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
--------------------------------------------------
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.
