Pedagogically Speaking

Problems of teaching Buddhism

Being a pedagogy course, I once took a Buddhism course and had a chance to teach a little on Buddha's teaching for another class so I typed up 2 problems of teaching Buddhism. Hope you find them fun to ponder...

Problem 1

• “My path goes against the grain; it is profound and hard to see; those blinded by passion will not see it—it is pointless to teach it.

Beings have fallen into desires and are carried away in the current; I attained this laboriously—it is pointless to teach it.”
-Siddhartha Guatama (Buddha)

Problem 2

• A buddha ought to be passionless and non-conceptual, but how and why would such a being teach?

• “For many Buddhists the ignorance that drives the world finds its expression in concepts, for conceptual thought is considered to be fundamentally distorted in that it falsely attributes ultimate essences to its objects. So too, the afflictive mental states that arise from ignorance are frequently epitomized by desire or “passion,” for it is passion that binds one to the world of suffering. But without concepts and passion, a buddha’s relation to the world, especially as a teacher, becomes problematic.”
-John Dunne, “Thoughtless Buddha, Passioinate Buddha.”