Seeking the religious roots of pluralism. (Buddhism)
(Seeking the Religious Roots of Pluralism;
Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum Foundation Special Issue)
Robert Thurman
Journal of Ecumenical Studies
Vol.34 No.3 (Summer 1997)
pp.394-398
COPYRIGHT 1997 Journal of Ecumenical Studies
Buddhism is definitely supportive of pluralism as is proved by the
fact that Buddhists are incredibly pluralistic themselves. Early on,
in the history of Buddhism, one king had a dream about a bunch of
blind men trying to figure out what an elephant was, and they were
running around groping at different parts of the elephant and
saying, "It's a coconut. It's a this. It's a that. It's an other.
It's a tree trunk. It's a snake. It's many things." When he later
had this dream interpreted for him by the Buddha, the Buddha
predicted this would mean that, shortly after the Buddha's time,
there would be many different schools of Buddhism, each of which
would think of it as something different. So, Buddhism has a history
of pluralism from the very beginning. It is based for Buddhism in
the view of the ultimate nature of reality. You could say the
absolute, which they call voidness in Buddhism; it sounds a little
scarier than "God," but I have always argued that it actually has a
similar meaning, especially in the Hebrew tradition. The two came up
with a similar insight, not that far a time apart in the ancient
period, that the nature of reality is finally beyond any human
conception of it.
So, the teaching of voidness does not really mean that everything is
nothing but that everything is empty of being whatever one thin it
is. It is opened. That means emptiness has a sense that something
has an open inside, a free inside. One can translate emptiness as
freedom, so that everything is free of being pinned down by what one
person or one group or one community thinks it is. I understand the
ancient Judaic-Mosaic prohibition of idolatry as conveying the same
teaching -- the idea that there can be no image of the absolute, of
God, and no golden calf.
From a Buddhist perspective of sunyata, the human conceptual image
of God is a kind of golden calf, not that there could not be many
visions of God that poets or religious visionaries could have: a
burning bush, wheels turning in space, even a human figure could be
a vision of the ultimate for someone. When that someone then says,
"That vision that I had, and that only is what the ultimate is, and
anybody else's vision is invalid and wrong, and they are not
included in this that I have seen," that becomes idolatry.
The Buddhist would want to expand the definition of idolatry from
just golden calves and such to include the concept of anyone's name,
for example. In the ancient Hebrew tradition, the fact that they
would not include vowels with the consonants in the name of God in
order to make it humanly unpronounceable is in this same direction
of what we would call voidness or freedom. That is the basis;
therefore, all human beings can realize their innermost nature from
the Buddhist perspective. Actually, every living being can, although
the nonhuman ones have to become human in some fife in order to do
it, since the humans have the greater intelligence in the Buddhist
view.
I was struck by Professor Greenberg's description that each realizes
his or her own uniqueness, a sort of finite representation of the
infinite, one's own freedom and dignity -- not because they were
created by a being but because their innermost essence or actual
reality is the reality of nirvana or voidness or freedom or whatever
we want to call it. Buddhism has at its core the notion of the
openness of reality to constant creativity, to total participation
(potentially) by every being. Therefore, Buddhism believes that
there should be tolerance and religious pluralism.
Now, in the history of Buddhism, there were many examples of
discourse with other religions in ancient India. Even there, it is
questionable whether Buddhism is one of the religions, because the
Buddha tended to criticize what he called "dirshti," a "view" or a
"dogmatic conviction." The Buddha considers one of our human
problems to be that we develop a conviction about something we
believe. This becomes dogmatic and interferes with our experience of
reality. This is why beings who will treat each other nicely under
normal conditions often can decide that another person is a
stranger. They belong to a different religion or do not believe in
what I believe or do not share my conviction. Therefore, I can treat
them in a subhuman way. I can kill them, destroy them, ignore them,
starve them, hurt them.
Something that I would not normally do to a person about whom I had
no special idea -- this tendency on the part of human beings to
place their convictions between their experience of reality and
reality, and to be driven by a sort of fanaticism or dogma -- is an
ancient human predilection. The Buddha thought of it as one of the
major causes of human suffering and one of the major things to be
overcome. Therefore, the Buddha's teaching has a very educational
and intellectual thrust to it; people should not necessarily accept
or cling to beliefs blindly. They should have only reasonable
beliefs, and they should examine beliefs that are handed to them by
their tradition or their elders and explore them and only then
really come to uphold them if they seem reasonable.
If you define religion narrowly, as holding a certain belief, then
Buddhism may actually be thought of as not a religion. It might be
thought of as a very early matrix of pluralism in the ancient world
in India's time, in the time of the Ashoka, the great Buddhist
emperor of the third century B.C.E. There is a very extraordinary
thing written on one of his stone pillars -- compared to the rest of
the ancient world, though probably the rabbis were making such
statements. It says, "People should not criticize each other's
religions. What is important is not being right about having a
particular religion but the growth of your own good qualities as
recommended by your religion; therefore, in most cases you should
not criticize others' religions." Then he adds this remarkable
comment: "or if the occasion is appropriate for interreligious
dialogue and therefore there could be mutual critique and dialogue,
then one should not do so immoderately."
Turning to modem times, His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, is most strong
on his own idea of being self-restrained as a Buddhist. I have heard
him speak very movingly about when he was younger, even though
Buddhism has these ideals of tolerance and this ideal of
understanding as being more important than faith or, rather, that
faith should be a reasoned faith only, not a blind faith. Blind
faith is an inferior form of faith. Although that is the case, he
admits that Buddhists do think of themselves as superior because
they hold that view, and they think a lot of other people believe
things that they think are not really reasonable. Therefore, they
feel somewhat patronizing about them, and they feel that if they
came to adopt Buddhism, maybe they could get enlightened. He
confesses, in other words, to this kind of Buddhist chauvinism
previously and says that it took him a long time to come to realize
it. He credits Thomas Merton as having helped him greatly.
Buddhists believe in a creator God, but they do not believe in the
omnipotence of the creator God. I want to make this point in the
dialogue with theism, which is very important. Buddhism was
translated in the last century by secularistic translators who were
trying to break away from Christianity, mostly Europeans, who held
that Buddhism was atheistic. However, that is not true. Buddha does
believe in Gods, even the creator God of the Indian civilization. He
not only believed in them, but he also encountered them, though not
as burning bushes. He just talked to them in various forms. He
encountered Gods and creator Gods. What Buddha came not to believe
was that any one of them had absolute power over everything. It is a
definition of the God-figure that is the difference, not the
question of absolute belief or no belief in them.
The Dalai Lama said that, through Merton, he came to realize that
someone who had this belief that he did not share could actually
develop all the qualities of holiness and wisdom that he defined as
enlightenment. He had to restrain his own natural tendency to
chauvinism when he understood that. He said:
I put the challenge to you all, especially if you meet me and you
might
happen to like me. You look at this man and you say, "Well, gee,
this man
looks nice," and then in the next minute you think, "but he doesn't
believe
in God." But you should overcome that and realize that it would be
possible
to be nice and even be virtuous and even represent all the good
qualities
that your religion seeks to inculcate in a human being and yet not
believe
in what you believe in as God.
He is very clear on this point, and I am also very firm in
interreligious dialogue on this point. I think religions can
certainly take great pride through history that they have encouraged
pluralism from the level of tribalism.
Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam are the three most overtly
universalistic religions, as they are not nation-specific. They haw
had the history of being able to unify radically different tribes
with radically different cultures. People have found a kind of
common sense of identity and, therefore, a sense of pluralism about
their cultural or racial or gender differences within the concept of
common identity as following the same religion. They have shown that
religion can provide meaning where national or racial or gender
identity does not reach. Religious identity has created a sense of
commonality, so that pluralism about the other elements can take
place. Where we have to face realistically the fact that religions
have failed is in that they have not managed to find a broader sense
of identity than themselves -- truly spiritual identity, so as to
really identify with members of other religions in the same sort of
pluralistic way.
The pluralism that we know today is too much, I fear, in the terms
that Professor Greenberg very aptly put, a kind of false relativism.
That is to say, it is based on the sense of identity of living in a
secular world, the secular society of America, or the even more
awful secularism of the anti-religious Marxist countries that are
now unraveling. This is still on the law books in China, where it is
still illegal to propagate religion or to practice or espouse your
religion openly. Russia has changed at last, although I do not know
whether they have changed all the statutes yet.
In other words, the sense of pluralism that has arisen in America
was a kind of negative pluralism or merely a relativism, because the
larger thing that we were encountering, religious people over the
last centuries, was nihilism or materialism, the idea that nobody
knows anything about what ultimately is, but we scientists are going
to find out. There is no spirit, and, in that light, we can tolerate
each other's various forms of fun and homey rituals that people use
to build up a sense of community, but these things really have no
claim on reality since reality is known only by science, you see.
Now the danger point we have in history at this time, reflected most
graphically in such a place as Bosnia, is that, with the collapse of
that secularism, the religions will re-arise with their old
fundamentalist attitudes and their attitude that "our claim to the
absolute is absolute, and people who do not share it deserve to get
out of our country." The Yugoslavian conflict is, in fact, a
religious conflict. It is neither nationalistic nor ethnic.
Fundamentally, it is a conflict between two types of Christianity
and Islam. This has not really been faced, but this is what we have
to face if we are to have a real dialogue on religious pluralism. In
facing that, what we have to look it in each tradition is those
interpretations of the tradition that do not acknowledge what
Professor Greenberg said: the uniqueness, the infinite equality of
all humans. They cling to a particular version and say that only
people who have this credo or that credo are really fully human.
Doctrines such as "You can only be saved through this religious
leader or that religious practice or this kind of meditation" must
be acknowledged as idolatrous by their upholders. They are
idolatrous in the monotheistic sense and in the Buddhist sense; they
are held as fanatical convictions, which is one of the mental
addictions that cause humans to suffer in life, the causes of the
samsara.
This is where the world's religions should and can get together and
insist on interpretations within their own traditions that critique
ideas that lead to this sort of lethal exclusivism that religions
are still practicing today and that, I fear, will be practiced more
and more where secularism fails. It is a real, live problem.