Hi Everybody,
Had a great great time away in the sun. Just back. Picking up the blog trail with a little piece on Buddhism and belief.
' 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 so profound and far-reaching.
Thus ther eis 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 defintion 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 is 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 circles round our lies. Ourselves at the centre. Then othe rpeople, society as a whole, a truly global society. Then the outer ring of the universal environment. So Buddhism is immensely forward looking, immensely modern you might say, in that it has always argued that all three are intimately connected in every way, and for us to live a truly full and fulfilling life we need to learn how to be creatively connected to all three. '
That's it for today.
Pleased to be back.
Look forward to seeing you again next episode.
William
PS The Case for Buddhism is available in paperback from Amazon and as a download from Kindle.
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