Today we find Buddha images just about everywhere in the West. Whether it’s the Grand Café at the corner, the shopping mall or in our neighbor’s home. The head with the curly hair from Thailand seems to be slightly more popular than the fat bellied grinning Chinese Buddha. In any case the Buddha is very popular. He represents wellness, that trend in our societies to combine spirituality with moderate consumerism, simplicity with a kind of selfish detachment. Great ‘spiritual leaders’ like Richard Gere and Steven Seagal teach us to enjoy everything Zen.
How well justified is this passion for Buddha, this desire for an Eastern yet atheistic spirituality? Elsewhere (on my Dutch apologetics blog) I have written on the threefold requirement that any worldview needs to meet in order to qualify for viability:
(a) Inner coherence (the different assumptions of a worldview should not logically conflict with each other).
(b) Correspondence to reality ( a world view should correspond to the reality as we generally know it).
(c) Livability in day-to-day reality (not only does a worldview need to be believed, one needs to be able to practice it too).
Whatever remains of the postmodern and irrational enthusiasm for Buddhism doesn’t amount to much as we shall see.
A worldview needs to have inner coherence. How well is Buddhism faring in this respect? Buddha’s fundamental insight was that all suffering comes from desire. When desire is put to a halt suffering also has stopped. How realistic is it to aim for non-desire as goal of one’s life? Doesn’t a buddhist contradict himself the moment he desires to reach non-desire? The goal has to be pursued with what is the opposite of that goal. The goal ceases to be a goal when that goal is purposelessness. How could the road to the top of the mountain only lead downwards? At this point various elements in Buddhism contradict each other, desire being necessary to reach ‘desirelessness’.
In the second place a worldview needs to correspond with reality. The Eastern religions that developed on Indian soil, buddhism and hinduism, propose a radical interpretation of reality. Hinduism teaches that everything is divine and that the material world is merely an emanation of that divine, whereas buddhism completely ignores the existence of God. Both religions however consider reality to be an illusion. Part of the deliverance that is sought consists of the insight into this truth. Buddhism is the more radical of the two in that it proposes that ultimate reality is nothingness. What we experience as reality is mere appearance. The buddhist has every right of course to believe this, but is it realistic to assume this to be true? The material world is simply there after all as are our feelings such as love, care, compassion etc. On which grounds are these things denied? Buddhism us something that is so radically different from what our intuition and our senses tell us.
The third test is that of viability of a worldview. In practice the followers of the Buddha come into conflict with the radical concepts of buddhism. To stop desire? Striving for the insight that the individual is nothing more than an illusory collection of components? To desire Nirvana, the state of being extinguished? Is the answer to the suffering in our human existence truly to eliminate existence from the suffering in order that the suffering too won’t exist anymore?
It is no surprise that along with Theravada Buddhism, the more radical and ‘orthodox’ form of Buddhism, a much wider movement developed called Mahayana Buddhism in which idols are worshiped en adherents believe in Boddhisatvas (half enlightened spiritual beings that help man on his way to Nirvana). Very often Buddhism has developed into a typical religion of good works.
Buddha was radical in his practice in life as was his take on it. At least, if the legends about him are historically correct. We may admire him for that. In that regard it is not strange that in our affluent and materialistic West there is interest in the simplicity, the emphasis on virtue and transcendental focus of Buddhism. But in his postmodern and eclectic flirt with Buddhism Western man ignores the elementary contradiction of non-desire through desire and the reality that the Buddhistic worldview cannot be lived out, a fact to which countless Buddhists have testified throughout the past centuries.
Buddhist poet, Kobayashi Issa (1762-1827) went to seek comfort from a teacher after loosing two children. The only comfort he got was that all things, including his two children, are an illusion. He wrote a haiku (Japanese poem) in which his doubt shines through:
The world of dew –
A world of dew it is indeed,
And yet, and yet . . .
Everything is illusory, and yet, and yet…
And yet it is impossible to live with that belief and find comfort in it.
Josh
nickknepper
Kyle
Second thoughts about the influence of religion on public discourse or – even worse – its involvement in politics? Enough of politicians who drag God into the picture (usually to defend their own position)? Not so fast. In the secularized societies of the West mixing religion with state affairs may be anathema. But there were other times. Much of the history of Europe has enfolded under the influence of Christianity. Professor of Church History at Bethel Seminary, Chris Armstrong, provides some evidence from history for the beneficial effects of religion on politics on his blog Grateful To The Dead. Religious motives may help kings, politicians and other rulers realize there is a power above them to which they are accountable. It may help them to wield their authority more scrupulously and provide altruistic motives otherwise hard to find. Read the posts here and here.
