Sometimes Buddhism Is Witchcraft & Magic

And Sometimes Buddhism Is Philosophy & Reason

Hi y’all,

Recently I received a ton of likes on a Note that I posted way back in November:

I posted this Note after plunging into the bowels of Reddit to find info on a Dharma topic I was curious about.

I emerged from that dark underworld of anonymous internet comments feeling saltier than usual, and picked up Passionate Enlightenment: Women In Tantric Buddhism by Miranda Shaw, as a palette cleanser, and took this photo and posted this comment.

At first, I was happy that the Note gained traction on Substack. (Hello, new subscribers! I’m glad we found each other! Welcome!). It’s nice to know that I am not alone.

But then Note got so many likes that I had a serious oh-shit moment. First of all, people on the internet can be really weird. Secondly, how true do I think my statement really is? Is it true all the time?

I wanted to dive deeper into my own understanding (or lack thereof) of how the philosophical, analytical side of Buddhism synthesizes the more devotional, intuitive, magical side.

I came to Buddhism, oddly enough, as a ninteen-year-old who was super into eco-feminist spirituality and neo-paganism. I have never fully grown out of that. There is a part of me that just wants to dance under the full moon in a circle of women and nonbinary people (and maybe men who feel comfortable putting on a skirt once in a while), and just take a break from toxic masculinity. If I were a better practitioner, this wouldn’t matter, but alas. I’m simply not that good.

I’m here for a Buddhist practice that is sensuous, corporeal, land-based, and animistic.

But it’s not like I want to throw out the logic and reason in Buddhism.

As a person who probably reads more than she should, the intellectual rigor of Buddhist philosophy has always excited me. Reason is not a sexy word, and yet I get a little hot under the collar whenever I see a really solid logical argument. A good argument, it seems to me, does not so much fight the reader into submission as much as it seduces them with persuasion.

One of the many things that drew me into Dharma practice is how Buddhism synthesizes analysis and reason with intuition, devotion, and magic. Tibetan Buddhist teachings and prayers (like this one) which are often phrased in a kind of incantatory syllogism—defining the awakened mind but what it is and what it is not.

The person who wrote this prayer, the 3^rd Karmapa Rangjung Dorje, was not only a philosopher, but someone who spent years and years practicing meditation and having visionary experiences.

And the visionary experiences are important. Rangjung Dorje was a philosopher and a mystic. These two modes of relating to being are not considered incompatible in the Tibetan tradition, and it’s one of the many reasons why I practice this path and not something else.

I should mention: I think it’s fine that people are practicing Buddhist meditation from a secular, scientific materialist worldview. Secular meditation seems to be relieving a lot of people’s suffering; it’s also helping people love better and live happier lives.

Some of my favorite writers on Substack are people who are meditators and who don’t consider themselves Buddhist, and I’m pretty convinced that they are wiser and kinder than a lot of so-called meditation experts out there. I don’t want to impose limits on something that is obviously enriching the lives of so many people. And besides there are about a billion doorways through which one can enter Dharma.

So what I think is harmful isn’t so much secularism as dogmatism. Sometimes dogmatism wears a secular mask, sometimes it wears a religious one, sometimes it wears a New Age woo woo one.

There’s a human tendency to flatten the experience of awakening mind. Philosophies are instructions to support practice, not as ends to themselves. When philosophy stays on paper it never truly lives. Those words are meant to be animated through the practitioner's lived experience and through sangha and through teacher/student relationships.

This human tendency to flatten experience isn’t unique to the West. There is a whole canon of Tibetan literature warning us not to get too cerebral.

Right now I’m working my way through The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa. Milarepa, a famous Tibetan yogi who had no formal education, had an abusive childhood and ended up murdering thirty-five people. Eventually he became incredibly enlightened and his fame spread.

One day, a group of scholars skilled in debate came to argue with Milarepa. Milarepa beat the pants off them. The scholars left jealous and humiliated because unlike them, Milarepa was not trained in logic and epistemology. His understanding of Dharma was based on personal experience and his teacher, Marpa. Eventually, a jealous scholar murdered Milarepa.

In a more contemporary, down-to-earth way, Dzogchen teacher Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche writes that countless people have had experiences of awakening who had no formal education and did not know how to read or write. There are traditional stories of people who experience a sense of awakening mind solely through devotion. (Devotion, here, might be described as a kind of love and emotional fidelity to something greater than the constricted self).

All these teachings seem to tell us that reason will only get you so far. And I have found this to be true. I have personally never found reason to be a reliable source of refuge.

I have never relied on logic while at the bedside of my dying mother, or in the wake of a disaster or rupture, or at the news of another’s misery or tragic loss. I have reached for practices in those moments to relieve my suffering. Often my practice fails me. In those moments when my practice fails, and I discover that have nothing left but my own intuition and devotion, I am forced let go and wing it, because philosophy was never the point, and love is not an argument.

Neither is intuition.

Intuition—a cognitive faculty we employ in relationships, care-taking, emotions, complex decisions with moving parts, and art—is considered subordinate to reason, and I suspect that is why we so often associate intuition with the female. “Feminine” forms of cognition—spontaneous, sudden, ambient—are simply valued less than the analytical.

I don’t believe that women are more innately intuitive and magical than men. But the experience of girlhood and womanhood often conditions us to value the intuitive and magical more. Like, I don’t know many cis-het men who went to slumber parties as thirteen-year-olds and tried to summon the dead and to make each other levitate and then braided each other’s hair and choreographed dance routines.

I also suspect that a sense social outsidership lends itself to relying on more intuitive modes of knowing.

Maybe Milarepa was threatening to those scholars not only because he understood the profundity of Dharma without an scholastic education but because he understood Dharma in an intuitive girly weirdo way.

He understood Dharma outside the norms of male monastic system. Sometimes I think it’s too bad Milarepa didn’t have the good fortune to be born as a woman. He would have been completely ignored by those scholars and left to meditate in his cave and serve his community in peace.

A highly intellectual, secularized approach to Dharma as the only or the superior approach often doesn’t attract people who are more aligned with magic, comfortable with not knowing, and with intuition.

There seems to be a real longing in our culture for spiritual practices that drop you straight into that sense of the numinous—a state of awe, wonder, enchantment, deep contentment, ease, pleasure, and understanding. I think that’s why things like plant medicine, contemporary witchcraft, astrology, and Tarot have gained so much popularity in the past few years. What strikes me as harmful about dogmatic secularism and exclusive intellectual Buddhism is they have effectively diminished the intuitive, land-based, wild, sensuous, and animistic parts of Dharma—the modes of being that so many people are longing to reclaim within their lives.

We’re doing a disservice to ourselves and to some very profound, very rich traditions if we only consider Buddhism to be an app, or a self-help book, or a scholarly text, or a clinical tool.

It can be all those things. But it’s also so much more.

Paid subscribers: My apologies for not having a new writing exercise out this month! Work has been busy, I went to an online retreat, and I currently have the flu. Please feel free to drop any of your previous exercises from past posts into the chat or email me directly. (My email address can also be found in the chat.)

Frontispiece to volume two of Fridtjof Nansen's In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times (1911).