The Zennist: The unholy birth of nothingness

The religion the West has today—all of it—was born from an unholy religious suppression going as far back as Roman Emperor Constantine who wanted “one God, one religion." In Constantine’s Rome, the temples and shrines of the pagans were desecrated and demolished. Many of the works of the pagans were thrown into bonfires. Even the Christian Gnostics suffered the same fate as did the pagans. As we might suspect, even the name “pagan” was coined by those who both hated and feared the old Mystery religions and, on their once sacred ground, erected the new churches of Christianity.

After this sacrilege, with nothing opposing the new Christianity born in Nicaea, the notion of spirit died as well. Religion, subsequently, was made into a spiritless shell by the victors. Sadly, it still remains this way. Pertinent to this, Elaine Pagels, an authority on early Christianity, reminds us, “It is the winners who write history—their way.” She is certainly correct. Those who helped destroy the pagan religions wrote a new, revised history, not to mention the fact, they also created a new religion. This dark legacy continues. It is orthodox to believe there is no real spirit, or ways of accessing it, called by the pagans, the “inner mystery.” “Spirit” is just a figure of speech, in other words.

When Buddhism was taken up by the West, it was put into the hands of this dark orthodoxy made up of clergy, philosophers, and those in academia. With Buddhism, the West believed they had found a truly unique unspiritual religion that taught, among other things, humans have no soul. Without even reviewing much of the Buddhist canon, they were quite sure that Buddhism taught, essentially, nothingness. It is not surprising that we find one of Western orthodoxy's greatest philosophers, Hegel, saying of Buddhism:

“Nothingness [Nichts], which the Buddhists have made the beginning principle for everything and the final goal and the ultimate end of everything, is this same abstraction.”

To be sure, with having a mere shell for a religion which altogether lacks an inner mystery, it is easy to project, unconsciously, the nothingness of one’s own religion, as Hegel did, onto another religion like Buddhism. What else might account for calling Buddhism nothingness or seeing it as a form of Indian nihilism except projection which is a defensive mechanism by which to protect oneself from some underlying horror that has been long repressed? And speaking of repression, didn’t Mother Teresa once confess, “I am told God loves me, and yet the reality of the darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. I have no faith”? What is better evidence than the words of Mother Teresa. She is honest. She had the courage to reveal what has been repressed; which has been at the core of Western religious orthodoxy since Constantine. It is nothingness and a continuing crisis of faith.

In much of the early literature of what the West had to say about Buddhism, in which Buddhist source material is relatively quite small, much of the description of Buddhism seems born of projection—Western projection.

Ironically, we may learn more about Western values from scholars and Western Buddhists who write about Buddhism than we might learn about actual Buddhism. Mainly, what we have learned thus far is to accept that, in the words of Mother Teresa, “there is nothing but emptiness & darkness.”

While it might seem that Buddhism is about nothingness or the same, emptiness and the absence of a soul, the arguments for these positions, which are often captious, have been for the most part untenable in light of what the Buddhist canon actually has to say. We know for a fact that the Buddha, by his very own words, was against nihilism and only meant by emptiness extrinsic emptiness—not intrinsic emptiness. In looking at the self, the Buddha was not against the notion of the self or atman but only that we should not identify with the Five Aggregates as being our self!

To conclude these thoughts, it is worth saying, spiritually speaking, that we are still in the Dark Ages. Even though Buddhism is the light—we are still with eyes wide shut seeing only nothingness.