“The Story of God” – Do
Buddhists Believe in Miracles?
May 4,
2016 by Justin
Whitaker Patheos
This is, once
again, one of those questions that requires some clarification
before an answer can be given. And even then, the answer will come
with caveats. First, for Buddhists, the concept of ‘miracle’
wouldn’t involve the intervention of a Creator God. If we were to
use the term for Buddhists, we would make clear that what some
Buddhists might consider ‘miracles’ could also be called
‘supernormal’, as opposed to ‘supernatural’. This is because
Buddhist cosmology does not split the natural realm of humans from
a supernatural one; instead six (sometimes five) realms of being
are described which include gods, titans, humans, animals, hungry
ghosts, and hell denizens.
While one
doesn’t normally encounter beings from other realms (except
animals, of course) in day to day life, a realized being such as
the Buddha indeed could encounter such beings and, according to
Pali scriptures, regularly did, leading to one of his titles being,
“teacher of gods and men.”
So the cosmos is a
bit more fluid. Spirits, sometimes pleasant, sometimes demonic in
nature, could appear at any time. Are these miracles? I’d lean
toward saying no. They are supernormal from a Buddhist view, and
probably supernatural, or just superstitious from a Westerner’s
point of view. As these two (Buddhist vs Western) viewpoints
intersected over the past two hundred years or so, the belief in
supernormal generally lost out to a more naturalistic worldview.
However, that’s not to say that no modern Buddhists believe in
the supernormal.
So, that brings us
to this week’s “The Story of God” (airing May 8 on National
Geographic). Morgan
Freeman begins as he has so often, with a personal story about
surviving severe pneumonia in his teens. Was it youthful vigor,
some luck, and modern medicine that saved him? Or was it God/a
miracle?
We hear the story
of Alcides Moreno, a window washer
who plunged 47 stories in NY City and
survived to
tell the tale. Usually 10 stories is not survivable. Falling 47
stories and surviving, barely: the only word that could fully
describe him for many was “Miracle.” When asked about this, Alcides
has difficulty though. This is because his younger brother was with
him in the fall, and he died on impact. Pondering the event,
Freeman asks if there is some entity that makes the choice – one
brother and not the other – or “do we live with randomness just
pure mindless randomness?
Freeman’s next
visit is to a Jewish family in Jerusalem
celebrating Passover. There he
meets Rabbi Maya
Leibovich, Israel’s first
native-born female rabbi. There, rather than taking the Bible as a
literal book of history, Rabbi Leibovich tells us that “the Bible
is a book of ideas. The question is, what can we learn from it?
What can we take into our own life?”
Our Buddhist
content this week begins with a quick segment of footage
showing Buddhists in Hong Kong who light incense before a statue of
Guanyin, “who they hope will grant them medical cures, a spouse, or
good grades.”
The science segment
brings us to Danny Oppenheimer, a psychology
professor who says many of our so called “miracles” are just random
chance. Freeman suggests that something happening only about 1 in a
billion times (or having 1 in a billion odds) is what he’d classify
as a miracle. Oppenheimer flips six cards from a deck,
explaining that THIS set of six only comes up about one in 14
billion times, thus making it even rarer than a 1 in a billion
scenario. Is it a miracle, or just another random assortment that
we can give meaning
to as
special?
Spanning a long
history of Roman religion, Freeman takes us from ancient Mithraism
to modern Catholicism before consulting a Taoist fate calculator
and traveling to Cairo’s Qalawun
complex, a hospital founded in the 1280s.
We are then taken
to Tom Renfro a physician and cancer survivor who attributes his
recovery to his faith and the prayers of his community. You can see
his story on youtube here:
Hemant Mehta over
at the Friendly
Atheist wrote
about his “miracle” recovery back in 2014:
Dr. Tom
Renfro nearly
died from cancer 17 years ago. He took drugs. He had chemotherapy.
And then… his tumors were gone.
Time to
thank the doct–wait, what?
“I
think it’s a gift of God. I think
it’s a miracle that God did in my life.How
else can you explain it?” asked Dr.
Renfro.
Umm…
Doctors? Drugs? Chemo? Something you haven’t figured out yet? In
any case, God doesn’t poof away anyone’s tumors.
He was
back in church just two weeks later.
“They
carried me. I had to learn to walk again. I was very weak still,
physically weak.” “I stood up in front of the congregation and I
told them, I said, what you’re looking at, is what you’ve been
praying for.” “You wanted a miracle of God
and this is what He’s done. And I am here today because of the
prayers that you prayed.”
Also,
because of the doctors, drugs, and chemo.
It was great to
see Candy Gunther
Brown,
an Indiana University professor, in the segment. She and I were on
a panel last fall looking at questions of ethics in mindfulness at
the American Academy of Religion conference. Her appearance is
short, and limited to a few good questions, echoing a bit of what
Hemant wrote: “do you ever wonder, did the chemotherapy just
work better than
the doctors expected it to work?” And Freeman concludes the segment
by suggesting that what we call miracles tend to start in the mind,
seguing nicely into a return to Buddhism and Bodhgaya.
There he meets
Tibetan monk Losang Tenpa (aka Ven. Kabir Saxena), who spends time
each year at the Antioch Buddhist Studies in
India program
I taught on in 2010 and 2014. Last time I was there he offered a
wonderfully down-to-earth, and much appreciated by the students,
explanation of the wisdom chapter of Shantideva’s “Guide to the
Bodhisattva Path“.
Kabir explains to
Freeman that the “miracles” of the Buddha were achieved through the
power of exercising his mind, a power available to any of us should
we take up the practice. Freeman notes, “For Buddhists, years of
mental training, and showing love and compassion to others,
can free them from suffering. Walking around this temple, you feel
like a miracle really could happen. The miracle of people being
content with their lives; people getting along
together.”
Kabir then takes
Freeman to Chökyi Nyima
Rinpoche, who is sat among the latest group of
Antioch students. Rinpoche gives him the “shortcut” teaching:
“we all need to care and love and respect each other. That is the
source of happiness. Whoever has that, their journey is good.
Whoever does not keep that in their heart, journey is not
good.”
In summing up,
Freeman, walking with Kabir around the Mahabodhi temple, says, “a
lot of religions are miracle based… ah, you don’t do
miracles?”
Kabir responds,
“What’s a miracle? I mean, flying in the sky? Is that a miracle?
Bugs do it.”
“We tend to think
of miracles as some sort of divine thing;
something that gives us proof of God.”
Kabir’s response,
in his delightful and usual common sense way, is that if you ask
mystics from any tradition, they’ll tell you that God really
is in
here; so if we want a
miracle, let’s not fixate on “people levitating 3 inches off
their butts – which is stupid” but
instead “let’s stick to
the real miracle, which is to transform the human mind,
really.”
This seems to
satisfy Freeman. And I think it is the view of most Buddhists in
the West today. You want a miracle? Focus your mind.
But scholars should
rightly note that the history of Buddhism is filled with stories,
from the Buddha to the present day, of beings taming dragons,
flying through the sky, calming wild animals with loving kindness,
communing with gods from India to Japan, and finding blessings or
luck in everything from the relics of
revered teachers to dolls.
As I wrote in my
discussion of Buddhism and
creation, the story coming
from Buddhism can be read at many levels, from literalism to
Kabir’s description of the mystic, where the ultimate teaching is
found within.
Such a variety of readings and flexibility of interpretation is
part of what keeps Buddhism, like other religions, alive in a
changing world and vibrant in varying cultures. And, it is what
allows for comparisons of religions as well as borrowing and
sharing of ideas. And it is only in ignorance of this breadth of
interpretation that allows many to claim possession of
the one
true understanding
or practice in a religion.
This series has
been eye-opening and a joy to watch because it hasn’t given
any one
true interpretation,
but has instead invited us into the hearts and minds of a few
living versions of the world’s great religions, sparking – I hope –
a journey that will last a lifetime.