Buddhism is evangelical. It's not a cultural religion like Hinduism is.
Yeah, Buddhism is absolutely a proselytizing religion.
And absolutely a religion. I love how something Sir Monier Monier-Williams said disparagingly in 1889 has gone on to become the sound bite of choice for sophomoric #analysis of Buddhism well over a hundred years later. Two important points: 'Buddhism doesn't believe in an afterlife' is a downright bizarre statement, and people who point out that the doctrine of anatman means that reincarnation is widely misunderstood are absolutely right but don't provide any account of why that means it's misunderstood, largely because 'what is the reincarnating substance?' is widely acknowledged to be an incredibly tough paradox in (most forms of) Buddhist thought. It's a paradox to which there's no pat, barista-with-a-soul-patch-friendly answer. Google 'alaya-vijnana' for one actual Buddhist attempt at resolving this theologically.
I didn't totally follow what you wrote, and my knowledge of world religions is woefully impoverished compared to yours, but my impression as an admirer and semi-practictioner is that
1) the realization that there isn't any essential "thing" that can cycle on is vitally important to understand to shatter your mental fictions of a self and that
2) taken from 40,000 feet, the religion as a whole is agnostic as to whether the "rebirth" alternative presented to reincarnation means that some kind of (very crucially: non-essentialized) consciousness can indeed pass on or whether rebirth is just an accurate way of conceptualizing the world vis-à-vis Mufasa's "our bodies become the grass, the antelope eat the grass," and that the former is much more prevalent in areas closer to the indian subcontinent.
Wait, that which is more prevalent in areas closer to the subcontinent? The way I'm reading the sentence, that seems inaccurate, but I could be reading what you're saying wrong. (The rest of it is accurate; it's just that 'from 40,000 feet' has struck me throughout my academic career as the wrong way of understanding a religion. It's a massive, massive problem that I have with comparative religions as a discipline.)
Absolutely agreed (and I think I might know who the professor you're talking about is, and that he might teach at my university and have an office next to one of my professors'. Is it Stephen Prothero? I'll feel incredibly silly if I'm wrong but whatever). My other main problem with the more Eurocentric definitions is their absolute uselessness and obvious paltriness when faced with the fact that Buddhism had fulfilled all the sociological, political, and artistic functions of religion to a tee in every society in which it's been the dominant school of thought.
Yes, it was Prothero. I've read some of his stuff and really enjoyed it.
What I meant with the first part was that, from my highly limited experience, the most recent strains of Buddhism (that seem to all be in SE Asia) are more likely to have strictly materialistic practictioners who often don't believe in supernatural consciousness transferring forms of rebirth (Zen, Chan) whereas other, older, larger schools like Mahayana, Theravada, Tibetan Buddhism are more likely to believe in some form of supernatural consciousness-transferring after death that appears similar to reincarnation, but is not the same, because the transfer is not essentialized (i.e., there is no self, no whole person, nothing to transfer). I could be wrong or ignorant, though, you tell me.
From my vantage point, I like the realization that there is no self and think that that realization is possibly really useful, and find truth in the paradox that the answer to "what lives on after death?" is the sarcastic, cagey response of "
who exactly is it that you think might live on or not live on?!?"
Or another way: When people ask me what happens after I die, I tell them that my biological material/matter becomes recycled into something else after I die, and that all of the times I was kind to someone or treated someone like sh**t make me live on, for better or for worse, in a very meaningful, consequential, real way. And if they are particularly game, I might give them that sarcastic cagey response.
