Buddhist Philosophy Basics
The Most Important Buddhist Concept You’ve Never Heard Of
The ‘Dharma Wheel’ and the Importance of ‘The Time’
Buddhism is a methodology, like ‘medicine’, not a prescription, like penicillin, much less a dogma, like “always administer penicillin when a bacterial infection is detected”. The consequence of this is that the right thing at the wrong time or the wrong place is the wrong thing. This concept is extremely difficult to internalize not just for those raised in the West, but anyone under the sway of its metaphysical presumptions, which is increasingly the entire developed (and developing) world. Even the concept of “religion” is really coherent only in describing Roman Catholicism — a sort of tribal monogamy not to a people, but to a premise. Most people assume dogma and religion are basically synonymous, simply because they were in the genesis of the Christian Church, and in turn all of its offspring and rebels, including Protestantism, scientism, and Western atheism. If you are define yourself by what you reject, you are still defined by that thing.
Therefore “Buddhism” can only said to be truly practiced to the extent that the principle behind its methodology is consistently applied: if you give chemotherapy to a healthy man, or use penicillin against a bacteria that has become resistant to it, you are not practicing medicine, you are playing with medical toys.
Every religion struggles to account theologically with the fact of social, economic, and political change, but Buddhism provides explicitly, at least at the conceptual level, for the means of addressing it, of updating the principle of sound medical administration amid the advent of new pathogens and the disappearance of old ones. The matter is extremely complicated, not least because of the contrary injunctions bequeathed by the Buddha: to work out one’s own salvation through personal initiative, as well as to forbid philosophical adventurism and the attempt to peel back the onion of his initial discovery solely for the sake of satisfying intellectual curiosity. But this basic point is simple enough: there are medical doctors who focus on research instead of patient care, yet it only counts as medical (rather than merely biological or chemical) research if in theory and practice it stands to redound to medical work and the healing of the unwell. Buddhism is a practical means for solving a practical problem — the inescapability of dukkha (sloppily rendered as “suffering”) — the moment it ceases to be concerned with this, it is not Buddhism. Buddhism is a plane in the air, a ship in the sea, a car in the road, etc. When the plane lands and the journey continues on the road, those who stay in the plane because they like flying are aviators, not Buddhists.
The Buddha prophesized that there would be three periods of history after his death, generally referred to as the Former, Middle, and Latter Day of the Law (Dharma). How it could be that what was simply “true” in one era could ever, even in theory, cease to be true — if it was in fact true in the first place — is the historical/temporal aspect of the fundamental riddle to which Buddhism (or any religion) adduces an answer. But the medical metaphor is helpful toward explaining it (in both Buddhist and early Christian scriptures, parables involving a “doctor” always refer in turn either to the Buddha or to Jesus Christ). In more metaphysical language, you could say that a religion is a bridge — from “is” to “ought”, from metaphysics to ethics and spiritual practice. The metaphysics never change, only their instantiation and the proper course of action to take in light of it does. As a Buddhist with strong Christian sympathies, I would argue that this lack of maneuverability and metaphysical sophistication proved the political and cultural undoing of Christianity in the modern era — even believing Christians can admit the world was so wholly other in premodern times, the reality it explained and the course of correct action inside of it so foreign to our own times, that there must be another piece to the story. They would simply maintain that that is exactly why the emphasis on the hereafter and a self-limitation to the mysteries addressed by the Bible and the Church Fathers is paramount and exclusive.
“Is” is like geometry, and “ought” is like architecture. There can be no disagreement about “is” — at least not among co-religionists. Buddhist sectarianism is somewhat different from that of other religions, because — at least until the Latter Day — the different schools need not say that their counterparts are wrong, even about the “ought”, let alone the “is”. Two doctors might both heal a patient with different medicine; they certainly need not disagree on the diagnosis, and probably won’t if they are both basically competent. But there are other factors on the line — does it work fast enough? Does it work for enough people or make provisions for those for whom it doesn’t? Are we beholden to said others in the first place or only rather to ourselves and those impressed by the medicine we’ve taken to? And so on. The Middle Day of Buddhism, characterized by the full flowering of its metaphysical “is” — and a certain carte blanche surrounding the genesis of new schools to accommodate it. The sectarianism of the Latter Day begins to look more like that of other religions, in that if one is right, the others have to be wrong — again, not because they have described the reality incorrectly, but applied the description incorrectly, from the standpoint of the other schools.
Conservative Hindus, twenty five hundred years ago the same as today, regard the Buddha as an evil heretic. But the very thing that legitimized his spiritual “charter” (from the Buddhist standpoint, of course) was that the “Wheel” was already in motion; “Hinduism” (a made up word coined by Christian-tinged Europeans needing to render any comprehensive spiritual doctrine as an “ism”) was “correct” and proper in primordial times, but eventually the medicine it provided stopped delivering, the point at which the wheel turned; and at that moment, the Buddha entered the world.
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