This is the third posting in a series of postings reflecting on Thich Nhat Hanh's book, Living Buddha, Living Christ (Riverhead Books, 2007; originally published in 1995). The introductory posting, setting the stage for the series, is (here).Following up on the second posting regarding Thich Nhat Hanh's openness to other faiths, we turn to his fundamental premise regarding the relationship of one religion to another: "People kill and are killed because they cling too tightly to their own beliefs and ideologies. When we believe that ours is the only faith that contains the truth, violence and suffering will surely be the result." He insists that we must put aside the idea that our religion possesses "changeless, absolute truth" and calls on us to cultivate an attitude of nonattachment to our beliefs and an openness to those of other religions. He concludes, "To me, this is the most essential practice of peace." (p. 2)
Thich Nhat Hanh is asking Western and Muslim people of faith to cultivate a more East Asian attitude toward religion, which takes beliefs less seriously and the practice of religion more seriously. He wants us to think of religion as many Buddhists do in places like Thailand, where the common wisdom of Thai society endlessly repeated on the streets is that, "All religions teach the same thing, namely to make people better."
And he's not just calling on people of faith in the West and the Arab world to think about truth and religion in new ways. He is challenging one of the fundamental characteristics of our societies, which is to take what we think about things with utter seriousness. He is challenging political ideologues and activist atheists to change their attitudes about the truths they think they know and their opponents supposedly don't know. He is telling us all that we need to chill, to back off, and to learn to hold our religious, political, and even anti-religious beliefs more gracefully and peacefully. He may be too gracious to come out and say it in so many words, but he must see in our beliefs and ideologies a major source of global violence and unrest. If he doesn't, he should, because they are. For us to see the dangers of being "true believers," however, requires that we think outside of our inherited social box and to see those dangers in our own beliefs. The point I want to emphasize here is that this is not just about religion. It is about the way we think and value what we believe generally in Western and Muslim societies. More in the next posting.
