Buddhist spectrum

The Buddhist role of faith

Thanissaro Bhikkhu

The Buddha never placed unconditional demands on anyone’s faith. And for anyone from a culture where the dominant religions do place such demands on one’s faith, this is one of Buddhism’s most attractive features.

We read his famous instructions to the Kalamas, in which he advises testing things for oneself, and we see it as an invitation to believe, or not, whatever we like. Some people go so far as to say that faith has no place in the Buddhist tradition, that the proper Buddhist attitude is one of skepticism.

But even though the Buddha recommends tolerance and a healthy skepticism toward matters of faith, he also makes a conditional request about faith: If you sincerely want to put an end to suffering - that’s the condition - you should take certain things on faith, as working hypotheses, and then test them through following his path of practice.

There’s a hint of this need for faith even in the discourse to the Kalamas:

“Don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that, ‘These mental qualities are skillful; these mental qualities are blameless; these mental qualities are praised by the wise; these mental qualities, when adopted and carried out, lead to welfare and to happiness’ - then you should enter and remain in them.” - AN 3.65

The first few phrases in this passage, refuting the authority of scripture and tradition, are so strikingly empirical that it’s easy to miss the phrase buried further on, asserting that you have to take into account what’s praised by the wise. That phrase is important, for it helps to make sense of the Buddha’s teachings as a whole. If he had simply wanted you to trust your own unaided sense of right and wrong, why would he have left so many other teachings?

Authority

So the Buddha’s advice to the Kalamas is balanced: Just as you shouldn’t give unreserved trust to outside authority, you can’t give unreserved trust to your own logic and feelings if they go against the genuine wisdom of others. As other early discourses make clear, wise people can be recognized by their words and behavior, but the standards for wisdom are clearly measured against the Buddha and his noble disciples, people who’ve already touched awakening. And the proper attitude toward those who meet these standards is faith.

“For a disciple who has conviction in the Teacher’s message and lives to penetrate it, what accords with the Dhamma is this: ‘The Blessed One is the Teacher, I am a disciple. He is the one who knows, not I’... For a disciple who has conviction in the Teacher’s message and lives to penetrate it, what accords with the Dhamma is this: ‘Gladly would I let the flesh and blood in my body dry up, leaving just the skin, tendons, and bones, but if I have not attained what can be reached through human firmness, human persistence, human striving, there will be no relaxing my persistence.’” - MN 70

Repeatedly the Buddha stated that faith in a teacher is what leads you to learn from that teacher. Faith in the Buddha’s own Awakening is a requisite strength for anyone else who wants to attain Awakening. As it fosters persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, this faith can take you all the way to the deathless.

Empiricism

So there’s a tension in the Buddha’s recommendations about faith and empiricism. I’ve discussed this point with many Asian Buddhists, and few of them find the tension uncomfortable. But Western Buddhists, raised in a culture where religion and faith have long been at war with science and empiricism, find the tension very disconcerting. In discussing the issue with them over the past several years, I’ve noticed that they often try to resolve it in the same ways that, historically, the tension between Christian faith and scientific empiricism has been resolved in our own culture.

Attempt

Three general positions stand out, not only because they are the most common but also because they are so clearly Western. Consciously or not, they attempt to understand the Buddha’s position on faith and empiricism in a way that can be easily mapped onto the modern Western battle lines between religion and science.

The first interpretation has its roots in the side of Western culture that totally rejects the legitimacy of faith. In this view, the Buddha was an embodiment of the Victorian ideal of the heroic agnostic, one who eschewed the childish consolations of faith and instead advocated a purely scientific method for training and strengthening one’s own mind. Because his method focused entirely on the present moment, questions of past and future were totally irrelevant to his message.

Happiness

Thus any references to faith in such issues as past karma, future rebirth, or an unconditioned happiness separate from the immediate input of the senses are later interpolations in the texts, which Buddhist agnostics, following the Buddha’s example, should do their best to reject.

The second interpretation has roots in the side of Western culture that has rejected either the specifics of Christian faith or the authority of any organized religion, but has appreciated the emotion of faith as an essential requirement for mental health.

This view presents the Buddha as a Romantic hero who appreciated the subjective value of faith in establishing a sense of wholeness within and interconnectedness without.

Tolerant and opposed to dogmatism, he saw the psychological fact of a living faith as more important than its object. In other words, it doesn’t matter where faith is directed, as long as it’s deeply felt and personally nourishing. Faith in the Buddha’s Awakening means simply believing that he found what worked for himself.

This carries no implications for what will work for you. If you find the teaching on karma and rebirth comforting, fine: Believe it. If not, don’t. If you want to include an all-powerful God or a Goddess in your worldview, the Buddha wouldn’t object. What’s important is that you relate to your faith in a way that’s emotionally healing, nourishing, and empowering.

Interpretation

Because this second interpretation tends to be all-embracing, it sometimes leads to a third one that encompasses the first two. This interpretation presents the Buddha as trapped in his historical situation. Much like us, he was faced with the issue of finding a meaningful life in light of the worldview of his day.

His views on karma and rebirth were simply assumptions picked up from the crude science of ancient India, while his path of practice was an attempt to negotiate a satisfying life within those assumptions. If he were alive today, he would try to reconcile his values with the discoveries of modern science, in the same way that some Westerners have done with their faith in monotheism.

The underlying assumption of this position is that science is concerned with facts, religion with values. Science provides the hard data to which religion should provide meaning. Thus each Buddhist would be performing the work of a Buddha by accepting the hard facts that have been scientifically proven for our generation and then searching the Buddhist tradition - as well as other traditions, where appropriate - for myths and values to give meaning to those facts, and in the process forging a new Buddhism for our times.

My first encounter with a Buddhist monk - Part II

Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi

Then it immediately struck me: “Yes, I have! One bright morning two years ago on the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Could this be him?” I had seen the monk in Madison from a distance of some sixty yards and thus couldn’t distinguish his facial features very well, and it was not unlikely that two middle-aged East Asian monks might look alike. So I decided to inquire.

I had to wait patiently while my monk friend, the visiting monk, and the host family spoke in Vietnamese. When I got an opportunity I asked him, “Is this your first visit to America, sir?” He said, “No, I was here a few years ago.” That was what I expected. Then I asked: “By any chance, could the Venerable have been on the campus of the University of Wisconsin in early August 1965?” And he said, “In fact I was. I was visiting my friend, Professor Richard Robinson, who started a program of Buddhist studies there.” Then I told him about that day when I had watched him walk across the campus. He chuckled gently and said, “So this is not the first time we are meeting.”

Bhikkhu ordination

Several years later, when Venerable Thich Minh Chau next visited the US (perhaps it was 1969), he stayed with us for a couple of days at our house in Claremont. Still later, when I was planning my trip to Asia to receive bhikkhu ordination and study the Dhamma, he gave me useful advice and provided me with a beautiful letter of introduction to the general secretary of the World Fellowship of Buddhists in Bangkok, which I made my first stop when I arrived in Asia in August 1972.

I kept that letter and still have it among my treasured belongings. After my one-week stay in Bangkok, before going on to Sri Lanka, I went to Vietnam to visit my first Buddhist teacher, who had returned to his home temple after completing his doctorate at Claremont in 1970. Together, we went to visit Thich Minh Chau at Van Hanh University. I still can see him in my mind’s eye rising up to greet me when I came to his office to meet him.

Buddhist Publication Society

During my first years as a monk in Sri Lanka I occasionally wrote to Thich Minh Chau for advice and he always answered me promptly and thoughtfully. It was he who suggested that, when I go to Sri Lanka, I study with the elder German monk, venerable Nyanaponika Mahathera.

Although I could not fulfil that aim until several years after my arrival in the island, I eventually wound up living with Nyanaponika Mahathera during the last ten years of his life, right up to the day of his death, and already during his life I had succeeded him as editor and president of the Buddhist Publication Society.

I lost contact with Venerable Thich Minh Chau after South Vietnam fell to the Communists in 1975, but when planning a lecture in 2004, I recalled our earlier meetings, and these memories became so vivid that I wrote an early draft of this recollection.

Through the Internet, I contacted a Vietnamese webmaster in Australia and found out he is still alive in Ho Chi Minh City, though weak and ill with parkinson’s disease. He is over ninety years of age. I gave the draft to a Vietnamese Buddhist friend of mine, Sukhavati Thu Tran, who had it translated into Vietnamese. It was published in a Vietnamese Buddhist magazine and read aloud to Venerable Thich Mihn Chau, who indicated that he understood it.

Over the past few decades, before his illness incapacitated him, Venerable Thich Minh Chau had translated into vietnamese the four Nikayas of the Pali Canon. This fact I learned only in the late 1990s. Now here is the remarkable and uncanny thing that raises some interesting questions: On that day in early August 1965, a twenty-year-old American college student, who would one day be the co-translator of the Majjhima Nikaya and translator of the Samyutta Nikaya, and who is presently working on a translation of the Anguttara Nikaya, encountered by sheer chance a Vietnamese monk, thirty years older than himself, who would translate the four Nikayas into Vietnamese.

Objective causality

The American student at that time was not yet a Buddhist. He was not at all involved in Buddhist studies and had started to read about Buddhism just few months earlier. He had no intention of meeting the monk, and in fact they did not meet face to face. Looked at from the standpoint of “objective causality,” the encounter was sheer coincidence. The American student merely made a chance turn while taking a walk in a town he had arrived at by chance while making a car trip across the country; he saw the monk from a distance and then went away without even knowing who he was. The monk didn’t see the American at all.

But what made me decide to take a walk that morning, and to turn off the lakeside road on to the campus at just that point and at just that moment? Was it really entirely a matter of chance, a mere series of random decisions? and if we can raise these questions, then let’s ask: What broader loop of conditionality might have connected my trip to california with the monk’s trip to Wisconsin at just that time? If I remember correctly - and I am quite sure my memory is correct on this point - we were due to leave Brooklyn two days earlier, on a Saturday, but a last-minute hitch forced us to postpone our departure until that Monday morning. If we had left as originally planned, my meeting with the monk would probably not have taken place.

Dhamma-farers

When I left the campus, convinced we would never meet again, I did nothing to consciously facilitate another meeting with him. Indeed, I hadn’t the slightest idea who he was! Yet I made a series of decisions, without any conscious design, that led me to him once again, and this time in a situation where we would be facing each other as fellow Dhamma-farers.

I selected a graduate school that eventually brought me into contact with another Vietnamese monk with whom I became friends yet I selected it without even knowing that this monk would attend that school (in fact, without even knowing anything about Vietnamese Buddhist monks); and through my friendship with him, I came to meet the monk whom I had seen two years earlier, whose deportment had so impressed me - yet without knowing that these two monks were acquainted.

Years later, when I took to translating Pali texts, though I knew that Thich Minh Chau had written a scholarly comparison of Pali and Chinese texts, I didn’t know that he was engaged in translating the Nikayas from Palinto Vietnamese.

Yet our projects, in our respective mother languages, are almost identical. Was this also in some way foreshadowed in that chance encounter at the University of Wisconsin, a place to which I have never returned since that meeting and to which I well may never return in the course of this life?

Source: Parabola

Buddhist concepts on protection of human rights

S M Abeyratna

The “Human Rights” is not a concept, it is a practical process in the society.

The UNO has declared policies of human rights three decades ago. Most of the countries are legally bound to protect the human rights. Sri Lanka also signed the Declarations to protect the Human Rights.

All religious leaders and philosophers emphasized to protect, develop and promote human rights in various aspects. The Buddha in most places of his doctrines highlighted the protection of human rights. The people have experiences of protection of human rights based on the Buddhist civilization.

In the Singalowada Sutta the Buddha emphasized four sections (Satara Sangraha Wastu) of the roles and responsibilities of the husband and wife. The husband has to pay attention to protect the wife’s rights. The husband should provide food, cloths, medicine, shelter for wife to maintain her life and the family. Here highlighted the material supports for day to day living.

The above items identified as ‘Basic Needs’ of people. In addition they have to fulfill the psychological, social and sexual needs of the partners. The Sutta clearly indicates that the husband has to provide love, protection and respect for the wife. This is very important because husbands do not really respect their wives. They may provide all the material support, but not psychological support.

The above concept very clearly indicates that all the time husband has to accept his wife’s views, opinions, ideas and suggestions. The family development is based on the active participation of the husband and wife.

They both must have proper knowledge and understanding of the family development and day to day activities. This is a protection of human rights. In the present there are several social issues are developing in the family level as well as in the society. More divorce cases or separation of marriage partners arise because of misunderstanding and the fact that they do not respect each other and the values of human rights.

In the field of social development the ‘gender and development’ has been analyzed by the social development activists. According to concepts and theories that highlight the equal opportunities, equal participation and sharing of responsibilities among male and female in the society. The above concepts have been highlighted in Buddhism in the sixth century before being highlighted by the modern scholars.

The Buddha explained the roles and responsibilities of wives towards the husbands: provide foods, medicine and safeguard his physical and sexual needs. In addition to respect and support to the husband’s parents. Through these approaches Buddhism has established the protection process of the human rights and family based development in the society.

According to the UN Declarations we have to protect the “Rights of the Child” in the society. In the Singalowada Sutta very clearly indicated the protection of child rights by the parents. The parents’ responsibilities of child rights are providing love and protection, providing food, cloths and shelter, provide proper value based education, give properties to them and arrange marriages on time. The children also have to protect their parents when they reach old age.

The UNO has declared the rights of the Older Persons and every government has to protect the rights of the old generation. According to the Buddhism that is a social obligation. Children have to protect old parents until death. After they died children should provide religious activities for the next world. The Buddhism has highlighted the protection of human rights of all the social categories and also emphasized to protect and safeguard the human rights of children, parents, adults, women and older persons .

Not only that, but the layman has to protect the rights of the clergy too. The layman has to provide food, clothes, medicine etc to protect their human needs. The clergy also should provide facilities for spiritual development of the layman.

The above concepts have been emphasized to establish and protect the healthy social environment in the society. The human rights have to be protected through the social solidarity among the all social categories.

All the social groups should develop human qualities and human values according to the Buddhist culture. Buddhist philosophy has been developed in-human society in the present. People don’t respect each other but cultivate hatred.

The social and political leaders have to pay more attention to develop more human qualities in the society. The protection of Human Rights is a collective responsibility in the present world. The Buddhism should provide guidance to protect the human rights and human values.