Man Is Dead; What Is The Way Ahead?

Is Buddhism as far removed from what Siddhartha lived and taught as Christianity has become from what Jesus lived and taught? 

Buddhism is a godless religion with which I have much sympathy, but little simpatico. I’m not using the word godless in a derogatory way. The belief in a paternalistic, patriarchal, all-knowing God -- in other words, monotheism -- is a dying remnant from civilization’s childhood that has become the biggest stumbling block to individual and communal spiritual maturity in the 21st century.

Indeed, Christianity has become so degraded in the United States that evangelicals believe the devil’s own is the second coming. And Judaism has become so debased in Israel that many see it as synonymous with the Zionism of the Jewish state that’s slaughtering thousands of children in Gaza in the name of “self defense.” 

Christianity started out by turning the failure of Jesus’ mission into the belief that “he redeemed us by dying on the cross for our sins.” It has ended up venerating the power and nihilism of the devil.

Buddhism didn’t begin with the sacrifice but with the illumination of its founder. In the centuries after Siddhartha’s death, a creative explosion occurred in the region, unlike anything that has occurred before or since in the world. However neither Jesus nor Siddhartha would recognize today the religions founded in their name. 

It is no coincidence that both sides in the “clash of civilizations” hold the same core belief. Despite all the talk of shared Abrahamic roots, the belief in one God by Christians and Muslims is the most divisive idea that the human mind has ever fabricated. Monotheists don’t venerate God, but the projected power of the human mind.

Isn’t the Allah that the terrorists praised as they flew jetliners into the World Trade Towers the same God that George W. Bush believed supported him in his invasion of Iraq? Neither mass murder had anything to do with God, but erupted, like the wars today, out of the distillation of collective darkness (aka evil) expressed through its worst conduits: Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ayatollah Khamenei. 

Though there is no separate Supreme Being, there is cosmic intelligence. The question is, does it care about what is happening to the Earth and on the Earth? 

There is no creator in Buddhism, and therefore theologians often refer to it as a philosophy, rather than a religion. With that aspect of Buddhism I feel affinity, though it also marks the point of my divergence. 

Buddhism has no adequate philosophy of evil, and has been powerless to confront, in the region of its birth, the evils embodied in the Chinese government’s strangulation of the Tibetan people and culture. Not that Christianity has an adequate explanation of the man-made phenomenon of evil, much less Catholicism, with its made-for-the-big-screen rituals of exorcism.

Rather than focus on any particular expression of collective darkness, serious people must ask: Can evil be dispelled sufficiently to no longer rule human consciousness and the world?

Whatever the degree of enlightenment of past and present founders of the various Buddhist lineages, the 5th century BCE religious explosion ignited by Siddhartha Gautama no longer holds any sway in our mad 21st century world.

That’s apparent in countries where Buddhism has been transplanted, such as the United States. Despite claims to the contrary, Buddhist spirituality and philosophy, which organically emerged in living Eastern cultures, cannot be grafted onto dead Western ones.

In America, widespread acceptance of Buddhist ideas has not prevented the darkness and deadness of this culture from becoming even more pervasive at home and abroad. Indeed, despite Buddhism’s core mission to awaken people from “the sleep of ignorance,” more people are sleepwalking than ever. With few individual exceptions, Buddhism has pierced no further than clichés about karma and the yoga/wellness craze. 

Sadly, many who have embraced Buddhism have simply added another layer of cunning avoidance to the hellish cultural conditions of America, where parents worry about their children getting shot at school and mass shootings barely make the news anymore. 

A reader expressed the view, common among American Buddhists, that “there have been many creations and destructions of the universe…the universe has gone through such perils as we are seeing on earth many times.” Such a perspective carries detachment to the point of reductio ad absurdum. It fails to make the distinction between compassionate indifference and comfortable apathy.

Perversely comforting notions like infinite-cycles-afford-infinite-chances allow adherents to remove themselves from the world, while believing they’re rising above it. This false practice of detachment works well for many in our hyper-individualized culture, grafting cunning indifference onto unexamined roots of egoism, while supposedly “transcending the smaller self.” 

American Buddhists thereby often express a cleverly concealed self-ignorance, uttering nonsense like “I see the light and darkness in a large overview.”

If the Buddha had practiced that type of detachment, he would not have attained enlightenment and ignited an inner revolution in India. In any case, the eightfold path has splintered eight thousand ways in the East and West, and transplanted Buddhism has made no difference in the trajectory of man.

There is no method or systems for illumination, and traditions have become obstructions to awakening. The creative explosion ignited by Siddhartha 2500 years ago was a regional phenomenon. The many branches of Buddhism, not to mention the mad rush toward materialism in the last few decades, have all but extinguished the original flame.

Even so, spiritually sensitive people say there are still places in Hindu nationalistic India where one can catch a whiff of Buddhism’s original perfume. Be that as it may, liberation from content-consciousness is impeded by tradition and ritual.

Through undivided, passive observation, awareness grows into unwilled attention, and attention effortlessly burns away the accretions of thought, cleansing and renewing the brain. That’s the wellspring in the individual for a global inner revolution that changes the disastrous course of humankind. 

Martin LeFevre

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