Moment-by-Moment Renewal

Easter is a great opportunity to evaluate the similarities between Jesus’ teachings and the Buddha’s—their basic message and the truth that they discovered. I would suggest that both men came to the same Truth. And then offered different practices for allowing each of us to discover this Truth for ourselves. This Truth was so powerful that it sparked a conversion in thousands of people for centuries to come. So what is this incredible Truth?

Beyond all the dogma and ritual and religious bickering, both discovered the root cause of suffering and a way to eliminate suffering. In Jesus’ time, he saw the suffering that was happening under Roman rule and prayed about how to alleviate the suffering of all people. He went out into the desert by himself and prayed and came back with a new outlook. He saw that worst suffering was not caused externally by the Romans, but was our internal suffering, caused by our forgetting our connection to God, The Source, pure potential. And why did the people feel disconnected? The translators described it because they had sinned, which in Greek is literally translated as “to miss the mark” or “to miss the target”. When Jesus was describing how sin caused our separation from God, it appears he was talking about those times when we are less than god-like in our behavior and actions. Jesus saw how these sins or bad decisions, caused people to suffer. Now, in our contemporary culture, the word sin is loaded with lots of connotations and perhaps even for each of us there is lots of baggage around the word sin. But imagine for a moment, that what Jesus was really trying to say is that sometimes we miss the mark, and that causes us to feel disconnected from God, The Source. And this feeling causes suffering.

Jesus then taught that we can come to God for all things, and act in a God-like way and suffering will be relieved.

So what did Buddha teach that was also revolutionary? He taught in his very first lesson, in the four Noble Truths, that we suffer because we seek happiness in inherently dissatisfying ways, and that is, we seek to cling to things that are pleasurable, and push away things that are not, and ignore everything else. In other words, we look for happiness outside of ourselves. And that in fact is what causes us to suffer. If we take this one teaching and overlay it with Jesus’ teaching on missing the mark, and we can start to see a great similarity. When we miss the mark, we suffer. Then, both teachers went on to teach two things: how to not miss the mark so often and how to start over when we do miss the mark.

I believe that the deeper insight here is that we suffer because we can’t let go of our old experiences, whether caused by us missing the mark or by others missing the mark and causing us pain. By hanging on to our old way of thinking, we suffer, we feel disconnected from our Source, we feel unhappy. What Jesus and Buddha discovered is that the suffering is caused not by the past action but by our current unwillingness to let it go and start fresh. The message of Easter is that Jesus’ taught us that our sins are forgiven, so we can start anew to live our lives.

Buddha taught that our suffering is caused by hanging on to things that have happened in the past. We can learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of others, and then move on. When we let go of what has happened in the past, we can begin to live fully in this present moment. To me, this is the deep meaning of the resurrection and new life. The resurrection and new life that each of us can experience.

Imagine for a moment, right now, that you have the ability to forgive yourself of anything you’ve done wrong in the past, no matter what. And imagine that you have the ability to forgive anyone who has ever harmed you in the past. You have the ability to forgive. Rest for a moment in what that feels like. You are forgiven, they are forgiven. Everyone gets to start fresh.

There is a phrase that people often use when bad things happen. They say, “Everything happens for a reason”. Well that’s true, in the law of karma, that everything that happens is a result of everything that happened in the past. But so what? The revolutionary truth that both Buddha and Jesus taught, is that whatever happened up to this very moment, right now, is gone, done. We can’t rewrite what has happened in the past. But what we can do, is from this moment forward, be mindful, in Buddha’s terms, or be saved, in Jesus’ terms, we can LET GO OF OUR BAGGAGE and start our lives anew. We can have a different response to things that happen regardless of how we reacted in the past. We may not get it right every time going forward, but we all get as many do-overs as we need. That is the comfort of this Truth. So, the phrase “Everything happens for a reason” isn’t nearly as important as the fact that We each have the ability in the present moment to change our response to whatever happens. Good things happen to everyone and Bad things happen to everyone. We each have the ability to decide what we make of it. Through Jesus’ teaching of forgiveness and Buddha’s teaching of mindfulness, every one of us can come to this realization on our own and start to live our lives differently. It doesn’t mean that we’re never going to mess up again—it means that when we do, we can forgive ourselves more quickly and move on to a higher level of being and doing.

This simple teaching was so powerful that when many people heard it and understood it, they went forward and lived their lives differently. They lived their lives without the baggage of past sins, they lived their lives born anew in their connection to the divine Source. Jesus called it God, Buddha called it our innate Buddha nature, that source in each of us that is awakened to the truth of our being, that we are all part of the Divine Source. Let’s just sit for a moment in that Truth. You are an expression of the Divine Source. Source being the pure potential available to everyone. And through you, good things can be manifested IF YOU LOOK FOR THE GOOD.

The other important similarity between these two men’s teachings is that once we realize these truths, we learn to act more selflessly, to serve others. Jesus said, “Treat your neighbor as you treat yourself”. Buddha taught compassionate action as a way of experiencing this nirvana, this supreme happiness. So, try this out for yourself. Instead of focusing on your own happiness, try focusing on someone else’s. It’s a simple practice that can be wildly transformative, and Both Buddha and Jesus taught it. It doesn’t mean being a doormat, but it means truly recognizing the needs of others and being of service to them.

Getting out of our own head and troubles and awakening to the suffering of others and how to help them. When the town of Greenburg, Kansas, was completely destroyed by a tornado, they didn’t sit around forever and lament their loss. They cried and hugged each other, they helped their neighbor, and they rebuilt a town even better than the one that was lost. Each of us has the ability to do this in our own lives. We cry and hug each other and help our neighbors and move on. That is the essence of the forgiveness and renewal. It just takes practice.

So, on this wonderful Easter Sunday, we can remind ourselves that on this day, we are forgiven and we forgive, and that happiness is found within by choosing different responses going forward. And that we are all part of the Divine Source, the innate Buddha nature, that manifests through each of us. How will you go out today and use this incredible power that you have?

Buddha taught the following:

Like a caring mother

Holding and guarding the life

Of her only child,

So with a boundless heart

Hold yourself and others.

And from Walt Whitman:

I am larger and better than I thought.

I did not think I held so much goodness.