No.23  Overconfident Human

The Buddhist tradition goes back to India 2,500 years ago. The beginning dates from the personal Enlightenment of a single man and ultimately spread from India to China and finally to Japan. Gotama’s Enlightenment was a spiritual awakening.

There are many denominations and sects of Buddhism, yet all the variations represent merely different roads or paths to reach the mountain top of that same spiritual awakening. We are all striving to attain the same goal. In that respect, we can call Buddhism the "religion of Enlightenment" or the "religion of spiritual liberation"; for that is our final aim and goal.

The next question asked often is "What is this so called Enlightenment or Satori as Buddhists call it?" It may be explained in various different ways, but simply Enlightenment means "to see reality-as-it-really-is". In other words, to recognize the world without blinders created by our own preconceptions. This may sounds very simple, yet it is a very difficult task for humans to achieve. For we are submerged into a false conceptual notion of reality.

Generally, we tend to think that we are safe to believe what we see and can believe what we hear. Yet, because of the basic ignorance of our nature, in the end, we only see what we believe and we only hear what we believe, and fail to see reality-as-it-is. From birth we have been conditioned partially by training and partially by experience to imagine that our senses present us with a true notion of the world. Yet, we fail to realize that our understanding of the world is based upon where we were born and our early life experiences. In our society we speak of reason and objectivity, imagining that everyone sees the world from the same perspective, but is there really such a thing as reason and objectivity? That is the question that has constantly been raised in the Buddhist tradition.

In modern society man has placed an over-confidence in his finite human judgment and without understanding the "why" he is constantly and tragically punished. Each group, each race, each people believe that they alone touch truth and scorn their neighbors or those who differ from them. Their mistake is simply failing to realize that we are all struggling creatures confined to a small world. We may differ and quarrel about theological differences yet in the end we are the "same earth people". We are all finite and share all the finite failings of human beings.

There is a quotation that states, "Man proposes but God disposes". Although as Buddhists, we may have different views of the idea of God, whom I prefer to call Amida Nyorai, or Ultimate Reality, I believe that that man has overstepped his boundaries and has come to believe that he indeed can be God. Like children, who like to wear the shoes of their parents, man wants to become a god and step into the footsteps of a god. But as a result, he is inevitably going to fail and suffer the consequences. In the vernacular, it means he is going to fall on his nose because of his pride.