Welcome to Gaia! ::

My teacher and I got into a huge arguement in class one day over whether or not buddhism was a religion. I think it IS a religion, but she said it was only a philosophy, and said that many buddhists call it a philosophy too.
But everytime she would say it was a philosophy, she would go on and say something about the "Great World Spirit" and riencarnation of a soul. To me, that sounds like a religion. It all just sounded contradictory. What are your takes on this situation? What do you think it is? Religion or philosophy?

[Not currently a member of this guild, but I sent an Join Guild thing and I'm checking things out.]

In my opinion, religion but with a philosophy you can somewhat take out of context.

At the most in-depth, to me it seems like a religion, especially in particular branches of Buddhism - with powerful bodhisattvas and whatnot, the specific ideas about samsara and karma and all. However, the general moral and ethical approaches to things, and perhaps the general idea - that there's an emptiness to things in reality, that we must realized to be free fro suffering - can be sort of "adapted" or taken even more metaphorically, as I do.

[That was a bad explanation, I apologize.]

I'd generally agree with this. Religion, to me, is supposed to be a way of life, not something you only consider when you feel like it. For the past while, though, the term 'religion' has taken such a different tone that the 'way of life' sentiment is more commonly associated with 'spirituality' than 'religion.'

In most respects, I also feel that any distinction between religion and philosophy is academic, not actual. The core of philosophy is often to discern the whats and hows of the universe. Not at all different from what religion does. You could make the distinction that philosophy doesn't use Divine explanations, but that isn't always true.

Some use this as an academic distinction though. And from that standpoint, Buddhism ISN'T a religion, because the very idea of Buddhism is to NOT rely upon Divine explanations. There are different varieties of Buddhism though, and some hold to the original ideas of Buddah more than others.