I'm a Buddhist experiencing a very real crisis of faith
Hi everyone. I'm looking for a little commiseration and/or advice on the situation I find myself in. I'm wondering if any of you have experienced the same.
This post is going to talk a bit about my skepticism and struggles with my experiences. I want to make it clear that I'm not looking to denigrate anybody's lineage, tradition, or practice. The very fact that I'm experiencing such struggles is because I believe these practices have value, and I find it painful that I can't connect with them as I'd like to.
Here goes:
I've been a practicing Buddhist for about 3 years now. I was a pretty staunch atheist who started off looking for a totally secular Dharma, and started a personal morning meditation ritual based on a "buffet style" approach of things I liked from the Pali canon, Thich Nhat Hanh and Chogyam Trungpa. As I got deeper into trying to understand concepts like emptiness and satipatthana, I found myself wanting to find a teacher, join a sangha, and become a more formal sort of practitioner. I got less and less attached to the concept of being anti-religion, and instead became more and more interested in the insights I was discovering by being open to the Dharma.
After a lot of trial and error with various local Buddhist centers, I felt unbelievably fortunate to find a vajrayana sangha studying under an accomplished lama. I instantly liked everyone in the sangha and really felt that something unique and beautiful was happening there. This frankly took me by surprise because I was trying to find something "secular" and wound up joining the most ritualized and hierarchical Buddhist community around. What can I say? It clicked.
Still, my feelings on a lot of the practices ranged from agnostic to totally disbelieving. I didn't feel connected to guru yoga, either in relation to Padmasambhava or the lama (whose teachings I loved, but who I struggled to "view as the embodiment of all the sugatas," as the scriptures enjoined me to do). I couldn't visualize or connect with yidam deities. I didn't believe that Padmasambhava was born on the pistil of a lotus flower or that Prince Siddhartha took seven steps on the day he was born. I felt inspired by Shantideva's writing, but kinda glossed over the parts where he tried to scare me with depictions of the hell realms. In short, I connected so deeply with some elements of the Dharma and tantric practices, but there were other elements I so deeply didn't get. I decided to focus on strengthening my practice and let the rest sort itself out.
Well, it's now been over 2 years with this sangha and not much has changed regarding my feelings. I still love my Dharma brothers and sisters, and our lama. But I still find myself feeling like the least-committed member. I still don't know how I feel about rebirth in general, let alone a really specialized esoteric practice like phowa, so sometimes I feel like I'm just plain faking it. The people around me are ever more committed to guru yoga, pouring ever more time and money into the lama's Dharma activities, and I find myself biting my tongue so as not to offend or "say the wrong thing".
As my practice has become more ritualized I feel that I have become a "church on Sunday" type of person. Sometimes my relationship with the practices feels transactional, like (for example) I'm using Vajrasattva to purify my karma rather than really living the Dharma. Sometimes I think I was a better Buddhist when I had no idea what I was doing and I meditated by staring at the living room wall and trying (usually in vain) to successfully count 10 breaths without getting distracted. At other times, though, I know that the instruction I've received in generating Bodhichitta (for example) has made me a better, more skillful person, and there's probably no way to put that toothpaste back in the tube, so to speak.
For me, these conflicted emotions have been compounded by a deep desire to be more engaged in alleviating suffering in the world, and a feeling that my sangha (like most Western sanghas) does almost nothing substantial in this regard. While Christians and Jews and Muslims are feeding the homeless and sheltering at-risk refugees, my sangha is in talks to raise money to buy the lama a house. In theory, this helps us "root Dharma in the west" and thereby benefit all beings, but it feels increasingly ludicrous when there are beings in need of immediate help right in our city. And when it comes to discussions of current events in the Buddhist world, there's always lots of deflection and excuse-making for the sex abuse scandals at Shambhala and Rigpa, or the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, where I'd like to think that the Way of the Bodhisattva enjoins us to take a firm stand on these issues.
I essentially feel like I'm in a marriage with someone I still love but we have "grown apart." I could of course go try to sit at the local Zen center again, or maybe give the Quakers another go... but the truth is that the connection I made at this sangha was unique and I worry that my practice will completely wither away if I become a one-man sangha in my living room again.
Frankly, this is a very weird situation to find myself in considering how anti-religious I was just a few years ago. Most of my friends can't even wrap their heads around the idea that I go to a room full of statues to prostrate and chant, so they can't offer me any insight or advice on what I'm going through. How about you, internet? Got anything for me?
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tl;dr: Have you ever experienced a crisis of faith as a Buddhist and had to sever ties with a community or practice that had become part of your life? What was it like? Did you emerge as a stronger practitioner?
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