My Shift from Criticizing to Accepting Buddhism

When I was young I was a fierce critic of Buddhism. I had read the philosophers and the scientists; I thought religion was superstition, that the talk of reincarnation and karma was the product of an ignorant age, and that any intelligent person should outgrow it. I saw Buddhist temples as places where the old and the frightened came to buy false peace, and I said so openly.

What changed my mind was not a sudden vision but a long, slow process. First, I met Buddhists who were not foolish or cowardly. Some were well-educated, honest, and kind in ways that their non-religious neighbors were not. They did not try to convert me; they simply lived well. I began to suspect that if Buddhism produced such people, it could not be entirely the fraud I had imagined.

Second, I suffered. My mother died; my health failed; my work brought me face to face with pain that no philosophy or science could ease. In those years I found that the Buddhist teachings on impermanence, on suffering, and on compassion described my own experience more accurately than any book I had read. I did not believe in heaven or hell; but I did believe, from experience, that clinging to what changes is the source of suffering, and that letting go is the beginning of peace.

Third, I read the sutras more carefully. I had once read them as a skeptic, looking for errors. Later I read them as a patient, looking for help. I found in them a deep psychology: a clear-eyed analysis of how the mind manufactures its own prisons, and a practical path for getting out. I did not have to accept every myth and miracle; I could take the psychology and leave the cosmology.

I am still not a devout believer. I do not believe that going to a temple guarantees anything, and I still criticize the commercialization and superstition that have crept into some Buddhist institutions. But I no longer reject Buddhism. I accept it as one of the great wisdom traditions of humankind, a tradition that has comforted and disciplined millions of people over two and a half millennia.

My shift was not from faith to doubt, but from arrogance to humility. I had thought I could explain everything with reason and science. Life taught me that some wounds reason cannot heal, and that the old teachings, for all their flaws, know things that modern books have forgotten.

Now, when I meet a young skeptic as I once was, I do not argue. I simply say: wait. You will suffer, as we all do; and then you will understand why, for two thousand five hundred years, people have taken refuge in the Buddha.