A look at the NY Times interview series about religion. The fifth installment looks at Buddhism, a major world religion often left out of the religious philosophical discussion in the United States.

1. What Does Buddhism Require?

2. The fifth installment of Gary
Gutting’s interview series is entitled,
‘What Does Buddhism Require?’

3. The interview is with Jay Garfield, a
philosophy professor and the
current Kwan I’m Thong Hood Cho
Temple Professor of Humanities at
Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

4. He is the author of the book,
‘Engaging Buddhism: Why Buddhism
Matters to Contemporary
Philosophy.’

5. Gary Gutting begins the interview by
asking how the addition of
Buddhism to traditional religious
philosophy curriculum would change
the discussion.

6. Philosophy of religion currently only
refers to Abrahamic religions such as
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

7. Religions outside of these are often
irrelevant to the discussion.

8. What can result is a sense that the
world’s other religions can be
viewed in the same way as
Abrahamic religions.

9. Sometimes debates even arise
about the validity of a religion based
on the similarities they share with
Abrahamic religions.

10. This ethnocentrism can really blind
us to important and wonderful
qualities of a religion like Buddhism.

11. Garfield starts by addressing the
importance of not generalizing when
it comes to Buddhism.

12. Buddhism is a large religion with
a storied history and many sects.

13. San Francisco Zen practitioners are
quite different from Sri Lankan
Theravada monks.

14. Because there is no central
authority, doctrine, or organization,
it’s important to be careful about
how we refer to it.

15. What Buddhists do share is quite
different from Abrahamic religions.

16. Most notably, Buddhism is atheistic,
with no questions about the
existence of god.

17. Buddhists are more interested in
awakening into Buddhahood, and
then how one in that state would
relate to the physical world.

18. There is also a philosophical
question in Buddhism as to how
ultimate reality relates to ordinary
reality.

19. Is the world illusory? Questions
like these would dramatically
change the discourse of
philosophy of religion courses.

20. Being a Buddhist, according to
Garfield, is about taking refuge in
the Buddha, Dharma, and
Sangha.

21. Taking refuge means recognizing
that human existence is flawed,
and accepting these three jewels
as the only solution.

22. Awakening and becoming a
Buddha, achieved by Siddhartha
Guatama, is an individual’s
awakening from suffering
to achieve a satisfactory
existence.

23. The Sangha is a community
awakening, though there is some
debate as to what community is
truly referring to.

24. The Dharma is a doctrine of four
noble truths.

25. First is that existence is
fundamentally unsatisfactory, full
of pain, aging, and a lack of
control.

26. The second is that this suffering
is caused by attraction and
aversion to and from things that
cannot be gained or avoided.

27. This causes primal confusion
and an egocentric connection to
the world.

28. The third is that in order to
eliminate suffering, we must
eliminate attraction and aversion
through metaphysical insight.

29. The fourth noble truth is a set of
ways by which one can
accomplish that feat.

30. What Does Buddhism Require?