The Hinayana Fallacy
I don’t use the term “Hinayana” to describe anything real people believe or practice, but there is a strawman frequently employed in critiques of Buddhism™ that I’m going to call the Hinayana Fallacy.
“If life is suffering, why don’t you kill yourself?” is the classic example.
The Hinayana Fallacy is use of the most individualized, exit-driven possible construction of a notional practitioner’s motivations in order to generalize about the mechanics of “Buddhist” practice. It also requires a purely propositional, philosophical relationship to Dharma.
An immediately obvious characteristic of the Hinayana Fallacy is that it is quintessentially Western, not just in its construction of what Buddhism™ is, but of what -ism is: Whether employed earnestly or cynically, the Hinayana Fallacy is a reason-only definition of the problem space.
Certainly, there is an earnest, good-faith version of the Hinayana Fallacy that is an effort to understand Buddhism™ by strictly limiting discussion to the words most realistically attributed to a historical Buddha. It’s a science-minded attempt to nail the terms down.
Of course, this is importing the Western theological/exegetical model into a completely foreign environment. It might make sense to SOME Buddhists, but it makes NO sense to MOST Buddhists and doesn’t relate to their lives or motivations at all.
For one thing, the measures of authenticity are basically arbitrary unless they account for and encompass millennia of Buddhist scholarship about it.
But much more urgently, what is the point of talking about a Buddhism™ that isn’t a thing followed by actual people?
A lot of the time, the Hinayana Fallacy (and critique of Buddhism in general) is directed specifically at something called Western Buddhism™, which, allowing for a moment that it refers to a real thing, might seem to make more sense.
After all (I guess), if anybody’s likely to relate to Buddhism as a linear list of philosophical axioms from which all recommended behavior is to be derived, it’s people born into a cultural mold of treating religion in general like that. (hand wave hand wave)
But just because people talk and think like that doesn’t mean they live like that. People just live.
The Hinayana Fallacy is just a gussied up version of the internet’s favorite sick burn: I affiliate you with proposition A, but you do B, therefore you are a 𝔥𝔶𝔭𝔬𝔠𝔯𝔦𝔱𝔢! And the thing is… Who cares?
And if that’s not what it is… if you’re earnestly asking why someone doesn’t kill themself… you should joyously accept ANY answer.
Now, why “Hinayana Fallacy”? It’s about the “individualized, exit-driven” construction.
To recap, the Mahayana teaching is that individual extinction (nirvana) is a “lower” aspiration, whereas the motivation toward full buddhahood through liberating all beings is “higher.”
To people hung up on the Western theological/exegetical mode, the (obvious) ahistoricity of Mahayana scriptures makes it hard to consider those teachings as “pure” Buddhism™. This overlooks the role of oral face-to-face teaching, which is how Buddhism is actually transmitted.
But this is still beside the point. Even for Therevada Buddhists who are sympathetic to this authenticity critique, “If life is suffering, why don’t you kill yourself?” is an annoying and uncomplicated question.
To think that people have religion as this kind of pre-cognitive algorithm or instruction set (outside of extreme brainwashing or mental illness, maybe) is just to have no internal understanding of what it’s like for people. They’re just getting through life.
Nirvana isn’t some known afterlife state people for which people are methodically preparing themselves, vulnerable to some flaw in their methodology. It’s something to have faith in.
THAT’s “why” they don’t kill themselves. Because they have something to live for.
Can we just ask people about the glorious, holy, personal things they live for instead of trying to reason out why some abstraction of a person in their situation wouldn’t kill themself?
