The Struggle for Reality.
In the early morning, the day before Christmas Eve 1984, I had the
most joyful conversation 10.000 metres above the Bay of Bengal with a Tibetan
Geshe, who was on his way back to India from the USA. He had been working there
as a Tibetan Buddhist teacher in various dharma-centres for the last two years,
and he was, as many Tibetan lamas, a very warm and cheerful person. So time
slipped by, and suddenly the plane stood on the runway at New Delhi airport.
Now my dear friend might have been a highly enlightened spiritual
person, but he wasn`t very practically minded, so I helped him at the customs
and immigration control, with all the formalities he had to go through, as a
person holding a refugee passport, and about 1 hour later than all the other
passengers, we made it through. I was just about to head off for the Anglican
Community where I had planned to celebrate Christmas, when one of the two
Western devotees, who had come to meet the Geshe, asked me, if I would like to
celebrate Christmas with them. I must admit, I was a bit taken aback, but they
assured me, that they were having a Christmas celebration the next day, so I
thought "why not?" - after all I was in India now!
It was the most amazing Christmas I have ever had. The house was
decorated with streamers, Christmas cards and a big Christmas tree, and there
was a sign above the entrance saying " Merry Christmas ".
On the evening of the 24th there was silence in the house. Only
Sakyamuni Buddha, the Gospel, an icon of the nativity and I were present in the
gompa. But next day, great celebrations took place. About 80 western Buddhists
and several Indians came to listen to lectures from high lamas, flown in from
Leh and other places, about the significance of the birth of Christ. They
Were
certainly no Christian scholars, but they showed in their lectures and by
their presence, a great respect for their Western disciples' past. " Do not
forget your cultural past ", was the message, " but let it be enlightened by the
Buddhist teaching ".
Over the next few months I became close friends with a number of the
Western Buddhists present that Christmas, and in many ways my expectations were
confirmed. They were in general very serious practitioners of their new faith,
and more aware than the average person in the West. They had searched for
meaning in the world, and now they had found it. They had knocked on " the door
of reality ", and reality had started revealing itself in their minds.
Every single Western person present had his own story to tell about
his way to Buddhism . Their stories were varied. For
some it had been the
attraction of a lama`s personal charisma, for others the loss of a beloved
person or philosophical interest that had been the determinant reason for taking
refuge, and for a
cynical outsider it could sometimes appear as mere attraction
to
something exotic and different. But they shared one thing; they
came from a modern, Western industrial society, and for them Buddhism had given
answers to many of the existential questions they had experienced in their lives
Buddhism had in it`s dharma revealed the reality of life.
Talking with not only serious Westerners in various branches of
Buddhism, but also with people involved in various Hindu practices, has
convinced me, that behind the personal story,
there is a common search; a search
which is rooted in the common experience of the existential questions, emerging
out of 'reality' as perceived by people in Western society today.
It seems that the challenge of Buddhism to the West, lies in the fact
that Buddhism provides the Believer with adequate answers to the specific
existential questions, that Modern Industrial Society may seem to raise.
In the following, I hope to illustrate this supposition with specific
examples of some of the questions raised(a), and the way Buddhism answers them
(b).
1. a.
The philosophical and religious unity in our Western worldpicture,
ended with the Middle Ages, and has never been restored.
Science and philosophy
have since struggled to reach an understanding of reality and Christianity has
gradually lost its decisive importance in the lives of people and society. There
is no longer a generally accepted philosophy or system of beliefs, to give
adequate answers to the questions of life; answers that may not be openly
acknowledged but that never the less shape the way people live. The only
accepted means of finding out answers to such questions, is rational and logical
thinking, which seems in general to have taken the place of belief.
1. b.
Buddhist teaching provides an ahistoric world view, that appears to
explain all the phenomena man meets. In its structure, it is logical, as long as
there is an acceptance of the basic anthropology including karma, cyclic
existence, and the concept of the mind. Moreover the logic of the Buddhist
cosmology and anthropology is fascinating, and if one carries out certain
specific practices to cultivate the mind, it will have some determinable
effects. This provides man with a promise of freedom obtainable within a
logically understood world.
2. a.
In many ways Western society of today is a broken society. There is a
tremendous lack of primary experiences. Man in general doesn`t any longer
experience nature with its change of seasons and its beauty. He lives in towns,
works in centrally heated rooms and only notices the workings of nature by the
fact that
he sometimes experiences the inconvenience of having to change into his winter
clothes! He is cut of from the silence and the experience of wonder in the
encounter with nature. He no longer experiences himself as a created being in
unison with all creation.
2. b.
Buddhist practice builds up a set of inner primary experiences :
through systematic training of the mind, using visualizations, mantric chanting,
rituals with an inner meaning and various other practices an inner world starts
to appear. These inner primary experiences, in a long term perspective, alter
the fundamental conception of reality, and slowly become decisive for values and
truths . The inner world becomes the real world and the basis of life and
reality, because the inner experiences have become the fundamental primary
experiences according to which reality is structured.
3. a.
The sense of community is today mainly defined by work or by common
interests such as, sport, hobbies etc. and exist only as long as the interest is
there. Fellowship is something existing between separated individuals, and deep
feelings of separation are still there in spite of an outside community
structure.
In the West, family-structures have changed dramatically over the last 100
years, and the family is no longer a definite basis for the experience of a
loving, stable community. Broken families in one way or the other are more the
rule than the exception today, and kinship doesn't imply fundamental feelings of
responsibility. Also, with society's acceptance and approval of pre-marital
sexual relationships, words such as faith, commitment and sacrifice have lost
their depth of meaning amongst young lovers. A relationship
is something to use
and throw away when it doesn`t fulfill your personal needs any longer. More than
ever, man today sees himself as an individual who primarily carries the
responsibility for himself and his own life.
The fundamental mechanisms of a capitalist society teach man, that he
will receive according to his yielding capacity, and even in relationships
between people, the law of give and take is present. As one gives, so will one
receive, and you alone are carrying the responsibility for your actions. In
general, modern Western society perceives itself as a society of cause & effect,
and man is also seen as a causal being.
3. b.
The concept of karma is fundamental to the Buddhist universe. The
intimate connection between the present suffering or joy and former actions is
expressed in the firm Buddhist belief in the law of karma. Everything is inter
connected, but each person is responsible for his present situation. This is a
challenge to the individual to cultivate his mind and be aware of how to act,
as
it will have an effect on life in the future. For modern man this sounds
reasonable and is an understandable motivation for starting to make changes in
his behaviour. Each person is responsible for himself• and even with the ideal
of Bodhisattvahood in Mahayana
Buddhism the conquest of karma is an individual
achievement.
Community with other people remains a causatum only, where a
person should aim to act as beneficially as possible.
4. a.
Western society today has no room for suffering. If anything
is
wrong, it has to be treated, either with medicine, psychotherapy or other
treatments that repair whatever is seen to not
function . Where there is
suffering something is 'wrong', and it
is just a question of finding the right
`medicine`. The
tremendous use of psychoactive drugs is an example of
How
suffering is reduced to an unacceptable failure in the human
machine. Modern
man has built a society where it is easy to keep
a safe distance from suffering,
and that way he hasn't learnt to
come to terms with it. He is fundamentally
afraid of suffering,
and shies away from it.
4. b.
The Four Noble Truths were based on Buddha`s overwhelming
experience
of suffering, and show a way out. In one of his talks
in the USA H.H. Dalai Lama
said about the Four Noble
Truths: Suffering is like an illness; the external and internal
conditions
that bring about the illness are the sources of
suffering. The state of cure
from the illness is the cessation of
suffering and of its causes. The medicine
that cures the disease
is true paths.
Buddha's overwhelming experience of suffering,
and the negation of
this experience in Western society are in a
way opposite in their approach to
this fundamental condition of
life, but they lead to the same conclusion.
Suffering is an
illness that needs to be cured.
5. a.
Death is an unavoidable part of life, and everybody has some
indirect
contact with it several times a day through television,
newspapers etc. But
direct confrontation with death is very rare,
because real death remains hidden
in hospitals, homes for retired
people and other institutions, so that it is
safely outside our
world of direct apprehension. No immediate
interpretation
concerning death is to be found in the general values of
society,
and there is no such thing as a living myth that gives hope of
an
existence after death. Man desperately tries to hide from death,
and never
lets it come close to him emotionally. Death usually
remains just another murder
in a Sherlock Holmes film; not death
as my final destination in life.
5. b
Seen in this perspective, the idea of rebirth comes as
something
of a relief, because if man is to be born again after
he dies, death isn`t
real. It loses it definitive character by
the fact that there is another
chance. This positive view of
rebirth occurs because the fear of cyclic
existence never seems
to penetrate into the mind of Westerners until they have
dealt
quite deeply with Buddhist philosophy and practice.
6. a.
Urban life, with it`s constant stream of external
impressions, the
emphasis on a person's outer appearance and the
urge to perpetually `do
something` creates a constantly busy mind in modern man. He can no longer
find peace inside himself, and
is in constant need of outer stimulation. He
has become a
consumer of impressions and experiences. The simplicity of life
is
lost. Sometimes in moments of being busy, man experiences
himself as ”a
spectator to his own life.• It passes by, he wants
to take the controlling role,
but he feels that life has become
unreal. He stands outside life and watches it
passing by like a
film.
The massive stream of impressions he gets from watching
television
for several hours every day, supports the experience
that reality is a constant
stream of events, happening outside
himself. It becomes increasingly difficult
to feel the reality
of the human suffering he sees outside in the world, be it
hunger
in Africa or a person on the street having a heart(r)attack.
6.b
Meditation in general aims at restructuring the busy,
Freely
associating mind to make it calm. The cultivation of equanimity
is an
essential part of meditation, aiming at a state of non
attachment to all
things of the physical and psychical world.
One general technique used in
various ways in Buddhist meditation
is the cultivation of awareness ie.
training oneself to act as
'witness' to phenomena occurring both in the outside
and the
inside world. This 'awareness' should become the natural state of
being
at all times, and help the meditator to perceive the true
nature of ”all•
phenomena, either as emptiness ( shunya c.f.
Madhyamika School) or as
consciousness (c.f. yogacara School).
To a Westerner, the idea of calming down his busy mind is
very
attractive, because of the mentally stressful life he often
leads. Techniques
that enable the person to step outside the
world and become a non attached
witness are seen as a
confirmation of the state, already experienced by modern
man,
ie. of being a spectator to life not an active participant, but
one who
stands back and watches from the side lines. There doesn't
seem to be much
difference between being a witness to the physical
world and to the mental
continuum.
7.a.
Life in Western society is centered around growth. There is
much
talk of the growth of both society and of the individual.
The economy must grow
to keep society going, and individuals must
grow in skill and knowledge, to keep
up with society. The
development of the science of psychology highlights this
growth potential in man. He has become a being of infinite
possibilities for
growth in both wealth and personality. But it
is up to him to find a way of
fulfilling this potential, and this
puts upon him a feeling of enormous
responsibility for his own
destiny.
7.b.
Buddhism appears to have techniques which assure constant
personal
growth, and the 'initiation' system of Tibetan Buddhism
plays an especially
important role in providing a concrete means
of measuring ones own growth.ie.
one can see how far one has
progressed, by the level of initiation that has been
reached. The
path towards liberation is a growth process and Western
adherents
to Buddhism tend to evaluate one another according to their
stage of
development.
8. a.
Finally I shall mention the tremendous importance of the
word
” energy• in Western society today. The word energy can be used in
almost
any connection, where there are forces at work which are
not fully understood,
and it makes sense to people, because it is
a word used by science. Nobody has
any strict definition of
energy, nor can it be seen, but still it is a central
word used
in connection with various phenomena in both society
and
individuals.
8.b.
Energy plays an important role in the various forms of
Tantric
Buddhism, and the use of energy manipulation important in the path towards
liberation. This is not the place
to go deeper into this aspect of Buddhism but
there is no doubt
that the possible manipulation of energy makes sense to a
person
from a modern Western society, because it fits in so neatly with
the use
of language in the scientific understanding of the world
that he has grown up
with. That a person can generate and benefit
from energy changes within his own
psyche, is quite easy to
accept in a society where energy is the cause of
material
progress.
This discussion of Buddhism in relation to modern Western
man, is by
no means an exclusive, finite analysis, but it
certainly highlights some of the
experiences in life of people in
the West, and shows how Buddhism provides
apparent solutions to
their many 'problems'. Many people of course, can cope
with life
in the West, by simply avoiding reflection. They prefer to
hide
safely in their own `busyness` without asking any
existential questions, and
thus to live in an existential vacuum.
They don't have, and don't appear to
seek any meaning in life.
But some people, and a growing number it seems to
me, pass in
one way or another from this basically non reflecting life into
a
search for meaning.
Not only confessing Buddhists, such as the ones present at
the
Christmas celebration in Delhi, are searching for reality in
the Buddhist
dharma, but there are also a lot of New Age groups
and non confessing seekers
influenced by Buddhist doctrines. The
reason for this is simple. Buddhism as
shown, provides a seeking
Western person with answers that seem to be adequate
to the
existential problems / experiences in life. In it's analysis of
life,
it is very close to how life is perceived by modern man in
Western society. It
ultimately seems to lead towards an interpretation of reality that appears more real than the reality
presented in
traditional Christianity.
In my opinion the real challenge to Western culture in
general and
Christianity in particular, doesn't come from Buddhism
itself, but from the way
the Buddhist doctrines are used by non Buddhist New Age groups. A person who
really follows the teaching
of Buddha must devote his whole life to his faith,
and as he
plunges deeper into the practices and their results, he
often
experiences a great crisis in his personal identity . It requires
a lot
of courage and time to be a practicing Buddhist. Most
people are too lazy for
this and haven't the courage it takes to
follow the path to such depths. They
get fascinated by Buddhist
ideas and use some aspects of Buddhist teaching to
make up a frame
of understanding of the world which suits them. The
Buddhist
views are not usually presented in the form of teachings of the
dharma,
but as a part of the New Age ideology, that is to be
found in many contexts. So
people influenced by Buddhism often
come nowhere near the depths at which the
personal identity is
shaken, but instead they build up a strong personality
using
Buddhist ideas to support their experience of the reality they
live in.
It is in this way that Buddhism might not be a religion
growing in
numbers of confessing devotees, but certainly a
religion with a growing
influence on peoples' understanding of
reality as it is seen in the West.
A reflection on Christianity today.
My Buddhist friends in the dharma center that Christmas posed
many
questions to me as a Christian, and I tried to answer the
best I could, without
trying to hide my own search within the
Christian Church. We talked about many
things, but the general
message I understood from them was, that they didn`t
feel the
Church had anything to offer. Of course seen from my
Christian
experience of reality, that isn't true, but such statements must
be
taken seriously and must lead to self criticism amongst us who
consider
ourselves a part of the Church. The following is meant as
a few personal
reflections on this subject.
Western society is built on the Christian tradition, and the
social
structures in our welfare society reflect to a large
extent Christian values.
But Christian cultural roots and values
don't make a society Christian. Unless a
society is permeated by
people expressing their faith in an active Christian
life through
the Christian communities, society remains Christian by name
only.
Most Christians in the West tend to be part time
Christians. That means going
to church on Sundays or special
occasions such as Christmas or Easter, and the
rest of the time
they feel their identity shaped by their work and the values
of
the secular society, instead of by their faith.
It doesn't make much sense from a modern rational point of
view, that
the historical events of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus were unique and brought salvation to
mankind. Jesus might
be considered "a Great Man " and "a good
example", but Easter isn't ascribed
an overwhelming significance
that makes the heart take primacy over the rational
mind. That is
why the sign of the Church as the centre of a loving community
has
become so very essential for modern man`s understanding of
the `good news`.
The Holy Spirit is God operating in His Church, and the
Spirit of God
is not an omnipresent power to be manipulated
whenever it pleases man, as is,
for example prana in Tantrism,
but God Himself being present whenever people
dare to live in the
love of Christ. But without a living Church that is
sensitive
towards the workings of the Spirit, God's Spirit will die, and
man
will be left alone with the suffering of impermanence. He
will experience the
world in the way Buddhism has interpreted
it.
In my opinion the Lutheran Churches, are amongst those that
suffer
most deeply from the inability to express what it means
to the people of God,
that Jesus Christ is Lord. They have in
general become dull, and have lost the
basic religious element of
searching, through which the faithful slowly
discovers the depths
of his faith. The sermon much too often merely presents a
set of
answers, and instead of being called to come closer towards the
depth of
the sacramental presence of Christ in his Church, man is
called to become a `big
Ear`.
From the pulpit the congregation is told about the Grace of
God
towards man, but unfortunately salvation by the Grace of God
has much too often
become merely a salvation from sin . The Grace
of God is not understood as a
Grace into a life in Christ, where
every Christian by Grace is set free from
the bondage of sin to a
life centered around love towards his brothers, sisters
and fellow
creation by utilizing the gifts that God has given specifically to
him.
The sense of mystery has been lost in the Lutheran tradition.
It
seems to take the incarnation, resurrection and salvation for
granted, and to
see them as such simple issues, that they can be
understood by the intellect.
The intuitive side of man, whereby
he feels the presence of the mystery in life
is ignored. Man
doesn`t get a deep sacramental understanding of what it means
to
live as a created being for God together with all creatures.
In other religions the rituals are important in providing this
approach towards
the mystery, but rituals in Lutheran services
don't create the atmosphere that
man needs in order to open up
his inner most being towards the Presence of God.
They have
become stiff ceremonies, with little possibility for man to
express
devotion. They do not provide the element of silence in
worship in which man can
stop and look at his everyday life from
a new and enlightening perspective.
The Church in Denmark is not, in the consciousness of the
ordinary
person, the place where his experience of life can be put into a new and vital perspective. It has become an institution
of `rite de
passage.
If the Church is to remain alive, it must not avoid
confrontation
with the essential questions about life and death
as man today meets them. Our
Christian religious language has
been so distorted, and more often than not it
gives the average
person strongly negative associations, rendering it almost
useless
when it comes to explaining what Christianity says about reality.
Only
through a religious search created inside the Church can this
be rediscovered in
Christianity, because the time of superficial,
ready made answers to the
questions about reality has passed.
Only a living Christian spirituality can
provide such answers
containing the depth of truth.
Buddhism is not a threat to Christianity, but a big
challenge,
which might force the Church to look at a number of
important questions
concerning the nature of reality for man
today. In the time of the Fathers the
encounter with paganism was
important for the development of theology, and through reflections
on the
questions posed by paganism, the Church found it's own
identity. The process of
creating theology contextual to its
historical setting is still going on, but it
is more a question of
doing theology today than making new dogmatic
statements. In a
pluralistic society a theological statement is just
another
statement, but the example of a living faith carries the truth of
love
from which the Christian reality springs.
It is Autumn outside my window and the trees have taken the
most
beautiful shades of red, yellow and many different browns.
From the
newly ploughed fields the fine scent of leaf mould
reaches my nostrils; a scent
sharpened by the freshly fallen
drops of gentle rain. Soon the sunset will bring
an end to another
day, and dusk will blur the sharp lines from the day's work.
ANDERS LAUGESEN
