in a hospital setting and therefore these cases occur in something akin to a controlled environment. This is not anecdotal.
In some cases the studies are extremely solid. Then clearly if the mind, consciousness or the soul depending on one’s religious tradition move on beyond death, we have the possibilities for far more meaningful refuges and these are the non material refuges. The great religious traditions which have tried to find answers to the human predicament and which have broadly speaking been abandoned in favor of the material refuges. Now as I hope to have shown you, the material refuges are not stable. They are fair weather refuges.
I would say basically that infatuation with material refuges is due to the extraordinary growth rate of western economies from 1945 to 1973 approximately during which the welfare system as we know it has been set up in all developed countries. We had in the nineteen fifty seven percent growth rate in European economies. In The US, we had similar growth rates. In Australia, I would suspect you had similar growth rates. All of our nations set up welfare systems which are predicated on these growth rates.
When the growth rates plummeted after the nineteen seventy three oil crisis, instead of addressing the fact that we were no longer able to afford our lifestyle, all of us without exception started borrowing. We are now at present since 2008 in the biggest crisis of debt in history. Crisis of individual debt in The United States and to a degree in Europe, crisis of what is known as sovereign debt or state debt throughout the developed world. It will come to Australia. When it comes to Australia, your lifestyle will crash as it has crashed in America, as it has crashed in Europe.
I speak regularly to friends and family in Switzerland, the wealthiest country in Europe. People are struggling to keep their heads above the water. So before this happens, for your own sake, you should try to see if there is some type of stable refuge, something you can pin your hopes upon. And you should be pretty hard nosed about it. So I propose to you that far from being naive and idealistic, the non material refuges, the religious refuges are the hard nosed ones.
And that the dominant refuges nowadays are the fanciful and naive ones. If we now look at non material refuges in detail, we find that there are two types of non material refuges. There are those which transcend reason, in other words those which rely on faith and those which do not transcend reason. Those which transcend reason are basically the refuges of the great monotheistic religions which are part of our heritage. Judaism, Christianity and Islam and perhaps also the Indian religions such as Vedanta where it does seem indeed that God transcends reason.
The Buddhist refuge is radically different because the claim of the Buddhist refuge is that it is rational and reasonable. In this sense it is open to question whether Buddhism is a religion. Certainly not in the sense we understand the term religion in the West. Now if we use an extraordinary tool for investigating social trends, Google Ngram, which checks the usage of terms in English literature throughout history, but exclusively the books which have been Googled which is still a very large proportion of all books. And we check the mentions of the term religion in English literature and books published in English between 1800 and 02/2008, this is a chart we get.
An absolute collapse in the mention of the term religion. In other words, this coincides with basically the end of the industrial revolution and the technological age in which we live in which one has focused on non, excuse me, on material refuges at the expense of non material refuges. This has led to widespread disaffection of all the religious traditions and we are a product of this culture in this society. Those of us in this room through Buddhism are trying to reconnect with non material refuges with greater or lesser difficulty. We will talk about that in the second part of the conference.
Now as you remember I mentioned that non material refuges are divided between refuges which transcend reason and those which do not. Let us address the refuges which transcend reason and Christianity which is part of our heritage. One of the passages in the Bible which summarizes this the best is in the book of Job. Where those of you who have read the Bible remember Job holds the creator, the Lord to account for the fallacies of the weaknesses of creation and the rejoinder which God gives to Job really summarizes the issue in transcendental refuges. God says to Job, where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Declare if you have understanding. God affirms himself as inaccessible to human reason, as an object of refuge in which one must have faith and faith alone. And man humiliated in the person of Job answers, therefore have I uttered what I understood not, things too wonderful for me which I knew not. Therefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes. This is I would say the western vision of religious refuge.
Transcendental refuge is inaccessible to man. It is revealed to man. Man must accept it by an act of faith. Any questioning, any analysis, any investigation is not only counterproductive but is destructive of faith. However, such transcendental refuges face fundamental flaws precisely because they are rooted in faith and not rooted in any type of rational analysis.
They are extremely fragile and I would like to point out just how fragile they are by giving you the case of a recently canonized, saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta who was perhaps one of the greatest exponents of Christianity in the twentieth century. It is only after Mother Teresa’s death that her private letters to her father confessor and to friends were published. And these letters revealed depths of despair, faithlessness and anguish which had never been suspected before. Mother Teresa says writing to a friend the Reverend Reverend Michael van der Pete, Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.
Keep in mind this is a Roman Catholic nun. And she adds in another letter, if there be no God then Jesus you also are not true. Face to face with the suffering in Calcutta which you can imagine, her refuge, God, gave no solace. Precisely because it was a transcendental refuge, the relation to that refuge was exclusively based on faith. And when faith is faith face to face with the brutality of the human lot, the harshness of suffering, sometimes it is not sufficient.
Then the editor of the Jesuit magazine which is close to an official spokesman of the Roman Catholic church said, I’ve never read a saint’s life where the saint had such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented. Why was this the case? Why was Mother Teresa so tormented when to all appearances she was living to perfection the life of a Roman Catholic nun dedicated to others simply because the object of refuge was incompatible with experience and reason. And I would like to present and this is for a Buddhist audience if there are those among you who are Christian, my apologies.
I would like to present the core arguments against the existence of a god as he or she is understood in the great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, specifically Christianity. The first strong argument against the existence of a god is simply the scale of observed suffering in the world. Because certainly for Christianity, God in addition to being omniscient, in other words all knowing and omnipotent, all powerful which are both accepted by Judaism and Islam, for Christianity in addition God is all good. Then God’s all goodness is very difficult to conciliate not just with suffering in general but with the tremendous scale of suffering we see nowadays. And I heard that a large number of very dedicated Christians renounced Christianity after the tsunami in 2005 simply because they could not believe in a God which would allow some 250 or 300,000 people, most of whom were innocent of any fault, to die for no obvious reason within a couple hours.
So the scale of suffering belies the existence of a creator God who is all good. This is known technically as the argument from theodicy, from divine judgment. The second which has plagued all of the revealed religions is the contradictions between scripture and what is now known to be the actual reality of the physical world. The world was not created in seven days. This is a given.
There was not an ocean over which the spirit of the almighty flew. This is also a given. So the totality of revealed scriptures is at odds with present scientific knowledge. Then there are technical problems with the notion of a first cause. A first cause in other words a being who basically creates everything without himself having a preceding cause and without changing is a notion which is rationally and philosophically very problematical.
So the thrust of the Buddhist critique of the existence of a god is a critique of the notion of a first cause. When we put these three together, the scale of suffering which is at odds with the all goodness of God, the fact that these revealed scriptures which are taught to be the actual word of God are contradicted by physical or scientific evidence and the fact that the notion of a first cause is very difficult to understand philosophically, we can only conclude that most probably God does not exist. If God does not exist he cannot be an object of refuge and it is this quandary which has haunted the great Christian practitioners. In the case of Mother Teresa almost certainly it was a scale of suffering. Almost certainly.
In the case of many educated Christians, the fact that what they study at university, let’s say, of the nature of the physical world is simply incompatible with with what seems to be a presentation of cosmology which is 25 or 30 centuries old. So this has led among those westerners who are trying to find non material refuges to an interest in other religions and specifically Buddhism. It’s the picture of Stephen Batchelor, one of my late teacher Geshe Rabten’s former students who has maintained over many years a very ambiguous and problematical relationship with Buddhism being somehow both inside and outside the tradition at the same time. Then we shall be talking, referring to him, but to other Western converts to Buddhism of the problems westerners encounter when they choose to become Buddhist precisely because it is something all of us must think about before we decide to take refuge and to become Buddhist. And in this context, I would like to quote from an article by Alan Wallace which I quoted several times here already on the particular problems the transmission of Buddhism is encountering in the West.
These are problems which you will have seen in this center. So I, would suggest that you read the article if you can. Wallace says and I should point out Wallace is also a disciple of Geshe Rabten and has a degree in physics. I think he may have his PhD in physics now. That westerners are now seen by the Tibetan teachers as impatient, superficial and fickle.
These are really the three biggest flaws one can have in Tibetan society. In Tibetan society the greatest quality one can have is to be reliable. You can imagine in the conditions which are Tibetans experienced on the high plateaus that someone who was lackadaisical like a butterfly would not be very popular. Unfortunately, this is not the case for many western students. And as a result of this Wallace has a few, I could add quite a few of the very finest Tibetan teachers now refuse to teach in the West.
They specifically refuse to give the great initiations in the West because the experience has been that Westerners are unreliable. Some are feeling given the brevity and preciousness of human life that devoting time to people with such fickleness and so little faith is time not very well spent. I should point out that Alan Wallace is American. This is not a Tibetan who is talking. The specific problem we encounter as westerners is what I would call spiritual materialism.
We are forced into a commercial situation in the centers. At this center for instance, we try to function as traditional Buddhist centers function. In other words, teachings are free and the students make donations if they wish. Then it didn’t work to such a degree that Khensur Rinpoche was extremely distressed by the situation, eventually called me into his room. He told me he had spent the previous night without sleeping.
Tenzin had come to him and said we were facing future bankruptcy because the students would come and as he put it rather sharply, drank the tea, ate the cookies, and left. Tenzin told Rinpoche we have to charge for these teachings. And about that, he asked me as the main sponsor of the center whether, I agreed with this or not. This had never been my goal when I funded the creation of this center, but we had no choice. So we started charging.
It is precisely because the students when the center was created in 02/2008 refused to enter any non commercial religious relationship that we have been trapped in a commercial situation to survive. Trapped because it was that or closing the center. Again and again, Rinpoche during teachings ask the students to make donations to help the center. This volunteer approach failed completely in Australia. I should put out it works much better in The United States.
But here, I think perhaps as a result of the welfare culture, you have a mentality of entitlement to a degree I have never seen in another country. Then what has happened and it has happened all over the West, we have entered into a commercial situation of supply and demand. Where the centers must supply teachings to respond to a demand of the students and the centers are financially dependent on the participation of the students. In other words, we have been forced into a commercial logic which is the logic westerners understand. The logic of money.
Now clearly once one enters into that situation, the teacher is no longer free to teach what is truly of benefit. Because if the teacher teaches what is truly of benefit such as refuge today, which is truly of benefit, attendance is low. When attendance is low, pressure is put on the teacher to teach a more glamorous topic such as Mahāmudrā, which actually is of no use to the students. And this occurs because we as a society are unable to understand the notion of a non material refuge. We are unable to move beyond money.
It is quite pathetic to be perfectly honest with you. So if we now study the issue of conversion to Buddhism, then the data I have mainly comes from France. There are very few studies on this topic. I have encouraged this center to take attendance and study the participation of the students. It has not happened.
I hope it will happen in the future but I think it would put the finger on some very sensitive topics which perhaps we don’t want to put the finger upon. So I will present the French data. I should point out I have translated in centers in Switzerland, in The United States, in Singapore, in Australia. It applies to all Western societies I know. It is includes basically some 650 formularies from Tibetan centers in France and some two fifty formularies from Zen centers.
So this data shows the problems Westerners have in converting to Buddhism independently of the Buddhist tradition they convert to. So the age groups and this corresponds to our experience here, basically covers a thirty five to fifty age group with a sizable proportion of students over 50 years of age. It is very rare for the young nowadays to have a strong spiritual interest largely because as members of a welfare society and welfare society still exist in Europe and America, The issue of suffering which leads to spiritual interrogation is one they seldom confront. Now among these Buddhist students, how many have taken refuge? Unsurprisingly, a large proportion, almost seventy five percent have taken refuge.
It’s only one fourth who have not taken refuge. And where Lenoir’s study becomes very interesting is that he then polled these students for their understanding of Buddhism. What specifically they expected from their practice? Surprisingly, 42%, we’re close to half expected improvement in this life. In other words, from a Buddhist standpoint, 45% would not qualify as Dharma practitioners or religious practitioners.
This is almost half. Then 13% expected a good rebirth, in other words would be practitioners of the small scope. 30% wanted liberation and I gathers those who were striving for full enlightenment for the sake of all mother sentient beings were so few they didn’t even make it into the chart. So this is the reality of attendance in Buddhist centers in France. The data was collected over the nineteen nineties.
It fits what I see in centers here. Then a particularly disturbing aspect of Lenoir’s study is the stability of the students over time in their freely chosen religious commitment. This is the attendance of students at Karma Ling, the greatest French center over ten years. Year zero obviously we have 100%. Everyone who comes during year zero is counted.
After five years it is only 10% of those who are present at year zero who are still coming. After ten years it is 3%. These are the highest attrition rates I know for a religious tradition and something we have seen at TBI. So I wanted to show you some pictures but I I simply didn’t have time and frankly perhaps would have cut too close to the bone. We have pictures of the students attending Khensur Rinpoche’s great seminars from 02/2007 onwards.
These are tantric seminars. In other words, they entail having received initiation and being in a full student guru relationship in the full sense of the term. Now we can see over the years of those pictures who was there and who was not there. I can say honestly when I first translated the Vajrayoginī seminar here in 2007, there were quite a large number of people present. I think between 02/2007 and 02/13 perhaps less than five of the people who were present in 02/2007 are still seen at the center.
It is around five or less out of perhaps 35 students. Keep in mind these are students who received a complete set of commitments and vows who took refuge, took the Bodhisattva vows, took the Tantric vows, took initiation, chose Khensur Rinpoche as their teacher. Where is everybody? Where is everybody? So these are rates of instability which bode ill for the future of the Buddhist teachings in the West.
Now if one looks at how these students saw the possibility of practicing Buddhism in another religion, one is quite puzzled to see that a solid 66% consider one can both be a Buddhist and practice another religion at the same time. Add the 15% who don’t know, you are looking at around 82% who consider either that you can be a Buddhist and practice another religion or aren’t quite sure. From a Buddhist standpoint this means that of the 73% who said they had taken refuge, in other words who said that they were single pointedly practicing as Buddhists, the overwhelming majority have no refuge because refuge cannot be divided. You cannot be unless you are pie if you’ve seen the marvelous movie The Life of Pi, you cannot be at the same time a Jewish, a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim as well as a Hindu. You to choose.
The viewpoints are not compatible. Yet it would seem based on Lenoir’s study that 82% of those attending French Buddhist centers considered that either they could have two religions at the same time or they weren’t quite sure whether they could or not. So this raises some very sharp questions regarding the actual issue of conversion. And I purposely chose the picture of the conversion of probably a young African to Christianity because we are much more sensitive to cultural issues when they concern others than ourselves. However, we are in precisely his situation.
We are westerners converting to a non western Buddhist tradition and the data shows that our conversions are not stable. The first question one has to ask is, when one converts, does one really convert? And a great Christian writer, Chesterton, put it very, very aptly, I think. He said, when a westerner converts to a non Christian religion, they really never convert with that religion at all. They really convert to Christianity minus the parts of Christianity which are bothersome.
And this is something I have seen over and again at the center here. That when you speak to people privately, I remember speaking to one of the students here who attends all of the teachings just a couple of weeks ago and she told me and she often asks very sharp questions during the teachings that whenever she needs something, she asks God for help and God sends it. And this was in the foyer. Then I was flabbergasted. I was absolutely flabbergasted because you cannot be a Buddhist and believe in the existence of God.
So it is clear that there is a very high level of confusion in the student. But it’s a confusion which is not expressed in public. It came out in a casual way. And this was confirmed when I was speaking with Geshe Jampa Gyaltsen at the end of his stay at the center. As Geshe-la was leaving, he said two things to me and I think, you know, we have to take them on board on board.
After having been driven all over town by Tenzin, to the beaches, the restaurants, and so forth, keep in mind this is a very pure Tibetan Geshe who has been a monk for thirty years. He said to me, it was very interesting to see Western life and culture. As a monk, there are many things I am not going to have to force myself to forget, but I think it will be very difficult with this culture for Buddhism to spread in the West. And then he added shortly after, there is a great amount of confusion at the center. And it is precisely of this confusion that we shall talk after our break.
Then time for a tea break.
Key terms in this teaching
- bodhisattva jang chub sem pa (Tib)
- One who possesses bodhicitta. LYWA
- bodhisattva vows chang sem dom pa (Tib)
- The vows taken when one enters the bodhisattva path. LYWA
- Mahamudra chag ya chen po (Tib)
- The Great Seal; a profound system of meditation upon the mind and the ultimate nature of reality. LYWA
- tantric vows sang ngag kyi dom pa (Tib)
- Vows taken by tantric practitioners. LYWA
Definitions adapted from the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive glossary, as taught in the Gelug tradition.