Intro

Eastern thought hit its heyday in America in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Practitioners and philosophers such as Alan Watts and Shunru Suzuki started bringing the message of Eastern Philosophy to the United States. It’s safe to say that it didn’t really take. Western thought is still dominated by forces that I would not call Eastern.

I’ll just get this out of the way and say that I consider myself a “Buddhist”, though begrudgingly so. What does this mean? It doesn’t mean that I worship the Buddha. As the Zen teacher Gudo Wafu Nishijima once said, “We worship reality.” But that’s a vague statement that doesn’t really get to the heart of what it means for me to be a Buddhist myself. I think for me personally, it means that I kind of believe in what I’m calling the “Eastern Gospel.”

The Gospel or “Good News”

The Christian Tradition has its Gospel or Good News. The good news can be summarized as such:

“Man is separated from God. So God came down in the form of Jesus and allowed himself to be sacrificed. Somehow this sacrifice is redemptive for people who believe in him, avoiding hell, annihilation, etc.”

Most of us who grew up religious or around religious people, especially here in the South, are familiar with some form of this narrative, whether we actually believe in it or not.

The Atheist Gospel

Atheism doesn’t really have a gospel. And that’s fine. As some have pointed out, it’s not atheism’s responsibility to give meaning, hope or purpose. All atheism states is a skepticism of, or outright denial of, gods or the supernatural. It’s neither idealistic nor nihilistic. Its basic assertion carries no specific weight on the importance of life one way or the other. Many atheists believe in or are inspired by many different things and they get their sense of meaning and morals from other places than religious people.

However, many atheists are secular humanists. If we combine the lack of belief in the supernatural with humanism, we essentially get this:

There are no gods or spirits coming to save us or deliver us an afterlife. Physical reality is all that exists. We must make the best of the situation we are in. Through moral reasoning, scientific understanding, we can do our best to make a better world for ourselves and others without relying on gods or the supernatural. Some day, we may even achieve a utopia.

I kind of think even religious people should act as if they are secular humanists. It’s great if God intervenes, but we should assume that for whatever reasons, She wants us to act on our own and that is not going to alter the laws of physics every time we need a parking spot and are late for work. As an old Muslim prophet quipped “Trust in Allah, but tie your camel first.”

Humanism always made sense to me, even if gods exist. We assume the laws of cause and effect work, until proven otherwise.

The Eastern “Gospel”

Does Eastern Philosophy have a gospel? Though it’s not called that, I do think we can sort of summarize the Eastern perspective, although this summary will of course lack the nuance and detail that the institutions and philosophies that underpin it deserve, but such is the way of things. So here goes. The Eastern Gospel says this:

“You feel like an lone individual soul in a strange and forbidding world. You feel you are a separate being with a mind which inhabits a body, different from and disconnected from the other people around you, strangers you have never met, and the natural world such as the animals, plants, mountains, stars and earth.

This is a mistake.

You are not an isolated individual. You are connected, maybe even completely one with, all the other people, animals and objects around you in a very real way. This is not a state you have to earn but a description of the reality that is waiting to be discovered. With practices such as meditation, prayer, devotion, yoga, etc. you can learn to recognize this oneness with everything, that the difference between you the subject and them the object, as false. We can dispel the hallucination of being a separate self, subject to frustration, anger and confusion and recognize our True Nature. Everything is already ‘One’.”

Again, this is an impoverished description like my descriptions of Christianity or Secular humanism, but it serves as a basis for discussion. Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism will vary on the degrees of this “oneness” (or non-duality as some call it), what exactly it means, how we get there and to what extent we remain individuals or not after we die. And you can debate to how literal to take ideas such as this concept of “oneness” or reincarnation. But overall, I think they would agree on the spirit of the gospel I just laid out. So what does the “Eastern Gospel” have to say about the world we now find ourselves in? How does it differ from other worldviews, in what ways is it compatible with modern life and in what ways does it side-step certain issues entirely?

That is what I want to explore in the next series of articles.