I had the misfortune of taking a tour of a Buddhist temple in Orlando today. It was a spur of the moment tour, taken only because the tour group passed by us and a lady who worked at the temple suggested we (my wife and I) join it.
The man leading the tour, which was apparently over, told the group to sit at some tables and he began lecturing us on the subject of Buddhism. He did a fine job, telling the classical story of the Buddha’s birth and upbringing. When he got to the four noble truths and the eightfold path, I began to have some misgivings about the depth of his knowledge but I kept quiet.
But then he introduced the five lay precepts. He started with the first precept and said it was not a black and white precept. It is wrong to kill a bug just to kill a bug, he announced. Never kill for no reason, he opined. But then he advised us that there was nothing wrong with killing an animal for food because people need to eat and as long as we were grateful for the food and were truly hungry, then that kind of killing was OK.
So at that point I spoke up because the other tour members were all nodding their heads, in agreement with him. I said that the Buddha spoke out strongly against killing animals for food and that he ate meat only as a beggar, not a chooser. The leader of the tour group then advised me that eating a vegetable item also took life and that there was no distinction between eating a pig, a cow, or a leaf of a plant.
I argued that plant life is not sentient; it lacks a central nervous system and has no brain with which to feel pain. He countered with the long-debunked story of the man who could get plants to react just by telling them he was going to burn them.
He then moved on to the precept about stealing and said it was a black and white precept. Absolutely a Buddhist can never steal. “This is not like the precept against killing,” he said. “This one is absolute with no gray areas.” He then announced that the precept against sexual misconduct was absolute but that the precept against lying had gray areas.
And of course he then advised the group that the precept against taking intoxicating substances was also a gray area and that the abbot of the temple had advised him that social drinking was fine.
So I looked him in the eye and said: “The precepts you agree with and follow you declare to be black and white; the ones you don’t agree with and don’t follow you declare to be gray areas.”
I was offended (I am not an enlightened being who can never be offended) by the fact that a non-follower of precepts has been charged with guiding tour groups at a vegetarian, no alcohol temple. I wondered if the nuns who had given him that job knew what he was teaching to tour groups.
If Buddhism is just another mundane religion where animal rights are ignored, I want nothing to do with it. The concepts of compassion and loving kindness were never limited by the Buddha to human beings. Only a fool can equate the killing of a carrot with the killing of a cow or a human being. If the fools are in charge of Buddhism, and are now temple tour guides, Buddhism will morph into just another useless religion and the Dharma taught by the Buddha will come to an end.
If a major temple is allowing a tour guide to lower Buddhism to the mundane, worthless level of just another religion where anything goes as long as you love the Buddha and ask his forgiveness for your transgressions, then Buddhism is in serious trouble. If it morphs into just an Asian version of Christianity, as our tour guide painted it to be, it deserves to die, just like any other irrational system of belief.
Zen will survive and prosper. It is closer to Taoism than it is Buddhism and of course the Taoists were strong vegetarians. So you meat-eating Buddhists can have your dumbed-down religion. As a Zen practitioner, I am tired of your pathetic excuses for not following the precepts and I am ashamed of that temple for allowing its tour guide to spread false Buddhism, the Buddhism of ignorance.
