Losing My Religion and Gaining Another

I don’t believe that heaven waits for only those who congregate.

Buddha statues in Swedagon Pagoda, the most famous landmark in Yangon, Myanmar (Photo: Jeremy Helligar)

“But if one carefully considers all the facts, one must be convinced that at the basis of all suffering lies the principle of craving desire. If avarice can be removed, human suffering will come to an end.” — The Teaching of Buddha

“In Japan, it’s a religion to be Japanese.”

That’s what a Japanese man once told me at a cocktail party in Bangkok. We spent about an hour discussing U.S. politics, religion, his country, and its people, and of all the things he said, he said that sentence, and it was the one that stuck with me.

While acknowledging the dominant religion in his country as Buddhism, he made the interesting point that Japan’s true religion is embracing elements of all religions. That, he insisted, is what it means to be Japanese.

And that, I thought to myself (or maybe I said it out loud — I did, after all, have three glasses of white wine that night), is unorganized religion I can get behind.

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