Buddhism: Week 1
The Importance of Inner Experience
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
Marcus Borg, in his marvelous book, Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings, describes the many amazing similarities in the lives of Jesus and the Buddha, who lived five hundred years before Jesus. Borg’s explanation for the similarity in their wisdom teaching is that “both Jesus and the Buddha had life-transforming experiences of ‘the sacred.’” [1] Buddha’s transformational experience happened under the Bodhi tree; Jesus’ transformational initiation happened at his baptism and during the forty days he then spent in the desert. Both endured temptations by “the devil.” Both men were around thirty years old at the time of their unitive encounter.
We all need such inner experience instead of simple outer belief systems. You need inner experience whereby you can know things to be true for yourself instead of believing them because other people say they are true. [2] This is second-hand religion or hearsay religion which is unfortunately the most common variety.
James Finley points out that unlike Christianity, “there is no belief system in Buddhism. That’s why you can be a devout Christian and a devout Buddhist at the same time. The word ‘Dharma,’ [which is what the Buddha spent his life teaching] means ‘law’ or ‘rule’ but not in the sense of a dogma. It means the way reality really is. There is no dogma or anything contrary to any Christian dogma in authentic Buddhism. Alongside everything the Buddha said, he also said, ‘Don’t believe it because I said it. Listen to it and check it out for yourself. See if it rings true with your own experience.’” [3]
The West has made an art form out of idealizing the separate individual and trying to make it “holy” by itself. You need a deep experience of radical participation to break beyond your normal illusion of ego separateness. Unfortunately, much garden variety Christianity only affirms your separateness and your supposed superiority. Religion was intended to give you an experience of what Owen Barfield calls “original participation” or primal unity. Before you are many, you are one. We have so emphasized the “many” for centuries now, that it is very hard for Western people to again experience the “one.” We are so self-conscious about either our private goodness or our private badness. And worse, the self we are conscious of, the self we are absorbed in, is precisely the self that mystics say does not exist! It’s actually our false self. [4] The Self that exists, in Christian language, is the communal “Body of Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:12f).
Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, uses the idea of making cookies to illustrate our confusion about who we really are: Imagine “that the moment each cookie leaves the bowl of dough and is placed onto the tray, it begins to think of itself as separate. You, the creator of the cookies, know better, and you have a lot of compassion for them. You know that they are originally all one, and that even now, the happiness of each cookie is still the happiness of all the other cookies. But they have developed ‘discriminating perception,’ and suddenly they set up barriers between themselves. . . . ‘Get out of my way. I want to be in the middle.’ ‘I am brown and beautiful and you are ugly.’ ‘Can’t you please spread a little in that direction?’ We have a tendency to behave this way also, and it causes a lot of suffering. If we know how to touch our nondiscriminating mind, our happiness and the happiness of others will increase manifold.” [5] This is “the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16).
Thich Nhat Hanh continues (emphasis added): “We all have the capacity of living with nondiscriminating wisdom, but we have to train ourselves to see in that way, to see that the flower is us, the mountain is us, our parents and our children are all us. When we see that everyone and everything belongs to the same stream of life, our suffering will vanish. Nonself is not a doctrine or a philosophy. It is an insight that can help us live life more deeply, suffer less, and enjoy life more. We need to live the insight of nonself.” [6] Which with great irony, we discover to be the One True Self!
Gateway to Silence:
To understand everything is to forgive everything. —Buddha
References:
[1] Marcus Borg, ed., Jesus & Buddha: The Parallel Sayings (Ulysses Press: 2004), 10.
[2] Richard Rohr, Jesus and Buddha: Paths to Awakening (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2008), disc 1 (CD, DVD, MP3 download).
[3] James Finley, Jesus and Buddha: Paths to Awakening (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2008), disc 2 (CD, DVD, MP3 download).
[4] Rohr, Jesus and Buddha, disc 1.
[5] Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (Broadway Books: 1998), 133-134.
[6] Ibid., 134.
