Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying: An Exploration of Consciousness With the Dalai Lama by Dalai Lama

Author:Dalai Lama
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Religion, Buddhism, Philosophy, Mind & Body, General
ISBN: 9780861711239
Publisher: Pgw
Published: 1997-12-15T02:00:18+00:00

6

Death and Christianity

THE TIME HAD ARRIVED TO LEAVE the gentle land of dreams and face the harsh reality of death, the ultimate frontier. The day would be devoted to defining how death happens as a bodily process. With such a subject, it was more essential than ever to start by setting the appropriate context. I had requested that Charles Taylor again give an overview of Western attitudes towards death. This he did with his characteristic conciseness.

Christianity and the Love of God

As soon as the Dalai Lama was seated, Charles sat next to him and launched in. “I’d like to talk about Western attitudes to death, but I want to start a bit farther back. One can’t understand Western attitudes without understanding Christian attitudes, and it’s hard to understand Christian attitudes to death without understanding certain very fundamental points about Christianity. So I’ll start off making some basic points of comparison and contrast between Buddhism and Christian faith. In both cases we have a picture of the human being imprisoned in a fixated understanding of the self, needing liberation from it. In both cases this liberation takes the form of changing our very understanding of who we are. Our identity must be transformed.

“At that point we find the divergence. For Buddhism it seems that the transformation—the change of the identity of the self-understanding—comes from a long discipline of understanding the nature of the reality, or the unreality, of this identity as first understood. In a sense, one transcends the self. In Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, what brings about the transformation is one’s relationship to God—you might say, the friendship of God.

“This whole religious understanding is based on a very common human experience. In intimacy with certain people, we find that the world appears different to us. In the company of certain people, we can be different. For instance, in the company of holy people, or people who are very profound, our own compassion can increase and our anger can diminish. I think we’ve all had this experience here in these very days in your company; we’re not quite exactly the same as we are outside. In a sense the whole religious standpoint of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam is based on understanding this particular human phenomenon on a much greater scale. Our relationship to God is an intimate friendship with a very holy being. Just as an intimate friendship with a very holy person can transform us, so the friendship with God can operate this transformation.

“I will call this the dialogical principle: the conception of the human being as transformed by dialogue, or by relation with others. This dialogical understanding is at the core of Christianity, and the love of God operates here both subjectively and objectively. It implies both the love that we have for God and the love that God has for us. This concept of God’s love for the world plays a very crucial role. The world is understood to exist only as held in the sense of God’s love.

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