The Buddha of the West

"Can western religion survive, retain continuity, without the old dogmatic literalistic myths, what would this state of affairs be like? ... Buddhism has no (literal, historical) central dogma similar to the Christian one, but has a large mythology, readily understood by simpler believers, used in a more reflective manner by the sophisticated. However, eastern religion has always made close links between religion, morality and philosophy, areas which western thought has tended to separate. ... The relation of religion, morality and philosophy is perhaps the great intellectual problem of the age. ... The reflective believer in the east is supported by a long tradition of thought on these matters which does not exist in the west. ... Can the figure of Christ remain religiously significant without the old god-man mythology somehow understood? Can Christ, soon enough, become like Buddha, both real and mystical, but no longer the divine all-in-one man of traditional Christianity? ...

"We must stop thinking of 'God' as the name of a super-person, and indeed as a name at all. Can we then be saved by a mystical Christ who is the Buddha of the west? A Buddhist-style survival of Christianity could preserve tradition, renewing religious inspiration and observance in a vision of Christ as a live spiritual symbol. The historical Buddha became the mystical Buddha-nature; but this process developed during a pre-scientific pre-rationalistic age. Can Christian thought and feeling consciously effect such a change now? Must we otherwise envisage a denuded existentialist 'God' as a symbol of commitment to 'religious values', or the vanishing of religion into political activity or technological utilitarianism? ... For [some people], a demonic magical Pauline Christ may be the god that the age requires rather than a calm though demanding figure symbolising our spiritual nature. ...

"Western people may now find themselves both inside and outside religion. On the one hand we increasingly see it as a historically determined phenomenon, and ourselves as emerging from an era where myths were regarded in an unreflective way as 'real', into a scientific era where, making a distinction which people in the past did not make, we treat them as symbols or purveyors of truth, though not factually true. On the other hand, if we do not want to dismiss all religion as childish fiction, we have to decide, as people in the past did not, what exactly religion is and where in the mass of religiosity and religious stuff it 'really resides'. ... One of the difficulties of a modern view of religion is that one may seem forced to suggest, and for many kind of reasons (modesty, historical sensibility) is reluctant to, that the religion of the past was for most people a consoling, though perhaps ethically efficacious, fiction. ... Of course simple faith cannot be dismissed as superstitious illusion, it may be more 'in the truth' than modern scepticism. Our huge jumbled history is a religious history from which we must learn. ...

"However that may be, one must still hold on to the present problem of distinguishing 'true religion' from the comforts of mythology, old or new. Much art and religious myth has the effect, and the intended effect, of concealing the fact of death. ... The idea of metempsychosis, transmigration of souls, in eastern religion, which may be thought of in supernatural terms of personal immortality, is in a more sophisticated sense a symbol of the unreality of the self ... The idea of the unreality of the self mediates the idea of death. ... Outsiders often help bereaved people by reminding them that they have urgent duties and must not remain in stilled contemplation of what is uniquely terrible. There are immediate tasks, arrangements to be made, others to be comforted, ordinary life at last to be carried on. Can less extreme lessons enable us to take in our mortality and see the world in its light? Can it be done through art, through meditation, through psychoanalysis, through reading books or listening to preaching?"

--Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992)