Charismatic Leaders
Six of the seven great world religions of this series have a strong identification with a particular teacher, prophet, or other such founding figure. (The exception is, Hinduism.)
- Judaism has Moses, the lawgiver, who spoke with God on Mt. Sinai and to whom God gave the Ten Commandments written on stone tablets to take to Israel.
- Christianity has Jesus for whom orthodoxy posits as the incarnation of God and whose death redeemed humankind.
- Islam has Mohammed, the Seal of the Prophets (including Moses and Jesus), to whom God gave an ultimate revelation, the holy book The Koran.
- Confucianism has the sage Confucius, whose wisdom codified a means for a social system of right relationships that corresponded with the Way of Heaven.
- Taoism has the sage Lao Tse, whose enigmatic teachings on how to be a successful ruler were hastily written down at the request of a border agent as Lao Tse was about to disappear in self-exile from disgust at the condition of the world.
- Buddhism has the Buddha, the Enlightened One, whose spiritual quest brought him to a god-like state of being, so that his teachings and his actions were exemplary.
Moses, Confucius, Mohammed, and Lao Tse are all very human figures, their wisdom and/or holiness notwithstanding. Jesus and the Buddha, in comparison, are transcendent.
Jesus and the Buddha occupy a special, most highly exalted status among all human beings for Carl Jung. In Jungian psychology, the goal of the psychological process of individuation is the archetype of the Self, or the god-within; and Jesus and the Buddha personify that possibility, which mere mortals will never totally attain.
It's not uncommon for someone to speak of the Christ-spirit or the Buddha-spirit as the attribute that should be revered in every person. And in greeting will reverently bow to that Christ or Buddha spirit in the other person.
The Buddha as Exemplar
We're culturally familiar with the qualities that set Jesus apart—qualities that ultimately relate to the doctrine of incarnation, that he was literally a manifestation of God born to a woman, though not conceived by a man. The Buddha, in contrast, was born of woman and man (albeit royalty), and his spiritual development and attainment was a result of his own striving. In this regard, the Buddha is, arguably, the most compelling human being who ever lived.
Buddhism and its spiritual truth "compassion," the subject of this sermon, is a timeless/timely worldview, because it is a matter of empiricism. The Buddha admonished, "Prove it for yourself." He reputedly said, "Do not accept what you hear by report, do not accept tradition, do not accept a statement because nor because it is the saying of your teacher ... Be ye lamps unto yourselves. ... He who, either now or after I am dead, shall rely upon themselves only and not look for assistance to anyone beside themselves, it is they who shall reach the very topmost height." He asked his followers to do as he had done.
The Young Prince
Most of you are familiar with the Buddha's life story: He was born in the sixth century B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) to a family of privilege—his father was a king—in northern India. The young prince Siddhartha Gautama of the Sakya clan was raised luxuriously. He was handsome and able. At sixteen he married a suitably beautiful princess who bore him a son. Siddhartha Gautama had it all: power, caste, ability, family, and a future as a ruler of a kingdom.
Indeed, when he was born, soothsayers predicted that the infant prince had a noble future, but that future would take one of two paths. Either he would inherit his father's kingdom and use that as a base to unify India and become its greatest ruler. Or he would forsake the world and become a world redeemer. His father tried to beg the results by plying the young prince with worldly pleasures, while sheltering him from the harsher realities. There were strict orders that the prince never encounter disease, aging, and death, so, his father the king decreed, that whenever the prince went out riding, the route would be swept clean of all such sights.
However, it was inevitable: on successive rides outside his pleasurable palace environs, Siddhartha came upon an old man with all the infirmities and ravages of advanced years and the prince encountered old age. On a second journey he encountered a body racked with disease. On a third journey he saw his first corpse. On the fourth day he saw a monk and learned of the possibility of withdrawal from the world.
These sights -aging, suffering, and death—along with the monk's example of renunciation, deeply affected Siddhartha. The more he reflected, the more troubled he became with worldly things. So, at the age of twenty-nine, in the stealth of darkness, he left the palace and its many distractions. He said a silent farewell to his sleeping wife and son. At the edge of the forest, he shaved his head and put on ragged clothes, signaling the beginning of a six-year quest for enlightenment. This is known as the Great Going Forth.
A Six-Year Spiritual Quest
His spiritual quest had three parts: First, he sought out great spiritual masters and became adept in raja yoga—the way of psychological experiment. Second, he joined a band of ascetics and mortified his flesh. He brought himself to the brink of death. Third, he turned to deep meditation, utilizing some of the lessons he learned in the first phase. Legend relates that one evening he sat beneath a fig tree, determined not to stir until he'd attained enlightenment.
That evening he was visited by a succession of temptations—beautiful women, visions of destruction and death, and finally by verbal confrontation with the Tempter himself. Siddhartha resisted them all and the earth resounded its multitudinous support. The Tempter fled and the gods showered blossoms and perfumes. The fig tree dropped red blossoms throughout the night. Siddhartha's meditation deepened and just before dawn he pierced the greater reality and attained the Enlightenment he'd long sought. Nature marked the moment with a variety of dramatic and beautiful responses. The Buddha was born. In a state of bliss he stayed beneath the Bo Tree—the Tree of Enlightenment—for forty-nine days. When he finally stirred, the Tempter tried one last ploy, arguing that no one could comprehend what The Buddha had experienced. Why not leave this tormented world and enter the perfect bliss of Nirvana, because enlightenment had opened that gate, the tormented argued. The Buddha was almost persuaded, but in the end the Buddha acknowledged that not all, but some will understand. The Tempter was banished from his life forever.
The Buddha's Ministry
For forty-five years Buddha walked the earth—teaching, preaching, counseling, establishing an order of monks and was a general critical of the prevailing Brahmin order, which the Buddha judged dead. He worked publicly for nine months and for three months of the rainy season he retreated with his monks. Each day he worked long hours, but three times a day he meditated privately to restore himself. He died after eating a dish of poisonous mushrooms. But legend relates that even on his deathbed he was filled with compassion for the person who'd fed him the mushrooms—a smithy named Cunda.
Buddha told Cunda that only two meals in his lifetime were truly blessed. The first was the meal that had given him the strength to endure the temptations under the Bo tree to attain enlightenment. The second was the one that would cause his death and open wide the gates of Nirvana.
The reports that have endured through time portray the Buddha as an extraordinary human being, whose presence commanded loyalty and whose teachings carried authority. Despite all attempts to deify him, Buddha insisted he was human and was quick to tell his own shortcomings, including the narrowness of his success. He acknowledged how close he was to failing even as he attained enlightenment.
After the forty-nine days that he spent in rapture at the Immovable Spot under the Bo Tree, he began to walk toward Benares, hundred miles away. Outside the city, he stopped at a Deer Park and preached his first sermon to five ascetics he known from before. He introduced them to a distillation of his discoveries, The Four Noble Truths:
- The First Noble Truth: all is suffering (dukkha).
- The Second Noble Truth: the source of suffering is desire (tanha)—specifically the desire that comes from what we now call ego: selfish desires.
- The Third Noble Truth: the way around selfish desire is to overcome those desires.
- The Fourth Noble Truth: The Eightfold Path is the way to overcome desire through 1) right knowledge, 2) right aspiration, 3) right speech, 4) right behavior, 5) right livelihood, 6) right effort, 7) right mindfulness, and 8) right absorption.
More than any other, great prophetic founder of a religion, the Buddha over a forty-five year ministry cast a religion. Not only did he teach the basic outline of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, he also provided teachings and personal example to establish a rather contrary religion that eschews authority, ritual, metaphysical speculation, tradition, and even the supernatural. In the subsequent twenty-five hundred years, two somewhat contending schools emerged—one emphasizing the individual, the other more group conscious—and those schools and their sub-branches developed their own style. But as much as a mythic founder can, the Buddha urged the adherent to pursue a universal human progression, psychological and experiential that is explicated in the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path.
Buddhism's Compassion
Buddhism's worldview begins with the notion that all is suffering. Now this may appear at first to be life denying and inherently negative. And it would be if it counseled withdrawal from the world. However the Buddha's own posture was engagement. Remember, when offered the final temptation of slipping out of the world of suffering and easing into the serenity of Nirvana, the Buddha chose to reenter the messy world and teach and work to ease physical and psychological torment of others. He became the embodiment of Compassion, which is Buddhism's great spiritual truth.
It's a simple and straightforward equation, which is why there's no need for authority and tradition, which is why each person is a "lamp unto [the] self" in Buddhism. Each person, as she or he comes into knowledge, recognizes that suffering is a large part of human fate, a reality so large that it can be a black hole that pulls all other aspects of a life toward the abyss. It seems reasonable that each person has the positive desire to overcome this fate. It is natural that empathy in concert with spiritual growth will lead to compassion to the similar fate of all other human beings and eventually out to include all sentient life. In an ethical sense, all the actions of someone who spiritual grasps the import of universal suffering will choose to act through compassion—lessen the suffering in the world.
Compassion isn't Love. Love, which I've identified as the essential Christian spiritual truth, is an aesthetic and worshipful orientation; and it is relational—between individuals, or between and individual and aspects of the world, or between the individual and God. It is easy to be enraptured in a relatively narrow love, and simply stay contained in it. Then, there are plenty of persons for whom love is an alien concept; and indeed when in Love's presence act contrarily, because Love's absence is a huge ache. In comparison, who doesn't know suffering? Every person has that starting point. Compassion is an ethical imperative that compels action, it is much more service oriented that Love Compassion causes a person to roll up sleeves and do the work.
In a practical sense, compassion is "easier" than love; at least compassion is more encompassing and attainable. There are plenty of persons who test my limits of love; indeed I could honestly say that I could never love them for whom they choose to be (though I'm challenged to do so by Christianity's imperative of Love). However, I have compassion for them, because the very aspects of their being that make them "unlovable" I perceive as tragic flaws that relate to the absence of what the Buddha delineated in the Eightfold Path.
Compassion, when compared to Love, is a much more realistic and practical virtue to cultivate. And I suppose where it a choice, I'd seek a compassionate society over a loving society. (Love needs Compassion, more than Compassion needs Love.)
The truth is we don't have to choose between Love and Compassion. We can have both. Indeed we should have both in a well-rounded spiritual/ethical orientation. And that's the contention of this series, that each great world religion brings us an essential truth that works in wonderful concert and harmony with the other truths: Judaism's Justice, with Islam's Surrender, with Christianity's Love, with Confucianism's Right Relationships, with Hinduism's Acceptance, with Buddhism's Compassion, and with Taoism's The Way. These various truths are in dynamic dialogue and they are something of checks and balances for excess or overemphasis.
What Compassion brings to the world table is grounded in the rawest, most real aspects of the human condition: pain, illness, aging, and death. Buddhism is the most realistic of all the world religions. Its empirical and psychological approach make it curiously contemporary and compelling for many grown weary of supernaturalisms.
