This blog and its website will come down immediately (to the chagrin of a very few, if anyone) if I ever encounter a passage in a Buddhist sutra that says: Have faith in the Buddha so that you can go to heaven when you die. Or one that says: If you don’t have faith in the Buddha, he will send you to the hell realms.
I have faith that I will never encounter such a passage. Any religion that teaches people to have faith in a savior or a god so that they can go to a pleasant retirement home in the sky after death is utterly repulsive to me and to any thinking person. Those religions also teach that lack of faith in their loving god or savior will be punished by that god or savior with everlasting torment.
Modern people should not tolerate such pathetic attempts at psychological terrorism. It worked in the dark ages, it worked in medieval times, and it continues to work in the 21st Century for people who cannot think clearly.
Most Americans accept, without even giving it a moment’s thought, the absurd proposition that they will someday be judged by some sky god and sent forever to a good place or a bad place, depending upon how much faith they had in their sky god.
Well, it’s embarrassing that such people exist and that they hold power in governmental offices in this country.
The only role of faith in Buddhism is that if we do the meditation taught by the Buddha, we will gradually rise above the human dharma realm and if we don’t, we may sink into lower dharma realms. But that’s not the same thing as belief in a supreme being that rewards or punishes us. This faith is a belief in the law of cause and effect. This is a belief that if we take action to become more subtle, we will become more subtle. And if we take no action, we become more crude. Nothing is static. We either improve or we back track.
Nor do we have to believe in improving or devolving over multiple lifetimes. We can see the results in one lifetime.
On our own efforts we rise, on our own efforts we fall. It has nothing to do with anyone else at all. (Master Hsuan Hua in The Ten Dharma Realms Are Not Beyond A Single Thought). No one can take us or send us anywhere.
People who have never tried meditation will be puzzled by this talk of subtle vs. crude. The only way to see it is to start a meditation practice and see. That’s why the Buddha said: Come and see.
The leap of faith required to become a religious person is a huge leap, a leap usually caused by fear of the unknown. We Buddhists make no such leap because we are not religious. It takes no religious faith to start a zazen (sitting meditation) practice.
We don’t even have to have faith that we are not wasting our time. As soon as we try it, we know that every other activity is a waste of time. So we practice mindfulness even when we are not sitting in formal zazen, and everything we do becomes a meditation.
Thank you for this straight forward post and its relevance to our world and the stranglehold that religions has on the people and their governments. You are a breath of fresh air…Shokai