One Of Us

I read part of an essay on Aeon, titled "The lethal act." The subtitle lays out the premise: "The Buddha taught not to kill, yet his followers have at times disobeyed him. Can murderers still be Buddhists?"

I have to admit that I lost interest and didn't finish reading the piece. Mainly because, I think, I'd already arrived at an answer: Of course they can. There are any number of rules-based philosophies in the world. Rarely, if ever, it is considered the case that violating even important rules is a complete disqualification from considering oneself an adherent of said philosophy. And in those cases were it is disqualifying, it tends to be because the the number of rules is very, very, small, such that they define the philosophy in and of itself. For example, one cannot both be a vegan and regularly choose to eat chicken sandwiches.

Of course, I'm not a Buddhist myself, and am not particularly well-versed in it. Perhaps the prohibition against killing is central enough to Buddhism that it does become the de-facto defining characteristic of the faith. But I've always understood Buddhism to be much broader than a particular stance on the value of life. I've always understood most religions to be rather complex in the way they look at, and interact with, the world, and defying attempts to boil them down into two or three things (let alone one) that people must always strive for. This may be a side effect of the fact that for a lot of philosophical viewpoints, religious and otherwise, the central tenet of the practice is fundamentally impossible. To use the example that I'm most familiar with, there is a general sense in the Abrahamic religions that one is called upon to be like God. But God is omniscient and omnipotent, two characteristics that human beings cannot realistically aspire to; and the remainder of God's divine attributes flow from those facts about it. So any quest to be like God is more or less immediately doomed to failure; this is not seen as being an impediment to being appropriately or properly Jewish, Christian, Molsem, Baháʼí or what have you. So I don't see why a failure to be like the Buddha should be considered much of an impediment, either.

But beyond the philosophical aspects of it all, a lot of these things are as much communities as anything else. I know a lot of people who are political partisans, and, as anything who has studied partisanship in the United States can tell you, consistency is not a requirement. Considering that even knowing and understanding a party platform falls, for most people, somewhere between entirely optional and a complete waste of time, adhering to a set of rules clearly isn't very important: so long as the group accepts how one behaves, that is. And I think it's the same with Buddhism. They're a community as much or more as they are followers of a religion. And as long as they have the support, or even simply the understanding, of that community, I'm not sure the rest of it matters.