It is actually hard for me admit that I am more at home in a traditional not evangelical or other new style Christian setting than in a temple. I think of myself in every way as a Buddhist, including finding the concepts of karma and rebirth completely sensible and useful. I meditate, I chant in Pali, my friends are Buddhist, my husband is Buddhist, I have an altar, I wear a yumju mala on my wrist, I write about Buddhism, I study it, I think about the world in these terms.
I have heard that they too struggle with reconciling some of the religious-cultural elements of Korea and Asia with that of Christianity. Why not embrace the complexity of our heritage and even honor our roots, even if those roots are mixed strangely with our beliefs? What do you think? How do you work with diverging cultural and religious forms? Wow, this sums up my feelings perfectly! We live in a postmodern age where people can access beliefs that are thousands of miles outside of their environment, where as years ago or years ago, or for the last thousands of years, your beliefs were directly related to your community herd and environment.
It is only natural that as westerners we wish to take full advantage of the accessing the greatest wisdom possible for dealing with the world's suffering to me, that is clearly buddhism, but i say this because i've tried many other religions , yet, it perfectly makes sense that our psychology would adapt to its cultural surroundings.
I feel at home in the notre dame, in paris, I could literally live there in the silence of its halls! My daughter is baptized catholic, and for all political and cultural reasons we are christians in that regard. I'm better off saying to my texan peers "you know meditation has helped me a lot with dealing with sin!
The dalai lama's words ring true, but there are some of us who cannot go back to our traditions. MOST people can, most people don't mind returning to santa clause when they are an adult again. SOME people cannot go back to santa clause, and must find another belief system to satisfy their psyche. There is no final accountability to a holy God on the judgment Day.
Karma, the cosmic Law of Cause and Effect, is the ultimate impersonal and merciless judge. There is no savior in Buddhism; the Buddha said he could not help anyone; he could only point the way.
Christian meditation focuses on God and its aim is to achieve fullness and oneness with Christ, not emptiness without Christ. Nirvana is the state where there is neither being nor non-being. Can both Christianity and Buddhism be true? Some will take the position that all truth is relative.
Taking that to be true does mean that they have to believe that there are absolute truths! This is precisely where the orthodox Christian must insist on the uniqueness of Christ. The reason the God of the Bible is fundamentally opposed to other religions is because they do not work! We cannot, therefore, approach God in any way we desire; Cain made that error in the early days of human history.
We do not choose the grounds of reconciliation with Him or dictate the terms. Jesus Himself declared that He is the way, the truth and the life, and no one can come to the Father except through Him.
If that is true then other ways cannot also be true. If there was another way to peace with God, why did God the Father, in love and compassion, send His Son Jesus Christ to die for our sins? If other ways in fact work, then God the Father has made a catastrophic error in sending Jesus to a horrendously painful and unnecessary death.
If God can make a mistake of such enormous scale, then He is not worthy of belief. Again, if other ways do work, then Jesus was deluded to think His death was necessary to save mankind , stupid to die so unnecessarily , mad thinking of Himself as the Son of God and Saviour or bad leading millions and millions of Christians astray!
That is not to doubt the sincerity of the adherents of other religions, or that other faiths do contain some universal, self-evident truths, or that their beliefs may enable them to somewhat cope with this often cruel world. God judges us in accordance with His own holy nature and laws; who among us can save himself and face the all-knowing and holy God with any degree of confidence?
Every genuine Christian respects the adherents of other faiths, and seeks to love them as his neighbour. We are one with them. This is what Thich Nhat Hanh means when he says that we have to be peace within ourselves. We have to overcome our egos and realize our connectedness with all beings. This is an aspect, I think, that is especially appreciated, or needed, by many Christians.
For Buddhism, and I would want to say for Catholicism as well, our fundamental nature is good. Our fundamental nature is the Buddha nature, namely we are part of the interconnected whole, called to be aware of it, and to act out of compassion. But our problem is that we are not aware of this. We think we have to gain things in order to establish our identity and, therefore, we act selfishly.
What do you mean? That is a loose quotation from my teacher, Karl Rahner. What he was getting at is this: There are so many challenges and so many difficulties that we face that unless our identities are based on our own personal experience of God, as part of them, of Christ, as their very being, they are not going to be able to find the strength and the stamina and the wisdom to hang in there.
What about death and life afterwards? That was perhaps, for me, the most helpful, but maybe the most controversial part of my book. Buddhism tells us that here in this life our true identity, our true happiness, is to move beyond our individuality.
This has brought me to recognize something that for me seems to be more satisfying, namely that the life that awaits me after I die is going to be an existence that is going to be beyond my individual existence as Paul Knitter. I will live on, but I will not live on probably as Paul Knitter. In other words, our life in the future life after death is a form of existence that is beyond individuality.
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