This is my contribution to our National Day of Religious Freedom.
For those of us who are armchair students of the Buddha, we are given to this understanding; Buddhism is very much like a science and not a religion in spite of our Western biases and filters. The scientific hypothesis being:
Focused attention in the prescribed way (meditation), and engaging in or avoiding certain behaviors (ethics), will bear the promised result (wisdom and psychological well-being) for its adherents.
For this clear reason, the Buddha also taught his disciples to cultivate devotional and reverential habits of mind in relation to this equation. Thus, devotion is not a "corruption" of Buddhism, but an expression of it. Of course, devotion requires an object. If Buddha was not a god, why bow to golden Buddha-like figures? Without going into great detail, it's safest to say that Buddhism defies the pat Western categories of atheism/polytheism/monotheism in a way that suggests that, not only are those categories not terribly useful, but they also misidentify what religion is about; and that because, religious or secular, Westerners tend to privilege the Christian worldview (in which "do you believe in God" or "do you believe in the power of prayer?" are indeed central questions) above all others.
Many Zen masters state that when one bows to the Buddha , one bows to oneself.
What do they mean? How do you understand it? Where do you find the self? Am I a narcissist now that I inadvertently bow to myself?
Working with those questions is not a corruption of Buddhism; it is Buddhism.
As Karl Marx once lamented:
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
(
Emphasis mine)
The need and desire for many throughout all of human history to ritualized devotions and passionate worship of the wonders of nature, Deities and the universe, will probably be analyzed and studied for 1000 more years by anthropologists, humanists and social scientists as they dissect the human mind and the need for religion with it's attendant Deities.
The nature of the human mind and its propensity to greed, hatred, and delusion with its equally attendant desire of transcendence to an understanding of human wisdom and compassion are worthy goals of any theist, atheist or non-theist.
For the many of us who have lived lives of faith or know and live with the overwhelming majority of faith based peoples,families, friends and acquaintances in our western culture, Atheism is a difficult and dicey topic. We know from a lifetime of personal experience in religious, spiritual and philosophical study that the most interesting and volatile of discussions are those that posit the unthinkable blasphemy:
Do I believe there is a GOD?
If atheism is the absence of belief in God(s), then many Buddhists are, indeed, atheists. However, Buddhism is more accurately described as being non-theistic than atheistic. This transitory definition of non-theistic also seems to allow "believers " of other faiths a fleeting moment of gray area in their dogmatic or conversely; even uncertain and skeptical theistic worlds, of good and evil, black and white and heaven and hell to pause...even be vulnerable to different spiritually meditative concepts. ( That's what I like about Christians, there tendency toward mysticism and spirituality) The meditative nature of Buddhist teaching is more about self realization than conversion to another religion.I have known many religionists, who will pause to discover something about themselves at this point for conversation's sake. Many are open to understanding a path of self realization through religion or psychology, however self respect is an entirely eastern concept and Buddhism is generally; an inward journey of contemplative self realization as opposed to outside forces of good and evil.
So if we can collectively put aside all our dogmas and orthodoxies for just one brief moment of experience, MAYBE we can have a discussion on Atheism or No-God or self realization.
Follow me below the Orange Mandala.
Sam Harris, the author of "The End of Faith", who argues that Buddhism's philosophy, insight, and practices would benefit more people if they were not presented as a religion and more as a philosophy, has this to say about the power of meditation:
Political correctness, religious sectarianism and cultural biases simply do not offer an enduring basis for human cooperation in the 21st century. If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of faith.
It will require a new
contemplative humanist philosophy and practice.
Many have proposed a "contemplative science" that fulfills the human desire for devotion and worship. A meditative prescription if you will.
Even the most cynical (orthodox) of atheists can marvel at the complexity of the natural world that science and reason has helped us to understand more fully. The magnificent Milky Way at night in the dark wilderness of my Colorado home, leaves this star gazer with a sense of insignificance, wonder and awe. I have expressed great spontaneous joy at times and thrown my hands skyward as I express the truth of my consciousness of a universal beauty all around me in a vast void of the universe.
It is a meditation of worship, a yoga of praise for my realization of such infinite beauty consciousness in the cosmos of infinity.
"A contemplative science that allows a means of convincing human beings to embrace the whole of the species as their moral community. For this we need to develop an utterly nonsectarian way of talking about the full spectrum of human experience and human aspiration. We need a discourse on ethics and spirituality that is every bit as unconstrained by dogma and cultural prejudice as the discourse of science is. What we need, in fact, is a contemplative science, a modern approach to exploring the furthest reaches of psychological well-being with its many social and physical problems "
which include and are not limited to climate, politics, governance, human rights, economy, humanism and compassionate justice.
It is as yet undetermined what it means to be human, because every facet of our culture and even our biology itself remains open to innovation and insight. We do not know what we will be a thousand years from now or indeed that we will be, given the potential lethal absurdity of many of our beliefs, but whatever changes await us, one thing seems unlikely to change: as long as experience endures, the difference between happiness and suffering will remain our paramount concern.
We will therefore want to understand those processes biochemical, behavioral, ethical, political, economic, and spiritual that account for this difference. We do not yet have anything like a final understanding of such processes, but we know enough to rule out many false understandings.
Indeed, we know enough at this moment to say that the Gods of mankind are not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; they are unworthy even of man himself.
May all your contemplative meditations be of compassion and wisdom for ourselves and all of the earth that we call our home.
Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.
Buddha