Buddhism’s Consistency

Jesus relished a good argument, and so did the Buddha. That is the premise of Michael Collender’s To End All Suffering. Collender relishes a good argument too, and he mounts one. He thinks that Buddhist-Christian dialogues ought to give way to something their founders’ would have recognized: Buddhist-Christian knock-downs. Charitable knock-downs, of course.

Collender spends the first chunk of his book summarizing the teachings of the Buddha is a fairly dispassionate fashion. He focuses on Buddhism’s empiricist epistemology, its theory of causality, which he labels the “heart of Buddhism,” and the ethics of Buddhism aimed at ending suffering.

He believes that Buddhism is inconsistent with its own premises on all of these points. For instance, if, as the Buddhist taught, everything changes, why not standards of validity? (143).  Collender knows the Buddhism’s arguments used to deflect the charge of logical inconsistency, and he analyzes them in depth to show that they don’t hold up.

This sort of analysis may seem a tangent, but Collender neatly demonstrates that logical inconsistencies undermine the pragmatic aims of Buddhism. He describes a visit to Wat Tai, a Theravada monastery near Los Angeles, and posed this question: “If one cannot empirically know the minds of other people, then pursuing knowledge of other minds is inconsistent with the Buddha’s doctrine regarding the kind of knowledge necessary to end suffering. . . . Is not compassion then inconsistent with the kind of knowing that leads one to be able to end one’s suffering?” A head monk answered, “If someone truly understand the Buddha’s teaching, they will see that compassion is meaningless.” Collender comments, “If metaphysical claims are that which we cannot possibly verify, then the Buddha cannot verify . . . that there are any individuals beyond himself. This makes the Buddha’s epistemology an enemy of compassion” (190).

Collender is well-informed about Buddhist philosophy. He wrote his book to give Christian’s some understanding of and apologetic equipment for confronting Buddhism. He is a rigorous thinker who pulls no punches, but his relentless critique of Buddhist philosophy is infused with affection: Collender admits he likes the Buddha and wants to think the best of him.

I was unconvinced at several points. One is comparatively minor: He says early on that his plan is to focus on early Buddhism (19), but throughout the book he cites philosophical elaborations of Buddhism and contemporary Buddhist literature. The distinction between early and later Buddhism seems to get lost. 

I wonder if Collender’s philosophical argument will touch the Buddhist in the pew, as it were. He makes a case for the practical importance of philosophy early in the book, but I suspect that most Buddhist’s, like most Christians, don’t think much about the epistemological or theory of causality implied by their faith. That doesn’t make Collender’s argument weak or wrong, but I wonder about their effectiveness. Different sorts of arguments will likely have to buttress the philosophical ones.

A final related observation: Collender makes an effort to get under the skin of Buddhism, to understand it from the inside. But his focus on philosophical questions is in tension with that effort. Suppose he is right that Buddhist epistemology is at war with Buddhist compassion (and I’m convinced of that): Still, thousands of Buddhists have for centuries been able to hold these inconsistencies together in their experience. Perhaps they are all deeply divided people. Or, perhaps there is some sort of existential coherence in Buddhism for which logic is a clumsy tool of analysis.