It’s a common enough question that Google’s search bar may autofill it for you: “Is Buddhism a religion or a philosophy?” That may even be how you ended up on this page. With so many people asking the question, it would seem that neither answer is entirely satisfactory—yet apparently, we don’t have another category that’s a better fit. People want to know what Buddhism is, but the available tools aren’t right for the job.

However, it could be that the question itself is not well formed. Whatever Buddhism is, maybe it can’t fit neatly into a single box. The categories ‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’ might turn our attention to some aspects of Buddhism while causing us to overlook others. Perhaps a different notion—that of rhetoric—can help us to see fundamental qualities of the Buddhist teachings that religion and philosophy miss.

If we define religion as a social and historical phenomenon characterized by a set of beliefs, attitudes, practices, and cultural forms centered around core teachings and concerned with both mundane and spiritual matters, then Buddh-ism is clearly a religion. It has core teachings and any number of beliefs, attitudes, practices, and cultural forms associated with it. We might even say there are, by this definition, many Buddhisms: the Buddhism of classical India, the Buddhism of Tang-dynasty China, the Buddhism of the Tibetan diaspora, Buddhism in the modern West, and so on. But this doesn’t help us better understand core Buddhist principles or get at what might set Buddhism apart from other systems of practice and belief. Perhaps here we can make a distinction between Buddh-ism as a cultural and historical phenomenon—a religion—and the teachings around which Buddhism formed. Let’s focus our attention on those teachings going forward.

Do those teachings constitute a philosophy? Philosophy, as we understand it today, is an intellectual activity by which we seek to discover the nature of things, the meaning of life, the foundations of ethical behavior. In philosophy we build systems of ideas and weigh them according to their power to describe our experience and motivate our actions. Some parts of the Buddhist teachings—especially certain commentarial schools—are philosophical, if not philosophy proper. They reflect some of the qualities we associate with philosophy: intellectual systematization, careful scrutiny of phenomena, rigorous argumentation and critique. But if the teachings are not philosophy, it is because intellection, systematization, and argumentation are secondary to the true goal of the teachings: liberation. “Just as the ocean has a single taste, the taste of salt, so this teaching and this monastic code have a single taste: the taste of liberation.”¹ In philosophy, speculation often takes first place, and is conducted for its own sake or for the sake of abstract knowing; in the Buddhist teachings, such considerations are never speculative. They are meant to guide and support practice toward liberation. The Buddhist teachings are instructions for action and self-transformation, not an attempt to formulate a picture of things.

The Buddha made this abundantly clear in scolding the monk Malunkyaputta, who demanded answers to various metaphysical questions, like whether the universe is finite or infinite and whether the soul and body are the same or different. The Buddha compared Malunkyaputta to a man who, shot with a poisoned arrow, would not allow a surgeon to operate on him until he learned who shot the arrow, what clan he came from, what kind of bow he used, what kind of sinew for the string, what kind of wood and feather for the arrow, and so on. Malunkyaputta’s metaphysical demands were as irrelevant as the questions of the wounded man. The Buddha had no intention of addressing them. Like a good surgeon, he cared only for his patient’s well-being. He taught only what led to liberation.²

Ultimately, this is where the categories of ‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’ fail to express the heart of the Buddha’s teachings. Both religion and philosophy tend toward the metaphysical and attempt to establish concrete, universal truths about the nature of reality, which are used to explain things and justify systems of behavior. The Buddha made no such attempt. The truths he espoused were truths of experience, as we can see in the four noble truths presented in his first teaching. The truth of suffering is the suffering we experience. The cause of suffering is in our own hearts and minds. We experience liberation because we walk the path that leads to it. Moreover, the Buddha formulates these four truths three times: first as a statement, then as a task to be undertaken (suffering is to be understood, its cause ended, liberation realized, the path practiced), and finally as already completed by him.³ These verbal formulations of the four truths tell us they are practical, not metaphysical. They are to be lived, not just talked about or written down in books.

What does all this have to do with rhetoric? First let’s define the term. Rhetoric in the everyday sense is well captured in the phrase mere rhetoric: language without substance, intended to distort and mislead. The art of the advertiser and the spin doctor. This negative notion of rhetoric has a long history. Plato defines rhetoric in a similar manner, as a kind of false philosophy that does not seek the truth but only to persuade. Plato’s student Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, cataloged the means of persuasion, the (mostly underhanded) tactics that speakers and writers use to get you to believe them.

Modern scholars of rhetoric take a broader view of their subject. For them, rhetoric concerns all the practical specifics of communication: who’s involved, what means are used, the context of time and place, all manner of supporting factors. Their studies include but go beyond the journalistic who, what, where, when, why, and how. Rhetoric scholars might ask how something was said; they might also ask how it was possible, at a certain time and place, by certain people, for something to be said at all. For example, consider how the internet has changed our communication. We’ve probably all experienced how its anonymity permits a casual cruelty to strangers that doesn’t occur in face to face interactions. This new behavior is a rhetorical concern. The communicative conditions of the internet (facelessness, distance, lack of consequences) have changed what we say, how we say it, and whom we say it to.

This broader notion of rhetoric helps us to better understand the Buddhist teachings in two related ways. First, rhetoric orients us toward the practical and away from the abstract. The Buddhist program of liberation is entirely practical; we stray from the path the moment we drift toward the abstract. Rhetoric reminds us that while language, especially the conceptual language we often find in philosophy, can leave us lost in the clouds, communication is ultimately rooted in our immediate conditions. Language, like life, is first and foremost embodied—as the teachings are, and as our practice must be.

Second, rhetoric reminds us to scrutinize the messages we receive. They are, after all, always limited. Some of them cannot be trusted, while others only apply to certain situations and cannot be generalized. Even the general is of limited use; the more generalized a claim becomes, the more it becomes a platitude, and the less power it has to help us in specific circumstances. So the Buddha taught his students to carefully examine everything they heard, and to measure claims by their practical consequences. Does an attitude, belief, or behavior lead to benefit or harm? Test it for yourself, and judge it by this criterion.⁴ He also taught them that his teachings were not a Truth to be worshipped but instructions for practice. They are a raft to cross a flood; we can leave the raft behind when we reach the other shore.⁵ After the work is done, there is no need to drag the Buddha’s instructions around like an idol. They should be offered to new students, of course, but they should not be enshrined.

Even the Buddha’s teachings were limited in a sense: he could only teach what people were ready and able to hear. So his teachings vary widely depending on the circumstances. We should exercise caution when we encounter a teaching and ask ourselves, “Is this appropriate for me, at this point in my path?” The monastic regulations also reflect this circumstantial specificity. These regulations were not established all at once, in advance; they were established one by one, in response to actual situations that arose in the monastic community. At the end of his life, the Buddha told the monastics they could abolish the minor regulations if they chose.⁶ They decided to keep them, but the Buddha’s permission suggests that these regulations do not constitute a universal behavioral system. They respond to the immediate needs of beings at a specific time and place.

A rhetorical stance or perspective helps us to approach the Buddha’s teachings as skillful means, strategies devised by a liberated person to help us transform our ignorance into understanding and our counterproductive habits into beneficial action. Instead of grasping the teachings as a doctrine to be argued about or mindlessly repeated, we can see them as signposts on a path we must walk with our own two feet.

Notes:

1. Uposatha Sutta (Ud 5.5).

2. Cūḷa Māluṅkyovāda Sutta (MN 63).

3. Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (SN 56:11).

4. Kālāma Sutta (AN 3:66).

5. Alagaddūpama Sutta (MN 22).

6. Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta (DN 16).