Reflection Rather than Dogma

The teachers who have most inspired and encouraged me in my own spiritual training have always offered their teachings for reflection rather than as the basis for assuming dogmatic positions.

Buddhism has a well-developed doctrine, but when doctrine is merely held as an opinion, it easily becomes the source of a lot of argumentative debate that is not productive. The task of the contemplative is to take a teaching and internalize it, thereby making it alive in your own heart. You do this because you have faith in a teaching, rather than any blind belief in it.

When I hear a teaching that makes sense to me, I need to learn how to apply it to my own life. This is a reflective capacity that we have as human beings. I like to differentiate between what I believe in and what I can reflect upon in a very alive way. I find this helpful because I’m not always sure whether the ideas presented in Buddhism are true or not.

But then there are things that I know for sure are true. For example, if you tell me that killing people is going to make me happy, I’ll say “no” because I know that harming people is not conducive to happiness. However, if you ask me about rebirth, I’ll say, “Beats me.”

In my early days as a monk, I struggled with those areas of Buddhist doctrine whose truthfulness was difficult to prove one way or another. I thought that if I couldn’t know for myself if something was true, then it mustn’t be true. I came to see that attitude as quite arrogant. Then I felt that I had to believe in a teaching such as rebirth because I’m a Buddhist monk, after all! But that way of thinking didn’t feel authentic either.

Then I began to reflect: “What if it was true? How would that affect me? And what would that imply about the way I live my life and how I perceive my world?” That worked for me. I thought to myself, “I’ll take this model on as a kind of working hypothesis.” That challenged my own beliefs and world views that weren’t so well formulated at the time. I found this to be a helpful strategy to apply to those areas of the teachings I just wasn’t sure about. I felt that I could take them on board because there was so much within Buddhist doctrine that I already trusted.

This reflective capacity is what defines human consciousness. In Thailand, it’s said that a biped isn’t necessarily a human being – that it’s living morally and reflecting on the way things are that qualifies you as such. This is a higher definition of Homo sapiens than we typically encounter.

So to be fully human, we need to have this capacity to investigate and understand life, which involves a training of the mind and heart.

This reflection by Ajahn Viradhammo is from the book The Contemplative’s Craft, in “Living a Contemplative Life, ” (pdf) pp. 119-120.