At first, he tried the traditional ways of Hinduism in which he had been raised, ways of self-denial and renunciation of the world. For seven years he struggled and searched. Finally, carrying his fasting to an extreme, he fell into a starving swoon. When he awoke, he was convinced that the traditional ways of withdrawal and renunciation were not right. He started upon a new course of contemplation, in which he observed moderation in all things—the middle way—never again to return to orthodox Hindu practices. Gradually his great mind working with maximum concentration achieved the understanding he sought. His search reached its culmination after a long period of meditation under the sheltering branches of a great Bodhi tree which became sacred to Buddhists, not far from the present city of Gaya in northeastern India. When he arose, it was with an understanding of the truth he had been seeking, and with a resolve to share that knowledge with others. A remarkable, exciting story!
The truths which Buddha found are expressed in the Sermon at Benares, which could be considered Buddhism’s Sermon on the Mount. The doctrine of the Middle Way is expressed in the four Noble truths: 1) Existence is unhappiness; 2) Unhappiness is caused by selfish craving; 3) Selfish craving can be destroyed; 4) It can be destroyed by following the Eightfold Path, whose steps are:
I.Right Understanding
II.Right Purpose (aspiration)
III.Right Speech
IV.Right Conduct
V.Right Vocation
VI.Right Effort
VII.Right Alertness (thought)
VIII.Right Concentration
From these initial realizations and from the underlying break with traditional Hindu ways, Buddha went on to question many aspects of Hindu orthodoxy. He became an active critic of the caste system, Vedic sacrifice, and of the far-fetched cosmological systems priests proposed. He challenged the infallibility of the Hindu scriptures, the Vedas. He saw that Hinduism was falling into orthodoxy and instead of serving human needs was becoming unduly preoccupied with ceremony and dogma.
So, it became the task of his great mind to break through the religion of the past and find new answers and beliefs. As we might expect from Gotama’s experience, in his religious thought there is less stress upon withdrawing from the world and more emphasis upon the activity and conduct of a person in life. Instead of extracting oneself from the world, there is insistence upon contemplation and meditation about life. Instead of a changeless soul, the human personality is thought to be dynamic. There is a stress upon moral virtues, friendship towards people, compassion towards animal life. Buddha said: “Hatred does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love—this is an eternal law” (Tachibana n.d., 186). And “Not in the sky, not in the midst of the sea, not if we enter into the clefts of the mountains, is there known a spot in the whole world where a man might be freed from an evil deed” (Babbit 1936, 21).
Buddha did carry over many aspects of Hinduism. In Buddha there is still a sense of Brahman, the mystical source of life, but man is perhaps less absorbed in it and retains more of his identity. There is still a suppression of one’s longing for material things and one’s emotions. But for a man who lived the better part of 3,000 years ago, in Buddha we find an astonishing relevance to our time and a stirring sense of kinship for us as religious liberals.
We began with a story about how Buddha comforted a woman who had felt the hand of death. There is another parable of how Buddha celebrated a wedding with a young couple. There was a man in Jambunada who was to be married the next day, and he thought, “would that the Buddha, the blessed one, might be present at the wedding.” And it happened that the Buddha passed by his house and met him, and when he read the silent wish in the heart of the bridegroom, he consented to enter. During the course of the wedding, his host prevailed upon him to speak. Rising, Buddha said:
The greatest happiness which a mortal man can imagine is the bond of marriage that ties together two loving hearts. But there’s a greater happiness still: it is the embrace of truth. Death will separate husband and wife, but death will never affect him who has espoused the truth.
Therefore, be married unto the truth and live with the truth in holy wedlock. The husband who loves his wife and desires for a union that shall be everlasting must be faithful to her so as to be like truth itself, and she will rely upon him and revere him and minister to him. And the wife who loves her husband and desires a union that shall be everlasting must be faithful to him so as to be like truth itself; and he will place his trust in her, he will provide for her. Verily, their children will become like unto their parents and will bear witness to their happiness.
Let no man be single, let everyone be wedded in holy love to the truth. And when Mara, the destroyer, comes to separate the visible forms of your being, you will continue to live in the truth and you will have life everlasting, for the truth is immortal. (Caras 1894, 181–82)
From age to age a great spirit is born as a sign to our troubled world that mankind can achieve goodness and peace. Obscured by the passage of time, buried in the folklore of India, the founder of religion that today is the faith of one-fifth of the world’s population, is one such a man: Gotoma Buddha.
8. Sermon delivered by the author at the Church of the Reconciliation Unitarian Universalist, Utica, New York.
9
If Jesus Were Alive Today9
The Easter season is upon us. It is a season of failure and triumph, of depression and resurgence in life. Next to Christmas, it is one of the most significant times of the year, not just on the Christian calendar but in our lives. It is a time when our feelings run deep.
Easter, of course, is historically about Jesus—his passion, trial, and crucifixion. Since next Sunday we will be considering some contemporary non-Christian interpretations of the season, it behooves us this morning to focus on the meaning of Jesus, clearly one of the greatest human beings who ever lived. He must have been a warm, loving, courageous, engaging person for people to think so highly of him after his death, and for him to have been revered so long.
It strikes me that one of the best ways of understanding what he meant is by hypothetically transporting Jesus, or his equivalent, across 2,000 years of time from a Middle Eastern country to North America, to this century in American society, and by trying to think of what it would mean if Jesus were alive today. We can best understand this by asking three questions. If Jesus were alive today: 1) What kind of a person would he be in our time and culture? 2) What kind of things would he be saying and what kind of problems would he be addressing? and 3) What would what our reaction be and what would we do?
First, what would he be like? What would he be doing? What kind of a person with he be in America? Judging from the attitude Jesus had toward Judaism, he would be interested in religion, and he would not be trying to work outside of organized religion. He would have probably come from a lower middle-class family: his father would possibly be a construction worker. He would have an undistinguished childhood. He would have gone to a public school or community college, and he would have an interest in religion, going on to theological school, perhaps a Presbyterian or Methodist one.
He would, however, be disillusioned with contemporary Christianity. He would preach reforms without any intent to break off from Christianity or to establish a new religion. He would be displeased with the formalism of churches, with the preoccupation they have on ceremony, and the absence of genuine religious feeling and action. He would condemn people who just go to church on Sunday and give lip service to their