In my upcoming book, Aging as a Spiritual Practice (Gotham Books, January 2012), I tell the following story:
Once, when I was on a live radio show being interviewed by a Christian talk show host, her first question to me was, "Do you Buddhists believe in God?"I had only a few seconds to think of an answer.
"Yes," I said.
"Good!" the host said. "And how do you pray?"
I said that we prayed in silence to reach our divine nature.
"I like that!" the host said.
When I have told this story in talks, some of my Buddhist listeners say, "Oh, that's nice. It's good to be polite." But I wasn't just being polite. I was raised in a Christian church and went to Christian Sunday school. My favorite song as a child was "God is Love." After graduating from college, for a year I attended Christian seminary, with the idea of becoming a minister. I didn't become a dedicated Buddhist until some time after that. I am comfortable with the word God.
It's true that by saying "Yes" I was also making an effort to establish some common ground. It was live radio, our time slot was 20 minutes and I was there to discuss a just-released book. I didn't want to spend the whole time trying to explain what Buddhists believe. Also, I felt that a more nuanced answer, however I couched it, would have come across as some version of "No." I sensed the need to give a definitive answer. The answer I gave came closest to what was so for me -- understanding that I was not trying to speak for the world's 320 million Buddhists, but only for myself.
The host knew I was a Buddhist; I was on her show to discuss my book, Healing Lazarus: A Buddhist's Journey from Near Death to New Life. I sensed from the way she posed her question that all she really wanted to know was whether I was a person of religious conviction and belief -- a person of faith. And I am. I'm an ordained Buddhist priest -- a religious professional. My daily religious practice is the center of my life. I lead meditation groups, I am training and ordaining other priests. In that context, "Yes" is the best answer.
However, even though most of the world's Buddhists recite the name of Buddha or pray to Buddha, Buddha is not a deity or supreme being in the same way that the Christian God is. A lay minister of the Jodo Shinshu sect of Japanese Buddhism once told me that he tries to explain to his Christian friends that Amida Buddha is a principle, like universal love, rather than a god. Another point worth noting is that there is no word for "Buddhism" in Buddhism -- that "-ism" was an invention of 19th century European translators. Gautama the Buddha called his teaching marga, or the Path.
In that sense, the host's second question -- about how I prayed -- was the more interesting to me. For Buddhists, what and how you practice is more fundamental than what you believe. My teacher, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, used to say that people could practice Zen meditation and also believe in God; that was OK with him. My good friend, Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, practiced meditation with us in the early days of Tassajara Zen monastery. Like many other Catholic priests and monks who have taken up, and even taught, Zen, Brother David did not feel a contradiction between his Catholic contemplative practice and Zen meditation. In fact, he felt that there was an affinity between the two. A Tibetan Buddhist teacher once said, when asked about God, "God and Buddha may appear to be different, but when we speak of the nature of God and the nature of Buddha there may be more closeness." I learned in Christian seminary that St. Anselm's definition of God was "that than which nothing greater can be conceived." Shunryu Suzuki often spoke of the inconceivability of Buddha in similar language. In Zen meditation we seek to express and embody this inconceivability.
So when I said to the radio host, "We pray in silence to reach our divine nature," I was not just making that up. I knew that there is a long history in Christianity of the "prayer of silence." In the Eastern Orthodox tradition this is known as hesychasm, which is based on Christ's injunction in the Book of Matthew to "go into your closet to pray." A more modern version of this practice is the so-called "centering prayer," whose ancient origins can be traced to the writings of St. John of the Cross and other early contemplatives.
My colleagues in Zen may object that it is a stretch to call Zen meditation "prayer," or to describe its purpose as a method "to reach our divine nature." I understand; I'm sure this post will receive many critical comments both from the Buddhist and Christian sides. My purpose here is not to defend what I said, as much as describe it, along with the thinking behind it. I think what is most important is that the host and I had a real dialogue. After the show was over, she told me that someone close to her had experienced a traumatic brain injury, as I had done, and she wanted to know more. That was a touching moment, a human connection that was more important, I think, than anything I said or she said on the show.
Interfaith dialogue can sometimes be superficial, but it can also go deep. Dialogue is the universal antidote to misunderstanding and prejudice, especially the religious kind, and I am all for it -- even when it falls short, or seems unfruitful. This week's headlines about Osama bin Laden reminds us all of the terrible cost of misunderstanding, prejudice and hatred. The hatred and the killing will not end -- in fact, given our human propensity for demonizing those who do not believe as we do, such things may always be with us. But we must never stop trying to counter prejudice with efforts to find common ground. That was what I was trying to do on the radio show, and what I am trying to do here by writing about it.
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God in Buddhism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lama Surya Das responds: If There's No God in Buddhism, Are ...
If one is a Buddhist, you might say that that you practice the Dhamma. In the Pali Canon, there is reference to gods or devas, though not the kind of god(s) mentioned in Western religions.
If you are a practicing Buddhist, it can be helpful to distinguish whether one is following Theravada, Mahayana, or Vajrayana. The Tibetan forms of Buddhism do have gods and practice centered around deities or gods, though not the kind of "Supreme Being" that western religions describe as "God Almighty."
Though it is said that Buddha himself found discussion of God not helpful or necessary, Gautama also taught the "Middle Way," which might help the discussion here...is there a supreme God, or gods? Perhaps none of us know, and the middle path might guide us to simply discuss this respectfully without attachment to our own personal views on a subject that none of us can really be truly expert about.
However, I find it somewhat interesting that many "Western Buddhists" cannot accept karma and reincarnation, as Buddhism is basically built upon these two fundamentals. Yet, they still consider themselves Buddhists as such. Kind of like believing Christ never existed, and calling yourself a Christian.
Reincarnation is similarly misunderstood. So-called past life regressions show everyone as Joan of Arc or Cleopatra (guys, choose your own), and never as a vicious criminal, and also seem to play to the desire to have an everliving Self (the current self in the regression session) that wears these lives as costumes. What is necessary for this to be corrected is re-education.
End of story.
To-tally.
nice definition of infinite which cannot be defined for to define infinite is to limit infinite and infinite has no boundaries. all are within infinite yep even the christians but they have yet to figure that out.
that atonement paradigm wont let them. ie slippery slope those christians live on. not as slippery or steep as the materialist slope but slippery.
now if infinite intelligence; why so much suffering, evil, and sin?
go deep into the necessity of unwareness for the relative phenomenal word to exist as expressions of this infinite intelligence and vitality. or not. :-)
one can remain in unawareness as long as they like. we all take a crack at it as no one begins their journey as perfect awareness. after many lives then on to another dimension over and over and over again and again to higher and higher awareness and where it stops no one knows but many claim to know.
I'm sure my idea of god and a christian talk show host's idea of god are very different.
In Shingon-shu, a very much alive school of Japanese Buddhism, the universe is the body of Mahavairocana Buddha, and the expansion and contraction of the universe (a la Indian cosmology) is his respiration. Pantheism? Kind of. Panbuddhism? Yes.
Or like how the Buddha was just an incarnation of Vishnu who taught raksasas false practices so they would go to hell, right?
Or like how the Buddha was really Laozi in disguise, teaching Daoism to the barbarians, right?
I agree. The Buddha gave the most accurate possible answer to the question of if there is a God by remaining silent. There is something going on. "It isn't this, no is it that, nor is it otherwise".
Yet somehow this is happening.
This magical, unimaginable display.
It was Joseph Campbell who said that, "The true idolatry is to concretize your own image of God". To believe that you know what God is which usually includes knowing what God's opinions are - mainly about everyone else.
It's a big step and takes a lot of courage to go from the child's relationship to the father to the undefined field of awareness. I commend those who make the effort.