For many of my life, when individuals requested me “what’s your faith?”, I often felt the necessity to reply with a paragraph. That modified about eight years in the past, coping with my spouse’s most cancers therapy, the place I noticed it was vital to me to have the ability to say merely: I am a Buddhist.
It felt unusual, and but reassuring, to have the ability to reply “what’s your faith?” with a easy reply. But complexity stays – the type of complexity that has led me to proclaim, “I am a fine distinction“. I be aware these days how there may be virtually no space during which my identification is single, and I say: I’m gender-fluid, biracial, binational… and a Buddhist who celebrates Christmas.
Christmas is actually part of my history and tradition, however greater than that, I’ve at all times dearly cherished the Christmas season. Maybe its enchantment to me started as easy greed – a toddler excited for all of the toys my beneficiant mother and father would get me as presents. However these days I can afford sufficient, and have managed to reasonable my desires sufficient, that I’ve grow to be “onerous to buy”: today it’s typically onerous to inform individuals what I’d even need as a gift. The content material of the presents is much less vital to me than seeing them below the tree, of their vivid and glossy wrapping paper. For what I actually love is the aesthetic of Christmas – the wrapping, the lights that hold back the year’s darkness. All the higher if there’s snow.
And perhaps above all, I really like the music. The songs of the Christmas season carry me again to my childhood, and I like their easy and infrequently haunting melodies. And that’s maybe the place questions of identification begin to get difficult. For whereas a number of of the songs I really like are “secular” – most notably “Deck The Halls” – the overwhelming majority of them come again to the story of Jesus. (A few of them accomplish that with a theological depth.) “What Little one Is This?”, “Hark The Herald Angels Sing”, “O Come All Ye Trustworthy” – I can’t do with out them, a yr with out them can be incomplete.
Does all this make me much less of a Buddhist? I don’t suppose so. The Abrahamic God is notoriously jealous, proclaiming that his followers should have no different gods earlier than him. The Buddha of the suttas is a really totally different determine, saying that one should comply with his path to get out of struggling – however there’s nothing in there concerning the gods someway. The gods are there within the Pali texts, simply in a subordinate function (like one memorable story within the Vinaya the place the king of the gods comes out to do the Buddha’s laundry).
And maybe extra importantly: the world’s Buddhist traditions are full of non-Buddhist tales. In Thailand, essentially the most notable of those is the Ramakien, a retelling of the Rāmāyana – which, remarkably, appears to have begun as an anti- Buddhist story, whose villain was the king of Buddhist Sri Lanka. The Thai Ramakien locations the Rāmāyana story in a Buddhist context by figuring out Rāma, the hero, because the Bodhisatta, a earlier beginning of the Buddha. That is an previous Buddhist transfer, going again to the Dasaratha Jātaka. However, as in lots of Jātaka tales, any Buddhist message is kind of unclear: for those who eliminated the framing that identifies a personality because the Bodhisatta, nothing of substance within the story would change. The story is beloved as a result of it’s a great story, not due to a Buddhist message. (It doubtless has extra in widespread with the Mahāvaṃsa than with the extra philosophical Buddhist suttas.)
I be aware all this as a result of I wish to say: the Nativity is my Ramakien. The non-Buddhist origins of the Rāmāyana story are not any barrier to the Thais’ love of it; and the non-Buddhist origins of the Nativity story are not any barrier to my love of its retellings, in music, in studying the Gospel of Luke round my in-laws’ Unitarian Christmas desk, in A Charlie Brown Christmas. I’m completely satisfied to embrace Christmas, not simply the washed-out shopping-mall “holidays” that erases all Christian references, however the entire Christmas, Jesus and all. That doesn’t make me much less Buddhist, any greater than loving the Ramakien does for the Thais.
Now it’s true that the Thai Ramakien does add the Buddhist framing of Rāma because the Bodhisatta. I suppose that the mission of philosophical consistency would encourage me to do one thing comparable with Jesus. However maybe that’s not so onerous. Jesus’s messages to like your neighbour (within the sense of compassionate agapē), to show the opposite cheek to a blow – these are messages of which I feel the Buddha would approve. The core of the Jesus story is a person dying that others could also be spiritually saved – which isn’t removed from what a bodhisattva would do. Not every little thing within the New Testomony matches with Buddhism by any means – however then, a really massive variety of self-professed Christians who have a good time Christmas would discover an important deal within the New Testomony that they may not endorse both.
