FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
nationthailand

Seeds of enlightenment sprout in mud of religious superstition

Seeds of enlightenment sprout in mud of religious superstition

Re: “PC has outlawed truth and strangled liberty” and “Sermon on Buddhism mistakes the nature of religion”, Have Your Say, April 5 and yesterday.

The silly old question, “Is Buddhism a religion?” has come up in this column. JC Wilcox thinks it isn’t; Paul of Khon Kaen maintains that it’s a religious philosophy. Paul has it right: Buddhism is both a philosophy and a religion. But I deplore the tendency of both writers to make broad claims without citing evidence. 
Like JC, many intellectuals would like to portray the Buddha as modern, rational and scientific, a philosopher whose thinking eschewed the supernatural, much like Bertrand Russell. But there are at least two beliefs in Buddhism that belong to the realm of the supernatural, with insufficient empirical evidence to establish them as universally acknowledged facts. They are reincarnation and the law of karma. 
A recent letter to this column asked who or what set up these two mechanisms. Apparently nobody set them up. If true, they are just part of the natural law woven into the warp and weft of the universe, like the laws of thermodynamics. 
Reincarnation and karma are not the only supernatural elements that have been embedded in Buddhism, apparently from the very beginning. Buddhism was born into an Indian, post-Vedic thought-world in which both beliefs were prominent. Also, the earliest Buddhist texts refer to post-Vedic deities (Sanskrit deva, Thai thewadaa); and if a system of thought has deities in it, that suggests that it is a religion. 
These deities persuade the Buddha to be reborn when he is still dwelling in the Tushita heaven; they rejoice at his conception, monitor his birth, and even receive him in a golden net. (Henry Clarke Warren, “Buddhism in Translations”, pp 38-46; from the introduction to the Jataka.) Subsequently they intervene periodically in the Buddha’s life to nudge the plot along, much as the Greek gods do in the Iliad and the Odyssey. 
It appears that the Buddha’s earliest followers, if not the sage himself, believed in these deities and attributed supernatural powers to them. At least they gave them lip service, possibly to avoid upsetting the existing social order. The Buddha himself seems to have regarded them with a sort of avuncular indulgence, an amused, ironic detachment. He may not have believed in them at all. 
Early Buddhism did not regard these deities as omnipotent and eternal; and when their good karma, which had propelled them to godhood in the first place, was exhausted, they were thought to fall back onto the wheel of rebirth just like everybody else. They functioned more like demigods than like actual deities.
The Buddhist texts always portray them as subordinate to the Buddha. They beg him for favours and submit to his commands. After his enlightenment, the Buddha realised that his doctrine was subtle and hard to understand; he initially resolved to keep it to himself. But the deity Brahma Sahampati begged him to teach it, arguing that at least some people would understand and benefit from it; and the Buddha consented. (Narada Mahathera, “The Buddha and His Teachings”, Colombo, 1980, pp 61-64; Majjhima Nikaya, Ariyapariyesana Sutta, No 26.) If we believe this text, without that deity’s benevolent intervention there would be no Buddhism today.
So Buddhism is both a philosophy and a religion. Here in Thailand it is most emphatically a religion. We have temples, rituals, monks performing the functions of priests, devotees praying to the Buddha as to a god, images, amulets, and a host of superstitions. (“Give me the winning lottery number!”) Of course, this is popular Buddhism; intellectuals will frown and scowl. 
But who would dare claim that the Buddha, with his wonderful compassion for suffering sentient beings, would deny ordinary people the comfort that a few tawdry superstitions can give to their dreary lives? One man’s superstitions are another man’s truths; and in the history of human thought, superstitions have often infected the foundations of later, more elevated philosophies. The thinking of Meister Eckhart is one of the loftiest flowerings of Christianity; but Christianity grew out of primitive roots that included beliefs in demons, a flat earth, and the creation of the world in six days. Beautiful lotuses can grow out of the mud. So don’t worry about the mud; wait for the lotuses. 
Ye Olde Theologian  

nationthailand