BUDDHA’S PROPOSITION

Vedanta holds that the purpose of life is to find God, whereas Buddhism teaches that eliminating suffering in one’s life is the goal.  Seek out your own salvation with diligence, the Buddha said.  Try it, see for yourself.

The Buddha stated, further, that you can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of salvation than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere.  When we are suffering, we are as much in need of our compassion as is any other being, and we are equally deserving of it.

In the end, only the individual can attain his salvation.  The Buddhas can merely teach that there is a Way.  It is the individual’s responsibility to follow it.  Abide with oneself as an island, with oneself as a refuge.  Seek no external refuge, the Buddha taught.

Of whatever teachings you can assure yourself that they conduce to dispassion and not to passions, to detachment and not to bondage, to decrease of worldly gains and not to their increase, to frugality and not to covetousness, to content and not to discontent, to solitude and not to company, to energy and not to sluggishness, to delight in good and not to delight in evil, of such teachings you may with certainty affirm that this is the Norm, this is the discipline, this is the Master’s message. (Digha Nikaya II.156)

As it happens, no small source of suffering for Vedantists is the struggle to find God, the reason why a percentage of them at least, like the Buddha himself, became and become Buddhists.

MISIDENTIFICATION

We mistakenly believe that we are our thinking mind, but the thinking mind is, in fact, the outside world.  We are the inside world, the Atman, our true identity.

The outside world is time-bound, transient, unreliable.  The inside world that is the Atman is timeless, steadfast, abiding. 
 
The outside world, because it is in flux, is the source of suffering, whereas the inside world, which never changes, does not cause suffering.

The thinking mind often misreads the outside world, of which it is a part, but the Atman, the inside world, pure consciousness, never misreads anything.  It strictly witnesses.

Lastly, the thinking mind creates the egoic self.  While the Atman mistakenly identifies with this egoic self early on, it soon sees it for the illusion it is and abandons it.

THINKING MAKES IT SO

There is nothing either bad or good, but thinking makes it so.-- William Shakespeare

REVELATION

To its complete surprise, a plant suddenly sprouts a flower.  Alas, it is now what it was meant to be, it sees, is now the only thing it could ever be.

ANALOGY

A bubble of air appears on the floor of a pond and then drifts slowly upward.  In Vedanta, this bubble is the Atman, and its appearance in the pond its birth into a human. 
 
The pond is the koshas or sheaths, as they are called, consisting of the body, the life force, the mind, the intellect or discriminating faculty, and the state of bliss, bliss because it is nearest to the Atman which is blissful.
 
The Atman bubble identifies with the pond for its entire assent, assuming that it is itself the pond.  Only when it reaches the surface does it see what it actually is, which is the air of the sky, Brahman.

WHAT HAPPENS

What happens when what is meant to happen happens?  You are meant to awaken spiritually, and when this occurs, as surely it will, there is a cosmic clicking into place.  You and the universe are then changed forever.

PRABHAVANANDA ON SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

In his teaching on Shankara’s Crest Jewel of Discrimination, Swami Prabhavananda underscored the necessity of consistent spiritual practice.

Just saying we are one with the Atman does not help, he pointed out.  We must maintain recollectedness throughout the day, and dedicate all we do to God.   

Chanting the name of God brings his sweetness, while just talking about him or reading about him does not.  The name of God in a chant and God himself are inseparable, he noted. 
 
We must take our mind from sense objects and place it at the feet of God.  Even if we do it for only half an hour a day, blessed is that half an hour.  To get results from spiritual practice we must continue doing it.  Chant to God, think of God, feel his presence all day long.

We talk of a spiritual “dry period.”  It is a dry period because we are not doing what we are supposed to do.  How much time do we spend to make a few dollars, have a few sense pleasures? 

The Buddha spent 12 long years in meditation before he attained illumination, and we complain when we put in an hour or two in a day.  We do an hour, half an hour, fifteen minutes and we wonder why God is not coming to us.

He concluded with, “Do something about it.”

PICKING AND CHOOSING

We do not need to be exclusively in one religious camp or another, although in the beginning we often are.  “I am a Buddhist,” we declare, or a Vedantist, or a Christian, etc.  However, some of us come to discover that we are happier not being so narrowly defined.  Picking and choosing from the different religions is more realistic.

Many of us like, for instance, the concept of the Atman, as found in Vedanta, so we adopted this.  Buddhism rejects the Atman, but there are other teachings in Buddhism that we may like.  The suffering in our lives, for example, caused by attachment, interests us.  Attachment is the grasping, clinging, clutching, striving to be this or to do that or to have this or to not have that.  The concept of dependent origination is also appealing, the notion that if this is, that follows.

Christianity has aspects that may attract us, too, especially as preached by such early Christian mystics as Meister Eckhart.  We may be drawn to a God that is personal, unlike Vedanta’s Brahman that is impersonal.

We can only go so far when picking and choosing this way, however.  There are doctrines in all the religions that don’t get along.  For instance, unlike Christianity and Vedanta, there is no God in Buddhism, and whereas everyone is the son of God in Vedanta, in Christianity there is only one son.

Finally, it is all right if we profess atheism.  Lightning will not strike us down.  But considering oneself an atheist is evidence that our thinking mind is dominating us.  Our thinking mind is not where God is, though, or even where God is not.

VEDANTA’S VIEW OF EXISTENCE

According to Vedanta the current universe, created by the “Big Bang,” was preceded by an infinite number of other universes, and will be followed by an infinite number of still other universes.

However, there is one ultimate Reality.  When regarded as transcendent this Reality is called Brahman, and when regarded as immanent it is called Atman.  Atman is within every creature and object. 
 
We humans superimpose our relative selves, and all that our relative selves are attached to, on our true nature, Atman, resulting in karmas.  These karmas, positive and negative, are expressed in our present and future lifetimes.
 
The purpose of human life is to identify, through spiritual practice, with Atman/Brahman, for doing so releases us from the karmic cycle of rebirth.  We humans are uniquely positioned to do this.

Vedanta accepts all the great spiritual teachers, and personal or impersonal aspects of the Godhead worshiped by different religions, viewing them as manifestations of the one Reality.

BUDDHISM'S VIEW OF EXISTENCE

This is how author John B. Noss summed up Buddhism's view of existence: 
 
“Wherever we observe it, the living world, whether around us or within us, is constantly in flux, in a state of endless becoming.

“There is no central planning world-self, no sovereign Person in the heavens holding all together in unity.

“There is only the ultimate impersonal unity of Being itself, whose peace enfolds the individual self when it ceases to call itself “I” and dissolves in the featureless purity of Nirvana, as a drop of spray is merged in its mother sea. 
 
“The permanency of the world is an illusion, and this also holds true of the empirical ego; there remain for human experience only processes of change and decay, of becoming and passing away, of appearing and disappearing.”

TWO-WAY MEMORY

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871),  the White Queen says to Alice, “The rule is jam (food) tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today.”

“It MUST come sometimes to ‘jam today,’” objected Alice.

“No, it can’t,” said the Queen.  “It’s jam every OTHER day.  Today isn’t any OTHER day, you know.”

“I don’t understand you,” said Alice.  “It’s dreadfully confusing!”

“That’s the effect of living backwards,” the Queen said kindly.  “It always makes one a little giddy at first---“

“Living backwards!” Alice repeated in great astonishment.  “I never heard of such a thing.”

“--but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.”

“I’m sure MINE only works one way,” Alice remarked.  “I can’t remember things before they happen.”

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.

Being able to remember not only the past but the future as well is an intriguing thought.  But how, beyond living life in reverse like the White Queen, would that be possible?

One way would be if the past, present, and future existed all at once.  According to physicist Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, the drama of the world is “played out” not on the three-dimensional stage of space, with time acting as an unchanging metronome, but on a four-dimensional stage of space-time. 
 
This way, just as every location on the surface of the Earth already exists, so too does every event that has ever happened and ever will happen already exist.

PANTHEISTIC EASTERN RELIGIONS

Zen is a combination of Taoism and Buddhism, and it is Taoism that makes Zen pantheistic.  Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi, the leading thinkers of Taoism, spoke of the Tao with a reverence similar to the way that pantheism discusses God as everything. 
 
Taoism, however, does not refer to a transcendent God but to a ground of being that underlies all things.  It was Zhuangzi who said:  “Heaven and I were created together, and all things and I are one.”  When asked where the Tao was, Zhuangzi answered that it was in the ant, the grass, the clay tile, even in excrement.  There is nowhere that the Tao is not, he said. 
 
Advaita Vedanta is pantheistic as well in that it holds that Brahman is everything.  There is an interesting distinction to be made, however.  The physical universe is a manifestation, or, more correctly, an emanation, like heat from fire, of the Brahman.  But because the physical universe is time-bound, in constant flux, and transient, it cannot be divine like the eternal, abiding, divine Brahman.
 
This is not to say, though, that there is nothing divine in the physical universe beyond the creator Brahman.  The Atman, the true self, the human soul, is identical with the Brahman, and therefore is abundant.  The physical universe, the Atman, and the Brahman are all one thing, however, is the point.

There is, incidentally, a similar term to pantheism and that is panentheism. Unlike pantheism that states that God is everything, panentheism posits that God is in everything.  Dvaita Vedanta is a good example of panentheism.