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CHAPTER THREE
THE SOCIAL ASSAULT ON CHRIST
It Confusing
Christ with Another
is Like Confusing a Credit Balance
with a Dead, Red Debt
June 8, 2011
A SPURIOUS CLAIM
Recently a flagrant letter appeared in an
Adelaide newspaper, in which the writer despised the contribution of
Christianity in this, that he felt Buddha, centuries before Christ, had said
much the same thing as is to be found in the Sermon on the Mount. As to this
assertion, the date is right, the rest is staggeringly wrong. It is confusion
confounded and culture sitting as sovereign over truth.
In fact, Buddha showed no belief in the Creator, or clear
understanding of God Almighty. It is difficult, operationally, to distinguish
his own work from atheism. It concerns suffering, cause of suffering, way to
reduce and finally extinguish suffering, and things to do in the meantime. In
extinguishing suffering, however, he extinguishes the capacity for suffering on
the part of the devotee, the disciple, who having followed all his life a vision
without rational confirmation, governing by appeal of some kind, is to be
rewarded by an indistinct and nebulously defined operational end as an
individual. In the interim, there is to be degree of passion, desire,
singularity of grasp, whether in some form into which man does not fit, some
other sort of creation, and even this abortive lowering, if so be, is rather
like Romanist purgatory, a place of sorrow.
It is like getting ready for a holiday, firstly
from some degree of wanting anything, then from some other degree, and having
your spirit, which conveniently is given all necessary adjustments so that it
retains some kind of identity before being ready for reincarnation of something
quite different from man, so that personality in abeyance, in the highroad to
individual nothingness as a reward, it finds itself re-created as the case
requires, by no one. For this enormous technical work has to be done, to make
suitable adjustments, in fact, like using a Ford chassis, salon, for a Boeing
737, only much more difficult in this, that the liberty of man in thought and
comprehension and understanding has to be lost in the format of what lacks these
things, and yet be the same, although entirely other.
The rationally testable evidence for this is as
absent as is the meaningfulness of the transformation without a transformer. It
is one more instance of a result without a specifically adequate cause.
Transmigration is a term used, but it is an illusion. If you migrate to Germany
from England, then you are you, identity retained, luggage and transport needed,
and authorisation to enable the change of citizenship, an adjustment of
acceptance, not of intrinsic nature. If however you migrate into the life of a
beast, your existence itself is altered, so that the essentials of personality
are absorbed into the instinctive and coerced, the debased and unrecognisable,
so that all that remains is the fact that you are living, and the entirety of
your power to evaluate, remember, be what you were, is lost in a confused muddle
of 'life', which being shared with worms, is a mere generality without receptive
significance. There is no place to put the reality of man, so man ceases, and
with it any sense of continuity that is moral or essential. It is a mirage that
transmigrates.
When it gets to Nirvana, it is lost in the
infinite, which being precisely what man is NOT, means by this very face the
loss of human life, individual life, and the end of man as an operative unit. To
say that the self is not regarded as permanent is the same as saying that what
we are talking about, a personality, a specifiable human being with power of
memory of individual guilt, grace, involvements, actions, no more exists. The
system of karma, reward for good and bad deeds in the processes of
transmigratory illusion, becomes doubly meaningless when what does the actions,
is no more there to experience their results, and in many cases, is
insusceptible to the power to know.
Thus morality becomes without base, and
discontinuity becomes a withering dynamic making of the most precise and
powerful moral dramas, a kaleidoscopic morass of indigestible fragments, failing
at last even to be. Seeking always for what is not even to be understood, with
the reward of not even being able to understand is a self-contradictory moral
constraint. It propels outside continuity of understanding of what is involved,
ending in lack of continuity altogether of the being who has so acted. Hence the
system is divorced from its (current) meaning in any individual case, and since
it is AS an individual, like it or leave it, that ALL of this in the known and
attestable world is done, with nothing beyond to act, except the call for the
transformations of spirit required to have continuity of vast and organised
proportions, which is met with NOTHING DOING. Yet it is done, for otherwise the
change could not be achieved.
The error of change and ignoring of criteria and
characteristics of individuality resembles the error of David Hume. Like his
approach, it ignores reality. For Hume, there is nothing enduring, things follow
and series of king. However what envisages series is not series, but
comprehending and static, or source of comprehension in unity that has a
platform for arresting thought, connecting it, giving to it a setting and
substance, functionality and place, so that it might BE thought and the person
who uses it has to be there, to HAVE thought. Thus in ignoring himself, the
operator, he engages in the most trite and trivial reductionism, solving what
lacks the data, with ephemeral ease and irrelevance.
Such is the case with Buddhism. Weary apparently
of the gods and agencies proliferating in Hinduism, the teacher of this religion
appears to have decided that instead of one being all, he would have
something different. Could he however graft onto this underlying sense of ONE
which is to BE all that is, what would remove its futility and dysfunction, or
so change it that some one or other, would remain to talk about so that there
could be some religion or other ?
There was a problem to solve. There was in
Hinduism the call for just ONE, nor respite from the manifest, absurd futility
and irrelevance of trying to marry stark opposites in one being, good and evil,
pain and grace, lying and truth, callowness and wisdom, self-contradictions in
the very being itself, which is to BE all, and this at whatever mode of
distancing. Thus, as one put it, there is a roaring silence, or another, there
is an inclusive spirit sitting in some sense over all this, merciful and somehow
known, while it is also in part constitutive in this ONE, and so in its very
being, of a chaos of clangour, contradiction and composition that varies, as to
its knowability. That is small wonder, since it incorporates all and
neither removes what is contrary to any concept given to it, nor asserts with
any power what it is alleged to be. It just is and absorbs all contradictories
so making mere muddle, and continues with this within it, with some kind of
unity despite the explosion of self-contradiction which it harbours in itself.
You cannot avoid it: IF it is one, then it explodes.
If it is not one, then it is necessary to cease
declaring that it is. Make the spirit of all as THE ONE, and the rest NOT the
one, and you avoid the folly. Then the rest is something else. You move to
Creator and creation, what is the basis and what is the result. Have it ALL just
there, AND self-contradiction PART of it, AS SUCH, and it can have no
meaning, for self-contradiction produces nullity. You have and do not have a
million dollars; ARE a cogitative fool and a brilliant thinker. You deny what
you affirm and hence have mere verbal muddle. To assert that beyond all this,
and yet not a different being from it, is something of this or that moral
character, is to confuse the ONE with two. IF it is a comprehensive containing
body, then it is self-contradictory, conceptually meaningless, unknowable and an
association of what is by nature incapable of unity. It does not matter if
something IN or OF the one is looked to, for as long as it IS as one, then these
features are inescapable.
IF the confusion is to be removed, then you need
a One and an other, and a relationship between them, just to start rationality.
If reason is to apply (and if not it is merely an irrational declaration), then
to give any understanding. If the new One is to have any character, then it is
not in any way the same as the many, itself a characterless confusion. So we
would have one of some nature or other, and one of no definable nature, in
confusion. Either the One creates the other, or they both always were. If so,
then there wholly divergent natures reside in a system containing both, and
enabling their communication and inter-action. How did this come if not from
what is greater than both! If you abandon reason, then there is no argument. If
you use it, this is so.
GUESSING IS NOT GOD
Guessing is not God. When you come to the one
greater than both, then you find that you have merely been guilty of
bifurcation, trying to wed the logically self-contradictory with what is not of
this kind. The One created both then ? However, subsidiary ones, these have no
point. There is the basis and the result; there is the cause and the
consequence; and as soon as you divorce your thought from an impossible
conflation of opposites, in whatever mode you may choose to have it, you have
what is eternal and NOT therefore self-contradictory, being actual and not a
film of clashing thought, and what is not eternal, as much shows itself to be.
The eternal is before the non-eternal in logic
and chronology. A source for the non-eternal is logically missing, and since
this non-eternal has to have its ground and commencement, if reason applies, it
is created by the Eternal One. It cannot BE it so it has to be FROM it. Of
necessity as we have seen earlier, there is the ETERNAL being, and of necessity
the contradictions cannot BE it in any sense without meaninglessness. Indeed,
they cannot even be one at all.
As the eternal one is beyond time, itself a
constraining and delimiting composition, then it has to be the source of
everything else; and since this involves choices as well as contradictions, at
once you have the Lord of liberty and the results of it. The creation is not
self-contradictory, for it has no self. It is various, diverse, and in measure
enabled to opt for contrary things, and so these arise. There is one source, one
basis, one creation, utterly diverse, with one plan for its operation, enabling
to the uttermost, total opposites with no cohesion problem. They do not cohere
because they are enabled to go in different directions, exhibiting the cause and
effect simultaneously of their being in one overall system, and yet producing
utterly contrary results.
Buddha was born into this. It had many
symbolisms given goddish standards, bred from the impossible base, with no
cohesion, just as the base lacked this, and seeking purgation of the rituals and
rules and unruliness, apparently he swept aside the ALL IS ONE, in favour of ONE
IS ALL. What however would be the nature of this new sort of ONE ? It
would not have one. It would be becoming (like Heracleitus), so that
individuality itself would be a temporary thing, and nirvana the end of right
this and that, an undefined bliss with no apparent linkage to individuals as
all, so that in effect, it had to enjoy its enlightenment, without actually
being there, the stuff of myth.
You cannot BOTH have individuals with coherence
and hence endurance and continued meaningfulness AS individuals, and NOT have
them, because losing all desire and passion, they are blessedly resting while
not there. It is one or the other. Confusion is no cover for contradiction.
Hence this virtual atheism has as its purge, the removal of the impossible
all-inclusive One, a portmanteau with no grounds, basis or coherence; but it
also has its own lust. That is, the removal of all coherence, cohesion and
continuity, by stages wrought by nothing, so that thought ABOUT this can have no
basis, being lost in mere all-change succession as with Hume. Hence the system
does not allow for the creation of the system, its sustenance or its meaning,
let alone all the categories of being involved; and hence it is another form of
reductionism, this time not the mere cohesion of the self-contradictory, but the
lack of basis even for the cohesion of thought. If mind is the continuity.
SMR pp. 1012 puts it like this.
As Baron F. von Hugel declares of Buddhism, p. 9 of his work,
Eternal
Life, "It knows no Brahma, no Atman, as the World-Spirit, - no Being
that consists in itself and through which other things exist." He cites
Professor Oldenberg: " The speculation of the Brahmans finds Being in all
Becoming; the speculation of the Buddhists finds, in all apparent Being,
nothing but Becoming." Thus, for the latter, all is one; for the former,
one is all.
Each approach however, is not merely gross over-simplification
and crass reductionism, but irrational ignoring of the requirements both
of order and of reason, as we have shown and will now consider on site
with these religions.
Neither is one all, nor is all one. There is process and
power to process, principle and eventuation, law and conformity, design
and its outworking, pattern and relationship, quality and defilement of
quality, purity and spoliation, gravity and humour, language structure
and use, logic and breach of it, rationality and irrationality, rationalism
and empiricism, spirit and surrender, overview and interview, participation
and explanation, guilt and expiation
There is also, indeed, theory and practice, true theory
and false theory ... the 'one' is cleaved, broken, divided! If there were
not, this Buddhistic concept of one as all could not even be maintained,
for it would then be simultaneously true and false, sound and unsound,
in principle, and hence constitute a divorce from thought, defilement of
language, an entire absurdity, conceptually incoherent, equal in value
to the ramblings of a drunkard, though more systematically absurd than
that.
Inconsistent collations of qualities and contents, explosive
diversities, by no means solve the problem: they simply ignore it. There
is no solution in that way.
ONE is not all, in any all-inclusive sense, as
in Hinduism; nor is all one, as in Buddhist approach, since its very diversity
makes the concept of 'one' merely inaccurate; and what it does have in common,
in the visible world, is not only event, but principle, not only change, but
laws enabling its understanding, rationality permitting argument and
presentation, cause and effect, which cannot without mere obfuscation, be
reduced to change: it is a particular sort of change involving not only the
event, but the basis for it, the conditions for it and the rules to be followed,
or the sustaining criteria necessary for it.
Trying to reduce it to one is not only
inaccurate, but a simple cutting off of one aspect, that underlying the
possibility of events, and this has not only if we are to use reason, the entire
sphere of logic, on which language and argument, presentation and
characterisation is partly based, to be added, but what has enabled this to be
applicable in a changing world, granting to it continuing penetrability by
reason, oversight by mind and assessment by spirit.
Moreover, it is no more feasible or rational to
have One all with what all the total mutual collisions making nonsense of the
'one' concept (as if all the pictures of an artist were 'one', when manifestly
they were different phases of creation, each from one source, indeed, perhaps
with some comparable but many diverse and perhaps even grossly divergent art
forms), then to have the ALL to be one. It is not one, but consists even on this
model, of a multitude, a vast assemblage of things lawful and unlawful,
beautiful and ugly, rational and irrational, destructive and constructive,
hateful, hate filled, loving, lovely, love directed, mathematical and
wrong-headed, with different laws, applicable in different ways to different
elements and on different features, programmatic necessitations and
liberty to create programs, scrambling and organisation, mistakes and purposes,
till the concept of these being one becomes a mere error.
What pervades them ? a process ? which one ? a
law ? there are hundreds. Logic ? they are often illogical. Truth ? process does
not know truth. It is ONE that this ALL is, the term being vastly inapplicable;
and this is just as true of the ALL that is to be called ONE. Neither is true,
and vain attempts to get around this simple fact are romancing mysticism, not
only devoid of logic, but an offence to it: even to what is necessary even for
the Statement of Model, or the religion concerned.
If then,
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the
time-space-logic-law-assessment-assessor base is to be ignored,
in the interest of events with change the criterion,
so that such entities as evaluating-analysing-deciding persons
are seen as transient happenings or bundles of events with no basis,
and with a desired dissociative end in some ill-defined nirvana;
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while the
implicit use of logic by persons is found,
as a rational alternative to gibberish,
in order to develop and state the religious model/case
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and
everythingness is to be united in mere verbal incohesion
and a veritable rhapsody of feeling breaking all bounds,
as an ALL, for which changeable process within it is to determine the
nature,
which however it does not have:
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then this model has an impasse of its own.
Unless, these very things, these functions,
these entities, have continuity, validity, and reality, descriptive precision,
nothing involving them can do better. Unless these things are valid, their
products are invalid. If however they are valid, so enabling expression and
coherent reasoning, survey and intelligible words and referents, then all is not
change or one, and what speaks against individuality in terms of illusion, which
nevertheless deploys such things, describes and declares them, is excluded
as irrational at the outset.
Whey then listen to it, self-outlawed!
This is the fundamental result of seeking to
remove all basis, background and reason for the things that are, by just having
them ... happen, and then trying to force them in some kind of philosophic
fidget, to be one, or some variably stated One, to be all. Creation and Creator
are in this merely irrationally merged, the diversities of the one, so well
known to our own creative powers, and the immutability of the other, so clearly
attested by reason (cf. SMR, TMR), being crushed in the maw of arrested thought
and the very essence of reductionism. NOT facing reality, ironically, thus
increases suffering, since collision between what is and what is falsely
imagined to be, has vast traumas, this being the most adverse of all collisions.
Solving a situation is no way to invent a world, and talking about some aspect
of the creation, is no more ground for this one, than for any other.
Since
1) logic must for validity have what makes any
use of it,
to present itself as truth, and
2) truth must exist for any attempt to state it
to be rational, in any case:
then logically prior to the world of
events, must be such qualities as these, and included are not only the ground
for this validity, but for truth so much as to exist, since it is, in this very
religion, claimed to be what is being spoken!
That, truth concerning the nature of all things,
requires One who knows without being subjected to circumstance, continues to
know and is not the butt of an intrusive or even containing nexus, so that not
reaction but reality is what is brought to MIND. The wisdom of this Being,
capable of such assessment and knowledge in order to provide it, must not only
exist, but if truth is to be known, must also be available, the PROVISION of
truth so being a matter of a discretionary judgment. If it were susceptible to
the intrusions of man, then it would not be the necessary function and knowledge
for the point at issue.
Since it to be the truth which is told,
therefore it must be available in fact, and in decision. This is not a series of
mutative events, nor immersed and conditioned by them, since then their reality
would not be outside the interactive and changing events, the nature of which,
amongst other things, is in view. Nor then, on such a basis, could there
by any validity in anyone's work in attempting to disclose the truth of things,
without the knowledge of God, at His will.
GETTING BACK TO REALITY
The name used to refer to this Being, One apart
from the surge and conditioning power of events, is not far from popular words
and thought. It is God, who invented the constraints for creation, which
He does not have, being thus able to tell the truth. That He is willing to do
so, is attested by the verified and validated Bible, unique in all religious
literature in this respect (cf. SMR,
TMR ). Let us peer back again for a little before proceeding to what is
found in terms of His willingness to tell the truth to man.
He invented therefore the constraints which He
does not have, being their source, ground and basis of power and operation, the
one which not only make law and give it power to control, law verbalisable
by our intellects just as emplaced by His mind. In order for us to be, on the
one hand, and to know truth, on the other, He is not subservient to or delimited
by process, or time, which has its own constraints. Thus for cause to be
operative and truth to be available, and hence the order we find to be followed,
He is contradistinct from what merely poroceeds accorind to law, and mutually
susceptible events. These occur; but they are not He.
He has to be there, free to know, and wililng to
transmit that knowledge for truth to be found by man, as distinct from notation
of events. Only then can it be said what must be, about the nature of events and
their place in the realms of reality. Without that, the truth, as alleged by
Buddhism, the, or anyone else, cannot exist and it cannot be know or conveyed.
You cannot convey by will or otherwise, a fortune that is not there.
Thus Buddha's teachings run into metaphysical
mayhem and ontological disaster. He has purged not only gods aptly form
Hinduism, but the basis fore truth and events alike. Reductionist, he is a
pragmatist, suffering his G-strong for his violin, which is turn has no case.
Thus the Creator and cause (inherent in all
logic that is coherent cf. Cause, SMR
Ch. 5) of all that is controlled and
participating in events of change, with undergirding principles making of events
a tissue and giving to them an issue, is identifiable in a unique manual, the
Bible, as by Jesus Christ, who took the trouble to take the form of a man,
without sin, so making a definitive declaration, fulfilling the testable
criteria for this, long set in the Bible in.
In so doing, He came to earth to show the
way personally. In this way, the propositional was enhanced by this more direct
communication; but also He came to deal with the CAUSE of suffering (John 1:29);
and thus, He removed it, not by prudent works such as Buddha was so keen on,
making the best of things in progressive detachment from what God made. No, He
did it by MEETING head-on this cause, and removing its power.
The cause is seen in high-profile :
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1) in
violation of what God made, its principles, logic, truth, peace, law
and the word of God,
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2) in not knowing
God; and
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3) in
worshipping not God,
but elements of this world, people in it, ideas within it,
with or without visible expression,
what is not testable as God,
mere empty words given a name,
phraseological foolishness, endowed with imaginary power.
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THAT is what the Old Testament focussed on
exceedingly, vanities
or emptinesses being a set term to refer to false gods of phrasing but no
confirmation, who are "not God" as Deuteronomy 32 puts it.
In removing the sovereignty, the creation and
the logic of it all, there is gross offence. Nothings become somethings, and
somethings grow in grandeur to vast levels of distinct and distinctive dynamism,
based in rationally investigable systems; for no reason!
Such is not this world, nor the way of logic. It
is flimsy phantasm of thought, fantasia of imagination, magical manipulation of
operational reality.
A SORROWFUL CAPTIVATION WITH
SUFFERING
THAT IS INSUFFERABLE TO
TRUTH
In this category is what is called
"vain philosophy" (Colossians 2:8), which presents
ideas without rationality or reason, ground or confirmation, demonstration or
basis that may be sustained, such as having worlds of laws and logic, truth and
understanding, without God, just arising from nothing, or being around without
cause or basis, results minus cause, systems without origin, commands without
any to utter, brilliance without mind, even able to generate it, and berate
misuse of the same, in miracles so prodigious that the fairy tale romance of it
is almost attractive in this, that nothing matters, anything does anything, and
it is a fantasia of escapism (cf. Ch. 1, *3
above, SMR Ch. 3,
Ch. 10).
Suppression is the word used for what this
implies in the attitude to God (Romans 1:17ff.). For Buddha, events are all, and
attitudes to them are important, and these with their sufferings have to be
controlled and 'managed' to use a medical terms concerning sickness. The cause
of their laws and organisation and underlying principles ? Don't worry about it,
think of nirvana and the best route to the relinquishing of being an individual
in due time, and try to minimise suffering on the way. There are good routes to
do this.
The prayerfully pragmatic, the mulishly
reductionist, the philosophically pre-occupied, this becomes a sad message
of final conclusion without the individual composition of abilities, symphony of
spiritual involvements, without persons sunk in a mire of feelings without the
feeler, at the end, and attitudes without the one to have them. It is loss with
dignity; but not with dynamic, triumph or victory, in having the key to life,
rather than the potassium cyanide to what you have been given. Sin is cast out
as the criterion for suffering; a cynosure of suffering modes and avoidance
systems becomes the substitute, making man the master by being the victim, a sad
lapse from life, into an impersonal serenity with no person left to experience
it, just floating this and that, disembodied, passing through phases of dis-involvement
to departure.
It is a sad pillorying of God, with
absent-minded omission, instead of sin, with presence of mind for its solution;
of throwing away the car, and solving automobile transport in that way; which
indeed some do, and one did, putting a car on the lawn of some Company estate,
with the attached word, lemon. True, this is not the desired end; but equally,
there is no solution found for the imaginary life which Buddha forges in
reductionism, so that if the end is sweet, it cloys because of the cost, the
loss of what tastes, and finds, and knows. It is victory by defragmentation and
disaster by careful living, rejection of the life given in favour of getting out
of a suffering state into another, which leaving suffering, moves into an
unintelligible, inexpressible, undefined contentment without content.
What then ? Leaving such inadequacy, we find God
Himself as eternal as often presented, is necessary instead of nothing, from the
start; for there to be a start with what it takes for such a finish with all its
features both superficial and underlying, as we have been seeing. Nothing won't
do anything, so to start with it is not to end with us.
You have to have one of two things: nothing and
irrationalism with the results discussed: this the starting point; or else
something that never was not
there, that is eternal, so that you do not have to
import from nothing, a contradiction in terms. As to this something, that
logically has to have been there eternally, it has to have the power to invent
mind, matter and spirit, or else these would not have come; but they are in
fact, operationally apparent (cf. SMR).
For this there are minimal requirements.
This sufficiency has to be there from the first,
rather than nothing, but it has altogether to be there, since to become and find
itself in stages merely puts it in a system, which is not nothing, and then THAT
system has its cause, and this goes to the point where all systems, any system,
has to be the object of view, and its cause the requirement. Elements of God do
not come from nothing, which has not even power to make a dust particle,
entirely non- and in particular non-operational. What is required is thus
totally and eternally present, and being sufficient, and with these results, so
acts. We ARE results. Products is a better word, in view of our constrictions,
constraints and personal nature.
What is eternal, then, coming from nothing in
stages, is mere self-contradiction. It cannot do so as nothing is defined to
have meaning and this is not within its bounds. Coming at all merely duplicates
the situation, and requires the same treatment: source, conditions of coming,
necessary minimal requirements in the source. To avoid stultified repetition, it
is necessary to go at once to the necessity: Eternal Sufficiency for all that
is.
Hence there is always an adequacy, cover for all
and basis and background for anything; and it has to have all to create mind,
matter and spirit, and put them in what, if not a unison, is a matrix for
operation, in turn, physical, mental and spiritual. As time with its constraints
and limitations is a product, it is not integumental to the Eternal who decides
to make truth available. Hence knowing beyond this area for development, and
lacking nothing, and needing nothing, and psychically without any room for
obtaining what lacks, which would merely again be a contradiction in terms, He
declares what He determines to divulge (as in Amos 3:7,Jeremiah 23, I
Corinthians 2, I Peter 1, II Peter 1), and into His sentient and conscious
creation in His image, He publishes this (cf. Isaiah 52:7). It is so important
because of sin and the understanding of reality by His magnificently created
product, man, that even the feet of those carrying its message of sin,
righteousness, redemption and pardon, are deemed beautiful.
Such is this Eternal Being.
NOTHING visible is of this kind. NOTHING visible
institutes this kind of creation. It is not seen. It does not show itself. What
matter and mind are in our universe, show themselves to be, are not
self-inventive; for only programs proceed in this creative way, inventing
children on a set programmatic basis, enabling un-inventible things, in terms of
any visible power. The work is past; the results are present.
Putting therefore the created world as it is, as
if it were all, the basis and containment of shat is, ignores the reason
for it, the restraints, constraints, laws, principles, persons and their logical
applications, whether in atheism, theism, agnosticism or adventurism. In such
modes as Buddhism, there is a specialisation, and an elision of the domains
outside it, in the intensification of thought, cursory glances beyond its
meaning, solution and reduction modes, being inadequate. It is like having
reading glasses, fine for one tiny page in front, but lacking any ability to see
the entirety in its imperturbable preoccupation with what is under its nose. It
fails in its grasp, lacks ability to meet the requirements of the whole;
and this is reductionism, not only in terms of cause and laws, but creation and
institution.
Let us however look beyond the systematic
failure*1 (see SMR on Buddhism), to the
results of it. Let us consider the allegation further, that the Sermon on the
Mount is really just the same sort of thing as Buddha's teaching.
THE COMPARISON
OF THE QUALITY AND TENOR OF
TEACHING
IN BUDDHA AND THE SERMON ON THE
MOUNT IN PARTICULAR
The aim is extinction of the desire, passion of
life, with the end absorption into some nirvana, which while some may vary
on what it is meant to be, appears to mean the loss of individual identity in a
soup of Being, or blessedness of end to all that makes for suffering in living
effort.
This is, in its OVERVIEW, entirely negative. Life
is to GO (not to HAVE go), and move into the dissolution at last, which while it may seem the solution,
has no identifiable difference from non-being, and certainly from non-individual
being.
Christ's sermon on the Mount, which the letter
writer so inaccurately demeaned vis á vis this view of Buddha, the one in point,
is wholly different in KIND. It indicates, underlying its many applications, that God is, is identifiable as in the Old Testament (in the main,
written centuries before Buddha), and His ethics is there characterised
basically, in terms of love for
one's neighbour as oneself, and love for deity with all the heart and soul and
mind and strength: He is presented as a God of justice and lovingkindness (Leviticus 19:18,
Deuteronomy 6:5). That is just the way He is, that He wants to be, who has
NOTHING to combine with, for any type of synthesis, unlike Hinduism and
Buddhism, and is personal because this is His eternal nature, on whom all else
depends, amid its multitudinous and eminently diversified natures.
In Leviticus 19, there are many detailed
particulars about just and due righteous and fair-minded treatment of one's
neighbour, with concern for the afflicted. You see the last named at length in
Amos 3:10-15, while in Joel 3:3 the scorn is high for the one who
'has given a boy for a harlot', while in Isaiah
3:15, the divine detestation that some 'grind the face of the poor' is manifest.
Indeed, in Isaiah 3:13-15 more on the lack of justice and compassion, concern
and regard for others is branded like a hot iron on the national conscience. The
passionate delight in love, loveliness, mercy (cf. Micah 7:18-19), justice,
righteousness, peace of heart (Isaiah 26) seizes the world like a
whirlwind, and so far from backing off with hope of reducing suffering, and
having a nullified thrust, it is endorsed with vitality, required with vigour
and attested with direness. Living is not a cute way to avoid suffering and to
deny its very self, in the instance of man, but to affirm God and His power and
presence, and to live in His vitality and grace, and to show it!
God has spoken, brought life, and man must live
it to the full (John 10:10). These are its ways, and the Lord Himself is THE way,
not only explicitly correction distortion and misinformation, but showing in
Himself the place for worship of God, in this, that as man He is formed to
manifest God in purity and truth, from heaven sent, to heaven returning, and for
His own people, coming once more to lose nothing loosed (John 8, 25). Thus
Christ is
worshipped as God for the very simple reason that this is He (cf. Matthew
7:15-21ff.). His eyes see, and He presents, and His heart speaks, and He shows
the sheer beauty of holiness, living that is not hollow but happy, not
self-centred but expressive of the God of truth and judgment, kindness and
consideration.
That is basic to the Sermon on the Mount. It is
to TRUST in this living God who KNOWS ALL about His people, and so find not
pain-free passage, but sufficiency for life in the manifest beauty of
divine holiness, the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:3-10), a life now available as
one serves God amid a fallen world, as well as
in consummate form, in a world to come (Luke 17:21). So distinct is the trust-truth and knowledge basis,
from God personally, that if one does not come to the living God as He is, on
the basis of His explicit word, one has no standing whatsoever (Matthew
7:21ff.); and only from God Himself, in His express word and presence in
power and peace, can ANY good thing be wrought. So good is this that it is
continued in eternal, individual life in the presence of this same God.
Free of works, is the ENTRY (Romans
3:23ff., Titus 3:3ff., Ephesians 2). Filled with works is the very nature of the
new creation, covering those who find and follow this transformative God, born
anew at the outset, with hearts naturally now loving God, and growing in grace
and knowledge afterwards. Life abounds; the Lord astounds: power and pity,
strength and direction, creative thrust and divine goodness work together.
In the one case, that from Buddha, you try to avoid suffering and
do what it seems to take. You end in a spiritless nothingness, or indefinable somethingness, most blessed, but by whom and for whom, it is difficult to know.
In the other, you face suffering manfully,
to achieve the good things that God shows and knows, in love trusting that God
who made you, and directs you, is the One to serve, and not oneself. Thus, one's needs
or one's canny avoidance of difficulties (Matthew 6:24,33) are not to
pre-occupy. Courage, truth and faith are the coin of this realm, and mercy for
its notes, is its water-mark. Difficulties and travails, these are to be
surmounted, not seen as dangerous suffering-adjuncts (Matthew 6:6,
6:10,5:17-20).
Immanent, eminent, outspoken, directive,
protective, granting mercy to those who trust Him according to His word, the
Creator who is God, it is He who is the focus, consummation and payor for life,
covering sin, granting salvation, inviting all, knowing His own. Moreover,
God is exhibited, in truth defined in clarity and illustrated profusely, with His own
blood in dying for man (Acts 20:28, I John 2:1-2), to cover as many as received Him in
spirit and reality (John 1:12, Matthew 6:12,15,24,7:11,21).
Thus life is so entrancing from such a source
with such a blessing, that to have it in an individual body, like the One raised
for Christ, and in the presence of all His people, freely living and loving Him,
and to have it eternally is a love story, an adventure of romance and a wonder
for time to come. It is not for the perfect, whose self-admiration is readily
seen. It is for fallen man, so splendidly made, so servilely sinning, and so
freely given entrance, but only by faith with repentance, to life (cf. Zephaniah
3:12-17,MIcah 7:18-19). ALL are invited (Matthew 22), even vigorously sought,
but no salvation is wrought or taught which merely seduces, or induces: for with
God, all things are manifest (Hebrews 4).
THE SERMON, THAT ON THE MOUNT,
THAT HAD VAST WORKS AS ITS WITNESS
The depiction of Buddha and the Sermon on the
Mount ? Thus the MOTIVES are different, the BASIS of life
is different, the END of life is different, the approach to SUFFERING is utterly
different, the basis is not only distinct, explicit and continually shown, but
the source, means and end of life, which is to be in Christ affirmed, used with
diligence, sought with passion, entered into with altruistic delight, not in
order to inherit less suffering, but out of love, looking and living in this
sphere for its consummation in the highly personal (Revelation 1-3) fulfilment
of the early promise and potential of life. Wonderful it is, far more wonderful
will it be to those who are NOT told to depart from Him (Matthew 7:21), since they are built on
the rock of His word, and thus His ransoming pardon and peace (Titus 3:7ff.,
Romans 5:1-12, Ephesians 1:11, I Peter 1:5ff.).
There is nothing in Buddha's teaching to resemble
this, and where something concerning good works appears, these are emphatically
NOT to save you (Romans 3, Ephesians 2, Titus 3), but to express love of God and
of those whom He has made (cf. Colossians 1:23). Comparing Buddha's teaching
with that of Christ: it is rather like comparing the lid of a box of chocolates
with the contents. The lid has some meaning, but the contents are
positively delicious, aspired to as remarkable, reflective of artful
work.
Not a tittle of the Old Testament does God intend
to discard, but rather to fulfil all (Matthew 5:17ff.), a giant
contribution carved out and put into history some 800 years before Buddha's
difficult to decipher conundrums, and negative thrusts towards loss of life.
On the contrary, the biblical revelation is the offering of God, not as
unknowable truth but the only basis for it and the declaration source for it,
constantly affirmed throughout millenia, and made known from the first (Genesis
3:15), set in ways testable, sometimes in blessing on faith, at others in
judgments on insincere servitude to pretence.
In Him is the gracious restoration to the blessed nature of
man's origin, of the source of that, in spirit and in truth. In Him is the
advance to the
consummation in this, body resurrected, life engraced with His grace (Ephesians
1:6: and it is then like the life of a child, before adulthood, at last reaching
this. Yet it is far greater than this; for that comes and passes; but this comes
to pass and never is ceased or surpassed.
From the suffering and sentence and curse, not an
endemic feature of life, but an additive because of sin, does Christ's
blood of sacrifice startle the air, the service of deity in the restoration of
man!
Again, in the Sermon on the Mount, the emphasis
is on light, not dissolution into darkness; on zeal, not dispassionate
departure; on pursuit of righteousness with zest in life, not help toward the
virtually meaningless, with even difficulty of definition, as the Schaff-Herzog
Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge attests, concerning Buddhistic approaches to
'nirvana'. In the Bible, the light is intense, the categories distinct, as
befits the God of all wisdom and knowledge.
One is to seek righteousness (Matthew 6:33), not
only in any basic sympathetic hope of allaying suffering, but because it
IS right, according to our design and the Lord's image: and zest for it is best,
hungering and thirsting. This is because this amplifies life, not because it
reduces suffering; it gives freer course to what is the wonder of God's gift of
life, not because it stuffs up holes in the roof of this world's difficulties.
It is not essentially a matter of minimising problems, but maximising life, with
the vision of what it is, sustained from Him who accompanies one with power and wisdom,
if one has become His! This moreover is a vision of true God, who by His Spirit
(Matthew 7:11, Luke 11:13) brings immediate nearness to God, aid to prayers and
enablement with strength to His people (cf. Luke 21:13-15).
One is to mourn (Matthew 5:4), not because simply
there is a lot of pain such as death, but because there is a better way,
available, pressed upon one with wisdom and knowledge, clearly statable, with
motivation correctly inscribed. Indeed, there is comfort in this mourning, for the
kingdom of heaven is present, will be consummated, and we work as in it with Him
who made us, till He comes to restore our bodies after death, to take the helm
once more, and to dispense with the SIN, revolt, rebellion against the God of
all vitality (John 10), which is the cause not merely of suffering, but of
confusion, of hatred of others, of vindictiveness, jealousy and divorce from the
God of all grace and comfort.
Again, blessed are those who are persecuted
(Matthew 5:12). Why
? Because it increases suffering ? Not at all, but because it is for
righteousness' sake. It is not minimisation of suffering which matters, any more
than minimising the soreness of your feet on a journey is paramount. It is
getting where you have to go with grace in the heart and light in the mind,
which matters. There are things to be achieved, in love, news of the
Gospel to be given, hope for the world and goodness for the desire. Thus, those
heeding this essentialising and sharpening of Old Testament teaching, centred in
the Messiah, will be those on a rock, unshakeable because HE is unshaken
(Matthew 7:24ff., cf. Psalm 18, 62),
suffering an evil event, borne for His sake (I Peter 4:14ff.), with a
relished joy of spiritual blessing, living a treasure.
Life resounds; its development is bugled, its
delightful destiny in the Redeemer, where purity of heart has led, shimmers and
love leads. This is as near to the teaching of Buddha as a beach is to a
desert, or at least, a wonder is to a wilderness.
It is this unificatory passion which also haunts,
in its own way, the
21st century where men are just as painfully passionate about making all things
one, all gods one, all ideals one, so that preferably they will be cast in such
morally neutral terms as to admit of any desired behaviour, so long as
they serve spiritual death with tweaked minds and nimble feet. They are setting about
making creation from nothing, and intemperately contrived imaginary nothings to
become authors of dedicated laws
susceptible to tight mathematical precision, discoverable in multitudes,
governing in much the entire universe. This is government by nothing, for
nothing, from nothing; and there is nothing to it; but to man there is much both
given and of which account is to be made.
It is that trampling on truth for the sake of the
cultural craze, philosophic haze, confused ways, which has made strong nations subside, like England
and the US, in
their governmental posturing, and the reliance they put on their own thoughts,
ways and morals. Weakness has led to more wars, threats, abeyance, abatement,
and division of the nations. It was the elevation of truth which saw
their rise; for the human being is not made for temporising but truth, for
autonomy but for obedience, for canniness but for courage, to be valiant for the
truth: not squandering it, but spiritually applying it. The fact that we have,
each one, a magnificent heritage from the donation of creation from our
God, does not alter because of thankless hearts, confused minds or feckless
spirits.
His word rules; His work awaits. His pardon with
peace needs to be found, or life is confounded, not with very intoxications of
decrease, but with judgment explicit, deserved and not to be denied. Truth has
many sides: it inspires, it calls, it invigorates, it resolves, it implies, it
implicates, and with God, where its heart is to be found, it breathes pardon in
peace, where faith and acceptance of the revelation of God in proposition in the
Bible, and in Person in the Messiah, Jesus Christ, received.