Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE GOD-CONCEPTION OF BUDDHISM1 AMONG the many critical opinions which are passed upon Buddhism by Christian or Western scholars, there are two which stand out most conspicuously and most persistently. One of them declares that Buddhism is a religion which denies the existence of the soul, and the other...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE GOD-CONCEPTION OF BUDDHISM1 AMONG the many critical opinions which are passed upon Buddhism by Christian or Western scholars, there are two which stand out most conspicuously and most persistently. One of them declares that Buddhism is a religion which denies the existence of the soul, and the other that it is atheistic or at best pantheistic, which latter term implies what is practically tantamount to the rejection of a God, that is, a personal God as believed in by the Christians. The object of this discourse is to see to what extent the second criticism is, if at all, justifiable. In other words, I propose here to elucidate the Buddhist conception of God. At the outset, let me state that Buddhism is not atheistic as the term is ordinarily understood. It has certainly a God, the highest reality and truth, through which and in which this universe exists. However, the followers of Buddhism usually avoid the term God, for it savors so much of Christianity, whose spirit isnot always exactly in accord with the Buddhist interpretation of religious experience. Again, Buddhism is not pantheistic in the sense that it identifies the universe with God. On the other hand, the Buddhist God is absolute and transcendent; this world, being merely its manifestation, is necessarily fragmental and imperfect. To define more exactly the Buddhist notion of the highest being, it may be convenient to borrow the term very happily coined by a modern German scholar, panentheism, according to which God is irav Kol tv (all and one) and more than the totality of existence. 'It may be interesting for our readers to read in connection with this article Dr. Paul Carus's Buddhist story entitled Amitdbha. One of the most fundamental beliefs of Buddhism is that all the multitudinous and multifar...