The following is an excerpt from the author’s book Safeguarding the Heart- A Buddhist Response to Suffering and September 11.
When we think about the tragedy of Sept. 11, we immediately think of how the event was categorized as a religious struggle. Indeed, so much suffering in the world, both in the past and at the moment, has a religious cast. Religion, one might go so far as to say, seems to be the cause of so much suffering!
Yet religion is merely the path that helps us to explore the truth within. It is, in essence, a means to an end. However, throughout history, as we see today, countless people have viewed religion not as a sacred path to the truth, but as truth itself. And yet no one religion can be equated with truth itself. Each of the world’s major religions has a history and a time span, but the truth cannot have a time span. By definition, truth cannot be conditional or temporally bound. The truths that religions seek and espouse are eternal, but the religions themselves are historically fixed in time.
As a Zen parable describes it, the master or teacher instructs by pointing the finger to the moon. To cling to one’s own belief as the truth itself or even as the sole means to the truth is like clinging to the master’s finger only, without seeing the moon at all. However, even the moon itself is not to be equated with the truth. The truth is found only when we make the mind as clean as a mirror, to reflect the moon and all its surroundings within it. To clean this mirror-like surface, we need to remove the murky illusion of self that divides our world, to lift ourselves out of the categories with which we frame our lives. An example of this is in the Diamond Sutra, where the Buddha tells his disciples, ‘My teaching is like the raft you shall abandon after you cross the river. You shall not carry it on the shoulders after you get on the shore.’ In other words, religion is a tool to reach enlightenment; after enlightenment or true wisdom is reached, religion is no longer necessary.
Communication and dialogue among members of differing religious frameworks is a major step toward the overcoming of artificial boundaries, the removal of illusions and prejudices within us and the search for common ground and universal truths. We need to respect each other’s faiths. For instance, the founder of Humanistic Buddhism, Master Hsing Yun, begins his prayer with: ‘Buddha, God, Jesus….’ He believes it is possible to have more than one belief. Indeed, religious pluralism can help us avoid the kind of blind faith that misleads some people to destroy other lives along with their own and believe they will go to heaven.
I do not mean, however, to suggest that we destroy the boundaries and differences that distinguish our various traditions and religious beliefs. Rather, it is hoped that we might seek a way to transcend such categories in search of common truths, to remain confident that no truth can call itself the name if it fears being questioned. On the contrary, the greatest truths are born of constant seeking. And yet, such seeking does not mean we turn our backs even for a moment on our own unique religions, just as seeking transcendent truths should never mean one stops working among all people of the world to better their conditions. We need to transcend our everyday categories-not to abandon them, but to discover higher truths, greater beauty, and apply this knowledge to our everyday world.
When one realizes that the self and the various categories it creates, including religion itself, are, in a sense, merely arbitrary boundaries that can be transcended, one begins to see the world as a far more hopeful place. Fundamentally, we are all united-Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and Buddhists alike. To heal ourselves, we must transcend our differences, and atone for our prejudicesto atone is to be at one. In fact, we need to consider the possibility that unless we do transcend religion as a category, we cannot truly hope to practice the ideals that religion professes to embody. When we think of the world after Sept. 11, the perils of thinking only in terms of the superiority of our own religious tradition become very clear.
The venerable Yifa is a professor of religion at Boston University and head of the Greater Boston Buddhism Center in Cambridge.