Truth
4-13-00
This is in response to the essay written by my friend Luke entitled "The Permanent Thing," which won first place in a literary contest at our high school. You should probably read that before continuing here in order to get the most out of it.
What Luke ended up saying was that we must try to dedicate our lives to following the path of Truth, regardless of societal or selfish leanings at the moment. This idea of liberation from the often immoral leanings of other people and society as a whole and sticking to the straight road of Truth is really common to all religions. At their centers, nearly all major belief systems strive to get people to live based on Truth rather than false notions or beliefs that may only be temporary. The major differences in these belief systems is in how people interpret the "Truth."
Luke is obviously a Christian, and like Muslims and Jews, Christians see the Word of God (the Bible/Koran/Torah) as the embodiment of this Truth. Followers of Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, on the other hand, would more likely say that God and Truth are one and the same, rather than that anybody's word is Truth. If people could only see this to be the case (that everyone seeks to live by Truth alone), much hatred and violence could be avoided.
Unfortunately, though, most religions have fundamentalist believers who claim that only one particular version of the Word is actual Truth and everything else is false. These people, who only believe a strictly literal interpretation of whatever version of the Bible, Koran, or Torah they're reading, don't understand that simple words cannot possibly contain all of the Truth. After all, they're only words. Rather than being the only possible version of absolute Truth, these books (which really don't contradict each other, when you get right down to it) are merely guides.
No book, whether it came directly from God Almighty or is Stephen King's latest work, can contain all of the Truth. It is like saying that someone who has memorized the entire Bible, or even every version of every book ever written, actually knows everything there is to know. Most of the knowledge we possess comes only from experience. You can read every book that's ever been written about water, but if you had never drunk a single drop of this liquid, you wouldn't understand.
Words can be used as a guide for those seeking the truth, and as a method for interpreting the truth for those who have already experienced it, but words are not a substitute for anything as infinite as Truth. One reason for this is that words are not permanent. As Luke said, Truth is the one permanent thing. Words, no matter how divine their origin may have been, change meaning over time. Also, when ordinary men pass those stories along to the next generation, some of the words themselves change. This is especially true when the original version may have been the Word of God (i.e. Truth itself), because no human being could understand this Truth and therefore wouldn't necessarily pass on the same information to his students in the next generation, which is how the Old Testament was passed on for thousands of years before ever being written down. Further change comes when the books are translated from Aramaic and Hebrew to Greek to Old Latin to "Modern" Latin to German to English and copied and recopied hundreds of times.
Therefore, while living the Truth is the goal of a great majority of humanity (Christians, Muslims, and Jews make up half the world's population, with Buddhists, Hindus, and Siekhs making up between half and two-thirds of the remainder), many of these people believe that a strict, literal interpretation of a set of words is a valid substitution for the Truth, and then exclude everybody who isn't reading exactly the same version of the Word.
Bringing the Kingdom of God into our everyday lives is the same for Christians as touching nirvana is for Buddhists and Hindus. If we could only see this fact, the world would be a much better place to live.
4-15-00
Just having seen the musical "Godspell," I am struck once again by the fact that I don't disagree with anything actually said by Jesus. Rather, I have problems with various other parts of the Bible. These other parts, though most have no specific author, are most definitely not wholly of a divine nature. The gospels were written by ordinary men about Jesus. Paul's letters to the Corinthians were written by, you guessed it, Paul. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, and all the other men (and undoubtedly a few unnamed women) who had an influence on what words actually got recorded in the Bible were assuredly not God.
Thus, the only parts of the Bible which can truly be called the Word of God are those containing the actual words of Jesus; who is, if you follow the Christian faith, the Son of God as well as one and the same with the Father and Holy Spirit in the divine Trinity. Of course, there's still the fact that those words attributed to Jesus weren't written until many decades after his death, but many decades is far less than the centuries which elapsed between any divine inspiration for the Old Testament and the time when they were actually written down for the first time.
Therefore, in order to live the path of Truth, if one considers the Word of God to be this truth, we must simply live the teachings of Jesus. Coincidentally, those teachings are no different from those of any other prophet or sage who founded a new religion. Muhammad, Zoroaster, Krishna, Lao Tse, Buddha, and Jesus all said the same things about living a life of simplicity and nonviolence. Regardless of whether or not you believe Jesus was the one and only Son of God, it is his teachings that are important in this life. Regardless of whether faith or good works have any effect on the afterlife (something which can't be known until we die, and even then there still may be some question) all that matters in this life is how we live.
Whether or not you think some other person is damned for his or her beliefs, you must treat that person with the same love and understanding as you would treat your brother ("Love thy neighbor as thy brother."). After all, this kind of compassion for others is the single best answer to the question "What would Jesus do?" Jesus would not ever act out of anger toward another person for any reason. In his own words (or at least King James's version of them): "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you," (Matthew 5:44). Of course, once you truly understand and love somebody, that person is no longer your enemy.
As far as living simply, Christians and Muslims are supposed to do this to leave room for God/Allah to enter their daily lives and Buddhists do it so that they may become enlightened, but these are the same events. Touching the Kingdom of God is the same as becoming enlightened. This result can only be achieved by understanding deeply everything we do, and this understanding can best be achieved when what we do is simply live moment to moment.
I could really go on for hours like this, pointing out parallels between Christianity and Buddhism, such as the need for living in the present moment ("Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself," Matthew 6:34) and so on. However, I'm sure we both have better things to do than discuss all of that. If you don't accept that Buddha didn't teach anything contradicting Christ, or are just interested in Buddhism and it's similarities to Christianity, I recommend the book Living Buddha Living Christ by the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. If you are coming at this from the other direction, and want to know about how Christ taught some very Buddhist principles, I recommend reading the book of Matthew, specifically the Sermon on the Mount (which starts in chapter 5 of that book).