Hi Everybody,
Well I'm packed and ready to go. Everything is sorted. My beautiful golden retriever Gatsby is going to be looked after by a house sitter rather than being packed off to kennels, which he's always been uncertain about. So, I've a couple of hours to spare, and what better way to spend it than a bit of blogging. So let's launch into Chapter 3. It's called Buddhism and Belief, and it sets out to deal with what we mean when we use words like faith and prayer in Buddhism. So here we go on page 39.
' The essential starting point for anyone seeking to understand a little more about Buddhism is that it doesn't have a god at its centre. It is atheistic or humanistic. That is to say it doesn't have at its heart, or anywhere else for that matter, the all-seeing, all-powerful creator-god figure that sits at the heart of all the other major world religions, particularly those with which we are most familiar in western societies, Christianity and Judaism, Islam and Hinduism.
That is very easy to say, and very easy to comprehend on an intellectual level, but in my experience it is much more difficult to grasp on a sort of daily, practical, down-to-earth level, because the implications are profound and never ending. Thus there is no divine hierarchy in Buddhism. it is this characteristic above all that gives Buddhism its wholly distinctive character. Instead of there being a set of dogma and beliefs handed down to mankind in various ways by a divine presence or divine being. Buddhism is firmly rooted from first to last in ordinary humanity. Moreover, since it is not attached to any definition of divinity, Buddhism doesn't have any boundaries. It doesn't have for example the boundaries that have been the source of so much conflict down the centuries that divide the Islamic definition of divinity from the Judaic, or the Judaic from the Christian, or the Christian from the Hindu. It is wholly inclusive. No one and indeed no thing is excluded. It is wholly inclusive.
So it it a colossal humanist vision that reaches out to embrace every man's relationship with himself, man with his fellow human beings, and man with his universal environment. Buddhism in effect draws three concentric rings aroundn our lives. Ourselves at the centre. Then other people, or society as a whole, a truly global societ. Then the outer ring of the universal environment. So Buddhism is immensely forward-looking you might say, immensely modern in that it has always argued that all three are intimately interconnected in every way. No one of them is complete without the others, and for us to live a truly full and fulfilling life it argues, we need to learn how to be connected creatively to all three.
That is to say we have to know how to fully respect our own life, with all its qualities and imperfections; understanding and embracing our faults and imperfections as well as our qualities is essential to our well-being. We need to support the lives of others in every way that we can conceive. And we need to play a consciously constructive part in protecting and preserving the natural environment that sustains us all.
There is no clearer way of expressing this idea I feel, than to say that Buddhism is in every way a man made religion, although you won't of course find those words in that form, in any Buddhist text. So the body of Buddhist teachings essentially represent the wisdom and the insights initially of one man, Shakyamuni himself, immensely extended and amplified down the succeeding centuries by some of the greatest minds in human history. But none of them at any point claimed any sort of divin ity, or divine connection. Shakyamuni constantly makes this clear in his teachings, and there are many references in the various commentaries that we might use to buttress the point, but two perhaps will suffice.
One is from an internationally renowned buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hahn, and goes as follows;
' Buddha was not a god. He was a human being like you and me and he suffered just like we do.'
The other is from an eminent Buddhist historian, who writes,
' The Buddha always stresed that he was a guide, not an authority, and that all religious propositions must be tested, including his own.'
There are of course many profound implications that arise from Buddhism's basic humanism. By no means least is the fact that since it isn't about a God or gods, we have to be careful about how we usekey words like ' faith ' for example and ' prayer. ' They occur all the time in the writings of all religions, including Buddhism. But if there isn't a God to have faith in or to pray to, then clearly these words will mean something very different in Buddhism, from the way we commonly understand them on the basis of our Judaeo-Christian heritage. And it goes without saying doesn't it, that it's crucially important that we have some understanding of what that difference is? '
That's it for today. Enough food for thought. I'm off to the mountains and the snow. I'll be back again with blog number 11 on or around 12th January.
Best wishes,
William
The book The Case for Buddhism is available on Amazon.
imperfections, understanding and embracing our faults and imperfections is
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