A buddy of mine was reading a book at work that compared a great many religions and asked me to glance over the Buddhist section to see what I thought.

“Sure, this could be kinda cool.  I’d love to see what a comparative religion textbook says about Buddhism.”

As I began reading, I discovered what I was reading was not a text book for a comparative religion class, but a book called “Why So Many Gods“, a Nelson Reference book.  Just to give you a taste, here is the amazon.com product description of the book:

Each of the religions is broken down into little sections:

1. Short History
2. Basic Beliefs
3. What They Think
4. Followers are called
5. How one becomes a…
6. What’s the attraction?
7. What’s the goal?
8. How does it look like Christianity?
9. How is it different than Christianity?
10. A quick breakdown box that outlines:
    1. Gods
    2. Figurehead
    3. Afterlife
    4. Worldview
    5. Sacred Texts
    6. Worship services
    7. Rituals/Rites/Sacrements
    8. Did you know?
    9. Geographic Center
    10. Number of followers
11. Important Vocabulary
12. Examples of beliefs in Pop Culture
13. Celebrities
14. “The Trick”

So, I learned some new things about Buddhism that I didn’t know from the “What They Think” section:

• Don’t give into worldly entertainment – like movies or TV
• Don’t wear jewelry or dye your hair
• You can worship idols
• Don’t pray to Buddha because he no longer exists

So I read this and sat there with my mouth hung open for a moment.  Of course, I must admit, this is when I still thought I was reading some new Comparative Religion textbook.  Some of this I can see where someone ill informed and just glancing may have misinterpreted something.  I mean, “You can worship idols”.  We have statues of the Buddha, Kwan Yen, etc… on shrines, but they are definitely not there for worship.   Maybe the “Don’t pray to Buddha because he no longer exists” part could be taken from “Buddha was just a man.  Enlightenment is attainable by all.” vibe we give out.  But I gotta tell ya, the whole dye the hair thing…just never heard of it.

They also broke down Buddhism into the Four basic forms we all know (and I quote here, folks):

• Therevada – the original Buddhism
• Mahayana – popular outside India, mainly in China and Japan
• Zen Buddhism – a branch of meditation that is big in the U.S.  Zen means ‘meditation’ in Japanese
• Tibetan Buddhism – the leader is the Dali Lama

In the “Basic Beliefs” section I learned that our only two basic beliefs, throughout all the different sects of Buddhism, are the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path.  Yes, it’s a big part, but saying this to a Mahayana or Vajrayana Buddhist would be like telling a Christian that there only basic beliefs are the Ten Commandments.  But I digress…

I learned that Buddhism is like Christianity because “we both have good morals, because the Eight Fold Path looks like the Ten Commandments.  Buddhists think lying, adultry, etc… are wrong the same way Christians do.” Hmmm…

The way we are different?  Buddhists don’t believe in God. (OK…I’ll give you that one, in the context being spoken about) and we don’t believe in heaven, hell or sin.  Hmmm…well…not in a Christian sense, but a quick look at wikipedia would have at least given you the 6 realms and karma.  Might have been a worthy note.

Admittedly, they did mention karma in the “Important Vocabulary” section.  They defined it as:

Do a bad thing, get a bad thing done to you. Do a good thing, get a good thing done to you. It might not happen to you ’till later, but it will happen. Your karma “account” determines you existence now and in the next life.

OK…considering how bad so of the rest of it is, this isn’t TOOOO far off.

Another thing I learned was about Buddhist sacred texts:

There’s a lot of them, but maybe you’ve heard of The Sutras? Scriptures are directly transmitted from mind to mind (telepathy) and don’t need words to be explained.

Wow…I don’t think I have ever received a teaching telepathically without a worded explanation. I must be missing out.

I learned that burning incense is an offering to the Buddha and  A koan is a verbal puzzle that leads to enlightenment.

But all this pales to the fact that I learned that Ouzo is like a rosary, used to count recitations of a mantra.  In my neck of the woods, a mala is the Buddhist equivalent of prayer beads, but I thought maybe I missed something here.  I thought Ouzo was a greek alcholic beverage, but maybe I had my terms confused.    Well, after looking on the internet and the Buddhist Books at my disposal, I can’t find anything about Ouzo other than it’s ” an anise-flavored spirit that is widely consumed in Greece.”

Now I can’t go any further without acknowledging Buddhisms “Examples of beliefs in popular culture”:

The Free Tibet Conserts.  They were huge in the 90s.  Also, the move Seven Years iIn Tibet starring hottie Brad Pitt…

That’s it?  They could have at least mentioned 70’s icon Hong Kong Phooey and his Sutra entitled “The Hong Kong Book Of Kung Fu” or the numerous Yoga shows that are on TV right now.  They missed a gold mine.

Now we get to “The Trick”.  This appears to be how you can prove to a person of the religion you are reading that their beliefs are obviously incorrect.  For Buddhism, “The Trick”  deals with rebirth and says:

“If there’s no God, then who brings them back after they are dead?“

So there we have it for Buddhism.  Since this book is aimed at teenagers and is apparently used in homeschooling quite a bit, you would think someone would have checked this stuff before they actually put it in print.  If you are a Buddhist, you probably find this hilarious or insulting.  I went for the former and was almost falling out of my chair by the time I finished.  In fact, I am considering buying the book so I can put it on my coffee table and laugh.   However, If this is your teenager’s only exposure you are being give to world religion, it’s pretty much inexcusable,  But that’s the extent of my scolding.

Now, after I had my laugh, I glanced at the table of contents, just to see what else was in here.  I saw the usual Hinduism, Islam, Shintoism, Agnostic, etc…  I even found Rastafarianism, which was just about as screwed up as Buddhism.  I got to the last section which was the ‘cults’.  Ok folks.  What do you expect to find here. Yea, Wicca and Paganism were there, of course.  These are NOT cults, by the way, but I expected to find them here.  As you can imagine, they were  just as misinterpreted as the Buddhism entry.  Then they had Jehovah’s Witness and Mormons.  This surprised me but since I didn’t know much about either,  my assumptions is they screwed that up too.  Then I ran into Unitarian Universalist…yes, under cults.  Now, I have known many Unitarian’s, led some meditation classes at the UU and if I weren’t a Buddhist, UU is probably the closest I could get to something that made sense.

Just for reference, let me tease you with “The Trick” that’s listed for Unitarian Universalist:

“Ultimately, you become confused because, if truth really is continually changing like they say, how is it truth?  The very definition of truth is constancy. “

They were pretty bad on Unitarian Universalist, at least in my opinion.  Who knows.  Maybe on that one they were right, but I somehow doubt it.  Not being UU, I wouldn’t presume to speak on their behalf, for fear I would screw it up just as bad, but if any UU folks out there have access to this book and want to show me the humor from the UU point of view, I will gladly let you post here, or, if you have your own blog, I will gladly put a great big link to it on Enlighten Up.  Just send me a contact me, message, tweet me etc.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 8:57 pm and is filed under Book Reviews, Buddhism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.