What Religion Is Dr. Nicholas Coleman Kagyu E-vam Buddhist Institute - September 2000

My own interest in the history, beliefs and practices of religions is instrumental. Rather than being an end in itself, I am interested in those things insofar as they help me on my personal spiritual journey. I am interested in what religion can offer as a way of life and thought directed towards salvation. That is what I think all religions are about. If there is one word that I would use to sum up the essence of religion, I would say it is 'salvation.'

I was pleased to finish writing this book for senior students of religion, called The Worlds of Religion. It covers nine different traditions: Taoism, Confucianism, Shinto, Judaism, Christianity, Gnosticism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Australian Aboriginal spirituality. The linking theme that I found and followed through all of those traditions is the religious search for meaning in life; that search is at the heart of all religions. Ultimate meaning is found in both the notion of a search for meaning and the idea of salvation. Both of those imply that there is some initial position that we start off from, which is somehow less than completely satisfactory. We are seeking salvation from something. We are seeking meaning, because we currently feel that we do not have any, or do not have enough. If we already felt that life was one continuous experience of meaningfulness, we would hardly be seeking meaning, we would already have it. We would not seek salvation if we felt there was nothing to be saved from.

In all religions, I believe, there is this movement from an initial state of dissatisfaction - the Buddha called it duhkha - towards some final state of definite improvement. Religion offers a third thing too, which is a way of getting from that state of initial dissatisfaction to that final state of fulfilment. There is this three-part movement, from suffering to salvation via a particular path. The clearest doctrinal expression of this theory is in the Four Noble Truths. The first chapter of my book was on Buddhism, because that is the tradition I have always felt most at home in and because it so exemplifies the theory that religion is about this movement from suffering to salvation.
That same movement is found, by those who look for it, in all other religions as well.

Experts on different religions have argued either with or against me, depending on their point of view, about the importance that I attach to this movement. Some of them say that the texts of a religion are much more important than spiritual experience or salvation, others say that you have got to study its rituals and others its social structures. There is a lot of dispute amongst scholars as to what the most essential part of religion is. I am representing my view here. I think all those other things are important, but what makes them important is the manner in which they contribute toward our spiritual journey to enlightenment. I believe that all religions, despite their important differences - and we should not overlook the differences - are different ways of approaching the same end. The differences can be of crucial importance, of course.
Different religions were initiated and established by different people at different times and different places, using different languages, different cultural backgrounds, different social concerns of their times and framed in many different ways. Nonetheless, they are all directing us from suffering - conceived in one way or other - towards salvation.

But who we are and how we are suffering is much more of an individual thing.
From my way of looking at things, there are two 'dimensions' of religion. First, there is the exoteric; the external appearances of religion, the details of it. These are the historical, cultural and linguistic particularities, the specific things that are individual to religions and which are, as it were, on public display. Any academic is going to be concerned with those. The academic perspective on religion will look at its outward phenomena: the things that can be observed, recorded and measured; the empirical things; the things that belong to the world of space and time which for most of us, most of the time, is kind of the real world, is it not?

On the other hand, there is also an esoteric dimension to religion. 'Esoteric' means the hidden dimension. It is the opposite of the outward phenomena. Outward phenomena are external and visible, the esoteric dimension is hidden and invisible. It is most commonly, I think, identified with the meaning of religious activities. We can all see that some priest or other, from some tradition or other, is parading up and down doing something. That is not in dispute. We can take photographs of that and write learned treatises about it. But what do the rituals and gestures, the ringing of bells and the chanting of prayers, mean? They are there for everyone to see, but the meaning of those things is an inner, hidden thing.

To know the meaning of religious actions requires us to enter into the life of the religion, even if it is only by asking someone else who belongs to that tradition. 'What does it mean when a Jewish groom wraps a glass in a handkerchief at the wedding ceremony, puts it on the ground and stomps on it with a resounding crash?' We can all see it beings done, but what does it mean? It does not matter how closely you study video replays of the action, you are not going to find out that it is a ritual Jewish commemoration of the destruction of the temple of the Jews.

The first time it was destroyed was about 500 BC, when the Babylonians came in, destroyed the temple, took the ark of the covenant away and buried it until Indiana Jones and his friends found it not so long ago. The Jews were not put off, however, and rebuilt the temple, even bigger and better than before. Then the Romans came in about 70 CE. They virtually demolished it completely, leaving not one stone standing upon another. All that is left now is the retaining wall. The temple was built in Jerusalem, on the top of a hill. They built a retaining wall to hold the hill in place with this large temple on top. Now the temple is gone and the retaining wall is all that is left. That is the Western wall, or what is called 'the Wailing Wall.' The Wailing Wall is unequivocally a holy site, a sacred site, of Judaism.

This destruction of the temple had radical implications for the practice of Judaism. Their tradition taught that it was only in this temple that you could actually worship God properly and their tradition instructed them to worship God properly at least once a year. So all Jews used to return to that site at least once a year to fulfil their religious duty. With the destruction of the temple it was no longer possible to worship God properly. This meant that either their religion was going to go into extinction or they would have to rethink it. They rethought it and made it much more mobile.
The meaning of religious activity - the meaning of any activity really - is directed towards salvation. In that example, it is towards the correct worship of God. Why would you want to worship God? In order to get and remain on good terms with God, because that is the best relationship to have, that is the best way to be. By living the right life and by becoming as close to God as one can, one is as assured as possible of happiness, salvation, fulfilment. It is fairly traditional, when bad things happen, to wonder, 'I must be being punished, why is this happening to me?' Usually we say, 'I can't think of anything I've done to deserve this.'

We could step lightly over into the Indian traditions and consider the notion of karma, which serves a similar function. Karma is a moral force of cause and effect. If we put good energies into the universe, the universe will send good things back. If we do bad things, bad things will come back. If we experience bad things now and cannot think of any bad things that we have done then, in all likelihood, this was retribution for some bad things that we committed in a previous incarnation. If we do good things now and good things still do not happen to us, we can take some comfort in the thought that we are building up good karma for our next incarnation.

In the Christian Gospels - I think they appropriated this from one of the older Jewish texts - there is a line which says, 'As you sow, so shall you reap.' Jesus said (I think he coined this one himself), 'If you live by the sword, you die by the sword.' This suggests the same kind of moral law of cause and effect. It is found in all religions in one form or another: if we do good things then good things will come back to us, if we do bad things then bad things will come back to us.
What really excites me are questions like, 'What is enlightenment?,' 'What is ordinary experience?,' 'How do you best understand these two?' and 'How do you get from one to the other?' They are deep philosophical questions. Hui-neng, the sixth Zen patriarch said:

When not enlightened, buddhas are no other than ordinary beings.
Where there is enlightenment, ordinary beings at once turn into buddhas.
We are taught that the human incarnation is to be most esteemed, more so than any other incarnation because it is only from the human world that we can directly achieve enlightenment. There are other Dharma realms of beings much more powerful. The gods and titans and even the hungry ghosts, in a sense, are more powerful than we are, but, in order for them to achieve enlightenment, they have first got to come back into the human realm. As human beings we are located at the intersection of, I believe, time and eternity. Enlightenment is not a spatiotemporal phenomenon; it is within, but also beyond, space and time, it is a timeless reality. As human beings in the temporal world we can get to the eternal reality of enlightenment, because we are located somehow at the intersection. I think that is what the spiritual journey is about - trying to get our bearings and find how to get from the world of space and time to the eternal, transcendent realm of spirit.

What is enlightenment? In my book I say something like, 'enlightenment is the Buddha's experience under the bodhi tree.' What I said for senior secondary school students who may possibly have done nothing more than hear of Buddhism is:
By mental discipline, Buddha passed through the eight levels of meditation until he reached the depths of his true existence. There he achieved the perfection he had been seeking, he pierced the bubble of the universe and transcended the phenomenal world of space and time. He recollected all his past lives and integrated his conscious and unconscious mind. He realised his own true nature as being no different from the true nature of all things and finally broke the chain of interdependent origination which perpetuates samsara, the whole painful and pointless cycle of birth, death and rebirth.
Enlightenment is the Buddha's experience. Whatever it was that he experienced under that tree, that is enlightenment, and if one is seeking enlightenment, then what we are seeking is the Buddha's experience. The enlightened mind of the Buddha is absolutely all-encompassing, it is all-inclusive and all-pervading. It is free of all conditions. It contains everything, the whole of existence, past, present and future.

Enlightenment is the one thought that is ceaseless, that includes everything. Because it already includes everything, there is nothing for it to change into. That is why it is ceaseless. Once you have got it you have got the whole thing, so whatever happens makes no difference. One ceaseless, all-encompassing thought - what a fabulous concept! It is said to be a single, transcendent comprehension of ultimate unity. Zen teaches:

All the buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the one mind, besides which nothing exists. Above, below and around you all is spontaneously existing, for there is nowhere which is outside the buddha-mind.
The mind of a buddha has only one thought in it and that one thought contains everything - past, present and future - one timeless thought. There are no conditions upon it so it is total liberation. It is free from all conditions and because it is free from all conditions it is unconditionally united with everything because it contains everything.

There, there is a teaching that says, 'Everyone dies for the same reason.' Everyone dies for the same reason and that reason is because we were born. Whatever is born is going to die. The point is, what is it that we can achieve between birth and death? All religions, in one way or another, teach that within and beyond us, right now, there is something that was never born and, because it was never born, it is not going to die. It is within us now, it is within all things. It is also beyond them as well, and beyond us as well. We have this very rare and precious opportunity to seek that unborn, ceaseless reality, because we are equipped for it; we have got everything we need. We have got an example of it within us and we have the reflective capacity - the freedom - to guide our own action in search of it. What then, is 'ordinary experience?'

Buddha taught the doctrine of the chain of interdependent origination, according to which samsara, the ordinary world of suffering and death, results from fundamental ignorance. Upon ignorance depends karma and karma governs everything else. The chain of interdependent origination may be explained in psychological terms. Because we do not recognise our unconscious habits of thought and behaviour, our lives are governed by those habits. Our habits steer us towards the fleeting pleasures of the ordinary phenomenal world. By seeking our enjoyment in temporary sensations of things we are forced to continue wandering from one fading moment of pleasure to the next. In that way, we are locked into the endless and futile search for final satisfaction in terms of temporary things, and that is the cycle of samsara.

We are trying to find final satisfaction by gaining temporary things. We are looking for lasting fulfilment by trying to attach ourselves to temporary phenomena. However, temporary things do not have the substance to give us the kind of fulfilment that we really desire, that would really satisfy us.

We get fixated on a certain course of action that we believe will deliver us the result that we want and we just hang in there. It is not delivering the goods, but we conclude that this is because we are not trying hard enough. So we just keep trying, but it is just not doing it for us and it never will. We are not ever going to get final and unconditional satisfaction from temporary and limited things. It is not their fault; they just do not have what we want. They do not have what we need. We are ill-advised in our action and not thinking it through clearly.

So the Buddha's wisdom gave him the insight to see how we are trapped within a cycling chain of psychological causes which all link together. His way to deliverance from suffering and death is to wake up to the insubstantial nature of these entrammelling forces. These forces keep us wandering in samsara. To know the ultimate reality of enlightenment, nirvana, is to become free from the totally believable illusion of ordinary existence in the phenomenal world of space and time.

It is a totally believable illusion. I find myself believing it all the time. The word buddha comes from a Sanskrit word meaning 'to wake, to wake up.' There is a great little story where the Buddha is being interviewed by some reporter from a Hindu magazine, who says, 'Look, we have kind of been wondering, what are you? Are you a human because you are just so unbelievably powerful and impressive? Are you a human or are you a deva, some kind of spirit. Are you a god? We are not quite sure. How would you describe yourself?' The Buddha said, 'I am awake.' If you say 'I am awake' in Sanskrit, you are going to say, 'I am buddha.' Buddha means to be 'an awakened one.' So that became his name, the name by which he was known, 'the Awakened One.' He had just woken up to the fact of his own true nature and he had seen through the believable illusion of ordinary existence.

Ordinary existence is the subject matter. Well, it is the object matter really. Ordinary existence is the object matter of science, I believe. History, the world of space and time, the things revealed to us by a certain level of activity in our consciousness, our sensations of things, the physical world as revealed through the five physical senses - are the object matter of ordinary experience.

There is also the question of what do you do with enlightenment once you have attained it? The answer is, I think, like the Buddha, you would go off and become a religious education teacher. Initially, he was reluctant to teach. He was not going to turn the Wheel of the Dharma because he said that his achievement was too difficult and ordinary people would not be able to grasp it, they would just get bored and angry and he would just get frustrated. He did not want to distract himself from the fulfilment of it, he was just going to sit there and enjoy it. Whereupon all the devas came and beseeched him, 'Please, some people will understand. You have got to admit some people will understand. It will be worth it because some people will understand.' So he kind of relented and consented to teach.

Plotinus, my favourite philosopher - the brightest star in my philosophical sky - said, 'Once we achieve communion with the ultimate reality, insofar as we can, we should share that with others.' Once we get enlightened, insofar as we can without threatening our own advancement, we should attempt to help others. That is kind of like the bodhisattva ideal. The bodhisattva will actually refrain from taking that final step, that last step to complete unconditional samyaksambuddha. He or she will remain just a little bit unenlightened in order to keep open the option of helping all sentient creatures.

There is a message there. I do not believe that our existence or the existence of anyone or anything is an arbitrary, senseless, meaningless act or meaningless coincidence. We are all here for some reason, because some original, deeper, higher, productive reality wants us to be here. We were created for a reason and if we cannot remember or do not know what that purpose is, my advice is that we should go back and seek our origins and stick up our little hands and ask.

We have been sent here for a reason, but we have forgotten what the reason is and we are wandering around blindly. I think we need to get in touch with the creative source of our own existence, get in touch with our own nature and find out what that reason is. Getting in touch with our own nature, that is achieving our enlightenment. Once we achieve our enlightenment we will find that the reason we were created in the first place is to communicate that reason to other people who have also forgotten. There you have the harmonious conjunction of the spiritual and the material, between the spiritual life in the material world.

One of my favourite second-string philosophers is John Smith, a seventeenth century Dean of Queen's College in Cambridge. He was a priest and philosopher in the early Anglican tradition. He coined this phrase, 'Life is the spiritualisation of material things.' Its purpose is, 'to lift things up to God' - he phrases it in that way because he was in the Anglican tradition - to lift things up to God by spiritualising them. That is a great idea.

If we look at the 'Big Bang' theory of western science, as far as I understand it, there is a bit of a question as to what it was that went bang! The story that I tell my high school kids is that the Big Bang created hydrogen and helium. Well, hydrogen and helium are like the basic elements, which are made up of cooled down versions of higher energy state things that were produced by the explosion. They can push it back to a couple of microseconds after whatever it was that went bang, but seemingly, there is a bit of a conundrum about what it was that went bang.

If all physical things were brought into existence as a result of something that went 'bang!' then, at least by logic, you would have to conclude that whatever it was that went 'bang!' was not physical. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot say that all physical things came into existence from this explosion and this explosion was of something physical. Either it was a physical thing that went bang, in which case there was something physical before the explosion, or physical things came after whatever it was that went 'bang!' that was not physical.

With a lot of pushing and leading my Year 10 kids, I can get them to put those two notions together and someone will put up their hand and say, 'Are you suggesting that the Big Bang was the materialisation of spirit?' It makes sense that something non-physical exploded with a mighty force and brought the physical universe into existence. Spirit, according to one conception of it, is a general term that refers to non-physical things. If something non-physical exploded, then we need to change our terminology and say that spirit materialised with a mighty explosion. Creation, which is what we are talking about here, is the materialisation of spirit and evolution is the spiritualisation of matter.

The best piece of graffiti that I have seen in years says, 'The best thing about religions is they affirm the intangible - ban scientific indoctrination.' The best thing about religions is that they teach us to believe in the intangible. Another one of the Cambridge Platonists, a guy named Henry Moore, lists something like twenty-three shared characteristics that space and spirit both have, which is an interesting concept. The one that I am going to tell you about is that they are both indivisible. There is only one of them and that is completely extensive and pervasive. The space between you and I is of the same space as between us and the stars. It is the same space that goes right down in between our organs and the space in between the atoms that make us up. We are somehow located in between the infinitely small reaches of space and the infinitely large. It is all the one space and we are just hanging here.
N

ow, I have got two paragraphs and a secret that I am going to tell you. First, we have the notion of salvation. There has got to be somewhere to be saved to and that is some higher, more unified, timeless, ceaseless realm. There has got to be somewhere to be saved from and that is the ordinary human experience of spatiotemporal phenomena that are constantly changing.

The religious story, all religions affirm, a higher reality or deeper level of being than ordinary human experience. We are saved from the dissatisfaction of a purely sensory experience of the world and we are saved to a completely fulfilling, timeless spiritual experience of the same world. Samsara is nirvana. We are here already.
We just have not woken up to that fact yet. We think enlightenment is somewhere and we are busy chasing it, but the more we chase it, the more it is just trotting along behind us, laughing.

Our fundamental nature is already enlightened. We are already enlightened. If we seek our nature outside ourselves as something apart from ourselves, then we are moving in the wrong direction, which is that the thought of enlightenment is the thought before the one we are thinking now. We commonly tend to seek it as if it is somehow going to be our next thought.

There are lots of ways of talking about enlightenment. You have got to go and find it yourself. One way of describing it is to say, 'No, no, it is not our next thought - it is our last thought. It is the one before we are thinking now. It is the thought that got us to where we are now.' We need to turn around and look back at where we have come from. That is where our true nature is. When those two become the same, what we are trying to get to is where we have just come from. When our starting point becomes our goal, I think we are well on the way.

I want to emphasise that this enlightened mind is within and beyond us. If it is within us, it is in us now. It is within our ordinary mind as well. If we are going to reject our ordinary mind and race off in search of something else, we are affirming, if not creating, a division, a distinction and a separation. If our goal is ultimate unity we cannot, in logic, hope to achieve ultimate unity by cutting anything off or separating ourselves from anything. If we want this one thought that includes everything, it has got to include our ordinary mind as well.

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