I have spent some time in a Vaishnava monastery, better known as the Hare Krishnas, and their scriptures say that the Buddha is an incarnation of God or Krishna.
Do you think that this was a tactic to reduce people converting from Hinduism to Buddhism?
I don't think so.
Because actually this is more a Hindu belief than a Buddhist belief.
So how could they have gotten people to become Buddhists or Hindus to become Buddhists?
No, it's to reduce people, to stop people from converting.
Oh.
Oh, well, yeah, then I do think.
Yeah.
Yeah, probably that was the case.
Then I understood it wrong.
I don't know.
I was going to say in Islam, Jesus Christ is one of their prophets.
So I don't think it's unusual in cultures that grew up together to have to share figures.
Well, in a religion that, and most religions claim to be universal truth.
Christianity claims to be the whole truth.
Islam claims to be the whole truth.
Hinduism also claims to be a philosophy that encompasses the whole of reality.
So, to allow for
something outside of that doctrine is not possible.
So regardless of whether it's a jealousy thing or a worry about people leaving, it's a way of blocking out
the truth really, that there do exist other truths or other religious paths, because it's a threat to your belief, to think that there could be something else, like an enlightenment that isn't your enlightenment.
they therefore find an explanation.
So people will come to the teacher, what about the Buddha?
Well, Buddha was just another, actually, Krishna has many incarnations and Buddha is just another.
So this is how these theories come up and it can become so ingrained in people that I've talked to these people, the Hare Krishnas, and they'll say it matter-of-factly.
because it's their accepted belief and they really do believe that that's the case they believe that we're deluded to think that Buddhism teaches something other than the worship of Krishna or however the attainment of Godhood
I think there's a real problem with this, because this theory makes Buddha a god, which is not the case.
I mean, or which was not the case.
And they are really...
taints everything and puts it in the wrong direction.
It makes all the entire teaching and the entire story of the Buddha kind of silly.
And there's one other thing that I thought of when I was talking about how these
religious traditions claim to have the universal, the whole truth, I think you'd almost have room to say that Buddhism doesn't claim such a thing.
That we might even boast of ourselves that we aren't falling into that folly.
Because, in one sense anyway, because Buddhism can accept many of the doctrines of these religions.
You could even say, well, yeah, maybe Jesus Christ was the son of God.
But who's this God guy anyway?
What's so special about him?
Or in Hinduism, we would accept Krishna.
Maybe Krishna exists.
I think it's a little bit silly because Krishna is actually a part of a Hindu... I guess you shouldn't talk... These are stories that they composed much later on.
The god Krishna doesn't even come into Hindu religion until after the Buddha.
The Upanishads don't talk about Krishna, I don't think.
the early gods of Indra.
The Vedic god is Indra.
And then you have Pajapati and I think even Vishnu, I can't remember.
But then it was much, much later when Krishna came and the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, which were really just folk tales like the Odyssey or the Iliad.
Very similar.
Long, oral stories that people told.
Very much like the stories of Homer.
But
Then the problem is that they became religious texts, and they incorporated religious teachings of the Upanishads into them, and they took this religious tradition and put them in the context of these stories.
And so you have the Bhagavad Gita, which is very much a religious teaching, but it's placed in the mouth of this new god, who really is a new god, like Shiva, for example, who came up later as well.
But we could accept that there are such gods.
We might not accept Krishna because we might say, well, it looks a little bit more like he was kind of made up as they went along.
But we might accept that Indra exists.
And in fact, in Buddhism, we do accept Indra because at the time of the Buddha, it was well known and people were talking about him.
But the Buddha said,
Well, you know, actually, his name's not Indra.
His name's Saka.
So, you know, this kind of thing.
But we can accept that these people have this path and it can lead you to become one with God.
We could even go so far as to say you can become one with God.
All we say is it's not enough.
So I think that is a valid point, that it's simply because these religions are trying to fit the whole universe, the complex and manifold, infinitely diverse universe with all of its infinite paths and potentials into a very, very, very small framework of reality that their own minds are able to encompass.
So I think in one sense we're free from that in the Buddha's teaching, that we don't really try to figure out who is God and what does He want and what does He want us to do.
We're not really interested actually.
We find a universal truth in another sense, and that is that even God, even
Heaven, even Godhood ourselves, or meditation practice, all of these things are made up of building blocks, just as a physicist will tell you.
The mind is also, and experience in general, is made up entirely of building blocks, of physical and mental components that are impermanent suffering and non-self.
The meaning is that there is no God.
No matter whether you see God and He comes and talks to you, there is no God.
When I'm sitting here talking to you, there is no me.
None of us really exist.
This place has, as I was telling Sumedha, I said this monastery has no people in it.
The best way to get along in a monastery is to remind yourself that there's no people here.
Because if there's no people, where could the problem come from?
And there is no people, are no people.
There are only physical and mental realities that arise and cease.
Okay.