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Vishvapani |
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Vishvapani |
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Good Morning.
This week started with remembrance of war and each day we've heard stories that turn on clashes of religion and culture from Iraq to university campuses. The modern world's inter-connections are forcing people together as never before. Traditional lifestyles have been transplanted to modern cities; religious believers are encountering secular societies; and tensions are exacerbated by ethic rivalries, inequalities of wealth and differing national interests.
How can we live together in this complex world, and how can religion cease to be part of the problem? As a Buddhist what strikes me as important in the clash of ideologies is not so much the content of our differing beliefs, as the emotions and attitudes that underlie them.
This is as true for Buddhism as for other faiths. It's easy for Buddhists, like western liberals, to feel indignant about fundamentalism and argue that the exclusive claims of theistic religions lead to conflict. Buddhism is indeed a liberal faith, and Buddhists sometimes claim that no wars have been fought in its name. Yet in World War 2, Japan's Imperial forces were cheered by the country's Buddhist establishment, who declared that the war effort was a fight for the Buddha.
By the Buddha's standards, the way in which these leaders had understood his teachings distorted them. A group of spiritual seekers once asked the Buddha how to decide between competing religious claims. He replied, 'Don't believe something because it's part of a tradition, because others believe it, or because it's found in a holy book. And it isn't enough that something sounds convincing, or that you're used to thinking in that way, or even that you've worked it out through reason.'
The test the Buddha proposed was whether a teaching promotes the welfare and happiness of oneself and others. Beliefs that do so, he suggested, spring from kindness and a deep understanding of life. What matters is not whether one believes in God, or life after death, or the Buddha's Enlightenment, but the inner needs that are met by that belief. That may be a need for certainty that's born of fear, or a desire for freedom that accepts life's unknowability and interconnectedness.
Whatever religious tradition asks us to think, in the end, our beliefs are our own, and their character is established by how we hold them. Buddhists, like followers of other faiths, have sometimes been led by an inappropriate attachment to tradition to promote it in ways that create suffering. Religion often teaches that people should serve the ideals it upholds; what we need are religions that truly serve people.
Copyright 2006 BBC