We believe that we live in a unique age of technological marvel the credit of which adds to our growing hubris. We tell ourselves that we are the greatest age of mankind. But when it comes to understanding religion such as Buddhism or early Christianity before the Nicene Creed (325) we can only manage to scratch the surface while some scholars have convinced themselves there really isn’t much to religion after all—it’s pretty much superstition. I can’t agree. We are trying to hide our ignorance with such a smug attitude. Alvin Boyd Kuhn writes,
"But in religion and philosophy it is one of the blindest of ages. It is not overstating the case to say that in these areas of human enterprise the mind of this era still slumbers in a state of ineptitude and gross darkness at least a degree or two below that commonly termed barbaric" (The Lost Light p. 21).
In my Zen Buddhist journey over these many years I have to agree with Kuhn. This age has, certainly, its marvels but it also is utterly blind when it comes to understanding religion—by ‘religion’ I mean the personal realization of ultimate reality.
It is not all that difficult to read the wisdom of a sage like the Buddha or even a Zen master like Bassui. But his words cannot tell us about his awakening to ultimate reality. We have only the sage’s doctrine absent of any direct knowledge of the super reality he saw. Oh yes, we can describe his doctrine but not his realization. What we have before us is a map to, let us say, the luminous jewel in the cave of the blue dragon but with no clear idea of the territory (it is certainly not external) or what within us this “luminous jewel” is a symbol or metaphor of.
It would certainly make all the difference in the world if our inward journey led us to the cave of the blue dragon. Instead, we are left with a most mysterious metaphor: a word or symbol pointing to a state of which we remain clueless. This is when we feel our ineptitude. And try as we might we are unable to locate the luminous jewel.
You could say that, presently, we live in a technological dark age in which spiritual and religious degeneracy are almost at their apex. In the modern religious world around us we sense hypocrisy and insincerity. The human soul, i.e., the animating principle, has become like the setting sun now hidden from view in which everything grows darker and darker. Buddhism and Christianity have turned against the soul. Buddhists worship the not-soul when the Buddha has never once denied the soul.
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