Well the truth is I don’t really know, but I think I have a better idea than any Buddhist. It is a curious thing, when one looks at Buddhism initially, that those outside of it can define it much better than those inside of it. One want’s to put it down to modes of thinking - Ethos. But it is not just that. These days one can hardly get a Buddhist to say that he’s a Buddhist, let alone describe what it is that he believes.
Basically, the Buddhist believes that when we add everything up, matter, energy, spirit, personality it will equal two things which will obviously equal each other. God and nothing. So God = nothing = everything. All striving, consciousness, choice, taste, experience to the Buddhist is a delusion which we will all realize one day but some enlightened ones realize already.
If you imagined that a workable worldview is like a sandwich where the top slice of bread is all matters spiritual or mataphysical and the bottom slice is all matters physical. A non-workable worldview would only have one of the two sides, and to use it practically one would have to try and fold it over to make a quasi-sandwich. In that illustration there are really only two worldviews which come with both sides intact. But there is now a new one being made in the kitchen.
Islam has spiritual references but it has no spiritual liturgy. It has only one side of the sandwich, the physical side. Islam revolves around physical laws and there are no miracles essential to the faith. Buddhism, on the other hand has physical exercises but no physical demands. You can, if you wish, make physical demands on yourself, but you don’t have to, to be a Buddhist.
Only Christianity and Hinduism have both as essential parts of their ethos. But they have them in very different ways. The physical parts of Hinduism are not linked with the spiritual parts, and vice versa. And that has an impact on Hindu people. The guru in the mountain does not visit the temple prostitute and the average Hindu jo, while visiting the temple prostitute, does not aspire to be the mountain guru (indeed to aspire for him would be sinful). In Christianity, they are linked and their people overlap each other. In Christianity, the greatest must be the least, the most able servant gets to lead, gets to see the spiritual way forward. The apostle does the greatest spiritual work yet is the ’scum of the earth’. The least are encouraged to ‘eagerly desire the greater gifts’, the ‘meak inherit the earth’. And so on.
Now I think that there is a new thing happening, a new religion forming which is the absolute extreme of the two sandwich halves. It is the coming together of Secular Materialism (those who believe that there is nothing except what is physical and when all matter has again been converted into energy, there will be merely protons decaying and weird anti-matter positive electrons doing whatever they do), and Buddhism (those who believe everything physical is a delusion). You can see how easily these two fit together. One says physical = nothing (eventually) and the other says nothing = physical (eventually). This new religion this post-post-modern word view is, I believe, the great harlot of Revelations and the Iron Clay mixture of Daniel’s interpretation. Secularism will swallow Budhism (or the other way round), the two will become one great delusion.
Trinitarian Theism is the only worldview, I believe, that will stand separate from this new thing which will keep swallowing everything else. The two will be come very separate things.
That’s my prediction, for what it’s worth.
Buddhism is the complex and unnecessary attempt to shut one’s spiritual eyes with philosophical lids and metaphysical muscles, and then to keep them shut regardless of any flashes of brilliance which will often penetrate the thick skin but will not be understood. It is to sit on the lawn on the 4th July with eyes shut and ears blocked and to explain in meaningless metaphysical rhetoric the flashes, bangs, oohs, and ahhs going on around.
Buddhism is to go nowhere under the deluded conviction that there is nowhere to go.
