When I was in my mid teens (this would have been 1984-ish) I read every Hesse book I could beg, borrow, or steal. After reading Siddhartha I asked my best friend and future roommate, Kalpesh (who is from India) if this Gautama guy in the book was real. He said, “that’s the Buddha, you dolt!” Thus began my decades’ long love affair with Buddhist crap. I identified as a Buddhist from then until my early thirties. I then wandered into the miasma of being a real live, believing Christian for 8 1/2 years, but that is inconsequential to this story.

My Buddhism was not what one could call… practicing. Okay, one couldn’t even call it remotely committed. I did participate in meditations and visited the odd temple. I fell in with a Nichiren Shōshū crowd for awhile in NYC and did the silly chanting every day. Maybe it’s a personality disorder or a character flaw, but I just couldn’t (and still can’t) seem to lose myself in meditation. Make no mistake, though, as the consummate hipster I did get off on telling everyone I was a Buddhist, regardless of my inability to reach inner peace.

But I did, and still do, believe in some of Buddhism’s tenets. The cardinal truths basically state that life is suffering -- a notion to which I still subscribe. I do still agree with the noble truth of the cause of suffering to a certain degree; but the truth of the end of suffering and the path toward that end I’m not so keen on now.

One thing that drew me to Buddhism, and which we still share to some degree, is the concept of continuous cycles. One cycle-theme is the reincarnation myth, which, to me, is very akin to the idea that matter and energy are never destroyed (at least as observed within our closed space-time universe), they merely change. Another cycle-theme is the notion of karma, which, to me, jibes with observations of material cause and effect. The main problem I have with these now is that reincarnation requires a transcendent spirit to continue on after death, where I don’t believe there is such a thing; and that karma tries to ascribe laws akin to those of physics to the decisions, actions, and even beliefs of people, which is simply not observed.

As to your comment about Buddhism not really being a religion, I can tell you that is folly. Buddhism and Christianity are merely two among a myriad of lenses through which I’ve tried to view reality, and having openly pursued and participated in so many faiths and belief systems, I can say with great certainty that Buddhism is a religion. In its purest form it is an atheistic religion, but a religion nonetheless. And there are plenty of sects which outright deify Gautama. It’s more than just a philosophy, it’s a transcendent explanation for why things are the way they are.

One great thing I can say for Buddhism is that I feel it prepared me for my current materialist world-view. It helped me to face the reality that my actions do have real and relatively lasting consequences in this world, however insignificant they may seem. And definitely my philosophy that no situation is ever really that bad came from my Buddhist travels.

Having dabbled in so many religions, I used to get a kick out of saying that my karma ran over my dogma. But I know that there is no karma and that any dogma is a subjective principal based upon imperfect and often imaginary perceptions of reality. Ironically, Buddhism is one of the aspects of my life that has informed that viewpoint.

I hope that wasn’t too much more than you were looking for.