Dialogue with Dan, part 2

It's probably obvious to those of you have been reading this and my other blog (thank you), that I've taken a break. A little explanation: in mid May Nan and I went on vacation. The first half of the week was great, then I got sick. This turned into one of the most debilitating cases of the flue I've had in many years. I'm finally feeling better, both physically and emotionally, so I'm back at the computer keyboard.

Dan, my Buddhist friend, was kind enough to respond to my last exchange. The following is his reply.

Don,
No problem on the delay in answers. I myself was a little too busy for a while to give you a properly thought-out reply.



To start with a latter point, I want to assure you I am not angry at Christians (I read “My-Road-Back” several months ago). I feel occasional twinges of anger at the collective members of a certain religious group nowadays, but it’s not Christians. When I referred to irritating habits, I was thinking of certain childraising customs, but those are neither universal among nor exclusive to Christians. And on the topic of things that are neither universal among nor exclusive to Christians, you won’t hear me accuse Christians of hypocrisy. That is a tired cliché.



I always chafed at the concept of original sin, but not being a particularly deep thinker, was only able to put a finger on it thanks to Ayn Rand. Let me get back to your reply, in the order of your points.



You must have heard the expression before, “Read your Bible. It’ll scare the hell out of you!” The *constant* fearmongering, the stories of deathbed conversions, which admittedly may be overemphasized in the materials presented to children, the handwaving over the fate awaiting those who lived without ever having the chance to hear the Biblical message, and the injustice that I mentioned in my previous comment was what convinced me that there was something essential missing. The “handwaving” was basically, “We need to trust in the mercy and wisdom of God, who will judge those who never had the chance to hear the Christian message on the basis of what they could have known.” This loophole made sense to me, and still does. If I tried to apply it to myself and what I knew, though, the Sunday school teacher immediately went back to the fearmongering. “Well, *you*’ve heard of it, now, so you have no excuse!”



Moving on, your point about faith being in actions rather than feelings, is commonly made among my sect of Buddhists. (See www.sgi-usa.org if you are curious, especially www.sgi.org/buddhism/buddhism.html)



I guess I confused you with my “anthropormorphic characterization of the universe”. I was attempting to use Christian terminology for “how the universe works”. What I have always believed, with or without the existence of God, is that there is a law of justice. I see karma as the manifestation of that. Why is a conscious Being necessary for a moral law of justice to function, any more than it is for the law of gravity to function? All that said, I certainly never believed in a purely material universe.



As for the origin of the universe, the stock answer in my sect is, that is a question for science, not for religion. Go ahead and consider that “weaseling out”. It is not a question I worry about; I assume that the universe was always here. There may well have been a Big Bang 15 billion years ago; very well, what was the thing that “banged”, and why did it hold together until that precise moment? That’s the scientific version of “If God created the world, then who created God?” I look at those questions as scientists and theologians chasing their own tails. I’m interested in what faith can do for me here and now.



I do my prayers in the morning and evening because I’m a better person for it. I’m happier (-chuckle- though that can be hard to tell; I am generally morose at the moral and political degeneration of this society and expect very hard times for us in a few years), more considerate, more productive, and smarter. This practice is a tremendous blessing.



A comment on your final paragraph; the above is an answer to your final question. You asked where Gautama derived his sense of what was right. Let me go into a bit of theology. Our term for it is his “Buddha nature” or “the world of Buddhahood”. Tien Tai, the great scholar who wrote annotations of the Lotus Sutra, identified ten “worlds” that describe the basic life-conditions: Hell, Hunger, Animality, Anger, Peace, Rapture, Learning, Realization, Bodhisattva and Buddhahood. The lower six worlds are characterized by a dependence of the person’s life condition on the conditions in his environment, while the upper four worlds are more self-determined. To describe the less self-explanatory names, “Realization” means the life-condition of a creator and “Bodhisattva” means the life-condition of a person dedicated to action to save others. “Buddhahood” means the life-condition characterized by wisdom, compassion, dedication and action. All of us spend most of our lives in one of these worlds, our basic life-condition, but can manifest any of these worlds at any moment. Our sense of right and wrong is innate within us and derives from our Buddha nature.


Dan in Corbett

My reply:

Dan, thanks so much for taking the time to continue this dialogue, and, once again, my apologies for the delay in my response.

I read much of the material on the website you listed, but I have to say my reading left me with more questions than answers. Perhaps this is, more than anything else, an issue of epistemology (the theory of knowledge and what distinguishes justified belief from opinion), but over and over again I read statements there--presumably about the nature of reality from the Buddhist worldview--for which, not only no evidence was offered, but, even worse in my view, no underlying system of logic was presented. For instance, on the Buddhist Practice page it says, "Buddhism teaches that a universal Law (Dharma) underlies everything in the universe. This is the very essence of life." Uh, okay. Why?

Another example on the Karma page: "Karma can be thought of as our core personality, the profound tendencies that have been impressed into the deepest levels of our lives. The deepest cycles of cause and effect extend beyond the present existence; they shape the manner in which we start this life--our particular circumstances from the moment of birth--and will continue beyond our deaths. The purpose of Buddhist practice is to transform our basic life tendency in order to realize our total human potential in this lifetime and beyond." Now I presume this alludes to the karmic wheel of life, the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth (or reincarnation, in Western terms), in which, if not the personal identity or "memories" of past lives (as in On A Clear Day You Can See Forever--in other words no transmigration of "soul"), the karmic balance sheet of right and wrong deeds that make up a person's life experiences is "recycled" in a new human life. Again, no explanation or underlying system of logic is offered for how or why this is so, only the circumlocutory declaration that it is.

What I'm getting at here is that for every system of thought there are first principles, presumptions or "givens", from which the other precepts logically proceed. The Declaration of Independence is something of a logical argument based on the "self-evident truths" Thomas Jefferson named in the second paragraph. So, in the Christian system of thought, a first principle is that over and above the natural world is a "supernature," that underlying the physical world, is a "metaphysical;" and that this "supernature" over and above the natural--or material universe--is personal. This not only resonates with things we know and sense, about our own existence--i.e., that we are personal, that we have a spiritual dimension--but also underpins the logical conclusions and deductions of our worldview as a whole.

So when I read in the gospels Jesus' instruction in how to pray, and that my prayer is to a personal God whom I am to call my Father in heaven, this concept is connected in an unbroken thread of reasoning all the way back to those first principles that inform everything from my cosmology to my most basic perception of self--that I am me.

This is what leaves me so totally at loss when reading the articles on the Nichiren Buddhism website, as well as some of your own statements. If you've never believed in a purely material universe, then what is the nature of the non-material that you do believe in? Did it evolve as, presumably, you believe the material part of our universe did? If so, what were the forces or mechanisms that shaped its evolution? When you direct your chant of "Nam-myoho-renge-kyo" to your Gohonzon to awaken innate capacities and "Buddha nature," how and why is that supposed to work?

Those are some of my questions. But one last statement before I finish. You posed the question of why a conscious Being is necessary for a moral law of justice to function, any more than it is for the law of gravity to function. In capitalizing Being, I presume you are alluding to the idea of a personal God as law-giver. My answer is that when we talk about the law of gravity, our use of the word "law" is a metaphor, a somewhat poetic way of describing how nature works; and that's what we're really talking about: how things really work. In other words, when we observe physical bodies moving through space-time, this is how they behave, and we call it "gravity."

But when we talk about a moral law of justice, we are talking about something that would not exist without consciousness or personality (in the sense of "personhood"), because we're no longer talking about how things really work, we're talking about how we sense they OUGHT to work. The tragic fact is that human existence is filled with examples of people committing the most hideous moral outrages and injustices for which they are never held accountable in this life. And if you doubt what I'm saying, then take humanity and sentient consciousness out of the equation--do you see anything like a moral law of justice at work in the animal kingdom?

You ended with the statement that our sense of right and wrong is innate, with which, with a few caveats, I agree (it also seems to be greatly malleable and subject to corruption), but this begs the question: "why?" Darwinist have twisted themselves into knots trying to justify morality as a product of evolution to frankly laughable results; a cursory examination of animal society and nature plainly demonstrate that our sense of justice, equality and morality are not a product of evolution, but rather an offense to it. We are clearly speaking of an idea. Ideas are products of minds. Minds are products of consciousness. Consciousness is a product of personality--self-aware, having identity, possessing the concept of "me" as separate from others. And that brings us back to that first principle--the personal "supernature"-- for no one has ever thought of a way of deriving personality from non-personal sources.