What are the needs among Christian believers that you think Buddhism is addressing? Buddhism does not affirm the existence of God. How can it have significance for a theistic religion like Christianity? So for me now when I say the word God, what I image, what I feel, thanks to Buddhism, is the interconnecting spirit -- this ever-present spirit, this ever-present, interconnecting energy that is not a person, but is very personal, that this is the mystery that surrounds me, that contains me, and which I am in contact with in the Eucharist, in liturgies, and especially in meditation.
When one looks at, first of all, the language that we Christians use to talk about the mystery of Jesus the Christ, perhaps the two primary words that we use -- or doctrines that we attest to -- are Jesus is Son of God and Jesus is Savior.
Now those two terms, Son of God, Savior, are beliefs. These expressions are our attempt to put into words what is the mystery of God. All of our words are our efforts to try to say in words what can never be fully said in words. This goes straight back to St. Thomas Aquinas and to my teacher, Karl Rahner. All of our language is symbolic. So when the Catholics say that Jesus came to save us, we are not saying just that? Again, to use the Buddhist image that is often used, our words are like fingers pointing to the moon -- not the moon itself.
Words can never be fully identified with the reality that they are indicating. This has been perhaps one of the key elements that I and many others have learned from Buddhism: the importance of silence. It is in some form of meditation we recognize that the mystery of God is something that cannot be appropriated simply by thought.
This fits into our Catholic sacramental theology. We say that every sacrament contains matter and form. So the matter in the sacrament of silence is our breath, being aware of our breath, being one with our breath, doing nothing else but breathing. A number of times in the book, you quote Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk. You write, echoing Nhat Hanh, that in order to make peace, we have to be peace.
Is that right? So we have been activists throughout our lives -- peace activists, social activists. But when I look back at that activism I am aware of how so often our actions were filled with a certain verbal violence. We had to resist, we had to confront the evil structures.
And there are evil structures, but something was missing for me. I said to him during this retreat that we were going down to El Salvador to try to do something to stop the terrible death squads. That is the experience that Buddhism calls us to, this deep, personal experience of our interconnectedness with all beings, even those whom we have to oppose as oppressors, as perpetrators of evil. Because among the key aspects of Buddhism, we find insistence that knowledge must be gained through personal experience rather than reliance on the authority of sacred texts or the teachings of avowed masters; because its orientation is empirical rather then theoretical; and because it rejects any conception of absolutes.
This teaching is widely and appropriately seen as supporting free inquiry and an absence of rigid dogma, an attitude entirely open to empirical verification and thus, consistent with science. Only thus should they be accepted, but not merely out of respect for me. On balance, it seems reasonable and appropriate that Buddhism be viewed in the West as comparatively free of irrationality, superstitious belief, and stultifying tradition — but this generalization must nonetheless be taken with a grain of salt, noting that in much of the world, Buddhism involves daily ritual devotions, belief in amulets and other special charms, and even the presupposition that the man, Siddhartha Gautama, was a divine being.
There are, I regret to note, Buddhist traditions that insist on retaining an array of nonsensical hocus-pocus and abracadabra altogether at odds with any scientific tradition worthy of the name. I have no difficulty, however, describing Mr. Tenzin Gyatso born Lhamo Dondrub , as the fourteenth Dalai Lama, so long as this means that he is the fourteenth person to hold that position, in the same sense that Barack Obama is the forty-fourth president of the United States, with no implication that he is in any way the reincarnation of George Washington!
The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. David P. Barash received his Ph. He was involved in the early development of sociobiology as a scientific discipline, and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and professor of psychology at the University of Washington. After a quest lasting two years, Josaphat found Barlaam living in the mountains and joined him there in a life of asceticism until his death.
Barlaam and Josaphat were included in the calendars of saints in both the Western and Eastern churches. By the 10th century, they were included in the calendars of the Eastern churches, and by the end of the 13th century in those of the Catholic church. In the book we know as The Travels of Marco Polo , published around the year , Marco gave the West its first account of the life of the Buddha.
In , an astute editor of the Travels noticed the similarity. It was, however, only in the 19th century the West became aware of Buddhism as a religion in its own right. As a result of editing and translating of the Buddhist scriptures dating from the first century BCE from the s onwards, reliable information about the life of the founder of Buddhism began to grow in the West.
Then the West came to know the story of the young Indian prince, Gautama , whose father — fearful his son would forsake the world — kept him secluded in his palace. Like Josaphat, Gautama eventually encountered old age, disease and death. And, like Josaphat, he left the palace to live an ascetic life in quest of the meaning of suffering. After many trials, Gautama sat beneath the Bodhi tree and finally attained enlightenment, thereby becoming a Buddha.
Only in did this new-found knowledge in the West about the life of the Buddha lead inescapably to the realisation that, in his guise as Saint Josaphat, the Buddha had been a saint in Christendom for some years. How did the story of the Buddha become that of Josaphat?
The process was long and complicated.
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