Review of: Buddhism and the Bahá'í Faith
Written by: Moojan Momen
Publisher: George Ronald, Oxford (1995)
Review by: Jonah Winters
Review published in: Journal of Bahá'í Studies 6:4 (1994), pp. 70-74
In 1990 Momen published a short book
Hinduism and the Bahá'í Faith, (George
Ronald, 1990) the purpose of which was to introduce the Bahá'í Faith to those
with a knowledge of Hinduism. (
Hinduism, viii)
Buddhism and the Bahá'í Faith
is, in intent, scope, and style, a follow-up to
Hinduism.
Momen's goal with this book is not just to introduce the Faith to Buddhists,
but to show that both religions are compatible and, more, that the
manifestation of Bahá'u'lláh fulfills prophecies of the Buddha about the coming
of a future Buddha, Metteyya (Maitreya) Buddha.
Momen devotes the first chapter to a selection of Buddhist texts presenting
the eight steps of the Buddha's "Noble Path [to enlightenment]", namely, Right
Views, Right Mindedness, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right
Endeavor, Right Mindfulness, and Right Contemplation, followed by a variety of
other topics such as death, forbearance, generosity, etc. Each of these topics
is presented side-by-side with similar selections from Bahá'í writings. Momen
here demonstrates that the two religions have held quite similar views on each
of these topics, and thus the Bahá'í Faith is entirely compatible with Buddhist
beliefs. Chapter two is a relatively in-depth analysis of Buddhist and Bahá'í
metaphysics, what Momen here entitles the "Structure of Existence". He examines
some key concepts of Buddhism, such as transitoriness (anitya), the nature of
the soul, the Absolute, rebirth, and nirvana, presenting the Bahá'í Faith as
almost entirely in agreement with Buddhism about each topic. In each of these
chapters, Momen has done an excellent job of finding similar, sometimes almost
identical, quotes from the Bahá'í writings available in English and the
Buddhist scriptures. He has wisely chosen to confine himself to the Pali canon,
the so-called Theravada (Old School) texts. This canon is one of hundreds of
Buddhist collections of scripture, but it is widely acknowledged to be the
oldest and, more importantly, is taken by almost all schools of Buddhism to be
normative. Momen's use of only the Pali texts thus bypasses the onerous
question of "what is original Buddhism?" Chapter three quotes Buddhist
prophecies and seeks to portray the Faith as the fulfillment of those
prophecies. Many of the quotes and calculations Momen uses are taken from
Jamshed Fozdar's Buddha-Maitrya Amitabha Has Appeared, to which book Momen
acknowledges his indebtedness. He presents only a gloss on this topic. While
Fozdar spends over 100 pages providing detailed and exact calculations
attempting to show that many historical specifics of Bahá'u'lláh's life were
explicitly foretold by the Buddha, Momen contents himself with demonstrating
only that the future Buddha would appear sometime before AD 1943, and then
provides general observations about the prophesied advent of Maitrya. The
remaining three chapters of the book give a brief overview of the history and
teachings of the Bahá'í Faith.
Momen has produced a lucid, succinct, and well-written comparison of Buddhism
and the Bahá'í Faith. He has presented selections from the writings of the two
religions that show the correspondences between them to be incontestable. He
has done so without misrepresenting either religion. As an apologetic of the
Faith directed to Theravada Buddhists, Momen has admirably succeeded in his
task. There are, however, some scholarly issues that this book raises which
Momen does not examine; namely, Buddhism as held by Buddhists does not accord
well with Buddhism as the Faith presents it.
Momen's agenda, as portrayed in Hinduism and Buddhism, is one that could be
termed inclusivist. The Bahá'í Faith, Momen writes, has the ability to
reconcile disagreements within religions and between religions by showing that
differing religious views of reality "are all valid aspects of truth."
(Hinduism, 5) The Bahá'í Faith promotes relativism, he holds, in such wise
that all religious disagreements can be seen as stemming from nothing more than
differing perspectives. (Momen, "Relativism: A Basis for Bahá'í Metaphysics," in
SBBR 5) This argument, while plausible and even convincing, threatens to do
injustice to the religious beliefs of non-Bahá'ís. Nowhere is this more evident
than with Buddhism.
The Bahá'í Faith holds that the Buddha was a Prophet from God who taught the
reality of the "Oneness of God" ('Abdu'l-Bahá, Some Answered Questions, 165)
and clearly foretold the coming of another Prophet. Both Buddhists and scholars
of Buddhism are practically unanimous in believing that the Buddha felt himself
to be an ordinary human, that the enlightenment he achieved was theoretically
within the reach of any human, that he eschewed talk of God, that he
emphatically and consistently denied the reality of the soul, and that for him
to have prophesied a future world-redeemer such as Maitrya Buddha would have
been entirely out of character with his teachings. This view of Buddhism has
been held, not just by non-Bahá'í Buddhologists, but also by some Bahá'í
scholars (e.g. Phyllis Ghim Lian Chew, The Chinese Religion and the Bahá'í
Faith, 178, (George Ronald, 1993) where she writes that the Buddha's
prophethood is not a tenet of the Theravada). If the Bahá'í interpretation of
the teachings of the Buddha is to be upheld, Buddhism will have to be radically
reevaluated. Most Buddhists and Buddhologists would find such an attempt at
reinterpretation to be futile and, possibly, offensive. Momen's book takes a
convincing step towards opening the possibility of such a reevaluation.
Momen acknowledges the apparently polar differences between the philosophies
of the two religions, but argues that the differences are caused mostly by the
differing societal paradigms within which the Buddha and Bahá'u'lláh were
operating. The Buddha may have negated concepts such as God and Soul in order
to contest the authority and orthodoxy of the Brahmin priesthood, not to
completely refute such concepts. Bahá'u'lláh, on the other hand, employed
concepts like God and Soul because such concepts were what those in his culture
would understand. (Buddhism, 20) When one looks at the issue from the Bahá'í
standpoint, i.e. weighing the philosophy of the Buddha in the balance of
Bahá'u'lláh's cosmology, such a reconciliation of the two is convincing, and is
clearly supported by a variety of statements in the Pali corpus. However, when
one looks from the standpoint of modern scholastic consensus, such a
reconciliation is plausible, but is no more persuasive than many other
interpretations. Three examples will help explain this.
The locus classicus of the theistic interpretation of Buddhism is the
following passage from the Pali corpus: "There is, O monks, an Unborn,
Unoriginated, Uncreated, Unformed. Were there not, O monks, this Unborn,
Unoriginated, Uncreated, Unformed, there would be no escape from the world of
the born, originated, created, formed..." (Buddhism, 23) From the Bahá'í
standpoint, this passage clearly indicates that the Buddha believed in an
Ultimate Reality. However, the common Buddhist interpretation is that, to be
consistent with the whole of the Buddha's scheme of metaphysical logic, his
point in this passage was no more than that all concepts come in dialectical
pairs; if one is to refer to the transitory world, one must posit a
transcendent base for it, but that, to the wise person, neither is in any way
real. Thus, the Buddhist interpretation is that to see the Buddha as here
affirming an Ultimate Reality would be exactly the same as declaring him to be
a nihilist, and both positions are wrong.
A second issue is the nature of Prophethood and Buddhahood. The Bahá'í
teachings declare the Buddha to be a Manifestation of God who was consciously
inspired by the Divine reality. The Buddhist belief is that the Buddha was a
mere human who, through right aim and right effort, "awoke" (budh = to awake).
One need follow no specific set of teachings and no religion to achieve the
ultimate goal of awakening. To exemplify this, the Pali scriptures contain
numerous parables of people who, never having met the Buddha, nor having heard
his teachings, nor even having heard of him at all, attained enlightenment
merely by being told "all is suffering, all is impermanent" (sarvam duhkham,
sarvam anityam). These are the two key insights of the Buddha and, to achieve
the highest goal, one need know nothing more than these two facts. To support
the opposing Bahá'í cosmology, Momen finds statements of the Buddha in which
the Buddha says that he is unlike any other human, that Buddhas arise in the
world but rarely, and that the nirvana realized by the normal human is not the
same nirvana enjoyed by the Buddha. Since both equally convincing sets of
statements are from the same source, Momen argues that, though the Buddhist
interpretation differs from the Bahá'í one, such a difference may ultimately be
nothing more than a matter of perspective.
A final example is perhaps the clearest. A commonly-used honorific of the
Buddha is Tathágatha. The intended meaning of this word was lost in the
earliest days of Buddhist history, for it is a compound of two possible words.
To support the view that the Buddha was an ordinary person who achieved
greatness, and thus to show the potential ability of all people to escape
suffering, the word is almost universally translated as Tathá = "Thus" + Gata =
"Gone", i.e. "one who has left the world and entered the state of neither being
nor non-being". The other meaning of the term, one which supports the Bahá'í
view, is that the Tathágata is Tathá, "Thus", + agata = "Come", i.e. "one who
has entered the world from beyond". Each interpretation of the word is equally
plausible.
These three examples show that the Bahá'í interpretation of Buddhism is in
many ways completely at odds with the normative interpretations of Buddhism,
but that, at the same time, it could very well prevail. However, it is unlikely
that such a reinterpretation would be readily accepted by Buddhists or the
academic community. The current and firmly-held attitude within the field of
Comparative Religion is to treat all religions as phenomenologically sui
generis and to be reluctant to make comparisons. Any attempt at explaining one
tradition through recourse to the philosophy of another is regarded with
historically-justifiable suspicion. The value of Buddhism and the Bahá'í Faith
is not that it will convince any Buddhologist of the Bahá'í view, but that it
will help to increase awareness that it is possible to interpret Buddhism in
ways radically divergent from the ways Buddhists have tended to do so. It must
be admitted that this review of the book may be reading more into it than was
intended, for the book purports to be nothing more than a simple introduction
to the Faith for those with a background in Buddhism. Nonetheless, this
apparent tension between the two interpretations must be discussed, for a
Buddhist likely would not find the Bahá'í Faith to be as compatible with his or
her religion as Momen portrays it to be.
'Abdu'l-Bahá has said that "the original principles of His [the Buddha's]
doctrines gradually disappeared, and ignorant customs and ceremonials arose."
(Questions, 165) Such a statement is difficult to accept in light of the
standard portrayals of Buddhism, for few Buddhists would be willing to accept
what the Bahá'í Faith declares to be original Buddhism. Momen's book is one
portent of a possible wholesale reinterpretation of the religion, one that is
founded on the same scriptures on which the heretofore standard interpretations
of Buddhism have been founded, and one that could eventually become
scholastically acceptable.