Other faiths and traditions
I was thinking about Buddhism and Christianity and Islam, and how so many of us divide ourselves into different groups and have feelings of animosity toward or superiority over people who don't belong to the same groups we belong to. I found this great quote from Thich Nhat Hanh, and I had to share it:I would like to tell you a story. Thirty five years ago I had a student who fell in love with a young man who was Catholic, and the family of that young man required that the young lady abandon the practice of Buddhism in order to be baptized as a Catholic. That was the basic condition for the marriage, and she suffered very much. Her family was also opposed to that. She cried and cried, and one day she came to me. I said that Buddhism is not there to make you unhappy. Buddhism is not an obstacle, so I think in the name of the Buddha I can tell you that you can become a Catholic and marry him, but I would like to make a recommendation. You have received The Five Mindfulness Trainings; you should continue to look on them as the guidelines of your life. You don't have to be called a Buddhist; you only have to be a true Buddhist within yourself. Live accordingly and practice the Five Mindfulness Trainings, and that would make me happy enough. She was so joyful that she was allowed to marry the person she loved. But she did not sleep during that night, and the next morning she came very early, and she said, "Thay, a tradition that is so embracing, so tolerant, so open, if I abandon it and turn my back to it, I am not a person of value. A tradition that is so strict, that has no tolerance, that is not able to understand, how could I formally identify myself with it?" So she just refused to get married to that person. I thought that I would help her get married to that young man, but I caused the opposite to happen. Today, thirty five years later, she is here somewhere in this Sangha.
When I was in Korea a few years ago, I participated in the first dialogue between Buddhists and Christians, and I said that many young people have suffered due to being caught in that kind of situation. So I proposed that we should be able to allow Buddhists and Christians to marry each other, with the condition that the young man would learn and also practice the tradition of the young woman, and the young woman would also learn and practice the tradition of the young man. Instead of having one root, you have two roots. Why not? If you love mangoes, you are free to continue to eat mangoes, but no one forbids you to eat pineapples or oranges. Your favorite fruit is the mango, yes, but you don't betray your mango when you eat pineapple. I think it's too narrow-minded, even stupid, to enjoy only mango, when there are so many different fruits around in the world. Spiritual traditions are like spiritual fruits, and you have the right to enjoy them. It is possible to enjoy two traditions, to take the best of two traditions and live with that. If you like to eat Italian food, you can still enjoy French and Chinese cooking. You cannot say, "I have to be faithful to my Italian cooking", that's too funny.
--Thich Nhat Hanh
posted by Jules @ Thursday, March 02, 2006
25 comments
25 Comments:
Thanks for that,Jules.
Isn't it funny how these posts often seem to be just what one needs at the right time...
I find myself, time and again, getting attached to this idea of Zen, and taking it too seriously -"I said that Buddhism is not there to make you unhappy"
Sound like wise words to me :-)
i remember when I was seeing a woman who was catholic, I was so curious about christianity - no matter that I was a practicing Buddhist- I started to read articles about the most interesting Christians, and of course, Christian mystics - to me those were very interesting issues and I was happy I found so much in common between Christianity and Buddhism, especially some kind of meditation experience, but as I was eager to share my Christian excistement with my girlfriend, she was not interested at all - so I started to feel as if her interest in Christianity was a little bit superficial, anyway I am happy I did that personal research and now I know much more about Christianity - but still, Christianity to me is something interesting while Buddhism is something I experience in my everyday life so I cannot compare these
It would be nice if it was as easy as Hanh suggests. But most religions are exclusive by their very nature. They require adherents to "believe" in certain things.
I grew up within Christianity. I knew of no other religions until I was older. When I was around 10 or 12 years of age, I began to question things. And since nobody could answer my questions sensibly, I turned away from Christianity.
Later, while going to university, I became curious about Christianity. I wanted to understand the religion that my parents and grandparents professed to believe in.
One evening, a couple of young women approached me in the hallway of the university, inviting me to a discussion group that was going to talk about Christianity. So I went. It turned out to be a cult that was looking for money.
Later (1990), I wanted to get married. So my fiance and I started going to church. We went for a year, and liked the minister a lot. He seemed very "Buddhist" to me. I told him about the things that I could and could not accept. And he seemed fine with that. Maybe he hoped that my beliefs might grow. Or maybe he saw that I was a well-intentioned person, and felt comfortable with a degree of uncertainty.
Just before the wedding, the congregation kicked this minister out of their church. Their resaon? He was helping people with AIDS, downtown. The congreagtion believed that AIDS was a "gay" disease, and that by helping these people, he was going against the beliefs of the church. (And this was the United Church, not a fundamentalist one.)
At that point, I had to face reality and give up on lying to myself. It was the most honest thing I could do. I was tired of compromising, and tired of believing only so much. It didn't feel right to me to belong to a group, but not really believe what they said that they believed.
I think I could have a girlfriend/wife who belonged to a religion... but only if she didn't demand that I believe what she does. And only if she could accept me for who I am. I would have trouble with it, for sure. But I could accept it. After all, we all have different beliefs.
It is too bad that religions cause such huge divisions. But they do.
There are people who believe that if you chant Amitabha Buddha's name a thousand times a day, through devotion you'll be saved and be reborn in the Pure Land when you die.
Do you let those people define what Buddhism is for you? If not, why let people of similar inclinations define what Christianity is for you?
/Just playin' devil's advocate here. >;-)>
Wow, rot-13, that was an impressive feat of mental gymnastics. Tolerance is intolerance, open is closed, black is white, ignorance is strength, and Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. :-)
He's ignoring their actual character in favor of his preconceived notions -- his prejudices.
You argue from the preconceived notion that some religions are inherently antagonistic to other religions. Aren't they all just paths to the Truth? That's what they all claim, anyway.
Sure, some proponents of almost every religion often paint their own religion as the One True Path, and that any deviation from their stone-carved doctrine is surely the whisperings of whatever their symbolism for "Evil" is. My earlier question was, why do you take that on faith?
What's the most obvious thing about the religions of this world? That they're tapestries of doctrine. That's what they're made of: each is a bunch of statements about truth, and the differences in those statements are what makes one a Catholic Christian or a Shi'ite Moslem. Believers are apt to die over points of doctrine, because that's the important thing.
Maybe it's way past time we all realized we're not Catholics, Shi'ites, or Buddhists. We're just human beings looking for the Truth about ourselves, which to some extent is contained in Catholic doctrine, in Shi'ite doctrine, and in Buddhist doctrine.
If you don't go beyond words, what use is religion, be it Islam, Buddhism or Christianity? If you are not tolerant truly, what use is tolerance? If you don't kiss somebody, what use is talking about kissing?
Coincidentally, in my last post on my own blog I compared Christian to Zen selflessness.
Here is an excerpt:
For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. For if we live, we live unto the Lord. And if we die, we die unto the Lord. Whether we live, therefore, or die, we are the Lord's.
Simply replace the word "Lord" with "universe" and this becomes extremely Buddhist!
The original post
But the above comments reiterate the problems of comparing religions - it sounds like the "unamed is the mother of all but the named is the mother of the 10,000 things" [including multiple mutually exclusive religions] issue.
Without demolishing religious schools (madrassahs) and minarets and without abandoning the beliefs and ideas of the medieval age, restriction in thoughts and pains in conscience will not end. Without understanding that unbelief is a kind of religion, and that conservative religious belief a kind of disbelief, and without showing tolerance to opposite ideas, one cannot succeed. Those who look for the truth will accomplish the mission.
--Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi, famous 13th century Muslim teacher, scholar, and poet
“My brothers, when I think of this spiritual heritage (Islam) and the value it has for man and for society, its capacity of offering, particularly in the young, guidance for life, filling the gap left by materialism, and giving a reliable foundation to social and juridical organization, I wonder if it is not urgent, precisely today when Christians and Muslims have entered a new period of history, to recognize and develop the spiritual bonds that unite us, in order to preserve and promote together for the benefit of all men, ‘peace, liberty, social justice and moral values’ as the Council calls upon us to do (Nostra Aetate 3).”
--Pope John Paul II, address to the Catholic community of Ankara, Turkey, November 29, 1979
“It is in mosques and churches that the Muslim and Christian communities shape their religious identity, and it is there that the young receive a significant part of their religious education. What sense of identity is instilled in young Christians and young Muslims in our churches and mosques? It is my ardent hope that Muslim and Christian religious leaders and teachers will present our two great religious communities as communities in respectful dialogue, never more as communities in conflict. It is crucial for the young to be taught the ways of respect and understanding, so that they will not be led to misuse religion itself to promote or justify hatred and violence.
--Pope John Paul II, address on his Visit to the Umayyad Great Mosque, May 6, 2001 – first pope to enter a mosque
You WILL embrace tolerance OR ELSE!!!
kidding, kidding. :-)
See, I consider myself a Muslim, but I don't see any huge irreducible problem. Sufism has LONG held that the "self" is a transitory illusion that has no basis apart from the supreme essence of reality, which has also been taught in Taoism and Buddhism as well. I don't believe EVERYTHING is valid and true, but I do believe that there's more to the discussion than most sides are willing to admit. I do not think people should stick with whatever "religion" they were born into automatically; I was born into Mormonism, which advocates all kinds of ridiculous dualistic nonsense that will only confuse the issue. But, as has been pointed out, we're all just human, moreso than Buddhist, Muslim, whatever. And even Rumi said that he was not Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, or even human more than mineral, vegetable, or animal.
I think part of what makes the discussion rocky is the insistence by many modern Buddhists that Buddhism, particularly that of the Japanese Zen schools, is not a "religion", which I think is a bit disingenuous. By almost any reasonable criteria, Buddhism is a religion. When its presented as other, I feel like it's being set up as a "science" in opposition to other paths, which are "just" "religions".
I tend to think that though we take different approaches though, it's a valid path to the ultimate reality. I don't claim to know much. I do know that there's a central, connective force that underlies everything. And I tend to view those who seek it as my brothers and sisters, regardless of most other differences.
Sorry if I'm not making much sense here, just my views on it all.
I like the Rumi quotation.
I remember reading a good answer to the 'Is Zen a religion or a philosophy?' question, which was that the aim of Zen was to find the source of all religions and philosophies. Ultimately I think that is a point where many religions meet. But on a popular level they all tend to manifest themselves as dogma.
Zen is relatively free from dogma, but you can see it there too: 'conceptual thought is bad', 'dogma is bad', 'enlightenment is good'.
Ultimately, I think the point is to be free from (which is not the same as denying) all dogmas and doctrines, all religions, all philosphies (including this) in order to find the origin of all doctrines, religions and philosophies.
da & Justin - my take is that Zen is more of a method than a religion. In this way it is very much like science because science is a method. There is no guarentee what will be discovered using the method, but since there is only one reality the answers tend to stabilize / converge over time. The 'facts' discovered by science or zen are never properly thought of as eternal truths but are all provisional - ready to be changed if new evidence turns up.
I think this difference is critical and is the basis for the Buddha's statements concerning not believing his words - find out for yourself. What religion says 'don't believe anything that any member of this group says is true - do your own "testing" to confirm or reject these statements' ?
Additionally, where Buddhism departs from this zen method it becomes a religion with a belief system that its practitioners hold on to the way any religion expects its followers to do.
Consider also the phrase "If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha." What religion would advocate this? If you meet Jesus, kill Jesus????
Consider also the phrase "If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha." What religion would advocate this? If you meet Jesus, kill Jesus????
David Koresh and Jim Jones certainly wouldn't have liked that statement...
Well, true, as a matter of respect we would not advocate killing any of the sages or divine messengers, whether it was Muhammad (pbuh), Issa (pbuh), or for that matter Siddhartha Gautama (pbuh). Nevertheless, I understand that you don't literally suggest killing so much as not counting on these figures too much. And I couldn't agree more! One thing Muhammad said was "Obey me as only as long as I serve Allah; when I serve allah not, obey me not." I wouldn't exactly interpret this as an exhortation to authoritarianism. Muhammad even forbade his followers from treating him as a divine being, as the Buddha did, and ate with them in the humble mud-brick home he maintained, though he could have lived in the finest palaces of the Arabian peninsula.
Allah, in the tradition sufis have preserved, is not some bearded capricious sky-god. Allah is simply the name for the ultimate reality that pervades everything.
While I appreciate that Zen has often served as a very individualistic, very powerful means of bringing people towards truth, it has also (especially in Japan) been extremely regimented and authoritarian at times. I really don't think it's credible to say that the majority of Zen rituals (observed very stringently by most of the Soto sect) are "experiments in truth" while other rituals are just superstition or what have you.
I don't think organized religion, on the balance, has been good for the world. On the other hand, I do think true, powerful, revolutionary spirituality that lies at the root of the religions, is amazing and wonderful. And I'm gonna include Zen alongside that, whether it likes it or not :-P
You want to solve the problems between Catholics and Shi'ites by removing the differences between them -- leaving us with no Catholics and no Shi'ites.
Who ever said anything about asking anyone to scrap their beliefs? Neither I nor Thich Nhat Hanh suggested that anyone abandon their faiths, quite the opposite in fact. You seem to be putting words in my mouth.
So what do you suggest? Should we all stop talking with each other because discussion is pointless? Or maybe we can all use what we have in common as a starting point to begin peaceful discussions with each other. Of course, peaceful discussions can't happen if we're not really listening to what the others are saying.
And maybe, as Thich Nhat Hanh was saying, it would in some cases make sense to change a single rule or two where the rules are obviously wrong and, as in Hanh's story, prevent a wonderful thing like the marriage of two people who love each other.
You suggested there would be no Catholics and no Shi'ites if we start changing the rules that don't match up with reality. You think the rules should never change?
Pope John Paul was the leader of a very large, very rigid organization. And he was the first Pope in more than three hundred years who thought maybe the Church ought to issue Galileo an official apology because, hey, it looks like the guy was right after all, and we probably shouldn't have thrown him in prison to rot until he died.
It didn't destroy Catholicism to change the rules and admit that the earth revolves around the sun. In fact, it strengthened Catholicism to change the rules where they didn't match up with reality, don't you think? They made a change to the rules, and look around: there are still Catholics.
I knew Jules hated dogs!
I feel like I just say something like, "Cats are cute." Then a bunch of people decide that my liking of cats implies that I hate dogs and I want to slit the throats of innocent puppies with rusty razor blades and sell them on the streets of Osaka as high priced snacks - Brad Warner
But I recall rot-13 is a wordsmith and thus is probably thinking that Jules' words are more important than his intention.
My experience with the notion tolerance (religious or otherwise), leads me to conclude that it exists only when two conditions are met:
(1) the individual has a sense of psychological-emotional security in his/her own belief (religious or otherwise) and,
(2) the belief (or belief system) itself recognizes that what it postulates is not The Truth (as in absolute, i.e., "true for all people throughout all time"), but simply one version of the truth (the relative truth which may have relevance for some people some of the time).
As is said in Taoism: "The Tao which can be spoken is not the Tao."
someone as articulate as Jules
Thank you!
Sorry if I've misinterpreted or overemphasized anything you said... So much of our daily communication is in body language, tone of voice, or other clues, and it's so easy to misread other people's intention when all we have are the words.
Wanna know an excellent model of religious tolerance? New York City. It's full of strummels and kafkans and saffron robes and clerical collars and crucifixes and Levi jeans and turbans and kaffiyehs and crescents and Stars of David, and nobody much gives a rip or lets it get in the way of business.
Exactly. Humanity first, then religion.
Which is exactly what I meant when I said "Maybe it's way past time we all realized we're not Catholics, Shi'ites, or Buddhists. We're just human beings looking for the Truth about ourselves..."
I guess I wasn't articulate enough...
Seems a rather nice thought/ story posted here.
Yet I can't get over the fact that it seems somewhat naive. It assumes that all parties will be quite open minded yet we are adressing an issue in which close-mindedness is at the core.
Rot-13,
It's like preaching a "multiculturalism" that makes everyone dress the same and speak the same language.
Multiculturalism isn't about cultural sameness as you suggest - that would be monoculturalism. Multiculturalism is about multiple cultures and subcultures living together harmoniously in a society which is probably politically secular.
Well, you did, when you said,
"Maybe it's way past time we all realized we're not Catholics, Shi'ites, or Buddhists."
I don't think that's Jules' point. I don't think he has said or suggested that people of these faiths abandon their faiths. What he's suggesting is that people of these faiths are ultimately just human beings with a great deal in commoneven while practicing their respective faiths
Wanna know an excellent model of religious tolerance? New York City. It's full of strummels and kafkans and saffron robes and clerical collars and crucifixes and Levi jeans and turbans and kaffiyehs and crescents and Stars of David, and nobody much gives a rip or lets it get in the way of business.
Put all of New York's religious in a room to work out a compromise, and you'll end up with a riot. Instead, what they do is, they live with their differences and wholeheartedly pursue their diverse beliefs.
Yes, its a good example of multiculturalism
Ah OK, sorry I must have misunderstood you. But I think you were misunderstanding Jules too. Has anyone argued in favour of cultural homogeneity?
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on that point, rot-13. I think you misread both me and Thich Nhat Hanh.
What TNH was teaching was certainly not intolerance but a high degree of tolerance. He was proposing that from the Buddhist side at least it is perfectly possible to follow another faith alongside it.
There are differences in doctrine of course but there's nothing in Buddhism to say that those who believe in a creator god (etc) cannot practice it. People who practice Buddhism have all sorts of beliefs and in a sense they're all wrong.
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