Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Blasphemy: 
I always find it perplexing that there is a perception of Buddhism that there is no God. And I don't think "Buddhists" themselves have given it much thought, and have simply rolled over and agreed with that outside, colonial perception. 

I think it's more accurate to say that Buddhism doesn't actively worship, as a specialized practice, an anthropomorphized version of God. It can even be argued, at the risk of insulting them, that Buddhism practices what the major monotheistic religions preach – that God cannot be known or rendered in human understanding. 

Looking for the concept of God in Buddhism, God is all things, all phenomena experienced by humans, truly universal, truly omni, and worship of God is an every day, every minute, every moment practice. Theoretically, at least, since in all religious constructs there is a break between what humans are supposed to do and what they actually do. 

The logic would involve God being universal, all-knowing, all powerful. That's something everyone can agree upon. So the easiest conception of God is that God is the universe. What can be more universal than the entire universe, and God cannot be less than that. 

As the entire universe, God is all-knowing as the universe knows itself. If God is unknowable to humans, it is reasonable to suggest that the way humans "know" something is not the only way there is to know something. 

Or another way to think about it is to think of my body as the entire universe. I know my body, how it works, how it feels, how it is, as a whole, better than any constituent part of my universe could know it. I am, of course, God, and at this scale, a human being would be smaller than a String Theory string (if an atom were the size of the solar system, a theoretical String Theory string would be as large as a single tree on earth).  

Encompassing all forces in the universe, God is all-powerful. No force in the universe can be greater than the force of the universe itself and all it contains. 

But this is all very big and abstract. I wonder how many religious types delve on the universe as a practical matter. We get images from Hubble Space Telescope from billions of light years away, but they are just photos, snapshots, and viewing them on the internet is different from the stretches of creative imagination necessary to even try to conceive of these things as real. It is the height of arrogance to simply brush off the immensity of the universe, and the extreme forces involved in stellar, interstellar, and intergalactic interactions whose electromagnetic evidence happens to reach our miniscule telescopes. 

What we can do as humans is apply these big concepts to what we do know as a matter of practical course – our lives, and this planet. If God is all the universe, surely God is everything on this planet, every molecule, every quanta of being, every thought and every idea to the very edge of human consciousness and sub-consciousness. How can God be any less? 

And from there is where Buddhism splits from the monotheistic conception of God by not putting a face, personality, or gender on God, i.e., making God concrete and knowable. And distinctively worshipable. You can have a relationship with God and feel holy, but treat your neighbor like shit, even though as God is universal, you should be treating your neighbor with like reverence. 

As an entity with a personality, God can have enemies. There can be human beings that aren't part of the "universal" rubric of God, which is now conveniently redefined not to be strict universality. You have subjectively identified heathen and infidels; you have heaven and hell, all concepts that stray from an objective universality of God. God is partisan. God is political. God is something less than the universe. And only humans do that.