Sacred Languages, Clothing, & Diets

Religions like to have "sacred" languages. Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, Pāli, Sanskrit, … This is a problem.

First of all, it is nothing more than an artifact of history that a certain group of people spoke a certain language during a certain historical period. It was the language they used to talk about cleaning out the pigpen, milking the goat, feeling nauseous, going to war, and having sex. For them, it was not sacred at all. It was just how they spoke, how they argued, how they bargained in the marketplace, how they cursed their neighbor.

For a language to become sacred is a fantasy notion imposed on it by people who came long after ancient traditions and texts came into existence. Astonishingly, this is often done by people who don't even speak the language they are making sacred. It is exactly as ridiculous as if someone decided a century from now that Valley Speak, or a heavy Brooklyn accent, or English with a French accent, or any everyday, unofficial variant of any ordinary language was suddenly chosen by God as the only one he will listen to from now on. In short, of propositions commonly found across multiple religions, the idea of a sacred language is one of the most obviously ridiculous and manmade.

Many martial arts and yoga traditions likewise treat Japanese or Korean, or Pāli, or Sanskrit, or … as if conveying the same ideas in another language lessens them. Instead, the rather obvious effect of using languages that congregants or students do not speak is that most of them end up having little idea of what the leader wants to convey. Many of them tune out. Many of them comply mindlessly, not even trying to bridge the egregiously imposed gap in understanding. Some of them find it pleasing. The latter is nice, but does it justify the former?

This is form over substance taken to a ridiculous degree, and to a profoundly immoral degree if the teachings at hand are the spiritually necessary truths that clerics insist they are. People come to clerics for guidance and clerics then actively refuse to make that guidance as clear as possible, by wrapping it up in a language foreign to the seeker. Who is that serving? God? Or does it just serve an implicit imposition of mysterious, magical mysticism, and of the cleric as a special font of esoteric knowledge?

The Amish and the Hassidim do this with clothing as well. People happened to dress a certain way during a historical period they consider important, so they dress that way, as if God chose it as the one right way to dress for all people for all time, and to do otherwise is an affront to God and inherently immoral. It's just a way for people to dress that was produced during some cultural episode. Keeping kosher or halal or fish on Fridays are likewise just ways for people to eat what happened to be produced as an artifact of some cultural episode.

Millions of people wear articles of religious or cultural clothing and jewelry not because they happen to like its esthetics, not because it reminds them of certain precepts and helps them live up to those precepts more fully, not because it makes a public statement about their identity, values, and beliefs, but because they think their God who knows all, is all, and loves them deeply is so petty that he regards their talismans as making an essential difference in who they actually are, how He should regard them, or as if it is a replacement for how their behavior fails to meet with His guidance.

While many Buddhist may embrace such trappings, Buddha himself did not. Buddha encouraged translation into local languages, to ensure as many people as possible could understand the teachings. Buddha's pro-translation stance says that the ideas are important, not the words, and certainly not mimicry of sounds one does not understand. He took this further by explicitly telling us that he used parables and other not-literal and approximate stories because he valued accessibility over dogma, because what matters is not that you fetishize something symbolic but that you actually embody the teaching in your behavior.

In fact, he evaded discussion of and advised against dogma, even against taking his words as dogma. Buddha emphasized personal exploration, and discovery within one's own experience. He instructed us to seek individual understanding and to act accordingly, and not to repeat words or rituals as if they in themselves have moral value.

Buddhism places its faith in you, rather than insisting that you have faith in it. This of course fits in very well with the secular interest in extracting valuable lessons without having to buy into unprovable, improbable, mystical assertions. Buddhism is more pragmatic, more empirical, more honest than that. It urges us to try ideas out, see what we get, and act authentically on the basis of our own best understanding. Even Buddha's teaching, in Pāli or otherwise, is just a finger pointing at the moon, not the moon itself, just a map, not the territory, just a set of directions, not the destination.