Miss Buddha (102 page)

Many other important questions about the
nature of religion were addressed during this period: Can religion
be divided into so-called primitive and higher types? Is religion a
product of psychological needs and projections? Is it a function of
political and social control? Such questions have, to this day,
continued to generate a large number of theories.

Religious Life

The religious life is an individual’s attempt
to live in accordance with the precepts of his or her religious
tradition. For example, Buddhists hold the Buddha up as a model and
try to replicate his life; Christians strive to be Christ-like; and
followers of the mystical Tao practice noninterference with the
natural course of things.

Religious experience also reflects the
diversity of cultural expressions in general: It can be formal or
spontaneous, solemn or festive, hierarchical or egalitarian; it can
emphasize submission or liberation; it can be devotional or
contemplative; it can involve fear or joy; it can be comforting or
disruptive; it can encourage reliance on powers outside oneself or
encourage personal responsibility.

The view that sacredness is an individual
experience and the view that sacredness is influenced by
environmental factors are not necessarily in conflict. Religious
life is given distinctive form both by the power of a community’s
social bonds and its traditional objects of veneration, and by an
individual’s personal interaction with those objects.

Religion as a Function of Society

In many cases, the things that people
consider sacred are determined by the community to which they
belong. However, the holiest things in the world to one group—its
gods, saviors, scriptures, or sacraments—are not necessarily seen
as sacred absolutes by another group, sometimes—especially by those
groups whose religion demands that no other god aside from theirs
ever be allowed—even as evil things.

The notion that sacredness is a value that a
given society places on certain objects—objects representing what
that society values most—and that such objects shape and generate
the religious feelings of its members was first proposed by French
sociologist Émile Durkheim.

According to his now
classic theory set forth in
Les Formes
élémentaires de la vie religieuse: Le système totemique en
Australie
(1912; and translated as
The Elementary Forms of the Religious
Life
, 1965), the distinguishing mark of
religion at its most fundamental is not a belief in divinity or in
the supernatural but is simply objects decreed as sacred by a group
of people.

In Durkheim’s view, it is the authority and
beliefs of a society that make things sacred or profane.
Consequently, religion is best understood neither as the result of
supernatural revelation nor as an illusion or a set of mistaken
ideas.

Rather, he claims, religion
is best understood as the power of a society to make certain things
(objects, whether physical or mental) sacred or profane in the
lives of its individual members. Therefore, social sacredness and
religious sacredness are one and the same. Thus, sacred things are
those objects and symbols, including principles and beliefs that
must be preserved from violation
because
they represent all that is of most value to the
community
.

All cultures hold something sacred. In
secular Western societies, the sacred might be embodied in certain
principles, such as individual rights, freedom, justice, or
equality.

In Durkheim’s view, therefore, religion is
not a matter of claims about the universe that are either true or
false, but is the normal way that a society constructs and
maintains its cherished tradition and moral values.

Religion as Divine Experience

A very different view,
emphasizing individual experience, was developed by German
theologian Rudolf Otto. In
Das
Heilige
(1917; Literally “The Holy” but
translated as
The Idea of the
Holy
, 1958), Otto holds that personal
experience of the divine power is the true core of
religiousness.

Such experience, according
to Otto, is marked by a sense of awe in the face of the
Mysterious Other
that in
this moment dramatically intersects our limited, vulnerable view.
It is this reality, Otto maintains, that religious traditions
symbolize by concepts such as God or the Allmighty.

In Otto’s view, the capacity for such
awareness lies within each person, and it is the purpose of
religious language, observance, and practice to shape and elicit
this awareness.

Religion as an Individual Phenomenon

For many people, religion is best understood
as individual spiritual life.

An influential book
exploring this view is
The Varieties of
Religious Experience
(1902), by American
philosopher and psychologist William James.

James attempted a study of all forms that
religious experience can take—from extreme asceticism (practice of
self-denial) and mystical union with the divine, to modern
techniques of positive thinking, giving special attention to what
he termed conversion experiences, or life-changing encounters with
spiritual forces.

James supported his study with hundreds of
documented cases where individuals reported that they had
experienced contact with something transcendent and that their
lives had changed decisively as a result.

Many of these recorded episodes came as a
sudden and unsolicited consciousness of spiritual unity or insight.
Mystical, quite ineffable, he said.

Based on this study, James hypothesized the
existence of a wider, subconscious dimension of the self that could
help account for the source of apparently supernatural visions,
voices, and revelations.

Religion as Experience Mediated by the
Sacred

Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade (1907-86)
emphasized that religious people experience our ordinary world
differently from non-religious people because they view it as a
sacred place.

In his view, believing in divine foundations
of life elevates the significance of natural objects and
activities.

He also believed that for
what he termed
homo religiosus
time, space, the earth, the sky, and the human
body can all have a symbolic, religious meaning, and, like Otto,
Eliade held that the study of religion must not reduce its subject
matter to something merely social or psychological, but must take
seriously the idea that in the believer’s world the experience of
sacredness defines a distinctive reality.

Patterns in Religious Life

Observing religion across many cultures
yields certain common themes and activity patterns. Naturally, you
also discover significant differences within those patterns.

Sacred Histories

Most religions are grounded in and organized
around certain past events or models. They, as a rule, have their
own account of the history of the world—the great time when gods,
creators, sages, ancestors, saviors, founders, or heroes
established or revealed the essential elements of the religion; the
single exception here being Buddhism, since the Buddha considered
such speculations pointless and non-productive of enlightenment,
and would accomplish little else but ensnare you in opinions and
guesswork.

But for rest, where sacred histories are
part of the fabric, these collective memories are ordinarily
preserved in carefully maintained oral traditions or in written
accounts known as scriptures or sacred writings.

In Christian histories, for example, the key
event of the past is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, whose
teachings, death, and resurrection set the model for the meaning of
Christian life.

In Judaism, the key event was the Exodus
(the flight from Egypt under Moses) and the subsequent handing down
of the Law at Mount Sinai.

The enlightenment experience of the Buddha
and the revelation of the Qur’an to the prophet Muhammad are
defining events in Buddhism and Islam.

And so, and not surprisingly, the Islamic
calendar begins with the birth of Islam in 622 CE, the Christian
calendar begins with the birth of Christ, and the Jewish calendar
begins with the biblical time of the Creation itself.

Renewal Observances

Most religions provide their followers with
continual spiritual renewal by setting aside special times for them
to recollect and demonstrate what they hold sacred. These occasions
may take place annually, monthly, weekly, daily, or even
hourly.

Muslims, for example, are expected to pause
for prayer at five different times every day, and during the holy
month of Ramadan—which honors the month when the Qur’an was first
revealed—they are expected to observe a fast every day from sunrise
to sunset.

For Jews, the High Holy Days—a ten-day
period in autumn celebrating the new year and concluding with the
holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement)—is a
major time of spiritual renewal, as is Passover in the spring. Jews
dedicate the seventh day, or Sabbath—which falls on the modern
Saturday—to recalling the divine basis of life.

Christians follow a similar seven-day cycle
but give special prestige to Sunday, honoring the day of the
resurrection of Jesus Christ, which, according to the Christian
scriptures, occurred on the first day of the week.

Every religion, large or small, stipulates
regular festivals and observances to celebrate and display
fundamental commitments to their beliefs. These events are intended
to intensify and renew the spiritual memory of its followers.

Sacred Space

Not only do religions establish sacred times
that define the calendar and the spiritual year, they also
establish special places that localize the sacred in the midst of
ordinary space.

At times these sacred places are ones of
natural beauty or of imposing power, such as mountains, caves, or
rivers. They may also be sites that commemorate great religious
events of the past—for example, the birthplace of the Hindu god
Krishna; the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment; or the spot where
Muhammad is believed to have journeyed to heaven.

At other times they are places where
miraculous spiritual appearances are believed to have occurred, as
in the case of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes,
France.

And they may be (and usually are) shrines
and temples built to house the gods or their representative
symbols, such as the Parthenon in Greece, which was dedicated to
Athena, patron goddess of Athens.

The use of space can reveal a great deal
about a religious worldview. Some structures, such as Pueblo kivas,
are built into the ground, thus acknowledging the earth as the
place from which human beings emerged and as the source of
sustenance for the Pueblo’s agricultural society. Others, such as
the European gothic cathedrals, through their delicate architecture
and skyward reach, suggest the transcendence of the divine
realm.

Others still, like the Shinto shrines in
Japan, express reverence for nature in the harmonious way they
blend with the natural environment.

Then we have the modern marvel of the
so-called mega-churches of North America that have taken the form
of corporate office complexes geared for efficiency of organized
service.

Interaction with Spiritual Beings

Most religions provide their followers with
prescribed ways of interacting with spiritual beings, a
communication that is often at the center of religious
practice.

Perhaps the most widely practiced forms of
such interaction are the petitionary prayer, offerings and
sacrifices, purification and penance, and general worship.

These interactions are sometimes prescribed
as regular events; at other times they are performed in times of
special need, such as illness, drought, infertility, or war—times
when human beings find themselves especially dependent on or
subject to the forces of a universe that are beyond their
control.

There are other forms of communication and
connection as well, such as the Christian Eucharist, or meditation
on the presence of a supreme being.

The gods, in turn—if they are listening—are
believed to make their will, power, or presence known to humans in
a variety of ways, including prophecy, states of trance, dreams and
visions, divination, healings, special signs and miracles,
intuition, mystical experiences, and embodiment in the lives of
special individuals.

Rituals and Symbols

Ritual is a specialized form of spiritual
communication and usually involves performance of symbolic bodily
actions, displayed in a tangible, visible way. They are supposed to
endow the practitioner with the power to focus experience and so
intensify the sense of the sacred.

A ritual can be as simple as bowing one’s
head before a meal, chanting a certain phrase, or removing
footwear.

On the other hand, they can involve
intricate ceremonies performed by teams of priests and lasting
several days.

Rituals are supposed to reveal the sacred
through specific, symbolic actions and objects, including
processions, special clothing, special sounds—for example
chanting—or silences, masks, symbolic objects, and special foods.
Some religions use rituals to great effect, while others assign
them a lesser role.

Original Buddhism (Theravada) considers the
adherence and attachment to rites and rituals a spiritual
hindrance.