St. Margaret’s Forum
Friday, Jan. 17, 2014 - Dr. Glenn T. Webb
The Art of Living in the World with Awareness,
Respect and Trust –
Responding to Buddhism
1. Two months ago I
gave a lecture at the International Buddhist Study Center in Little Tokyo. My audience was made up of Japanese business
and religious leaders, consulate officers, and Buddhist clergy. My topic was American customs and religious
beliefs that puzzle the Asian community.
Of particular concern to my listeners was how they should respond when someone
asks them if they believe in God. (Just
for the record, I always tell them to say yes, just to avoid trouble.)
2. Of course,
Buddhism doesn’t speak of God, so that is the problem. Today I am talking to you as an expert in
Asian cultural values and Buddhism, telling you what I think the historical
Buddha Shakyamuni might say about the so-called religion that bears his
name. I assume most of you are
Christians and are here because you are curious about Buddhism and would like
to know more about it.
3. But why should I
be the one to speak to you on the subject?
That in itself is a long story that I will share bits of as I go
along. I feel that my focus here must be
on two points: (1) the Hindu/Buddhist
view of reality, and (2) the very different view that Jews, Christians and
Muslims have of reality. After I have
finished we can discuss the differences.
4. Let me start by
asking you a question. How many of you know
what miso is? Answer: miso is a fermented paste made of soy
beans, barley, rice, salt, and a yeast culture called kojikin. Small portions of miso paste mixed
with hot water makes a delicious broth that is served at mealtime throughout
East Asia.
5. What, you ask,
does miso have to do with Buddhism or me or anything? Well, I use it here merely to lead into my
thoughts on how to live in the world with awareness, respect and trust. When my family and I first arrived in Japan, in
1964, we contacted some missionaries from the Church of Christ, the Christian
denomination associated with Pepperdine University and indeed with my family
and my wife’s family.
6. You will hear more
about the history of this denomination shortly.
But right now I want to tell you a funny story about a hymn that is
popular in Churches of Christ. It was published
in 1907 by J. G. Dailey, an obscure composer of spirituals and gospel songs. The
first line of the song asks the question: “Why Did My Savior Come To Earth …?”
The song ends in a chorus with the answer:
“…Because He Loved Me So.”
In Japan the little bi-lingual children of the few
missionaries living there were quite sure the answer in the song referred to
God’s love of miso. In their minds it
made perfect sense that God would send his Only Begotten Son so that He, too,
could enjoy the wonderful taste of miso!
7. Quite a
misunderstanding, right? But misunderstandings
can be more interesting than understandings sometimes. Could it be that both of these – involving
God’s love for me and the taste of miso -- touch the truth of things in their
own way?
8. In any case, what
we UNDERSTAND (識) is exactly what I want to talk
about today. We can understand simple
things without probing the mystery of life at all. But to understand the mystery of life and
death, particularly the one about what happens to us after we die, we have to
take a leap of faith. That leap is built on sacred stories rather than on
reason.
The stories in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim traditions,
despite their differences, require us to believe that the ultimate
understanding of reality belongs to God.
The Hindu-Buddhist stories, on the other hand, require us to discover
ultimate truth within ourselves, sometimes with assistance from spiritual
guides.
(Re the Chinese character on the screen: to study Buddhism seriously you almost have
to know the rudiments of Sanskrit and Chinese.
There are many words in scriptures from both languages for “understand”,
but I’ve chosen the Chinese character for my purposes here.)
9. I grew up in the
Churches of Christ. The founders of that
Protestant denomination were part of the 18th-century Scottish
Enlightenment (going back to Locke, Hume and Kant.) They were determined to “restore” the New
Testament church on earth using logic and common sense. They insisted on a
rigorous study of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, to get at Biblical teachings
linguistically. They insisted as well on a knowledge of the latest archaeological
and historical findings of the time, in order to put the teachings in their
context. Once that was done, the devout Christian
was free to do what the Bible taught or take the consequences.
11. My father, R. O.
Webb, was a devout Christian of this type.
He took a PhD in history in 1918 from the University of Oklahoma. Before that, he did work at the University of
Chicago. In Henderson, Tennessee, he was
a student of Arvy Glenn Freed (1863-1931), a Church of Christ minister and
professor at Freed-Hardeman University.
My father and mother named me after Dr. Freed. They also made sure I
knew the Bible well enough to recite many passages of scripture in three
languages. (Both my parents were federal employees, as directors of the Indian
School in Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, and were welfare agents covering Comanche County,
as well.)
12. Family friends
tell me that my father took great pride in telling them how at the age of three
or four I came to him one day and asked if it was true what Jesus said in John
14:6, viz., that “… nobody comes to the Father except by me.” I
guess I was upset because I said (or so the story goes), “Well, I think that is
very unfair! What about all those people
who lived on earth thousands of years before Jesus was born?”
13. This is exactly
the kind of common sense answer that the Church of Christ approved, so I think
my father was proud of me, in spite of my blasphemy. But at that young age I also learned what it means
to take a leap of faith, by trusting God to let those poor people into heaven,
even though they lived long before Jesus was born! Moreover, I had to remind myself that man’s
ways are not God’s ways (Isaiah 55:8 ) and that we cannot find God by searching
for Him (Job 11:7).
14. Well, that’s all
true according to the way the monotheistic religions of the ancient Near East
see things. Jews, Christians and Muslims
view things vertically, with each of us bound to our Creator. (Indeed, the Latin word for “religion” denotes
the link between God and man.) We cannot
understand the mind of God, but we trust and obey Him in order to live
eternally with Him in heaven after we die.
This, most assuredly, is the faith of our fathers.
15. But that version
of the way things are is not the only one.
It is not compatible with the notion of reality that came out of ancient
India, where we are not vertically connected to God but horizontally, so to
speak, to our past selves and each other. In the Hindu/Buddhist view we are in
a constant struggle to return to a perfect realization of the
interconnectedness of all being. That
goal is Enlightenment, which we alone can reach. Hindus say we will reach that
together after eons of rebirths, and with a lot of help from Hindu gods. (We
will look at what Buddhists say about that later.)
16. Both concepts of
reality, the vertical and horizontal, seem to have emerged in two parts of Asia
– in Palestine and India -- at about the same time, around 2000 B.C., with
scribes putting the basic beliefs into writing at least by 1000 B.C. Of course, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian
and Islamic scribes continued their elaborations well into the first 1000 years
of the Christian era, bringing revolutionary changes to the original
formulations. But in historical terms, they wrote the classic story of East and
West.
17. Let’s take a
closer look at the Indian case.
Brahmanical hymns and scriptures are the basis for the Hindu world-view. They imply that the universe began as a
perfect entity, unsullied by differences of any kind. This non-differentiated Perfection they call
Brahman (梵). The
Chinese character refers to both the Sanskrit language itself and to the
all-inclusive Self (with a capital “S”) that later became divided up into our
normal distinctions of I, you, he, she, it, we, you and they.
18. Brahmanical texts
do not seem to ask how Perfection came into being. They simply begin with its dissolution, at
some point in time, into all of the selves we are today. And they call those many selves Atman (我), the “collective memory” of Perfection, or better yet, its spark,
that is in all sentient beings. (In
Buddhism that memory is known as the Buddha Nature.) This little spark of
perfection gives us the ability to return to Perfection and thus reach
Enlightenment. But only (according to
Hinduism) after we collectively evolve, so to speak, into the memory and
reality of Brahman.
19. In the meantime,
each Atman-carrying self must endure countless rebirths, reincarnations, going
through many levels of realization in the four human castes (四性): Brahmin priests, Kshatriya protectors, Vaishya citizens, and Shudra servants. Castes below the lowest are Outcastes: humans who are as unaware of perfection as
animals and demons. (We who are not
Hindu, I found out, are to be pitied for not knowing their caste, because we
will have to make it to Enlightenment blindfolded, as it were!)
20. Each Hindu caste has its own Dharma (法), or set of rules to live by.
Each
human being is born to parents of the same caste and dharma, and thus
each family knows precisely its members’ places not only in society, but in their
progress on the return trip to perfection.
They must go by the rules of their dharma, but they also can call
upon the avatars, the gods, the spiritual guides, who appear in art and in
human history to help them climb the ladder to spiritual realization. Shakyamuni
Buddha and Jesus Christ are both reincarnations of Vishnu, for example, in
Hinduism.
21. Now let’s turn to Buddhism specifically. Around 600 B.C. the historical Buddha began
to challenge one very important aspect of Hindu teachings. He was of the Kshatriya protector class. He was a prince, who left his father’s palace
to deepen his understanding of life and death.
He was a rebel. And after
undergoing every spiritual practice available, he ultimately concluded that
what Hinduism taught about the subject might very well be true, but that he was
not sure.
22. With that blasphemous doubt in his mind, the
Buddha insisted the only path to Enlightenment was a personal one, a “middle
path” of deep meditation in a life full of compassion towards all
creatures. Turning down the volume of
self-concern and being aware of the needs of others was a key element in his
teachings. That was the sure method of
reaching Enlightenment, the only Dharma.
23. Like Jesus, the Buddha never wrote down a
single word himself. Disciples
formulated doctrines, writing in their master’s voice. By the 3rd
century B.C. the great king of India, Ashoka, had declared Buddhism to be the
state religion. But by 600 A.D. Hinduism
had reemerged, swallowing up Buddhism in its wake. Then, with the coming of the Moguls in the 16th
century, India began its long struggle between Hindus and Muslims, which unfortunately
has not ended, despite the creation of Islamic Pakistan and Hindu India in 1945.
24. After Buddhism was made obsolete in India,
the religion spread to others parts of Asia where today it claims more
followers than any other religion on earth. Buddhist teachings are followed in tens
of millions of Buddhist temples throughout Asia and the rest of the world. But Buddhists differ from one another as much
as Baptists and Catholics do. In some
ways Buddhist denominations seem as unlike each other as Judaism is to
Christianity and as the two of them are to Islam. So I must be selective about
what kind of Buddhism I discuss today.
25. Most of my actual training in Buddhism has
been in Japan. I have also spent time learning from teachers in India, Tibet,
China and Korea. But I will end my talk today by describing some of the
features of Japanese Buddhism as I experienced them. Let’s start with a little
history. The Buddhist priesthood in
India, like the Christian priesthood in Palestine, did not exist at first. Once established, however, it required
priests to take care of the spiritual needs of lay people. And, to be celibate! That is still true in every Buddhist country
except Japan.
26. In the 6th
century, when Buddhism was adopted in Japan, the priesthood became
hereditary. It has remained so almost
without exception to the present day. For over fourteen hundred years Buddhist
priests in Japan have married and their eldest sons have inherited the temples
and congregations that their families have served. Over five million such temples are in
operation in Japan today.
27. It would never occur to ordinary Japanese,
from other classes in society, to ask a temple to allow them to enter the
priesthood. So when American hippies
began knocking on Zen temple doors in the 1950’s, abbots did not know what to
think. From 1964 through 1966, my
professors at Kyoto University encouraged me to deepen my understanding of
Japanese history and culture by practicing meditation at Zen temples. That was
not part of my plan, but it changed my life.
28. Buddhism at its core puts the responsibility
on each of us to search the scriptures, all scriptures. It also insists that we go deeply into our
own consciousness for understanding. (Note that I did not say
“conscience”! Because my conscience, I
believe is something that is tied to my cultural and religious prejudices.) The historical Buddha plumbed the depths of
his own consciousness, his own mind, and I think that is what he proposed for
all of us.
29. Sakyamuni Buddha did claim that Enlightenment
can be reached by each one of us individually, in direct contradiction
of Hindu belief. But he did say it was
not easy to get there! Not surprisingly,
the hard work of training for self-realization seemed to call for specialists,
i.e., priests. The priesthood did
eventually emerge, some 400 years after the Buddha’s death, permitting ordinary
followers to tend to everyday matters and trust the priests to lead them.
30. At the same time, progressive priests looked
for a way that allowed ordinary people to be more involved, one that would be
easier. This easier way is known as the “Great Vehicle” (or Mahayana)
form of Buddhism that encompasses almost all denominations of Buddhist practice
today. Some priests began to rely on scriptures,
dating to the first two centuries of the Christian era, that tell wonderful
stories that chart the way. I am
particularly fond of the story of Queen Vaidehi, who lived at the time of the
historical Buddha, 600 years before Christ.
31. According to scriptures of a major form of Pure
Land Buddhism (S. Sukhavati, J. Jodo), the queen and her husband
the king enraged their sons by renouncing Hinduism and adopting Buddhism. For that the sons had their father killed and
left their mother to starve to death in prison.
In response to her pleas the Buddha is said to have taught her how to visualize
a beautiful place, a Pure Land in the afterlife, where personal ignorance
(controlled by karma) could be short-circuited, so to speak, and the
cycle of reincarnation stopped.
32. The queen learned that this beautiful place was
created by Amitabha (J. Amida), the Buddha of Infinite Light and Life. And that all people caught in pain and
ignorance can be reborn there simply by developing their faith in Amitabha’s
promise. Once there they have no
impediment to their own powers of insight, and they can improve, then return to
earth and bring themselves and others to Enlightenment. Other forms of Mahayana Buddhism, including
Zen, offer similar stories of compassion towards ordinary folks (although I
would not call the Zen path easy, for reasons I will explain momentarily.)
33. Tantric (or “secret”) Buddhist practices began
to spread in the 7th century (especially in Tibet.) They make it
easier to rely on countless Buddhas, mostly ethereal, through mantras,
mandalas, and secret teachings and initiations that summon the powers of such
fully-realized beings in order to give priests and lay persons the strength to
face and overcome self-ignorance. Ironically,
I am regarded by many scholars in my field as a Buddhist iconographer, i.e., a
leading expert on the vast array of Buddhist images – my family would call them
idols – that are used in Tantric Buddhism. (Ah yes, life is full of ironies!)
34. To my mind, the
followers of Tantric Buddhist sects come close to praying to the
“deities” behind these images, if not the images themselves. For me, some of the images are astounding
works of art, and I fully appreciate the human need to have them. Their stories are fascinating beyond
belief. But I do not consider them
sacred, any more than I consider the masterpieces of Christian art that command
similar devotion from some believers, to be sacred.
35. I grew up in a family in love with another
story, the story of the Creator God of the Universe who came to earth in the
person of Jesus of Nazareth, as the Annointed One, the Christ. The question I asked myself more than fifty
years ago is, “Can I be aware of Buddhism, respect it and its followers, and trust
its methods to enhance my heritage? In
short, can a Christian be a Buddhist? My
answer is an unqualified, “Yes!”
36. Original Buddhism places no restrictions that
I can see on the Gospel narrative. In
fact, one of the abbots of a Japanese temple begged me to conduct a weekly Bible
class for the young men in training with me.
He hoped I would focus on the Trinity and said he thought a Christian
should use meditation as a time to pray.
The Buddha’s core
message does seem to be, “Do whatever
you have to do to be inwardly quiet, listen to the world you think of as
outside of you, and open yourself to it.” I could be wrong, but I think God must be
pleased that I don’t get in His way anymore when offering up prayers. The late abbot of the Cold Mountain Temple in
Suzhou, the site of my lineage in Zen, wrote a calligraphic scroll for me when
I visited him in 1993. What he wrote
thrills my heart. In English it assures
me that “Only in Silence Can the Truly Wonderful Be Known.”
37. As for the outer trappings of Japanese Zen
practice – reading and reciting daily teachings in Japanese, wearing priest’s
clothing, following the rules about eating and doing daily chores in certain
ways, and in general being Japanese for all intents and purposes – my students
know I do not recommend keeping those trappings.
38. For me, however, it was necessary to break
through many barriers of physical and mental pain brought on by the particular way
Zen meditation (zazen) is done in Japan.
And those barriers must be broken.
Sitting Zen-style is not easy. In
Japan it still requires a full lotus position:
cushion under the buttocks, feet pulled up onto the inner thighs, and
knees resting on the ground.
39. I thought I could not do that at first. But teachers pulled my legs into position,
pushed my back fully upright, and made sure my head was high, my chin down, and
my eyes slightly open. Hands are always
held in the lap, clasped in positions that vary with the denomination of Zen
being followed. (Yes, there are denominations!)
Each period of sitting is between 30 to 45 minutes, with only a 2-minute break
between each period. During a normal day
in Japanese Zen temples there are three hours of sitting in the morning, three
in the afternoon, and three more at night.
40. The pain, even for young Japanese, is
excruciating. At first I would always
hyperventilate and vomit after about 15 minutes. Once I began to get used to the pain (after
the first year) I was able to sit “on top of” my pain and experience the first
stages of consciousness exploration. My
heart rate and breathing slowed down measurably, and “unhinged gratitude” often
brought tears to my eyes. My prayers became
quite wordless. The trick (as one of my students later put it wisely) is to
live in that state regardless of what you are doing.
41. By now you must wish I would stop
talking. I’m sure I have gone over the
40 minutes I was allotted. Let me
conclude by saying that I don’t know what the Buddha would say about Buddhism
today. But he would be very happy, I’m
sure, with the opening of the third form of the “people’s prayers” in the
Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer. We
say it every Sunday this time of year.
It begins with the admonition, “May we all become one.” I think Prince Shakyamuni, the historical
Buddha, would say “Amen!” to that. But
he probably would point out that we already ARE one! The challenge, he would say, is to decide
what to do about that. How do we live
together as one? In short, how do we practice the art of living?
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