Tricycle | Awake in the World

It is a fact that we live in a religiously diverse world. Religious diversity can and often does result in grave misunderstanding, hostility, and, as we know all too well, conflict, with unacceptable costs to human life and well-being. For this reason, among others, it is incumbent on responsible people to know how to think clearly and compassionately about religious diversity. For Buddhists, it is important in thinking about such issues to use Buddhist tools and views, lest our attitudes and actions simply reflect the biases and reactions we have absorbed from the surrounding culture.

Perhaps the single most discomfiting thing about religious diversity is that, at the level of concepts, religious people simply do not agree, or even come close to agreeing, about how to think about the nature of reality. Yet it generally goes without saying that one’s views about reality are crucially important. This is something about which Buddhism has much to say.

It is difficult to interpret from the Pali suttas what advice the Buddha might give us for dealing with the situation today. According to tradition, the Buddha had tried many of the religious options of his day and found them wanting. The Pali canon is full of stories of other religious teachers debating with the Buddha, losing the debate, and converting. The canon also recounts the Buddha sending his disciples out to teach and spread his message far and wide. Are we to conclude from this that today the Buddha would advise us to regard our version of Buddhism as clearly superior to anything else? Given that the Buddha was adamant in teaching his students not to cling to views, it seems unlikely that he would encourage us to cultivate a view, belief, or ideology that our own religion and lineage are clearly superior to anyone else’s. Given the deleterious effects of such views in promoting the three poisons of aversion, lust, and ignorance, it seems even less likely that the Buddha would today advocate single-mindedly clinging to or promoting the view that one’s own religion or lineage is best.

The clearest text in the Pali suttas regarding these issues is the famous Kalama Sutta, in which townspeople ask the Buddha how they should respond to visiting religious teachers, each of whom proclaims his own doctrine to be the best and all others to be false. The Buddha replies that people should take nothing on authority but should test everything in their own experience to see whether it produces negative or positive results. He says, “When you know for yourselves, ‘These qualities are unskillful; these qualities are blameworthy; these qualities are criticized by the wise; these qualities, when adopted and carried out, lead to harm and to suffering’—then you should abandon them.”

The Buddha, then, is represented as being more than willing, when challenged by other teachers, to engage them in debate and to accept those he has defeated as converts to his teachings. But he is not shown to proclaim that his teachings and practices are superior to all others or necessary for everyone to adopt. What he does say about his own teachings and practices is that they can lead one to Unbinding, to the Deathless. Beyond that, it is up to each student to “know for themselves,” one way or the other. Leaving it up to others to “know for themselves” whether or not certain teachings and practices lead to beneficial or harmful results, rather than proclaiming the superiority and universal relevance of one’s own teachings, is a model that is eminently relevant today.

The Buddha encouraged his qualified disciples to disseminate his teachings, and that effort was successful. As a result, Buddhists have had varied experiences in living with and learning from people of other faiths. In ancient India, strident religious debate, sometimes with the consequence that the losing side was required to convert to the winning side, was quite popular, and Buddhists participated in these debates with mixed results. Although Indian traditions debated with each other, they also adopted teachings and practices from each other. Buddhism changed a great deal in its long history in India, and some of these changes certainly appear to be due to Hindu influences. When I did my first fire puja, practicing in a Tibetan Vajrayana lineage, I was both shocked and amused to discover that the first ritual summoned Agnideva, an ancient pre-Buddhist Vedic fire deity, to the fire around which we would meditate all day. Because I love fire, Agnideva was my favorite Vedic deity when I studied that material in graduate school, and I had once written a paper on him. I was quite surprised to meet him again, so many years later, in this Buddhist context. This ritual would definitely not have been performed by the historical Buddha and his students. I use this small example to illustrate concretely the larger point: that Buddhism and Hinduism cross-influenced each other.

Beyond India, especially in East Asia, the situation was quite different. There, Buddhists also often participated in other religions. Only religious specialists clearly identified with just one religion. In Japan, many people would be hard-pressed to declare whether they were Shinto or Buddhist, or to know which sect of Buddhism their family patronized. This is not because religion and ritual were irrelevant to people, but because a very different view of religious belonging, quite unfamiliar to Westerners, prevailed. Called “multiple religious belonging,” it is becoming more common in the West, especially among those for whom two or more religions—Buddhism and Christianity, for example—are compelling. Clearly, when this view of religious belonging prevails, the question of which religion (or lineage) is best and truest recedes in importance.

From the experience of many millions of Asian Buddhists over many centuries, we in the West might glean some important clues about how Buddhists might think about religious diversity in contemporary situations. First, even if one disagrees with and debates with one’s religious neighbors, one still might learn something valuable from them, even something worth adopting. Second, the question of religious labels and loyalty is far less important than developing a viable spiritual life, even if that means drawing water from more than one well.

In premodern, nonmonotheistic contexts, people probably experienced religious diversity in ways that are different from experience in the modern West. For most people, a singular religious affiliation was not as important, and religious identity was more fluid and easygoing. Ethnic and cultural identities, however, were quite strong, and religious identity as a secondary phenomenon, as part of one’s ethnic or cultural identity, would then follow suit. But it is important to recognize that it was the ethnic and cultural loyalties that were, and sometimes still are, primary. We have seen, even relatively recently, that ethnic groups can change religious identity quickly, en masse, without weakening their ethnic or cultural identities, such as happened when large populations that were formerly Buddhist became Muslim, Hindu, or, for that matter, Communist.