"To understand everything is to forgive everything." He said it four hundred years before Jesus arrived.
Over the Christmas holidays Mister Hume was feeling uplifted by affirming Christ, and did what Americans do when you take on the energy of Jesus, the activist, who forgives and brings grace to the believer - you start preaching. Because, when you're feeling it, you want everyone else to feel it too. So on his Fox catbird seat he forthrightly advised Tiger Woods to ditch the Buddhist whatever and take that exclusive opportunity for forgiveness through Jesus.
I think he had the right role of the Christ down and I give him kudos for that. But he just showed the level of education we accept in our wisdom bearers, by things outside of but mysteriously part of our circumscribed lives. We lack a simple, sufficient popular cosmology that explains the relationships of the major religions to each other, and there should be one at times such as these. I'll try this approach.
All the paths that have stood the test of time declare the unity of the Divine and mankind. While Christianity makes it more personalized, and Buddha refused to say if there is or isn't God, it's all about attaining the same state of binding-to-the-One again (re-ligio). As crazy as the mind seems to others in the variations of the quest, the successful end results are: a state of awakening, even if briefly, in union with the All, Allah, God, Light, and with Buddha and Christ.
I don't like doing this again, but: when I was twelve I had a Christ experience. When I was 61 I had a Buddha experience. It's the same experience.
Buddha means, in ancient Sanskrit, awakened. To wake up to absolute truth is the path. Jesus, the Taoist poets, Kabir, Buddha, Wallace Stevens (sold insurance in Hartford, Brit), Walt Whitman, they're (at least in the awakened moment of writing or speaking) essentially of the same understanding.
Buddhism is there, intact, uncorrupted, and which teaches to actual experience. The teachings have implicit forgiveness embedded in every example.