To Have or to Be?

“The nature of the having mode of existence follows from the nature of private property. In this mode of existence all that matters is my acquisition of property and my unlimited right to keep what I have acquired. The having mode excludes others; it does not require any further effort on my part to keep my property or to make productive use of it. The buddha has described this mode of behavior as craving, the Jewish and Christian religions as coveting; it transforms everybody and everything into something dead and subject to another’s power.”

Mere Christianity

“It is easy to think that the Church has a lot of different objects – education, building, missions, holding services. Just as it is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects – military, political, ecnomic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden – that is what the state is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. In the same way the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time.”

Mere Christianity

“One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons – marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.”

Living Buddha, Living Christ

“Christians and Buddhists both realize that without concentration, without abandoning distracting thoughts, prayer and meditation will not bear fruit. Concentration and devotion bring calm, peace, stability, and comfort to both Buddhists and Christians. If farmers use farming tools to cultivate their land, practitioners use prayer and meditation to cultivate their consciousness.”

In My Own Way

“If Christ is really God’s search for man, God, to have effectively ‘come down to Earth,’ must be discoverable here in this very place and moment.  But the emulation of the ‘Jesus of history’ obscures the truth.  It concerns itself so much with what happened two thousand years ago that it misses the point, confusing the pointing finger with the truth.  ‘Why seek ye the living among the dead?  He is not here, but is risen.’  The disciples sought him at the tomb; we seek him in the tradition of the Church or the record of the Bible – or in the future, which is merely the past projected ahead.  They are all tombs, and ‘he is not here.’”

In My Own Way

“The best Christian thought has always seen that only Pharisaism comes through trying to be good.  For sanctity is less in wanting to be moral than in loving God and other men.  But the moralism which condemns a man for not loving is simply adding strength to that sense of fear and insecurity which prevents him from loving.”

This Is It

“But are God and nature, spirit and flesh – like individual persons, mutually exclusive?  ‘He that is unmarried,’ said St. Paul, ‘careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord.  But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife.’  Yet this is to say that the divine cannot be loved in and through the things of the this world, and to deny the saying that ‘Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.’  If the love of God and the love of the world are mutually exclusive, then, on the very premises of theology, God is a finite thing among things – for only finite things exclude one another.  God is dethroned and un-godded by being put in opposition to nature and the world, becoming an object instead of the continuum in which we ‘live and move and have our being.’”

This Is It

“The Hebrew-Christian universe is one in which moral urgency, the anxiety to be right, embraces and penetrates everything.  God, the Absolute itself, is good as against bad, and thus to be immoral or in the wrong is to feel oneself an outcast not merely from human society but also from existence itself, from the root and ground of life.  To be in the wrong therefore arouses a metaphysical anxiety and sense of guilt – a state of eternal damnation – utterly disproportionate to the crime.”

This Is It

“At the roots of Chinese life there is a trust in the good-and-evil of one’s own nature which is peculiarly foreign to those brought up with the chronic uneasy conscience of the Hebrew-Christian cultures.  Yet it was always obvious to the Chinese that a man who mistrusts himself cannot even trust his mistrust, and must therefore be hopelessly confused.”

This Is It

“Now it is of great interest that we cannot effectively think about self-control without making a separation between the controller and the controlled, even when – as the word ’self-control’ implies – the two are one and the same.  This lies behind the widespread conception of man as a double or divided being composed of a higher self and a lower, of reason and instinct, mind and body, spirit and matter, voluntary and involuntary, angel and animal.  So conceived , man is never actually self-controlling…The problem is well illustrated in the Christian theory of virtue, which for centuries has put an immense double-bind on Western man.  The greatest commandment is that ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God’ – and, note the addition – ‘with all thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy mind.”  How can such a commandment be obeyed?  The addition implies that it is not enough to think and act as if I loved God.  I am not asked to pretend that I love.  I am asked really to mean it, to be completely sincere.  Jesus’ whole condemnation of the Pharisees was that they obeyed with their lips and hands, but not with their hearts.”