What Would Buddha Advise You To Do?

Someone recently showed me a book called "What Would Buddha Do?" (which I will call WWBD for short):

What Would Buddha Do? After all, he was a person just like us. He struggled with life just as we do and eventually discovered life's deepest secrets. The author explores how Buddha would handle the many trials of contemporary life, showing how 2500 years of Buddhist teaching can guide us in our modern society. Questions of materialism, relationships, stress, love, personal identity and values are dealt with in a straightforward manner, following the wisdom of a great teacher.

The concept behind this book is borrowed from the "What Would Jesus Do?" (or WWJD) phenomenon that was quite popular among American Christians in the 1990s.

I've always had a problem with the WWJD concept, and I object to WWBD for the same reason. In Christian religious belief, Jesus is the Son of God and can do things that no ordinary person can do. Here are a few examples of why WWJD wouldn't work:

• You run out of wine at a wedding. What do you do? WWJD? It's simple, really – just turn water into wine.


• You want to feed a crowd of five thousand, but have only five loaves of bread and two fish. What do you do? WWJD? Why, just multiply the food.


• You're on a boat that's caught in a fierce storm. It's in danger of being capsized. What do you do? WWJD? How about order the sea to calm down.


• ... I can come up with dozens more examples, but you get the idea.

Exactly the same problem applies to the Buddha. While the Buddha dismissed supposed miracles as having nothing to do with spiritual progress, he is attributed with all sorts of miraculous powers in Buddhist lore. He can, among other things, shoot light and fire out of his body, change his form, levitate, teleport himself to other realms, and generally do the sorts of things that only comic book superheroes are able to do. What a person with such powers would do is sure to be different from what an ordinary person would do, in many situations.

Of course, the book actually just gives rather down-to-earth advice based on Buddhist sources. So it should really be called "What Would Buddha Advise You To Do?", but I suppose that results in an overly long title and an ugly abbreviation.

南無阿彌陀佛