How does the phrase "respect is always due to all creatures" illustrate the indigenous worldview?

LIVING RELIGIONS

N I N T H E D I T I O N — M A R Y PAT F I S H E R

CONSULTANTS

CHRISTOPHER QUEEN Harvard University

DAMARIS PARSITAU Egerton University, Kenya

RITA SHERMA Taksha University

CHRISTOPHER CHAPPLE Loyola Marymount University

RODNEY L. TAYLOR University of Colorado at Boulder

JOHN BREEN International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, Kyoto

HILLEL LEVINE Boston University and International Center for Concilliation

MARY DOAK University of San Diego

OMID SAFI University of North Carolina

GURINDER SINGH MANN University of California, Santa Barbara

EILEEN BARKER London School of Economics

GEORGE D. CHRYSSIDES University of Birmingham

M. DARROL BRYANT Renison University College/University of Waterloo, Canada

Boston Columbus Indianapolis New York San Francisco Upper Saddle River

Amsterdam Cape Town Dubai London Madrid Milan Munich Paris Montréal Toronto

Delhi Mexico City São Paulo Sydney Hong Kong Seoul Singapore Taipei Tokyo

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Credits and acknowledgments borrowed from other sources and reproduced, with permission, in this textbook appear on pages 555–56.

Copyright © 2013, 2011, 2008, 2005, 2002, 1999, 1997, 1994, 1991 Mary Pat Fisher

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RELIGIOUS RESPONSES 1

Before sunrise, members of a Muslim family rise in Malaysia, perform their purifying ablutions, spread their prayer rugs facing Mecca, and begin their prostrations and prayers to Allah. In a French cathedral, worshipers line up for their turn to have a priest place a wafer on their tongue, murmuring, “This is the body of Christ, given for you.” In a South Indian village, a group of women reverently anoint a cylindrical stone with milk and fragrant sandal- wood paste and place around it offerings of fl owers. The monks of a Japanese Zen Buddhist monastery sit cross-legged and upright in utter silence, which is broken occasionally by the noise of the kyosaku bat falling on their shoul- ders. On a mountain in Mexico, men, women, and children who have been dancing without food or water for days greet an eagle fl ying overhead with a burst of whistling from the small wooden fl utes they wear around their necks. In Jerusalem, Jews tuck scraps of paper containing their personal prayers between the stones of the ancient Western Wall, which once supported their sacred Temple, while above that wall only Muslims are allowed to enter the Dome of the Rock to pray.

RELIGIOUS RESPONSES

C H A P T E R 1

• Attempts to defi ne religion 2

• Why are there religions? 3

• Understandings of Sacred Reality 10

• Ritual, symbol, and myth 14

• Absolutist and liberal responses to modernity 18

• The encounter between science and religion 20

• Women in religions 26

• Negative aspects of organized religions 28

• Lenses for studying religions 29

KEY TOPICS

Jewish women praying at the Western Wall. Many scraps of paper with personal prayers are tucked into the cracks between the ancient stones.

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2 RELIGIOUS RESPONSES

These and countless other moments in the lives of people around the world are threads of the tapestry we call religion. The word is probably derived from the Latin, meaning “to tie back,” “to tie again.” All of religion shares the goal of tying people back to something behind the surface of life—a greater reality, which lies beyond, or invisibly infuses, the world that we can perceive with our fi ve senses.

Attempts to connect with or comprehend this greater reality have taken many forms. Many of them are organized institutions, such as Buddhism or Christianity. These institutions are complexes of such elements as leaders, beliefs, rituals, symbols, myths, scriptures, ethics, spiritual practices, cultural components, historical traditions, and management structures. Moreover, they are not fi xed and distinct categories, as simple labels such as “Buddhism” and “Christianity” suggest. Each of these labels is an abstraction that is used in the attempt to bring some kind of order to the study of religious patterns that are in fact complex, diverse, ever-changing, and overlapping.

Attempts to defi ne religion

The labels “Buddhism,” “Hinduism,” “Taoism,” “Zoroastrianism,” and “Confucianism” did not exist until the nineteenth century, though the many patterns to which they refer had existed for thousands of years. Professor Willard G. Oxtoby (1933–2003), founding director of the Centre for Religious Studies at the University of Toronto, observed that when Western Christian scholars began studying other religions, they applied assumptions based on the Christian model to other paths, looking for specifi c creedal statements of belief (a rarity in indigenous lifeways), a dichotomy between what is secular and what is sacred (not helpful in looking at the teachings of Confucius and his followers), and the idea that a person belongs to only one religion at a time (which does not apply in Japan, where people freely follow various religious traditions).

Not all religious behavior occurs within institutional con- fi nes. The inner dimensions of religion—such as experiences, beliefs, and values—can be referred to as spirituality. This is part of what is called religion, but it may occur in personal, noninstitutional ways, without the ritual and social dimen- sions of organized religions. Personal spirituality without reference to a particular religious tradition permeates much contemporary artistic creation. Without theology, without historical references, such direct experiences are diffi cult to express, whether in words, images, or music. Contemporary artist Lisa Bradley says of her luminous paintings:

In them you can see movement and stillness at the same time, things coming in and out of focus. The light seems to be from behind. There is a sense something like a permeable membrane, of things coming from one dimension to another. But even that doesn’t describe it well. How do you describe truth in words?1

Religions can be dynamic in their effects, bringing deep changes in individuals and societies, for good or ill. As Professor Christopher Queen, world religions scholar from Harvard University, observes:

Lisa Bradley, Passing Shadow, 2002.

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RELIGIOUS RESPONSES 3

The interpersonal and political realms may be transformed by powerful religious forces. Devotion linking human and divine beings, belief in holy people or sacred space, and ethical teachings that shape behaviors and attitudes may combine to transform individual identities and the social order itself.2

Frederick Streng (1933–1993), an infl uential scholar of comparative reli- gion, suggested in his book Understanding Religious Life that the central defi ni- tion of religion is that it is a “means to ultimate transformation.” A complete defi nition of religion would include its relational aspect (“tying back”), its transformational potential, and also its political dimensions.

Current attempts to defi ne religions may thus refer more to processes that to fi xed independent entites. Professor of Religious Studies Thomas A. Tweed, for instance, proposes this defi nition in his book Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion:

Religions are confl uences of organic-cultural fl ows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing on human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries—terrestrial, corporeal, and cosmic....This theory is, above all, about movement and relation, and it is an attempt to correct theories [of religion] that have presupposed stasis and minimized interdependence.3

Religion is such a complex and elusive topic that some contemporary schol- ars of religion are seriously questioning whether “religion” or “religions” can be studied at all. They have determined that no matter where and at what point they try to defi ne the concept, other parts will get away. Nonetheless, this diffi cult-to-grasp subject is central to many people’s lives and has assumed great political signifi cance in today’s world so it is important to try sincerely to understand it. In this introductory chapter, we will try to develop some under- standing of religion in a generic sense—why it exists, its various patterns and modes of interpretation, its encounters with modern science, its inclusion or exclusion of women, and its potentially negative aspects—before trying in the subsequent chapters to understand the major traditions known as “religions” practiced around the world today.

Why are there religions?

In many cultures and times, religion has been the basic foundation of life, permeating all aspects of human existence. But from the time of the European Enlightenment, religion has become in the West an object to be studied, rather than an unquestioned basic fact of life. Cultural anthropologists, soci- ologists, philosophers, psychologists, and even biologists have peered at reli- gion through their own particular lenses, trying to explain what religion is and why it exists to those who no longer take it for granted. In the following pages we will briefl y examine some of the major theories that have evolved. They are not mutually exclusive.

Materialist perspective: humans invented religion

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scientifi c materialism gained considerable prominence as a theory to explain the fact that religion can be found in some form in every culture around the world. The materialistic point of view is that the supernatural is imagined by humans; only the material world exists.

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An infl uential example of this perspective can be found in the work of the nineteenth-century philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872). He rea- soned that deities are simply projections, objectifi cations of human qualities such as power, wisdom, and love onto an imagined cosmic deity outside our- selves. Then we worship it as Supreme and do not recognize that those same qualities lie within ourselves; instead, we see ourselves as weak and sinful. Feuerbach developed this theory with particular reference to Christianity as he had seen it.

Other scientifi c materialists believe that religions have been created or at least used to manipulate people. Historically, religions have often supported and served secular power. The nineteenth-century socialist philosopher Karl Marx (1818–1883), author of The Communist Manifesto, argued that a culture’s religion—as well as all other aspects of its social structure—springs from its economic framework. In Marx’s view, religion’s origins lie in the longings of the oppressed. It may have developed from the desire to revolutionize society and combat exploitation, but in failing to do so it became otherworldly, an expression of unfulfi lled desires for a better, more satisfying life:

Man makes religion: religion does not make man. … The religious world is but the refl ex of the real world. … Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.4

According to Marx, not only do religions pacify people falsely; they may themselves become tools of oppression. For instance, he charged Christian authorities of his times with supporting “vile acts of the oppressors” by explaining them as due punishment of sinners by God. Other critics have made similar complaints against Eastern religions that blame the sufferings of the poor on their own misdeeds in previous lives. Such interpretations and uses of religious teachings lessen the perceived need for society to help those who are oppressed and suffering. Marx’s ideas thus led toward twentieth-century atheistic communism, for he had asserted, “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.”5

Functional perspective: religion is useful

Another line of reasoning has emerged in the search for a theory explaining the universal existence of religions: They are found everywhere because they are useful, both for society and for individuals. Religions “do things” for us, such as helping us to defi ne ourselves and making the world and life com- prehensible to us. Functional explanations have come from many disciplines.

One version of the functional explanation is based on sociology. Pioneering work in this area was done by French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858– 1917). He proposed that humans cannot live without organized social struc- tures, and that religion is a glue that holds a society together. Surely religions have the potential for creating harmony in society, for they all teach social virtues such as love, compassion, altruism, justice, and discipline over our desires and emotions. Political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell concluded from a survey of religiosity in the United States that people who are involved in organized religions are generally more generous toward their neighbors and more conscientious as citizens than those who do not participate in religions.6 The role of religion in the social process of identity

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RELIGIOUS RESPONSES 5

formation at individual, family, community, and national levels is now being carefully examined, for people’s identifi cation with a particular religion can be manipulated to infl uence social change—either to thwart, moderate, or encourage it.

Biology also offers some functional reasons for the existence of religion. For instance, John Bowker, author of Is God a Virus?, asserts that religions are organized systems that serve the essential biological purpose of bringing people together for their common survival. To Bowker, religion is found uni- versally because it protects gene replication and the nurturing of children. He proposes that because of its survival value, the potential for religiosity may even be genetically inherent in human brains.

Medical professionals have found that religious faith is good for our health. Research conducted by the Center for the Study of Religion/Spirituality and Health at Duke University found that those who attend religious services or read scriptures frequently are signifi cantly longer lived, less likely to be depressed, less likely to have high blood pressure, and nearly ninety percent less likely to smoke. Many other studies have indicated that patients with strong faith recover faster from illness and operations.

Many medical studies have also been done on the potential of prayer to heal illness, but results have been mixed. However, meditation has been proved to reduce mental stress and also to help develop positive emotions, even in the face of great diffi culties. Citing laboratory tests of the mental calm- ness of Buddhists who practice “mindfulness” meditation, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama points out that:

Over the millenniums, many practitioners have carried out what we might call “experiments” in how to overcome our tendencies toward destructive emotions. The world today needs citizens and leaders who can work toward ensuring stability and engage in dialogue with the “enemy”—no matter what kind of aggression or assault they may have endured. If humanity is to survive, happiness and inner balance are crucial. We would do well to remember that the war against hatred and terror can be waged on this, the internal front, too.7

From the point of view of individual psychology, there are many explana- tions of the usefulness of religion. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1938) suggested that religion fulfi lls neurotic needs. He described religion as a col- lective fantasy, a “universal obsessional neurosis”—a replaying of our loving and fearful relationships with our parents. Religious belief gives us a God powerful enough to protect us from the terrors of life, and will reward or punish us for obedience or nonobedience to social norms. From Freud’s extremely sceptical point of view, religious belief is an illusion springing from people’s infantile insecurity and neurotic guilt; as such it closely resembles mental illness.

On a more positive note, the twentieth-century psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900–1980) concluded that humans have a need for a stable frame of reference, and that religion fulfi lls this need. As Mata Amritanandamayi, a contemporary Indian spiritual teacher, explains:

Faith in God gives one the mental strength needed to confront the problems of life. Faith in the existence of God makes one feel safe and protected from all the evil infl uences of the world. To have faith in the existence of a Supreme Power and to live accordingly is a religion. When we become religious, morality arises, which, in turn, will help to keep us away from malevolent infl uences.

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6 RELIGIOUS RESPONSES

We won’t drink, we won’t smoke, and we will stop wasting our energy through unnecessary gossip and talk. … We will also develop qualities like love, compassion, patience, mental equipoise, and other positive traits. These will help us to love and serve everyone equally. … Where there is faith, there is harmony, unity and love. A nonbeliever always doubts. … He cannot be at peace; he’s restless. … The foundation of his entire life is unstable and scattered due to his lack of faith in a higher principle.8

For many, the desire for material achievement offers a temporary sense of purposefulness. But once achieved, material goals may seem hollow. A long- ing for something more lasting and deeply meaningful may then arise. The Buddha said:

Look! The world is a royal chariot, glittering with paint. No better. Fools are deceived, but the wise know better.9

Religions propose ideals that can radically transform people. Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) was an extremely shy, fearful child. His transformation into one of the great political fi gures of the twentieth century occurred as he meditated single-mindedly on the great Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita, particularly the second chapter, which he says was “inscribed on the tablet of my heart.”10 It reads, in part:

He is forever free who has broken Out of the ego-cage of I and mine To be united with the Lord of Love. This is the supreme state. Attain thou this And pass from death to immortality.11

People need inner strength for dealing with personal problems. Those who are suffering severe physical illness, privation, terror, or grief often turn to the divine for help. Agnes Collard, a Christian woman, reported that her impend- ing death after four painful years of cancer was bringing her closer to God:

I don’t know what or who He is, but I am almost sure He is there. I feel His presence, feel that He is close to me during the awful moments. And I feel love. I sometimes feel wrapped, cocooned in love.12

Conviction that Someone or Something that cannot be seen exists may be an antidote to the discomforting sense of being alone in the universe. This isolation can be painful, even terrifying. The divine may be sought as a lov- ing father or mother, or as a friend. Alternatively, some paths offer the way of self-transcendence. Through them, the sense of isolation is lost in mystical merger with the One Being, with the Ultimate Reality.

According to some Asian religions, the concept that we are distinct, auton- omous individuals is an illusion; what we think of as “our” consciousnesses and “our” bodies are in perpetual fl ux. Thus, freedom from problems lies in accepting temporal change and devaluing the “small self” in favor of the eternal self. The ancient sages of India, whose teachings are preserved in the Upanishads, called it “This eternal being that can never be proved, ... spot- less, beyond the ether, the unborn Self, great and eternal, ... the creator, the maker of everything.”13

Buddhists see the problem of human existence differently. What humans have in common, they feel, is the suffering that comes from life’s imper-

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RELIGIOUS RESPONSES 7

manence and our craving for it to remain the same. For Buddhists, reliance on an Absolute or God and the belief in a personal self or an Eternal Self only makes the suffering more intense. The solution is to let go of these ideas, to accept the groundlessness and openness of life, and to grow in clear awareness and humanistic values.

We may look to religions for understanding, for answers to our many questions about life. Is life just a series of ran- dom and chaotic incidents, or is there some meaning and order behind what is happening? Who are we? Why are we here? What happens after we die? Why is there suffering? Why is there evil? Is anybody up there listening? We have diffi culty accepting the commonsense notion that this life is all there is. We are born, we struggle to support ourselves, we age, and we die. If we believe that there is nothing more, fear of death may inhibit enjoyment of life and make all human actions seem pointless. Confronting mortality is so basic to the spiritual life that, as the Christian monk Brother David Steindl-Rast observes, whenever monks from any spiritual tradition meet, within fi ve minutes they are talking about death.

It appears that throughout the world man [sic] has always been seeking something beyond his own death, beyond his own problems, something that will be enduring, true and timeless. He has called it God, he has given it many names; and most of us believe in something of that kind, without ever actually experiencing it.

Jiddu Krishnamurti14

For those who fi nd security in specifi c answers, some religions offer dogma—systems of doctrines proclaimed as absolutely true and accepted as such, even if they lie beyond the domain of one’s personal experiences. Absolute faith provides some people with a secure feeling of rootedness, meaning, and orderliness in the midst of rapid social change. Religions may also provide rules for living, governing everything from diet to personal rela- tionships. Such prescriptions may be seen as earthly refl ections of the order that prevails in the cosmos. Some religions, however, encourage people to explore the perennial questions by themselves, and to live in the uncertainties of not knowing intellectually, breaking through old concepts until nothing remains but truth itself.

Faith perspective: Ultimate Reality exists

From the point of view of religious faith, there truly is an underlying reality that cannot readily be perceived. Human responses to this Supreme Reality have been expressed and institutionalized as the structures of some religions.

How have people concluded that there is some Unseen Reality, even though they may be unable to perceive it with their ordinary senses? Some simply accept what has been told to them or what is written in their holy books. Others have come to their own conclusions.

One path to faith is through deep questioning. Martin Luther (1483–1546),

For some, religion offers relief from feelings of loneliness and isolation.

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father of the Protestant branches of Christianity, recounted how he searched for faith in God through storms of doubt, “raged with a fi erce and agitated conscience.”15 Jnana yoga practitioners probe the question “Who am I?” Gradually they strip away all of what they are not—for instance, “I am not the body, I am not the thinking”—and dig even into the roots of “I,” until only pure Awareness remains.

The human mind does not function in the rational mode alone; there are other modes of consciousness. In his classic study The Varieties of Religious Experience, the philosopher William James (1842–1910) concluded:

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the fl imsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. … No account of the universe in its totality can be fi nal which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.16

To perceive truth directly, beyond the senses, beyond the limits of human reason, beyond blind belief, is often called mysticism. George William Russell (1867–1935), an Irish writer who described his mystical experiences under the pen name “AE,” was lying on a hillside:

not then thinking of anything but the sunlight, and how sweet it was to drowse there, when, suddenly, I felt a fi ery heart throb, and knew it was personal and intimate, and started with every sense dilated and intent, and turned inwards, and I heard fi rst a music as of bells going away … and then the heart of the hills was opened to me, and I knew there was no hill for those who were there, and they were unconscious of the ponderous mountain piled above the palaces of light, and the winds were sparkling and diamond clear, yet full of colour as an opal, as they glittered through the valley, and I knew the Golden Age was all about me, and it was we who had been blind to it but that it had never passed away from the world.17

Encounters with Unseen Reality are given various names in spiritual traditions: enlightenment, realization, illumination, satori, awakening, self-knowledge, gnosis, ecstatic commun- ion, “coming home.” Such a state may arise spontaneously, as in near-death experiences in which people seem to fi nd them- selves in a world of unearthly radiance, or may be induced by meditation, fasting, prayer, chanting, drugs, or dancing.

Many religions have developed meditation techniques that encourage intuitive wisdom to come forth. Whether this wisdom is perceived as a natural faculty within or an exter- nal voice, the process is similar. The consciousness is initially turned away from the world and even from one’s own feelings and thoughts, letting them all go. Often a concentration prac- tice, such as watching the breath or staring at a candle fl ame, is used to collect the awareness into a single, unfragmented focus. Once the mind is quiet, distinctions between inside and outside drop away. The seer becomes one with the seen, in a fusion of subject and object through which the inner nature of things often seems to reveal itself.

Kabir, a fi fteenth-century Indian weaver who was inspired alike by Islam and Hinduism and whose words are included in Sikh scripture, described this state of spiritual bliss:

Sufi dervishes in Sudan chant names of God’s qualities as a way to God- realization.

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The blue sky opens out farther and farther, the daily sense of failure goes away, the damage I have done to myself fades, a million suns come forward with light, when I sit fi rmly in that world.18

[The “fl ash of illumination” brings] a state of glorious inspiration, exaltation, intense joy, a piercingly sweet realization that the whole of life is fundamentally right and that it knows what it’s doing.

Nona Coxhead19

Our ordinary experience of the world is that our self is separate from the world of objects that we perceive. But this dualistic understanding may be transcended in a moment of enlightenment in which the Real and our awareness of it become one. The Mundaka Upanishad says, “Lose thyself in the Eternal, even as the arrow is lost in the target.” For the Hindu, this is the prized attainment of liberation, in which one enters into awareness of the eternal reality. This reality is then known with the same direct apprehension with which one knows oneself. The Sufi Muslim mystic Abu Yazid in the ninth century CE said, “I sloughed off my self as a snake sloughs off its skin, and I looked into my essence and saw that ‘I am He.’”20

A sense of the presence of the Great Unnamable may burst through the seeming ordinariness of life. (Samuel Palmer, The Rising of the Skylark, 1839, National Museum of Wales.)

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An alternative kind of spiritual experience brings one into contact with what the German professor of theology Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) called the “Wholly Other.” Otto referred to this as numinous—a nonrational, non - sensory experience of that which is totally outside the self and cannot be described. In his landmark book The Idea of the Holy, Otto wrote of this myste- rious experience as the heart of religion. It brings forth two general responses in a person: a feeling of great awe or even dread and, at the same time, a feel- ing of great attraction. These responses, in turn, have given rise to the whole gamut of religious beliefs and behaviors.

Though ineffable, the nature of religious experience that leads to faith is not unpredictable, according to the research of Joachim Wach (1898–1955), a German scholar of comparative religion. In every religion, it seems to fol- low a certain pattern: (1) It is an experience of what is considered Unseen Reality; (2) It involves the person’s whole being; (3) It is the most shatter- ing and intense of all human experiences; and (4) It motivates the person to action, through worship, ethical behavior, service, and sharing with others in a religious grouping.

Understandings of Sacred Reality

In the struggle to understand what the mind cannot readily grasp, individu- als and cultures have come to rather different conclusions. Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) was a very infl uential scholar who helped to develop the fi eld of comparative religion. This discipline attempts to understand and compare religious patterns found around the world. He used the terms “sacred” and “profane”: the profane is the everyday world of seemingly random, ordinary, and unimportant occurrences. The sacred is the realm of extraordinary, apparently purposeful, but generally imperceptible forces. In the realm of the sacred lie the source of the universe and its values. However relevant this dichotomy may be in describing some religions, there are some cultures that do not make a clear distinction between the sacred and the profane. Many indigenous peoples who have an intimate connection with their local landscape feel that spiritual power is everywhere; there is nothing that is not sacred. Trees, mountains, animals—everything is perceived as being alive with sacred presence.