How does one go about telling the truth about Buddhism without appearing unflattering in one’s portrait of the Buddha?

The Limitations of Buddhism:

 A Response to My Critics

by Regis Martin

“There’s little point in writing if you can’t annoy somebody.” 

So wrote the late Kingsley Amis, one of the grand old curmudgeons of English letters who, over a long and highly combative literary career, managed to annoy just about everybody. And while I do not aspire to the same heights of abrasiveness achieved by Mr. Amis, I am nevertheless certain that, from time to time, things I’ve written have managed to annoy somebody. Indeed, as recently as last week, when a dozen or more incensed readers seized upon a couple of animadversions in a piece I wrote on Buddhism October 2nd. How eagerly they set about discharging their pistols in the comment section following the essay!

So what did I do to incite such a firestorm? And why has it taken me so long before attempting even to contain the blaze? Did I find their arguments secretly compelling and was thus reduced to silence? In point of fact, I wasn’t even aware of all the thunder and lightning until this week when my editor, John Vella, a very able and nice man, dropped me a line to say what a “clobbering” I was getting among the bloggers. “It’s a bloodletting and it’s not a pretty sight,” he added. And I expect he was right but what the hell could I do? A whole busload of grandchildren having descended the week before to lay siege to my house, I was hardly in a position to compose calm rebuttals. Their arrival having coincided with the first stirrings of the storm clouds, you might say I’d been blindsided by the Buddha.

OK, so what was the warhead that set off the conflagration? Was it the fact that I’d taken such an unflattering snapshot of the Buddha? That in presenting so revered a religious icon as “a plump fatuous fellow, sitting cross-legged upon the floor with eyes closed upon the world,” I had projected a mocking tone that proved belittling in the eyes of true Buddhist believers? Ex-believers, too, who, despite confessions of having come home to Rome, continue to regard the religion they left behind as something benign and beautiful. “The central Buddhist virtue is compassion,” insisted one such reader, who complained that I’d misrepresented the faith he’d converted from seven years before. And then he accused me of “arrogance” for supposing that only Christians had cornered the market on mercy and love. It was a charge that would be echoed by others, all equally insistent that the straw man I’d constructed was no better than the caricatures one finds in Chesterton who, it turns out, was the first to pronounce on the unopened eyes of the Buddha. “Next time you write,” concluded one such critic, “write on a topic you’re familiar with.” Or, to quote my all time favorite, “If Regis Martin is a Professor of Theology he should be fired!”

Fair enough. Although on the matter of losing my job as a result of lampooning the Buddha, it is far likelier to happen at the College of the Holy Cross where the gospel of tolerance scarcely applies to people like me. Meanwhile, at the Franciscan University of Steubenville where I’m a tenured professor in a department not exactly conspicuous for courses on Buddhism, I’m at liberty to lampoon all the enemies of faith.

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