Can you still be a Buddhist if you believe in God?

 This question was asked on the Quora forum.  This was my reply.

I’m always amazed at how easily people can say “believe in God” as if it means something objective, that is, the same thing for everyone who says it. Saying “do you believe in Sol or believe in Earth?” (the names of our star and planet) requires a category distinction from the concept of “believe in God”. It is thus impossible to answer *your* question, because you have not defined the terms “believe” and “God.” So any attempt to answer the question requires the responders to provide their own definitions of believe and God, meaning they will be answering their question, not yours. Here, your invitation includes the BYOB that means “bring your own beliefs.”

First let’s address “believe.” There are several terms with a shared meaning element: belief, trust, confidence, and faith are in the overlapping rhetorical region. I can say, “I believe that when I sit down on it, the chair will support me.” Is that the “believe” you mean? Or do you mean “I believe in unicorns, because people have drawn pictures of them.”? Same word, with completely different bases for its use. When Carl G. Jung was asked if he believed in God, he said, “No, I don’t believe, I know.”

And this brings up the second issue to address, what is meant by the word “God”? What is the concept, the meaning, the image, that is within the word and it’s use? This is the holy grail of the question. What is your God concept? Two people can both say, “I believe in God” but their concepts of God can be completely different when saying the identical word. Carl Jung was talking about the psychological experience of God, so he could say he “knows,” and “belief” was not part of the question, any more that whether the quenching aspect of water is a matter of belief. In other words, only people who have no experience of God, speak of believing in God, like believing in Unicorns.

If the question is “Can you still be a Buddhist if you believe in the God of another religion?” then the answer is “it depends.” What is a Buddhist? The word means a follower of the Buddha Dharma (Pali: Dhamma). The traditional declaration of being a follower of the Buddha Dharma is “I go to the Buddha for refuge; I go to the Dharma for refuge; I go to the Sangha for refuge.” All three words, Buddha (the Awakened One), Dharma (the teaching, method, and pattern of life articulated by the Awakened One), and Sangha (Community of followers of the Buddha Dharma) have multidimensional meanings, but primarily each word has three levels of meaning: the conventionally concrete, the imaginatively metaphorical, and the absolutely ultimate.

If you are in fact and in deed a follower of the Buddha Dharma, then you have thrown in with a different view of the universe than the one that has a Father-Creator-God as the Supreme Person who is objectively separate from you. In fact, that is not even “the Father” of Jesus’ teaching, because Paul’s Christianity used an entirely different conception of God than Jesus had. We Buddhists don’t deny the God realm or the God beings who populate it, or what Carl Jung called the Archetypal Realm populated by the Archetypes, but we have a different view of it because, like Jung, we see that there is an inherently subjective aspect to the God realm that cannot be removed. In terms of the “personage” of God, Buddhist see the “person,” “personality,” or “self” of both humans and gods as an illusion, a phantom, or a dream, i.e. a psychological and imaginal construct. In this context, one of the titles of the Buddha is “the Teacher of Gods and Humans.”

As a Buddhist, you can believe in or imagine the God whom the Buddha teaches as his student. But there is no room for belief in a God that creates the Buddha. This is because if you are a follower of the Buddha Dharma you have at least a basic understanding that nothing is “created” in such a supernatural sense and all things appear by the causes and conditions of deeds and events from moment to moment through causes bearing fruits, and fruits becoming seeds for successive causes (to use the traditional agrarian symbolism).

Alternatively, you can re-frame the whole concept of God into Buddhist terms. Buddhism has many terms for the ultimate reality: Tathata (Thusness), Dharmakaya, Sunyata (Emptiness), True Suchness, One Mind, etc. The LankavataraSutra has a list of names that include the names of Hindu Gods as well as names like “the Sun” and “the Moon” as names of the Buddha Tathagata. "The same, Mahamati, can be said of myself, for I come within the range of hearing of ignorant people, in this world of patience, under many names, amounting to a hundred thousand times three asamkhyeyas, and they address me by these names not knowing that they are all other names of the Tathagata. " (pp. 165-166) That is, when surveying the highest representation of every other religion, the Buddhist sees that name as a synonym of the Buddha Tathagata of Buddhism. In this context, believing in God is believing in the Buddha Tathagata by another name.

The first Zen Buddhist to come to America 120 years ago was Soyen Shaku who was accompanied by D.T. Suzuki as his young translator. After his visit he wrote a book titled Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot [Zen For Americans] published in 1906. The Zen Teacher Shaku addressed this question as “The God-Conception of Buddhism.” He said that Buddhism was not theism (God as objective transcendent person) or atheism (no God), or pantheism (God identified with the objective universe), but the closest Western term for Buddhism is panentheism (absolute and transcendent, simultaneously all and one). He comments,

“[H]ere Buddhism is speaking of our inmost religious experience, which deals directly with facts and not with their more or less distorted intellectual reflections. It is, therefore, really idle to say that Buddhism is pantheistic or atheistic or nihilistic. Buddhism is not a philosophical system, though it is the most rational and intellectual religion in the world. What it proposes is to make clear facts of the deepest spiritual life and to formulate a doctrine which leads its followers to the path of inward experience.

“Thus, according to the proclamation of an enlightened mind, God or the principle of sameness is not transcendent, but immanent in the universe, and we sentient beings are manifesting the divine glory just as much as the lilies of the field. A God who, keeping aloof from his creations, sends down his words of command through specially favored personages, is rejected by Buddhists as against the constitution of human reason.”

One way it has been said is that Buddhists have faith that every person can awaken and become a Buddha and that the essential nature of people and Buddha are one and the same, and therefore a belief in a God as a heavenly entity or personality is essentially irrelevant to walking the path of the Buddha Dharma for one’s own realization of liberation and Buddha's awakened knowing and seeing.

What Happened to the Unconscious?

The first half of the 20^th century brought into the light of Western consciousness the great discovery of the unconscious.  The great initial pioneer Sigmund Freud, followed by the even greater explorer and surveyor Carl G. Jung, showed the world the actual workings of the unconscious in our conscious lives, from the most individually mundane effects, such as our tics and foibles, to the most collective inundations of our collective consciousness in war and mass phenomenon such as fascism, communism, and commercialism.

Then after the most compelling and complete demonstration of the overcoming of collective rationality by the irrationality of the collective unconscious from WWI to the culmination that was World War II, Western collective consciousness reacted by closing down and shutting away the very acknowledgement of the unconscious.  Western psychology turned to rationalism in hope of explaining the irrational, and the unconscious was driven out of psychology, with “psychology” being redefined without the unconscious element as “behaviorism,” “cognitive studies,” ”neuro-psychology” “evolutionary psychology,” etc.  This is an utter and complete failure, because the totality of the psyche includes both the conscious and the unconscious, and any attempt to rationally explain the irrational aspects of the unconscious by ignoring the unconscious is set up for failure.    

The rationalist delusion of the previous 70 years has forced the psychology of the unconscious underground.  And as Jung noted over and over again, when an important part of our psychic reality is submerged, it always and inevitably comes back to overwhelm us in ways we find problematic.  The denied elements of our personal unconscious, the complexes, reappear as disturbances in our body or mental functions, as somatic symptoms or psychic disturbances such as hauntings or obsessions.  The denied elements of our collective unconscious, the archetypes, reappear in stark polarized contrasts as “demons,” “daimons,” or “divinities,” as social contagions resulting in genocide, occupation, and apartheid, as social mass movements for weal or woe seeming to appear overnight, etc.

No matter how much people may try, there is no exclusively rational explanation for the election of Donald Trump as president, because it is an expression of the repressed unconscious factors that created a “faith” mentality in the people who voted for him. The rationality of consciousness (organized as it is around the ego complex) can never deal with faith, because the best that rationality can offer can never touch the unconscious basis of faith.  Rationally can only call “faith” a form of nonsense, i.e. irrational, and then believe it has taken care of the matter.

In analyzing the problem of the rationalist critique of faith without reference to the unconscious, Jung wrote in “A Psychological Approach to the Trinity”:  “Naturally, it never occurs to these critics that their way of approach is incommensurable with their object. They think they have to do with rational facts, whereas it entirely escapes then that it is and always has been primarily a question of irrational psychic phenomena.” (p. 153 of Coll. Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 11.)  It is the denial of a basic recognition of the collective psychic phenomena at work in the Trump election that befuddles all attempts by the political and social pundits to explain it.

We have seen over and over again interviews with “Trump followers” who deny the basis facts of Trump and instead project onto Trump a faithful expectation that he will eventually fulfill their desires for a better government.  This is an act of faith of the deepest feelings. The factual historical personality is obscured behind the projections of the unconscious looking for an appropriate screen upon which to projects its symbols.  When faith is at work for a “higher cause,” it is invariably the archetype of the totality of the person, i.e., the individual’s wholeness, attempting to find its way into consciousness.   The psychic phenomena of a person who feels cut off, separated, and estranged from both themselves and their society stimulates their collective unconscious to respond by insinuating the archetype of their self-realization of their fundamental totality into their personal consciousness.  This is experienced directly and irrationally, and even the person’s own rationalizations used to explain it come after the fact.

The recognition of the unconscious opens a door to the confusing and terrifying emotions, imaginings, and thoughts of our inner life that most people are more than happy to close immediately. The anti-Trump voter as well as the Trump voter are equally eager to pretend there are no psychic phenomena at play here, and it is all just a matter of rational analysis and discussion to determine the facts. But the abrupt and widespread appearance of the social meme of “fake news” in conjunction with the “Trump-era” shows the archetypal influence behind Trump’s meteoric rise in politics. The label “fake news” is telling us to our faces that the collective social forces we are dealing with are irrational psychic forces working on the level of symbols not facts. Itr is not a question of which media outlet is or is not dealing in “fake news,” because at bottom, they all are in their own ways.  The New York Times has its particular way of presenting “fake news” just like FOX News has its own way of presenting “fake news.” The common denominator of all fake news is its failure to address its contextual prejudices supporting its perspective, and this is due to the failure to acknowledge the unconscious psychic phenomena at work in the presentation of the news.   

The completeness which the archetype of our own wholeness seeks is not something that can tamed or determined by our conscious ego.  Our conscious ego seeks our wholeness from within the bifurcated environment of consciousness, and therefore can only conceive of wholeness and totality as “perfection.”  But real wholeness and totality must necessarily include our nocturnal side, the very aspects of ourselves that we have shunned or exiled.   Thus when we consciously open ourselves to a search for our wholeness, we are faced with the problem of suffering and “evil” in the world and in ourselves as intimately expressed by our own shadow side.  People who long for such wholeness, but have no personal guide who has experienced the journey, are confused by the necessity to confront the world of suffering directly and personally as the gateway to inner unity. They think they can find the perfection of wholeness without facing suffering.  In his extensive monograph “Aion: Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self,” Jung notes:

“To strive after teleiosis in the sense of perfection is not only legitimate but is inborn in man as a peculiarity which provides civilization with one of its strongest roots. This striving is so powerful, even, that it can turn into a passion that draws everything into its service. Natural as it is to seek perfection in one way or another, the archetype fulfills its own completeness, and this is a τελείωσις (teleiosis) of quite another kind. Where the archetype predominates, completeness is forced upon us against all our conscious strivings, in accord with the archaic nature of the archetype. The individual may strive after perfection (“Be you therefore perfect— τελειόι--as also your heavenly father is perfect.”) but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness.”(p. 69 Coll. Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part II.) 

When we seek the wholeness of ourselves, we are usually drawn by affinity to a living archetypal symbol of that wholeness such as the Buddha or the Christ.  If we follow the Buddha we must begin the journey with the First Noble Truth of Suffering, and if we follow the Christ we must begin with identification with the Passion (i.e., suffering) and crucifixion of the Christ.  The Taoist archetypal symbol of wholeness, the Taiji  is not anthropomorphic, but its containment of the opposites of yin and yang, dark and light, within the circle of completeness confronts the follower directly with the necessity of dealing with their own dark side if wholeness is to be realized.  Ultimately there is no way to wholeness except through the confrontation and integration of suffering and the shadow side of ourselves. We can’t become complete by running away from suffering.

It is the archetypal unconscious impetus to seek completeness being perverted by the conscious prejudice against suffering that leads to the illusion we can become perfect by getting rid of the “bad things of life.” This psychic phenomenon is exactly expressed in the Trump voters’ resonance with the symbol of “draining the swamp” projected onto government.  Those who would be personally perfect and then project this desire onto the social screen desire a perfect government. Their own sense of imperfection, as a being personally filled with swamp creatures within their own inner world, is projected outward onto the government as a swamp needing to be drained.  The psychic dimension of this projection is evidenced by the denial of the Trump voters who literally can not see that Trump has brought more “swamp creatures” into his government than any previous president. This self-blinding in consciousness is a primary symptom of the archetype’s unconscious influence. 

Trump is the manifested expression of our denial of the unconscious. The so-called anti-Trump resistance is also an expression of our denial of the unconscious as shown by its psychic contagion of a new Mc Carthyite “red scare” anti-Russian hysteria.  Because the anti-Trump forces can not acknowledge either the conscious or unconscious psychic forces behind Trump’s popularity, they project their dissociated psychic contents, with the sense of “evil,” onto an available target like “Russia,” so that they no longer care for the facts to be proven before they are certain of their conclusions. Their certainty before the determination of any evidence and their eager grasping at any straw or suggestion of “collusion” without a verification demonstrate conclusively the unconscious influences. 

So what happened to the unconscious?  It seems that humankind’s struggle with its own dark side in WWII was so traumatic that our collective consciousness revolted against itself and drove out the messenger that offered the only hope of understanding what had happened because merely trying to understand was too terrible. Using the terminology of rationalism, the study of the unconscious was tarred and feathered as “mystical” or, to use a more technical term, “woo woo.”  .  This kind of over-rationalization and sloganeering literalization by the perspective of materialism shows the unconscious influence in the repression itself.   Materialism became the new religion of science and dogmatically repressed the scientific study of psychic phenomenon from the psychological perspective.  Only the materialist perspective was officially allowed in the post-war study of the psyche within the major educational institutions funded by commercial and military interests.   

Psychology deals with the facts of mental contents. The fact that the idea or symbol exists as a psychic phenomenon is the truth that psychology studies. Thus the fact of the idea or symbol of a God (or the Buddhist Dharmakaya of Taoist Taiji) as the symbol of our own desire for wholeness, and the incarnation or birth of that symbol as a person who manifests that wholeness in human form (e.g., Christ, Buddha, or Immortal), is the rightful object of the study of psychology, and this is not a question of neurons firing or the literal historical objectification of the symbol in any particular individual. It is not the individual but the archetypal symbol projected onto the individual that allows the historical person to be honored or worshipped far beyond the historical death of the individual, precisely because the archetypal aspect is collective not individual.. 

As Jung said, “It is certainly a good thing to preach reason and commons sense, but what if you have a lunatic asylum for an audience or a crowd in a collective frenzy? There is not much difference between them because the madman and the mob are both moved by impersonal overwhelming forces.” (p. 15 of Coll. Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 11.)    The impersonal overwhelming forces of the collective unconscious that brought Trump to the presidency must be studied and understood or we make a fatal mistake in regard to the human psyche as well as to our society and culture. .

~end~

Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications

This is a new feature for the TWW Blog with the hope of adding a little more coherence to the line up.  Under the title of “Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications” I will be outlining my pet peeves about Buddhism’s “coming to the West.”  Being aware of the processes of accommodation, acclimation, and acculturation that occur in transplanting Buddha Dharma into another culture is my primary concern.  The Buddha Dharma is the teaching of how mind awakens.  This awakening is not bound to any particular culture and is universally available to and inherent within each and every single person and living being. 

One of the most important factors in Buddhism’s arrival in the West is the necessity of disentangling the cultural aspects of Buddha Dharma from those aspects that are the common denominator of the human mind, i.e., the Buddha aspects. This happens whenever Buddhism enters a new cultural context.  It happened whenever and wherever Buddhism spread beyond the region where the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama Shakyamuni, actually walked as a living, breathing, spiritual mendicant, e.g., into the areas now known as Southern India, Northwestern India, Southeast Asia, Ancient Gandhara, Centeral Asia. China, Mongolia, Tibet, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

The core problem is that we mostly do not know what is cultural and what is mind. As Buddhism spread throughout the regions of Asia, there was a general cultural communication that facilitated the transplanting of Buddha Dharma without a head on collision of cultural themes.  For example, Buddhism moves relatively easily into a culture that has either an animistic-shamanistic or pluralistic-pantheistic approach, because it can either become one more view among others in a panoply of perspective, or can integrate the perspective of the mind’s awakening within the preexisting metaphors of awakening in a shamanistic cultural matrix. 

But Buddhism has more difficulty in cultures that worship and idolize an anthropomorphic monotheistic hegemonic God, such as the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  It is therefore historically significant that Buddhism is now able to come to the West, only after the West has had its own form of “Enlightenment” wherein the Dharma of Science has been able to free its own culture from the dogmatic rule of an anthropomorphic God.    

This current historical condition now presents problems of its own for Buddha Dharma coming to the West, as now practitioners of Buddha Dharma must take advantage of the cultural space created between the old precincts dominated by the God-religion and the new fields of the scientific worldview, while at the same time addressing the concerns of each.  Buddhism’s finding its place in the West between the polarization of an other-worldly God religion and a worldly science is analogous to Buddhism’s finding its place in China between the preexisting forms of Taoism and Confucianism. 

Part of the difficulty will be for Buddha Dharma to simultaneously shed the Indian, Chinese Tibetan, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese cultural encrustations, yet remember and retain Buddha Dharma itself.  As we wash off the cultural accretions, this of course presents us with the paradigmatic conundrum of not throwing the baby out with the bath water.   As just one example, we can see in the West that some adherents to a materialistic scientific worldview misperceive karma and rebirth as merely cultural aspects of Buddha Dharma that can be jettisoned.  But as I see it, we have in the scientific field of psychology the common denominator of the study of the psyche with which Buddha Dharma can ally itself to show us that in the scientific study of mind, every single human culture that has existed has some form of teaching about karma and rebirth, e.g., the Christian teaching of “you reap what you sow.”  

For instance, in 1939 Carl G. Jung wrote an essay titled "Concerning Rebirth" recognizing that the concept of rebirth has various aspects and outlining five categories of rebirth as psychological forms that the archetype of rebirth manifests itself.  Jung points out that rebirth is not a materialistically measurable phenomenon, it can't be weighed or photographed, but it is a "purely psychic reality." Jung said,

Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind. These primordial affirmations are based on what I call archetypes. In view of the fact that all affirmations relating to the sphere of the suprasensual are, in the last analysis, invariably determined by archetypes, it is not surprising that a concurrence of affirmations concerning rebirth can be found among the most widely differing peoples. There must be psychic events underlying these affirmations which it is the business of psychology to discuss--without entering into all the metaphysical and philosophical assumptions regarding their significance. [The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9.1, Par. 207.]

 

Therefore by recognizing the role of psychology we can scientifically determine that karma and rebirth are not merely cultural notions to be discarded but are archetypes of the universal collective unconscious that is the foundation of all cultures, and both karma and rebirth can be scientifically and personally studied today, with the 2500 year history of such Buddhist study providing insights for us today .    

For this series, the heading “Caveats” will warn about and point out the problems in sentences and ideas that I come across in English speaking texts, usually describing the Buddha Dharma erroneously, giving false impressions, causing confusion, or generally mistaking or misstating something about the Buddha Dharma.

The heading “Corrections” will attempt the brief restatement from my perspective to correct what was written.

The heading “Clarifications” will articulate the reasons for announcing the caveat and making the correction.

It should go without saying that I’m not writing from a position of a particular orthodoxy, but from a particular perspective.  The point is not that these corrections are intended to establish objective dogmatic views that everyone must adhere to, but that they reveal the “truth of perspective” itself, which is a central aspect of the core teachings of the Buddha Dharma, i.e., having an “Aligned View” is the first of the folds of the Eightfold Path that is basic to Buddhism.     

Here, the Buddha Dharma view we are centrally aligning with is the One Vehicle. This mind-only perspective “stands on zero” as the nondual teaching of emptiness (sunyata) and manifests Buddha Nature as the coming and going of thusness (Tathagata) for the great matter of bringing people to hear of, learn about, and enter into the Buddha’s seeing and knowing in order to alleviate the imbalance and off-centeredness (dukkha) that inevitably arises with self-consciousness and causes the general distress and dissatisfaction inherent in our lives that leads to our greed, hatred, delusions and the whole plethora of vexations, and ultimately to our killing, harming, stealing, lying, and generally bad behaviors towards each other.   

My initial anticipation is that many of first blogs of the series will circle around the areas of confusion between the One Vehicle and the Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha themes of Buddha Dharma as understood by scholastics in the West. 

This page will act as the introduction and table of contents for the blogs posted in this series, as well as a preview of blogs I hope to include.  The posted blogs can also be found by clicking on the “CCC” link in the list of Labels on the side of the pages.

If you have any suggestions or pet peeves of your own about how Buddha Dharma is being accommodated and acculturated in the West, please let me know in the comments.

_/|\_

Gregory

Posts in this series:

Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications: The meaning of ‘ Mind-only’

Anticipated Topics for Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications:

~ Manas, the 7^th Consciousness
~ Alayavijnana, the 8th Consciousness
~ Mind Only (citta-matra), Consciousness Only (vijnana-matra), and Notification Only (vijnapti-matra)
~ Lankavatara Sutra, The Sutra of Going Down to Lanka
~ Zen and Zen Samadhi
~ Samatha Vipassyana and Samadhi Prajna
~ Tendai Shikan and Zen Shikantaza
~ Five Types of Zen

Review of TED Talk by Materialist Philosopher Stephen Cave

This is a review of the TED Talk by Stephen Cave titled

The 4 stories we tell ourselves about death

Sadly, this is one of the worst TED talks I’ve heard.  Perhaps my expectations are too high.

Mr. Cave focuses on “bias,” yet as a philosopher he shows bias too, but apparently unconsciously.  His bias is that there is no truth to be found in the “four” typical immortality stories that he has identified.  He shows his bias because he is a scientific philosopher, not a psychologist. The psychologist views these kinds of archetypal stories as myths, and takes their commonalities as telling us something true about our own psyches, not just fake fairy tales to be thrown out or left behind. Yes, we grow out of the literal belief in these kinds of stories, but we should be growing into discovering the truth that these stories are pointing us toward if our growth is to be anything remotely identifiable as maturation. 

 

For example, the sad philosopher Mr. Cave ignores what the essence of the “elixir” story is all about. He should read Carl G. Jung to know that there is an archetype of the “elixir” for the reason that there is an actual elixir in the human psyche (the heart-mind) that can lead us to understanding life and death and thus transcending death. In alchemy, "the One that dieth not" is the homo philosohicus, the One, who is the tincture or elixir of life.  Only the young child, the naive, and the uninitiated would imagine the elixir of life, the elixir vitae,  to be something only literally composed of physical molecules.  Always, the physical properties are merely the anchoring attributes for the transcendent qualities of the elixir.  In one instance it was said that the elixir was to be made from the "prime matter" that is taken from a single tree that "grows on the surface of the ocean as plants grow on the surface of the earth." Only a fool would think that this was speaking of an actual tree.  In our modern alienated view of reality we would call the physical aspects a metaphor.  However, in the premodern view, the metaphor was the actual living psychic property of the physical aspect.  So in the previous example, the alchemist knew that "the single tree" was an image of oneness to be sought growing "on the surface the ocean" of the mind's true reality.  Philosopher Cave seems to have the bias of scientific materialism that “the mind,” the psyche, is merely an epiphenomenon of the physical brain.

Elsewhere on his recent TED Blog titled "The immortality bias: Further reading on the 4 stories we tell ourselves about death," Mr. Cave has written about the “soul” story in this way:  

 

"Buddhism has a similar belief in reincarnation — the movement of the soul from one body to another — although it confusingly also teaches that there is no permanent soul or self."

That comment shows a woeful lack of knowledge (i.e., ignorance) about the Buddha Dharma. There is nothing confusing about teaching there is no permanent soul or self in rebirth because the Buddha Dharma does NOT teach anything remotely like "the movement of the soul from one body to another."  The Buddha acknowledged that reincarnation occurs as a law of nature, but radically transformed the naive understanding of a "soul" to point to the fact that there is no separate or individual "soul" that transmigrates even when there is the appearance of one. That is, the Buddha does not deny the naive "appearance" of a soul, but the Buddha says when we inquire deeply into the appearance of a soul we will see that it is a construct of our imagination. Still, the Buddha teaches that karma is relentless, regardless of the imaginary character of the soul, and that what is reborn is not consciousness but the mind. The arising and disappearing of consciousness is what appears to the ignorant as birth and death, but it is the activity of the unborn and undying mind of innermost thusness.

What is reborn is only the effects of the karmic waves. Modern physics would call this the noninterference of waves, as when there are countless electromagnetic waves coursing through a room but our cell phone picks up one frequency stream without any interference by all the others. The idea of a "soul" is the illusion of a standing wave formation formed by all the karmic waves from countless previous lives. We take the temporary appearance of a standing wave formation to be the "person" and then we assume that the "person" possesses something that is behind the appearance that is a "soul." That assumption is an unnecessary wish for the eternity of the "person." In fact, the true eternity is the constancy of the appearance of impermanent and transient waves. In other words, what is reborn in the wave formation of a single life is the ocean itself, not some thing called a "soul."

Mr. Cave’s conclusion is that “We believe these stories because we are biased to believe them, and we are biased to believe them because we are so afraid of death.” This is really just a statement about the bias of belief, not about the stories themselves.  When we are afraid, we are confused by what we call "belief." But when we become free from our fear, then we see the stories in a new light having nothing to do with belief.  Mr. Cave would have us ignore the truth of the stories under this new light and simply forget and ignore them altogether. He reasons we can give up our childish belief in them by giving up our fear of death. That is throwing out the baby with the bathwater and not philosophical at all.  Yes, we can find the way to no longer be afraid of death, but that has nothing to do with necessarily giving up these stories, only giving up the idea of a literal belief in them.

Mr. Cave has the personal bias that we are limited to “the one life we have.”  He says, “just as book is bounded by its covers by beginning and end, so our lives are bounded by birth and death.”  He says the characters in a book don't worry about who wrote the book or what the world is outside of the book covers, so neither should we worry about what is outside of birth and death.  Sadly, he does not explore why or how he has this king of biased belief in the face of considering death.  Instead Mr. Cave would have up put aside the very consideration of death and simply adopt the view that since we will never “experience” death that we need not consider it.  He tells us don’t think about death and just enjoy life while we have it.  Certainly, there are some people like Mr. Cave who will find some kind of solace in sticking their head into the sand.

 

Mr. Cave says that we merely need to see how “the fear of death is not rational,” and then we will see how that irrational fear brings out our biases. In this we can see the confusion that Mr. Cave has about the role of rationality in life based on his own bias in the face of death. With his story, he has constructed an elaborate rational edifice, not to defeat death by a story of immortality but to defeat death by a story of why we should ignore death.  He doesn’t see that by ignoring death we only drive the archetype of death into the unconscious where it will come back to haunt us in so many ways.

If we want to find the truest story, we should tell the story that shows how all the stories are true given their presumptive perspectives. That is, we need a story that includes all of the other stories, without claiming that any particular one or all the others are totally false, because the apparent differences in all the stories are just because they are about other parts of the elephant in the room: death.

The Materialist Hegemony in the Psychology of Religion

A recent Salon article by Frans de Waal titled  Militant atheism has become a religion 

 is interesting and provocative. The subtitle used to inform us of the basic premise states, "Prominent non-believers have become as dogmatic as those they deride -- and become rich on the lecture circuit."

 

 

The science that looks at the material world as physical stuff really can say nothing about religion. Religion arises from and in the mind, not the material world.The science that looks at mind or psyche is called psychology. Psychology can speak about religion but unfortunately, today the materialist scientists have exerted a hegemony over psychology and usurped psychology in the name of neurophysiology. 

 

For example, de Waal writes,

 

Neo-atheists keep pitting the two against each other, however. Their audiences pee in their pants with delight when the flat-earth canard gets trotted out. This is not to say, however, that religious narratives are much better. They, too, play fast and loose with the facts. In Puebla, D’Souza featured near-death experiences as scientific proof of the afterlife. After a brush with death, some patients report having floated outside of their bodies or having entered a tunnel of light. This surely seems bizarre, but D’Souza failed to bring up new neuroscience of a small brain area known as the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). This area gathers information from many senses (visual, tactile, and vestibular) to construct a single image of our body and its place in the environment. Normally, this image is nicely coherent across all senses, so that we know who and where we are. The body image is disturbed, however, as soon as the TPJ is damaged or stimulated with electrodes. Scientists can deliberately make people feel that they are hovering above their own body or looking down on it, or have them perceive a copy of themselves sitting next to them, like a shadow (“I looked younger and fresher than I do now. My double smiled at me in a friendly way”). Together with the hallucinogenic qualities of anesthetic drugs and the effects of oxygen depletion on the brain, science is getting close to a materialist explanation of near-death experiences.

Explaining the psyche as merely brain functioning is the hall mark of materialist science and here de Waal is actually proud of his materialism.  This face off between materialist science and materialist religious views is what makes for the unbridgable gulf between the two points of view on the opposite ends of the materialist spectrum.

 

The genuine psychology that takes mind as both the basis of observation and the field to be observed --and not the physical world as the basis-- are the streams of psychology that flow from Carl G. Jung analytical psychology of the archetypes.  "God" as an archetypal image of the psyche is the analytical starting point of a genuine scientific look at religion.  So far, I have not heard Hitchens (RIP), Harris, or Dawkins (and neither does de Waal) acknowledge this necessary starting point for any scientific analysis of religion. Instead, the professional atheists simply deny the existence of God as a physical fact and ignore the existence of God the archetype as a psychical fact.  For example, materialist scientists don't understand Jung's psychology and think the archetypes are merely metaphors and not actual autonomous psychic organs that are every bit as necessary and every bit as autonomous in their functioning as the physical organs of the body like the heart, stomach, and liver.

 
As a Buddhist practitioner, I see Buddhism as a religious psychology and as a psychological religion.  Buddha was a man who did not deny the Gods and did not worship them either. He was known as "the teacher of Gods and Humans" so show that his awakening was something that can be taught to both the religious and the nonreligious. When the Lankavatara Sutra states that all manifestations are nothing but mind, it is stating the psychological basis of Buddhism. The analysis of the 8 conscousnesses and the 5 skandhas are analytical and psychological views of the structure and function of consciousness.

So far professional atheists like Dawkins say they don't know enough about Buddha Dharma to have an opinion about it, but until they learn about their own Western heritige of analytical psychology of the archetypes, they won't be able to understand the Buddha Dharma much less the Christian, Moslem, and Hebrew religous eachings.

The Anima and Animus in Buddha Dharma

My intellectual goals regarding psychology and Buddhism are to harmoinze Buddha Dharma with archetypal depth psychology, as the truth of mind is necessarily both the basis of Buddha Dharma and of anything that can be called modern psychology (not to be confused with modern neuro-science masquerading as psychology).

In his archetypal depth psychology, Carl Jung presented the psychological view of the structure and function of consciousness that is remarkably similar, and I would say virtually identical, to the Buddhist analysis of the Five Skandhas and Eight Consciousnesses. That is, in looking at a zebra, it might be described by some as a horse with stripes or as a donkey with painted lines, but though the words differ the description indicates the same thing is being viewed. Likewise, though Jung's archetypal psychology uses a different framework and language, it is absolutely clear to me that he is observing the same mind and the same structure and function of consciousness that the Buddhist masters have observed. This is what makes it clear to me that mind is not something culturally conditioned, though cultural conditions may lead us to argue about our observations of the mind.

Question: I wonder how the Jungian anima and animus reflect in the five skandhas. It does look as though patriarchy reflects in both Buddhism and Jungian thought quite well. A hero with a thousand faces, sure, but all the faces are male. Zeus is a male. God is a male. Mohamed is a male. Brahman is male. And of course Buddha is male. 

Okay, let's see.

Q. How does the Jungian anima and animus reflect in the five skandhas?

Anima and animus are primary functions in relation to the ego complex, and I see them as aspects primarily of the fourth skandha.  To speak of the full complexity of the situation means to acknowledge that the anima and animus also rely on the first three skandhas, but their primary expression is as configurations of the fourth skandha upon which self-consciousness is constructed. 

The anima or animus is the reflective image of our ego-complex that takes our identity beyond the personal into the impersonal. It is the vital aspect of our feeling our life to be "animated" and filled with life. We come to know this aspect of our psyche throught the image of the "other", but it is the "other" that we are drawn to through the psychic energy called libido. As this "other" is the one that draws out our libido from being wrapped up in our personal self-image to move toward the world, it is met or felt through the image of the contra-sexual personification. Thus the male imagines the feminine anima, and the female imagines the masculine animus.  This is why sexual energy is the physical(ized) aspect of the psychic energy of libido, that is why we encounter the libido first as sexual energy.

Appreciation of the function of polarity and opposites that is expressed in the anima-animus analysis is also integral to the analytic framework of the skandhas.  This is made clear by Great Master Huineng in the Platform Sutra when he discusses the opposites in the context of teaching about the 5 skandhas and 18 Realms (dhatus).  Though he doesn't mention the specific pair of opposites of "male and female" he mentions pairs like "sun and moon," and "shady and sunny" (the synonyms of Yin and Yang") which are common images for male and female.  It is the polarity function of the skandhas that is the point of how the opposites of consciousness arise from the skandhas and manifest as opposites which confuse us and become false thinking when we disjoint the opposities and believe they can exist independently of the other.

The anima and animus is the function of consciousness that entices us out of the defensive position of the ego into engagement with the world. For example, using some of the opposites used by Huineng, if we see the world as cruel, the anima or animus can draw us into engagement through the anima or animus appearing compassionate. If we see the world as muddy, the anima or animus can draw us out by appearing clean or pure. Form and emptiness are likewise like this.

Q. A hero with a thousand faces, sure, but all the faces are male. Zeus is a male. God is a male. Mohamed is a male. Brahman is male. And of course Buddha is male.

Sure, we can't argue aginst the fact that patriarchy took over most of the world's societies.  But that does not mean that patriarchy is the truth, or that Buddhism is limited to patriarchy.  Over the years, the recognition of the problem of one-sided patriarchy became apparant.
Of course, Zeus was accompanied by the goddess Hera, and only a partisian of the patriarchy would dare to undervalue Hera and the other goddesses.

In Christianity, the mother Goddess was indeed missing in the Garden of Eden and only appears through her earthly messenger the serpent, who then becomes vilified by the father God, but this is rectified by the development of the Madonna image to take the place of the missing mother in the Garden.

In Buddhism, the the importance of and reintegration of the feminine arose in several ways. One way was the designation of the Prajna-paramita as the mother of the Buddhas. Another way was in the Sutras such as the Vimalakirti Sutra and Queen Srimala's Lion's Roar Sutra that explicitly portrayed women as every bit the equal of men. 

So, strictly speaking all the faces are not male.  But admittedly, in Buddhist countries the cultural patriarchy has been slow to respond (if at all) to the equality of opposites that Buddhism teaches. This is largely due to Buddhism usually taking a nonconfrontational approach to such cultural politics, or in some countries actually turning a blind eye to the problem of patriarchy.    

Q. How does the anima and animus function in relation to the defensive position of the ego?

The most important example of this within the context of the Buddha story is the appearance of the maiden Sujata. If we view the life story of Buddha as an embodied archetypal story of the journey of awareness to awakening, then the anima appears in a most pivotal and crucial role, that of the milk maid who rescues Buddha from the impending death caused by his own asceticism. 

While Buddha remained in the castle, he was still within the domain of family and tribe and so could not develop the individuation necessary for awareness to awaken. The ego must be developed for this. When Buddha left the palace this was the necessary initial stage of individuation of the ego. Buddha initially developed the ego by study of the Dharmas of any teacher he could find.  However, this is not sufficient on its own because the development of the ego under the sway of the fight or flight instincts creates the defensive position vis a vis the environment, i.e., the world, or an attack position. Thus the ego either defends against the world or wants to become a world conqueror. Study becomes a way of trying to conquer the world. Modern science shows us how this path turns out.  Thus for a conscientious ego, it becomes clear that the world cannot really be conquered by study, only more questions arise with every one answered, Only more ways that we are conquered by the world are shown to us, for example, DDT, radiation poisoning, global warning, as the humbling responses of the world to our attempts to conquer it.

In the Buddha’s story the ego-complex is played out by Buddha adopting the ascetic approach in which the world is simultaneously both defended against and attempted to be conquered by the same ascetic practices.  The ascetic believes the world can be conquered by not allowing it to attack oneself through the desires and needs of the flesh, The ascetic believes that the impure, dirty, confusing, and entangling world cannot conquer oneself if one literally removes oneself from the world’s influences. However, this is where the conscientious ego, though necessary in the developmental scheme of awareness, also comes to the limit of itself and the anima and animus are necessary to be constellated for the journey to continue to fruition.

The Buddha’s extreme indulgence of asceticism is the perfect example of the ego’s self aggrandizement and defending itself against the world by creating an image of the world’s muddy, impurity, ignorance, etc. and the ego-based idea that to overcome the world one must separate oneself from all of that muddiness, impurity, ignorance, etc.  Here the story of Buddha engaging in asceticism with five fellow ascetics is noteworthy because it show Buddha as the sixth consciousness of thinking attempting to remove himself from the world along with the five sense consciousnesses.  However, because Buddha carries this to the extreme, he is able to come to realize the hopelessness of this one-sided approach of the ego. At this stage then the anima is constellated first in the form of a lute, then in the form of the milk maid.

At first the anima comes to us in odd ways that we don’t necessarily recognize in anthropomorphic images.  Buddha at the edge of his despair is roused from his anguish by the sounds of the lute being played.  From this experience he comes to understand the embodied meaning of the Middle Way. If the strings are too loose they cannot make the melodious sound, if they are too tight they will break and not make any sound. Only the Middle Way of tuning between too loose and too tight will allow the string to vibrate and make music.  In the life story of Buddha, this is the first recognition of the Buddha that can truly be called Buddha Dharma. From this awareness of the Dharma activity of opposites heard in the vibrations of a lute string, the Buddha Dharma is born. Some versions of the story say that it was Indra who appeared in the passing boat playing the lute. This obviously points to the archetypal or mythic aspect of consciousness as the source of the experience. The lute itself is the anima image that through its sweet voice has drawn Buddha back to engagement with the world by the recognition of melody, tone, sweetness, etc. as playing their role and that the Way is to be found not by defending against or attempting to conquer the world. 

However, at this point the Buddha is so weak that he cannot even walk, so this means that the ego, if left only to its own resources will starve itself to death.  Something deep in the psyche is moved to rescue the ego from this predicament, and the Buddha story portrays this next anima movement (animation) by the milk maid.  There are several versions of this story, as there should be with any truly archetypal story. One version has a passing goat herd boy come by and offer goat’s milk to rescue the Buddha, but this seems to be a version tinged with patriarchal aversion to the female image that is intended to erase the sexualized aspects of the anima from the story. This misunderstanding comes because the tree that Buddha was sitting under was called “the tree of the goatherd” (ajapala).  Other versions just say “villagers brought him food.” The more archetypically authentic stories portray the milk maid version. Here’s one.

The young woman was named Sujata (“well born”).  (Here it should be noted that Sujata also is one of the names or epithets of the Buddha himself, so this is another way of pointing to the archetypal context of the story where the maid Sujata is the anima figure of the Buddha Sujata.)   Sujata the maid had been lamenting her inability to conceive a child. She goes to the village sage who tells her that in order for her to become pregnant that she must provide the tree [i]deva[/i] (or divinity of the tree) with a special mixture of rice milk.   Sujata prepares the milk by using milking the best cows and feeding that milk to better cows and then feeding that milk to better cows until she has the best milk possible. Then she mixes is with the best rice and goes to the forest to offer it to the tree deity of “the goatherd tree.”  Buddha happens to be sitting under this tree and in his completely emaciated state he is unrecognizable as a human and Sujata believes him to be the tree deva and offers her milk and rice mixture to Buddha in a golden bowl. . Buddha receives the rice milk and is saved from starvation and revived.   The archetypal story continues with the golden bowl being tossed into the river and floating upstream with the involvement of the Nagas but that can be explored at another time.  At this point it suffices to say that the involvement of the Naga here is the transition of the anima figure to the deeper imagery of the psyche.

What is the necessary food that the anima brings to us to save us from the starvation diet of the ego complex and aid us in our enlightenment?  We learn something from Bodhidharma when he is asked about this in the work attributed to him called “The Discourse on Breaking Up Appearances” (破相論), loosely translated by Red Pine as “The Breakthrough Sermon.” 

This discourse is historically important to Zen as it clarifies many points of differentiation between the Three Vehicles approach to Buddha Dharma already present in China when Bodhidharma arrived, and the perspective of the One Vehicle Lineage of Southern India that Bodhidharma brought to China.   The Discourse is presented in the classical style as interrogatories on points of Dharma with Bodhidharma’s responses.  The gist of the Discourse is that “Only the one Dharma of contemplating Mind unites and includes all Dharmas and is superlative for introspecting the essential.”  After this point is made, the Discourse explores how the Buddha Dharma is perceived from this perspective. 
At one point the interrogator asks about the story of Buddha having to receive Sujata’s offering before realizing enlightenment. This doesn’t make sense to the questioner if just contemplating Mind is the direct Dharma Gate to enlightenment. 

Here’s Red Pine's translation:

[Q.] But when Sbakyamuni was a bodhisattva, he consumed three bowls of milk and six ladles of gruel prior to attaining enlightenment. If he bad to drink milk before be could taste the fruit of buddhahood, how can merely beholding the mind result in liberation?

[A.] What you say is true. That is how he attained enlightenment. He had to drink milk before he could become a Buddha. But there are two kinds of milk. That which Shakyamuni drank wasn’t ordinary impure milk but pure dharma-milk. The three bowls were the three sets of precepts. And the six ladles were the six paramitas. When Shakyamuni attained enlightenment, it was because he drank this pure dharma-milk that he tasted the fruit of buddhahood. To say that the Tathagata drank the worldly concoction of impure, rank-smelling cow’s milk is the height of slander. That which is truly so, the indestructible, passionless dharma-self, remains forever free of the world’s afflictions. Why would it need impure milk to satisfy its hunger or thirst?
The sutras say, "This ox doesn’t live in the highlands or the lowlands. It doesn’t eat grain or chaff. And it doesn’t graze with cows. The body of this ox is the color of burnished gold." The ox refers to Vairocana. Owing to his great compassion for all beings, he produces from within his pure Dharma-body the sublime Dharma-milk of the three sets of precepts and six paramitas to nourish all those who seek liberation. The pure milk of such a truly pure ox not only enabled the Tathagata to achieve buddhahood but also enables any being who drinks it to attain unexcelled, complete enlightenment. (From [i]Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma[/i], translated by Red Pine, p. 91-93.

Here's my translation:

Question. The Sutra says that at the time the Tathagata of the Sakyas was a Bodhisattva he had already drank three pecks (about 6 gallons) and six liters of milk and rice gruel just to complete the Buddha Way. Before, because he drank the milk, afterwards he could bear witness to the Buddha fruit. How could it be that merely contemplating mind attains liberation?!

Answer: Truly know that which you declare is without falsehood! Certainly, because he ate the milk like that at first, he became Buddha. Of that which is declared to be “eating milk” there are two kinds. That which is the food of the Buddha was not indeed the worldly milk of impurity and actually was the clear and pure Dharma milk of True Suchness! That which was three pecks exactly was the three collected pure precepts. That which was six liters exactly was the six paramitas. At the time of completing the Buddha Way from eating the clear and pure Dharma milk like this, just then he could bear witness to the Buddha fruit. If it is declared that the Tathagata ate the worldly concoction that was the rank and malodorous milk of the ox of impurity, h1ow could it not be the extreme of the wrong of slander?!
That which is true suchness itself is the indestructible diamond (vajra) without leakage, the Dharmakaya forever free from every and all sufferings of the world. How could it be necessarily so, that the milk of impurity is used to fill the hunger and thirst? It is like the (Mahaparinirvana) Sutra which articulates, “This ox does not dwell in the high plains and does not dwell in the low wetlands, does not eat unhulled rice, horse grain, chaff or bran, and doesn’t participate with the bull ox in common with the herd. The color of this ox body is made violet as burnished gold." That which is declared here as “the ox” is Virocana Buddha! Because of using great compassion and sympathy for everyone, from within the embodiment of the clear and pure Dharma is produced like this the subtle Dharma milk of the three collected pure precepts and the six paramitas to nurture everyone of those who seek liberation. So indeed the milk of clarity and purity from the ox of true purity is not only to complete the Way of the Tathagata’s drinking; for everyone of the multitude of beings, if they are those who are capable of drinking, then in all cases they attain unexcelled unified thorough enlightenment.

Here we see that Bodhidharma takes the story out of the literal to the archetypal level and explains that what Buddha received at the hands of Sujata was not common milk but the Milk of the Dharma of the Cosmic Buddha. This is important to understand because it is not the anima that provides enlightenment; the anima is the intermediary who brings the initial taste of enlightenment. The anima does not give us enlightenment but is the one who enables us to be fortified to find the place where we can realize enlightenment.  Thus Buddha was able to rise from underneath the “goatherd tree” and move to sit under the Bodhi Tree by the nourishment provided by the anima.

There is an important point here in that when Buddha accepted the food from the anima Sujata, the five ascetic companions left him in disgust as if he had given up on the quest for awakening.  This is the portrayal of the abandonment of the five sense consciousness as the sixth consciousness turns inward toward the eighth consciousness. More importantly, it shows that when the anima brings the ego out of the self-world opposition, the awareness now can either chose to re-engage in the world as ego or turn away form the world and ego to go further and deeper in contemplating the mind. As Buddha is the one who awakens, the Buddha story tells us the anima’s nourishment is to be used to continue the journey to the Bodhi Tree, not to return to the ordinary world. Thus the awareness that has transcended mere ego awareness by the help of the anima now turns from engagement with the five senses to engagement in direct contemplation of mind.  At this point the seventh consciousness appears in the archetypal figure of Mara and attempts to dissuade, confuse, and scare us from the task of directly perceiving the eighth consciousness. 

So the role of the anima (or animus for female practitioners) is crucial for awakening as awakening is told in the story of Buddha.