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Are these corruptions of the Buddha's teachings? Understanding the difference requires looking deeply beneath the surface of Buddhist teaching and practice. It's not just belief in gods that are irrelevant to Buddhism. Beliefs of any kind play a different role in Buddhism than in many other religions. Buddhism is a path to "waking up," or becoming enlightened, to a reality that is not consciously perceived by most of us.
In most schools of Buddhism, it is understood that enlightenment and nirvana cannot be conceptualized or explained with words. They must be intimately experienced to be understood. Merely "believing in" enlightenment and nirvana is pointless. In Buddhism, all doctrines are provisional and are judged by their skillfulness. The Sanskrit word for this is upaya , or "skillful means.
Whether the doctrine is factual or not is not the point. No gods, no beliefs, yet Buddhism encourages devotion. How can that be? The Buddha taught that the biggest barrier to realization is the notion that "I" am a permanent, integral, autonomous entity.
It is by seeing through the delusion of ego that realization blooms. Devotion is an upaya for breaking the bonds of ego. For this reason, the Buddha taught his disciples to cultivate devotional and reverential habits of mind. Thus, devotion is not a "corruption" of Buddhism, but an expression of it. Of course, devotion requires an object.
To what is the Buddhist devoted? This is a question that may be clarified and re-clarified and answered in different ways at different times as one's understanding of the teachings deepens. If Buddha was not a god, why bow to Buddha-figures? One might bow just to show gratitude for the Buddha's life and practice. But the Buddha figure also represents enlightenment itself and the unconditioned true nature of all things.
In the Zen monastery where I first learned about Buddhism, the monks liked to point to the Buddha representation on the altar and say, "That's you up there. When you bow, you are bowing to yourself. How do you understand it? Who are you?
Where do you find the self? Working with those questions is not a corruption of Buddhism; it is Buddhism. For more discussion of this kind of devotion, see the essay " Devotion in Buddhism " by Nyanaponika Thera. The Mimamsa philosopher Kumarila said that if a god had created the world by himself in the beginning, how could anyone else possibly confirm it? Kumarila further argued that if a merciful god had created the world, it could not have been as full of suffering as it is.
According to the census , there were approximately 2. Atheism is still a significant cultural force in India, as well as in other Asian countries influenced by Indian religions. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article. We welcome your comments at ideas.
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