Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers

It is said that God has created man in his own image. But it may be that humankind has created God in the image of humankind.

Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible.

There are many people who in the name of faith or love persecute countless people around them. If I believe that my notion about God, about happiness, about nirvana is perfect, I want very much to impose that notion on you. I will say that if you don’t believe as I do, you will not be happy. I will do everything I can to impose my notions on you, and therefore I will destroy you. I will make you unhappy for the whole of your life. We will destroy each other in the name of faith, in the name of love, just because of the fact that the objects of our faith and of our love are not true insight, are not direct experience of suffering and of happiness; they are just notions and ideas.

Life is so precious, too precious to lose just because of these notions and concepts. Very often we feed ourselves only with words and notions and concepts. Please reflect. Not only do we feed ourselves with words and concepts for one, two, or three days, but we do it all our lives. Concepts like “nirvana,” “Buddha,” “Pure Land,” “Kingdom of God,” and “Jesus” are just concepts; we have to be very careful. We should not start a war and destroy people because of our concepts.

There may be a time when a country will have to wake up from a vision of happiness, when they have to realize that theirs is not the perfect idea, that there are many aspects that do not correspond to the reality of what is there, the real need and aspirations of the people. A country might want the people to become heroes, but maybe they don’t want to be heroes. The moment they release that notion of happiness, the country will again have another chance. But if people do not learn from the suffering of the past, they will repeat exactly the same mistake and adopt another notion of happiness. And we don’t know how long they will keep this new notion of happiness. So a notion is always something dangerous.