Warning: Religious Content (with a twist at the end)

I was raised in an Irish Catholic family of 6 siblings - we all drank, smoked and partied almost every night while growing up. I remember I started smoking around 12, and I guess drinking not long after that. It was a wild, memorable childhood.

The Irish part meant that religion was an important aspect of our lives. The girls put on boater hats with dangling ribbons, and we all trundled off to church on Sunday mornings. Dad was Church of England, but mum insisted he become Catholic. 

“It’s all the same bloody God Jerry” - Dad told me later - so he converted. 

But on Sundays, he stayed at home.

Christianity never suited my intellect.

I am a logical person, and “God’s will” didn’t cut it for me. Enter Buddhism, a logician’s dream. My practice as a Buddhist was first positioned in Sydney by my dearly beloved teacher Geshe Dawa. He was an old Lama who trained traditionally in Tibet before the Chinese invaded. As I was about to move to Japan to start my epic adventure there, he gave me two pieces of advice which continue to resonate with me today. The first was how to behave as a Buddhist:

“Try to be helpful to people. And if you can’t do that, at least don’t harm them.”

Now the Buddhists, like all religions, are very cunning in how they motivate you. The reason you don’t want to harm others is simple: it will come back to bite you. This revolves around a preposterous but profound Buddhist idea: nothing can happen to you for which you did not create the cause. 

This was logical to me. It wasn’t “God’s will” - it was my own bloody fault!

In this idea, I found some alignment with FM's central tenet: you are responsible for your reactions. However, FM had nothing to say about what causes things to happen to you.

What is the answer to this question: “Why is this happening to me?” 

C. S. Lewis proposes an elegant way of handling that:

“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”

Of course, that means accepting your situation - ridding yourself of the “poor me” victim mentality and being the person who has the power to change. But as a youth, the unresolved question - why me? - still lingered about…

HH Dalai Lama has a simple definition of religion - any creed supposing life after death. Religions don’t agree on how life after death works - but they all agree it happens. If you buy into that, the idea of past and future lives is just as improbable. And as a logical device to maintain your responsibility, quite a clever invention.

Now finally, I get to the point of this post - which is all about Queen Elizabeth II.

Haha. Didn’t see that coming did you?

As improbable as it may seem to a non-Buddhist, there is actually a sound logic behind a monarchy. Because nothing is arbitrary in Buddhism - which means, nothing happens without a cause - which means, you can’t be born a Queen without having created the cause to be born a Queen.

Of course, if you don’t additionally believe in past lives and actions, this is a horrific philosophy. In fact, HH Dalai Lama quietly advises Buddhists not to talk about it to Westerners. He told us that it could cause unnecessary enmity towards Buddhist thinking. And here’s me going blah, blah. 

Sorry, Your Holiness.

But how do you create the cause to be born a Queen?

I bet my gay friends have a few comments to add about that!