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• W2058713035 abstract "Is it right to describe Buddhism as atheistic? Many people do, pointing to the fact that Buddhism doesn’t refer to a creator God. Yet it’s not so simple.In the earliest Buddhist texts, the Buddha tells some stories that make fun of Brahma, who thinks he is the supreme deity. But in some versions of Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddha himself eventually became elevated from “a person who is awake” (the literal meaning of Buddha) to a more celestial figure. Whereas Shakyamuni (the historical Buddha) emphasized the importance of “being a lamp unto yourself,” it was believed that Amitabha Buddha could inter-cede at the time of death and take us to his Pure Land in the West, far beyond our world. This led to the development of more devotional types of Buddhism, which still predominate in East Asia. In some ways this Pure Land Buddhism seems more similar to the Abrahamic religions than to the original teachings of the Buddha as preserved in the Pali Canon, the core collection of early Buddhist scriptures.Moreover, there are plenty of less powerful gods and spirits in the premodern Asian Buddhist traditions. Early Buddhism accepted the existence of these disincarnate beings, even as it emphasized how they are impermanent and subject to laws of cause and effect, including the law of karma.All this raises questions about whether Buddhism should really be described as “atheistic.” The modern term has connotations that do not really fit Buddhism, especially naturalistic presumptions about the secular nature of this world. It’s better to say that Buddhism does not accept the theism vs. atheism dichotomy. It accounts for our experience (and our spiritual potential) in a different way.Apparently the Buddha did not say very much about the nature of nirvana, the goal of the Buddhist path. As a result some ambiguity arose as the Buddhist tradition developed. Nirvana certainly involves transcending this world of suffering and delusion, but transcendence can be understood in different ways — and has been.Early Buddhism understood nirvana as the end of rebirth, which has often been understood to imply the attainment of a higher reality no longer subject to the sorrows of this one. In contrast, some forms of Mahayana Buddhism claimed that enlightenment involves simply realizing the true nature of this world. Using more contemporary terms, we could say that our usual ways of experiencing and understanding this world are mental constructs that should be deconstructed and reconstructed, with the implication that we don’t need to go anywhere else — we only need to wake up to what’s happening right here and now.The two perspectives are not necessarily all that different, depending on how literally one understands transcendence. Does nirvana refer to another reality (analogous to an afterlife), or another way of perceiving this one?It’s an important issue — maybe the most important issue. I have come to believe that any religion espousing cosmological dualism (devaluing this world in favor of a superior reality such as heaven) and individual salvation (the idea that what ultimately happens to me is disconnected from what ultimately happens to you) is contributing to our world’s problems rather than offering a solution. For too long religious orthodoxies have diverted our attention and concern from what’s happening here to “pie in the sky after you die,” thereby making it easy for modern educated people to dismiss religious claims as outdated superstitions. Yet there are other possibilities that have been explored by great mystics in all the world’s major religions, many of whose teachings have emphasized our nonduality with the world.For Buddhism (literally “Awake-ism”) the important issue is not whether a supreme deity exists but rather the fact that, because of our cravings and delusions, we do not usually experience the world as it really is, nor do we understand who we really are. To become enlightened is to awaken to the true nature of our cravings and delusions, which ends our dukkha (dis-ease). This includes seeing through the illusion of a self that is separate from the world it experiences. Each of us normally has a sense of self, of course, but (to use contemporary language again) that self is a psycho-social construct composed of conditioned tendencies: mostly habitual ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and reacting. Lacking any discrete reality of its own, such a self is inherently insecure, with a dis-ease that we normally experience as a sense of lack: I’m never good enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, famous enough, powerful enough, etc.Buddhism emphasizes meditation because that is how we “let go” of ourselves and overcome the delusion of duality: “I” am not behind my eyes or between my ears, looking out at an objective world that is separate from me. Rather, “I” am one of the countless ways that all the causes and conditions of the universe come together, right now. The Advaitic teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj captured this idea eloquently when he said: “When I look inside and see that I am nothing, that’s wisdom. When I look outside and see that I am everything, that’s love. Between these two my life turns.”The Japanese Zen master Dogen described his own awakening in a similar fashion: “I came to realize clearly that my mind is nothing other than mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars.”This way of experiencing one’s true nature challenges common materialist and reductionist understandings of what the world really is. Rather than being a collection of discrete things, our world is a confluence of impermanent and interdependent processes that manifest “something.” “Something” is in scare quotes because it’s not a thing at all in the usual sense: it is a no-thing in that it doesn’t have any form or characteristics of its own. The most common Buddhist term for that no-thing is shunyata (emptiness). Being formless in itself is what enables shunyata to assume any form — including you and me.Shunyata is never perceived in itself, only as an aspect of the way an enlightened person experiences the world: things (including oneself) are shunya (empty) because they have no substance of their own. They are how shunyata appears — or, better, they are how it presences. As Mahayana Buddhism’s Heart Sutra puts it, “form is empty, and emptiness is nothing other than form.”Describing an experience he had, the English poet Thomas Traherne wrote, “Eternity was manifest in the Light of the Day, and something infinite behind everything appeared.” Later William Blake said something similar: “If the doors of perception were cleans’d, everything would be seen as it really is, infinite.” Calling something “not-finite” (unbounded) is another way to refer to this something that has no attributes of its own. Its impermanent forms arise and pass away, according to conditions, but that which they manifest is “unborn” and “deathless.”While in some ways these Buddhist teachings may seem distant from the often God-centered inquiries of other traditions, their focus on nonduality is in fact extraordinarily resonant with similar teachings in the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, the Christian mysticism of Meister Eckhart and The Cloud of Unknowing (an anonymous fourteenth-century text), the Sufism of Ibn Arabi and Rumi, the Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, and the Daoism of Lao-tse and Chang-tzu, to cite some of the most prominent examples.In other words, fingers from different traditions seem to be pointing at the same moon — which supports the notion that the moon is not simply the fantasy of one tradition. The similarities are very helpful in another way too: if our perpetual problem is that we tend to take the finger for the moon — that we cling to descriptions and miss what is being described — then a variety of different fingers (that is, various teachings and terminologies) can help to free us from identifying with any particular religious orthodoxy.Globalization has made us more aware of other religions, and it is no exaggeration to say that today the “growing tip” for all of them, if they are to remain alive and relevant, is what they can learn from each other. The growth of fundamentalism in almost all traditions (including Buddhism) reveals how difficult and threatening such a conversation is. It’s much easier to adhere to the old ways, believing and practicing as our ancestors did. In the long run, however, any religion that ignores what the modern world has discovered will become irrelevant.The metaphor that comes to mind is a tumbling jar, full of different types of stones. As the jar revolves, the stones keep rubbing against each other and end up polishing each other. In the same way, diverse religious traditions can help each other distinguish between what is truly important about what they offer, and what can and should be revised today because it is no longer so helpful in our modern world.Needless to say, this is not an easy task, but do we really have a choice? If religion is what teaches us what is really important about the world and how to live in it, then we can see that secular modernity has developed its own religious worldview: consumerism, which has already become the most popular religion of all time, winning more converts more quickly than any conventional religion ever has. From a more traditional perspective, however, the basic problem with consumerism as a way of life is that it promises a com-modified salvation: the idea that the happiness we seek will be provided by the next thing (it’s always the next thing) we buy. And, as we know, it’s possible to go to a church on Sunday or meditate a couple times a week and still be caught up in a consumerist lifestyle during the rest of one’s life.What role will twenty-first-century religions play in addressing this new competitor, which is secular but nonetheless religious insofar as it promises a happiness that it never quite delivers? For contemporary religions to succeed in challenging commodified salvation and the consumerist lifestyle, they will need to offer genuine alternatives. I believe that they have the best chance of doing so if they stop emphasizing the hereafter and focus instead on how to overcome the illusion that we are separate from this precious, endangered earth." @default.
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• W2058713035 title "A Buddhist God?" @default.
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