God.

At one time many years ago my teacher, a very senior Burmese Buddhist monk, was alone in his monastery in England when there was a knock on the door.

Because he was by himself it was he who went to answer it to be met by two well dressed and charming Jehovah's Witnesses. Even though it was a Buddhist monastery and my teacher wore the simple saffron robes of a Buddhist monk, they were not deterred and began their attempt to save his soul.

Of course during the conversation my teacher was able to offer many counter points to their presentation until finally they asked if he would meet with their senior, who would much better explain how he was wrong and they were correct in their religious views.

Reluctantly my teacher agreed and half an hour later they arrived again, this time with the third person, a very kind elderly man.

My teacher invited them into the monastery and took them to the library. Here they sat and the conversation began.

After some time my teacher raised his hand to ask a question.

"Please tell me," he began, "how do you know that God is real?"

The senior Jehovah's Witness held up his bible and said, "because this book says he is!"

My teacher gestured to all the books in the monastery's library and replied gently, "but all these books says he is not." (This story recounted to me some days after the event.)

Truth is not contained in a book. It lives in our heart and however we can justify our actions by telling ourselves that we are serving a greater being, we will, without fail always meet the consequence of our actions.

It is not necessary to cultivate a belief system to be kind, loving, generous and caring, this is already the way of the heart, but it is a useful excuse to justify every kind of intolerance, violence, social, gender and racist repression and the exploitation and cruelty to animals and fellow human beings. To explain our bias in favour of men, our group, our unkind action towards others because they are different to us.

Conversations about the reality of God always seem to be a huge misdirection in any relationship as neither side can provide real evidence for or against.

God says this, God says that. The Dhamma position is, what does your loving heart say?

However, it does seem to me that mankind is always able to improve upon gods work by covering hair on women and even the whole body in some cases.

Perhaps I am wrong but I do feel that genital mutilation comes from the mind of men, not God, as with animal torture and sacrifice. 

If God is perfect, how can his (or her) work need improving?

So these questions come to nothing in our Dhamma training. You are responsible for you, for your kindness, for your cruelty and for your contribution to the welfare of this planet and everything on it. 

Actually, in our Dhamma training the question of God isn’t something we need to concern ourselves with.

If we think back to the moment we awoke this morning and trace the events of the day until this moment now we can see that some good things happened, and some not so good things happened, and in any event, things turned out as they did.

Now, if we tell ourselves that God exists, these things happened. If we tell ourselves that God does not exist, these things happened anyway.

Whether God exists or not, does not alter our life in any way, and forming an opinion or taking a position for or against his reality, does not help us on our spiritual quest. The road to liberation must be free from blind faith and belief.

We can only ever know what we know, and keep an open mind about the rest.

However, if we have to cover our faces to do 'gods work' we can be fairy sure that we are deluding ourselves.

 

May all beings be happy.