Sad Events

I have only recently learned of two events that make me sad, but in very different ways.  First, I mourn the death, but the very nearly-selfless life, of Robert Aitken Roshi.  My sadness comes from the end of Aitken’s steady influence for peace and justice in our world.  I pray that his disciples (and there are many) will continue his legacy. 

The second event that makes me sad is the recent public flap over Shimano Eido Roshi’s unrestrained love of women (just Google his name or the name of his Daibosatsu Zendo.)  His latest sexual dalliance has resulted in him (and his wife) stepping down from the board of the New York Zendo.  Unfortunately, Eido Roshi is not alone among Japanese Zen teachers outside of Japan in seducing or being seduced by his female students.

I turn 75 this year.  At least fifty of those years, part of them, were spent training in Zen monasteries in Japan.  As a serious student of Japan and Buddhism, I witnessed the considerable restraint that “parishioners” (danka, in Japanese) impose on the Buddhist leaders in their neighborhoods. 

Those restraints come from rules that make it absolutely forbidden to father a child with a woman and refuse to marry her.  I know of dozens of Japanese priests who have broken that rule and who have been summarily dismissed from their training temples.

There is no similar rule in Japabnese temples governing the conduct of a married priest who has sex outside of marriage.  But all of the priests who have done the latter have done so with a professional bar-girl, geisha, ets.  I know of only two priests who have had sex with a female STUDENT.

To be clear, there are no female students in the main Zen priest-training temples in Japan.  The two instances I mention were foreign women who came to the priests asking to train with them privately.  This is a post-war phenomenon, and similar to the situation we have in Zen centers outside of Japan. 

I think the sexual misconduct that has gone on in American and European Zen centers has taken place because the Japanese teachers have no parishioners to restrain their sexual urges.  They have been treated like holy sages, gurus, whose every whim is taken very seriously.  The could not easily get away with their behavior in their own country.

What I have learned from all of this cultural and religious cross-breeding is how fragile our lives are.  And how easily we damage them.  Out of ignorance or selfish motives we fail to fulfill the very tenets of the Buddhadharma when we take ourselves so seriously that we feel we can tear down accepted social standards of behavior.

Zen Buddhism seems especially guilty of allowing contradictory behavior to seem enlightened.  But even Tibetan priests who left their Tibetan communities to teach foreigners have similarly been allowed to act upon their sexual urges with impunity. 

As I approach my last years in this amazing dance of life and death, marveling in the self-and-other trips we all must take, I can only hope that Zen and other forms of Buddhism with survive this crisis and not be characterized by it in Wikipedia forever.

GTW

On the Title "Roshi"

LOVE LETTER TO KURT’S SANGHA ON THE TERM ROSHI AND ITS USE

Recently I have heard that some of you are thinking you should be referring to Kurt as Roshi, and I agree with you.  As Kurt’s teacher, the one who ordained him and gave him his priest name, I think he has demonstrated to you what a Roshi is, so this is just a matter of calling a spade a spade. If you do this he will be the first “Cold Mountain” Roshi in America.  Let me explain.

The use of the term “Roshi” (老子) has an interesting history.  In Japan it is one of several terms associated with the Rinzai branch of Zen Buddhism, which originated with  the Tang Dynasty Chinese priest Lin Chi (臨済), Rinzai in Japanese, who died in 867.   Over twenty branches of this denomination existed in China by the time it was brought to Japan by the Japanese priest Eisai (栄西) in 1191, after he had trained in China for a number of years.  Japanese Zen is divided into three large branches. Two branches were brought by Japanese priests who went to China to train at the end of the 12^th century.  A third branch was brought to Japan by a Chinese priest, at the behest of the Japanese Shogun, in the 17^th century. 

The Rinzai tradition of Eisai retains the large body of literature featuring koans (公案) to aid trainees in their understanding of reality.  They convey how Zen masters in the past (most of them from ancient China) broke through to enlightenment. The Soto (曹洞) tradition of Zen, which was brought to Japan by Dogen (道元) does not use koans.  The third branch of Chinese Zen, the Huang-po (黄檗), known as Obaku in Japanese, was brought to Japan by the Chinese priest Yin Yuan (陰元), known in Japanese as Ingen.  Like Rinzai, Obaku Zen also uses koan literature in its training regimen. 

The Chinese priest Han Shan (寒山), or Kanzan, as he is known in Japan,  is perhaps best known for his poetry today, and may have been part of the circle of priests around Lin Chi in the 9^th century.  His “Cold Mountain” Temple in Suzhou is the headquarters of the lineage (that you now belong to.)  Perhaps the mutual use of koan training linked the Rinzai and Obaku traditions together for some 500 years, from the 9^th century to the 17^th, making it no surprise that the Chinese priest Yin Yuan brought with him to Japan some Rinzai priests of the Han Shan lineage in the 1660’s.  Nor is it surprising that at the same time Zen temples of the Han Shan lineage sprang up in the same area.

It is this Han Shan branch of Rinzai that I brought to America after studying with Miyauchi Kanko Roshi (宮内寒光老子) in Kameoka for a number of years.  It was during a pilgrimage we made together to Buddhist sites in India in 1971, in Patna, that Kanko Roshi gave me his personal seal of succession, or inka (印可).  The terms “Roshi” and “inka” were probably used in all sects of Zen in China, but in Japan they indicate that the people using the terms are part of the Rinzai or Obaku denominations rather than Soto.  In America the distinction made in Japan still holds, except in groups where the traditions have become mixed.  But in recent years the practice of referring to the leader of any Zen group outside of Japan as “Roshi” has become widespread.

In theory the title of Roshi should be conferred on a person with inka succession by that person’s master only when the master is on his deathbed.  The title itself (written 老子) means “Old Child” and in practice could not be held by someone who was less than about sixty years of age.  Historical records throughout East Asia abound of two old men, separated in age by no more than ten years, passing the title from one to the other, master to disciple.  The idea is that two people who have truly plumbed the depths of reality itself are passing on a torch of wisdom and responsibility. That torch is truly alive in only one person at a time in a lineage. 

I was around 35 years old when I received inka, and Miyauchi Roshi was approaching 80.  He was urging me to take on the responsibilities of the lineage in Japan as well as the temple he grew up in, maintained, and used as his base to minister to neighboring families whose ancestors lived there since the 17^th century.  I had been an ordained Zen priest since 1968, but the idea of a foreigner taking on the job as abbot of a Japanese temple seems odd to people in Japan, even though that has happened a few times (including one involving a student of mine.) 

But for me to stay in Japan, and for my wife Carol and our two sons Burke and Reg to spend the rest of our lives there, away from our relatives in America, did not seem appropriate.  We would return almost every year to see how things were going, but my mission seemed to be as an academic and encourager of Zen students.  Unfortunately, my opting not to accept my teacher’s kind offer resulted in the end of the line for Cold Mountain practice in Japan.  As for the title of Roshi, Master Miyauchi decided that if I was too young to accept it he would refer to me as “Koji” (居士) instead, which implies that I am the one who carries the “Intentions of the Household” (in Sanskrit, the term is grihapati.)  In Japan “Koji” is equivalent to “Daishi” (大師), which is like “Saint”. 

“Roshi” may have been better after all!  Priest names are conferred on disciples almost from the moment they enter the Zendo.  Certainly from the moment they formally take refuge in the Buddha, his teachings, and the sangha.  Those names, known in Japanese as anmyo (安名), are “names of peace” literally, to distinguish us from our birth names that come with luggage that is blood-related and sometimes bloody.  When you receive your anmyo you are immediately a “cloud and water” (雲水) person, who strives to move and behave the way clouds and flowing water do:  humbly, helpfully, selflessly.  People in Japan then refer to you (male or female) as “Osho-san” (和尚さん), or “Ms./Mr. Peaceful”.

In Japanese temples the first syllable of your anmyo is passed down in your lineage.  Ours, of course, is (in Japanese pronunciation) “Kan”.  We all are children of Kan (or Han, if you prefer Mandarin), and that Chinese character, as you know means “cold”.  The second character you receive from your teacher, who chooses it to make a name for you that will inspire you to be what the name suggests, which is always far beyond what human effort can produce.

Let’s take my name, the priest name I’ve had for over forty years, as examples of how such names work.   My name is Kangan (寒巖), which essentially translates as “Cold Rock”.  But the Buddhist imagery of the name gets lost in that translation.  It makes me sound like a lump, a clod, which I am, but that’s not exactly what the name says I aspire to be.  “Cold” in Buddhism is the stunned silence that pervades an early morning scene after a heavy snowfall.  It is the chill that leaves everything in suspended animation, with selfish concerns stunned into breathless awareness.  Clear sound overwhelms distinctions between self and other, inner and outer, here and there.  This beautiful image is what your name begins with, what our names begin with.  Buddhist dictionaries say the word cold in practical terms is a synonym for a host of adjectives including nourishing, humble, paternal, fair-minded, and selfless.  And we are the object they describe!

Now let’s look at the second character of my priest name, pronounced “gan” in this case.  The direct translation of the character is simply “rock”.  My response to that is good and bad.  First, I was such a sissy as a boy, a piano prodigy who never played sports.  It was good to hear in my adult proto-Buddhist stage that I am a rock!  Like Stallone!  That is definitely good.  But I feel bad because my Christian up-bringing cringes at the thought that I must compete with the “rock upon which I will build my church …”  (St. Peter, I’m so sorry.) 

When I consult Chinese and Japanese Buddhist dictionaries further, in an attempt to get to the heart of the matter, I find that the character “gan” refers to a massive rock, a cliff, really, overlooking the ocean, with crashing waves hitting it over and over, and all sorts of plants and birds finding refuge on it.  Now that’s nice.  Add the Kan and Gan characters together and Cold Rock becomes a big basalt rock face with fissures for all creatures to take root in while ignorance pounds away on the surface.  Becoming a humble and selfless protector for all is not easy for a nervous, self-serving gadfly like me.  But that’s my name. 

In Japan everyone refers to every else as Mr./Ms. So-and-So, by adding the suffix “san” or “sama” (様、さん、さま) to the name.  But it is a cardinal sin, simply unthinkable, to ever refer to yourself with such titles.  In other words, in Japan people will always address me as Mr. Webb, or Webb-san.  (If they know me well they may call me Glenn-san.)  But if they know I am a teacher they may use the suffix “sensei” (先生) meaning teacher (literally, “someone born before me”), so they will say “Webb-sensei” (or just Sensei.)  But I will never sign anything or make reference to myself as Mr. or Dr. or Professor Webb or Sensei.  Never. 

In addition to the priest name that we receive from our teachers, there is also the generic title, Buddhist Priest, which in Japanese has two forms.  Most people today in Japan refer to priests as “Obo-san” (お坊さん) or less politely, “Bozu” (坊主).  The “bo” in these terms (with a long “o”) refers to the place where Buddhist priests live, i.e., temples.  This form for “Buddhist Priest” is not very kind.  (It is the form used by Japanese who believe the Buddhist clergy is a burden on society.)  A more respectful way of referring to a Buddhist Priest is “Osho” (和尚), a short “o” followed by a long “o”.   The word literally means “Peace Everlasting” and the implication is clear that Buddhist clergy are peaceniks.  I can refer to my self as an Osho.  But others would refer to me as Osho-san (和尚さん). 

A further complication:  in temples the trainees (unsui-san) usually refer to themselves and to each other using only the second character of their priest name.  Thus, I call myself Gan.  Others call me Gan-san (巖さん).  This is an iron-clad rule.  Before he died, my teacher, as I explained earlier, referred to me as Gan-koji.  I called him Ko-roshi (光老子), or simply, Roshi-sama (老子様).  (Literally his name means Cold Light.)

All of this leads me to Kurt’s priest name, his anmyo.  The minute I set eyes on Kurt, back in our make-shift classroom Zendo on the University of Washington campus, I smelled snow.  (See above.)  He was sitting there, his first day, in full lotus, with the soles of his feet facing up.  But they were not in front of him where most Buddhas put them.  They were all the way out to the sides of his body, like little TV trays waiting for dishes of popcorn. 

Years later when it came time to give him a priest name to legitimize him as the leader of a group of sitters at his university post, I chose the second character Kan (感), which has the literal English sense of “Feelings”.  Like my Cold Rock, with its aloof sound, Kurt as Cold Feelings sounds even worse.  (Worst of all, of course, is the sound of Kankan, as in French Can-can, to the English ear!)  Again, the Buddhist imagery is important here. 

The character can and does mean many things, but in Buddhist literature it conveys the sense of the full realization of all things, heart-body-mind realization.  Wisdom, perception, empathy, understanding … you get the picture.  Unlike my rock image, which is certainly a thing, this one is human - very cerebral/emotional, and tied exclusively to human feelings.  Kankan (or, if you prefer the sound better, Kangan – identical to my name) is definitely a human being.  That’s your Kurt.  What do you think?  Am I right?

So far I’ve been talking about the different Japanese customs that impact the way people relate to each other with titles, including those of priests in and out of temples.  When you compare those with the customs and titles that have been transplanted outside of Japan, the story is very different.  Some Japanese “missionaries” have imposed the Japanese system very strictly, and with mixed results, I think.  Others have tried to hybridize and fuse Japanese and non-Japanese ways.  Their ways are my ways, but I take them even further than they do.  I hate to sound smug, but right or wrong (and by now I hope you know being right doesn’t amount to a hill of beans!) I take living in the moment very seriously:  spiritually, but also historically and culturally.

Time and circumstances do indeed have a way of interrupting traditions and sometimes changing them completely.  This happened in Japan during the Second World War.  All priests were conscripted to fight in the military.  And whole lineages, of families as well as temples, died out.  By some calculations, after the war Japan’s population had shrunk by almost half.  The Zen lineages and those of Buddhism as a whole certainly did not die out.  But old traditions in general became suspect, because they were seen as contributing to Japan’s defeat. 

It was in this narrative that Japan’s traditional arts, including Buddhist practices, began to take root outside Japan.  Or I should say the rooting began with beatniks and hippies who knocked on the doors of Japanese Zen temples and the studios of traditional artists -- some of them so decimated by the war that many had little hope for recovery -- and asked to be admitted as disciples.  This was like the victors seeking help from the vanquished.  The Japanese were incredulous.  Why are these foreigners here?  What do they want? 

Ordinary pre-War Japanese would never have dreamed of seeking entrance to temples and studios (the way the beatniks and hippies were) unless they were members of a priest family, or a family of artisans.  To attempt such a thing would amount to forcing their way into a social class they didn’t belong to by blood.  They had their own social class (farmer, merchant, samurai or aristocrat) and couldn’t imagine trying to change it to that of a priest or artisan.  Foreigners didn’t know any better.  They just wanted enlightenment!

That is how the Zen and other forms of Buddhism began to leave Japan and spread throughout the world.  Unlike Christian missionaries (with all due respect in both directions) Buddhist priests have no Great Commission that requires them to go into all the world and spread the Gospel.  I think it is fair to say that the priests who actually did leave the country and try their luck in foreign countries felt a little lost.  Things looked pretty grim in Japan for priests, but all these foreigners clamoring for their instruction was enticing. 

I personally helped a number of them get their green cards and set up shop in the United States.  Gurus from India had already established a tradition here in the first decades of the 20^th century.  And I’m afraid that tradition was continued with regard to attitudes of Westerners towards Japanese spiritual teachers.  Big mistake!  Each Japanese priest, before leaving Japan, had always been under the strict control of their particular branch of Buddhism, and were supported financially and critically by the dozens, sometimes hundred of families that lived and died in the neighborhood he came from. 

Buddhist priests in Japan are not and never were gurus.  They have no followers.  Disciples, yes, but not followers hungering for enlightenment.  Usually their disciples are the sons of other priests in the same order, who send their sons to them for training.  (It is said your own father cannot train you properly.)  So when the first Japanese Zen priests began arriving in America in the 1950’s some may have felt like they had died and gone to heaven.  Or, as some of them expressed to me, “What should I do?  Do these people (young Americans and Europeans) want to become real priests or do they just want me to answer their questions? “ 

Language, of course, was a major obstacle in transmitting Japanese Buddhism to the West.  In the best cases the result has been a transformation of Japanese Buddhism into a thoroughly non-Japanese hybrid, appropriate to the cultures in question.  Actually, I think that is what the transmission of the Buddhist Dharma requires.  If you end up with a bunch of people from one culture just imitating people from another culture, you don’t have much, in my opinion.  For me, having faith in one’s teacher and his teachings is not a matter of believing or doing what you are told without having some understanding of his culture and the culture that produced his teaching.

Using the Japanese term Roshi in your sangha (another term worthy of discussion) may not have as much significance as the term Mister --  or Doctor, or Professor, or Reverend, or just Dear Friend -- to people who speak English and have grown up in America.  It in fact is a Chinese term that has no equivalent in the Pali/Sanskrit texts of Indian Buddhism.  “Old Child” was a Chinese title used for great Chinese teachers long before Buddhism was introduced in China. 

Sometime in the second century AD, Chinese emperors started adding the new religion of Buddhism to the ritual Daoism (and practical Confucianism) that had always controlled ancestor worship and funerals.  This sparked a religious debate lasting for a thousand years, beautifully chronicled in a late third century text called “Daoism [Old Child] Versus Barbarian [Buddhist] Teachings”(老子化胡経), a text that in the 1920’s was included (No. 2139) in the mammoth Japanese Taisho Period collection of Buddhist scriptures and related texts.   As the title of that work shows, the term Roshi had been associated so completely with the semi-historical founder of Daoism, Laozi (Lao-Tse in pre-Communist Romanization), that the Chinese considered “Roshi” to be synonymous with Daoism.

But a little less than two thousand years ago the founders of the Rinzai tradition of Zen Buddhism in China used the term Roshi for their oldest, most venerated leaders, and the practice was continued in Japan.  As a nominally Rinzai group in America you probably have more right to the term than other American Zen groups.  But you could follow the Chinese precedent of using a native term for a foreign religion by choosing an American title for your leader.  It really is up to you.  What’s in a name, after all?  May I suggest “Lover Boy”?

With deep love and respect,

Glenn Taylor Webb, also known as Cold Rock

Age 74, March 4, 2010, Palm Desert, CA    

MODERN PARABLE

THE STORY OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN AS A PARABLE ABOUT AMERICA TODAY

It occurs to me that the story of the Good Samaritan is an effective parable about America today.  Samaritans in ancient Jewish history were (and still are, the few that remain) outcastes.  The fact that the writer of Luke chose to preface the word Samaritan with “good” is appropriate, because Jews never saw a good Samaritan.  That is why the ostensibly good Jews, the priests and Levites, who walked along a country road, did nothing to help the Samaritan who lay raped and pillaged at the side of the road. The lesson of the parable, as presented by Jesus, is to chastise orthodox Jews for not being able to help a person because their religion deemed such people unworthy. 

As a modern parable, I see the lesson this way:  President Obama and people who now bear the label “liberal” have been raped and pillaged by the conservatives in the GWB (last letter standing for a word rhyming with “tush”) camp.  The priests and Levites in this analogy are so certain of their religion and politics that they have lost sight of human compassion, the hallmark of their religion, i.e., Christianity.   Judging by the large number of objections my comments in “Great Depression Babies” elicited, I would say my interpretation of this old parable, while effective, will bring me more misery.  Let me just say that anyone who is against a healthcare plan that will bring comfort to people who cannot afford health insurance is conservative only in the way that the Gospels find despicable.   

BEYOND COMPASS

Beyond a Moral Compass 

In my paper “A Moral Compass” I tried to differentiate in a very general way between Eastern and Western religions by pointing out their profoundly different doctrines.  I also editorialized a bit with the recommendation that we not take the doctrines so literally that we end up losing what Karen Armstrong calls “practical compassion” or missing what Alexander McCall Smith says is the “moral compass” in all religions.

In the wake of that paper, a number of questions surfaced about Eastern religion, a couple in particular:  one concerns the worship of Buddhist images, and the other concerns the ancient Chinese traditions of Confucianism and Daoism. 

In “A Moral Compass” I purposely did not bring those issues up, and people seem to want to know why.   What follows is my response, starting with the question about Buddhist image worship.

Many people, Asian and non-Asian, have been exposed to the sight of family members or friends “worshipping” the Buddha or Buddhist images of various kinds.  They have asked why I have not included that practice in what I wrote about Buddhism in general.  That question is especially appropriate, since I am regarded by my peers as something of an expert in Buddhist iconography, or the meanings behind the statues and paintings made by Buddhists for devotional purposes. 

After years of studying Buddhist doctrine, when I actually went to Japan, Korea, China, Tibet, and Thailand, to do graduate fieldwork, I was overwhelmed by the abundance of devotional images everywhere I looked.  I wanted to study them, to know what they represented and how they were used by believers.  The same impulse had driven me much earlier in my life regarding Christian images. 

As a child growing up in the Church of Christ, a Scottish brand of Protestantism (but not, I must add, the brand known as Presbyterianism), I was taught that making and using Christian images (such as Christ on the cross, and even a simple crucifix) was idolatry.  My teachers were especially dismissive of the Roman and Orthodox Catholic faiths for their widely-known use of images (and for all the other reasons that are buried in history but still throb with pain and resentment in the Catholic/Protestant struggle.) 

In the Churches of Christ in southwestern Oklahoma and Texas there were no Christian symbols for me to see.  A typical church building was a very plain structure with the barest of essentials.  The congregation faced a speaker’s platform behind which was a built-in tank of water for baptisms.  There was a lady, however, who came to my church (and to hundreds of other Churches of Christ, I later learned) to paint scenes of the River Jordan on the three background walls of our baptistery. 

I was entranced by the realistic scene she created of a woodland setting with a stream, drawn in perspective, and a white dove floating in the blue sky above.  The river seemed to flow into the very water where at age ten I was “buried with Christ” in full emersion, “in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” For me, at the time at least, such magical set-designs made up for the lack of art in the Church of Christ circle.

At a fairly young age (perhaps in reaction to the iconoclasm of my faith) I became interested in art history, which is to say Christian art.  It was not until very recently that I had the opportunity to see for myself the great monuments of Christian art in European churches and museums, but even before entering college (in 1953) I knew hundreds of them from photographs in books. 

Maybe because of this personal experience, I was not surprised to learn, in my subsequent studies of Buddhism, that there were no images made of the historical Buddha for centuries after his death.  After all, I had grown up understanding that there were no images of Jesus in the early Christian community.  So it seemed logical that the first images of Shakyamuni were not made right away. 

In my mind I guess I concluded that these two men became objects of worship only after they were long dead, when their followers needed to see their heroes.  I think I also wondered if there was not some link between them, in as much as the images of Jesus and Shakyamuni began to appear historically at roughly the same time. 

Christian images first appeared in Rome under Contantine (d. 337), and Buddhist images appeared in Pakistan and India under the Kushan Kings at about the same time.  Not only that, but the images in both places had their heads backed by golden haloes of light, signifying the transcendent nature of themselves and their teachings. 

Since many of the first Buddhist images wore toga-like robes and were made by artists from Roman outposts (such as Gandhara in Pakistan), it is a good guess that the influence went from West to East, carried by Roman converts to Buddhism.  They may have felt it was about time their newly-adopted faith in Asia had images like those in Christian Rome. 

Whatever the case, for well over 2000 years, the making of devotional images of the founders and other subjects of Buddhist and Christian veneration has flourished.  Just as it is possible to distinguish image-rich Catholicism from generally iconoclastic Protestantism in the West, similar observations can be made about which forms of Buddhism make liturgical use of images and those that do not. 

Let me say unequivocally that there is no form of Buddhism in the world that regards religious images with the disdain that the Church of Christ does in the American south and southwest.  Not even Islam, which is quick to level the charge of idolatry on other religions for daring to depict God in human form, can compare.  At least Muslim children can take pride in the rich heritage of their faith’s architecture and decorative art.

When my Sunday school teachers wanted to show me what idolatry was they pointed to the poor misguided Latin American Catholics with their churches filled with statues they brought out on festival days. Above all, my teachers snarled at statues of the Virgin Mary, the very embodiment of the corruption of Roman Catholic history.  When I said I thought that our worship of money, or even our arrogant defense of our “true” religion could be idolatry, too, they dismissed me as the spoiled brat I was.

With that in mind, I left the “use of idols” in Buddhist Asia out of my “A Moral Compass” paper.  But it must be said that every Buddhist denomination in Asia reveres religious icons, and the ideas behind them.  Even Zen temples, the Buddhist denomination with the least number of Buddha statues and paintings (and few liturgical texts governing their use in practice), have images of the Bodhisattva of Wisdom Manjushri in their meditation halls.  This image is meant to help trainees remember that they must respect deep silence over their most learned rhetoric:  in his famous debate with the scientist Vimalakirti, Manjushri came to see that both science and religious imaginings were of limited value, and useless when it came to probing the mysteries of the truly wonderful.

If Zen is less guilty of idolatry in Buddhism, Tantric and Pure Land denominations practice exactly what my upbringing would describe as idolatry.  Tantric Buddhism, which is best seen in Tibetan Buddhism, exists as well in all parts of East Asia (e.g., Tendai and Shingon in Japan.)  Of all forms of Buddhism, this one seems at first glance to be close to Hinduism, simply because of the vast number of deities in its pantheon. 

But the aim of Enlightenment in Tantric sects of Buddhism is clearly Buddhist rather than Hindu:  each of us can aim for it without actually waiting for all parts of ourselves to wake up in what amounts to universal perfection.  Each Tantric Buddha (including all forms of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and guardians) has specific names, powers, and duties of his (or her) own.  Each can be summoned by Tantric priests, and can offer assistance of an appropriate kind to supplicants.

Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, the Lord Who Sees the Cries of Suffering, and best known today by “her” Chinese name, Kuanyin, is a favorite subject for statues and paintings throughout the Buddhist world.  For Tibetan Buddhists, the Dalai Lama is believed to be the present incarnation of Avalokiteshvara.  This veneration of a living Buddha is unique to Tantric Buddhism in Tibet, but it is merely another way that supernatural help is offered to individual believers who cannot easily awaken on their own. Tibetan Buddhists clearly act towards His Holiness the Dalai Lama in ways that can only be called worshipful.

They also consider some statues and paintings of specific deities to be more powerful than others.  So it seems reasonable to say that Tantric Buddhists do indeed worship Buddhas of many forms, including the historical Buddha Shakyamuni.  But they certainly are not worshipping him or any Buddha as the creator of the universe.  They are just following a form of Buddhism that allows them to seek outside help in their quest for full self realization. 

Another form of Buddhism offering help outside oneself is Pure Land Buddhism, which is based primarily on the two Sukhavati-vuya Pure Land texts.  Pure Land Buddhism (which in Japan has two branches, the Jodo-shu and the Jodoshin-shu) reserves a special place of honor for the Buddha Amitabha in its practice.  He is described as an especially compassionate Awakened Being (his name means Buddha of Infinite Light and Love”) who made a holy vow to bring all forms of life in all castes or states of being, regardless of their karmic past, into a karma-free realm, or Pure Land, where they can escape the chain of rebirth long enough to purify themselves and return to the karmic level, finishing their lives as useful creatures fit for Buddhahood.

This version of Buddhist doctrine (which a Theravadin priest in Thailand once described to me, with a twinkle in his eye, as “the most creative form of Mahayana Buddhism”) was born in China to appeal especially to the laboring masses who had little opportunity to develop their minds and practice the meditation required to reach the higher spiritual levels that are the goals in most sects of Buddhism. 

At the same time, the founders of Pure Land Buddhism were suggesting that even the most spiritually mature person, on his own effort, was still incapable of living the sort of selfless life of wisdom and compassion that would lead to a breakthrough into Buddhahood. All of us, Pure Land Buddhists say, need help; and of all the help offered by Awakened Beings in Buddhist scripture, the holy vow made by the Buddha Amitabha is clearly the surest way for all sentient beings to follow.

The Chinese Communist Revolution altered Buddhism and all religions there forever by banning them for thirty years and then allowing them to open for business again under government control.  In China the Pure Land form of Buddhist practice is almost indistinguishable from other denominations; it is so mixed with others that “Buddhism” serves as the government’s general term to refer to all. 

As a result, Chinese Pure Land temples often includes Zen meditation as well as the

chanting of Amitabha’s name. The fat and dirty 8^th-century Zen monk/hero, nicknamed “Cloth Bag” (Pu Tai, known as Hotei in Japan) frequently takes the place of the Buddha of the Future, Maitreya, on Chinese temple altars.  And I have seen quite a few images of Daoist deities in Chinese Buddhist temples, looking not the least bit out of place.

Buddhist denominational differences are preserved in Japan like countless other foreign things that were brought into the country hundreds and hundreds of years ago.  So I will use the Pure Land tradition there to make a general comment on what that denomination may have looked like anywhere in East Asia between the 12th and 19^th centuries.

There are two forms of Pure Land doctrine in Japan, one following on the heels of the other, historically speaking.  Honen (1133-1212), established the faith in Japan, following Chinese teachers who emphasized the necessity of chanting the name of the Buddha Amitabha as a sign of devotion and faith in his holy vow to “save” the faithful in his Pure Land (J. Jodo).  But Honen’s disciple Shinran took the teaching to an even simpler level.  Faith alone, coming from a pure heart of dependence, was all that was necessary. 

Therefore, the underlying focus of Pure Land Buddhism is tenaciously on the Buddha of Infinite Light and Love.  But the means of focus is vocal in one branch of the faith (Jodo-shu) – with endless repetition of the name of Amitabha in prayer bringing the believer into a state of utter devotion, while the focus on the Holy Vow of Amitabha in the other branch (Jodo Shin-shu) is silent, buried deep in the believer’s heart, without any outward sign of self effort.

Pure Land temples in Japan are almost as austere as Zen temples, except for the focus on Amitabha.  A statue of him is always the main image on the altar, with the Chinese Pure Land patriarch Shantao on one side and Honen on the other.  In Jodo-shu temples another statue of Amitabha will be in a room where serious group chanting (nembutsu) can be done, with each person supplied with a copy of scripture and a small percussion block known as a “Wooden Fish” (mokugyo) to set the rhythmic beat.

All of this is not so far from Christian evangelical worship, with chanting taking the place of praise songs and Amitabha standing in for a personal Jesus.  Even though the Buddhist focus is not on a personal God in Heaven, it is just too close for me to feel comfortable, in either place.  At the risk of sounding foolish (but still wanting to explain why I left Tantric and Pure Land practices out of my previous attempt to put Eastern and Western religions in perspective), I would say that for me Tantric Buddhism is too Catholic and Pure Land Buddhism is too Protestant. 

Now, as to the question of Daoism and Confucianism, and why I chose not to mention them in my “Moral Compass” paper, the simple answer is I consider them to be stuck in a view of reality that inherently excludes half the world.  At first the Western religions were similarly stuck, appealing only to people in the ancient Near East, but gradually going international.  Anyone can convert to Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.  The same is true of Buddhism, which had a huge boost from the person we speak of as the historical Buddha in India.  Just as Jesus (with Paul’s help) opened up Judaism by making his new form of Jewishness available to everyone, Shakyamuni likewise opened up the Brahmanic view to all humanity, by challenging the Hindu caste system of laws governing each caste in Indian society, and giving everyone the same law (Dharma) to live by.  From that time onward, anyone has been free to convert to Buddhism.

But the ancient Chinese view of the way the world works has ancestral trappings that prevent the conversion-friendly nature of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism from ever developing.  For this reason, Westerners attracted to Daoism, for example, study it as a philosophy rather than adopt it as a religion. Confucianism is a bit friendlier, at least to East Asians, because it provides practical solutions to everyday problems.  But it, too, when fully carried out to the letter, requires practitioners to honor (and yes, worship) their ancestors above all else.  The major East West religions, on the other hand, are transcendental rather than ancestral. 

Every civilization on earth began its journey towards religion with ancestor worship, which we normally speak of as folk religion.  Such “religions” predate the transcendental religions we’ve been looking at.  Daoism and Confucianism, despite developing philosophical traditions of great beauty, are tied to the oldest ancestor worship systems in North, East, and Southeast Asia.  Some are still alive today (none more plainly so than Japanese Shinto.) Ancestor worship in India before Hinduism is not alive today as a separate entity, but the hints of it we have seen are un-Chinese.

Relics found in ancient Chinese tombs, as well as in modern ones, show the clearest evidence of the ancestor worship that drove Daoism and Confucianism from the outset.  Oracle-bone geomancy going back some 2000 years before the Christian era reveals that maintaining a harmonious relationship between heaven and earth was always the goal of the Chinese people. That goal was given the name Dao (Tao) or Way, and was thought to be made up of two opposing elements:  the earthly-dark-wet-female Yin and heavenly-light-dry-male Yang. 

The ancient Chinese assumed that before being born we were in a state of perfect harmony in the Dao.  But once we enter this world we face a life-long struggle to achieve a balance between Yin and Yang.  Such harmony in life, filled with the spirit-breath of life-and-death known as Chi, was believed to be almost impossible to achieve.  So when a person died it was left to his living relatives to assist him achieve a harmonious spirit.

Through ritual burial offerings of food, bronze vessels, money, paintings and statues, the Yin-inspired part of the dead would be persuaded not to stay unhappy and incomplete in the dark earth but to reunite with its Yang-inspired part in the life-giving heat of the sun.  These offerings also added to the inadequate supply of spirit-breath that the dead may have achieved in life.

The ancient Confucian classics– especially the Book of Changes (I-Zhing) and the Book of Ritual (Li-Zhing) – offer precise instructions as to how the living should maintain harmony in the family through ancestor worship.  In its bare outlines, fathers are in charge of families, regional rulers are over families, the emperor is head of the entire nation, and heaven is over the emperor. 

Such division into high and low is the foundation of Confucian morality.  It was also incorporated in folk religions in much of Asia.  Male-dominant societies are nothing new (in fact, they are still with us), but the Confucian sense of high/low is not only sexist, it also contains a certain elitist element that says the brightest people are obviously superior to the not-so-bright, and the wealthy people are educated, thus probably superior, etc.  In short, the high are superior and the low are inferior. 

Because of the Daoist/Confucian answer to what happens after we die, there is an implied responsibility on the high to take care of the low and a deeply felt duty on the part of the “inferior” to obey the commandments of the “superior”.  The relationship is that of parent to child and child to parent. Bottom line:  children will feel obliged to defend and correct the faults of dead parents without fail, and expect their children to do the same for them.

I hear Westerners say all the time that so-and-so is looking down on them from heaven.  And Jewish, Christian and Islamic doctrines do not suffer very much as a result.  But ask almost anyone in Buddhist Asia if they believe their ancestral spirits are alive and must be honored by daily rituals; they will say yes, which puts them in open conflict with basic Buddhist doctrine, which teaches that within forty-nine days after we die we are reborn in a form of our own karmic creation (unless, of course, we have attained full awakening as a Buddha.) Old beliefs die hard, and are often retained, sometimes in formal ways.  

Japan is a case in point:  when Buddhism was established in the 6^th century as the state religion, about half the nation’s Shinto priest families, who had been in the business of keeping family records straight for centuries, were asked by the new Buddhist government to allow their sons to become Buddhist priests, who then became heads of families responsible for educating children and preparing bodies for Buddhist cremations.  Shinto priest families merely continued attending to newborns and overseeing their stages of growth, including the arranged marriages that keep things in the family. 

Buddhism thus had a steady supply of priests in the eldest sons of many Shinto priest families whose class identity before the 6^th century had been as priests in “the Way of the Gods”. Buddhism was formally acknowledged in Shinto as “Both Aspect” (Ryobu)  Shinto, in which every ancestral spirit was also identified as a specific Buddhist deity.  Carried into ordinary Japanese life, most families have both Shinto and Buddhist altars in their homes to honor the dead in both aspects.  

My students are used to hearing me say that Shinto is not a religion, but a national ancestral organization.  It has played a vital role in Japanese history, longer than Buddhism.  But it is not a religion that people outside of Japan can convert to.  To put it another way, when a Japanese person goes to a Shinto shrine on some important occasion, such as when an infant child is brought to be formally introduced to the ancestral gods enshrined there and receive their blessing, the person and the child must be Japanese.  The idea that a non-Japanese person (even one of mixed race) would participate in such a ritual is unthinkable.

On the other hand, my wife and I have lived in Japan long enough, and have so many dear Japanese friends, that we have been asked to participate in Shinto birth ceremonies and weddings.  On one occasion we acted as the official go-betweens (nakodo) in a wedding, for which we had to have the approval of the Shinto national registry, but only after we ourselves were registered as members of a Japanese family rather than the foreigners we are.

This is a very long answer to the questions about idolatry and ancestor worship in Buddhism, which I now must admit exist in Eastern cultures in the ways I have described.  But I would offer the plea to realize that these elements are not at the core of the Eastern religious mainstream, e.g., Hinduism and Buddhism. 

They do not altar in any way the vast difference between the theistic world of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and the atheistic world of Hinduism and Buddhism.  I would say the worship of transcendental images in Asia is probably a relic of a premature religious consciousness, in which ancestor worship played a vital part, and which has indeed had an effect on how people in the Eastern cultures of our world live their lives, now as in the past.

- Glenn T. Webb, in Palm Desert, May 19, 2009.

MORAL COMPASS

A MORAL COMPASS　

I recently was one of four American scholars presenting papers in a seminar on East/West morality at the Los Angeles campus of a Japanese Buddhist University.  The president of the school chose us to present our views, first because we are fairly well-known specialists in Asian religion, and second because we are Caucasians who grew up in Christian households. 

Only about a third of the audience was Japanese or Japanese Americans, for whom Buddhism was the inherited faith.  The rest consisted of non-Japanese who had some interest in Buddhism.  A few had even taken priest vows in one denomination of Buddhism or another.  Some, like us, were from Christian families (I know of one Catholic priest in the audience), but the religion in the room was Buddhism.

Out of the four of us on the podium, three of us attended the University of Chicago in the early 1960’s, where we were influenced by the late Joseph Kitagawa.  Also, we were personally influenced by the Zen scholar Masao Abe and his famous teachers, Daisetsu Suzuki and Shinichi Hisamatsu.  On the Christian side, two of us came from the Church of Christ tradition, one from the Dutch Reform movement, and one (who is himself a Jesuit priest) from the Roman Catholic community.

We were asked to reflect in our papers on the moral lessons we brought from our Christian heritage while at the same time offering the audience insights into what we had learned of Buddhist (and Hindu) morality, with as many personal examples as possible. 

The focus of one paper was on the writer’s growing appreciation for Hinduism while he was in India doing research.  Another paper pointed out how the Christian parable of the “good Samaritan” is really directed at Jewish leaders who were missing the real point of Jewish law by being too bound by purification rituals that separated Jews from non-Jews.  One more paper praised the Japanese cultural trait of carefully considering the needs and feelings of others (omoi-yari) before saying or doing anything of a more selfish nature.  My own paper was a bit out of place and controversial, in that I brought up some topics that are condoned as practical legal matters in Japan but vilified as sinful and immoral by some Americans, such as abortion, adultery and homosexuality. 

The discussion of our papers at the time was lively and insightful.  For my part, I came away thinking that we all were talking about the moral compass that makes us declare some behaviors moral and other behaviors immoral.  My own moral compass comes from religion, mainly.  And that may be so for most people.  But for many the source may not be religion at all, especially if they grew up untutored in, opposed to, or just uninterested in the subject.

Alexander McCall Smith, a medical lawyer, has lived most of his life in Africa and is the author of some charming books about practical morality.  His multi-volume No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series is a case in point (both in print and in a popular television series directed by Anthony Minghella.) 

McCall Smith has said our “search for a moral compass” is widespread today because we have seen that “just doing what we want doesn’t work very well…” The point he makes is that we need a moral compass to give  “moral structure” to our lives.  His implication seems to be that our religions, the sources of our moral compass, are outdated.

The author implies that women in South Africa’s Botswana have a keener sense of what is right and wrong, at least in practical terms, than men do.  And while the theological source for their moral compass is Abrahamic, the way they deal with everyday justice is not always in strict accordance with Christian or Islamic law.

In fundamentalist interpretations of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scripture, the punishments for immorality can be severe indeed – everything from ostracism, to cutting off arms and legs, to death by stoning, to everlasting hell are included in all these Abrahamic faiths.  Sexual sins receive the severest punishments.  The sense of living in accordance with God’s commandments or else… is very strong. 

This fundamentalist radicalism is what McCall Smith suggests the modern world has discarded, even among followers of Western religions.  The charm of his books, at least in part, is how his female characters get to the bottom of things, solving problems by dealing with practical matters first and fine points of the law second.  In the process we can see the absurdity of some of our religious teachings, and how the women manage to respect the core values of those teachings without actually inflicting harsh punishments.  In the end they retain the moral compass of the law and discard the rest as so much garbage. 

People who are familiar with McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series usually see and applaud the wisdom of the female characters’ solutions to moral and ethical problems.  They can see the practical logic that springs from the ladies’ religious faith.  The women sometimes bend or break rules that men might insist are part of the religion (in this case, the Christianity that Catholic and Protestant missionaries brought to the country), and their struggle to outwit the men can often be very funny. 

Some critics laugh at their antics only because the women try so hard to hang onto the religions that provide their moral compass.  But my sense of them is that they are not funny clowns but are closer to being saints or even angels.  I think of them as cousins to the characters in much of Mark Twain.  Just as Twain’s characters speak in a distinct and dying dialect, the Botswanans in McCall Smith’s stories speak an accented British English that is full of colonial-period cliches.

The religious sources for the moral compasses of the women in the Detective Agency stories are in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition.  Although that tradition was born in the deserts of the ancient Near East, history has flung it across the globe in such a way that it long ago became the religious tradition of the Western world.  The religions of the Eastern world, as we think of it today, are part of the distinctly different tradition of Hinduism and Buddhism.  This is important to keep in mind when watching the actions of McCall Smith’s women.

The same moral compass works equally well in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  All of the women in the stories used the same compass.  It’s only the doctrines behind the moral compass that are different.  The differences in the doctrines, of course, have been the problem, causing Christians, Jews and Muslims to disrespect, hate, and even kill each other for centuries.  If we had operated with the moral compass of the religions rather than their doctrines, maybe history would have been different. 

The question is, if the major South and East Asian religions are compared to the Abrahamic ones of the West, how does the picture change?  Is the moral compass totally different?  Similar?  The same?  Over the years I have taught many classes in comparative religion, focusing on Asian religions.  Some of those classes were for scholars who already were familiar with the doctrinal differences.  But most classes were for people who came from a Judeo/Christian/Muslim background and knew nothing about Eastern religions. 

The doctrinal difference between the Eastern religions and Western religions is simply put:  Hinduism and Buddhism are atheistic, whereas Judaism, Christianity and Islam are monotheistic.  (Early Christian missionaries in India labeled Hinduism a polytheistic religion.  But that is not accurate.  It is not theistic at all.) 

People in the Western world have a very hard time making sense of atheism.  They think it means that someone who is an atheist is against the God of the universe, as defined in Abrahamic religions.  Being anti-God, then, is being anti-Western culture, they think.  I think it is more reasonable to say that an atheist dismisses as inaccurate the definition of reality that the doctrines of Abrahamic religions teach.  A modern atheist is often a scientist, who holds science up as a method for defining the workings of life and death. 

But there is another definition of reality besides the one offered either by science or by Western religions.  When I say the Brahmanical religions of Hinduism/Buddhism are atheistic, I am simply suggesting that their definition of existence differs from the Western religious and scientific definitions.  The Eastern definition grew up in a different part of civilization.  Its assumptions about where we came from and why we are here are not the assumptions held by Jews, Christians and Muslims.  Nor is it remotely similar to the assumptions of the modern scientific community. 

One important characteristic of the Eastern definition of reality, historically speaking, is that it has not insisted on its definition being correct.  Its correctness has not been an issue for people who have grown up with it.  It has never been taught as the true definition, the “one true faith,” at war with the false definitions of others.  The way the Eastern religious tradition has defined itself is as a process, with all of its working parts as immutable as gravity is for scientists (and indeed for all educated people on earth today.)  For this reason the very concept of unbelievers and infidels is almost inconceivable for Hindus and Buddhists.  They merely want to be at peace within the process rather than at war with unbelievers.

In contrast, knowing the truth and being right is at the heart of Western religions.  The Abrahamic tribes are quick to call non-believers infidels, by which they mean they are lost and worthless.  Furthermore, the various versions of God offered by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures have led to fighting not only between these three Abrahamic faiths in general, but also internally, most notably between Catholics and Protestants, Shiites and Sunnis, and even between off-shoots of each of these.  Can there be any doubt that being right and defending the righteous (in God’s name) is the guiding principal of all forms of Western religion? 

The Hindus and Buddhists I have met have never tried to convert me.  Nor have they ever insinuated that the faith of my fathers is wrong, or that their understanding of life and death makes more sense than mine.  The philosophical among them have always enjoyed listening to me talk about the assumptions of Westerners, and have gently filled in the gaps I had about their understanding of how things work. 

We always got around to the question of “What happens after we die?” And I remember being incredulous at first when I realized they actually believed they were being born over and over again, making up for ignorant actions they made from one life to another.  They were less shocked than bemused, I think, by my explanation about how each of us has one shot at pleasing God, and expect to be praised or punished at death by a jealous but loving Father, who might forgive us our sins if we truly repent.

The purpose I have in mind for this paper is not to dwell on the doctrinal differences between Western and Eastern religious traditions, but rather to see if the moral compasses of the two traditions are compatible.  I think they are.  But first we have to be clear on some of the basic assumptions upon which the doctrines are based.  And they are clearly incompatible.       

Here I have decided to focus on Christianity for the Western religion and Buddhism for the Eastern religion.  The former is fundamentally monotheistic; the latter is fundamentally atheistic.  Knowing that fact is both important (otherwise we will misinterpret things coming and going) and, from a Western point of view, scary (because for all children of Abraham the denial of a creator God is the ultimate blasphemy.)

Christianity and Buddhism arose from preexisting faiths based on huge bodies of literary records.  The Bible in itself was formed by documents that fill libraries.  The Buddhist scriptures, too, including the Tripitaka, fill libraries.  They both can be traced back to antiquity, and ancient languages, which have been translated into every language on earth. 

Each of the two faiths has a hero, who is customarily referred to by the words that identify him as such:  Christ, meaning the “Anointed of God,” and Buddha, meaning “Awakened One”.  Their birth names, or names people called them if they did not acknowledge their religious character, were Jesus (or Yeshua) and Shakyamuni (which literally means “Sage of the Shakya Family.”)  Using the universal calendar that honors Jesus’ role in world history, we can say that Jesus lived in the 1^st century A.D., and that Shakyamuni lived some 600 years earlier, in the 6^th century B.C. 

Jesus and Shakyamuni

Anyone who speaks with any kind of authority about Jesus and Shakyamuni, these two selfless heroes of Christianity and Buddhism, the major religions of the Western and Eastern worlds, has to admit that what we know of those two men comes to us through scriptures that Jesus and Shakyamuni themselves did not write.  We also must admit that the difference between the two religions that bear their names could not be more pronounced.

Nevertheless, I have come to believe that Jesus and Shakyamuni were like twins in one important respect.  Reading the texts that purport to record their lives and teachings makes it clear that Jesus and Shakyamuni were rebels, even revolutionaries, who challenged the religions and societies that produced them, namely, Judaism and Hinduism.  This seems to be a good place to begin any comparison of them. 

Jesus and Shakyamuni apparently were happy with what their religions claimed to be real and true.  But they were clearly disturbed by the ways their religions were being practiced. The issue that seems to have concerned them most was not so much what happens to us after we die and why.  Rather, it was how we should live the lives we are living. 

 In other words, they seem not to have had a problem so much with the orthodoxy, or proper doctrines of their religions.  Indeed, they even defended on occasion what those doctrines teach about reality.  But they abhorred the negative effects their birth religions were having on the people of ancient Israel and India.

Jesus (who lived in the first century of “his” era) was critical of Judaism, and Shakyamuni (some 600 years before Jesus) was critical of Hinduism, for failing to practice proper action, or orthopraxy.  Simply put, each of them said that followers of his religion were talking the talk but not walking it. They both reminded their spiritual leaders that human beings should live with compassion towards one another first, and worry about doctrine later.

Although Jesus was a faithful Jew, and spoke primarily to Jews, he spoke more about the spirit of the law of Moses than the letter of that law.  His parables of the good Samaritan and prodigal son come to mind, but there are so many others.  Most of Jesus’ parables were addressed to “Priests and Levites” – the holy men of Israel – whose obsession with rules concerning purity and holiness often made them lose sight of the other side of the law:  love and compassion. 

The historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, likewise, addressed himself to leaders in his religion of birth.  This “Sage of the Shakya Kingdom” (in what today is Nepal and north-central India) spoke primarily to the upper-caste Brahmins and Kshyatrias (Shakyamuni’s own caste) when making them aware of the horrible discrimination that the Hindu caste system taught in the name of purity.

Hinduism teaches that all beings are in possession of a spark of perfection (Atman), which at one very ancient time was complete in itself (as Brahman), a state of perfection allowing no distinction whatsoever between self and other.  It further teaches that all living beings are on a return journey leading to that perfect state (known as enlightenment or Nirvana.) 

However, the operational aspect of the Hindu idea is that we are reborn over and over again, in different levels (castes) of spiritual attainment, based on our actions in each life, until all of our karmic ignorance of the true self is erased, thereby allowing us to collectively return to that perfect state of selfhood that we came from.   

Both Jesus and Shakyamuni stood on the edge of heresy, as far as the practice of their religions was concerned.  Jesus suggested that Jews could remain Jews, but that they also could associate with all sorts of people without polluting themselves.  A rabbi could do the same thing a half-breed (a Samaritan) did when he went to the aid of another pollution-carrying person.  In fact he should do that, as a good Jew, despite laws to the contrary.

While Jesus seemed to imply that it was no longer necessary to keep all the dietary restrictions, make the animal sacrifices, and follow the circumcision practice of ancient Jews, Jesus did not attack the basic Law of Moses, regarding God the Creator, Adam and Eve, Abraham, and most especially, the Heaven that awaits good people after they die and the Hell that bad people (who do not keep the commandments) will have to suffer forever after they die.

In somewhat the same way, the Buddha Shakyamuni did not dismiss the Hindu notion of being born over and over again (reincarnation), in the process of moving closer towards the spiritual perfection of Enlightenment or Nirvana with each lifetime.  He did imply, however, that we don’t all have to get there together, but that individuals can realize that sense of togetherness in one lifetime, as awakened beings, or Buddhas. 

That is the one teaching that makes Shakyamuni a Hindu heretic, because such teaching implies that the most important aspect of Brahmanical Hinduism was wrong:  we do not have to wait for all of our various self-delusions to disappear, through reincarnation, before we as individuals can attain a full state of non-differentiated selfhood. 

To say that one person can reach enlightenment in one lifetime (which by implication means she has reached oneness with all other beings) renders the Brahmanic definition of Enlightenment (collective spiritual perfection) quite meaningless.

In Zen Buddhist teachings, in the seemingly nonsensical puzzles known as “Superior Teachings” (J. koan), used in teacher-to-disciple training in two branches of the Zen Buddhist denominations in East Asia, the practical and compassionate side of Buddhist teachings is always championed over any that get bogged down in doctrinal and philosophical musings about how Enlightenment happens. 

At heart, therefore, both Christianity and Buddhism can be seen as branches of Judaism and Hinduism.  The view of reality held in Christianity (and Islam, for that matter) remains that of Judaism.  And Buddhism’s take on what is real is the same as Hinduism’s.  Perhaps this is why we find fundamentalist Christians rushing to the aid of modern Israel, and why Hindus merely accept Shakyamuni Buddha as a Hindu god.

So what’s to be done?  I admit that I have tried to fit my life into the orthodoxies of these great religions all my life.  Now at 74 it is clear I have failed.  I did not find a fit.  Worse, the religions seem irrelevant to me now, and to have caused (and continue to cause) more suffering than benefit to the world.  That really is a shame, because the stories of Jesus and Shakyamuni will forever be an inspiration to me. 

Looking back at my life (and imagining the future), I can say that I have spent (and plan to continue to spend) my life in three principal places:  university classrooms, Christian churches, and Buddhist temples (not counting the hours I spend watching TV and dancing with my wife.) 

When I am with students my spirit is lifted by their enthusiasm and curiosity.  I do not need to change their minds or convert them to any system of belief.  At church (Episcopal, for the last twenty years) I most enjoy Holy Communion.  The sacraments bring me into the mystery (and personal challenge) of Christian love and service.  I do not wear Christianity as a doctrinal suit of armor.   The best part of Zen temples is my pillow in the meditation hall; all of the sutra parsing and lineage posing seems almost silly to me now. 

If you, like me, have a problem with any orthodoxies that claim to solve the mystery of life and death, I would suggest that we join Jesus and Shakyamuni in paying attention to the orthopraxic side of their religions.  The orthodoxies that informed the Judaic and Brahmanic sources of Christianity and Buddhism also infiltrated the religions that later came into being in the names of their founders.  The irony in that is painful to admit.  Surely Jesus and Shakyamuni, wherever they are, must be saddened by that twist of fate. 

Since none of us can offer any proof as to what happens after we die – either to be judged by God and end up in heaven or hell, or to be reborn over and over until we finally get it right and wake up as Buddhas – we might as well do what we can do very well if we try, namely, treat everyone with respect and kindness, with no preference and absolutely no thought of personal reward.  Maybe it is by our actions that the world can really know Jesus and Shakyamuni after all. 

Karen Armstrong, one of the most thoughtful minds among us when it comes to looking at the world’s religions with a sympathetic heart, has it just right, I think, when she says that all of our religions require a leap of faith where doctrine is concerned, but that no leap is worth taking unless it leads to what she calls “practical compassion.”

The female characters in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency clearly are not using a moral compass that they fashioned from Christian doctrine with the aim of declaring their faith to be true or even obeying each of its commandments.  But their moral compass is clear to see in the kindness and goodness in their words and actions.  I think they teach us how we can emerge from our various belief systems – whether Western or Eastern – with a moral compass that benefits everyone.

- Glenn Webb, at home in Palm Desert, CA, April 16, 2009