Letter to The Editor - Cut off Humanity from the Ultimate Source of Truth and Right Guidance

to THE AUSTRALIAN
     Steve Kessell’s blanket claim that ‘Buddhism has no god’ (29/8) is simplistic, even misleading. For example, the doctrine of nirvana does not refer to a final nothingness (as in nihilism) but a final separation from all the things of this world. That still leaves room for the mysterious divine One, an ultimate reality more immediately obvious in sacred traditions such as Christianity and Islam. The spirituality of Buddhism has been well addressed by Frithjof Schuon (‘The Buddha is renunciation, peace, mercy and mystery.’) and the Buddhist scholar Marco Pallis in his essay ‘Is there room for ‘grace’ in Buddhism?’

     It is not that ‘a kind and caring spiritual practice does not necessarily need a god’, but that it does not need any particular contingent and limited image or conception of the divine One. By contrast, the danger of the current surge of atheism in the West is that it threatens to cut off humanity altogether from the ultimate source of truth and right guidance. That road leads to tyranny, corruption, horrors.
NJ, Belgrave, Vic