Periodic Resumarizing Buddhism

Not unlike Christians reciting the Nicene Creed, Buddhists used to recite periodically all the monastic rules as a way to remember what the project was.

The fundamental problem. I'm influenced by Prothero's reasonable idea that religions each are trying to solve a specific fundamental problem.

The fundamental problem is that we suffer. We suffer for a variety of reasons, everything is changing, taking away our accomplishments and what we enjoy now. We suffer from alienation from everyone else. We suffer because we misunderstand the universe and are unskillful in reacting to it.

The solution is somewhat esoteric. In jargon, the goal is universal full Bodhi (Buddhist enlightenment) We should have a healthier relationship to the stuff we want and recalibrate our expectations about how long we'll have it. We should work towards the end of suffering for everyone because until everyone's suffering is solved, ours isn't. We should spend a good deal of time on self-improvement, learning and doing philosophy, we should study and work hard on mundane things like your households economics. You don't solve the even the basic suffering of hunger and sickness without real world resources. No one can realistically solve even these basic problems for all on their own, so we have an obligation to also act collectively. In our life, we will make progress to this end and we won't ever achieve it. Along the way though, we can achieve regular enlightenment, in Buddhist jargon, satori (aha! moments where you figure something out), and Mahayana style enlightenment (finally getting the answer to the harder philosophy questions about desire, who we are and so on).

Practices, both actual and symbolic move us towards the solution to the fundamental problem. Of the Buddhist practices that address the above problems, the Layman's Precepts & Bodhisattva Precepts are a reasonable starting point.

Mental practices. Practicing staying calm, paying attention, practicing not paying attention, and many other meditative practices. Also practicing thinking about philosophy, through sitting, reading 

Study. Study Buddhism, philosophy broadly, but also mundane topics like mathematics or anything else you might study in school.
Teach. Teach, we can reach universal bodhi, without bringing everyone with us. 
Mundane practices, duties, prohibitions.
- Keep social harmony by not lying stealing, personal possessions, fighting, etc. The writings of psychologists and relationship therapists are just as likely to be useful as memorizing the "virtue ethics" lists of ancient Buddhism.
- Comply with civil law, but also comply with the spirit of the law, not just what you can get away with.
- Jurisprudence (the modern study of law) and Ethics (the philosophers studying obligations) and the opinions of other social scientists will be as helpful as just memorizing the five or ten precepts.
- The dharma is a superior law to civil law.
- Don't kill humans or animals. Preserve life when possible.
- Don't eat animals. Be a vegetarian.
- Pay your taxes, work a job, run your household. 
   - The only thing different from a monk and householder is it is a different business model.
- Take care of the sick (either directly or indirectly)
- Participate in Buddhist society (not necessarily any particular sect, book clubs are fine too)
Symbolic Practics.
These are symbolic stand ins for Buddhist action when you don't have other options. You can't find your self each day in a hospital doing surgery or redistributing food to the hungry.
- When you can't
  - chant, do prostrations, 
  - setup a shrine and put out offerings
 

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Important Departures from Other Sorts of Buddhism
All currently existing Buddhisms have significant differences and often have self contradictory elements that they picked up from everywhere over the centuries. The various Buddhism provide the bulk of the raw material for modern practice, but no particular Buddhism has a monopoly on the right practices or is free from useless thoughts and practices. We will have to figure out which is which collectively.

No particular role for a monastic sangha. Buddhism exists now at all because a long lived organization, often state-supported lasted so long. The role of the sangha is my mind is "archivist". The monastic lifestyle isn't a precondition for full enlightenment, the end game is not universal monasticism.
No particular role for any particular founder/sect leader. The founders of each sect of Buddhism might be interesting for what they wrote, but they've no particular preeminence over any other teacher of the Dharma. No particular teacher is the prerequisite for progress or accomplishment. 

Karma is mundane. Karma doesn't know why you did that and doesn't know how to reward or punish you to ensure that the world feels fair. It is up to us to ensure that the world is fair, through law and justice.
Death is permanent, but the better way to think about who we are is not a soul, but part of a collective consciousness that outlasts us individually and that is who we are right now anyhow.
No one will do the hard work of reaching Enlightenment for you. 
Symbolic rituals are not enough, some part of your practice needs to have real effects on the world.
Magic only works in your head. If you visualize a flame, you've magically conjured an image of a flame in your head.
Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, etc exist only in our collective heads. 
The realms exist only in our collective heads. Tien Tai thinking seems to have best captured this, but at the same time, historical Tien Tai entailed practices that implied a literal understanding of the realms.
The ancient texts are all full of magic, gods, and so on. We have to work with this raw material and can't hope to find a primordial secular, enlightenment era (in the European sense of the word) historical Buddha. But that doesn't matter, we're interested in the Dharmakaya-- the Dharma personified. The personification of the Dharma, also, only exists in our heads.

Constructed Lifestyles

A code of conduct is a constructed lifestyle. If we are to make a constructed code of conduct, we should look at the success & failure of other constructed social artifacts.

Constructed languages
- None are anywhere near as successful as a natural language
- Criticized for lacking a 'culture' to go along with them, which makes the semantic part of a constructed language clunky

Constructed (planned) cities, communities
- The more detailed the plan the worse they work
- Utopias tend not to hold up
- The most successful types of planning tend to just formalize what was going to happen without planning (for example, in both places with and without zoning, you tend

Original Sources

One shorter version of the monastic code


A longer version of the monastic code


Some things I like (and probably have wide appeal)
It establishes a method for discussing rules. Violations must meet certain conditions of : Intention, Effort, Object, Result, Non-offenses.
It covers the issues to be addressed. (What to wear, what to eat, what is suitable ettiquitte)
Parts mirror the eight-fold path


Some things I don't like (and sometimes leave me scratching my head)

• Rules that apply to absurdly rare situations
  Traveling by arrangement with a group of thieves from one village to another -- knowing that they are thieves -- is a pacittiya offense.
  
• Rules that are just anti-woman
  
• Rules that are specific to a particular geographic time or place
  eat bean curry only in proper proportion to the rice.
  
• Pedantic rules (nit-picking)
  refrain from sitting with his arms around his knees.
  
• Rules that are obsolete (technology has changed)
  Making a felt blanket/rug entirely of black wool for one's own use -- or having it made -- is a nissaggiya pacittiya offense. (who makes their own rugs nowadays or even orders custom made ones?)
  
• Rules that make a lot of assumptions about the organization (is it a hermit monk, a self supporting monestary, a travelling band of beggars, a couple of monks running a temple, a commercial enterprise run by monks, like the FWBO)
  
• Rules that are just plain bizzare in a modern context
  e.g. Digging soil or commanding that it be dug is a pacittiya offense
  

Rules shouldn't just be an expression of, or idealization of some perfectionist ideal.

Buddhism is a good set of ideas-- however, it is a monastic philosophy and a monastic code, developed not long after the dawn of agriculture and civilization. Since then a few things have changed. For example, the scientific revolution makes it really hard to have put much confidence into the Buddhist cosmological picture. (The Buddhist cosmology holds that we reincarnate and move to-and-fro among the worlds of Gods, Demi-gods, animals, men and hungry ghosts, on account account of the moral quality of the karma we create in our life.) The monostic ideals of being a forest monk and begging for food don't really play very well in countries where such a lifestyle is prohibited by local ordinance. A system based on guru veneration doesn't work very well when there nearest guru is 300 miles away. Devotional Buddhism doesn't have much appeal when Christianity is already established and offers much the same philosophy.


So here are some proposals for the same kind of 'rule based' religion you sometimes find in Theravada Buddhism, but borrows liberally from the ideas of other schools of Buddhism. I think that the Buddhist tent is big enough for everyone, after all some people really like the idea of being a cafeteria Buddhist, which is OK, but they just shouldn't label themselves as traditional buddhist out of respect for those who are trying to follow the classical systems of buddhism. What I'm proposing here definately falls into the category of Buddhist that doesn't follow the classical systems, so don't get irritated because I don't exactly match up with any particular classical school of Buddhism.

Buddhist Creed & Cosmology: (roughly corresponds to 4 noble truths)
1) The world began with a big bang, this may change as physicists discover more. The world will end on earth in billions of years when the oceans boil away and the earth is engulfed by the sun.
2) Life began in the primordial soup and we have evolved from simpler life forms, this may change as biologist discover more
3) There is no evidence of any connection between our life and the life of future living things except for genetics and culture, passed down generation to generation. It is our responsibility as the sole lifeform capable of understanding buddhism to implement it. Celebacy is not an practical universal ideal and promotes extinctionalism. The problems of life can not be solved by ending our own or by preventing life from starting by not having kids. The chain of suffering that brought us to this point is monumental, it would be disrepectful and futile to try to end it by bening celibate.
4) There is no evidence that gods, demi-gods, or hungry ghosts exists, and if they did they would be subject to the same essential problems of existence (change, death, disease, etc) and their existence or lack of it wouldn't change our essential problems of existence
5) The essential problems of existence is that: The world goes on and on with significant cyclical patterns, desire keeps the wheels of the world turning, but the cycle inevitably leads to death, disease, decline. The solution to this essential problem is to follow the buddhist lifestyle, once of moderation, modesty, restrain, compassion. The ultimate goal of such a lifestyle is enlightenment. Enlightenment is an overloaded word and means the unachievable ideal of the extinction of desire and release from the cycle of death, disease and so on and it also means the happiness & contentment gained by following the buddhist lifestyle.

Lay Code of Conduct: (corresponds to 5 precepts, 8 fold path)
1) No drugs, foods or drinks that cloud the mind.
2) No escapism
3) No meanness and cruelty
4) Be socially engaged
5) Be polite
6) Respect the rule of natural law (no lying, stealing, cheating)
7) Do meditate
8) Don't check your ethical, moral and religious principle at the door when going to work
9) Its okay to have kids & get married.
10) Try to reconnect with the Buddhist community once a week
11) Live modestly- Desire and attachment to our loot is one of the roots of misery & unhappiness. It is the desire that is causing the problems. A lay Buddhist should work & earn money & spend it-- they are just reacting to the social & economic situation they find themselves in. What matters for a lay Buddhist is how much they want and how attached to the loot they own, not if they own loot at all. A religion should not ask its members to do things that make no economic sense.
12) Know somthing about Buddhist philosophy. Learn about no-self, transcience and other buddhist concepts and incorporate them into your world view.
13) Avoid delusion, greed and hate. Seek wisdom, charity and compassion.

A good monastic code of conduct is a superset of the lay code of conduct. It should essentially cover what an enthusiastic Buddhist should do, outside of the context of a institutional monestary. Frankly, I have no idea what a real live indigenous North American monestary would look like, probably something like the FWBO. The rules of running such an organization are going to depend a lot on practical matters of experience, the expectation and desires of the sort of people that would want to be so enthusiastic about Buddhism as to live

Monastic Code of Conduct: (corresponds to the 250 or so rules monks & nuns follow)
1) Live very modestly. Not having loot doesn't mean you don't want it, but its harder to convince yourself and other that your big pile of loot is an accident and not a result of out of control desire.
2) Teach, study, exapand on the dharma. The sangha are the professionals of the Buddhist community and should take their qualification no less seriously than professionals in other braches of society. Admitedly, not everyone has the background required for being a scholar, so this rule should be followed to the best of one's ability.
3) Avoid cruelty to all living things. A monastic should be less willing to resort to excuses. Stepping on bugs, setting mouse traps, running over animals with cars, hunting, fishing, using pesticides are one set of issues at one level of controversy. Murder, self defense and war is anther bundle of controversy. Abortion, assisted sucide, suicide is another set of death related controversies. Leather and diet is yet another and is even more controversial. The Buddhist community should expect the lay follower to answer these decisions according to what is possible in his social context. The professional monastic should make the hard decisions in favor of life and we would expect the more advanced buddhist to be able to prefer decisions that involve less death.
4) Meditate a lot.
5) The sangha is open to all
6) Its okay to have kids & get married
7) Don't make claims about you'r enlightenment
8) Promote the enlightenment of all living things