Blessings and peace.” Anne Ashworth is a poet and editor of the Quaker “Universalist” BUDDHISM Is Religion Created or Discovered? he raison d’étre of Sea of Faith is ‘Te “explore and promote religious faith as a human creation”. Given that the majority of Sea of Faith members have strong links with the Christian tradition in its many forms, it is primarily within the language of Christianity that this motto is explored. However, several prominent SoFties have expressed a high regard for Buddhism, suggesting it has much to offer today’s non-realist religious practitioner. Don Cupitt quotes with approbation from Dogen and Nagarjuna - huge figures in the Buddhist historical pantheon - and David Hart in his recent London talk spoke of a fusion of Christian vocabulary and Buddhist practice as a viable mode of spiritual life. So, does Buddhism fit the bill? Let us proceed methodically and explore to what extent Buddhism (as understood by most Western practitioners at least) is firstly human, and secondly a creation.
There is no God in Buddhism. A personified creator God is not only rejected, but the desire for such a being is equated with an abnegation of personal responsibility by the believer. The Buddha himself, despite subsequent mythologizing within the multi-layered Buddhist tradition, never occupies the position of the deity in theistic religion.
As a modern Buddhist text puts it: “The Buddha was born as we are born, What the Buddha attained, we too can attain.” A Buddhist answer by Varaghosa “Buddhist ethics pivot around empathy with all that lives. To talk of creating value implies we could just as well create an equally valid ethic of violence.” Rather than praying for strength from without, a Buddhist develops it within herself through meditation and friendship. Ultimately we too can become a Buddha - an Awakened One - here in the late twentieth century.
However, Buddhism, or the Dharma - the path, truth and teaching of Buddhism, to be more accurate - diverges from such promising humanistic credentials in its view of what being human means. Cuppit talks of an essentially one-layered world. The world as presented to and created by our senses is all there is, he says. The Dharma however talks of much more, of different realms of experience much clearer and more expansive, and of transformative effect, available through meditation, ritual, art, etc.
It is axiomatic to Buddhist practice that our state of mind, or being, determines the “world” we experience. “If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness follows one like one’s shadow”. (The Dhammapada). The meditator can inhabit a different world during his practice, a world that then gives signifi- cance and clarity to the more communal world of shared experience. So, as is often the case, the Dharma, whilst holding firmly to the baby of significant and profound “mystical” experiences, experiences beyond our everyday world, has no need to dip this baby in the bathwater of Platonic dualisms! A similar process explains the ricli pantheon of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and other strange and wonderful figures that dominate the Tibetan Buddhist landscape. We need myth, ritual, and archetype. Whilst the purity and simplicity of a Zen garden speaks to some, others need to envision the goal in concrete, personified images, vibrant with energy and power. In psychological terms this is positive projection, the meditator projecting her compassion onto the visualised form, only to have it returned as the figure “blesses” her in return. Whilst the traditional language of such practice may speak of supplication and evocation, the (Western) Buddhist knows that ultimately the qualities of Enlightenment reside in the human heart alone.
Secondly then, is the Dharma a creation?
Buddhists would see the Dharma more as a discovery; a discovery or insight into a way of being that is in accord with the way we are as people, and the way the world is. For example, you cannot go far into the Dharma before encountering impermanence. “All things are impermanent” the Dharma proclaims in ringing tones. All “All things are in flux” Photo: Clark & Madden things are in flux. (It then proceeds to deconstruct this sense of things. To segment the flux into “things” with names is what we bring to the situation, through the agency of language and our desire for security). Such ideas are surely not “created”, but more of a universal, human truth (even if the concepts we use to express it are created within our own culture). Likewise Buddhist ethics pivot around empathy with all that lives.
To talk of creating value implies we could just as well create an equally valid ethic of violence. Buddhism would disagree: empathy reflects the fact that we are interconnected, part of that same flux...
A number of SoFties in email debate expressed unease with “the heavily emotive word ‘creation”’, with its somewhat egoistic and arbitrary connotations.
Does Sea of Faith need a better slogan?
What about the goal of the Buddhist path, Enlightenment. Enlightenment, or Awakening, is talked of in terms of three qualities, embodied in their plenitude by the Awakened person. Firstly compassion. After Awakening, one no longer experiences the split in our world between oneself “in here”, and you and everything else “out there”, a split that is so fundamental to our unenlightened minds. Such a dualistic framework is transcended, and the pleasures and pains of others become one’s own (in a way that we may have passing glimpses of in our more expansive moments).
Secondly Enlightenment is a state of inexhaustible creative energy. One is untrammelled by prejudice and habits, the ruts and grooves of our psyche, and is free to act spontaneously for the good of others. One enjoys pure and radiant awareness. Finally, Awakening is talked of in terms of Wisdom or Insight; an allembracing all-transformative vision of life as it is - open and interconnected.
Awakening then is of this world, in that it is not of any other world, and yet it is not of the world that we stumble through in pain and confusion.
So, is Buddhism “a faith of human creation”? Well, yes and no. Maybe nonrealism needs a better definition when applied outside theism? Buddhism is a religious faith of discovery, of understanding and of compassion, which enlarges and gives significance to what it means to be human, right here and right now @ Varaghosa is a member of the Western Buddhist Order, working in the Birmingham Buddhist Centre, UK, and a recent member of the Sea of Faith Network STORIES The Good Levite and the - Bad Samaritan?