listening in on someone else's discussion

The age-old question, "Is Buddhism a Religion?" is resurrected here.

Most adherents of distinct religious traditions resent having their tradition lumped under the category "religion," because they perceive such categorization as a form of denigration: my tradition becomes just "one religion among others." In my travels, Christians and Buddhists alike have told me that their respective paths shouldn't be thought of as mere religions: they are, instead, ways of life.

I think such an attitude is fine for laity, but it lacks precision in the academic realm, where terms like "religion" or "tradition" or "religious tradition" have certain connotations generally understood by fellow academics in the field. Such terms-- despite their lack of universally accepted definitions-- are meaningful and serve as a way to exchange valuable information about these human phenomena.

One can rightly ask, though, whether academe is (or should be) the final authority on tradition X's status as a religion. What makes the academics, who are often at an intellectual and emotional remove from the traditions in question, the arbiters and interpreters of a tradition's significance? It seems to me that, if an academic is truly to study a given tradition, he or she will want to learn something about the self-understanding of that tradition's adherents: the lay folks' opinions matter. To their credit, many academics do indeed strive to gain such knowledge, and the more phenomenologically-inclined ones will even go so far as to attempt an empathetic understanding of the tradition (scholar Huston Smith comes to mind as a popular example of this sort of approach).

At this point, after years of study, my own answer to the question of whether Buddhism is a religion is Joju's forceful "無!"


_