A Very Buddhist Christmas

In all the Christmas rush and in what some perceive to be a "war against Christmas," America's growing Buddhist community seem to be missing in action. There are two reasons that many Buddhists typically do not have a problem wishing "Merry Christmas" or participating in other aspects of the holiday season.

A Buddhist holiday in December

First, there is a Buddhist holiday on December 8th, known as Bodhi Day, which can be absorbed into the Christmas/Hanukkah season. Unlike most Buddhist holidays, based on a lunar calendar like the Jewish festival of Hanukkah (more) or the Christian festival of Easter (more), Bodhi Day does not move around the solar calendar from year to year.

Bodhi Day commemorates the attainment of Enlightenment (Bodhi in the original languages) by Siddhartha Gautama, who thereafter would be called the Buddha, the Enlightened. A good review of the events in the life of the Buddha is A Young People's Life of the Buddha, available here.

A Buddhist Santa Claus

Second, there is Hotei. Traditions about the identity of this fat man in a monk's robes carrying a sack get confused, but does that sound familiar? A fat man with a sack, a Buddhist Santa Claus? Hotei is based on a historical figure, a Chinese monk. Although he is known in Western countries especially as the "laughing Buddha" or the "fat Buddha," he is not technically a Buddha, an enlightened one, but a bodhisattva, a Buddha-to-be (more).

He is identified with Maitreya, who, it is taught, is the next Buddha yet to be. Some traditions say that Hotei gave children sweets from his sack, while other traditions say that he simply carried all his worldly goods in that sack.

Those are easy, fairly superficial Buddhist connections to Christmas, reasons why Buddhists do not have a war against Christmas. But, the one recurring Buddhist objection to Christmas in several blogs and websites is one that many Christians would share, that Christmas has become too commercialized and hectic, that its spiritual values have been diminished, by those who celebrate it.

Happy Bodhi Day! Happy Hanukkah! Merry Christmas!

Dependent Origination

The physical world as we know it, with all its imperfections and suffering, is the product of what the Buddha called dependent origination.

The Buddha taught that this was a 12-stage process - a circular chain, not a straight line. Each stage gives rise to the one directly after it.

1. Ignorance: inability to see the truth, depicted by a blind man.

2. Willed action: actions that shape our emerging consciousness, depicted by a potter moulding clay.

3. Conditioned consciousness: the development of habits, blindly responding to the impulses of karmic conditioning, represented by a monkey swinging about aimlessly.

4. Form and existence: a body comes into being to carry our karmic inheritance, represented by a boat carrying men.

5. The six sense-organs: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body (touch) and mind, the way sensory information passes into us, represented by the doors and windows of a house.

6. Sense-impressions: the combination of sense-organ and sensory information, represented by two lovers .

7. Sensation: the feelings we get from sense-impressions, which are so vivid that they blind us, represented by a man shot in the eye with an arrow.

8. Craving (tanhā): negative desires that can never be sated, represented by a man drinking.

9. Attachment: grasping at things we think will satisfy our craving, represented by someone reaching out for fruit from a tree.

10. Becoming: worldly existence, being trapped in the cycle of life, represented by a pregnant woman.

11. Birth: represented by a woman giving birth.

12. Old age and death: grief, suffering and despair, the direct consequences of birth, represented by an old man.