Buddhist Academia, what's wrong with this picture?

Pause to consider just how much is wrong with this picture.

This isn't a poster that was created to promote a temple, nor yoga classes, nor a video-game… it is a poster created to promote graduate-level research in Buddhism.  Where?  At the "Centre of Buddhist Studies", 佛學研究中心, at Hong Kong University, 香港大學.

What does it try to sell you?  Philology?  Language-classes?  Mastery of ancient texts?  No, it tries to sell you happiness (here symbolized with a cartoon of a child sitting on a crescent moon… which is not a Buddhist symbol).

Frankly, no M.A. program in the world should try to sell you happiness: they should try to convince students of the value of their academic program… of what they can learn or, at least, what skills/qualifications students will gain.  Both the image and the promise of "happiness" here make me suspect that the M.A. program is lacking in some of those other things.

It gets worse: why does the poster promise friendship with "your inner self"?  The most fundamental premise of Buddhism is that you don't have an inner self!  This is discussed in English as "no self", and "no soul", but there are also numerous suttas that state (reciprocally) that what's inside you is nothing but "blood and guts" (more poetically, "a synergy of sinews").  The attack on the idealization of "the inner self" (demystifying the body and the self, qua no-self) is one of the distinctive aspects of Buddhist philosophy and religion.

Yet here is an M.A. program in Buddhist studies that is supposedly going to promise you the same thing as every new-age cult: a deeper connection with your so-called "inner self"!  This is especially unseemly for the academic study of Buddhism, but it is also a promise that (probably) no university can deliver on.

Let's be honest: they're asking you to pay thousands of dollars to read some books, write a bunch of exams, and then receive a diploma that will never help you to get a job.  That's what an M.A. in Buddhist studies really is.

They cannot possibly offer you "quality relationships" nor even "a decent environment" in downtown Hong Kong.

As terrible as this poster is, I can say that it is more ethical than McGill University (Canada) that simply publishes a pamphlet with a direct lie, claiming that they offer Pali as a language of instruction when they don't have a single employee who knows anything about Pali, nor Theravāda Buddhism.  That is false advertising on another level entirely.

Buddhist Philosophy 08, Dissent from the Top

Suppose someone formed their opinion of Buddhism based solely on the articles on this blog (a scenario only slightly stranger than meeting someone whose opinion of Buddhism is based entirely on Kung-Fu movies… and yet much less common).  The question might then be asked, "Given all of this supernatural material in the canon (that you complain about other western interpreters selectively ignoring, etc.), why does anyone think of these texts as records of specific historical events at all?"

In a roundabout way, questions of that kind do reach me.  I received an utterly unexpected response from an established, PhD-wielding, career academic (specialized in Buddhism) who felt that my work supported his own conclusion that the Pali canon contained no description of the Buddha as an historical figure at all, nor (in his opinion) did the texts depict him as a human being.  This was both astounding and hilarious, as I then had to provide this professor with a link to one of my prior articles in reply: I had already written "The Buddha was Bald" to discuss the descriptions that we have in the Pali canon that do indeed make the Buddha seem like a normal human being (with nothing supernatural about his appearance, etc.).  I have never heard back from that professor again (the Socratic method is dead, apparently).

The question of whether the the Buddha is described as natural, supernatural, or alternating between the two, is a fairly narrow issue; we have a broader problem in questioning his status as an historical figure (in any of the texts, or in accordance with any possible archaeological evidence, etc.).  Even so, the latter question is still narrower than the universal problem of why anyone regards any of the ancient texts as "real historical evidence" (as opposed to religious fables), and why other texts in the same canon are disregarded (as mere fables).  In effect, modern interpreters end up selectively disregarding some texts, while insisting on the importance of others.

One of the great ghosts haunting "popular philology" is the criterion of embarrassment.  This is not a technical concept: its origin is in a book that sold in airport lobbies, and it was neither narrowly defined by academics nor by religious authorities.  If you look around the internet for debates employing the term, you'll find that they both demonstrate a diversity of (implicit) definitions of what it means, and you'll also see that the authors (often enough) debate amongst themselves the problem of how exactly this criterion should be used.

Given that the term is legitimately contestable in its meaning, it is easier for me to give an example of how it applies to Buddhist studies than to define it.  Mahā-Moggallāna was one of two monks who were expected to inherit the leadership of Buddhism (as a then-new religion) at the time of the Buddha's death; this didn't happen.  Despite the fact that both of these monks were younger than the Buddha, they both pre-deceased him; and Mahā-Moggallāna was reportedly murdered.

Modern icons depicting Moggallāna & Sāriputta (source).

The texts concerning Mahā-Moggallāna are full of the magical and the supernatural, and the events surrounding his death are further embellished upon in the commentaries.  Modern readers tend to regard the death of Mahā-Moggallāna as an historical fact, even if they regard all of the stories told about it as mythology.  How is that possible?  If your only evidence is myth, why would you suppose that you have evidence of anything other than mythology?

Well, there is this dubious thing called the criterion of embarrassment: in general, modern readers suppose that the untimely death of both of the monks who had been appointed to inherit authority was a subject of "embarrassment" (in the peculiar sense that it required further explanation and justification).  Even if the myths are largely fiction, modern readers tend to suppose that the reason for creating the myth was real: the supposition is that a story needed to be invented to "explain away" an inconvenient fact.  However, this whole attitude remains one of supposition.

Many people who don't use the term "criterion of embarrassment" nevertheless share in this basic attitude toward textual evidence (and many people complain that the word "embarrassment" itself is poorly suited to the meaning of the phrase, and is an unwanted distraction, etc.).  The point here isn't that ancient Buddhists were embarrassed by the death of Mahā-Moggallāna itself; rather, the assumption is that modern readers can infer that the invention of the myth served as a type of compensation for a real historical event (and that we can further infer what that real event was that the authors are compensating for).  It all seems so obvious and yet it is really very dubious.

Was Mahā-Moggallāna really murdered by Jains?  If we have a myth stating that he was, couldn't this text reflect tensions between the two religions (Buddhism vs. Jainism) at the time of the myth's authorship, rather than recording a prior historical event?  Can we really "selectively disregard" supernatural elements of a story (that would tend to categorize it as myth) simply because there are other elements that seem (to us, with modern eyes) to indirectly reflect real events?

Could it be, conversely, that these myths cover over something completely different that we can't guess at from the mere supposition that something is concealed?  Human nature being what it is, we might say, at least hypothetically, that there could have been a power-struggle to determine who inherited the control of the religion around the time of the Buddha's death.  As such, it could be that the myth isn't concealing the "inconvenient fact" of Mahā-Moggallāna's death, but, instead that the "convenient fact" of death itself was the myth.

If we started from the skeptical assumption that Mahā-Moggallāna might not have been dead prior to the Buddha, we would then interpret the written myths as offering an explanation of his absence (i.e., exclusion) from power thereafter.  That would be wholly speculative; however, the problem with the criterion of embarrassment is that every theory it supports is wholly speculative.

Monks on pilgrimage (in 2010) to Moggallāna's hometown.

We cannot reduce the degree of speculation even if we employ Occam's razor: there is absolutely no reason why the simplest available explanation for the invention of a myth would be more true than a convoluted one.

Unlike the pure sciences (or even the medical sciences), neither mythology nor history are susceptible to Occam's famous principle: the simplest explanation for why Napoleon went to war with Russia may be utterly false (his real reasons may have been extremely convoluted, etc.) and the simplest explanation for various myths that have been made up about the ensuing war may also be false (propaganda isn't counted as one of the pure sciences).  Given that we're looking at an uncertain mix of mythology and history, "the principle of parsimony" is doubly misleading.

Unlike the laws of physics, we're investigating a story that intentionally conceals something: the motives of the authors may be complex, and we don't even know to what extent they regarded themselves as writing fact, fiction, or a mixture of the two.  In the 21st century, if we were to speculate as to the inspiration for a particular song's lyrics, the simplest explanation has no reason to be more true than a convoluted one.  In looking for historical facts that may be masked within a work of art, simplicity need not correlate to accuracy (although simplicity may make our analysis seem more logical, our conclusions are not any less speculative for that reason).

Returning to the question that opened the essay: why does anyone regard any of this stuff as historical evidence of anything at all?  Well, as a broad aesthetic tendency, I think that most of us (i.e., modern readers) really do share in the mentality of the criterion of embarrassment, and the canonical texts offer us various critical and self-critical remarks about the (imperfect) development of early Buddhism that seem all-too-easy to believe in.  It isn't the case that all of the monks in the canon are paragons of virtue; instead, we have many acrimonious dialogues preserved in which the monks disagree about philosophy, or, sometimes, accuse one-another of ethical lapses and moral misconduct.  There is no real reason why we should regard a story about a bad monk as more historically real than a story about a good monk; however, we should be aware of this tendency of thought that elects to do precisely that.  We tend to treat texts as factual if they contain criticism, self-criticism, conflict, and explanations for what seem to be "inconvenient facts"; we tend to regard the absence of these things (in an otherwise grandiose narrative) as mythical.

If the canon described everyone as levitating and radiating magical beams all the time, etc., nobody today would believe any of it, nobody would really be interested in it, and the whole canon would probably be thought of as quite boring, in contrast to the human drama of other ancient sources, such as the myth of Heracles.  However, the canon does preserve very down-to-earth reflections on the state of the religion, alongside the supernatural narratives (and sometimes mixed in with them indifferently).  This is the sense in which Buddhism is (frankly) more interesting than the myth of Heracles: the religion was intensely aware of its own corruption from the outset, and it was intensely concerned about the misunderstanding of its own philosophy even within its first group of core followers.  The canon preserves a record of many of those concerns (debates, complaints, remonstrations, etc.) --although these are not separate from the mythological material in the texts themselves, and they definitely do not comprise an "earlier stratum" whereby anyone could/should disregard the mythological material as "later strata".  More fundamentally, we should admit to ourselves that we have no clear "criterion" as to what may be called a myth anyway (nor of how/why anything would be separated out as a non-myth); instead, readers just operate on the basis of their own sentiment, and something like the criterion of embarrassment.

Returning to the question of who inherited power at the time of the Buddha's death, I would look very briefly at the example of Mahā-Kassapa.  Whereas the two monks appointed to inherit power did not do so (reportedly due to their untimely demise), Kassapa was the man who actually did take over control of the religion.  Was he appointed to do so from the Buddha's death-bed?  No, reportedly, he wasn't present.  However, as the myth goes (in the MPNS), the fact that he was intended to take over the leadership was indicated magically by the fact that the wood stacked up for the Buddha's funeral-pyre refused to burn until Mahā-Kassapa arrived to attend the funeral.  No, I'm not making this up.  The question is, who did, and why?

Mahā-Kassapa statue rediscovered in 2011.

Yes, theoretically, it is possible that this is an actual historical event, but I don't think that anyone alive today interprets the text in this manner (not even the most pious of monks, and I've met many).  Conversely, if the point of the myth were to legitimate the power of Mahā-Kassapa, the question deserves to be asked: why didn't someone simply fabricate a decision on the part of the Buddha (on his death-bed) saying that Kassapa should take over control of the religion?

It may also be noted that the wood on the pyre does not speak with its own voice: another important monk, Anuruddha, offers the explanation that the gods were preventing the fire from alighting until Kassapa could arrive.  Again, it is tempting to imagine that this myth preserves Anuruddha's support for Mahā-Kassapa inheriting power, and that it is indirectly depicting the fact that Anuruddha wanted to delay the funeral proceedings until Kassapa and his supporters could arrive to advocate for his leadership.  However, we don't know this: it is speculation of the crudest kind.

The inscription from the shattered statue.

Mahā-Kassapa isn't even mentioned in the text (the MPNS) until after the Buddha's death; he enters the narrative with the description of his absence, explained in reference to this issue of the funeral-pyre remaining mysteriously flame-retardant.

Conversely, Sāriputta, one of the two monks who definitely was appointed to inherit power, is mentioned in the same text as speaking to the Buddha shortly prior to the Buddha's death --yet more than 3 months before, apparently (when the Buddha is still in Nalanda).  So, incongruously, we have the Buddha praising the wisdom of Sāriputta as part of the Buddha's death-narrative, and then Sāriputta simply disappears from the story, with no mention of the fact that he was supposed to take over the leadership, nor any statements of the Buddha's disappointment that this wouldn't happen.  Sāriputta isn't mentioned again (neither as alive nor dead nor dying), nor is he present at the funeral, nor is his absence at the funeral mentioned as significant.  Meanwhile, Mahā-Moggallāna isn't mentioned even once in the whole story, although he was the other man appointed to inherit the leadership, and he allegedly died subsequent to Sāriputta, but still prior to the Buddha.

In terms of the chronology, wasn't Sāriputta supposed to be dead all along?  In retrospect, we are supposed to believe that both Sāriputta and Mahā-Moggallāna died just a few months before the Buddha's own funeral, and that news of this shocking turn of events reached the Buddha, and yet their deaths aren't mentioned within the same text.  If all of those deaths transpired in such rapid succession within the last three months of the Buddha's life, why would there be absolutely no mention of such an important drama in the midst of the very myth that details the last three months of the Buddha's life?

These were the two "chief disciples", who were supposed to be in command after the Buddha's death; are we expected to imagine that their own deaths are simply omitted as unimportant from this narrative?

It seems almost irresistible to imagine that we can unravel what the myth means, and also what it conceals.  The truth is that we can't.  We don't know whether or not it was written to conceal anything, and we can never verify what it is concealing in particular.

If these myths were written to serve a simple political purpose, Mahā-Kassapa would instead be mentioned in the Buddha's final orations, and he would be unambiguously named as the intended successor throughout the canon (but he isn't).  Instead, the canon preserves an incongruous and ambiguous situation at the time of the Buddha's death, despite the mythological and grandiose tropes that are built into the narrative.  Nobody who studies the Pali canon as a whole could have the sense that Mahā-Kassapa's accession was obvious or uncontroversial.  We're left with fragments of many strange controversies, and that inescapable feeling that we're looking at an imperfect record of real historical events, even though we're only looking at myths that we suppose to very indirectly reflect those events.

Thai patrons re-sacralize the fragment in India (2012).

Within the Pali canon, Mahā-Kassapa emerges as a very interesting and very human character (who deserves to be written about at greater length than I would do here).  Mahā-Kassapa offers us some of the most striking examples of "dissent from the top" within the canon: he complains very directly about what he perceives to be wrong and corrupt within the religion.  This, also, tugs at our sense of the criterion of embarrassment: although we really have no evidence at all, the nature of the complaints themselves just seem so human, and so believable, that we easily take them as indirect evidence of something actual.

One of the most interesting complaints offered to the Buddha was in the Saddhammapatirūpaka-suttanta (SN, PTS vol. 2, p. 223–4) where Mahā-Kassapa laments the decline of the religion, still within the lifetime of its founder (see the Pali text displayed in the first illustration).  In the past, he complains, the number of rules was few, but the number of monks who became properly trained was many; now, by contrast, there are many rules, but few of the monks are really becoming accomplished in the training.  This is dissent from the top: one of the foremost monks (and the one who eventually took over the leadership of the religion) is complaining that the rules don't work.  Buddhism is a religion built on rules: the complaint against the (prolix) monastic code from one of its foremost proponents is significant.  The fact that the canon preserves dissent of this kind (mixed in with supernatural narratives and all the rest of it) is even more significant.

This is a religion that preserved dissent as part of its bible (including some of the reasons that would-be converts stated for rejecting the teaching of the Buddha, the words of ex-monks who formerly accepted but later rejected the teaching, as well as the arguments of rival philosophers who criticized the Buddha).  As in the case of Mahā-Kassapa, we even have evidence of dissent from the top.

So, "is this stuff historical evidence of anything at all?"  In general, people answer that question in accordance with their own evaluation of human nature: although it is easy to imagine that a religion would invent myths to glorify itself, it simply seems difficult to imagine that they would invent myths to criticize themselves (within their own canon).  Conversely, there is absolutely no distinction between myth and historical fact within the texts (of "the core canon", as I choose to put it) and we need to be keenly aware of the subjective and emotional nature of the decisions we make in disregarding some texts as fictional, and in historicizing others.

Buddhism and the Leaders of Public Opinion

Charles Johnson, 2010 (OSU Library)

As I've said some disparaging things about Schopenhauer lately,*¹ *² I'll open this article with his dictum that increasing awareness increases suffering: his illustration of this is a child with a skinned knee, who continues playing, oblivious to the pain, until an adult happens to expresses concern or pity, drawing attention to the injury, resulting in the child suddenly crying, even if the injury had taken place hours before.  His observation was that suffering arose not from things themselves, but from our awareness of them; intelligence therefore magnifies suffering through our capacity to reflect on injuries, both real and imaginary.  Although the label of "pessimism" is applied to Schopenhauer in many strange ways, on this particular point it could be more meaningfully associated with his name: if the basic premise of philosophy is that we can think our way out of our problems, and that intelligence reduces our suffering, we could say that Schopenhauer offers us the opposite theory.

Charles Johnson (inconsistently cited as Charles R. Johnson) is an American writer of both fiction and non-fiction, who is probably somewhere on the list of the most influential people to convert to Buddhism in the last century.  It would be nice if I could be a fan of his work.  I can't.  I know too much.  Reading what he has to say about Buddhism makes me wince; I know what's wrong with it, and it's a scraped knee that (once discovered) I can't ignore.

Although I studiously avoid reading anything published in Shambhala Sun, their interview with C.J. happens to be the best thing I've ever read from that magazine.  Here's a short quotation from C.J., illustrating why it is so difficult for me to be "a fan" of him, or almost any of the mainstream Buddhist leaders of public opinion:

"In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Dr. Martin Luther King said that civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. I link King with Buddhism because his statements are very close to the idea of dependant [sic] origination. He talked beautifully about how the world we live in is one of mutuality in which we are all equally dependant [sic] on each other."*³

I suppose if I had read that quotation about 15 years ago, I wouldn't have known how deeply flawed it was; but now I do know, and it's impossible to ignore.  C.J. isn't just an author of fiction: he's also a journalist and essayist, who lectures about the importance of journalistic research, fact-checking, ethics and other procedures (see the video, below).  He both aspires to and (quite reasonably) preaches a higher standard of research and writing, but he doesn't apply those standards to his knowledge of his own religion.  Journalism doesn't set a very high standard, but even so: there's a difference between reporting on religion and simply making things up.  For anyone who has actually studied (so called) "Dependent Origination" in the Buddhist Canon (or in any of the canons!), this short quotation (above) is a dead giveaway.

Definition of "Dead Giveaway" (source).

We don't expect Richard Gere to know what he's talking about because he's Richard Gere.  We don't expect Metta World Peace to know what he's talking about because he's Metta World Peace.  Do we expect anyone to know what they're talking about, or does Buddhism remain in a sort of D.I.Y. cultural sub-basement, where anyone can pretty much invent anything like a revelation from a dream?  Buddhism isn't based on revelation: if you want a religion in which people are free to invent anything and call it "the will of god", you should convert to pretty much any religion other than Buddhism.

I'm aware that almost nobody has bothered to read the original source texts describing the 12 links / "Dependent Origination" formula (not even in English apparently) and that's why I've written my own lengthy articles on the subject in the past.  However, when you're looking at an erudite leader of public opinion like C.J., the question deserves to be asked: why?  Why shouldn't he know what he's talking about?  Conversely, why is it that I'm in the position of wincing in agony whenever a public statement is made on behalf of Buddhism?  Why are these statements so often made by westerners who are balefully ignorant of the doctrines that they seem to preach?

He's looking at you, Metta (source).

I continue to receive messages from people who are profoundly uncomfortable with the concept of textual authority itself (and I suppose that's why they're writing to me).  Well, if you want to be part of a religion that doesn't require reading, then Buddhism is pretty bad choice for you.  If you want to be part of a modern intellectual movement that doesn't require reading (and doesn't require respect for the philology and problems of translation) then even "secularized" Buddhism is a bad choice for you.

Buddhism presumes a lot of reading, a lot of recitation, and a lot of memorization; and, if you become a monk, it also presumes knowing and obeying the writ of a lot of rules.  Within that tradition, being a critic or "freethinker" doesn't require less reading than being a conformist, it requires even more: within Buddhism, if you want to challenge the authority of the texts (or of the social status quo), you can't do so on the basis of ignorance of those texts, but only by knowing quite a lot above and beyond the writ of those texts.  I would say that one example of this type of challenge (as part of a process of cultural change) is Taiwan's ongoing attempt to "reinterpret" the status of women in Buddhism (釋昭慧 and her 廢除八敬法運動).  The fact that this debate has drawn Mahayanists into invoking (and debating) Theravāda textual sources is itself a indicative sign that you can't get beyond the writ of the ancient text without first showing that you know and understand it very thoroughly.  Even for people trying to "abolish" a certain set of rules (as per this Taiwanese example), ignorance of the source text is not an option; there are even higher expectations of their scholarship (or "jurisprudence") precisely because they want to challenge the received opinion (and plain writ) of the original texts.

Who is going to take up that kind of challenge?  We have to challenge ourselves.  Conversely, people who don't want to do the work need to have the humility and discipline to admit that they haven't done the reading, and can only defer to the opinions of those who have.

I sympathize with reformers like 釋昭慧, and I sympathize with self-made intellectuals like Charles Johnson, too, who are drawn to Buddhism for their own set of reasons, but never really get to grips with what Buddhism "is".  However, it is physically painful for me to read C.J.'s opinions: they're both misled and misleading.  In our culture, we have no equivalent to 釋昭慧; the leaders of public opinion are guys like Richard Gere and Metta World Peace.  They make C.J. seem profound by contrast.


[C.J.'s comments on journalism are at the end of part 6 and the start of part 7 of this video-set; click here to jump to the precise moment.]

Gay Marriage, Buddhist Conversion and Attrition

The author of Le Coran et la Chair is (understandably) getting a lot of press coverage for his recent marriage: apparently he had the first homosexual marriage conducted with Islamic rites.

Interestingly, the guy isn't just a Muslim, but he's also an ex-Buddhist:

"Despite his break with Islam, the young man still yearned for faith, and turned to Buddhism. 'But I realised that misogyny and homophobia were the same everywhere,' he told FRANCE 24, and gradually Islam re-conquered him."

Although my first reaction is to insist that no, they're not the same everywhere, this is also an occasion to pause and reflect on the fact that Buddhism has a high rate of conversion, it also has an extremely high rate of attrition.  I mentioned this in my two short articles on the (exceedingly small) number of Buddhists in the U.S.A. and in Canada.

Homophobia isn't the same everywhere: there's a border between Thailand and Malaysia, and the status of homosexuals is starkly different on the two sides side of that border.  The difference between Theravāda Buddhism and Islam is accountable for a large part of that difference (I dare not say all of it) --and Malays themselves will hasten to tell you that they practice a relatively relaxed form of Islam.

Conversely, even if we were willing to consider Sri Lanka as relatively homophobic (within the range of Theravāda nations) it is still much more accepting than the most liberal of Islamic nations (and many Sinhalese will complain that they've inherited the homophobic aspects of their current culture from non-Buddhist sources, including, of course, the missionary Christianity of several successive European empires).

Thailand today is a destination for homosexuals who are (for one reason or another) dissatisfied with their lives in neighboring Malaysia, Indonesia, and other majority-Muslim states --despite various forms of open racism that make their lives difficult as non-Thais in Thailand.  I haven't seen statistics for the phenomenon, but I have seen the phenomenon itself (I assume that someone doing research on sexuality in Southeast Asia has statistics on this?).  I don't know if this pattern will repeat itself in Myanmar/Burma in future.

At any rate, it seems that the author (Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed) made a well-informed rejection of Buddhism: he converted, and then converted back again.

In his interview with The Local, he comments, "Eventually, I realised there was a big hole in my life so I investigated buddhism, but discovered there are also buddhists who are homophobic."

Yep, we've got homophobes.  However, we also have a religion based on a belief in non-violence, impermanence, that there is no soul, that life is suffering, and so on.  Those might be reasons for some people to deal with homophobes in this religion, rather than dealing with the homophobes in other religions (that might both endorse the death-penalty, and consider homosexuality a death-penalty offense) --or the homophobes who have no religion at all.  Everywhere you go, it's a struggle; it's amazing that he has chosen to continue his struggle within a religion that is openly hostile toward him.

[The happy couple: rights to the photograph belong to The Local.]

When Buddhist Monks Arm International Terrorists

 [The Rights to the Photograph Above Belong to Gary Jones]

The immortal Ian Baird has published an article on the subject that "everybody" knows about, but nobody ever talks about: Buddhist monks who raise money to support international terrorism.  Yeah, I said it.  The following quotation involves exotic locales that may be unfamiliar to my readers such as Edmonton (埃德蒙顿) and Winnipeg (温尼伯) --thus I've added links throughout to avoid confusion.


The 65-year-old abbot of the Lao Buddhist temple in Edmonton, Canada, and I sat on the floor. […]  [After fleeing Laos in 1975] Achan Sounthone stayed at a temple in Kalasin province, northeastern Thailand, for the next five years. […] After being regularly hassled by Thai government officials, however, the monk decided to register as a Lao refugee and enter the Lao refugee camp in Ubon Ratchathani province in 1979.  But he soon found himself disgusted with the corruption in the camp, and he became increasingly convinced that the cause of the insurgents was just.  So in 1980 he moved to a village in Thailand on the edge of the Mekong river where one of the main "white Lao" groups […] was headquartered. […]  He spent over eight years treating injured insurgents […] and training medics. […]  In 1988 when the Chat[i]chai Choonhavan government announced its policy to transform "battlefields to marketplaces," making it difficult for insurgents opposed to the Lao government to continue operating from bases in Thailand, he entered the Lao refugee camp at Napho.  From there, he ended up being sponsored by the Lao Buddhist temple in Winnipeg, Canada, where he arrived in December 1990. […] [The monk stated:] "Since 1995 I have been sending money to an insurgent group that still lives in the forest in Southern Laos," […] [After discussing the monk's moral justification for this, Baird comments:] A thought came to mind.  Wasn't the monk's justification for providing insurgent groups with money similar to the legitimization that many monks give for consuming meat even if they are not allowed to kill animals? […]

[Source:] The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 71, No. 3, August 2012, p. 655 et seq., "Lao Buddhst Monks' Involvement in Political and Military Resistance to the Lao People's Democratic Republic Government Since 1975", by Ian G. Baird.

When Statistics are Junk: a Study of Religion and Atheism Worldwide

If the social sciences are at all scientific, we have to admit, bluntly, when we're looking at junk science.  I am going to argue (briefly) that a recent poll on religion and atheism (that managed to grab headlines) is junk.

The case is not hard to prove.  The study states that they interviewed 51,927 people worldwide.  It also states misleadingly, that, "In each country a national probability sample of around 1000 men and women was interviewed" (p. 7 of the press release).  If that were true, we would have an absurd situation: how could 1,000 interviews be equally representative of Lithuania and the People's Republic of China?  Indeed, how could you even conduct research with the same methods in the (starkly different) political conditions of those two countries?

The reality is even worse: they did interview 1,000 people in Lithuania (1,025 to be exact) and they did interview about the same number in Canada (1,003).  How many people did they interview in all of mainland China?  Precisely 500.

That's right, just 500 interviews are supposed to represent the religious diversity of the country, from Xinjiang (新疆) to Shanghai (上海), and have a reasonable level of statistical significance for a population of well beyond one billion people.

On this basis, they offer the absurd claim that China has the highest rate of atheism in the world (47%).  Perhaps the readers of newspapers would take this claim less seriously if they realized that this generalization is based on only 500 interviews --half as many as the company had used to represent the tiny population of Lithuania.

It is absurd, and this is not the only absurdity.  The press release very casually mentions that the interviews in some countries were conducted by telephone, in some face-to-face, and in some they were merely an online survey!  Fully 10,376 of the surveys were internet questionnaires: this data would not in any way be comparable to the other methods described.  Among other serious forms of bias, of course, is the fact that you would only get replies from people who use the internet (!) and who are comfortable reporting sensitive information over the internet; this excludes the average man in your average poverty-stricken totalitarian regime.

Some of the other categories are self-evidently absurd as well: the total number of Jews interviewed (in the entire world!) was only 106.  If someone offered generalizations about Judaism in England on the basis of merely 100 interviews, people might look askance at it, although the number of Jews in England is relatively few; in this study, instead, we have claims made about Judaism from Texas to Tel-Aviv, being made on the basis of only 106 interviews (and I do not know how many were by telephone, vs. internet, etc.).

The number of Buddhists interviewed (in the entire world) was a total of 725.  I do not know how many hundreds of millions of Buddhists there are on the planet, but 725 persons would be an extremely small percentage of them, and certainly incapable of representing even the diversity seen from Thailand to Taiwan, let alone from India to Japan.  The number of Hindus whom they interviewed was a similarly puny 974 persons (and, again, we are using the term "interview" very loosely, as I would not normally count an online form as an interview).  There is no basis whatsoever for any generalization about the state of these religions in this study.

Why is it that journalists (reporting these numbers as matters of fact) did not see any of these warning signs?  This is junk science, and the conclusions do not deserve to be taken seriously by anyone.  (Links to examples of the source being cited as factual: (1) in the Washington Post, (2) by the BBC, and (3) by the Ottawa Citizen).

I have the population of Lithuania as 3.2 million.  They interviewed roughly 0.032% of the population of that country, and if they had used a consistent and robust methodology (not internet questionnaires!) that might be a study worth reading.  The population of Canada is more than ten times larger than Lithuania, but the sample size is still the same, so we're talking about only 0.0029% of the population being interviewed.

How about China?  Can we even express the same equation as a percentage?

Interviewing 500 people out of 1.344 billion equates to 0.000037% of the population.  That would round off to zero.  Even if the best methodology imaginable were used, this would be insignificant --and there are serious warnings that the methodology was in fact inconsistent and (in my opinion) deeply flawed.

Full citation of the study: Gallup International Association (not related to Gallup Inc.), "Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism, 2012", Press Release.

Taiwan's Funeral and Cremation Statistics (2001–2011)

After looking at the Taiwanese government's data on religious identity, the obvious next step was to try to spot trends in the various types of funerals conducted on the island.  The results have not been so obvious.

I have a lot to learn about the funeral business in Taiwan.  Somehow, they're managing to bury, cremate and inter vastly more people than the number who actually die on the island.  I assume that there are some very interesting reasons for the discrepancies in these numbers (perhaps some overseas Chinese are shipping their remains to Taiwan, etc.) but it is wildly incongruous that 139,125 corpses were cremated (火化場) in Taiwan in 2011.  Why?  Well, only 153,206 people died in Taiwan in that year (meaning that the cremations would seem to be, prima facie, more than 90% of the deaths), and a further 68,336 corpses were sent to funeral homes (殯儀館); and when you add those two figures together, you're looking at much, much more than 100% of the corpses that you would expect to be in circulation.

Although a human corpse may be reduced to ashes just once, apparently the process of interring the relics happens repeatedly in 21st century Taiwan.  As a cultural outsider, I'm assuming that a large portion of the repeated interring are the result of urbanization, land-scarcity, and the resulting relocation of human remains from one place to another.  I do not know if families now relocate human remains for other reasons (perhaps to consolidate remains from a family in a single location, that were formerly dispersed at various sites, or perhaps some families simply upgrade their cenotaphs).  I've certainly read about traditional re-burials and re-interring of remains (in passing) in the last few centuries of Chinese tradition.  However, starting only in the year 2008, the government started tracking a separate statistic for the number of ashes "moved out"; I assume that the majority of the remains "moved out" of one location are then interred again in another location, meaning that the statistics for the number interred in one particular year are not (alas) proportional to the number of deaths in that year.

Just how disproportionate do the statistics get?  In the year 2011 alone, we had 175,956 ash reliquaries (骨灰) interred in Taiwan, but only 153,206 people died.  When you look at the first chart, you can see that the black line for ashes interred exceeds the number of deaths per annum.

Although some (unknown) number of these could be people who died abroad whose families relocated (or repatriated) the remains to Taiwan, a large proportion of this total must have been interred some number of years after the death --and not necessarily interred for the first time.  Even if we subtract the number of ash reliquaries recorded as "moved out" (only 4,206) from the number interred in the same year, we still have a number that exceeds 100% of deaths in 2011.

In other words, the numbers don't make sense, but they probably fail to make sense for reasons that are really interesting, and deserve further research.  I have no idea whom I could ask for more information on this subject (has anyone heard of a professor with some salient research background?).

I'm still inclined to consider the funeral statistics relative to the total number of deaths on the island, because population has grown significantly (2001–2011) and the number of deaths increased from 127,892 (in 2001) to 153,206 (in 2011).  I have to compensate for population growth somehow, and measuring funerals relative to deaths makes more sense than births (or total population).

In looking at the statistics, it is clear that the government is trying to track the total amount of ground occupied by cemeteries and cenotaphs of various kinds (and, yes, the total area is growing) but the methodology of what exactly they're tracking under these headings is unclear to me.  I have separate statistics from the Taiwanese government for (1) bone relics 骨骸, (2) ash relics 骨灰, (3) planned burials, in contrast to (4) unplanned burials (a distinction that I assume concerns the type of land occupied by the grave); and then there is also the aforementioned contrast between the numbered of corpses registered at (5) the crematorium 火化場 and (6) the funeral home 殯儀館.  It is entirely possible that all of these categories are overlapping (and double-counting) in ways that I can't guess at.  None of them add up to 100% of anything, and, as explained, they certainly exceed the 100% standard we might expect to find in the number of deaths per annum.

As to what the real issues are at work here, I don't yet know: perhaps some social scientist will get in touch with me and explain how the various government registries really work.

Religious Identity in Taiwan 2001-2011

The statistics on religion in Taiwan are extremely interesting, but my initial warning (and final conclusion) here would be the standard refrain that "more research is needed".

The statistics that we have (on religion in Taiwan) are not provided by the census: the numbers are put together by a separate department of statistics inside the Ministry of the Interior (M.O.I.).  They rely on a number of other agencies, that evidently report on different religions in different ways.

Is that a problem?  Well, it means that each statistic can only be compared to itself over time, and that you can't really compare the numbers of one religion to another.  The measures used to define and document "membership" in different religions is not uniform, so you get a number that may be quite abstract that tracks the change within each religion, but that can't be compared to the others.

The threshold to be counted as a follower of Buddhism (n = 167,088) is completely different from the threshold to be counted as a Protestant (n = 401,023) and the two religions are administered by starkly different agencies.  Buddhism in Taiwan is governed by the B.A.R.O.C., a unique government agency, with unique restrictions that do not apply to any other religion on the island (cf. any of the work on this subject by André Laliberté).

If someone were looking uncritically at the bar charts of the raw numbers from the M.O.I., they would have the (incorrect) impression that Christians vastly out-number Buddhists on the island; meanwhile, the estimate offered by the C.I.A. would seem to devolve from a completely different universe.  It's the same universe, just two very differently calibrated statistics.

Although the C.I.A. is not my preferred source of information, their estimate that 93% of the population is either Buddhist, Daoist, or some combination thereof, would lead us to expect to find more than 21½ million people in this category in Taiwan (the island's population, in 2011, exceeded 23 million).  How many Buddhists and/or Daoists are recorded by the M.O.I.'s methodology?  Merely one million (n = 1,005,451) in their combined category of all "temple" (寺廟) religions (inclusive of Buddhism, Daoism, and a number of other East-Asian religions, the most numerically significant being Yi Guan Dao [一貫道]).

What none of these statistics indicate is how many people have no religion at all (be they atheist, agnostic, or otherwise).

The C.I.A. estimate does not leave any category at all for people who might be "none of the above".  In this cultural context, it seems that people who might otherwise be listed as having "no religion" are instead presumed to be "misc. Buddho-Daoist"; that's very misleading, and raises a set of issues that deserve some research unto themselves.  As with many post-colonial societies around the world, the contest between missionary Christianity and "Local Religions" has created a cultural assumption that anyone who has not consciously converted to a foreign religion will (by default) implicitly accept the local religion.  This is utterly untrue, and sets up a strange asymmetry of the religions: one category of religions is consciously chosen (and converted to), whereas the other is presumed to include everyone who does not reject them (by dint of their ethnicity).

The statistics we've got from the M.O.I. remain useful: they simply cannot be compared across categories and they have no relationship whatsoever to each religion's proportion of the total population.  Those are two considerable caveats, but I'll work with the numbers I've got.

Whatever paperwork is required for a person to be written down as a follower of a particular Buddhist organization in Taiwan (under B.A.R.O.C.) is evidently not the same as the procedure used for the other religions (not governed by B.A.R.O.C., nor any comparable institution).  Some of the smaller religions are reporting vague estimates to the government (e.g., it is not credible that Taiwanese Scientology [山達基教會] had exactly 1000 members every year since 2009, whereas they had only 100 members in 2008, etc.); others give very precise numbers, with annual fluctuation (there were exactly 902 Confucians [儒教] in 2011, whereas there were 909 in 2010 --or, at least, these were the numbers documented as formal members of one of the 15 confucian temples generating the paperwork).  I can also imagine, at least hypothetically, that some religions would be more motivated than others to provide documentary evidence of their following to the government, especially inasmuch as such paperwork may be linked to the regulation (if not subsidy) of social services provided by the religion.

Although Catholicism [天主教] is a minority religion in Taiwan, it is massively institutionalized: in 2011, Taiwan was home to 9 Catholic Hospitals, 7 Catholic Clinics, 16 Catholic Middle Schools, and 142 Catholic Kindergardens and Nursery Schools (exceeding the number of Buddhist institutions in every category mentioned; see the charts for some other examples).  This type of institutional depth probably produces paperwork documenting the membership of a larger proportion of their followers.  Religions, also, will vary as to their requirements for people to "enroll" to receive various rites of passage (and, again, the litigious nature of baptism, marriage, etc., in the Catholic tradition is a point of contrast).

The raw data for the number of religious institutions (shown here as eight pie-charts) can be misleading in many ways: there is no correlation between the number of institutions and their number of beneficiaries.  10 small schools may have fewer students than 1 large one, and so on for the number of patients in hospitals, or the number of homeless people assisted by a shelter.  There are nevertheless a few interesting facts that seem to leap off of the page here.  The focus of Catholicism on early childhood education is an interesting contrast to the emphasis that Taiwanese Daoism (apparently) places on retirement homes for the elderly, and "welfare foundations" (presumably for the poor?).  The underwhelming performance of Buddhism in all categories is self-evident.

At any rate, you've got the incongruous situation that the Christian minority (estimated at 4½% of the population by the C.I.A.) dominates the institutional landscape, and has greater numbers of formally documented followers than Buddhism --with the significant caveat that the nature of the documentation applied to the two is not comparable, and has no correlation to real numbers of devotees.  Confused yet?

However surreal the statistics may be, they're still indicative of changes over time: from 2001 to 2011, the number of (documented) Buddhists actually declined.  This is both true in real numbers and when we render the number as a percentage of the (growing) population.

In the first chart, the orange line shows you that the decline took place between 2002–2004, and that the numbers have recovered some of their losses since then, from 2004–2011.  This orange line is showing the total for all of the "temple" (寺廟) religions measured as a percentage of the population (year-by-year), to compensate for the growth in the latter.  In raw numbers (with no such compensation) there were 1,053,165 "temple" followers in 2001, and this declined to a low of 946,469 in 2004; the number increased again to 1,005,451 in 2011 --but because of the growth of the total population, this is a more significant decline than the number itself would suggest.  As a proportion of the population, "temple" religions declined.  As already explained above "temple" (寺廟) is a category that includes Buddhism, Daoism, and a few other East-Asian religions (all 902 Confucians [儒教] aforementioned); the category excludes all forms of Christianity, Islam, and so on.

During this period, both Buddhism and Daoism declined.  In raw numbers, the documented followers of Buddhism declined from 212,671 to only 167,088 in 2011.  Although this is an abstract figure (with all of the caveats stated above) and does not indicate the proportion of the population that is Buddhist, when we compensate for population growth, we're looking at a decline from 0.95 to 0.71 (a number that is abstract, but still indicative of change).  The corresponding decline in Daoism can be seen on the charts.

What does that mean?  Is there a real and ongoing decline in Taiwanese Buddhism, or have there been institutional changes (in B.A.R.O.C.) during this period that would have distorted the figures?

One of my reasons for writing an article of this kind is to invite responses on that point from my colleagues (some of whom know much better than I) --but there does seem to be "cause for pause" in these numbers, and many questions that deserve some further study.

Religious Identity in the Canadian Census

Canada does not operate under the principle of the separation of church and state (quite the contrary: we were founded as a British Empire colony governed through the collusion of church and state, and our "constitution"* opens with the declaration of "the supremacy of God").

* [The meaning of the word "constitution" is debatable: the document in question is actually called "Schedule B of the British North America Act", and it was, along with its prequel, an act of British Parliament.]

Although the disadvantages are numerous, the lack-of-a-separation between church and state entails that our census does report on religious identity (unlike the American government's census, that refuses to ask the question as a matter of principle).

If you're expecting to see the numbers from the 2011 census data, you may be waiting a few years yet.  The findings are "rolled out" in a series of thematically-specific reports.  The data on religion from the 2001 census was published in May of 2003; the publication of the 2011 results (pertaining to religion) are not yet on the docket for 2012.

The most striking thing about the data that I'm looking at is the near-zero rate of reporting for aboriginal religion (or First Nations "traditional religion", or whatever term we might apply).

In the year 2001, the only province or territory with a non-zero value for "Aboriginal Spirituality" was the Northwest Territories, where this category amounted to only 0.6%.

It is astounding to see an absolute zero for this category (or any equivalent category) in provinces like Saskatchewan, that have large populations identifying as First Nations (but not, apparently, identifying their religion as such).  Part of the reality here is that a very large proportion of Canada's indigenous people do identify themselves as Christian (with invidious divisions between Protestant and Catholic contested between communities, and sometimes within them).  In Southern Saskatchewan, I note, even the Mormons have made some efforts to convert the Cree and Saulteux, and I heard a few verbal anecdotes indicating that they have had at least a few converts so far.  Another part of the reality may be "survey fatigue", as the census has very specific questions for self-identification as aboriginal, including specific band association (i.e., a greater degree of specificity than for other ethnic groups).

There may also be a significant cultural difference between the expression of indigenous identity (qua religious identity) in the U.S. and Canada in the 21st century.  It will be interesting to see if these numbers remain at zero when the 2011 findings are published.

Unlike the U.S. data (that separately counted atheist, agnostic and "no religion") the Canadian data presents just one vague category of "no religion".  This has been re-enforced by having a check-mark box for the value of "no religion", in contrast to a blank line to write in any other religious identity as a noun of the respondent's choosing.  This standard continued in the 2011 census (see illustration).  In a sense, this precludes the possibility of diverse self-identification as various shades of "atheist", etc., and encourages the respondents themselves to subscribe to the category offered (if their religion does not correspond to the type given in the list of suggested identities on the left-hand side of the form).

Of course, an even more fundamental assumption predetermined by the wording on the census form is that each person can have only one religion.  In many cultural contexts (Taiwan, Korea, Japan, etc.) the opposite is true; we cannot guess from the census data to what extent the opposite might be true in Canada.  The reality of having more than one (simultaneous) religious identity can (and does) extend to people having multiple marriage ceremonies, and even multiple funerals.  Currently, this remains outside of the remit of the census.

The headline-grabbing story that emerges from the census data is that "no religion" has increased significantly across the country, and also that it varies significantly between provinces.  In the bottom half of the first illustration, you can see that Saskatchewan is significantly more secular than Quebec; however, Quebec itself also has a significant increase within the "no religion" category.

The other story, here, is that Canada is much more Catholic than it is commonly imagined to be: Catholicism is the single largest religion in Canada (43% in 2001) and this is not only for historical reasons, but is also re-enforced by ongoing patterns of immigration.  New immigrants who had arrived (in Canada) between 1991 and May of 2001 were only 4.6% Buddhist; 23% identified as Roman Catholic, the single largest religion amongst new immigrants, with Muslims constituting 15% by contrast.  However, new immigrants were also very frequently secular: 21.3% opted for the "no religion" category.

Without digressing into specific denominations, it is no surprise to anyone living in Canada that "mainstream protestantism" has been on the decline, coeval with a number of small sects increasing their numbers.  Roughly aggregating all protestants together, their share of the population declined from 35% (in 1991) to only 29% (in 2001).  I say that this is done "roughly", for several reasons, one of the most striking being that (in 2001) a statistically significant 2.6% of respondents identified as "Christian", with no further denomination or identification.  The decade's decline in the number of protestants would be much less dramatic if we were willing to assume that this further category was largely comprised of "misc. protestants" --or even if we were willing to assume that half of this category was protestant.

Contrary to many inflated claims that I have seen around the internet, Buddhism is not now (2001) and never has been a numerically significant religion in Canada; both its absolute size and its growth (1991–2001) are puny relative even to Islam.  As we should see the 2011 data within a few years, it might be interesting for anyone to take out a bet on whether or not these trends will continue.

The establishment of Buddhism in Canada (such as it is) has transpired in the shadow of war: the relocation of refugees (and wartime allies) created in the 20th century's wars in Asia brought Buddhists to Canada (the arrival of our Lao and Cambodian populations were very directly linked to that chapter of history, and do not reflect a constant form of economic migration; there have been several academic studies on the phenomenon, e.g., Penny Van Esterik, 1992).  The wars of the 21st century, following a familiar pattern, are now relocating Muslim populations to Canada.  I hear this discussed in a rather strange voice on C.B.C. radio, as if the broadcasters are not quite sure what angle to put on the fact that both refugees from Afghanistan and former allies/employees of the Canadian military are applying to permanently relocate to the country, and openly state that their families would be targeted if they remained in Afghanistan.

As with the evacuation of forces from Vietnam in the 1970s, there's an implicit recognition of military defeat if it is (in fact) impossible for the supposed conqueror's allies to remain in the country that they have allegedly conquered after the conquest is complete.  If (e.g.) the men employed as translators for the Canadian forces would be in danger if they remained in their countries of origin, this is a reasonable indicator of the extent to which Canada not only "lost the war", but has also created enduring hostility, and the conditions for civil war to ensue thereafter.  I do not think that this transfer of population will be from Afghanistan only, and I do not think that the full extent of it will be captured in the 2011 census (i.e., there will be a lag, for many years after the conclusion of the war, as with refugee camps on the Lao border continuing to send "evacuees" to the U.S. and Canada for a period of decades after the military had withdrawn, etc.).

The Only Statistic for Buddhism in the USA

There are not many statistics worth knowing for Buddhism in the U.S.A., and I would like to offer a few notes on some of the limitations of the main statistic that's now available: the A.R.I.S., illustrated above.

One fact that leaps off of the chart here is that Buddhists now outnumber the adherents of all the religions native to North America combined: this is not something to be proud of.  In the context of a former British Colony, this is part of the endgame to cultural genocide.  I've included the statistic for just how endangered First Nations religiosity really is for just that reason: to keep this in the perspective of the genocidal social history of a country that has (lately) adopted a form of political pluralism that allows Buddhism to be preached, practiced, and develop institutions of mortar and brick.  Complaining that Buddhists are a small minority in the U.S. is not morally equivalent to complaining that Buddhists are a minority in South Korea (itself an interesting fact), nor is it morally equivalent to the situation of Buddhists in countries where their own religion had been indigenous prior to conquest (and persecution) by Islam.

In relation to the chart, I would quickly mention a few things about what the A.R.I.S. numbers do and do not tell us.

1. Most people would look at the increasing bar-chart and assume that the survey is capturing the opinions of increasing numbers of Buddhists born overseas: the opposite is true.  Amazingly, the 2001 A.R.I.S. interviewed zero persons born in China, zero persons born in India, and zero born in Thailand, Vietnam, Japan or Sri Lanka.  The random sample did manage to interview two persons born in Bolivia and two persons born in Venezuela, and it lists 7 as "other" (unspecified); from what I can see, however, there seem to be zero from traditionally Buddhist countries.  So, believe it or not, the A.R.I.S. numbers do not capture increasing immigrant Buddhism to the U.S.; the skew is in the opposite direction, and we're looking (disproportionately) at non-immigrant Buddhists in these charts.

2. Many of the most obvious types of distortion in the data relate to the method of "random number dialing" itself: these are telephone interviews, and for anyone wondering "how did they manage not to interview a single person born in China?", part of the answer may be that speakers of Chinese as a first language refused to participate in the interview at all.  Plenty of people will hang up on a voice they don't recognize; some immigrant groups may be especially unwilling to discuss politically-sensitive information over the telephone, in their second language, in these circumstances.

Telephone-interview data has other important sources of distortion: in 2001, 32.4% of the persons interviewed were "not employed", with a further 11.2% describing themselves as only employed part-time.  That is not a representative sample: it's a sample of the type of people who are available to answer the phone at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and who choose not to hang up when they hear that this is about a survey.  Inevitably, this method will over-represent people who are retired, unemployed, or who are working as stay-at-home parents.

What makes this worse is that the skew is not consistent over time: normally, a distortion in a baseline study can be ignored (to some extent) as soon as we've got a sequence of studies to compare it to, because all stages of the study should reproduce the same distortion equally.  However, if there is one thing that has changed more dramatically than religion (in the period 1990 to 2008) it is the culture and technology of the telephone.

3. If I had access to the full data-set (and I don't, thus no cross-tabulations in SPSS) I would work only with the reports of the interviewed person's own religion: the number of interviews is 54,451 --and I would prefer to work strictly with the "self-described religion" of those 54,451 persons interviewed.  Instead, the data that A.R.I.S. has made public on their website tells us about the reported religion of 228,182 persons indirectly represented in the interviews.  In measuring religion by telephone, that's a problem.

I do not think that the persons interviewed will fairly represent the religions of their own spouses and children: instead, we're looking at a kind of skew arising from the degree of paternalism (and varying thresholds to conversion) in the different religions.

Hypothetically, if they had interviewed Bhikkhu Bodhi's own mother, she might have been confident in stating that her children were all the same religion that she was herself (but, in fact, her son had converted to Buddhism, and become a famous monk, etc. --something the parents did not approve of).  Some people will continue to describe you as your religion-of-birth no matter how you may insist that you have converted to another religion --and this tendency can be especially strong within the family unit (inasmuch as religion becomes a marker of shared ethnic identity more than a reflection of belief or personal choice).  The thresholds and boundaries are also very different for the various religions concerned: at what point would an apostate Catholic actually be described as "not Catholic" by his or her own father (in the context of a telephone survey)?  It's worth considering that the dotted lines involved are considerably different for Catholicism, Judaism, etc.; direct self-identification as "agnostic" is probably much less ambiguous than the question of whether or not your parents would report you as "agnostic", or even what your own spouse might say about you.

I've combined the numbers of atheists and agnostics into a single category for all three years (1990, 2001 and 2008) because they were combined as a single category in the first study (1990).  This total does not include those who describe themselves as having "no religion": the latter category is much larger than the first two.  In 2008, the study found 1,985 self-described agnostics, plus a further 1,621 self-described atheists; however, I have not treated this as the same category as the 30,427 other respondents who instead said that they have "no religion".

As some sort of disclaimer, I should say that I'm not a fan of studies of Buddhism in the U.S., and it's a relatively prolix literature, pioneered by Charles Preblish (from whom you can hear a one-hour lecture on Youtube, reviewing some of the changes in the field of study that he partly invented, over the course of the last few decades).  In many ways, the study of Buddhism in North America has become a pretext to study Buddhism in vitro, and in the medium of the English language only.  This entails all the same problems that I've complained about (when Anthropologists make comparative claims in comparing something known to something unknown) in my article "Problems of Canon and Reason"… and all of the problems I've complained about resulting from the lack of canonical literacy in both East and West (both in Cambodia and in Sri Lanka… what did you think I meant by "East and West"?)… and more.