Question: I was raised Catholic with Christ Jesus and images of Mother Teresa, or Mother Mary, or what have you, and then I noticed in Buddhism, there are different images of the Buddha, Tara, all of that. I don’t know how to ask this, but do Buddhists turn to these enlightened beings for help?
Answer: I understand, good; it’s a good point. I understand exactly, I understand your question exactly. In some ways, it really is very similar.
What I’ve got to do is, a bit, describe really what Buddha is. Then it’ll answer your question. So I’ll take a moment to do that, okay?
First of all, in the world, there are different presentations of Buddhism, just like there are in Judaism, just like there are in Christianity. You’re going to hear Christians like a Southern Baptist talk, and you’re going to hear someone from the High Catholic Church or the Russian Orthodox Church, and you wouldn’t initially see anything similar at all, but there is the common ground.
In Buddhism, the common concept is this concept of a buddha. What we usually think of as Buddha is this Indian fellow of two and a half thousand years ago, sitting there looking holy. He was this person known as Shakyamuni: the Great Shakya. His family apparently came from the Shakya family, a royal family.
He went through this whole kind of amazing, sophisticated Indian system that was existing at the time, the philosophical views and the spiritual views, and he did all this study and analysis of the nature of reality, the nature of self, these meditations, blah, blah, blah, and then he went in his own direction, beyond those current views, and became a buddha: fully enlightened. He’s known as the historical Buddha, the source of our teachings now.
Buddha doesn’t use the word soul, and he doesn’t agree about there being a creator: in this way he’s radically different.
He talks about our mind or consciousness – and he doesn’t mean the brain: he’s referring to a more subtle level, your actual cognitive process itself. And this consciousness goes back, before, before, before: it’s like a river of mental moments, and it continues into the future, moment by moment, moment by moment.
The Buddha’s idea, the Buddhist approach, is that every consciousness, every being in the universe has the potential to become a buddha: the ridding completely from your consciousness of all the neuroses, all ego, all fears, all nonsense – he says all of this is not at the core of our being – and fully developing infinite wisdom and compassion. That really is the simple idea psychologically of a buddha. We can all become perfect, in other words.
I always tell this story. One time, years ago, in Melbourne, in Australia, where I come from, I was invited by the Catholic University to give a little talk at some conference, and I didn’t know what to talk about. I got there in the morning and I just didn’t know what to talk about.
So I looked up the dictionary for the definition of God, and it said three essential qualities: infinite wisdom, infinite compassion, and infinite power – they’re the three main qualities of what they refer to as God, the creator. And there’s only one of those, one God, and he’s the creator of the universe.
I thought, well, isn’t that interesting? Those three qualities, from the Buddhist perspective, are the same three qualities of a being who’s become a buddha or fully enlightened – these are the words they use.
But the radical difference in Buddhism is that everybody’s got that potential and the job of a buddha is not to create anyone – that is not in Buddhism at all.
My talk then was on the similarity between the definition of Buddha and God. I don’t know if the Catholics liked it or not, but that was my talk.
That’s the Buddha’s view, that every being has this potential: we have this potential to be perfected, to be full of wisdom and clarity and goodness. And we don’t need creating: our consciousness goes from life to life, and we do the work of becoming this buddha.
From that point of view then, there are countless beings who’ve become buddhas. Then you think, well, what do you do when you’re a buddha? Sort of twiddle your thumbs in the sky or what?
When you’re a regular person, you’re stuck in what they call “samsara” – you go from life to life, some suffering lives, some happy lives, blah, blah – but when you get out of all that, when you’ve achieved your nirvana, and you become a buddha, you don’t need to be reborn. All these buddhas, these beings who’ve become buddhas, they don’t need a body themselves, but out of their compassion, they choose to be reborn to help others – in countless bodies for countless eons of time.
In that sense, there are countless buddhas, beings who’ve become a buddha, and all those different images that you see, especially in Tibetan Buddhist places, they’re all just like archetypes or images of different psychological qualities of different buddhas.
So yes, the answer to your question is yes: you have this relationship with all the different buddhas, not as your creator, but as different buddhas that you can relate to that help you develop those qualities that you’re trying to develop. There’s a buddha of wisdom, there’s a buddha of love, and so forth.
By doing those practices – imagining them or saying their mantras –it helps you become those qualities. Do you understand? That’s the basic idea.