sabrinamari | "The central message of Buddhism is not 'Every man for himself.'"

So, this post is not really about my favorite quote from "A Fish Called Wanda."

That was just the perfect title.

Recently, on the

the_wildhunt, our intrepid Pagan reporter noted that Reverend Dennis Terry said this:

“I don’t care what the naysayers say. This nation was founded as a Christian nation. The god of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. There is only one God. There is only one God, and his name is Jesus. I’m tired of people telling me that I can’t say those words. I’m tired of people telling us as Christians that we can’t voice our beliefs or we can’t no longer pray in public. Listen to me. If you don’t love America, and you don’t like the way we do things, I’ve got one thing to say, get out! [...] We don’t worship Buddha, we don’t worship Mohammed, we don’t worship Allah. We worship God. We worship God’s son Jesus Christ."

He and many others have covered the deeply ethnocentric nature of this comment and others like them. I'm not even going to address that. I'm also not going to point out that Reverend Terry contradicts himself.

Instead, I want to point out something much, much smaller, just to make sure that folks understand.

Buddhists do not worship Buddha.

The Buddha was just a human being. An ordinary person who was more reflective than most, and who reached an awakened, fully conscious state often referred to as enlightenment.

The whole point of Buddhism is that this is available to anyone.

Some hybrid forms of Buddhism recognize gods and goddesses. Others don't.

The most essential and streamlined forms of Buddhism---mostly those that have not morphed with other belief systems---don't have that much to say about the gods.

That's not what's important in Buddhism.

Buddhism is about how to be a fully awake human being. That's it. It doesn't spend much time on the gods, or on demons, or on other kinds of beings at all. I mean, it's got nothing against them, its just that its focus is totally on understanding human nature, coming to know the human mind, and learning to actively shape one's conscious self.

If you accept Dion Fortune's definition of magic as "...the art and science of changing consciousness according to the Will," then Buddhism is absolutely a kind of magic.

It offers a systematic method for observing the human mind in action (via several varieties of sitting and active meditation). During these observation periods, it asks practitioners to test a range of basic principles (hypotheses) against their own experience and then suggests several ongoing practices for achieving conscious control of/detente with/peace with a whole bunch of different neuroses.

That's it. That's Buddhism at its core, as I understand it.

So, just in case you were wondering: Buddhists do not worship Buddha.

They steal his methodology and mimic his practices in order to become saner.

That's it.