In critiquing any subject, it is essential to know what one is criticising. That is, one must not attack straw men: one must critique a subject for what it is, rather than what one imagines it to be. Most fundamentalist criticisms of Buddhism usually fall into this fallacy of misidentification. The misidentification is frequently fueled by ignorance and by preconceived biases learned from particular demoninational statements and creeds. In this article I would like to refute some commonly-held misidentifications and misconceptions by which many biblical literalists attempt to condemn Buddhism.
1. True religion is based on revelation. Buddhism has no revelation and is therefore a false religion.
My first response begins with an objection to the notion of divine revelation. One’s personal revelation(s) may be invaluable to oneself, but of little use and meaning to others (unless of course revelation can somehow be a shared experience). The issue centers around the question, How can one test another’s private revelation? How do we decide between a true, valid revelation and the rantings of a hallucinating, delusional person? How can we tell a real revelation from an outright, manipulative lie? How do we know that God has revealed truth to one person, while another person is making an equally sincere claim to divine inspiration?
Moreover, in Buddhism’s favor, the Buddha taught that the experience of religious truth is open to all, not merely to selected “favorite children” of a particular deity. The experience of truth in Buddhism is not the result of accepting anyone’s revelation nor is it a consequence of belief in a set of doctrines based on a revelation. Instead, Buddhism claims that spiritual truth is based on the seeker’s own experiences, which are gained through a variety of contemplative/meditative methods. Faith is not a requirement in Buddhism. Rather, Buddhism invites the seeker to “try this”: complete the spiritual injunction, perform the meditative experiment, and share the conclusions with others who have also adequately performed these steps. Since faith is not a spiritual requirement for Buddhism, Buddhism does not depend on anyone’s belief-claims, or on anyone’s puported revelations, or on any divinely-inspired texts.
Therefore, the objection that Buddhism is a false system because it does not depend on revelation is really something of a back-handed compliment: “belief-in” has been supplanted with direct experience and hands-on testing.
2. True religion claims the reality of an Absolute and offers a means of connecting with that Absolute. Buddhism claims no Absolute and therefore is not a true religion.
This objection is simply false, and a misidentification of what Buddhism really claims. There is Buddhist Absolute, namely, the Dharma. Buddha conceived of the Dharma as a universal law, the understanding of which is the highest spiritual goal. Under this law are subsumed all other Buddhist truth claims. Moreover, especially in Mahayana Buddhism, the Absolute goes by many names and descriptions, such as the Buddha Nature, Sunyata, the Plenum-Void, the Buddha Mind, the Dharmakaya, etc.
Buddhism claims that correct action and meditation lead to direct experience of the Ultimate within oneself. Further, Buddhism claims that correct understanding and practice actually result in the observable and experiencable embodiment of the Absolute in people and therefore in the world. Like the Christian Kingdom of God, the Buddhist Absolute is “here, but more than here”, it is “within us”, and the arhats, Boddhisattvas, and Buddhas “incarnate” the Ultimate in a way not dissimilar from the way that Christianity claims that Jesus embodied God and the Spirit. Therefore the claim that Buddhism has no Absolute, and no means of reaching the Absolute, is false.
3. The Buddha was a sinful human being who left his wife and family for the sake of his own spiritual benefit, and later, his missionary career.
My main objection here is that Christianity – even fundamentalist Christianity – claims that experience of God or the Spirit is “the pearl of great price” for which many sacrifices are called for and many social expectations are overturned. Did Buddha leave his family? So did Jesus, who also said that his followers must “hate” their families, and who expanded the definition of family to include anyone who obeys God (“Who are my mother and my brothers? Those who obey God,” Jesus said… in the presence of his mother and his brothers). Did Buddha recommend celibacy? So did Jesus, who said that the highest service to God’s Kingdom is to make a eunuch of oneself. Saint Paul in an important sense echoes this sentiment when he damns marriage with the faint praise: “It is better to marry than to burn [with lust].”
Fundamentalistists who condemn Buddhist celibacy and monasticism do so without reference to their own Christian tradition’s counsels along the same lines. Here a fatal lack of self-inquiry, if not hypocrisy, raises its ugly head.
4. True religion must claim universality. However, Buddhism does not claim that it is for all people. Therefore, Buddhism is a false religion.
It is true that the Buddha limited his own experience of the Dharma to his own teaching and meditative practices, yet he never denied that the Dharma is available to all. After all, the Dharma is an absolute and would not be likely to be limited to a single human being or religious order or contemplative practice. What Buddha claimed was that the spiritual injunctions worked for him – and for his followers who successfully performed them. The experimental nature of Buddha’s injunctions can be summarized, as previously mentioned, “Try this. If ‘this’ doesn’t work, then try something else, and test your own experience against what I am teaching.”
The injunction’s experimental nature therefore makes the Buddha’s attitude relativistic toward method, but not toward the absolute Dharma underlying his – and all authentic teachers’ – methods. Therefore the objection that Buddhism’s claims are not universal is a partial truth at best, because while the methodology may be relativistic, the truth-claim is universal, just as the Dharma is universal.
5. Buddhism claims that the universe is eternal, and is therefore an atheistic system.
Simply illogical:
Atheism is the denial of God’s existence or reality, not simply the denial of a Creator-deity.
Theism is the affirmation of God’s existence or reality, not limited to statements about a Creator-deity: that depends on the religious system invoked.
Along with many “new” atheists, fundamentalists’ view of God is narrowly focused on God as a Creator. If God as a Creator is refuted or denied (they think), then God generally defined is also denied. This limited “God must be a Creator or God is unreal” view makes colorful, if grotesque, bedfellows of fundamentalists and atheists.
The problem is that “God” has many more definitions and functions than “His” narrow fundamentalistic, “biblical” consignment to the role of Creator. Granted, if God as a Creator is refuted or denied, then obviously, “God” is deleted. That is, God’s definition as a Creator is deleted. God’s other definitions and functions, however, remain untouched. Therefore, to claim that the universe is eternal, is probably to deny the existence of a Creator. But it is not to deny the existence of God.
Moreover, it should be noted that several of the interpretations and meanings applied in Buddhism to Nirvana, the state of Bodhi, Buddha Nature and Buddha Mind, etc., are actually functionally equivalent to several important (“non-Creatorist”) God-definitions in Western faith and mysticism.
That fundamentalist critics of Buddhism seem mostly unaware of these two major God-issues speaks volumes about the bias and ignorance with which they approach the subject.
6. Buddhism is negative and fatalistic because the Buddha claimed that life is suffering.
This objection is simply a result of laziness. The briefest exposure to Buddhism exhibits the fact that the Buddha said, “I teach suffering, and the end of suffering.” Fundamentalist critics’ inability or unwillingness to read the rest of the sentence beyond the comma is as baffling as it is intellectually suspect.
7. Buddhist prayer is illogical because it attempts to change fatalistic karma.
Fundamentalists may see Buddhists standing or kneeling with their malas in hand, chanting and/or reciting verses, and they come to the conclusion that Buddhists pray. This is mostly a false conclusion. Only a relatively little-educate minority of Buddhists pray to Buddha, or his manifold manifestations, as to a g0d. There is no Creator in Buddhism, so even this petitionary, supplicative form of prayer is usually a request for merit, not for miracles. It approximates the type of prayer that devotees in some Catholic countries direct to their saints.
Instead of prayer,, Buddhists practice meditation, some of which takes the outward appearance of Western, theistic prayer. But instead of attempting to engage the will of a sky-father-Creator, Buddhist meditators seek to focus their mind; to cultivate peacefulness, compassion, and calm; to better understand the teachings; and to accumulate merit, which is said to impact their karmic “debt”. Common sense dictates that a dept that can be modified, influenced, worked off or shortened cannot at the same time be termed absolute and defined fatalistically or deterministically. Therefore the claim that a belief in karma is necessarily fatalistic is false when objectively observed in its actual Buddhistic philosophy, interpretation, and practice.
8. Buddhism is a religion of despair and negativity because its highest goal is Nirvana, the extinction of the self in nothingness.
The Buddha did not describe Bodhi as a zombie-like state of living death. On the contrary, he invoked it as a living, calm, alert, witnessing kind of consciousness, a kind of still center of perception at the “hub” of the bodily/egoic/samsaric “wheel”. The Buddha taught a life centered in this non-egoic awareness.
Moreover, Jesus himself taught the death of self and described the path to godliness as a daily taking up of one’s cross. He also said that to find oneself, one must lose oneself. And, to cite New Testament scholar Marcus Borg, Jesus taught a life centered in this spiritual mode of dying-to-self - for the purpose of rooting oneself in Spirit rather than in culture (or in any other “samsaric” set of values).
So again in this case we can observe that fundamentalist objections to Buddhism are based on a combination of ignorance and a definite, sometimes glaring, lack of self-questioning.
Finally, Jesus said that we are to remove the log from our own eye before we dare to remove the speck from another’s eye. Fundamentalist condemners of Buddhism would do well to follow their Lord’s injunction.
“Gospel” means “good news”. Most are familiar with the Gospel’s standard benisons, for example that the Christian Messiah has come in Jesus; Jesus taught a new life in God by example; about a hidden but widespread Kingdom of God on earth; he preached the Beatitudes, love of neighbor, forgiveness, charity, etc.
But one New Testament teaching, preserved in both Latin and Greek churches, has a strange, even exotic, aroma. This teaching treats of the believer’s merging into God. More than a merely adoptive filial relationship or a purely juridical incorporation into the Kingdom, this doctrine conveys the idea that the believer unites with God: unites with God, that is, to the extent of partaking in God’s own nature. The Latin church calls this transformation Deificatio, and the Greek church terms it Theosis.
John 17:21-23 has Jesus telling his disciples:
“That they may all be one, as you, Father are in me, and I am in you, that they also may be one in us…
And the glory you gave me I have given them, so that they may be one, even as we are one;
I in them, and you in me, that they may be made perfect in one…”
Alan Watts commented on these verses in words to this effect: “Jesus envisaged us becoming one with God in just the same way and to the same degree as himself.”
At first blush, “divinization” of the believer might seem an Eastern or even a New Age concept. But there it is, in the heart of Christian scripture. And John’s instance is not its only occurrance. In addition, there are:
John 15: 1-8 “I am the true vine… Abide in me, and I in you. As a branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except that it abides in the vine; no more can you, except that you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me, and I in them, brings forth much fruit: for without me you can do nothing… If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask what you will, and it will be done for you.”
2 Peter 1: 1-4: “…accordingly, His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness…that by these you might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through evil desire.”
1 Corinthians 15:49 “Just as we bear an earthy image, we will also bear the image of the heavenly.”
(Or: “Just as we are like the one who was made out of earth [Adam] , we will be like the One who came from heaven [Jesus].”)
2 Corinthians 3:18 “[w]e are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory.”
Romans 8:29 “For those God foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.”
1 John 3:2 We “shall know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”
For the New Testament, union with Jesus is said to be union with God, participation in God’s nature, and a transformation into a state of “being like” the glorified Christ. “Deification” is the Christian’s ultimate goal. Strange how seldom this essential doctrine, with its glorious claims, is taught in Christian congregations.
Shinran’s Gospel of Pure Grace, by Alfred Bloom: 1965, Association for Asian Studies: Ann Arbor, Michigan: Eighth Printing, 1991.
I have many nice things to say about this classic of Shin Buddhism, and scarcely know where to begin, so I will simply discuss the book thematically, in chapter order.
Dr. Bloom sensibly begins his Prologue with a brief biography of Shinran, concentrating on Shinran’s conversion to the Pure Land sect as taught by his master Honen. This Bloom calls Shinran’s “period of discovery”:
“It symbolized the rejection of the decadent, aristocratic, confusing religion of the time… Shinran long remembered the event and in the epilogue of his work Kyogyoshinsho he stated,
‘But I…Shinran, in the year 1201, abandoned the difficult practices and took refuge in the Original Vow.’”
(I always find it heartening in studying religions to have origins pinpointed so sharply…)
Bloom next moves on to describe Shinran’s exposure to the Pure Land scriptures and to the teachings of the lineage’s great sages, “the Seven Patriarchs”, especially those disseminated by Patriarch Master T’an-luan. Concerning this teaching, which was to figure so largely in Shinran’s later re-interpretation of Honen’s theories (Blogger’s italics) Bloom writes:
“We can rephrase T’an-luan’s view to point out more clearly the fallacy he saw in the self power approach to enlightenment. The self power attitude is based essentially on a dualistic view of reality. The devotee believes that through religious practices he can build a bridge to infinity, i.e., to purify himself to the degree that he can attain unity with ultimate reality. Relying on his virtue, he may manifest arrogance and pride. Although he claims to be doing away with ego-clingings, he is actually cultivating them. The Other Power attitude is based on non-dualism. Pure Land devotees believe that they stand on, or in, infinity and whatever concrete efforts they make to reach the goal are really efforts in which infinity itself participates.”
Shin sees ultimate reality as a compassionate, providential “Other Power” that provides grace without human effort; and views the human participation in it as non-dualistic.
Borrowing G.R. Lewis’s (Sensei of Buddhist Faith Fellowship of Connecticut), Shin seen in this light might be interpreted as a form of panentheism – the universe as viewed as existing “in” the divine. Of course since Buddhism contains no deity in the Western sense, Lewis suggests the term “panenDharmism” (which could be further refined as “panenAmidism”) to describe the universal presence of Amida Buddha’s Vow and grace.
Just because this omnipresence and omni-sufficiency of Amida’s grace renders self-effort toward salvation useless, Shinran happily took up T’an-luan’s view that the self-effort theory of the “Holy Path” schools of traditional Buddhism ought to evaporate in the radiant heat of Amida Buddha’s impenetrable light.
Bloom notes that Amida’s omnipresent, life-bestowing “Name” is “never separate or apart from beings, but intertwined in their existence…as the manifestation of faith in mind, word, or deed… what is spoken of as apparently existing objectively [Amida, grace, "the divine"]… is, in reality, to be discovered within one’s consciousness.”
Because of this insight, Shinran was necessarily opposed to self-power practices, even as they occasionally survived in Pure Land schools:
“What [interested] him was the attitude of devotees who engaged in the performances of religious exercises. To him it seemed that these individuals believed that somehow they were doing a good act and that this good act was the basis of their salvation. He perceived that such persons were in error from two points of view. On the one hand they failed to take seriously the depravity of beings, and on the other hand, they did not recognize the true meaning of the need for Buddha’s assistance in attaining salvation… from this standpoint, it can readily be seen that religiously there can be no such thing as a ‘good deed.’”
Bloom summarizes:
“Within Shinran’s interpretation there are two aspects that are coordinated. On the one hand, he saw a great gulf between mortal life and the Buddha which was impossible to span from the side of beings. On the other hand, the fundamental unity that he saw between mortals and the Buddha…Shinran claimed came completely from the side of the Buddha through the gift of faith as the transfer of [Amida Buddha's] qualities of mind. In other words, it was by the Buddha’s act of compassion that one attains Buddha nature.”
This may sound familiar to Western readers, particularly Christians:
“This new way of life which grew out of Shinran’s thought has sometimes been termed ‘naturalism’ The Japanese term for it is Kono Mama, and perhaps the words of the Christian hymn, ‘Just as I am’ depict the sentiment behind the term. Because one is accepted as he is by the compassionate Buddha, one can take life just as it is, as one finds it, and in the midst of this life find the ultimate reality.”
Bloom emphasises Shinran’s insistence that salvation and participation in Amida’s pure realm is a facet of our life lived in the present world, not simply the devotee’s final goal. Shinran envisioned being embraced by Amida as supplying “entrance into the company of the truly assured” of gaining spiritual enlightenment, which is also “the stage of nonretrogression” (the stage of no longer returning into the paths of evil birth or karma). Since Amida alone saves beings, and there is nothing that beings can do to save themselves, their primary response to Amida’s grace is gratitude. It is in gratitude that saved beings pray and chant the Nembutsu or “Namu Amida Butsu“. This is Shin’s chief practice, and like all of Shin’s few practices, the Nembutsu is not a means of salvation. Rather, it is a means of expressing gratitude for salvation. Bloom notes that Shinran kept this ancient Pure Land practice, but changed its meaning from a salvation-granting “work” to an “other power” expression of gratefulness.
Additionally, the Nembutusu functions to remind those who practice it of Amida’s grace, of their participation in it now as well as in the future, and it helps them to recall, and center themselves in, the spiritual reality which is Amida. (As the New Testament scholar Marcus J. Borg has said, a major part of the spiritual life is paying attention to our relationship with God, in a similar way that we (ought to) pay attention to our other relationships. Shin Buddhism’s Nembutsu can be seen as a powerful means of “recollection” in the religious sense of the word.)
Shinran seems not to have denied spiritual “birth” and at least a modicum of helpful spiritual practice to those outside the circle of his novel “Way”: He maintained in fact that there are two such births, but that the new Way’s”third” birth is the highest and most complete. Bloom charts Shinran’s three “births” as:
1. “Birth under the twin Shal trees,” these trees being the ones under which the historical Buddha was said to have died in India. Shin regarded this traditional path of practice and spiritual destiny as a birth in a transformed state or “land”, but as only a temporary or provisional path. It has the merit of appealing to certain “striving” kinds of seekers; and it arouses their desire for enlightenment.
2. The “Incomprehensible Birth,” namely, the birth resulting from Pure Land self-power practice of Nembutsu recitation which Shinran kept but transformed into a thanksgiving to Other (Amida) Power. Shinran called this the birth in the “Palace of Doubt” (doubt in the complete power of Amida to save), or the “Embryo Palace” (embryonic because the devotee’s faith has not yet matured into the Other Power mode). Yet - since after all this birth is based nevertheless on Amida Buddha’s “Name” – Shinran grants that this birth is wonderful and mysterious – in fact it is “the incomprehensible birth.”
3. The “Most Incomprehensible Birth,” the birth resulting from absolute abandoning of self power practices wherever they exist in any-and-all forms of Buddhism, including Pure Land. Bloom explains that this mode of rebirth “refers to the entrance into the company of the truly assured in this life and birth ultimately in the True Recompense Land where Nirvana is experienced”.
To conclude this post: At 106 pages, Bloom’s book is a pithy and succinct primer of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism as well as a streamlined introduction to Shinran and his place in Japanese religion, as well as his implications for global spirituality. I experienced only two negatives in reading this publication:
1. On one page, Bloom seems to indicate that he views Amida Buddha as a mere symbol of one’s subjective process of salvation and enlightenment. Yet on other pages Bloom indicates that Amida Buddha is a real, dynamic spiritual force, if not a personality or a deity. So I am not sure just how Bloom envisions the “panendharmic” implications of Shin. In addition Bloom shows no awareness that this exact issue – whether Amida is an objective “Something” somehow working within human subjectivity or a mere symbol of a purely internal psycho-spiritual process – is a question currently being hotly debated in Shin communities. However, the book was first published in 1965, perhaps before the debate got into full swing. Perhaps editions subsequent to my 1991 copy have been updated to include the debate.
2. The edition I own has some unfortunate typos, suspect grammar and a lack of gender-sensitive language – all of which could easily be corrected in a revised edition.
I highly recommend Shinran’s Gospel of Pure Grace for all students of religion, but especially for Buddhists who may have little familiarity with Jodo Shinshu and its central teacher, Shinran Shonin.
Filed under: Jodo Shinshu, panentheism, religion, spirituality | Tags: Jodo Shinshu panentheism religion spirituality
While Buddhism generally rejects the notion of a personal creator god or gods, still its descriptions of ultimate reality do not exclude the concept of a divine or godlike Absolute, as the following citation suggests:
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Our final ignorance is to imagine that our final destiny is conceivable. All we can know is that it is a condition behond the reach of any psychophysical state still tethered to an “I”… The Buddha would venture only one affirmative characterization. “Bliss, yes bliss, my friends, is nirvana.”
Is nirvana God? When answered in the negative, this question has led to opposite conclusions… The dispute requires that we take a quick look at what the word “God” means… Defined in this sense [i.e., a personal god], nirvana is not God. The Buddha did not consider it personal because personality requires definition, which nirvana excludes it. And though he did not expressly deny creation, he clearly exempted nirvana from responsibility for it. Finally, the Buddha left no room for supernatural intervention in the natural causal processes he saw governing the world. If absence of a personal Creator-God is atheism, Budhdism is atheistic.
There is a second meaning of God, however, which (to distinguish it from the first) has been called the Godhead. The idea of personality is not part of this concept, which appears in mystical traditions throughout the world. When the Buddha declared, “There is O monks, an Unborn, neither become nor created nor formed. Were there not, there would be no deliverance from the formed, the made, the compounded,” he seemed to be speaking in this tradition. Impressed by similarities between nirvana and the Godhead, Edward Conze has compiled from Budhdist texts a series of attributes that apply to both. We are told that
Nirvana is permanent, stable, imperishable, immovable, ageless, deathless, unborn, and unbecome, that it is power, bliss and happiness, the secure refuge, the shelter, and the place of unassailable safety; that it is the real Truth and the supreme Reality; that it is the Good, the supreme goal and the one and only consummation of our life, the eternal, hidden and incomprehensible Peace.
We may conclude with Conze that nirvana is not God defined as personal creator, but that it stands sufficiently close to the concept of God as Godhead to warrant the linkage in that sense.
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(Huston Smith & Philip Novak: Buddhism: a Concise Introduction. Harper Collins: NY, 2003, pp. 53-54)
Filed under: Christianity, panentheism, religion, spirituality | Tags: religion panentheism spirituality christianity
You claimed that there is no god evidence. I replied that the evidence is plentiful. I did not promise to present the evidence, and I explained why: unlike scientific evidence which can be pointed to as an external object in the material universe, god evidence is internal and nonmaterial. God is neither an object nor a theory. Moreover, the evidence can only be acquired by a hands-on individual, experiential methodology, not by discussion or debate.
I said that god evidence, like scientific evidence, results from a three-stage process of knowledge acquisition (it’s sketched out in the final paragraph of this post).
Do you want to know if Jupiter has moons? Since they are invisible to the naked eye, to confirm or disconfirm the proposition that Jupiter has moons, you will need to look through a specialized lens. Only after you have done that will you be competent to talk about the existence or nonexistence of Jupiter’s moons. Do you want to know if god is real, or if attributes ascribed to god are valid? Since these are invisible by common perceptual means, in order to confirm or deny the proposition that god is real/has particular attributes, you will need to look through a specialized lens. Only after you have done that will you be competent to talk about the existence or nonexistence of god/god’s attributes.
To reiterate: If you want to know if Jupiter has moons, you yourself must look through a prescribed lens. If you listen only to others (whether or not they themselves have looked through that lens), you’re only getting information by hearsay. Only if you yourself do the looking through the specialized lens can you truly have verified or disconfirmed the existence of Jupiter’s moons. The same applies to spiritual issues: If you want to know about god/spirit/the sacred, you yourself must look through a prescribed lens. If you listen only to others - me or anyone else – you’re only getting your spiritual data by hearsay. Only if you yourself look through spirituality’s specialized lens can you truly have verified or disconfirmed the existence of Jupiter’s moons.
Do you wonder if Jupiter may or may not have moons? Want me to prove it to you? I can’t. I can only tell you to look for those satellites by using a specialized lens. Do you wonder if god/spirit/the sacred may or not be real? Want me to prove it to you? I can’t. I can only tell you to look for those entities by using a specialized lens. For the acquisition of both scientific and spiritual data, the ONLY means of confirmation or denial of a proposition is to 1) perform the injunction; 2) do the experiment; 3) share your conclusions with the community of others who have adequately performed # 1). There’s no other way. Unless you’d rather satisfy yourself with faith and belief-in, rather than experiential investigation. In that case, you would strongly resemble the very religionists you so vehemently condemn.
Filed under: Christianity, panentheism, religion, spirituality | Tags: panentheism religion christianity spirituality
My god definition does not depict god as a creator. Once god as creator has been eliminated, the tone of the discussion changes radically.
Positing a creator god automatically requires invention of a “theodicy” – a model which attempts to explain and excuse the existence and the persistence of evil in a creation supposedly spawned by a creator deity. If god is a creator then responsibility for the condition, state, and maintenance of the creation is solidly on that creator’s shoulders.
Eliminating the creator function from one’s god definition automatically eliminates the need for invention of a theodicy. A non-creating god is not responsible for the state of creation, and cannot be blamed for its bad or praised for its good.
Generally the Abrahamic faiths each posit a creator, and each has been forced to develop woefully inadequate theodicies. A non- “creatorist” view escapes this problem. There are some exceptions to this in the West. The Gnostic Christians, for example, posited an “Alien” god – a transcendent, transcosmic being who, though real, is not a creator. Instead, they claimed that the creator is not the true god, but rather an ignorant, arrogant, indifferent (but sometimes cruel) “Demiurge.” The Gnostics bemoaned the fact that so many falsely worship a creator who is not the real god. They came to the smart conclusion that belief in an Intelligent Designer is not necessarily good news: god exists – but he’s mean? He’s incompetent? Evil? Insane? Better to deny the creator and contemplate the True Alien God.
As I said, once the idea of a creating deity has been eliminated, the tone of the discussion changes radically. It moves beyond the necessity to derive, or to decline, evidence for an Intelligent Designer. It moves beyond the need to prove god’s existence by some purported behavior or element in or of the physical universe. It moves beyond the necessity to uphold or deny god’s omnipotence, since the transcosmic god after all is neither powerful or un-powerful. Like the Buddha Mind or the Tao, the real god is the smallest of the small, is subtle, and to the extent it is known and named, its essence remains elusive.
I am not a Gnostic, but I do deny the notion of a creator deity. I much prefer the notion – found in mysticism, Eastern spirituality, and some forms of panentheism – of a non-creating god, Which has more to do with the qualities of transcendence, no-thing-ness, non-being and paradox than with that all-too-familiar Sky Father whose incoherent image haunts the West.
Filed under: Christianity, Jodo Shinshu, panentheism, religion, spirituality | Tags: religion christianity panentheism spirituality
My current credo is panentheistic: god is here (immanent) and more than here (transcendent). To my way of thinking and believing, this type of “here-and- more -than- here Ultimate Reality” is not – and is not required to be – a creator and/or an intervener.
Those who posit an all-good, all-powerful creator god are bound to produce a theodicy, a model which attempts to explain the existence and persistence of evil in a universe purportedly designed by a perfectly good deity. Among evil’s obvious, observable effects are included all the non-interventions by this putatively all-powerful and all-benevolent god – all the chances missed for interrupting and forestalling evils that at root flow from the very fabric of that god’s “good” creation.
But when one’s definition of god excludes creatorism and interventionism, an entirely new picture of deity emerges. Since according to this view god neither creates nor intervenes, theodicybecomes unnecessary. God can be neither blamed nor praised for worldly conditions whether good or bad. God cannot logically be addressed through petitionary prayer. Moreover, if god is not a creator, then obviously god is not responsible for the world’s evil, and is not obligated to intervene in its material processes. Possibly, even: god does not create or intervene for the simple reason that creation and intervention are not options for god: they are not inherent in God’s nature. This idea certainly conflicts with many religious god-definitions, especially those of the Abrahamic faiths, in which god’s primary role is that of an intervening creator. What good, of what use, adherents of these faiths may ask, is a god that neither creates nor intervenes? Before addressing that question, let’s look again at what creatorism and its companion, theodicy, require.
Most creatorist systems posit that an all-good, all-mighty deity created the universe. But observably the universe is at best indifferent, and at worst, hostile to the feeling beings trapped within it. Suffering, struggle, conflict, waste, and death are among its primary features. It is a slaughterhouse, even if a sometimes beautiful, slaughterhouse. Creatorist religion realizes this and steps in with its various explanatory theodicies. It’s not god’s fault, they (especially the Abrahamic faiths) say – even though god is total love and total power. Rather it is man’s fault: man who deliberately and maliciously killed the inner divine life by a sin of disobedience from which all subsequent ills devolved. Other creatorist traditions chime in with similar excuses. We are not seeing the universe, the world, or life as it was originally created: rather we are seeing a creation damaged by our own (theodicy-explained) sin. Unfortunately for theodicy, the universe as it is, with all its wasteful suffering, trumps all made-in-hindsight religious excuses. Theodicy – quite without meaning to – promotes a flawed creator of a flawed creation who must rely on ham-thumbed interventions to correct sundry messes.
The panentheistic non-creatorist god is by nature absolved of all these considerations. Or rather, not absolved, but fundamentally free of them, since they don’t accrue to god’s nature to begin with. Creatorists may ask of what use is a non-active god. This is similar to asking what is the use of the sun, gravity, field forces, the atmosphere, etc. These geoplanetary givens don’t intervene, yet they are sources of life and energy. So too is the non-creatorist god/ultimate reality, but on a deeper and higher scale.
The Buddha Nature is inherent in all things but neither creates nor intervenes. So too the Tao – the most hushed of the most silent, the smallest of the small. So too the Kingdom of Heaven, waiting to be discovered like a treasure buried in a field. So too the Gnostic alien god, they Abyss, the Silence, the Profundity. So too the divine Suchness in which everything unfolds, wherein the sparrow’s fall is not prevented by intervention, but is embraced and perceived in a vast world-transcending compassion.
The advantage of such a “Ground of Being” theology is twofold: First, it requires no hand-wringing about god’s action or refusal to act. Second, it hints at something better and broader than “God” – a transcendent, radiant “Something” in which we are immersed, which embraces us, and in which we participate on a fundamental level.
But suppose creatorist theology turns out to be right. Suppose that there is really only one deity, and that deity is both a creator and intervener. If that’s the case, listen for the sirens of theodicy’s emergency-response vehicles.
So: The universe is indeed the product of intelligent design – and this is supposed to be good news? So the creator exists but is (to paraphrase W.P. Blatty) a bent genius? So the creator exists but is indifferent, or worse, cruel? The creator exists but manages its own created world so poorly that the creator must constantly intervene to clean up messes that should have been preventable – and prevented – in the first place?
As long as I belong to any theistic category, I’ll take the non-creating, non-intervening deity over any creator-intervener class of god(s). This concept is far more streamlined and it happily lacks clumsy theodicies, as well as the tragic need to manufacture them.
Filed under: Jodo Shinshu, panentheism, religion, spirituality | Tags: Jodo Shinshu spirituality panentheism religion
Salvation in Jodo Shinshu Buddhism is enlightenment. Enlightenment is the mutual unfolding of Amida Buddha in us, and us in Amida. Amida issues the salvific call, and from within us, makes the reply. Thus, Amida’s grace is all-sufficient for our salvation; Amida’s “Other Power” vitiates our “Self Power.” We are by nature incapable of attaining salvation. We can, of course, deepen our awareness of the Call through meditation and a practice specific to Shin called “Deep listening.” But beyond these considerations, Shin is mute concerning the issues raised in other traditions by the role of mystical experience as a means of spiritual gnosis.
Central to most religious groups, at least in their origins, is the achievement, entering into, nondual consciousness, or divine union mysticism. This is the kind of mysticism found in Jesus when he declared “The Father and I are One” and “When you see me, you see the Father;” when the Buddha entered the nondual state of Nirvana, when a shaman becomes a vehicle for the Spirit, when one of the early Sufis, gesturing to his garments, stated “There is no one inside this cloak but God.” Sometimes this is conceived as union with a personal deity, or with an impersonal spirit, or some kind of ultimate reality. The essential factor is a nondual awareness that is directly expressed in and by this experience. Yet it is exactly this very primary, basic feature that is missing in Shin.
Shin claims that Amida is the life and light of the universe. Amida is at once Amitayus, Infinite Life, and Amithabha, Infinite Light. Moreover, Amida’s Light is called “unimpeded.” As such, Amida and Amida’s attributes are panentheistic, to apply a theistic term to a nontheistic religion. Panentheism sees the divine as being “here” (immanent) and “more than here” (transcendent). These are exactly Amida’s attributes. Amida is beyond the cosmos, yet permeates it.
This being the case, it is almost de rigeur that Amida’s infinite light and life ought to be experienced globally, historically and cross-culturally. If Amida’s relation to reality is truly panetheistic, or better phrased, panendharmic or panenbuddhistic, then it is almost demanded that Amida, too, should be experienced in a nondual or divine union mysticism. Again, though, Shin makes no such claim.
One would think that Amida’s universality would lend itself to these other religious manifestations. For instance, it might be said – from a certain perspective – that Jesus was an expression of Amida, as exemplified in his compassion and his claims that a merciful “Suchness” abides in the world. Or it might be said that the nondual experiences of mystics, Eastern and Western, are valid encounters with Amida – Amida’s Voidness, Amida’s Non-Existence, Amida’s Compassion, Amida’s non-segregation from our enlightened selves, etc.
If Shin eschews these, the bedrock mysticism of so many other traditions, its universality would seem to be an incorrect claim. Does Shin really ask its adherents to turn a blind eye to the obvious truth, holiness, harmony, and pragmatic workability of those other traditions at whose center nonduality lies? Surely, if Amida is a universally present divine factor, then those who have claimed to encounter a universally present divine factor should be listened to and their testimony examined in the light of Shin’s panendharmic principles. To fail to do so would isolate Shin, as well as make it an anomaly in the most negative sense of the word.
Filed under: Jodo Shinshu, panentheism, religion, spirituality | Tags: spirituality religion christianity Jodo Shinshu
A world of eternal Spirit; or a world of materiality, suffering, death. The ancient Gnostic Christians opted for the spiritual world, a realm they did not identify as the standard Christian heaven. The Spirit realm, according to the Gnostics, is an utterly transcendent sphere centered on an utterly transcendent God. The Christian heaven and its God were far too hylic, far too corporeal, for the Gnostics, who considered themselves to be pneumatic, or spiritual beings whose true home was in the transcendent domain of the Other God, whom they named the Abyss, the Silence, the Profundity.
Most Gnostic sects condemned the world as the creation of an ignorant, arrogant deity they called the Demiurge. Some Gnostics identified the Demiurge with Yahweh, Judaism’s creator-deity, whom they conceived as an upstart godling who created the material universe. He was a creator – of an inferior, pain-filled world - but he was not the true, transcendent God the Gnostics held to be supreme.
Contrast this spirit with the famed cosmos-piety of the Greeks, the vision of Yahweh’s world as “good” by Jews and Christians, and the nature-love found in many “pagan” systems and folk beliefs. For these, the beauty of the world, the harmony of the celestial lights, the fecundity of the soil, the blessing of the rains, the marvelous regency of life and its mysteries of birds, animals, the bounty of the sea, the puzzle of meteors, the eternal pattern of day alternating with night, the moon and its phases, and so many more features of a living world, were a source of wonder, reverence, and veiled meaning. One thinks of the simple but deep mystery of the sacred grove with its holy springs, or the god-touched mountain top, the lovely visions of goddesses and demigods so frequently associated with such places… the “genius loci” which imbues certain special places with an enigmatic, supernal beauty.
Yet that very world – impermanent and full of pain and struggle, a sometimes-beautiful slaughter house- is where we, as embodied creatures, live. Its cyclic rhythms are full of death, disease, dismemberment. The Gnostic vision confronts these hylic elements, despises them, and points to the True God’s non-material realm as our only true refuge and home.
It is hard not to acknowledge that both conflicting views contain truth. Can we recognize and accept the reality of both a non-material realm of radiant spiritual joy, with its non-creating but supreme Reality… and at the same time a material world which, though full of suffering, still conveys its own heart-rending splendor and hidden meaning?
I don’t have the answer to that question, but my guess is that the person who does, has found the key to real happiness.
Filed under: Christianity, Jodo Shinshu, panentheism, religion, spirituality | Tags: Jodo Shinshu spirituality religion christianity
Panentheism claims that God is both immanent (here) and transcendent (more than here). Pantheism, on the other hand, states that God is only here; God and universe are the same. Panentheism holds that the universe is in God and God is in the universe. But it goes on to say that God extends beyond the universe. Thus, to paraphrase Luke’s citation of Paul in the book of Acts, it is in God that we and the world “live and move and have our being.”
Jodo Shinshu makes a similar claim about Amida Buddha. Though not a deity or a creator, Amida Buddha permeates the universe, and the universe unfolds within Amida’s being. Thus, panentheism and Jodo Shinshu (Shin) share a vision of an ultimate reality which exists in, and outside of, the world. In several modes of panentheism, God is a presence but not a creator or an intervener. The same is true of Shin. Amida Buddha is a presence but is not a creator, a designer or an intervener. Like panentheism’s non-creating God, Shin’s Amida Buddha is a presence whose divine life flows naturally into and outward from a universe that is held in Amida’s being. As G.R. Lewis, sensei of the Buddhist Faith Fellowship of Connecticut has put it, Jodo Shinshu is from one perspective an expression of “PanenDharmism,” (and by extension, “PanenBuddhism” and “PanenAmidism”). Viewed in this light, Amida is functionally equivalent to some panentheistic definitions of god.
This is in stark contrast to mainstream expressions of the Western Abrahamic faiths. Basic to god’s attributes in these faiths are the ideas of creation and intervention. The Abrahamic God is the Creator, and as such bears responsibility for the world, his creation. This Semitic God, frequently imaged as Father and Lawgiver, contracts or covenants with “his” people(s). They, in turn, pledge to live by the laws he has revealed. More importantly, they pray to God and perceive his answers to prayer as interventions. Their traditions are replete with narratives describing historical interventions by their deity. (In addition to petitionary prayer, of course, these faiths also have contemplative prayer, which much more resembles meditation than does petitionary prayer.) But the main emphasis is on a God who creates, who acts – and who acts through intervention in response to prayer.
There are inherent problems associated with this notion of a creator-intervener deity. The most pressing are the troubling questions raised by all the non-interventions, and by the arbitrariness of selective intervention. Moreover, there is the question of divine purpose: why does God intervene here, but not there? Why do some receive the rewards (or the punishments) through intervention, while others go about their lives completely untouched by and uninvolved in any particularized divine actions? The more the question is considered, the more it seems that the notion of the creating and intervening God requires increasingly complex and artificial explanations.
The primary explanation is to create a paradigm which attempts to explain the existence and persistence of evil in a world purportedly created and maintained (some would even say “shepherded”) by a just and compassionate cosmic Ruler. Such explanations are collectively termed, “theodicy.” Theodicy attempts to make sense of evil in a creation deemed “good” (the Hebrew creator’s self-flattering assessment of his own work) – from the Designer’s point of view.
In some aspects of panentheism, and certainly in “PanenDharmism,” this question disappears. Rather, it has no existence to begin with, because Amida is not a creator or an intervener. Amida is a radiant sea of Compassion directly apprehended by the practitioner in a naturally occuring dynamic that is independent of miracles or physical mediation. Amida is ultimate Compassion but is not entangled in material processes. Amida loves but does not intervene. But isn’t this a contradiction?
One of the obvious and even stereotypical mainstays of love is intervention. We human beings (sometimes) intervene to prevent evil, to feed the hungry, to defuse war, to house the destitute. What kind of ultimate reality can be said to be compassionate yet non-intervening? A God or a transcendental Buddha who do not act on their compassion could at best be said to be useless.
The primary spiritual burden of modernity is the realization of divine abandonment, together with its resulting feelings of hopelessness and meaninglessness. Albert Camus said that if we found that the universe could love, we would be reconciled. But modernity’s universe not only cannot love. It is not even sentient. It is a series of mindless cycles of force wherein minute, finite sentient beings struggle, suffer, and die. It has become clear to us that there is (in all likelihood) no Designer, no one to watch the store. Or, if a Designer exists, s/he is totally unconcerned by the horrors the Design has wrought among feeling creatures. “A Creator exists, but he’s nasty” is hardly good news. One is reminded of William Peter Blatty’s (author of The Exorcist) comment to the effect of, “What if God exists, and is brilliant yet bent?” (Blatty: “Legion”).
Jodo Shinshu acknowledges this state of affairs: We are indeed “abandoned,” at least in the sense that what we had once seen as revealed providential plans, tokens of divinity, special cosmic attentiveness to human concerns, are now seen as naturally-occurring products of random processes… or, worse yet, never existed except in our wrong-headed hopes and imaginings. We are abandoned in the midst of swirling indifferences.
However, according to Shin, help is available. Symbolized as “a raft from the other shore,” Jodo Shinshu’s “Panendharmism” (G.R. Lewis’s term) offers a connection to a Compassion as real and as non-interventionary as Light. Just as the Light of the Logos in John’s Gospel “shines on in the darkness, but the darkness cannot grasp it,” so too does the Light of Amida’s Compassion. The term “Amida” is derived from Amitabha Buddha and Amitayus Buddha. Amitayus Buddha is universal Life. Amitabha Buddha is universal Light – “Unimpeded Light” as Shin in fact calls it.
Though non-interventionary, once grasped, this Light enables sentient beings to witness the unfolding of our suffering, samsaric universe within Amida’s being. It enables our suffering selves to partake in the divine life of the universal Amida Buddha and to realize the Pure Land in our own lives. Which is to say, we realize ourselves as Amida, as vehicles for Amida’s limitless Life and Light. Viewed from this new perspective, samsaric existence begins to be experienced from the sheer Grace and in the sheer Compassion of the transcendent yet immanent Buddha Mind.
Jesus may have been indicating something similar when he pointed to the birds of the air as they swooped through the Galilean skies. When even just one of them falls, it falls in the ever-present awareness – the “Really Real” being – of God. God – like Jodo Shinshu’s Amida Buddha – does not intervene to prevent the bird’s fall. But the fall itself is already immersed in a sea of Compassion. The Suchness of Amida embraces the fate of the smallest beings, and Amida’s Compassion extends to every last one of them. Paradoxically, then, it can be said that we are at one and the same time abandoned and cared for.
