Religious | Dave's Place

What Is That?

“[God] is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said.”

–Paul, to the Athenians, in the Book of Acts.

“If you want to experience the unnameable, you need to be a person who is the unnameable. Since you already are a person who is the unnameable, why worry about the unnameable?”

–Eihei Dogen, as rendered by Brad Warner

“I Am That I Am

—translation of the name of God, Yahweh.

“One Who Has Thus Come”

–translation of Tathagata, a word used to refer to the Buddha.

“I Am What I Am and That’s all That I Am”

—Popeye the Sailor Man.

Kosho Uchiyama, whom I consider to be one of the great religious minds of the 20^th century[1], said in more than one place that he thought that the twenty-first century would be the great century of religion. I’d read that opinion before, but when I came across it recently—eighteen years into the century—I thought, my God, how wrong could one person be? What was the man thinking?

He died in 1998, so he didn’t see any of our current horrors.

But I have recently thought more about him as a person. He is revered as a Zen Buddhist, author of possibly the best book about Zen meditation ever written[2], but in many ways wasn’t typical of a Zen priest. He was completely devoted to zazen, the practice of sitting meditation, but he didn’t believe in any of the other trappings of Zen, floor bows, chanting, Oryoki practice. He allowed lay people to come to his sesshins—which he held once a month—and let them make their own schedules, around their work schedules, so that sometimes people were sitting three deep, other times it wasn’t all that crowded. The place must have been a madhouse.

He had studied Western philosophy as a young man, then studied the Bible and flirted with the idea of becoming a Catholic priest before he made the decision to become a Zen monk, but he continued to read the Bible all his life, used the word God rather freely in his writings—a real no no for many Buddhists—and on the last day of his life finished a poem that mentions God and Buddha in the same line. He also sometimes did the Pure Land practice of chanting Namu Amida Butsu[3] because his health was poor and he wasn’t always well enough to sit zazen. He spoke with great respect of Pure Land practice, and joked at one point that Zen people are performing Namu Amida Butsu with their bodies, and Pure Land Buddhists are doing zazen with their mouths.

He doesn’t fit the stereotype of the Zen priest, at least not where I come from[4], but if you step back and look at his life, it seems profoundly religious from beginning to end. Even his reading of Kant at the university seems part of a religious quest. And he lived in poverty all his life. He owned only a few robes, lived in a small room in his temple. He often lived by begging. He never really did anything to make money, though his books must have brought in some.[5]

I have come to the conclusion as I reach the age of 70 that religious life isn’t about what you believe, it’s about how you live. Truly religious people all live alike, no matter what they believe (even if they believe nothing). When the New Atheists, who take such delight in pulverizing various problems of religion (the beliefs they pummel are always the most primitive ones they can find; you don’t hear them criticizing Paul Tillich, or Martin Buber), they often cite the fact that religions are at war with one another. But the wars are always about what people believe. They’re not about how they live.

People make a huge deal, for instance, out of the differences between Christianity and Buddhism, but if you look at typical days for Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama, they seem exactly like. The same thing is true of lesser practitioners: I and many of my friends get up early in order to meditate, and arrange our days around that, but through the years I’ve met Christians who rose early to pray (the president of a Korean university that I once visited woke up at 4:00 AM and prayed for two hours, as did the American television icon Fred Rogers. And a casual friend of mine at the Y once explained to me why he got up at 4:30. “I’ve got to thank the Lord”). And though Buddhists and Christians might imagine that they don’t see eye to eye politically, there are plenty of Buddhists who disagree with Buddhists, and Christians who disagree with Christians. The Catholic Church alone includes the full range of political opinions, and I once listened to a vociferous argument at my Zen Center between a man who was for John Kerry and one who was for Rick Perry. They were both looking at me as if to say, You’re on my side, right?

It is also true that, if you look at religious guidelines about how to live, they are remarkably the same. People in Buddhism often say, about the precepts, no no, they’re not like the Ten Commandments, they’re not commandments, they’re just guidelines about how to live your life, but that’s a rather fine distinction. Both religions see the danger zones for human behavior in the same places, though they may have different ideas about how to handle them.

So I would like to suggest, completely modestly, that being religious might have nothing to do with beliefs (even though a particular religious person might find certain beliefs very important) but with an attitude toward life, first of all that life is sacred, life is beautiful, life is something to be valued and cherished; that—although we might love and especially cherish people who believe the same things we do—all people are our brothers and sisters, and all beings are a part of life; that loving God involves loving all of his creation and all that is; and that living a religious life involves taking a vow to live a certain way, rather than living any way we want to.

Kosho Uchiyama may just have been nuts, but I think it’s also possible that he was looking far into the future, seeing that it is only when people become less fixated on particular forms of religion that a truly religious life can come to be, that people who are devoted to some religion have more in common than those who are not leading a principled life at all. A religious life has a certain feel to it. It’s broader than any particular religion. And some people who lead it don’t believe anything.

[1] I don’t mean that he created some profound theology. He didn’t create a theology at all; he was a Buddhist! And in many ways, compared to many writers on Zen, he seems quite simple. But it is his very simplicity that is profound. People who make religion complicated are only showing off their own ideas. They’re not addressing true religion.

[2] Opening the Hand of Thought.

[3] I take refuge in Amita Buddha (the Buddha of life and light).

[4] The priests in my temple take all the trappings of being a priest quite seriously, especially conducting rituals. Being a priest is largely about learning and knowing those things. Otherwise they’re just like the rest of us.

[5] At the same time, he was extremely proud of his ability to do origami, which his father also practiced. He called himself the god of origami, and published books on that subject as well as Zen. And though his whole life seems religious from beginning to end, and he suffered from tuberculosis for much of his life, he also smoked all his life (just four cigarettes a day) and mentions that he drank three small shots of whiskey every evening before he went to bed. He smoked a cigarette on the day he died.