Still a long way to go

In my own ad hoc backward glance of Buddhism and Zen on the Internet since the advent of Netscape (remember that?), I would have to say that the majority of people who become interested in Buddhism are looking for something other than the Judeo-Christian religion; something without dogma and God.  In this same group there are agnostics and atheists many of whom put their faith in science and the materialistic view of the universe which has been around for over 300 years.  Almost all accept the belief that the Buddha denied the soul or Ātman.  This could be interpreted to mean that these same people believe that Buddha did not teach gnosis of the transcendent.  If he did this would be akin to Vedanta which is Hinduism, which the Buddha rejected.

I dare say that if one fits into this mold, they will have many rebirths before they even get close to learning what Buddhism is about.  It would be better to imagine that the Buddha's teaching is that of a space alien.  Imagine that he came here in his flying saucer to rescue stupid human beings, and as much as he dumbed-down his message it was still too recondite for the average knuckle-dragging human to comprehend.  There are several Buddhist works which border on being incomprehensible but nevertheless present Buddhism, accurately.  Three that come to my mind are the Lankavatara Sutra, Surangama Sutra, and the Awakening of Faith.  There are others.  But these go to the pith more directly in my estimation.

But more than these discourses of the Buddha what he taught can be boiled down to a spiritual substance such that when you receive it there is blissful light beyond belief.  It is overwhelming and, oddly, productive of intelligence.  It is aiming to include all things in its field, from a sand flea to the human race.  If this were film, we could imagine something akin to Stanley Kubrick's film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  In our film, the monolith would direct human consciousness to this light by putting it through several hundred years of social purifications.  Step by step human beings would discover that their universe is highly intelligent which has been waiting a long time for them to mature!  They would eventually discover what love is (S., karuna) and also realize that what they thought was love was only fellow feeling in which I can love my child but hate an Arab child.

People who are sympathetic with the teachings of Buddhism have a long way to go before they meet real Buddhism face to face.  The are still wallowing in the mud of Judeo-Christian values and scientific materialism.  Just look at the history of the Judeo-Christian (and Muslim) faith.  Then look at the history of scientific materialism with its wars of annihilation and its nuclear weapons.  This is not civilization.  It is barbarism propagandized as civilization.

Comments

[Augustinus]

There is certainly a grain of truth here. I hold firmly that two of the greatest banes of humanity are scientism and religious fundamentalism - two different faces of naturalism/materialism who share their hatred of the freedom and self-subsistance of soul and of the gnôsis. Concerning what you called "Judeo-Christiantiy" I cannot pronounce at the moment anything certain, but I acknowledge the countless negative and crypto-materialist aspects historically present, and these seem to have gotten progressively worse. The Roman Catholic Church seems to have imposed in the 19th-century the Empiricist Aristotelean Thomism (which seems to deny the possibility of divine illumination in this life) over the Platonic-Augustinian Ontologism. The spirit is drawn closer and closer to the body and the senses and away from self-knowledge and divine illumination. Rituals and obedience to the Church become the only means of transcendence. Maybe Vatican II changed this, maybe not.
But I would like to say something on behalf of the West:
There can be no doubt regarding the fundamental agreement between both Vedânta and Mahâyâna and the higher Western traditions: Platonism, the Mystery Traditions,
Pythagoreanism, Middle-Platonism, Neoplatonism, and Hellenic-Egyptian Hermeticism. Many of the Apostolic Fathers and the School of Alexandria of the 2nd and 3rd centuries (Justin Martyr, Clement, Origen) professed a form of Christianity that was a close as possible to these higher traditions (i.e. the Bible was taken in a symbolic-esoteric sense, there was no everlasting damnation, vicarious atonement or literal resurrection of the body). Also these traditions - in the form of several (it is true, often persecuted) of the so-called Mystical Theological treatises (but also in genius thinkers such as Cusanus and Fénelon) survived well into the 18th century under their Christian form. Also Quakerism seems to me very interesting, but perhaps a little Dogen-ish ?

[smith]

you said some true things , even beyond that which you understand, and you said some really dumb and ignorant things. Ill leave it to you to figure out which is which. Surely, if i told you, you wouldn't believe me. You are not yet able to judge.

[n. yeti]

"The Buddha said: Since the time without beginning, all living beings have given rise to all sorts of inversion because of the karmic seed (of ignorance) which is like the aksa shrub. This is why seekers of the Truth fail to realize Supreme Enlightenment but achieve only the states of sravakas, pratyeka-buddhas, heretics, devas and demons, solely because they do not know the two basic inversions, thereby practicing wrongly like those who cannot get food by cooking sand in spite of the passing of aeons as countless as the dust.
What are these two basic inversions? Ananda, the first is the basic root of birth and death caused, since the time without beginning, by the wrong use of a clinging mind which people mistake for their own nature, and the second is their attachment to causal conditions (which screen) the basically bright essence of consciousness which is the fundamentally pure and clean substance of Nirvanic Enlightenment. Thus they ignore this basic brightness and so transmigrate through(illusory) realms of existence without realizing the futility of their (wrong) practice."

--Surangama Sutra

[thezennist]

gamzoo:

The avidya of the One Mind.

[gamzoo]

If the ultimate source of reality is the one Mind, then who is getting reborn?