Criticism of Buddhism

• 1. Introduction

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  Criticism of Buddhism arrives from an unexpected range of directions. Philosophers, rival religions, feminist scholars, and Buddhists themselves have all, at various points, found fault with the tradition's doctrines, its institutions, and the behavior of its practitioners. The questions they raise are not marginal. They strike at the heart of how karma works, whether nonviolence is truly practiced, and whether the religion's treatment of women reflects its stated ideals. What emerges is a portrait of a tradition that, like all living traditions, contains contradictions its followers have spent centuries trying to resolve or explain away.

• 2. Women and Marginalization

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  Isaline Blew Horner and Diana Mary Paul have each written with concern about the discrimination faced by almswomen and laywomen in Indian Buddhism. Their worry is grounded in what the texts themselves say. An early Buddhist text records the Buddha describing a woman's body as "a vessel of impurity, full of stinking filth. It is like a rotten pit... like a toilet, with nine holes pouring all sorts of filth." That passage has shaped attitudes within Buddhist communities for centuries.

  Kawahashi Noriko, examining the contemporary Buddhist community in Japan, found two contradictory but equally damaging beliefs operating at once. One holds that women are inherently incompetent; the other holds that women require men to achieve liberation. Noriko also observed that the Japanese Buddhist community has consistently ignored both women themselves and the feminist critiques directed at the tradition. Some Buddhist communities have worked to address these historical inequalities, reinterpreting teachings in ways that are more socially inclusive.

• 3. Violence and Nationalism

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  During the Cold War, the Thai monk Kittivuddho gave an interview in which he asserted that killing communists did not violate the principle of non-violence. That statement sits in sharp tension with one of the five precepts for lay Buddhist practitioners, ahimsa, which calls on followers to refrain from harming others. The precept is foundational, yet in practice it has proven subject to a range of competing interpretations.

  In Sri Lanka, during the civil war, Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist monks served as military chaplains for soldiers fighting Tamil Hindu insurgents. Monks who opposed this, including Gananath Obeyesekere, Mahinda Deegalle, and P. D. Premasiri, argued that violence is generally considered un-Buddhist and a distortion of the Buddha's teachings. Buddhists in Japan, Thailand, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka have all, at different moments, drawn criticism for their involvement in violent conflicts.

• 4. The Problem with Karma

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  Whitley Kaufman's 2014 book lays out five distinct problems with the doctrine of karma. His first is the Memory Problem: because no reliable evidence for reincarnation has been found, a person cannot know what evils they committed in past lives and therefore cannot atone for them. This, Kaufman argues, brings the theory closer to vengeance than justice.

  The Proportionality Problem raises the difficulty of measuring the relationship between a person's good and bad acts. The Infinite Regress Problem asks where the first karma originated. Kaufman's fourth criticism, the Problem of Explaining Death, notes that death is treated as the greatest evil in Buddhism, yet everyone experiences it, which weakens the internal logic of the karma framework. His fifth is the Free Will Problem: karma, he contends, contradicts free will entirely.

  Sallie B. King adds a social dimension to these critiques. She writes that karma frequently leads to the stigmatization of people with disabilities and people of lower social status, including Dalits in India. The Buddha's own words in the Cūlakammavibhanga Sutta have been used to justify that stigmatization. Paul Edwards offers a more direct challenge: karma, he says, does not provide a meaningful guide to action.

• 5. Hell, Names, and Commerce

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  Inoue Shinichi of the Foundation for the Restoration of Buddhism has drawn a direct parallel between posthumous Buddhist names sold for cash in Japan and Catholic indulgences. The comparison stings. In Japan, deceased individuals receive posthumous Buddhist names that are said to improve their afterlife status, and for centuries those names were tied to donations and services rendered at temples during the deceased's lifetime. Over time, the practice has become increasingly commodified, drawing mounting scrutiny.

  In imperial China, bereaved families paid monks to chant at their homes, offering alms to the monastic community in return. Critics have also noted that monks in some settings have threatened audiences with the torments of Hell, linking salvation to regular offerings. Rui Han argued that the concept of Hell does not translate cleanly into Buddhism because Buddhism does not recognize an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent god. In Buddhism, individuals fall into Hell through the accumulation of karma, not divine punishment. Ethan Leong Yee and Luis Cordeiro-Rodrigues pushed back on Rui Han, noting that his analysis contains contradictions: if Hell depends on beings with free will who are accountable for their actions, then Buddhism's denial of a real "self" undermines the necessity of Hell's existence altogether.

• 6. Rival Faiths and Doctrinal Disputes

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  Since at least 166, Taoists propagated the idea that Laozi, or one of his disciples, traveled to India and became the Buddha to civilize the peoples of the West. Buddhists responded with their own counter-narratives, and the exchange of accusations continued until the middle of the 9th century. Since the fall of the Han dynasty, Chinese Taoism and Buddhism had accused each other of copying their sacred texts.

  Hindu Vedanta philosophers, with their emphasis on the theories of atman and Brahman, labeled Buddhism a nastika school of thought, meaning it fell outside the pale of orthodox Hindu philosophy. Their objection centered on Buddhist doctrines of sunyata, or emptiness, and anatta, the denial of a permanent self. Jains, meanwhile, found the Buddhist notion of the impermanent or transient nature of the soul to be an oversimplification. In Chapter 8 of the Atmasiddhi Shastra, a 19th-century text by Shrimad Rajchandra, Buddhist momentariness is addressed directly, with the argument that matter cannot produce consciousness.

  Hirata Atsutane, a Shinto fundamentalist and Japanese Kokugaku scholar, wrote a critical biography of the Buddha. The shogunate banned the book, but it still circulated widely among Japanese intellectuals and caused considerable embarrassment to the Buddhist community.

• 7. Sectarianism from Within

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  About a hundred years after the death of the Buddha, the Buddhist community began holding councils to resolve internal divisions. Despite those efforts, a series of schisms occurred, giving rise to many distinct schools. The bitterness between those schools left its mark in the language they used against each other.

  Adherents of Mahayana, and its derivative Vajrayana, applied the term Hinayana, meaning small vehicle or lesser vehicle, as a pejorative label for followers of Theravada. Scholars today use more neutral language, preferring terms like "early Buddhism" to describe the tradition before the first religious splits. The fact that Buddhists have wielded contemptuous language against other Buddhists has itself become part of the broader record of criticism, a record that scholars like those who studied the Cūlakammavibhanga Sutta continue to examine for what it reveals about how doctrine and institutional power intersect.