My journey so far

I enjoy reading, studying, working, and watching cartoons by night. My favourite time to do so is at around 11:30pm or 12:00am. I switch off my room’s main light and turn on my desk lamp, so that light is given through the lamp and my computer screen. Two small sources of light is enough to bring a sense of hearth and home in my room, and enough for me to fulfill my life’s work – philosophy and religion. In this way my entire life has been a constant groping in the dark for a candlelight or a desk lamp that might show me the way towards the Good Life that Greek titans like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle so revered. My family is agnostic and I was raised agnostic, i.e. it was up to me to pursue matters concerning philosophy and religion on my own, and my family played no part in it. Therefore I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that unlike a lot of people I did not dive into religion for the sake of others or for the sake of community. Why do I bother saying this? Because people who say that religion is not a social phenomenon are kidding themselves.

I believe that being raised in an agnostic background was one of the best things that could have happened to me, for I was free to pursue whichever line of profession I wanted. When I was young I was fascinated with dinosaurs and I remember I often felt sad that these majestic reptiles were never around. I fantasized of being a paleontologist and digging in North America, Europe and Asia for the bones of large dinosaurs. When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I ended up being a philosopher of religion, but I suppose this will need more explaining anyway. My love of dinosaurs and scientific proof of their existence is what moves me to dismiss creationism and the Young Earth theory as claptrap. To me, Christian creationism is what the Roman Inquisition was to Galileo: the denial of empirically undeniable scientific proof on the misguided basis of defending dogma.

What attracted me to Buddhism was its presence of devotion, and at the same time, lack of dogma. Buddhism, throughout its history, has produced many dedicated and stalwart sentinels of wisdom and ethics, among them Nagarjuna, Dharmakirti, Santideva, and the authors of the cosmic text, the Flower Ornament Scripture. Yet there was no author who believed that belief was a criterion for Heaven and unbelief was the default precursor to Hell. The Kalama Sutta is one of the hallmarks of Buddhist philosophy, on par with with Greeks’ healthy skepticism and open-mindedness. I have yet to find a religious teacher who so keenly emphasized such a wise approach to religion and religious teachers: “It doesn’t matter who said it, even if I said it; if upon deep contemplation and investigation, you experience that it isn’t true, then it’s not true.” In modern times, when asked what would happen to Buddhism if reincarnation was proved wrong, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama said, “Then Buddhism would have to change.” I cannot say in my heart that this is not an admirable statement from a deeply devoted religious leader who has already seen his country raped and suppressed by socialist murderers.

But it would be a mistake to think that I think Buddhism is the “best” or a perfect religion. First, I find it best for me, and it is far from perfect; there are plenty of philosophical problems within Buddhism, the debate between the no-self students and the Buddha-Nature students is still going on today. Another mistake is to think I drifted towards Buddhism early on. Being born in Hong Kong and raised in a Chinese family, if this was the case, I could understand if people accused me of studying Buddhism simply because Buddhism has been a large part of Chinese history and culture for centuries. In other words, I would have just been “filling in” my father’s footsteps, or fulfilling social obligations (it’s common for people to choose either the Dharmic religions or the Abrahamic religions nowadays, whilst ignoring the grand plethora of other externalist and pagan religions).

I hold the “dead” religions in as much validity as the religions I specialize in (Christianity and Buddhism). My favourite myths came from the ancient Egyptians, and much of my early studies in mythology and religion came from books about gods like Ra, Osiris, Thoth, Horus, and others (I am a big fan of Thoth, the cosmic god of wisdom and time. I once wrote an entire essay on him in high school). By this time I familiarized myself with Indian religion, the basics of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (although I have never been well-versed in Islam), and the precursor to these three monotheistic religions, which is Zoroastrianism. I devoured books on the Norse religion, the faith of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the mystery religions that were the fruition of the Near East and the Mediterranean, Chinese mythology, Japanese legends, the religion of the Mayans and Aztecs, and to a lesser extent, those of the Native Americans and Australian Aborigines.

On the philosophical front I was most interested in ethics and epistemology. I dabbled in LaVeyan Satanism for a brief period in year 8/9 because I was attracted to its aggressive, hypermasculine outlook and its replacement of religious ritual with a Nietzsche-ian Overman philosophy (LaVey himself stated that the Satanic rituals used in his form of Satanism were only to fulfill mankind’s primal needs, and it was only natural since Satanism was a “carnal” religion, based on the physical and sexual needs of humans first and foremost). Thanks to the early influence of Near Eastern and Western thought, I am now attracted to all sorts of European philosophy, from idealism to existentialism, although I am not necessarily agreeable to them. Currently my favourite writer is Montaigne, known sometimes as the “French Socrates”.

LaVeyan philosophy left me feeling a bit unfulfilled, but I don’t hold any bad feelings towards Satanism. It is, after all, not a nihilistic philosophy, and it is only fatalism, psychological egoism and nihilism that I am suspicious of. Anything else goes. The Greek philosophers came in relatively late onto my outlook, and I would describe myself nowadays as a moderate Epicurean and a moderate Stoic, while at the same time a big fan of Aristotle’s Golden Mean and a supporter of the Socratic method. I admire the Ionian proto-scientists for their early attempts to understand the world, and Heraclitus was particularly difficult for me. I have written a short essay on the Eleatic philosopher Zeno in one of my courses, and I quite enjoyed it.

I am now 18 years old. Academically I specialize in Christian theology and philosophy of the Buddhist and European traditions. Mystically (I hesitate to say “religiously”), I am a Mahayana Buddhist. I see much of the Mahayana works as among the pinnacle of ethics and morality, in particular its emphasis of “salvation for all sentient beings”, regardless of their state of existence or their beliefs. As an admirer of the late Carl Sagan and modern British philosopher A.C. Grayling, both of whom are hardcore atheists, I cannot say in my heart that God, if he exists, has deemed our planet and our existence as the most important one. After all, as scientists love to point out, the cosmos is so vast, we are so infinitely small. We are relatively developed lifeforms drifting on a slab of rock in a massive lonely galaxy surrounded by billions of other galaxies. And it is certain that one day, our sun will die and our earth will suffer a fate worse than that of the dinosaurs. This is a scientific fact. There will be destruction and fire, and whether or not there is an afterlife/reincarnation, it is likely, millions or billions of years from now, homo sapiens will have evolved beyond recognition, or have died out. The essentially geocentric worldview of theism, with its three-tiered universe of Heaven, Earth and Hell, and eternal life, does not satisfy me. My intuition tells me that is almost too… arrogant. This worldview, along with the notion of an eternal Hell, smacks of a religion developed in response to human emotional and political insecurity, and (I commend the more sophisticated theologians and religious philosophers for this) we can do better than this.

Add in the immense Problem of Evil and try to reconcile gross evils such as systematic genocide or the starvation of small children, and many might understand me when I say that although I have tried for three years, I cannot salvage classical theism (the belief that posits an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving God, transcendent yet immanent and personal) from my spiritual dustbin. To me it is the right of every sentient being to have a chance at life, liberty, and the accomplishment of good deeds, whether in this life or in a future life. No one, demon or God or Buddha, can take away that right. When an innocent girl is raped and butchered by an axe murderer, what does this say about the classical theistic God? Certainly not omnipotent, or more disturbingly, perhaps not all-loving. And what of the theistic eternal Hell? I will never, ever believe in infinite punishment for finite sins because I believe in second chances (and I see reincarnation as another chance – a pity that theism won’t accommodate this). In reading apologetics and application of theology in philosophical problems, I have found it difficult to defend classical theism without resorting to cognitively dissonant theodicies. The apparent contradictions or philosophical problems I find in Buddhism do not cause cognitive dissonance to such an extent (reincarnation/no-self is a much less loaded philosophical debate than all-loving God/evil). Therefore I adopt the position of many modern philosophers of religion: “The fact of evil certainly contradicts the Christian’s speculative claim that God is all-powerful and loving; a naturalistic approach can reveal how religion is a function of human intellectual and emotional frailty; and a consideration of the peculiar nature of religious language may well lead us to scepticism about its informative status… As we saw, the traditional proofs are not convincing. Hence, while theism has little evidence in its favour, there is fairly strong evidence in its truth” (Beverley Clack and Brian R. Clack, 1998, The Philosophy of Religion: A Critical Introduction, Polity Press, Cambridge UK).

There are plenty of theistic exceptions. My lecturer, who is Lutheran, has utterly respectable beliefs. To him, God is not all-powerful, nor does he believe fundamentalists can ever be at peace, because they always need an enemy to bitch about/lobby against/persecute. I dig that.

Now, I have given a very broad skim of my current position. Most philosophers posit that there are alternative approaches to religious devotion. A good one is henotheism, a mode of religion that the ancient Egyptians favoured. Another is deism, the belief that essentially, God created the universe and then became a couch potato from watching too many episodes of 24 and Grey’s Anatomy. And because of God’s absence, the universe has been running on its own ever since. Thomas Paine was a deist, and along with George Washington and the other Founding Fathers of America, emphasized the null role Christianity played in the Constitution (which makes me think even less of creationists and dominionists who champion a so-called “Christian America”). For me, an alternative approach can be Buddhism – a philosophy of life that talks of countless universes and world-systems and does not place Earth in the centre of the cosmos. A cosmic religion that emphasizes liberation for all sentients regardless of creed or being. In many ways, thanks to applying Buddhist ethics into my life, I literally scorn dogmatism. I could not care if you are religious, or whether you are a human or an intelligent alien. Humans, while having more potential for Buddhahood, play no central role in the grand scheme of things, or lack thereof. Who knows, perhaps we may one day meet Christian extraterrestrials or alien Buddhas? I am mellow and liberal about it all as long as it is not fundamentalist or hurtfully dogmatic. I have read the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Bible on several occasions. I have read many works by atheistic and religiously moderate philosophers, both Continental and Asian. I have studied many a manner of ancient religion and philosophy. So many more great adventures and deeds await; there is no way I am stopping here.

My motto in life is intentionally centered around Mahayana Buddhist principles, as well as the tradition of duty and self-sacrifice that is inherent in all cultures. It is intentionally non-religious, but it is offered in humble devotion to all sentients in all time and space, just as the Buddha and his succeeding sages intended. Remember the Truth of the World: All sentient beings are in this together and there is only one undeniable truth in life: we’re not getting out of it alive! There is so much suffering in the cosmos: divisions and conflict, especially religious or ideological divisions, only adds to the hurt. The journey must go on, and the Good Life must be continually pursued.

My journey is far from over. But my motto always reminds me I am always, “In the service of all sentient beings”.