The other day, I was listening to Coleman Hughes' podcast, "Conversations with Coleman," and he was interviewing, Samaneri Jayasāra, a Buddhist Nun. I have done a little study on Buddhism in the past, and I was curious to learn what more. Coleman is an atheist, but he often has interesting guest who deepen my understanding of the world. Furthermore, because he is not a Christian, he helps me to understand a different point of view. I like to see how he views life and how he handles day to day situations.
He had this particular guest on because meditation is one of the ways that he has attempted to deal with the stresses of life. Samaneri apparently teaches some of the practices of Buddhism on her youtube channel, including how to meditate. She has lots of people who watch her channel because like Coleman they have stresses or have not found peace in this world, and she appears to have found a path to contentment through her Buddhist practices.
I was curious to know if she came to some of the same conclusions that I had read and heard from other Buddhists, namely that the key to peace is to get rid of desire. Whenever you fight internal strife, you just identify what you are desiring and then deny the reality of your need for that thing. When you stop desiring things, you stop having discontentment, and you can feel peaceful. In fact Samaneri did promote such a view of the world, and in fact promoted a view that in fact nothing in the world is real. Once you realize that then your meditation becomes a practice of reminding yourself of the unreality of the things you desire.
Now I can see several real problems with this perspective. First, it calls people to deny their own experience. Yes, we often desire things that we cannot attain such as money, health, or fantasy relationships, but that does not mean all of reality is an illusion. The physical world is real. Your body is real. Relationships are real. In fact, we even seem to have an internal sense of the goodness and then the brokenness of things in the world. When we see a baby, a flower, a mountain, the stars, or a thunderhead, we see incredible beauty and have a desire to extol their beauty. The same goes for good tasting food, beautiful music, and love between a man and woman. Likewise, when we see good things used wrongly or abused, we are angered because we know that something has gone wrong with the goodness. Our internal nature seems to confirm both Genesis 1 where God calls His creation good, and Genesis 3, where the whole of creation was affected by sin. Buddhism seems to recognize the suffering caused by the brokenness in the world, and proposes the solution to deny the reality of both the bad and the good.
This leads to my second problem with Buddhism, namely that is it primarily a solution to a negative problem, namely suffering, but gives us no way to go toward or extol the good. Since there is no ultimate reality, Samaneri's form of Buddhism is like many forms, ultimately atheistic, in that they do not propose a higher being or reality to explain the good things of the world. Coleman is someone who also does not believe in a personal god, although I believe he comes at it more from a scientistic or naturalism mindset, so he also does not have anything higher that gives us a reason to believe that the beauty and goodness are real things beyond our personal experience of them. In other words, something beautiful or good is just relative to the experience of individual people, and does not conform to some higher or supernatural definition of good.
Now interestingly this actually agrees with a main point from the book of Ecclesiastes, namely that everything under the sun is meaningless or vanity. Buddhist, like atheist,like all of us have to deal with how to live at peace in our world, but they have limited their view of the world to "under the sun" or just to the natural world. Christians on the other hand, have resources to look for outside just the physical world, which is where the author of Ecclesiastes finally leads his readers too. We internally feel the need to worship or extol the goodness of good things, but when we try to find their ultimate reason inside the universe, we cannot find it. Therefore, it seems that we desire something that can only be explained by something outside the universe. C.S. Lewis said, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
The solution then for the desires is to look beyond this world. The good things in this world have their origin and meaning outside this world in the very nature of God. Christians then do not need to deny reality and their own innate knowledge of goodness, rather we need to acknowledge its source. When we do we see that the goodness of creation leads of beyond creation. When we see that baby or mountain, or hear the beauty of a melody and harmony, or experience the look of love in your spouses eyes, we know that they are expressions of God's goodness. Our hearts turn to worship, not the creation, but the creator. And since His goodness and beauty are infinite, we will never in all of eternity grow weary of His goodness, like we often do of earthly pleasures. He grounds our desires in something, no someone, real, and the way to true peace and contentment is not to deny our desires, but to turn them toward God in worship.
I am find myself worshiping more and more as see the frailness of our world, and as I see my own need for fulfillment can only be met in Him. I not only worship by turning on music, but when I am biking and feel the muscles of my body being used or see the sunset, or when I look in the eyes of my wife and give her a kiss, or when I listen to my daughter ask a great question, or I hear my son's excitement about his first day of work. In any number of ways throughout my day, God reminds me of His goodness, and my heart turns to Him in thanks and adoration. I cannot image that the emptiness of Buddhist meditation can possibly bring the type of rich fulfillment that worship of the one true God and His son, Jesus Christ brings.
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