Fourth Universalist Society in the City of New York

August 26: “If You Meet the Buddha…” - led by Rev. Jill Bowden

If you see the Buddha on the road, the old story says, kill it. Not a message those of us with Judeo-Christian roots are comfortable hearing if we equate the Buddha with a God-like holiness that is apart and above the corporeal life in which we live our lives. I do not presume to know what Siddhartha Gautauma was thinking when he sat under his Bodhi tree telling his disciples his vision of the holy, but I have been taught that it had nothing to do with transcendence, the separation of all that is holy from all that is immanent, all that is of this earth, and everything to do with one’s very personal advancement toward one’s own God-ness. In Prince Gautauma’s vision, all that is holy is contained within each individual, each creature, each mortal being on a path toward becoming a realized and enlightened life form in touch with all levels of existence, each one a potential Bodhisattva, a potential Buddha.

We Unitarian Universalists value the teachings of world religions, it is one of the stated sources of our living tradition, which would have us be “grateful for the religious pluralism which enriches and ennobles our faith and inspires us to expand our vision.” But some would say that we are engaging in syncretism, taking the parts that suit us, the parts that we like and leaving out the rest. When we incorporate liturgical elements, teachings and principles from other religions is it not a legitimate form of worship? Is it only taking what we call the 3F’s – food, festivals and fashion – without assuming the burdens, the trials and the history of the other faith? Is it respectful admiration or is it sacred envy? Do we pick and choose to make our religion which as Theodore Parker asks us to do goes everywhere, like sunshine? Is such a sunny perspective a true belief or do we need to hunker down within the traditions into which we were born? That is the advice the Dalai Lama often gives to persons who say they want to become his disciples. He advises them to find that which they seek inside the culture from which they come, and to find their path within that environment. One might hear that as rejection, but who would believe that from one who is a universal symbol of faithful living? Might we not hear a restatement of the Buddha’s message – kill the Buddha you meet on the road?

Many of us who self-identify as Unitarian Universalists come from other religious traditions, many of us were born into families that worshipped in churches, mosques or temples that hold to beliefs that are outside our personal sensibilities, and we chose to come out – or come in – to the practice of Unitarian Universalism. In a recent article on Buddhism and syncretism for the Long Island Council of Churches newsletter, Sheila Sussman defines those who choose their own religious belief systems as “self-identifiers;” disciplined adherents who are committed to their practice of Buddhist rituals and vows, over and against those whom she calls “sympathizers,” persons who accept only those practices consistent with their own self-image. Apply this to your own spiritual beliefs and practices – which are you? Do you embrace the practices, the purposes and the principles of Unitarian Universalism, or do you choose only those parts that are consistent with your beliefs about yourself? Where do you look for enlightenment, for solace and support for your spiritual fulfillment? Inside? Or outside? Remember the dancer from “A Chorus Line” who said, “I reach right down to the middle of myself…” to find the inspiration and the strength to achieve her goals? This is the location of the Buddha-self – right down in the middle of yourself, the inner knowledge that what is true for you, what is central to your being, what is deepest and best and undivided from all that you hold most dearly. In a recent sermon from this pulpit, Rev. Ed Bolella told the story of the Hassidic Rabbi who said that if a person was waiting for God to answer her prayers that he would, not tell that person to wait upon God, but act as if there was no God. Shocking idea to a person of theistic beliefs, but coming from a rabbi, one cannot believe that the rabbi meant to say that God was not present, or even that God is dead. The rabbi located the place of belief in one’s own actions in the actions of the believer – reach right down to the middle of yourself, and kill the Buddha you meet on the road.

When we meet the Buddha, what is it to each of us? Is the Buddhist teacher’s warning against false prophets? That seems unlikely coming from a practitioner of a faith that has no theistic enter. On another level, then, how might the use of practices from other religions seem like cultural misappropriation?

Many of us attach another descriptive word to UU when describing our personal spiritual practice – I call myself a Unitarian Universalist theistic pagan, for example. My individual practices are incorporated into the fabric of my daily life. They manifest my deepest beliefs in living in a way that is present to each moment, that is mindful of all beings and circumstances, that respects the earth and all things and beings that rise from it.

The call to worship that I hear inside myself means that the principles by which I choose to live are located in some part of me that I cannot identify – but the power definitely resides within my own being. There is a Japanese concept that locates sacred principles of faith either inside or outside the self. “Joriki” is the name for power manifested from within, “toriki” is the description for power that is located outside the self. Both are methods for describing accountability, responsibility and freedom that are in some way part of all religious practices. When I was unable to speak religious language I would dismiss such differences as ‘foreign’ and ‘not part of ‘us.’ Now I see that a Jewish principle called tikkun olam is no less a part of my own faith tradition than it is of Judaism. Tikkun olam means that we are called to repair the brokenness of our world. It is not a principle unique to Judaism, it just happens to be an excellent description of a principle that we Unitarian Universalists embrace as part of the social responsibility of our liberal religious faith. There is an even larger principle at work here, however: the motivation we gain from the practice of our faith may actually be more important than that which we have faith in. This is the hinge on which we may reveal our understanding of self-identification: it may not matter whether we locate our sacred principles inside ourselves, “joriki,” or outside, “toriki.” What matters is that we are called to repair the brokenness of our world – we are called to tikkun olam. The motivation may actually be more important than the faith – it matters more what you do with what you believe than that you believe it.

You might guess that significant amounts of time are spent in seminary training on exploring the location of one’s own beliefs, ideals, principles and faith. In early days I explained my own sunny and outward-looking faith as an unshakable belief in serendipity and synchronicity – that the right things would happen, that we are always in the right place, no matter how it looks or feels, and that things would come out right in the end. My teacher looked a little shocked, and asked, “but what about ambiguity and paradox?” and I felt my growing edges expand a bit – I could not ignore that what happened did not always feel right, that what was right for me might not be right for someone else, and that one person’s victory often times results in another person’s defeat. Life is like that – serendipity and synchronicity are only a part of life, ambiguity and paradox are there, too.

What, after all, can we do with grief and sadness – we cannot say that they are among the pleasant parts of life, they are located within us, but if we are to live through pain, then we must find a way of dealing with it, a way toward comfort and relief.

Sadness and depression are normal and extreme manifestations of a biological loss response inherent in all human beings, and in many other species as well, animal behaviorists teach us. Sadness, as John Cloud remarked in a recent issue of Time magazine, is “a brutal economic response useful for gaining social support, protecting us from aggression, and teaching us that some behaviors need changing.” He uses the example of being sad for getting fired because you continually came late to work. “We are sometimes meant to suffer emotional pain so we can learn to make better choices,” Cloud says.

Metaphysically speaking, sadness is a response to being separated from ‘all that is,’ that is, from the ocean of love and life that some call God. We have these experiences, metaphysically speaking, of emotional and physical life only because we are separate, but the separation, it adds (most confusingly to some,) is only an illusion. If we are part of the one-ness, then our experiences serve a purpose – they allow us to be deeply and organically aware of that which life presents to us, and in our awareness we know our hearts to be awakened, and we become conscious.

So if you see the Buddha – kill it. That is, take that which you see that is separate, that is apart, that is foreign, that is alien, that is unacceptable, take it back into yourself – become one with it and know yourself to be whole and healed. Then go and heal the world – if you know this, way deep down in the middle of yourself, it is all you can do. Blessed be and amen.

Please join me in a spirit of meditation and prayer:
Light of light, love of love, God of many names, precious life – we look to the most and to the least for the answers to life, and we often find ourselves in ambiguity and paradox much more often than in serendipity and synchronicity, but still we look. We pray deeply for well-being and for peace for every existing creature; we pray that they attain inward peace and awareness. We pray with limitless desire for freedom from despair, from deceit, from apathy and from antipathy. We pray with all the force of our beings to devote our talent, our time and our treasure to acting from the very best of ourselves for the best possible good for all beings. So may it be. Amen.
Reading:

Buddha, Karen Armstrong
p. 115

“The Buddha believed that a selfless life would introduce men and women to [Nirvana.] Monotheists would say that it would bring them into the presence of God. But the Buddha found the notion of a personalized deity too limiting, because it suggested that the supreme Truth was only another being. [Nirvana] was neither a personality nor a place like Heaven. The Buddha always denied the existence of any absolute principle or Supreme Being, since this could be another thing to cling to, another fetter and impediment to enlightenment. Like the doctrine of the Self, the notion of God can also be used to prop up and inflate the ego. The most sensitive monotheists in Judaism, Christianity and Islam would all be aware of the danger and would speak of God in ways that are reminiscent of the Buddha’s reticence about [Nirvana.] They would also insist that God was not another being, that our notion of “existence” was so limited that it was more accurate to says that God did not exist, and that [God] was Nothing. But on a more popular level, it is certainly true that “God” is often reduced to an idol created in the image and likeness of [God’s] worshippers. If we imagine God to be a being like ourselves writ large, with likes and dislikes similar to our own, it is all too easy to make [God] endorse some of our most uncharitable, selfish and even lethal hopes, fears and prejudices. This limited God has thus contributed to some of the worst religious atrocities in history. The Buddha would have described belief in a deity who gives a seal of sacred approval to our own selves as “unskillful”: it could only embed the believer in the damaging and dangerous egotism that he or she was supposed to transcend. Enlightenment demands that we reject any such false prop.”