Is Buddhism new age?

[prodigalson2011]

Exactly right:

ZEN IS BORING

Let’s face it. Zen is boring. You couldn’t find a duller, more tedious practice than Zazen. The philosophy is dry and unexciting. It’s amazing to me anyone reads this page at all. Don’t you people know you could be playing Tetris, right now? That there are a million free porno sites out there? Get a life, why don’t you?!

Joshu Sasaki, a Zen teacher from the Rinzai Sect, once said that Buddhist teachers always try to make students long for the Buddha World, but that if the students knew how really dry and tasteless the Buddha World actually was, they’d never want to go. He’s right. Look at Zen teachers. Not a one of them has any sense of fashion. They sit around staring at blank walls. Ask them about levitation, they won’t tell you. Ask them about life after death, they change the subject. Ask them about miracles and they start spouting nonsense about carrying buckets of water and chopping up fire wood. They go to bed early and wake up early. Zen is a philosophy for nerds.

Boredom is important. Most of your life is dull, tasteless and boring. If you practice Zazen, you learn a lot about boredom. I remember the first time I sat Zazen, I was real excited. I figured I’d be seeing visions of four armed Krishnas descending from the Heavens, or I’d be fading into The Void just like the old Beatles song, or reach Nirvana (whatever that was) or some great wonderful thing. But the clock just ticked away, my legs started aching, and stupid thoughts kept drifting by. Maybe I wasn’t doing it right, I thought. But no, year after year it was the same. Boring, boring, boring. After almost 20 years it’s still boring as Hell.

– Zen is Boring by Brad Warner

It is worth reading the whole essay. A definite antidote to the New Age approach to Zen.

rossum

Priceless. I’ve had friends who carried pretenses of wanting to join a Buddhist monastery. I’d have loved to have had this on hand at the time.

 

[TheAtheist]

That term gets regurgitated in this forum so much it’s becoming a parody of itself. The other day someone posted a quote from The Cloud of Unknowing here and somebody, unfamiliar with that book, told him to stick with Church-approved writings and stay away from New Age stuff.

If you rifle through the Eastern Catholic forum (or was it perhaps the older Orthodox forum that used to exist on CAF a number of years ago), I do recall a few threads where while the explicit accusation of being “New Age” was not made, the same sort of criticism you mention above was leveled against of all things…the Philokalia due to the poster not sourcing his quote correctly.

It has often led me to wonder as to why any expression of what commonly comes under the category of “Mysticism” seems to be greeted with such a high degree of suspicion from Western Christians in general.

Orthodox Christianity seems to be “at-home” with the idea, at least in terms of their rather well-defined presentation of the spiritual ascent to God.

But a cursory glance over the history of the Catholic Church reveals some rather…odd…interactions between individuals who would be later acclaimed as Saints by your church (once they are dead and buried) versus the leadership in the Curia.

If the stories were conveyed to me correctly, while some of your Saints enjoyed some rather positive relations with the Vatican, others (St. John of the Cross, Padre Pio to name two off the top of my head), didn’t really have much of an easy time interacting with the folks in Rome.

An “air of suspicion” hangs over “the mystic” in a manner that I haven’t seen replicated in any other religious systems with the exception of Islam…which at least in the past 100 years has much more brutal consequences for those attempting to engage with their tradition in such a manner.

I of course, find this all rather odd, given that the foundation of the Christian experience rests upon the belief that a man resurrected from the dead. You don’t get much more mystical than a being who can seemingly violate a law of nature.

If Catholicism from my perspective seems to at best enshrine an idea of “institutional caution” toward mystics, Protestantism in the American sense seems to out and out reject the idea altogether.

Any form of mysticism, even your own or your Eastern Orthodox brethren’s, gets lumped into the larger category of the Occult which therefore implies some form of demonic connection in the popular mindset.

I can’t help but feel given my observations on this forum versus other religious forums (including other Christian and Catholic ones on the net), that a little of that mindset, of that gnawing suspicion, has rubbed off on at least the American participants on CAF be they Catholic or some other form of Christian.

Which leads to reactionary comments against something like the Philokalia or the Cloud of Unknowing - things which are based within their own religious tradition!

The thing i can’t quite figure out is - Why? (And why does CAF seem to attract that particular personality type?).

 

[Forkfoot]

The Church has an extensive history of keeping its mystics on very short leashes. One reason is probably for the same reason the Spirituality sub-forum here has a rule against sharing “private revelations”; in a religion rife with infallible doctrine and dogma, you can’t have folks just hopping into the role of teacher and saying “Well no actually Mary came to me in a vision and told me it’s really like this:”.

There’s another reason too, and I think I’ma just come right out and say it: the inward path ultimately leads to a shift in perception which, when described innocently and uncensored, really sounds totally contradictory to a lot of the biggest and most fundamental precepts of Christianity. People start talking about being one with God and one with the world, about how no concepts or beliefs are inherently true, about how everything’s perfect and beloved just as it is, and you can totally imagine someone opening their mouths after awakening to that aspect of reality a thousand years ago and being burned at the stake. They had to be very, very careful about how they worded things, in complete cooperation with and under the direct supervision of the Magisterium the entire time, or things got ugly.

 

[Odonata]

And why?

It’s been around longer than Christianity.

all pagan religions are older than Christianity.
pagan by its contemporary definition refers to religions/or philosophies that predate the Abrahamic faiths

new age would describe spiritual and religious paths often inspired by pagan faiths and often eclectic modernised or adapted versions of those beliefs,
such as Wicca and can to some degree apply to reconstruction religions that are reviving non living traditions as aposed to pagan faiths with unbroken living history of practive such as hindu
(traditions where history has seen the culture die and revive, having a break in the traditions history, these are technically both pagan and new faiths and often very historical based academic systems)
the same way a lot of orthodox churches, and Christian denominations are modernised adapted/amended versions of Catholicism

i would even call more recent denominations of Christianity new age before i would ever say it of Buddhism.

Buddhism is a philosophy
the teachings of Buddha are a pathway to spiritual enlightening
it is not the belief or worship of a deity.

examples of recon religions for those who are unaware:
Asatru (viking), Hellenic (greek), Roman paganism, CR,

for interest sake i am CR- Celtic Reconstruction, specifically (paganacht) or irish pagan.
i follow the pre Christian faith of Ireland , which is an animistic and polytheistic religion and culture