In todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;Why Choose Buddhism?,and#8221; Sangharakshita points out possible potentially misleading assumptions concerning Buddhism, and describes three principal avenues to a practical spiritual life. This track is from the talk and#8220;The Approach to Buddhismand#8221; given in 1966 as part of the series and#8220;Introducing Buddhism.and#8221;
Dharmabytes from free buddhist audio
Why Choose Buddhism?
[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you, and happy listening. Friends, as you all know, today is the third talk in the series, a new series for the New Year, entitled Introducing Buddhism. In the first talk, which we had some two weeks ago, we discussed the necessity of religion. And we saw that religion, in the broadest sense, representing, we may say, the achievement of what I then called psychological and spiritual wholeness, is necessary for those who have become self-aware as the instrument of their higher evolution. And it is necessary only for those who have reached the point where that higher evolution begins or where, in fact, it can alone begin, the point of self-awareness. For others, we may say, though this is perhaps rather unconventional, it isn't necessary, or it hasn't yet become necessary. Now, last week, we tried to give an answer to the question, why Buddhism? Assuming religion to be necessary, in the sense in which I've already defined it as necessary, then why follow Buddhism in particular? Religion doesn't after all exist in the abstract. We speak very often in terms of religion, but the capital are, but really there's no such thing. All of you really have taught our concrete individual religions. And last week, we saw that altogether, there are 11 of these. That is, counting only the major living religions of the world. Not counting the dead ones, not counting those of minor importance, even though they are still alive. So the question arises, when one has all these religions, when one is confronted by this great richness of material as it were, what is the reason for choosing Buddhism, the teaching of the Buddha, in preference to all the rest? So last week, as we pursued this inquiry, we saw that very broadly speaking, there are two groups of religions, the ethnic on the one hand, and the universal on the other, the ethnic religions being those professed by certain ethnic groups, confined to a certain geographical area, or limited to a certain race of people, and the universal being, those which were not so confined and so limited, which were addressed to mankind as a whole, irrespective of geographical location. Now, our choice, when we take up this question of choice of religion, is obviously limited to the universal religions, because in order to belong to an ethnic religion, like Hinduism or Judaism, one has to be born into it. So the universal religions, to which our choice is in fact restricted, are only three in number. These are across Buddhism, in chronological order, and giving them Christianity and Islam. These are the three great universal religions of the world. So for anyone who is seriously considering this question of choice of religion, in practice, in effect, is twice as limited to these three. Now, these three themselves, in ten, fall into two groups. There's a theistic group, and a non-theistic group. That is a group of those that believe in a personal God supreme being, and a group of those that do not, who believe in some impersonal or super-personal, non-creative principle, instead. Now, it is a fact that what we may call the theistic idiom is no longer intelligible to a very large number of religious-minded, modern people. If one speaks this idiom, one will no longer be understood by them. So we find that amongst the universal religions, Buddhism is the only one which is non-theistic. Christianity and Islam, the other two universal religions, are theistic. So to that extent, their appeal is limited for many modern people who no longer speak or even understand the language of theistic religion. So we find that amongst this group of three universal religions, Buddhism is the only one which is non-theistic, which lays down a complete system of ethics, psychology, meditation, metaphysics, and so on, but without any reference to a personal God, a supreme being. So this, as we saw, is really the basic reason for its appeal. The reason about all other reasons why, in an increasing number of people in the West, are taking to this particular teaching, or this particular tradition, or this particular religion. The fact that it offers them what we may call a non-theistic universal religion, something which they can follow, something which they can try to practice, something which speaks a language and idiom, which is intelligible to them. And all the other reasons that it teaches a comprehensive system of meditation that is tolerant and so on, all these other reasons, they're good in themselves, and bad in themselves, are comparatively secondary. The basic issue is this of non-theistic universal religion. So this is the primary answer to the question why Buddhism. Most people take it up, basically, essentially or intrinsically, for this reason, because it is a non-theistic and universal system of spiritual self-development. But having settled this question, as we did last week, another question arises in its place, in turn. We've spoken in the first talk on our religion as the instrument by means of which the self-aware person pursues the cause of what we call the higher evolution. So Buddhism, of course, answers to this description. Buddhism also is a religion or teaching or system which functions as an instrument by means of which the self-aware person, the person who is spiritually alive, contours of himself and his spiritual destiny, pursues the cause of the higher evolution from enlightened humanity right up to enlightened humanity or Buddha put. In fact, we may even go so far as to say that Buddhism is, in fact, better adapted to such an end than any other spiritual teaching which isn't known to us. We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freeBuddhist.io.com/donate. And thank you. [music] [music] [music] [ Silence ]