From “Taste of Chicago Buddhism” May 2016
One benefit of interfaith discussion is finding out how
others see your religion. At the recent Universal Muslim Association of America
gathering after our interfaith panel, I was sitting at dinner with one of the UMAA
Chicago leaders. I told him I liked his speech about being close to God and the
Quran, and he said, “I visited your temple a couple years ago in the Sacred
Spaces tour.” I told him it was a different temple that was a part of that
tour, not our temple. He said the visit left him with an uneasy feeling about
Buddhism. “It seems to be a religion that each person comes up with his own
ideas along the way. The person explaining Buddhism to the tour group kept
saying, ‘In Buddhism, we listen to our inner self and follow that.’”
I told him that’s not how I see Buddhism – it’s not a
“Do-it-yourself, make it up as you go along” religion. In our sect, Jodo
Shinshu, we recognize there is a power beyond our ego-self and there are
teachings to help us become aware of that power. I hate to speculate on who
gave the explanation to the Sacred Spaces tour, but I know there are many
people (including ministers) at Jodo Shinshu temples who would say the same
thing, “We don’t need texts or external experts – it’s our inner voice that
guides us.”
[from UMAA conference goodie-bag, a souvenir magnet]
In fact, I think a lot of people who identify as Buddhist
feel that same way – that somehow Shakyamuni Buddha turned on the green light
for each person to do their own thing and call it “Buddhism,” free of the
restrictions of any organized form of religion. But anyone who bothers to read
any bit of the sutras knows that Shakyamuni wasn’t just flapping his jaws and
saying, “Don't accept what I say – go find out for yourself what the truth is.”
On the contrary he was pointing out for us the pitfalls of relying on our
deluded judgments and challenging us to test our fixed ideas against the flux
of real life.
In addition to the oft-heard Western Buddhist rejection of
“book learning,” there is the tendency to characterize Buddhism as pulling
yourself up by your own bootstraps to enlightenment. In the 1990s my father was
chauffeur in Minneapolis to Dr. Alfred Bloom on a lecture tour in the Midwest.
At one public lecture, a man stood up and asked Dr. Bloom, “Do Buddhists
believe in God?” My father said Dr. Bloom simply gave an emphatic, “No!” and
the questioner promptly left the room. My father told me this story in a
chuckling “What the heck!” way – but my impression is that my father and most
of the people present would’ve preferred to see Dr. Bloom engage the questioner
in discussion.
I feel it’s the Buddhists who close off interfaith
discussions by refusing to listen to anything that references “God” with a
capital G – “We don’t go that sh*t.” If we get past the label, we find much of
what is said in monotheistic religions is a deeply experienced sense of tariki, the power beyond self. For
example, one of the imans at the interfaith discussion said he rejects the
narrow sectarian views of the militant Wahhabis. He said God’s mind is beyond
our human comprehension and that the Quran says that in the diversity of life
we see the beauty of creation and that includes the diversity of religious
expression. So any group that claims only they follow the true way of God are
deludedly believing they know God’s mind.
Humans need to be taken down a notch or ten – we think we
have the answers but our attachment to our “rightness” makes us intolerant
towards others. Religion, including Buddhism, has the wisdom of the ages, of
the transcendent, that makes us humble listeners and more open-hearted towards
others.
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