To get to the point of this real long read, I need first to talk about two things, realtalk and religion.
Realtalk is something I came up with - pronounced like “realpolitik” but has no further parallels with it - it refers to the description of something that you arrive at by repeatedly asking “but what the fuck does that mean?” question. Realtalk is boiling down some lingo to the common life experience. A well-known dialect of realtalk is “explain me like I'm five” but strictly speaking everyone has their own dialect because, well, realities differ between people - what makes sense to me, doesn't to you and vice versa.
Religion - any religion - is an attempt to reconcile neocortex, mammalian, and reptilian brains, and to help navigate that confusing space we, humans, create - a subjective version of reality. Religion is amazing insofar that it's a creation without a creator (yes, I'm an atheist): it's kinda like the BlueSky app right now - everyone is getting the vibes and surfs on those, creating a commonly shared experience of a cool place to be. Religion is kinda like that - some initial impulse draws ppl in and makes them open the inner door with the access to the commonly shared confusing space of the amalgam of neocortex/mammal/reptile that we are - and the logic of navigating it. I think that the religion (and here I'm talking about Christianity because I know it the most) is an absolute marvel of creation of the human mind - given that it wasn't even orchestrated.
Alright, what it has to do with doubting Thomas and Buddhism?
This post is inspired by Father Monk's take on Thomas [1] - but what occured to me was that maybe Thomas was the realtalk person and when the other disciples were telling him that Jesus has risen, it was some kind of lingo, an accepted phrase that all people of faith repeat without getting into its substance - and Thomas was the one who was “but what does it fucking mean?” and since lingo people can only repeat lingo, no one could answer him, so Thomas was forced to unpack himself - “you mean, risen like alive? Alive like I can stick my fingers in his wounds?” (And I'm fantasizing here that maybe - just maybe - there was a common expression in Aramaic about fingers in the wounds because so much crucifixion was there to go around - like, Russian has “easy like pee on two fingers” - why can't Aramaic have “alive like I can put my fingers in his wounds” but I digress).
So. We arrive at Buddhism because I am the doubting Thomas of Buddhism. I felt constantly angry at the lingo - what the fuck does it mean, sit with it - until I was forced to unpack it. The substance of Buddhism was so far ahead of the available knowledge of the time that there was no other way of explaining than the lingo - hence, koans - you cannot understand until you understand. Nowadays we have deeper knowledge of the underlying mechanisms so it should be possible to do realtalk.
[1]
Lovely post also the linked article "Unholy Sh+t: Who’s Tommy and why are the other disciples so petty" was an interesting read. Especially the closing line was amazing.
Looking forward to your future posts, perhaps they unpack some of the gems of books that you read.