I was invited to give a talk at the Buddhist College in Singapore sometime in 2024, speaking primarily to Master’s students. My topic was humanism and atheism: not as oppositional positions to religion, but as lived philosophies concerned with meaning, ethics, end-of-life questions, and responsibility to one another.

The session itself was warm and engaged. The questions during the Q&A were thoughtful, probing, and sincere. Many revolved around end-of-life care, suffering, materialism, the role of religion, and how one lives well knowing that life is finite.

Then one student asked a question that stayed with me: “Your views and philosophy of life sound very Buddhist. Why don’t you consider yourself a Buddhist?”

It was not a confrontational question. It was curious. And it deserved an honest answer, but also a careful one. Resonance is not identity I do resonate deeply with many ideas commonly associated with Buddhism: impermanence, compassion, non-attachment, mindfulness, and an honest confrontation with suffering.

These are not exclusive to Buddhism, they are part of the broader human inheritance of wisdom traditions. But resonance does not require identity. To identify as something is to take on a label, and labels come with institutions, histories, hierarchies, and expectations.

At some point, what began as insight becomes organised religion. And that shift matters to me. Humanism allows me to engage ideas without surrendering my capacity to question them ncluding questioning the founders themselves.

The question of Siddhartha: enlightenment and abandonment : - This is where my discomfort begins, and I know it is an uncomfortable place to stand. The story of Siddhartha Gautama is often told as a heroic renunciation, a man who leaves palace life in search of enlightenment for the sake of all beings. But when I listen to that story through a human lens rather than a sanctified one, another question arises: What was the human cost of that departure?

Siddhartha did not leave alone. He left behind a wife, a child, and a responsibility as a leader.

When this was raised, someone responded that his wife was left in luxury, not poverty. But that response reveals a narrow definition of wealth. For a married woman, especially in that historical context, true wealth is not material comfort. It is presence. Partnership. Shared responsibility. The knowledge that you are not raising a child alone while your husband pursues a higher calling elsewhere.

We can acknowledge what Siddhartha eventually accomplished : of course we can. Otherwise, there would be no Buddhism. But moral reflection does not begin only at the end of the story. It must include the moment of rupture.

What was it like for his wife to wake up and find him gone?

What was it like to hold a baby who would grow up fatherless, at least for a time because enlightenment demanded absence?

These are not rhetorical attacks. They are ethical questions. And they matter.

“But he came back later” so they say. Yes, he did. And again, that is as expected.

History remembers those who succeed. The story is preserved because the outcome was triumphant. But we must be careful not to let outcomes erase moments of suffering.

Humanism insists that ends do not automatically justify means, especially when those means involve abandoning relational responsibility. The question is not whether enlightenment is valuable, but whether enlightenment that requires withdrawal from human obligation should be placed beyond critique.

Withdrawal, robes, and the problem of separation.

There is another layer to my unease, one that surfaced clearly during that conversation. The idea of removing oneself from society, marking oneself visibly as “outside” through dress and role, has always troubled me.

Coming from a Tantric background, this feels deeply… untantric.. Tantra does not ask us to step out of life. It asks us to stay inside it to work with desire, embodiment, emotion, relationship, and responsibility rather than escape them.

The question Tantra asks is not: “How do I leave the world?”

But: “How do I move through the world without being enslaved by it?” Visible withdrawal, whether through robes, titles, or renunciate identity risks replacing one ego with another: the spiritual ego.

A lesson from my guru This perspective was not theoretical for me. It was lived. One of my brothers on the Tantric path was initiated around the same time as I was. We even share the same birthdate:- day, month, year, and almost the same time. Coming from a Brahmin background, he naturally gravitated toward dressing in saffron, priest-like attire. It felt aligned to him.

But it never sat comfortably with our guru. He would sometimes lament to me, half amused and half serious: “Look at this guy and the way he dresses. This is not what we are. Even I don’t dress like that.”

Our guru wore his red veshti only during sadhana. Outside of that, he dressed like everyone else. His message was simple and unwavering: You do not separate yourself from society.

Spiritual practice does not place you above, outside, or apart from ordinary life. You do not announce yourself as different. You live among people, indistinguishable accountable. Staying is also a spiritual act

There are days when I feel the pull of solitude so strongly that it aches, a deep, wordless desire to walk away from everything, to vanish into the forest, to sit by a river with no name, and dissolve into silence. But when I turn around, I see the faces of those I love:- my husband, my daughter and I cannot walk away.

Their faces hold me. Their existence anchors me. Sometimes I wonder, is this a trap? Or is it love? And then I remember, it is my choice. I chose this life. I chose to love this man, to share this lifetime with him. I chose to bring a child into this world, to have someone to love beyond myself. I cannot walk away from what I chose. It is not a prison.

It is a path.

So when asked why I do not identify as Buddhist, despite resonating with many Buddhist ideas, this is my answer: Because my ethical compass does not allow me to place founders beyond questioning. Because my spirituality does not require withdrawal from human responsibility and because I do not believe wisdom demands abandonment.

And because my path insists that transformation must happen within life, not outside it. This does not make me anti-Buddhist. It makes me humanist. Wisdom deserves reverence but never immunity from moral reflection. And perhaps the most honest spiritual practice begins not with leaving the world behind, but with choosing to remain fully, painfully, responsibly present within it.


Questions I often received

[1] not all buddhist becomes monk. There's those who have families too..

I fully acknowledge that many Buddhists have families, careers, and social responsibilities. My concern isn’t with how Buddhists live, but with the fact that renunciation and withdrawal are still often treated as the highest or most complete form of spiritual achievement. That framing matters, because it tells us subtly what is valued most.


[2] And there are those who insist that I should declare myself as buddhist since my way of
thinking is very Buddhistic very much like those married buddhist with family..so why am I not doing it?

As I see it, what they were doing often unconsciously was trying to absorb me into their map because my way of thinking made sense to them, that’s human. My refusal is not a rejection but a refusal to disappear into someone else’s category. This is the same with the Christians cannot accept me being atheist and insist that I’m an agnostic, this denial of god is too much for them to handle.

What they are really saying is: “Your self-definition destabilises my framework, so I need to re-label you in a way that feels safer to me.”. It is more about cognitive comfort because my clarity creates category anxiety.


In fact, there is something deeply "Buddhistic" about rejecting the label of being a Buddhist. The Buddha himself often compared his teachings to a raft: you use the raft to cross a river, but once you reach the other shore, you don't pick up the raft and carry it on your back for the rest of your life.

You leave the raft behind.

January 9th, 2026