Last Saturday my daughter handed me a small book. It’s a copy of Christmas Humphries’ ‘Buddhism’, which I’ve been vaguely aware has been missing from my bookshelves these past 23 years, but didn’t know where it was. I had a feeling it would turn up someday. It has my name written inside its front cover in loopy handwriting.
It’s a Pelican paperback that I bought in Malawi in 1974 for the equivalent of its cover price of 55p. Humphries, who was born in 1901, first published it in 1949. He was president of the British Buddhist Society for 40 years, which is some achievement.
It’s a superb piece of work, a brilliant distillation and examination of some very complex ideas. The section on Zen is a masterpiece of concision and illumination.
There’s also an excellent chapter on Tibetan Buddhism, which I’ve been wanting to know more about since my friend B told me that the new woman in his life, C, is a student of the Tibetan school of Buddhism. When I met her and spoke with her I had the impression that she knows almost as little of Zen as I know of the Tibetan School.
The second reason I’ve been wanting to learn more about this particular School, of course, is that Tibet itself seems to have become the hot international cause celebre since we’ve entered the year of the Beijing Olympics, and since the Tibetan monks started protesting about China’s oppression in Tibet.
Thirdly, I’ve become very interested in the Dalai Lama himself since I read “Destructive Emotions” and realised he’s an incredibly intelligent and spiritual leader, and has very strong links with Daniel Goleman and his work on brain science and Emotional Intelligence.
This has stimulated my interest in the practice of meditation and its effect on one’s ability to manage ‘destructive emotions’, as well as its contribution to developing an attitude of ‘Loving-kindness’.
I’d begun to get interested in the Dalai Lama some time ago after reading a brilliant little book of his called ‘Ancient Wisdom, Modern World - Ethics for the New Millenium’.
Buddhism hit the world headlines earlier year after the monks in Burma came out on the streets in protest about the military regime there, and for a while seemed to be starting an insurrection that could free the country from the regime’s yoke. This was social and political action, guided by spiritual intelligence, the scale of which had been previously unimaginable. Maybe the Year of the Rat and the start of a new cycle has something to do with these events. If so, the next 12 years could be very exciting, and very different to the past 12 years.
A Buddhist temple in Japan has decided not to host the Japanese stage of the Olympic torch relay as a protest about China’s treatment of monks and the general populace in Tibet.
Could it be that Buddhism is a liberation theology or philosophy that could increasingly become a force for good in the world in the 21st century? What if millions of people got into the practice of daily meditation and started to free their minds and their spirits as a precursor to freeing their countries from repression, hatred, and other destructive emotions?
I was reading an article the other day about Catholic priests in South America practising what they called liberation theology as an antidote and resistance to fascist dictatorships and military governments, starting back in the 1980’s.
Of course the Pope, John-Paul II, being a conservative and an anti-communist, disowned the budding movement and ordered the priests to stop ‘meddling’ in politics. Which was pretty much like telling them to give up their religion, I reckon, since Jesus Christ seemingly had a mission to free the people from oppression by the military, the occupying power, the commercial interests of the day, and indeed the existing priesthood and their corrupt practices in the guise of religion.
It appears that the current generation of left-leaning and progressive political leaders in South America were indeed influenced by the liberation theology of their priests, if not their church, and continue to this day to be guided by the spirit of Loving-kindness, which was the central message of Jesus as well as the Buddha, if I’m not mistaken.
Such beliefs have within them the notion that all humans are equal, and that justice, love, and freedom from oppression and coercion are essential aspects of spiritual intelligence. Which is in marked contrast to the neo-conservative/CIA/military-industrial world view which assumes that the New World Order requires the USA and its ‘allies’ to exercise world domination in the name of democracy, globalised economics (i.e. capital and rapacious Big Money), ‘freedom’ and God.
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One of the wonderfully intelligent things that appeals to me about Buddhism generally, and Zen in particular, is its freedom from a belief in ‘God’ - freedom from an all-powerful deity. Certain forms of Buddhism contain a great deal of ritual and study of ‘holy scriptures’, if you will, which may have a great deal of appeal for people that aren’t inclined towards intellectual effort or developing their own intuition. But it seems to me that in its purest form Buddhism is essentially a philosophy and a system of psychological practices that are aimed principally at developing spiritual intelligence and ultimately ‘enlightenment’. As such, there is not only no need to believe in a Supreme Being - to do so is in fact very unhelpful in enabling human beings to assume responsibility for their own spiritual health and strength.
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This blog needs to conclude with some quotations from Christmas(!) Humphries.
“What is Buddhism? To describe it is as difficult as describing London. Is it Mayfair, Bloomsbury, or the Old Kent Road?
Buddhism is a family of religions and philosophies. The Buddha himself wrote nothing, and none of his teaching was written down for at least four hundreds years after his death. [The Buddha was born in India 600 years before Christ.]
The oldest School, and probably the nearest to the original teaching, is the Theravada (the Doctrine of the Elders), and this today is the religion of Ceylon, Burma, Siam [Thailand], and Cambodia.
The Mahayana (Large Vehicle) includes the rest of the Buddhist world. [Mongolia, China, Korea and Japan]
But the peculiarities of Tibetan Buddhism, which covers Tibet and its neighbours, Bhutan, Sikkim and Nepal, are so marked that though it is part of the Mahayana it may be considered a School on its own.
The same applies to the Zen School of Japan, which is utterly different from any other School of Buddhism or from any other religion-philosophy. [Maybe he’s not considering Taoism here, which seems to me to have many similarities as a ‘religion-philosophy’.]
Buddhism’s range of subjects is so vast it is in fact it is in fact the most comprehensive and profound school of spiritual achievement known to history. In its earliest form it included the finest moral philosophy then known to man, with a range of mind-development and pioneer psychology that was second to none.
In its developed form it includes religion, advanced philosophy, mysticism, metaphysics and psychology. It includes the triple Yoga of India - intellectual, devotional, and the way of action - and it includes its own unique contribution to human achievement, Zen.
In every [Buddhist] country it has [enriched] the indigenous culture, and in China and Japan produced the greatest art of each country. Indeed the art of the T’ang Dynasty of China, often described as the finest in the world, was largely Buddhist art. Throughout the East it has set such a standard of tolerance, gentleness and a love of nature and all forms of life, that in religious history, where these virtues have not been prominent, it stands supreme.
In Ceylon, Burma and [Thailand] the worship of nature-spirits continues side-by-side with Buddhism, while in China and Japan the Confucian, Taoist and Shinto beliefs have modified the entering stream of Buddhism. Still more has the indigenous Bön religion of Tibet corrupted Tibetan Buddhism, itself already mixed with Hindu Tantric practices.
[It may be said that] the Buddha’s major task on earth was to make available to all mankind the principles of the Wisdom which the Brahmans had hitherto preserved as their tight monopoly.
In matters of spiritual knowledge the last word lies with the [Taoist] Tao Te Ching: ‘He who speaks does not know; he who knows does not speak’.
Buddhism, like any other form of relative truth, must vary with the individual, and grow for him with his individual growth. Only the Buddha fully understood ‘Buddhism’!
Buddhism may be compared to a net - a net of principles, life-tendencies, knots in the flow of life, vortices of force called matter. For life is motion and life is one. Pick up the knot of a net, therefore, and the rest of the net comes with it.
A bit like a blog entry really.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Humphreys
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalai_lama
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afp/20080418/tts-china-unrest-tibet-rights-japan-oly-48988b0.html
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