The Absurdity of Fighting for Buddhism

by Rev. Mas Kodani - Los Angeles Senshin Buddhist Temple

In creator-god religions, God’s wishes for his creation is revealed to man and his words are viewed as absolute truth. Hence certain points of view and certain laws are seen as absolute and applicable to everyone. Non-creator-god religions such as Buddhism take the view of each uniquely different individual attempting to experience the ultimate reality through the windows of his six senses. These six senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and thought are arranged differently according to each individuals constantly changing karmic makeup. Each person therefore perceives the same delusion and reality differently. To impose one’s own arrangement of sense windows on another is therefore clearly absurd. To attack another person for his religious views is silly enough, though we are often guilty of doing so – to threaten or kill someone because of his religious views is an unforgivable crime that brings immediate and long term negative consequences to the perpetrator.

Ours is not a religion of absolute belief in a set doctrine that tells us how to think and what to value. It is a religion that points out to us the nature of the ultimate and suggests 84,000 (i.e., “many”) paths to connecting with it. Anitya (“the constantly changing nature of all component things”) is the one reality all Buddhists agree upon – that everything is subject to birth, growth, decay and death. This includes all sentient and non-sentient beings, institutions, ideas, etc., etc., - even religions. Buddhism too, must one day cease to be, and a clearer more appropriate system of thought and practice replace it.

This being so, all conflicts, religious and political, group and personal are but a pathetic display of ego; at best, a puffed-up and preening pigeon prancing to be seen, admired, and paid obeisance to – at worst a self-pitying, control-freak who is a self-and other- destructive bully. Ain’t we all, ain’t we all!! This being so, how can even the thought of harming others because they are being themselves occur?

Namoamidabutsu,

Rev. Mas