Faith Connections
The Buddhist concept of beginningless time offers very unique differences to the way the story of the cosmos plays out in the Muslim, Christian, or Jewish canons. Believing in linear time, many practitioners of Abrahamic faiths believe in a time when the struggle between cosmic good and evil will eventually draw to a close. This struggle is reflected in their terrestrial lives. The aftermath of this struggle in the life of the believer is, as with a Buddhist, a new life somewhere better or somewhere worse. The difference for most believers in Abrahamic faiths is that this afterlife is a permanent one, the result of a final verdict on that person which, in the views of some practitioners of Abrahamic faiths, lasts forever with no hope of reconciliation or fear of damnation. It’s as though the deeds of the believer in their one has permanently set or revealed their true nature. Buddhism’s idea of endless reincarnation softens the dire tone of permanent consequences found Abrahamic religion.
In Buddhism there is the belief that there is an afterlife after the afterlife, and forever on after. The nature of the self is indeed a very complicated issue though it is commonly understood that everything that pertains to it, including the consequences of misdeeds, are impermanent. This means that the self, or this polite and useful conventional understanding of the self, has no permanent qualities whatsoever, and so cannot have a permanent place anywhere. So though in Buddhism consequences abound for one’s actions they do not forever mark one’s fate, whereas in the Abrahamic view consequences are permanent. This brings enough levity to the problem of karmic induced rebirth that success or failure is understood as more of a matter of wisdom or the lack thereof than as a matter of avoiding moral failing. The reality of non-self complicates the notion of culpability wherever it is applied.
Before encountering Buddhism I was already convinced of a number of its precepts. According to a literal interpretation of my science education I knew that the earth and the heavens were impermanent. I knew that humanity was the product of billions of years of natural selection conditioned by the ecosystem. Abiogenesis and evolution painted a picture of the same universe of mutual arisings and conditioned beings I found exploring Buddhist thinkers. Math, like Buddhism, dealt with the world on a level more subtle than speech. Mathematical truth, like Dharma, is true whether or not it is known and is not subject to change over time. I believed that math as something developed by people was a flawed way of reflecting the absolute, but also a way of bypassing its unfathomable barriers to arrive at unintuitive truths, like accurate rates of change at infinitely small time intervals. Its hierarchies of infinities and intricate interconnections could only be represented in symbols, just as Buddhists have their own symbols for the inconceivable. Many Buddhists believe that this sentiment, also in the Heart Sutra, comes close to encapsulating in words an understanding of reality that does not lend itself easily to description.
Someone looking for truth will encounter paradoxes through both Buddhist and mathematical lenses; Kurt Gödel broke formal logic with his incompleteness theorem, seemingly placing perfect truth in ineffable territory beyond our most potent symbols and theoretical frameworks. Nagarjuna accomplished something similar. He identified emptiness with form and form with emptiness. This total emptiness that comes from the perfection of wisdom in Mahayana Buddhism upstages the conventional reality of all dualistic dharma teaching, uniting in miraculous fashion Nirvana with Samsara, the most incomprehensible with the most familiar.
My ethical opinions, my views on careers, my whole worldview intersects with ideas I have found in Buddhism in the moments when I realize that no system can ever have the final say on reality. This notion leads me to mistrust labels and generalizations, and to learn through many lenses, having encountered, from the likes of Gödel and Nagarjuna, refutations of the sturdiest notions of self and logic and having become convinced that reality is more interesting than any of these ideas suggest.
