The 5-fold 10-fold comparison - Day 4

Day 4: In talking about the trends of human religious evolutionary consciousness, as I mentioned earlier, it is dangerous and oversimplifying to think of specific time periods in history as belonging completely to one mode of thinking versus another. As I already pointed out, some of the major religious evolutionary developments we are heirs to involve progressions of consciousness that we ourselves struggle with on a daily basis and that most of us have thought patterns belonging to each of the 5 different modes of thinking identified in Nichiren's and my comparisons. It is necessary to say this now because in examining the period of the Renaissance, which we started to get into last week up to the time we're currently living in, the ability to identify clear trends of a particular period is not that easy. Notable achievements of the Renaissance, from Galileo's and Copernicus' identification of astronomy in a way challenging orthodoxy to Shakespeare's deep understanding of human beings and his ability to get inside the heads of everyone from pagans to Jews to Christians to skeptics—in fact, to see the unique ways each person thought—in many ways define the next trend in human consciousness that will be identified today.

In terms of Nichiren's 4th Buddhist comparison, he identified it as the difference between the theoretical teaching of the Lotus Sutra and the essential teaching. The Living Buddhism article from the Nov-Dec 2010 article on page 96 talks about two big differences, (1) the difference between merely possessing the Buddha nature and actually being able to manifest it, and (2) the difference between cause and effect time-gap and cause and effect simultaneity. Nichiren identifies the first half, the first 14 chapters of the Lotus Sutra, as the theoretical teaching in which the fact that all people have the Buddha nature, is elucidated, and the second 14 chapters as the essential teaching, in which, in the 16th, Life Span chapter, Shakyamuni reveals that whereas everyone understood him to have attained enlightenment when in a deep meditation at the age of 30, in actuality, he had really attained his enlightenment eons ago and the many lives he had previously lived as an unenlightened person, as he had told his disciples about throughout his teachings as parables, were actually lives he had lived while already a Buddha. The significance of this is that Buddhahood is not something separate from ordinary life. We don't become a Buddha through Buddhist practice, nor, as the theoretical teaching maintains, do we manifest the Buddhahood we already have as something apart from an unenlightened state, and then enter nirvana, never to return to this world again. Rather, the real implication and significance of this Life Span chapter is that we are always both a Buddha and an ordinary person. Remember how I told you in the last segment not to become attached to labels and titles? Well now more than ever is when you're going to need that understanding. All of a sudden, in saying this, everything was turned on its head. No wonder, as Nichiren lamented, no one in the Buddhist world got it right. No wonder they had lapsed into worshiping statues of images of Buddhas hoping to attain salvation that way.

I thought long and hard about how I would categorize and name the corresponding western development to the Essential Teaching of the Lotus Sutra's Life Span chapter, and clearly the term, “secular humanism” won the day in my mind. The word secular can be misleading, however, because this does not mean atheism necessarily, although I would probably place the more orthodox observants of Christianity among Protestant denominations, including today's popular Evangelical movement, more closely with the 3rd group which corresponds to the Theoretical Teaching of the Lotus Sutra, but there are definitely developments in the Christian world that challenge the dualism of orthodox Christian thinking enough to be considered in this 4th group, the secular humanists. These range from many of the leading thinkers of the Renaissance, such as Montaigne, to pull a name out of a hat, who were Christians, to England's Queen Elizabeth who, ahead of her time, and probably due to the intense religious persecution she experienced, almost being put to death more than once, established the first English kingdom where freedom of religion prevailed (though, unfortunately such freedom was short-lived), to Shakespeare, who I already mentioned, and of course many people today, both Christian and non-Christian, both religious and non-religious fall into this category. I think what clearly defines it, keeping in mind how the Life Span chapter turns everything on its head by getting rid of the distinction between Buddha and non-Buddha, establishing that Buddhist practice exists within regular society, not just in religious practices alone, is the coming together of God and man, or humans, as one and the same. Pantheism is a great example, the teaching that God is in everything. The spirit of America's founders clearly is in this group, and of course, the many who reject religion altogether, are clear examples of this. What unites them all is their belief that humans are central to everything. Of course, scientific endeavor is central, the seeking out of the truth through observation, reason and experiment. I really should have started talking about science in the last installment because embedded in the thinking of the Reformation was also the understanding that God's works and truth are communicated through everything, not just through religious texts. However, perhaps, this installment is the better time to speak about science because the big achievement of the Protestant movement was making God's word more accessible, i.e. making the Bible's very word more accessible. However, the beginnings of seeing the natural world as not divorced from the supernatural or metaphysical world was also a feature of the Protestants and it is not surprising that the economies of these countries in northern Europe took off while those of Catholic southern Europe did not to the same degree.

But what separates the aspect of the scientific movement that goes with part 4 from that which goes with part 3 at the time of the scientific revolution (in which scientific thinkers were not challenging the words of the Bible) is that these were and are willing to take up inquiry and discovery that may challenge the understanding of the Bible and to challenge it. Hence, while the Reformation afforded one the ability to understand and know God on a personal level through direct contact with His word, the scientific revolution enabled people to explore their world with no holds barred, even if it meant, or means, coming up with a completely different truth. Hence, this opened up a mode of understanding, that is only today becoming more accepted and common, that of pluralism and relativism. Contact with other cultures in the world in the last 200 years has speeded up the breakdown of absolute “truths” as we discover an amazing variety of them. In fact, my article, as well as the work of Joseph Campbell, has been to discover the common elements in seemingly uncommon and belief systems, even that seem to contradict each other but may not do so as much as we think.

To conclude this comparison, we have seen the increase of human freedom progressively and the current development, both in terms of Buddhism and in terms of western thinking, effectively closes both the temporal and the spatial gap between what is seen as the great and the ordinary, the highest and the lowest, as one is both instantly a Buddha and there is no God outside of man himself.