Click here to return to the author's website: taoism21cen.com
Where is God? You-Sheng Li
Christianity
branched off from Judaism while Buddhism branched off from Hinduism. Neither
Christianity nor Buddhism succeeded in their homelands but both flourished in
foreign lands to become major religions in today's world.
Buddhism was created by
Sakyamuni ( Siddhartha Gautama), the Buddha, who was
born about 563 and died 480 BC. The Buddha was a prince in a small state which
is inside
When there was a war, wounded
soldiers and civilians were left dying in the battlefield. If there was a God,
why didn't he stop the war and why didn't he heal the wounded? When there was a
famine, hungry farmers travelled far from their homeland in search for food. If
there was God, why didn't he feed those who were starving?
The Buddha then concluded that
there is no God. The Buddha also denied the existence of the subjective I or the soul. Buddhism accepts the traditional theory of
reincarnation but insists that both the world and I are illusory. Once the
subjective I is lost, there is no more suffering. Thus
the Buddhist religious truth resides outside God, the world, and I. Whoever
realized and accepted this religious truth is called a Buddha, the enlightened
one. So the pursuit of Buddhism is really a process of enlightenment. Contrast
to the rigid unjust caste system suffocating the low caste talents, Buddhism
emphasizes the equality of all humans in the sight of the Buddha. Everyone has
a Buddha nature and everyone can become a Buddha, so they claim. The Buddha
also taught whoever wanted to learn from him, regardless of sex, class, or
caste.
The Western enlightenment
movement started in the seventeenth century and ended with the French
revolution in the late eighteenth century or early nineteenth century. Like the
Buddha, the Western enlightenment employed rational thinking to examine the
existence of God. They argued that if everything, physical and metaphysical,
could be well explained in scientific terms by rational analysis, we do not
need a supernatural being. There is no rational evidence for the existence of
God.
Although there is no room left
for God according to rational thinking, there is no proof for the non-existence
of God either. Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895) believed that the large secondary
society of the modern human world is intended to be run by God not human
beings, as he compared a colony or state with a farm or orchard. The
intellectual gap between God and human beings equals the intellectual gap
between man and plants or sheep or pigs. Lao Tzu said similar words, “The
social world is not something humans can possess or grab in hand to meddle
with. The one trying to possess it will lose it; the one trying to grab it and
meddle with it will fail.” According to the textbooks of politics, the
conservative parties in the Western countries were originally based on a
similar belief that the master of our world is God, and human beings had better
not meddled with world affairs to create an ideal world. What we can do is only
to solve the emerging problems.
The so-called fideism insists
that religious truth is not, and ought not to be, based on rational knowledge
but solely on faith. God exists only by faith. But why do we need such a faith
to create a God who does not speak to rational minds but speaks to irrational
minds with conflicting messages resulting in endless violence?
According to the custom of the
day, the Buddha's mother traveled back to her mother's home to give birth. On
the way she stopped to enjoy a beautiful garden, where the Buddha was born in a
gesture with one hand pointing to heaven and the other to earth announcing, “In
both heaven and earth, I am the only one superior to all.” He then walked seven
steps where seven lotus plants grew into full bloom immediately. Such a story indicates
clearly that the Buddha is a supernatural being to their worshipers.
Then I observed, a middle-aged
woman knelt down in front of the Buddha image in such a submissive way that
five parts of her body attached to the floor, the head, the elbows, and the
knees, and she stayed in that position for a long time.
With the advance of science
today, in the well-educated minds of the worshipers, the Buddha was thus born a
God, worshiped as a God while they were reciting the Buddha's teaching: there
is no God.
During the Cultural Revolution
(1966-1976), the American writer and journalist, Edgar Parks Snow (1905-1972)
was once invited by the Chinese leader Mao to join the Chinese national day
ceremony. Mao was worshiped as a living God inside
Snow asked Mao, “Isn't that a
personality cult? Isn't that a superstition?”
Mao was silent for a long time,
and then said, “If there is no God, people will create one. What can I do?”
In Mao, A Biography, Ross
Terrill gives vivid descriptions of this Chinese living God, Mao's bitter life
in his later years, lonely, being worshiped but deserted. Terrill concludes,
the time of the hero is over, people live their life
without a hero. Unfortunately, Terrill isn't right yet. In a recent trip to
Please leave your comments on this essay, and join the New Epoch Forum