The Path to Inner Peace: Hinduism and Buddhism

Today, I will briefly talk about Asian religions, beginning with Hinduism and Buddhism. These Asian religions, unlike the Abrahamic religions, do not have specific individuals who started them but grew from the general religious practices of Asia.

It is said that about four thousand years ago, Arians from what is today called Iran moved into India. In India, they found people already living there, Dravidians (who are Black people). The two races co-mingled. Over time the resulting people, who were shepherds, formed a religion that we now call Hinduism.

These shepherds, called Rishis, wrote songs and poems about what they understood God to be. Their poems and songs are today called the Veda. The Veda is the root of all Hindu religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.

Over time, other poets built on the songs of the Veda and wrote heroic and epic poems, including the Mahabharata (a section of which is the Bhagavad Gita, the formal Hindu Bible) and the Ramayana.

The philosophical-oriented Hindu subjected the poetic ideas in the Veda, Mahabharata, and Ramayana to rigorous philosophical examination and wrote what is now called the Upanishads, discourses based on the Veda and other religious Poems. Other people wrote other books, such as Patanjali’s Yogas (in which he explicated the five Yogas of Jnana, Bhakta, Karma, Tantra, and Raja Yoga…other people wrote the Ayurveda Yoga and Hatha Yoga, these last two dealt with Hindu health science, one on good food and the other on exercises to keep the body healthy).

If you sift through these Hindu religious and philosophical literature you get a clear understanding of Hindu religion, its beliefs, and practices.

Briefly, Hindus believe that there is God, whom they call Brahman. Brahman lives in Brahmaloca, heaven (which is said to be inside us as our highest self).

Brahman, one God extended to parts of him; if you like anthropomorphic language you could say that he had sons. Each of his infinite sons is called Atman.

Brahman and Atman are one. Where one ends and the other begins is nowhere. They are in each other; they share oneself and one mind.

In eternity, Brahmaloca, heaven Brahman, and Atman relate to each other, this is like oneself in several places relating to itself from several standpoints.

At some time, which has not occurred since there is no time in heaven, each Atman, that is, each son of God decided to separate from God and other sons of God. He cannot separate from God since God is in him and he is in God and all the other Altman.

Unable to separate from God, the son of God, as it were, cast a magical spell, called Maya unto himself, and went to sleep.

In his sleep, he dreams that he is now separated from Brahman and other Altman. This is not true because he cannot separate from them, but it is the nature of the dream.

That dream is our present three-dimensional universe and time. Each of us, Atman, sleeps and dreams that he is separated from God and his brothers. In his dream, he invents a universe of space, time, and matter.

Please note who created the universe: you, and me, all of us acting in tandem, collectively invented the universe, so we are not victims of the universe because we made it.

Each of us has a solo dream and is also part of the collective dream called our universe and world.

In the temporal universe of multiplicity, the world is the opposite of God and his heaven. Heaven is unified; our world is separated from God and other things. Thus, we live as the opposite of union. Our world opposes the eternal union of heaven.

Our world came into being in opposition to union, and to God and is a place where there are opposites, not sameness and equality. In our world are adults and children, black and white, light and darkness, good and bad; it is a world of opposites; we are opposed to the world of sameness and union of God.

Please note that all these conceptions are mythological, not literal truth; they are metaphors trying to explain what cannot be explained with the language of our world; God is one, so the language of those in the world of separation cannot describe the world of sameness and oneness.

In our world of opposites, we forget our true self, which is Atman who is one with Brahman. Each of us formulates a separate self-concept called Ahankara, ego. Now we see ourselves as egos, each believing that he is separated from others and each working for his self-interests and placing his interests ahead and above other people’s interests.

In such a world there must be conflicts and disharmony, whereas in heaven we are the same and have the same interests hence have harmony and peace; in heaven we live in perfect peace, bliss.

The Hindu made a valiant attempt to explain the world in what we might call rational terms. He sees matter as composed of the three Gunas (Rajas, Tamas, and Sattva). These three forces interact to form matter (compared to the Western idea of electrons, protons, and neutrons and you understand how advanced Hinduism is in philosophy).

The Hindus believe that the world began at a point in time, like the Western idea of the Big Bang, expands and after much expansion collapses back to itself and rebounds in another universe. There have been many universes, each coming to exist for a while and collapsing into another universe (this idea is still germane in physics).

Each universe or age is called Kalpa or Yuga; each Kalpa is characterized by certain behaviors. At present, we, according to the nineteenth-century Hindu saint called Ramakrishna, are in the age of Kali Yuga/Kalpa.

Since the material universe is seen as our collective dream, Hinduism aims to awaken us from the dream. When one awakes from the dream of self-forgetfulness he is said to be enlightened to his real self, oneself in Brahman, he is now an illuminated person (as Gautama Buddha was).

Within Hinduism, people are categorized into five basic types, and each will awaken following a path amenable to his nature. There is the Bhakta type, these people like to see God as a father figure that they must worship, so they worship and pray to him, and sing songs to him, they come near him and may be awakened to their true self, God. Most human beings are Bhakta.

The other type is the Jnana. The Jnana is thoughtful and philosophical in orientation. He thinks about things and wants to understand things through pure reason. He thinks his way to the understanding that there is God.

Hinduism has produced many rational philosophers, including the eighth-century Shankara, then Ramanuja, and others. These Hindu philosophers, believe it or not, are better than anything that the West has produced (and I am familiar with most Western philosophers, from Plato to Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Leibniz, Spinoza, David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Nicolo Machiavelli, George Berkeley, Jean Jacqui Rousseau, Charles Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rene Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Denis Diderot, Emmanuel Kant, George Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer…Schopenhauer, upon studying Hinduism said that he was put to shame because no European philosopher is as good as Hindu philosophers, Frederick Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Henri Bergson, Bertrand Russel, Willam James, and others).

The Jnani Yogi has given the world extraordinary philosophy, usually in the form of idealistic monism, the idea that reality is one and that we are all parts of that oneself.

Karma Yoga, here, people are doers and they are encouraged to do, amass wealth and political power but use their power and wealth to serve the public because since all people are God in serving people he is serving God, he does not need to go to church, he just needs to serve people and in doing so he is worshipping God.

Tantra Yoga, here, folks try to return to God and gain awareness of our oneness through love (including sexual intercourse, sex can unify people if there is love in it).

Raja Yoga, here, people are encouraged to meditate and in meditation stop thinking, clean their minds of all ego-based ideas, concepts and remain silent, and ask Brahman to reveal himself to one. God is beyond our ego-based thinking so we must stop trying to understand God with our ego intellect and keep quiet and love all people. If we do so we experience the disappearance of the ego self and the ego-based world. One may see the astral world of light forms, a world that looks like our current matter-based world with people and everything in our world. That world of light forms is not heaven, it is the gate of heaven. From there a few people experience heaven.

Heaven has no space, time, and matter in it, there are no people in forms, no you and not you, seer and seen, subject and object, there is just oneself that knows that he is all people.

In meditation, some people are said to break through Maya, in Moksha, and experience Samadhi, oneness with all people and with God. That experience of oneness is said to be incredibly peaceful; in it, one knows that one is eternal, permanent, and changeless; only the temporary self, the ego, and its body are subject to change, ephemerality, and transitoriness.

Very few human beings have had Samadhi; some of those who have had it are Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ, Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi, etc. These people are said to be God-realized and know that they are not bodies and egos; they know that they are spirit, part of one spirit, and in it are peaceful; they no longer feel fear of death, and have overcome anger (only the separated self, ego feels fear and anger).

Hinduism has many denominations, including Vedanta (the rational intellectual path to God), and the various Bhakta groups that pray to God. All of them have a central idea of God as oneself; this is called nondualism…some have qualified nondualism.

Contemporary India has about a billion and a half people, most of them Hindus (a few are Muslims and other religions stimulated by Hinduism, such as Jainism and Buddhism). Thus, Hinduism is a major world religion.

The other world religions are Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Taoism. Thus, it pays one to study Hinduism because it enables one to understand how to relate to almost a billion people. Moreover, since Hinduism is extremely rational in understanding phenomena, it enables one to understand modern physics more than any other religion.

If you doubt this go to Western universities and see who dominates physics and applied physics, engineering, Hindus. In the top twenty-five American universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, Caltech, and so on) and the top European universities like Oxford and Cambridge and, the University of Paris, you will find that Indian and Chinese students are often more than half of the students in the physical sciences.

Hinduism has some negative aspects; it is riddled with gods, which Hindu philosophers, such as Shankara, tell us are mere metaphors that help us to understand reality and for us not to take them, literally.

Hinduism classified people into four basic classes, Brahmin, Kshatriya, Sudra, and untouchable. The Brahmin class is the priestly and intellectual class and they are on top of the social hierarchy; the Kshatriya are the administrators and business people; the Sudra are the workers; the untouchables are at the lowest class of society and are discriminated against because they are seen as people who did bad things in past incarnations and are in the present punished for their sins (samsara).

BUDDHISM

Hindus see Buddhism as a sect of Hinduism. Hindus do not see Buddhism as a separate religion; they see it as emphasizing Raja Yoga, and meditation. If you understand Hinduism, you have understood Buddhism (Buddhism removed the superfluous gods of Hinduism; Buddhism has no Gods, hence is sometimes called a philosophy).

Gautama Buddha was a Hindu from Northern India. He was born 2500 years ago. He was born into a royal family in one of the northern Indian states (Rajasthan).

His father, the story goes, did not want him to see the sufferings that characterize human existence and hence kept him a virtual prisoner in the palace. He was given whatever he wanted.

However, at age twenty-eight, he managed to leave the palace grounds and ventured to the streets of India and saw people suffering, the sick, the pained, and the dying littering the streets. He could not believe that some people lived in such pain and penury. He returned home, put his house in order, left his young wife and their only son, and joined the wandering searchers for God we see in India.

For many years he studied under many Hindu Holy men, Sadhus, saints, and swamis (priests). He tried every aspect of the Hindu religion, including Jnana, Bhakta, Karma, and Tantra and he did not get the result he was seeking. After many years of not finding his answer, he tried Raja Yoga, the royal Yoga, that is, meditation.

He sat under the bodhi tree and told himself that he was not going to get up until God revealed himself to him if he existed, as Hindus said that he would reveal himself to people in meditation. The man went for broke and just sat there, not getting up. People gathered around him, looking at the young prince sitting cross-legged under a tree, day and night.

In that meditative state, he was assessed, as Jesus’ was said to have been tempted by Satan. Mara, Satan, came and promised him the kingship of the world if he left what he was doing, returned to the world, and joined the kingdom of the ego. He asked Satan why he should do that.

He is born and will die so what is the point of becoming a king if his fate is death and decay? Mara tried another ploy. He paraded nubile damsels before his mind’s eyes. He was shown every type of sexual activity (Tantra Yoga), and he asked Mara, what is the point, see, those beautiful ladies, in a few years they would become old hags, and no one would like to see them much more have sex with them, and eventually they would die and rot.

Satan tempted him in every imaginable way he could to get him to stop seeking a return to God and join the world ruled by Satan, the ego. Buddha always countered with the view that the world is one giant nothing.

We are born, struggle to live and be important egos, then old age comes, and we become decrepit, and sickness and death take us out of our misery.

Why should one tolerate the sufferings of the world, Buddha asked? He wanted to stay right there under the tree and die and get it over with if all there is to life is pain, suffering, and death.

Thirty days later, the man experienced what he called Nirvana, which is equivalent to Hindu Samadhi. His ego self and its body disappeared, and the universe of space, time, and matter disappeared. He transcended perception and experienced a sense of oneness with God and all his infinite sons. In that state of oneness, he realized that all of us lived permanently in unified spirit and that the world we currently live in is a dream world, a mirage world we chose because we had the desire to separate from our true self, our shared oneself, and our one mind.

He felt blissful in Nirvana, a unified spirit state. At last, he was ready to see our world; he opened his eyes and people asked him to tell them what happened. He said that there was nothing to tell them about and that if he told them they would not understand, anyway.

Nevertheless, he told them what is now called the Four Noble Truths and Eight Paths to those Truths.

(1). We are on earth because we desire it, we desire separation from our real self, one shared self. We chose to live the opposite of our true self and home, love and peace.

(2). To be on earth is to suffer. Our lives on earth, like the life of the prodigal son who separated from his father, separated from oneness, and union, are marked by suffering.

(3). We chose to suffer when we chose to separate from each other and God. If one lives as a separate ego, one must suffer.

(4) . We end suffering when we voluntarily give up the desire to live as separated selves and return to the unified self, God, our shared oneself. But to return to God we must extinguish our ego selves. We do not want to give up our ego selves because we made them and are proud of what we made, our handiwork; being egos makes us feel proud and powerful.

To live in ego and body, to live on earth is to suffer; suffering is not what happens to us against our choice, we chose it by our desire for separation.

To stop our human suffering, we must give up the desire for separation; that is, we must give up our ego selves, and stop identifying with bodies housing separated selves.

Stop right here and ponder what the man said. It is what Jesus Christ, five hundred years after him, said. You must die to your old self, the ego, and be reborn in a new self, the new man, the Christ self.

God created you as the Christ, that is, as unified with him and all his sons, you left that unified state and separated from God, as the prodigal son did.

You must give up separation and return to God. God is union, you cannot cherish separation and be in God.

You must die to the ego and be reborn in Christ, in a unified self. Buddha and Jesus Christ are, in effect, saying the same thing.

The ego is a puff of smoke, it is a fantasy, a dream figure that we take as real. We must let it go to awaken to our real self, a formless self that is one with all selves and God. If you do so you become illuminated and enlightened to yourself in nirvana.

Buddha laid down what he called the eight noble paths to return to God. It is like the Ten Commandments of Moses: love the whole, that is, love God, love all people, love you, do not kill anyone, do not take what is not yours, have compassion for all suffering humanity, do your best to awaken from Maya, false identity as ego and then help other people to do so by modeling the life of an enlightened person.

Buddha built the first monastery in the world (the Catholic Church later borrowed the idea of the monastery from Buddhism). The idea is that people in the world are full of pride and vanity; they want to seem especially important and powerful. If they seek power and wealth, they are in ego and must suffer.

Those who want to return to God and regain the awareness of their true self are to live in a communal setting with vows of poverty. Thus, Buddhist monks have only two pairs of robes, and sandals and do not have property; they carry begging bowls and beg for food. When they are hungry, they beg for food, otherwise, they meditate and learn how to regain awareness of their true self. They are trying to humiliate their egos, pride, and vanity; one must humble one to come to God.

No proud and vain person can ever come to God (since most African big men are driven by empty pride and vanity they are far away from God!).

The followers of Gautama Buddha built monasteries all over India and were called monks. Later, the followers spread from India to all over Asia, to China (where Buddhism is called Chaing, to Japan where it is called Zen). Most non-Indian Asians are Buddhists (or Taoists, or Shinto in Japan),

There are two major denominations in Buddhism, Theravada (belief in oneself as all of us) and Mahayana Buddhism, a kind of Bhakti Hinduism where people pray to God and feel happy doing so.

Regardless of the school of Buddhism one belongs to, the goal is to meditate and lose the ego self-concept, attain no ego self, and know oneself as one with all selves and God.

Buddhist priests in Japan are called Roshi; Hindu priests are called Swami. Hinduism and Buddhism have more members than Christianity. Therefore, it serves one well to understand the religion of over three billion Asians; if you are going to deal with Asians, you had better understand some Hinduism and Buddhism.

If you have eyes, you must have seen that the age of European domination of the world is over. China, India, and Japan are now the economic superpowers of the world. If you want to relate to those who dominate the world economically and, soon politically and militarily, the least that you must do is understand their religious culture.

China has an Indigenous religion called Taoism. Some people also call Confucianism a religion (I call it a code of ethics, a sort of moral philosophy). I will not dwell on these other Asian religions here, for one thing, they are akin to Hinduism and Buddhism.

Asian religions teach that there is one life force, Brahman, or Chi in China; we are all parts of that force and must be in alignment with it to live good and happy lives.

Greek and Christian Gnosticism is akin to Hinduism and Buddhism. Some people claim that when Alexander the Great got to India around 300 BCE, the Greek scholars he brought with him learned Hindu religions and took them back to Greece and North Africa and in syncretism, converted them to Gnosticism.

Indeed, some people say that Jesus himself traveled to India and learned Hinduism and Buddhism. If you read the Gospel according to John, you are reading pure Hinduism and Buddhism. In that Gospel, Jesus said that he and God are oneself, and where you see the son of God you see God because God is not apart from his sons. That is, he is teaching Hinduism’s view that God is in each of us and is not apart from us and that to know God we must look inside us to see the God in us, the kingdom of God is not outside us but inside us, is our unified self.

In a different talk, I will talk about the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Greek Gnosticism. For now, let us try to understand the two major Asian religions, Hinduism and Buddhism.