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.