“The world is impermanent. Swallows that have departed will return again. Wilted flowers will one day bloom again. Cold winter days will not be forever, for they will only remain temporarily. What follow would be warm springs and refreshing summers that offer the luxury of full blossoms and summer creeks.”
BY NURAN YILDIRIM
“Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: it transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural and spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism,” Albert Einstein famously said in 1954. In this sense, Buddhism is a raid on dogma and theology – asserting the key tenets of simplicity, normality, impartiality, pertinence and most importantly humanism. It was founded by the Buddha in the sixth century B.C. – an age of great thinkers, such as Plato, Socrates, Laozi and Confucius – and eventually its influence has extended far beyond its own time and place.
According to the story, Buddha was born as the royal prince Siddhartha Gautama in place called Lumbini. His father was King Shuddhodana – the leader of a large clan called the Shakya. Legend has it,however, that Buddha’s desire to attain ultimate peace was extremely strong for one who grew up as a gifted Prince Siddhartha Gautama in a palace; he did not spend his life reigning over the kingdom but he instead drew his attention to discrimination of the caste system, wealth disparity and oppression by the powerful. He realized that no political power could relieve people from these issues; he thus decided to see the outside world and become renounced. As a result of years of meditation, the Prince attained enlightenment and he was awakened to a new world in the light of Truth. Henceforth, he was no longer the prince Siddhartha, but the Buddha, the “Awakened One”.
After the Buddha entered into the state of nirvana, his disciples promoted the principles of Buddhism in all directions. Buddhism spread not only throughout India, but also internationally and consequently it has become one of the biggest religions worldwide.
In the course of time, different sects and reflections of Buddhism, i.e., Tibetan, Japanese, Sectarian, Northern, Southern, and Early Buddhism, arose and the meaning of Buddha’s early teachings have been changed or misunderstood. In this sense, Master Hsing Yun – a Buddhist monk for over eighty years and the founder of the Fo Guang Shan Buddhist Order – believes that this complex system of Buddhist sects and terminology has caused deviation from the earliest form of Buddhism. He thus proposes Humanistic Buddhism for the purpose of reconnecting Buddhism with the human world and unifying different sects and reflections of Buddhism. Master Hsing Yun’s work Humanistic Buddhism: Holding True to the Original Intents of Buddha – originally published as renjianfojiao fotuo benhuai – provides answer to what the Buddha taught and what is essential to human beings through enhancing understanding of its core concepts, essence, historical development, and ways of propagation.
Indeed, Master Hsing Yun delivers his wise insights on the teachings of Buddha, using metaphors to explain the most complex and mostly misunderstood concerns in the Buddhism. For instance, he illustrates suffering with an apt metaphor:
“Suffering is like a clay, which, having gone through the furnace becomes a firm path for travelers. Suffering is like gold, which must be subject to extreme temperature to become refined and pure.”
And he speaks about death, in other words the greatest suffering, as a sense of joy:
“An aging and dying body is compared to a dilapidated house that requires reconstruction in order for someone to live in it again. Death is similar to a rundown running engine that needs to be replaced in order to get the machine running again. Death is also like a garden that need to be trimmed and weeded, otherwise there is no hope or future blossoms. It is true ignorance to think that there is no hope or future beyond death. Just as the cycle of seasons continues to revolve, once winter is over, one need not be afraid that a spring full of blossoms will never come.”
Master Hsing Yun further designates metaphors on the emptiness and he writes:
“When a house demolished, the empty land can make way for a bigger building. When the circle of life goes through old age, sickness, death and rebirth, death does not result in nothing. Like the arms of a clock, it merely means that the number twelve has been crossed and will start anew. Since the law of causes and conditions operates in a cyclical manner, then emptiness or the great void would be infinite and boundless. Such are the meanings of emptiness and conditions.”
These teachings sound rather dramatic and are often portrayed as an endless forms of pain, misery and dissatisfaction, but in Buddhism they refer to a contributing condition as well as a nutrient for life; for instance, death doesn’t mean the end because life continues in a cycle without end. Much like Walter Benjamin argued destruction as a path of emancipation explaining his insights on destruction in his most dazzling essay titled The Destructive Character – which explains to get rid of the past and move forward into a future created through destruction – Buddha’s long for change derives from the predicament of the life and it was indeed a form of resistance with an open mind and open heart.
As though many people have deified the Buddha and described supernatural powers of him, Buddha has not regarded himself as a god, but a part of multitude. In this sense, Buddhism is commonly described as a spiritual philosophy, rather than a religion. But perhaps, the true essence of Buddhism goes beyond the meanings attributed to a philosophy or a religion as Master Hsing Yun explains:
“Take a table for example. The moment you call it a table, its conventional form traps you, because in fact it is a timber. However, if you call it timber, it is still conventional, because timber is obtained from trees, those essence is actually a seed. Yet the moment you come to understand that the true form of a tree is a seed, you must also realize that this seed has gathered the conditions of soil, water, sunlight, air, and human labor in order to grow into a tree that is cut into pieces of timber, which are made into a table.”
Buddhism stands for what makes us not only human but humane. Presenting, then, humanism and Buddhism on a common ground, Master Hsing Yun’s work Humanistic Buddhism: Holding True to the Original Intents of Buddha gives a chance to change and it is a great read for anyone who is interested in Buddhism.
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