Midweek Faith Lift
March 13, 2024
Unity and Buddhism, Part 1
Rv. Deb Hill-Davis
Spiritual Passages
March 1, 2024
For more than 140 years, Lyle’s Golden Syrup has featured a rather curious logo on its tin: a lion’s carcass surrounded by bees. But now, for the first time since the 1880s, the product recognized by Guinness World Records for having the world’s oldest branding is undergoing a major redesign. Golden syrup was first produced by Abram Lyle & Sons in 1881. The company’s founder, the Scottish businessman Abram Lyle, chose a logo inspired by the story of Samson who, in the Hebrew Scripture, kills a lion with his bare hands only to later discover that honeybees have nestled in the animal’s carcass. In the Biblical tale, Samson eats honey from inside the lion, gives some to his parents, and then presents 30 wedding guests with a riddle alluding to the encounter: “Out of the eater came something to eat; out of the strong came something sweet.”
"The sweetness of living comes to us when the very humanness we regret and try to hide, our seeming flaws and shameful secrets, are worked by time and nature into a honey all their own. Ultimately, it is where we are not perfect -- where we are broken and cracked, where the wind whistles through -- that is the stuff of transformation."
~Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
Affirmative Prayer for today:
Divine sweet Spirit, awaken in me the awareness of all the possibilities of sweetness that are present in the challenges of my life. Create in me a consciousness of the good that may come forth from what appears to be rotten and deplorable. May I awaken to the true goodness inherent in every situation and circumstance of my life. Amen.
And thus we begin our exploration of Buddhism and how it relates to Unity. The origin story of the Buddha is very much in alignment with this story of Samson and the bees. Siddartha who became the Buddha began his life as a prince who lived inside the palace completely sheltered from all suffering and negativity. He lived a life of ease and privilege and was married to a beautiful princess who bore him a son. He was expected to move into the role of being a great king in due course as his father wished. His life was idyllic by all standards with nothing about which to complain and no reason for a negative thought. Hmmmmm….was he an early Unity student?!?!
However, and this is a BIG however, he wanted to experience life outside the palace and so he left and took four journeys and discovered another dimension of life. On his first three journeys he encountered an old man, a sick person and a corpse all of which disturbed him greatly as he had never before seen this. On his fourth journey, he learned from his chariot driver that this would also happen to him. He then encountered an ascetic searching for truth and decided to join him. Ultimately, he left the palace at age 29 to determine if life had any meaning beyond the pleasure and pain which were the actual limits of his experience. He lived with yogis who fasted to the point of starvation and he decided that was not the way. So he left them and vowed to take a seat beneath the Bodhi tree, a fig tree, until he attained enlightenment, until he understood.
There are many stories about what happened to him as he sat beneath that holy tree. As he meditated, many adverse, even demonic forces assailed him. Their leader was Mara, not unlike Satan in the stories of the temptation of Jesus. All the forces opposed to enlightenment showed up, including fear, desire and death. First were agitation, mania and pride, sons of Mara. Then discontent, excitement and craving, the daughters of Mara appeared. All were unable to distract him in his deep meditation and transformation from Siddartha to Buddha. His nonresistant openness was the power that transformed what seemed to be deadly into a gift, not unlike our opening story of the bees transforming the carcass of a lion into honey.
At that point, Siddartha entered into an examination of reality and considered the cycles of reincarnation, his own and that of others. On the second watch of the night, he looked into the “spotless mirror” and discovered the truth of karma; that what you do in this life impacts your next life and will be balanced in that life. On the third watch he penetrated into the essence of the “real” the true nature of reality and on the fourth watch a gentle breeze blew, rain fell and flowers and fruit fell from the tree. As the dawn came, he awoke as the Buddha, the enlightened one and discovered he was awake. It was a powerful transformation.
This is not unlike the story of Jesus and his baptism and his time in the wilderness, his resisting temptation. We read in the Gospel of Mark 1:9-13:
The Baptism of Jesus
9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10 And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove upon him. 11 And a voice came from the heavens, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
The Testing of Jesus
12 And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. 13 He was in the wilderness forty days, tested by Satan, and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him.
It was only after this experience in the wilderness that at age 33, Jesus began his ministry of healing, teaching and speaking in public to all who would listen. He was no more certain of how this would unfold than the Buddha was when he resumed his life after the experience of sitting under the Bodhi tree.
Buddha was reportedly 35 years old at this time and he never returned to the Palace or his family. He had doubts about sharing what he had learned but ultimately resolved to teach what he had learned. His first 5 disciples were the ones who had rejected him because he no longer wanted to fast to extreme. They now formed his Sangha, the word for community. From the beginning, his focus was on his teachings and sharing them, not on getting people to follow him, not unlike Jesus. His words to others were to “Be your own lamps, be your own refuge.” The word “Buddha” means “enlightened one” and the teachings of the Buddha are that all beings are able to be awakened or enlightened just as he had.
One significant feature of the journey of both Siddartha and Jesus is the connection to nature. It was in the wilderness and desert that Jesus became aware of his mission and his journey and ministry and said yes to it. It was sitting in nature under the Bodhi tree that Siddartha had the transformation to Buddha. It is in the carcass of a dead lion that the bees devour and transform into honey, the sweetness of life. The message is that out of the experiences of suffering come transformation and rebirth, awakening and enlightenment. It does not happen in comfort, wealth and ease. It comes from being tested mightily that transformation happens.
Richard Rohr writes about this in his March 3, 2024 blog entitled, “The Soul of Nature.” It is in nature that we often find that which is transformative in how it challenges us. He writes:
The modern and postmodern self largely lives in a world of its own construction, and it reacts for or against its own human-made ideas. While calling ourselves intelligent, we’ve lost touch with the natural world. As a result, we’ve lost touch with our own souls. I believe we can’t access our full intelligence and wisdom without some real connection to nature.
Without such soul recognition and mirroring, we are alienated
and separated from nature, and quite frankly, ourselves. Without
a visceral connection to the soul of nature, we will not know how to
love or respect our own soul….
I think of soul as anything’s ultimate meaning, which is held within. Soul is the blueprint inside of every created thing telling it what it is and what it can become.
When we cannot see our own soul, we cannot see the soul of anyone else or any other live being. Our journey is to awaken just like the Buddha. This is very much in line with our Unity teachings of that Christ energy within each one of us that is seeking to be expressed and made manifest. The Christ within and the Buddha nature are essentially the same energy. We are challenged to engage the unpleasant, the difficult, that which we would prefer to avoid, be it disease, old age or death. It is only in engaging and meeting that challenge that we can embrace the full aliveness of our soul and that of others and realize our inner Divine Blueprint.
In Unity and Buddhism there are precepts, which give us guidelines for living that create the conditions for our waking up. We will consider those next week as we continue in our exploration of Buddhism and Unity. In the meantime, we read as it is written in Proverbs 24:13-14
My child, eat honey, for it is good, and the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste. Know that wisdom is such to your soul; if you find it, you will find a future, and your hope will not be cut off.
May you taste the sweetness of life in all the challenges, trials and joys that life hands you!
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb