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Welcome to Hillsboro United Methodist Church! If you are searching for deeper meaning in your life that includes lasting relationships, spiritual growth and service to the world you have come to the right place. We offer a safe place in which to ponder important life questions within an atmosphere of support. Our hearts, our minds and our doors are open. We hope that as you visit with us that you will find a place to call home.
Sermon - August 8th, 2010
World Religions: Buddhism
Rev. Gwen Drake
John 17:20-26
Prayer: O Holy One, let us listen with open minds and open hearts. May your grace and love flow freely through us. Amen.
Marcus Borg, an Oregonian, professor, and a Jesus scholar has concluded that Jesus and the Buddha are the two “most remarkable religious figures who have ever lived.” He wrote, “If the Buddha and Jesus were to meet, neither would try to convert the other—not because they would regard such an effort as hopeless, but because they would recognize one another. The parallels between them are impressive.”
Both their teachings on ethical behavior are very similar. They both had life-transforming experiences around thirty years of age, for the Buddha it was his experience of awakening while sitting under a Bo tree. For Jesus, it was his baptism and wilderness experience. Both began their public activity after these experiences. Both began renewal movements within their inherited religious traditions, Hinduism and Judaism. Neither saw themselves as the founder of a new religion. Both were perceived as more than human; and both were given an exalted—even divine—status. Also, you can find in both the Gospels and a Buddhist story their objections to this exalted status. Both the Buddha and Jesus were teachers of wisdom, a world-subverting wisdom that challenged the status quo and taught a way of transformation, a new path of living. They were both teachers of “the way less traveled.” Both Jesus and the Buddha sought to bring a radical shift of perception—a new way of seeing life.
Of course, there is much speculation about why Jesus and the Buddha are so similar. They were not contemporaries. The “historical” Buddha lived about 500 years before Jesus. Some have said it is because Jesus came in contact with Buddhist teachers on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, or that the Buddhist teachings reached the cities of the Jewish homeland. There is some speculation and legend about what Jesus did in his “missing years” where nothing was recorded— about traveling to India or somehow coming into contact with Buddhist teachings.
Or, it could be what Marcus Borg believes—they both had a common spiritual experience, an encounter with the sacred. In other words, they tapped into the same source.
It is said, only two people have provoked the profound question, not “Who are you?” but “What are you?” Jesus and the Buddha. People asked the Buddha, “Are you a god?” “No.” he replied. “An angel?” “No.” “A saint?” “No.” “Then what are you?”
The Buddha answered, “I am awake.” His answer became his title. The root of the word Buddha points to both “to wake up” and “to know.” Buddha not only means the “Enlightened One,” it means the “Awakened One.”
Like Jesus, the historical facts of his life are sketchy. He was born around 535 BCE. It was the time of Confucius in China, King Cyrus in Persia, Pythagoras in Greece, and the major prophets in Israel. He was born in what is now Nepal, near the Indian border. His name was Siddhartha Gautama of the Sakyas, Sakya being his clan name. His father was a king. His upbringing was luxurious. He married a neighboring princess and had a son whom they named Rahula. He was a man with everything, “handsome, inspiring trust, gifted with great beauty of complexion, fair in color, fine in presence, stately to behold.” He was destined to his father’s throne. Despite all of this there welled up in him questions and discontent. The discontent led him to a complete break from his charmed and worldly life. The legend of the Four Passing Sights is one of the most celebrated calls to adventure in literature where Siddhartha learned the reality of sickness, old age, death and suffering. When he turned 29, he embarked on his Great Going Forth in search of enlightenment which he finally found under the famous Bo tree at age 35. It is one of the great moments in human history, when he saw all things as impermanent and ever changing. He saw how we suffer because we wish the world was different than it is. And he saw his suffering wander away. After this profound experience he was silent for days, then he started speaking and teaching, the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path. He taught the path of the elimination of suffering.
For the next 45 years, the Buddha wandered around the subcontinent of India, turning the wheel of dharma and gathering monks and nuns into a motley crew of wandering beggars. They bore witness to what has been described as “history’s most dangerous idea”—that we can solve the human problem of suffering on our own, without the help of a greater power.
One well-known story of the Buddha’s life concerns a man who kept peppering him with all kinds of metaphysical questions like, “Is the world eternal?” and “Are body and soul one and the same?” The Buddha responded with more questions (like Jesus did). “If you were shot with a poisoned arrow, would you waste time and breath by asking who shot the arrow, how tall he was, and of what complexion? Wouldn’t you just pull the arrow out? Buddhism,” he said, “is about removing the arrow of suffering. Speculation only plugs more pain and poison into the skin.”
The Buddha died of food poisoning at age 80. Just before he died, he asked his followers not to grieve for him. Everything must decay and die, he said. His last words were, “Be lamps unto yourselves; work out your own liberation with diligence.”
And Buddhism spread, not because it had a new holy book or a new god. It spread because it had a story, a powerful new story about someone who, by waking up, had solved the problem of suffering and found peace in the midst of suffering world. Today Buddhism is the fourth largest religion after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. What is interesting is Buddhism is declining in places where evangelical Christianity is growing and it is growing rapidly in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States where Christianity is declining.
Buddhism teaches that the human condition of suffering is our karma-fueled cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Rebirth is not desirable because of suffering. Buddhism is about overcoming suffering through achieving nirvana. Nirvana is bliss, a bliss that is beyond description. Nirvana is achieved through letting go of our attachments, our desires.
Now the history of Buddhism like Christianity involves a major skism and two major branches. One way to describe the split is in this story: Four men journeyed across an immense desert. They came upon a compound surrounded with high walls. One of the four, determined to find out what was inside, scaled the wall, reached the top, gave a whoop of delight and jumped over. The second and third did the same. The fourth man scaled the wall, and saw below him an enchanted garden with sparkling streams, pleasant groves, and luscious fruit. Though longing to jump over, he resisted the temptation. He remembered others who were trudging the burning deserts. He climbed back down to the desert side of the wall and devoted himself to directing others to the oasis. The first three became the Theravadin, responsible only for their own enlightenment. The fourth man was the Mahayana who vowed not to desert this world “until the grass itself be enlightened.”
The fourth man would be described as someone who had a crisis of conscience while standing on the threshold of nirvana. “How can I enter into nirvana when so many other beings are suffering?” he asked. And the compassionate answer was, “I cannot.” So rather than renouncing the world, this man or the bodhisattva returned to it, promising to postpone his own final nirvana out of compassion for others.
The Theravadins (the first three men) saw the Buddha as a pathfinder and a human being. The Mahayanists came to see him as eternal and omniscient—a supernatural being who could answer prayers and reward devotion. Also they spoke of many Buddhas. Mark Epstein says it this way, “We need partners in order to realize who we are.” It is the Mahayanists who moved Buddhism into the family of religions. The story of the four men is a very simple way of looking at the differences of the two. Of course, as Buddhism moved through out the world, it changed and evolved and adapted to the cultural differences as well as the interactions between other religions. To wrap your mind around all of the Buddhist practices and differences may be impossible. What might be more fruitful is to look at it through a Zen Buddhist lens that says, “You can’t think your way to nirvana; it comes when you are out of your mind.”
What is at the core of Buddhism is that it is a path that will lead us out of suffering in a world that is full of suffering. And one of those paths is through the teaching of shunyata, or emptiness. This is a very challenging teaching. It goes something like this: Since everything comes and goes in a great chain of cause and effect, nothing is independent; nothing exists on its own. There is no fire without fuel, and fuels such as wood and natural gas cannot even by conceived of as “fuel” without the concept of “fire.” When I posted on Facebook that I was writing a sermon on Buddhism, my colleague who followed me in Dallas, responded, “What is the sound of Gwen writing, and if she is alone, does it make a sound?” That was a very Buddha-like comment. The Heart Sutra says, “Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.” Pema Chodron says, “Emptiness is openness.” The Shunyata teaches emptiness as freedom rooted in experience:
Until we experience it, / Emptiness sounds so Empty./ Once experienced,/ All is empty by comparison.
The Mahayana Buddhists call this an Absolute Truth with a capital T. Everything is empty. There is no distinction between you and me and your best friend; each is radically interdependent; there is no unchanging essence of anything. All is impermanent, all is changing. Everything is empty. The most important thing about an empty bowl is its emptiness.
This teaching of emptiness is often misunderstand by us Western thinkers. We tend to think of it as destructive and pessimistic when it is really about freedom and joy. It offers liberation from suffering. Emptiness liberates us from our attachment to everything, I mean everything—our good ideas we put forth, our judgments, our opinions, as well as objects and people and religion. We tend to cling to things, all kinds of things—we cling to God, to our loved ones, our political party, our nation, our ideology. We believe that is what defines us, empowers us, what makes us worthy and important. What Buddhism teaches is that anything that comes to you secondhand is worse than worthless; trust only what you yourself have seen to be true in your own experience.
The Truth of emptiness short circuits dualism, the taking of sides, the us vs. them and the me vs. the world stuff that we humans are so good at. It also disables our affinity for judging others. When we see something other than what we would do, or think, or worship—we judge, we make a judgment. This judgment comes from a false dualism of right and wrong, true and false, good and bad. Now to us, this may sound like we are saying there is no problem and there is no solution, so what is the point?
What the point is, even us Christians, is the experience of emptiness teaches us that there is nowhere to go, nothing to wait for. This is it. John Updike wrote, Buddhism serves “to give the mundane its beautiful due.”
What we can learn from Buddhism, we can also learn from Jesus, they are not that far apart! We can study the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path and that would be useful. We can look at the problem of suffering and its solutions and all the practices that help lead us to nirvana. But all the studying and knowledge and belief will get you nowhere. Buddhism is more about experience than doctrine. For the Ultimate lies way beyond words—it is in the Buddhas smile and in his silence. Amen.