Do You Look Into Other Religions?

[Kia ora]

I've been learning Sanskrit for a year. My journey of learning more about Indian and South East Asian literature, religion and philosophy has so far been a really enriching one. I've barely dipped my toe into what is a truly vast ocean.

 

I don't really know a lot about Western Christianity, let alone Eastern Christianity. I know very little about the Lutherans, even less about the Copts and practically nothing about the Ethiopian Orthodox. The more I look into Christianity, even as I am learning to be this strange thing that is a Christian, the more I realise I don't know. How much more the case for other religions!

 

One thing I've always kept in mind is that I'm not just supposed to learn to live with other religious people, I'm supposed to learn to love them as well. The whole world sings out in praise of God, even if our voices are dissonant and clashing.

 

One of my most pleasant experiences was getting into Hindu theologians, philosophers and poets of devotional worship. It's called bhakti, a personal, loving relationship with God. They compose really wicked love poetry and hymns for God.

 

I'm so segregated from Hindus that when I hear them talking about love of God, it's surprising because I usually only talk to Christians about loving God, but it shouldn't be surprising because God loves all - Hindus and Christians.

 

This poem is from Nammalvar, a Tamil theologian-poet from the 9th century. He's a Vaishnavite, which means that he worships Vishnu:

 

We here and that man, this man,
and that other in-between,
and that woman, this woman,
and that other, whoever,

those people, and these,
and these others in-between,
this things, that thing,
and this other in-between, whichever,

all things dying, these things,
those things, those others in-between,
good things, bad things,
things that were, that will be,

being all of them,
he stands there.

 

 

 

 

 

[Lefebvre]

I've belonged to two different religions before converting back to the Catholicism I was baptised in. While ultimately I am of course glad I found my way back to the One True Faith, outside of which there is no salvation, my time spent elsewhere was vastly enriching and informative and I made a few good friends. I don't regret it. However, when looking into Hinduism I would spend equal time looking into Catholicism. There's more there than you think/

[puellapaschalis]

For a while Islam seemed very appealing to me, on the basis of their medieval philosophical output (also their SCIENCE), but I can't say that I've ever seriously considered the idea of apostasising. Judaism is sometimes attractive for its close-knit family structure.

 

Non-Abrahamic religions I find fascinating, mainly for the mythology.

[CrossCuT]

Ive been quite attracted to various aspects of Buddhism myself although I dont feel any urge to convert. 

[The Bus Station]

No

[John Ryan]

I love the Daodejing of Laozi. I have a certain affinity to the teachings of Kongzi (Confucius), and I recently bought an anthology of the writings of Guatama Buddha. I am very interested in what I can take from Eastern philosophy and religion to compliment my Roman Catholicism. However, I have not considered trading in my Roman allegiance for religious Daoism or Buddhism. 

 

While I believe reincarnation to be a beautiful idea, I do not find it very plausible. The concept of the soul required for it to work is merely too abstract for me. I also do not care for the entrenchment of the karmic cycle in eastern religion/philosophy. For me, grace, love and restorative justice taken together is a superior model that overcomes the karmic cycle. In fact, one of the primary victories of Christ, in my humble opinion, was to defeat the power of Death in a karmic cycle of lex talionis. Lastly, I am way too far gone as a humanist and a theological materialist (my staunch Marxism) to accept that the final aim is an abstract sort of nothingness in the nirvana of Hinduism and Buddhism. 

[CrossCuT]

I am highly drawn to the Buddhism ideas that its all about works essentially. We suffer because we crave things that do not satisfy our truth sense of self; we cave worldly things that all fade away. 

 

Buddha explains this through the Four Noble Truths that suffering is simply ignorance of our sense of self and that we can overcome suffering (the thirst for worldly, meaningless things) by following the Eight-fold path which centers around finding the right intentions, views, actions, mentality and what not. Basically, Buddhism is all about the golden rule IMO. 

 

Some Christians believe in faith alone...Catholics believe in faith + works, and from what I gather from Buddhism, it is all about works. Its all about living life and finding your own truth. Its about experiencing truth and testing things out. Nothing is to be taken on faith, it is to be tried and experimented with. Obviously I will never lose my faith in God, but I do very much find the extreme emphasis of works and being a good person appealing in Buddhism and i think it definitely mirrors a lot of what the Catholic church teaches. 

[Clare Brigid]

Kia, I recommend to those who have been involved in occultism or Eastern religions to read Meditations on the Tarot, by an anonymous author (who was in fact Valentin Tomberg), a profound book which shows the esoteric depth of the Catholic faith and builds a bridge back to it.

 

It is not a book about divination.  The author uses the major arcana of the tarot as launching points for his meditations.

 

That said, there are some things in it that I cannot endorse.  Nevertheless, on the whole, it is extremely valuable, which is why Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote a foreward to it, and why St. John Paul II was photographed with the two-volume German edition on his desk.

[veritasluxmea]

Depends of what you mean by look into. I've learned about other religions and thought about whether they are true or not, especially paganism and progressive Christianity, and sometimes talk about it with my friends who belong to other religions, but I've never explored other religions as a means of converting to them. 

[beatitude]

I am very interested in other religions and studied quite a bit comparative theology at undergraduate and Master's level, plus literature, art, and music in relation to religious culture. I have enjoyed visits to other places of worship to see how things are done and I have participated in interfaith groups. But while I am sincerely interested in other people's faiths, I have never wanted to be anything other than Catholic - it's an intellectual curiosity rather than anything else.

[brandelynmarie]

Believe it or not, I've been all over the road map in my search for Truth since I was a young teenager. :) With God's Grace, I am Home.

However, my favorite Buddhist quote is: "After the ecstasy, the laundry."

Or as I say with my take using Christian terms: After the Transfiguration, you have to come down off the mountain! ;)

[CatherineM]

Did a lot of study of other religions last semester. I had world religions. Kind of goes with the syllabus.

[Kia ora]

I am highly drawn to the Buddhism ideas that its all about works essentially. We suffer because we crave things that do not satisfy our truth sense of self; we cave worldly things that all fade away. 

 

Buddha explains this through the Four Noble Truths that suffering is simply ignorance of our sense of self and that we can overcome suffering (the thirst for worldly, meaningless things) by following the Eight-fold path which centers around finding the right intentions, views, actions, mentality and what not. Basically, Buddhism is all about the golden rule IMO. 

 

Some Christians believe in faith alone...Catholics believe in faith + works, and from what I gather from Buddhism, it is all about works. Its all about living life and finding your own truth. Its about experiencing truth and testing things out. Nothing is to be taken on faith, it is to be tried and experimented with. Obviously I will never lose my faith in God, but I do very much find the extreme emphasis of works and being a good person appealing in Buddhism and i think it definitely mirrors a lot of what the Catholic church teaches. 

 

You should definitely look into Pure Land Buddhism for a kind of Buddhism that most Westerners don't seem to hear about, even though it's the most popular kind of Buddhism in the world.

 

In Pure Land Buddhism, the aim is to be reborn into the Western Pure Land, which is a kind of training place for the teaching of the Dharma, but this can only be done through complete faith in the saving power of the Amitabha Buddha.  The story goes that in one of his previous lives, the bodhisattva that would become the Amitabha Buddha made a great Vow to save all sentient beings through measureless time, out of his great compassion. 'Works' or the self-power of the individual is not enough to save the person, as all works that come from the ego-filled, self-ish person is mired in ego and selfish intentions and karma. it is only the Other-power of the Amitabha Buddha who

This is how the Chinese Pure Land patriarch Shandao describes it:

 

“Deep mind” is the deeply entrusting mind. There are two aspects. One is to believe deeply and decidedly that you are a foolish being of karmic evil caught in birth-and-death, ever sinking and ever wandering in transmigration from innumerable kalpas in the past, with never a condition that would lead to emancipation. The second is to believe deeply and decidedly that Amida Buddha's Forty-eight Vows grasp sentient beings, and that allowing yourself to be carried by the power of the Vow without any doubt or apprehension, you will attain birth.

 

 

 

When I first learned first about it, I drew immediate comparisons to Lutheran Christianity. Especially the tradition of Jodo Shinshu (one of the most popular forms of Buddhism in Japan) as created by the Japanese Buddhist theologian Shinran. If Dogen is the Japanese St. Aquinas, then Shinran is the Japanese Martin Luther.

 

The way I've described it does very little justice to the beauty of the theological narrative of Pure Land Buddhism, although I could go into it a little more. The Vow in particular, I don't think I've explained it well enough. The Amitabha's Vow is actually what reality *is*. I think theological is an appropriate word to use here, because Pure Land Buddhists are all about the word (logos) of the great saving Vow. I've even heard a comparison that whereas in Christianity, the Word becomes flesh, in Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, the flesh becomes 'Word'.

Edited August 24, 2014 by Kia ora

[Kia ora]

Okay, got cut off but here's the rest of it:

 

it is only the Other-power of the Amitabha Buddha who

 

It's only the Other-power who can save you. By trusting, sincerely, honestly in this power beyond you, you kind of empty yourself of your self, its delusions, its hatreds and its greed. The word Shinran uses for this deeply entrusting mind is shinjin, which is normally translated as faith. Pure Land Buddhism is a salvation by faith religion.

 

As to what I said about the Vow being reality, it basically comes down to the Buddhist belief in Three Bodies (the Trikaya doctrine). Tri means three in Sanskrit and kaya means body. The docrine means that the Buddha has three 'bodies' or aspects of existence. Body has to be understood in a very loose sense.

 

The first is the Dharmakaya, the body (kaya) of Dharma (reality).

 

Mahayana Buddhism, the kind of Buddhism that the Pure Land Buddhism belongs to, states that reality is characterised by emptiness. Emptiness doesn't mean that nothing exists, a kind of nihilism that they reject utterly, rather that existence's characteristic is that there is nothing for itself, by itself. It denies the existence of a substance or nature beneath the appearance of things, if by substance or nature you mean something that is intrinsically what it is without reference to something else.

 

Reality is empty of such 'selfish' things, it is instead unspeakably full of selfless things. Reality in fact is unselfishness. The virtue of the perfection of wisdom in Buddhism is the realisation of this truth of emptiness. So the Dharmakaya is also perfect wisdom as well as perfect compassion, because it's the state where 'all me, all by myself, it belongs to me' or even 'Me' and 'You' disappear.

 

The second body is the Nirmanakaya, the body (kaya) of the nirmana (appearance, creation).

 

This is the kind of body of the historical Buddha and of all the other Buddhas, the one you can touch and feel and who spoke and did things, in a historical place in a historical time. The third body is the Sambhogakaya, the body (kaya) of enjoyment (Sambhoga), the body that the Buddhas take, similar to the Nirmanakaya, but it is celestial, it's unbound by historical time or place.

 

The point is that the Dharmakaya, reality itself, emptiness itself, 'assumes' these different bodies.

 

Emptiness - which is empty of form - takes the form of a historical Buddha in its Nirmanakaya, out of the profound compassion that emptiness is (as emptiness is completely free from egocentricity) in order to deliver the teachings that will shake sentient beings from their daydreaming existence, their narcotic slumber, their painful lives. And it takes the form of a historical Buddha because emptiness is also perfect wisdom, and it uses skilful means and methods to attract and teach people. Some people need teachers in time and space, who are born and die, who eat and sleep and speaks. The Dharmakaya gives it to them.

 

Emptiness - which is empty of form - also takes the form of a celestial Buddha like Avalokiteshvara (the celestial bodhisattva of compassion, whom you may often see statues of in Asian households, she who looks upon the world with compassion), because it wants to help people, to give them relief and heal them, in ways that Nirmanakaya can't do.

 

Like Avalokiteshvara, the Amitabha Buddha is a celestial Buddha (sambhogakaya), a body of enjoyment that is actually the form of emptiness. His great Vow to save all beings is a skilful means, a means devised to help those who cannot help themselves. But his Vow is merely form given to what is formless, the Dharmakaya. So the Vow is really the Dharmakaya, the compassionate ringing promise is what Reality is. The Dharmakaya gives itself, totally, empties itself out, to become 'full' in a touchable, seeable, believable way for people.

 

What makes it truly mind-boggling though is what the Heart Sutra (a famous text from Mahayana Buddhism) says: form is not different from emptiness, and emptiness is not different from form. Form itself is emptiness, and emptiness itself is form.

 

Mahayana Buddhists say that samsara (the existence of endless rebirth, i.e. form) and nirvana (the cessation of endless rebirth, i.e. formlessness) are one and the same thing.

 

So 'form is empty' is just one side of the story and if you focus on that too much, then you make a serious mistake, one that keeps you mired in samsara. You're making a form out of emptiness if you think that emptiness is a 'thing', a substance, a nature, something underneath the casual everyday appearance of things. Nagarjuna, a famous Buddhist philosopher who I had the pleasure of reading in Sanskrit, says that people who make emptiness into a thing are incurably sick. He states flat out: emptiness itself is empty.

 

This realisation allows the Buddhist to go back and reaffirm samsaric existence. this skin, this tree, these words, this sun, this cloud, this paper, this stinky poo, all of it. Emptiness is form.

 

Edited August 24, 2014 by Kia ora

[Kia ora]

Now I'm not a Buddhist, even though I think Buddhism is very interesting. I'm a Christian. Maybe I know more about other religions than a Christian should. I don't believe that all paths lead up to the same summit. But I definitely think people think and believe in similar ways, whatever their religion.

 

What else could explain this recorded saying of the Buddha, which has been a key source for the Trikaya doctrine:

 

"He who sees the Dharma sees the Tathagata (the Thus-Gone, i.e. the Buddha), he who sees the Tathagata sees the Dharma."

 

I read it and I couldn't help but think of Jesus' in John 12:45 or 14:9, where he says that he who sees me sees the Father.

 

I can see echoes of Jesus everywhere.

 

More than anything, it's made me a lot more willing to hear people out. People this devout and smart, people this devoted to the well-being of other people, I don't think they could be spawn of Satan. The works of our common enemy are well known, it is hatred and discord. Not love of neighbour and good will.

 

There's been repeated monastic interreligious dialogue between Catholic monks and Buddhist monks throughout the world. In America there's one famous one that takes place at the Cestercian monastery at Gethsemani, Thomas Merton's home, every couple of years. The Dalai Lama actually attended the first one, because he was Merton's friend.