The Hinduism so beautifully personified by Paramahansa Yogananda in “Autobiography of a Yogi” is full of devotion to a God who is inside and outside us all at once. In fact, Yogananda describes himself as being devotional by nature, ever since his childhood: devotion being one of Hinduism’s three basic paths to God. Of course Hinduism stresses that we must each look inwards to find understanding. We all have a Higher Self, and gazing inwards to find this Higher Self is the key to finding God. Blissful union with God is called “samadhi” in the yogic tradition.
At first glance, Buddhism appears very similar to a Westerner. One gazes inward in meditation to uncover the dharma, or right path. Many of the basic terms of Buddhism, such as karma and dharma, come straight from Hinduism. After all, the Buddha arose in a Hindu culture just as Jesus was born into Judaism. Nirvana, the blissful state to which the Buddha ultimately awakened, is essentially akin to samadhi. Compassion is a key ingredient in the teachings of both religions, and indeed of Christianity as well.
But there is an important respect with which Buddhism differs from Hinduism. Buddhists generally don’t speak of God at all. Whereas the Hindu God is manifested in so many different forms, such as Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma, in Buddhism there is nothing at all to manifest. This is not to say that Buddhism is atheist, but neither is it theist. One might say that while Hinduism celebrates union with the Divine Presence, Buddhists seek awakening to the (divine) Absence. To Hindus, God is the Oneness that encompasses, enfolds and transcends all the spiritual and worldly forms of Being. To Buddhists, a divine Nothingness is the core Reality into which all worldly forms dissolve. What Hindus call God, Buddhists simply call Mindfulness, and it is to be found entirely within.
Mindfulness is the opposite of multi-tasking. Mindfulness is an open, vibrating, still and peaceful awareness of ourselves, the world around us, our thoughts and our actions. Multi-tasking breaks up and fractures the screen of mindfulness into thousands of tiny fragments, like shattering a sheet of glass into myriads of sharp, blood-drawing crystals. It is unfortunate and at times even tragic that our modern culture leads us so inexorably away from mindfulness and into the fragmented, stressful, interrupted vortex of our high technology-dependent lives. Where is inner peace when the mental space we inhabit is shared and dominated by computers, smart phones and television, all vying for our attention at once? As Adam Gopnik puts it in “The Information – How the Internet Gets Inside Us,” an article in the February 14-February 21, 2011 issue of “The New Yorker” magazine, “It is the wraparound presence, not the specific evils, of the machine that oppresses us.” He adds, “Shut off your computer, and your self stops raging quite as much or quite as loud.” That would be the “very little self” of Hinduism, in contrast to the Higher Self of Mindfulness that is our true soul.
The great strength of Buddhism is its simplicity: its turning away from the barbarism of India’s caste system and its embrace of the untouchables, which is so similar to Christ’s embrace of social outcasts, including prostitutes and the destitute. As Thich Nhat Hanh puts it in his excellent book, “Living Buddha, Living Christ,” “Taking refuge in the Sangha (Buddhist community) is not a matter of devotion. It is a matter of practice.” In Buddhism, practice is everything. If in Hinduism, devotion leads one to practice meditation and to live the dharma, in Buddhism, practice leads one to devotion. But the object of one’s devotion, when it comes, is not God. The object of devotion is the practice itself.
Bird of Spirit 