Q: What does it mean to "be a Buddhist"?  My mother referred to me as "her son the Buddhist" and I found it somehow disconcerting.  

A:  Your question actually requires a complicated answer due to the expectations our culture has about religious identity.  In Theravada Buddhism, a "Buddhist" is anyone who can sincerely take the Three Refuges and the Five Precepts. These are ancient formulas going back to the Buddha, but the idea that taking them implies an exclusive "conversion" to Buddhism I suspect is an idea influenced by Christianity. For lay people, to follow the Buddha's teaching has not historically been interpreted as something that excludes devotion to God or gods or other practices. One might find a statue of Vishnu in a Buddhist Temple . This is because Buddhists tend to see devotion to gods as something pertaining to worldly benefits (divine favor and heaven are considered worldly benefits!) while seeing the Buddha's teaching as leading to transcendence of the perception of world, self, and gods to an ultimate vision of truth.  Thus monks in Theravada Buddhism generally do not worship gods, though they are not thereby necessarily "atheists" in terms of belief--they're just aiming a bit higher.  As a result of exposure to Protestant Christianity, however, one now finds Asians teachers who insist on "purity of the cult" and teach lay people not follow other teachings or worship gods, and who proclaim Buddhism as a form of "atheism." Many western Buddhists are of this ilk.

The Three Refuges express trust and confidence in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, ("I take refuge in the Buddha," etc.) and they have a conventional and a more ultimate meaning.  Conventionally, they mean one has confidence that 1) the Buddha was fully awakened, and 2) his teaching (Dhamma) is thereby also trustworthy, and 3) the sangha, primarily the community of monks and nuns, have preserved it adequately and realized its truth so that we can continue to receive the teaching.  The suttas make clear, however, that one's primary loyalty should be to the truth, not to the Buddha, and that one's confidence in the Buddha should grow naturally as the truth of his teaching is verified in one's experience. Loyalty to truth requires faith in the sense of being open to learning and trusting the teacher, and neither blind assent nor skepticism is skillful.  In fact, short of enlightenment, one should not give absolute assent to the Buddha's teachings. The five precepts say "I undertake the training rule to abstain from taking life, from taking what is not given, from sexual misconduct, from speaking falsely (or divisively or harshly or gossiping), and from taking intoxicants that cloud the mind and lead to heedlessness."  Taking the precepts expresses a moral intention not to harm, but they can be taken with the knowledge that the impurity of our hearts may lead to breaking them over and over again.

More ultimately, the Three Refuges express 1) trust in one's own capacity as a human being to fully awaken, just like Siddhatta Gotama, 2) trust in understanding things as they truly are as the path, and 3) trust in the sangha of those who have experience some level of awakening as verification and support for the path.  I think that people who come to meditation classes implicitly take the three refuges by coming at all, though it may take some time for that confidence to become explicit.  I don't stress "taking refuge" because the idea creates anxiety in westerners, who tend to assume they express an exclusive, eternal allegiance and are quite reasonably wary of efforts to "convert" them.

However, I generally don't think of myself as "a Buddhist," though I clearly fit the criteria.  I can take the 3 refuges and 5 precepts sincerely, and truly guide my life with the Buddha's teaching.  But I find that the very concept "being a Buddhist" tends to do something unwholesome in my mind.  As I identify myself as a Buddhist, I feel I am somehow separate from my Christian upbringing, and that "Buddhism" is something I must uphold and defend against something else.  It seems to evoke what the Buddha calls "craving for existence," craving for a concrete identity as this or that, a source of dukkha, suffering.  As the Thai teacher Achaan Chah put it, "Don't be a Buddhist. Don't be a Bodhisattva.  Don't be anything at all.  If you do, you will suffer."  I also heard a meditation student once put it this way: "When I go home to my family and I'm a Buddhist, everyone hates me.  When I'm a Buddha, everyone loves me."

Email questions to Mark Hart.