xabir wrote:
A non-Buddhist can attain liberation, sure I have no problems with that. In the Pali suttas, lots of non-buddhists awaken or even instantaneously liberate through listening to the Buddha alone. Then, they took refuge or seek ordination, but only after their own awakening. So what you are saying is nothing new.
But I do not see how a person can awaken and then still hold on to their old beliefs and views or their religions, since they would have seen through the views of their old religions (particularly the views that contradict dharma, that is). Even a stream enterer has ended three fetters: wrong view of self, sceptical doubt and belief in rites and rituals, (sakkayaditthi, vicikiccha and silabbatta-paramasa)
Even within certain particular faith-tradition, there is a sense in which sakkayaditthi, vicikiccha and silabbatta-paramasa can be weakened significantly and perhaps even eliminated with the development of greater depth of understanding and maturity in that tradition. In the world of Orthodox Judaism, for example, I can remember being told by a disciple of the late Rabbi Dessler, a founder of the Gateshead Yeshiva, that Rabbi Dessler often used to say that many or most observant and not-so-observant Jews had not moved beyond a child's conception of God (presumably essentially the huge old man on a throne with a long beard, albeit incorporeal, and a decidedly patriarchal character), and that it was important to grow out of that immature conception. Outside the bounds of Orthodox Judaism, things open up even more. On the conception of the late Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist Movement, Judaism is to be veiwed as a culture and Jewish observance is a matter of folkways rather than of salvation. Kaplan's conception of God is argualbly naturalistic -- he was probably technically an atheist. I spent more than a decade of my life as a member of a Catholic religious order, the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans) and served as a priest for some years (and, to pre-empt certain questions, never surrendered my Jewishness, though this got up certain people's noses, and made mindfulness practice in a full-blooded Buddhist {or should we say "Dhammic" sense and context} a fundamental part of my life from the time I was a novice in the Order, also becoming the secretary of the University Buddhist Society for a year -- I've never been particularly good at the "boundary" things). Some time before I joined the Order, God dropped out of my life and out of my world in a sense: it dawned on me that if the term "God" referred to the ground of all being or to the Creator of all from nothing, any conception of God as a coinhabitant of the universe, however big or powerful, as the top of some kind of great chain of being, or even as a something, was unsustainable. Some months later, when I was a novice in the Order, I had the privilege of attending the General Chapter of my Province of the Order and of hearing the late Fr Herbert McCabe O.P., my novice-master and perhaps the finest Catholic preacher and theologian in the United Kingdom, preaching to the chapter and saying much the same thing. In a wonderful sermon he noted that one of the joys of teaching at our House of Studies was noting the moment, which came for all students at some point, when they realised that there is no God in the world. What had hit me some months before and completely changed my vision of the world at the time, and where Herbert was coming from, was a radically negative conception of God, a time-hallowed approach to theology called "apophatic theology", negative theology. It is the conception of God put forward by many of the great Muslim philosophers of the Middle Ages, by Rabbi Moses Maimonides and by Thomas Aquinas among others, so both Herbert and I were in good company. This tradition commits one in principle to a fundamental and ineliminable agnosticism with regard to the putative Divine nature. It also follows from this conception that the notion that God has a character is misguided. I remember Herbert once saying that it perplexed him -- as it perplexed me -- that a certain eminent Catholic logician and philosopher, since deceased, actually believed that God had a character and was a moral agent. All of this also had implications for the way one viewed practices, whether moral or ritual. It did not favour superstition or magical conceptions. In addition, speaking personally, something which also folllowed was that I could make no sense of the claim that, rather than
being a soul, that is to say, having vitality, there was some separable part of me which was my soul. The older and more intelligent brethren would certainly have agreed with me about that. Most pew-Christians and indeed many theologians, and their Jewish and Muslim counterparts, would have excoriated our views as atheistic. We, for our part, felt that their conceptions of deity were idolatrous -- in a sense, infected by kinds of sakkayaditthi, vicikiccha and silabbatta-paramasa.
My own conceptions have moved some way beyond that. Something I accepted at the time was that what is sometimes called "the
seinsfrage", "why is there anything at all rather than nothing", was comfortably within the bounds of sense, and this allowed me to describe myself as a theist. The logic of this is not really relevant to this thread. A few years back, I came to feel that, contrary to appearances, the
seinsfrage in fact pushes beyond the bounds of sense, something which made me -- rather to my own surprise at first -- an atheist rather than an agnostic.
The point of all of this is that there is sometimes much more scope for the development of appreciation for and even insight into Dharma outside the formal boundaries of Buddhism than you might imagine, and there is certainly significant scope for awakening without necessarily having to abandon some non-Buddhist traditions. The conceptions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other religions held by outsiders and insular insiders are often stereotyped and simplistic, almost children's conceptions rather than mature ones which realise that there is space for contextualisation, appropriation (applying to circumstances, as Rinpoche would perhaps put it) and that it is not about arid and inflexible dogmas. Why should it be surprising that there are some Rabbis and other observant Jews out there, some of them Orthodox, who can appreciate Dharma? Have you ever read
Nostra Aetate, the document promulgated by the Second Vatican Council about the Church's relationship with non-Christian religions, states that "Buddhism, in its various forms, realizes the radical insufficiency of this changeable world; it teaches a way by which men, in a devout and confident spirit, may be able either to acquire the state of perfect liberation, or attain, by their own efforts or through higher help, supreme illumination", and that "(t)he Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions" and "regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men"? Truth is truth is truth, wherever it is found. Dharma is Dharma is Dharma.