Thats all well and good in theory, but in practice every single society where Buddhism has been the state religion has become fascist. Why?
I think Buddhism is out of touch with reality [personal opinion] and hence only works well for those inclined to escapism.
Yes I have. Ever hear about the LTTE? The Japanese? The Banpo? The Burmese junta?
etc etc
God is never defined in Buddhism. To give names to god is a typically human affair, god if it exists is nameless and without quality. God is undifferentiated reality, the void that is always full. Questions of whether god is male or female, outside or within, a being or a cosmic unity, material or not, have no place in Buddhism.
The Buddhist emphasis is not on god, but on man.
And man, essentially, is mind. “All that we are is the result of our thoughts; it is founded on our thoughts, made up of our thoughts.” (The Dammnapada). Not only ourselves, but also the world outside us is constructed by our thoughts. It is not that the world isn’t real; simply that we do experience it as it really is. All experience is subjective, because we colour it with our thoughts and feelings, our hopes and fears.
Beyond this subjective world, however is the world as it really is — without colouring. And it is a fundamental tenet of Buddhism that each of us is able to gradually liberate him or herself from subjectivity, and so gain an increasingly non — Subjective awareness of how the world really is.
What is subjectivity? Buddhism defines subjective experience as making distinctions, of which there are two kinds. There are those distinctions which present themselves to us simultaneously, such as black type on white paper; and there are those that we perceive as a result of the passage of time, which we experience as change. These distinctions give rise to our conviction that the world is infinitely varied and ever — changing, filled with a multiplicity of things.
Because of this Buddhists believe that it is possible to wrest what is better from what is worse, happiness from pain, wealth from poverty. The Buddhist social goals and personal goals are based on this belief — the ‘growth philosophy’. Because of distinctions, we live in fear of losing what we have, and in constant search for what we do not have.
We do not realize that all this grasping and seeking is necessarily vain, since the very idea of having cannot exists without the idea of not having; better without worse, wealth without poverty. This fundamental insight of thought — that opposites are complementary rather then contradictory is quite alien to Judeo, Christian, Islamic minds except maybe amongst the teachings of the Sufi’s.
It is ironic therefore, that science reveals the truth of this argument in order to account for the paradoxical behavior of light, which travels both as a wave and a particle. It is now enshrined in modern physics as Niels Bohr’s “Principle of Complementarity”.
Distinctions, therefore, are traps for the unwary. They are false, not in the sense that they do not exist (They obviously do), but in the sense that they form only one side of the coin, one half of reality.
Distinction is complemented by integration and the multiplicity of all things; true Buddhists believe this and that’s what make them better then you are.
