Alan Watts on the One Thing Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism All Lack

We call Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism religions. Alan Watts thinks that is a mistake, and in this talk he explains why by going back to what the word actually means. Religion, from its Latin root, means a bond or a rule of life. That is why the most exact use of the word is when we say someone has gone into religion, meaning they have entered a monastic order and are living under a rule, living a life of obedience. On that strict definition, Watts argues, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are religions, and they rest on three things he calls the three Cs. The creed is the revealed map of the universe, the nature of things and the existence and will of God. The code is the revealed law or exemplar a person is meant to follow, though in Christianity the code becomes less a law than a person, the following of Jesus of Nazareth through grace. And the cult is the revealed way of worship, through prayer, rite, and sacrament, understood in these traditions less as our way of worshipping God than as God's own way of loving himself with us caught up in it. Watts quotes Meister Eckhart: the love with which I love God is the same love with which God loves me. When monks recite the psalms, the idea is that you worship God with God's own words and become a kind of flute through which the divine breath plays. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism cannot be religions in this sense, he says, because they lack the element of obedience. They do not picture the Godhead as a monarch standing over mankind. And that, Watts suggests, is what the Western model really is: a political metaphor, drawn from the relation of an ancient Near Eastern king to his subjects, imposing his will from above. He points out that the title King of kings was borrowed from the Persian emperors, and that the language of formal prayer often reads as court flattery. In this model there is an unbridgeable gulf between creator and creature. God is God, and everything God made is not God. Watts ends on a puzzle he leav