Expert: Laurie McLauglin - 3/20/2009

Question
is it possible to follow both Christian, and Buddhist views? Basically I'm asking if you can live your life as a Buddhist, and still believe in a Christian God

Answer
Hello, Tyler. Thank you for letting me answer your question. From what I understand, the two questions you ask sort of contradict each other.  So, I will answer them one at a time.

The first question you ask is “Is it possible to follow both Christian and Buddhist views”.  The answer to that question is yes. Absolutely.  Buddhism does not have to be viewed or taken as a religion at all but be taken instead as a philosophy and thereby it can be used to provide the tools to help us become better people. ince Buddhism teaches one must develop compassion and loving kindness for all sentient beings, for example, in many ways the belief in Christianity and the belief in Buddhism dovetail nicely.

Plus, one can take the aspects of Buddhism such as learning to meditate and thereby train the mind to be calm and happy. One can use this kind of meditation to create an awareness on how one’s mind works so that one  can recognize negative emotions, for example as they arise as thoughts and stop them before they manifest as actions we may regret.

One can use Buddhist training to develop compassion by doing practices such as tong-len which is a meditation practice whereby one imagines taking on the sufferings of the world as one breathes in and imagines sending out compassionate energy to the world as one breathes out. One can also do meditations whereby one learns to treat all people be they friend, enemy or stranger with equanimity.

One can use the teachings of the Buddha to help to reduce the hold our ego has over us and to be able to let go of anger and hatred. One can use the teachings to find ways to reduce our every day sufferings by reducing our grasping at material things as a true source of happiness.

So one can learn the things mentioned above from Buddhism and still be a perfectly happy practicing Christian. In fact there are many folks who remain Christian and still gain huge benefits from the things Buddhism can teach them.

Now as to the second question.  Though there are many ways Buddhism can be of benefit to practicing Christians, there are some fundamental differences between the two. You ask “Can you live your life as a Buddhist and still believe in a Christian God?”
The answer to that is fundamentally, no. Buddhists do not believe in a traditional Creator God as do the Christians.

A Christian God has qualities I assume we can agree on.
1)   It is a being or power outside ourselves that created and rules the universe and ultimately judges us.
2)   It is a being or power that we worship.

So, from the perspective of taking Mahayana Buddhism as one’s religion,  there is no one being who created, rules or runs the universe. Why? There is no need. Why? Buddha Shakyamuni, (who started life as a Prince named Siddhartha) the fourth primordial Buddha, whom we generally refer to as just “The Buddha” began teaching for one major purpose.  He saw all the suffering in the world and wanted to free himself from it and later also wished and taught some 84.000 teachings in order to helo all sentient beings be free from suffering.

He became The Buddha because he realized through his experiences and his meditation the ultimately perfect nature of reality. He realized that all sentient beings can eliminate suffering in their own lives, find perfect happiness and bliss and help others to do the same. He realized that he was no different from anyone else and because he could attain this liberation, so can all sentient beings.  Buddhists believe that we all have Buddha Nature.  And when we truly practice the path of Buddhism correctly, we can access our own Buddha Nature which means that we become free of suffering. We attain enlightenment. We become perfect because we train our mind to seek its true nature of complete clarity and complete wisdom, we train our hearts to have perfect and unlimited compassion for all sentient beings and we use this wisdom and compassion to help all other sentient beings reach this perfect state as well. This nature of perfection resides naturally in all sentient beings, we simply have to develop it. No power outside ourselves does it for us.

There is no need for a God to judge us.  Our karma does that for us. Furthermore, we can eliminate our own suffering because we created it. There was no outside being that created the suffering we are experiencing nor for that matter, the joy we experience.  We create both.  It is called the law of karma. When we do any action (or think something for that matter) it plants a seed in our mind or psyche (or mental continuum as the Buddhists would say) If we do or think something positive, we plant a positive seed, when we do or think something negative, we plant a negative seed and when we do a neutral action or have a neutral thought, we plant a neutral seed. Karma is the law of cause and effect.  It is a natural law. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.  So when bad things happen, for example, there is no outside God allowing them or causing them to happen. They happen due to the karma of a past action ripening. So the more good things we do in the present, the more good things will happen to us in the future.  The more bad things we do in the present, the more bad things will happen in the future.

God did not create us. We have existed from beginningless time.  Buddhists believe in reincarnation.  We believe that we have a mental continuum (read soul) that we carry from one life to the next which keeps the record of all our deeds.  We believe this continuum never began and never ends.  The reason we believe this is because of what we call the belief in dependant arising. It may sound hard to fathom, but if you think about it logically, it does work.  Take your life as Tyler.

Dependant arising means that this moment you are reading this exists based on the causes and conditions of the previous moment before you started reading this. And that previous moment exists based on the causes and conditions of the moment that preceded that.  This makes sense logically, right? So follow each moment backwards, and you get the causes and conditions that produced Tyler at 10 years old, Tyler at 5 years old, Tyler at birth – okey so where does it stop?  If it does stop, it is only because we choose a random arbitrary stopping point.  Can that point be found or proved? Can we say Tyler’s first moment started at birth? Well then what about conception?  What about the split second before conception? Did you really not exist then and suddenly you existed?  Buddhists say that if you had the causes and conditions to exist at conception, there must have been causes and conditions that existed the split second before that that caused the conception to happen and for you to enter the womb of your mother; because, they reason, if there are causes and conditions that can be traced every second from the moment you were born till now, how can there suddenly be no causes and conditions when you die, for example?  If causes and conditions are occurring that produce the next second of your life, and the next, there must have always been causes and conditions at work creating us from beginningless time and going on with no end.

Therefore, there is no being outside ourselves, there is no being that created us, that rules over us or judges us, because there is no God that we follow, there is no one to worship.  Buddhists also believe that once we gain all the realizations we can, and attain complete Buddhahood, that this complete Buddha Nature does not lack anything. There is no need to worship a God because we do not need to find devotion or love outside ourselves. We work very hard to develop Boddichitta. Boddhichitta is ultimate compassion – the sincere wish to free all living beings from their suffering.  When we have ultimate compassion for all sentient beings, there is no need for worship.

So this is why as a Buddhist we do not believe in a Christian God and why the second question you posed could not, as far as I understand things now, work.

Don’t hesitate to ask any further questions based on my rather long winded answer.