Dorothy Rowe

January 2007

Thought for the Day 

The presenters of the BBC Radio 4 morning programme Today have a reputation for being tough interviewers. Indeed, many politicians, including the Prime Minister Tony Blair, are reluctant to be subjected to an interrogation by John Humphrys because he will not let them get away with an inconsistency or seeming fabrication. John Humphrys sees this as being what the public expect of him. On occasions he may have been reprimanded by his bosses for pursuing a too vigorous line of questioning but he has never been forced to resign. Presumably BBC bosses want the presenters of the Today programme to be rigorous in their search for truth. However, there is one part of the Today programme which is ring-fenced and protected from probing questions. This is Thought for the Day. No matter how illogical or inconsistent contributors to Thought for the Day may be, they simply say their piece and leave.

Contributors usually select an item currently in the news and extract from it some meaning that leads them to arrive at a conclusion that has a religious significance. In setting out their arguments contributors usually make not so much small logical steps but vast leaps from one proposition to the next, which can be quite dizzying for the listener. When the news item selected is a disaster which caused much suffering the contributor may appear to be tackling the conundrum, 'If God is all-good and all-powerful why do innocent people suffer?' but, rather than attempt to solve the conundrum, the contributor always takes refuge in a maze of undefined abstract nouns which somehow leads to the conclusion that we must take God on trust. What these particular abstract nouns are depends on the religion of the contributor. The question of why good people suffer is one that certainly interests John Humphrys. In his recent series 'John Humphrys in Search of God' he questioned the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Muslim academic and author Professor Tariq Ramadan, and the Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks about this issue. However, even when given thirty minutes instead of two, none of these religious leaders could produce an answer which satisfied John.

Contributors to Thought for the Day are representatives of the religions that are recognised by the BBC. For many years humanists have been trying to be included in this elite group by claiming that they have something of importance to say about life, but to no avail. Thus it was that on the morning of November 18, 2006, when I was reading with the radio on beside me, a voice startled me into an awareness that something very different was happening on Thought for Today. This voice asked, 'How can we live in this complex world, and how can religion cease to be part of the problem?' Thought for Today now had my complete attention. Had the humanists at last won their battle?

But no. the speaker was not a humanist but a Buddhist. It was Vishvapani of the Western Buddhist Order. I listened carefully and was amazed. At last there was a Thought for Today to which neither John Humphrys nor I could find no objection.

Later I consulted the BBC website and found the text of Vishvapani's message. After posing his question Vishvapani went on to say,

It's easy for Buddhists, like Western liberals, to feel indignant about fundamentalism and argue that the exclusive claims of theistic religions lead to conflict. Buddhism is indeed a liberal faith, and Buddhists sometimes claim that that no wars have been fought in its name. Yet in World War 2, Japan's Imperial forces were cheered by the country's Buddhist establishment, who declared that the war effort was a fight for the Buddha.

By the Buddha's standards, the way in which these leaders had understood his teachings distorted them. A group of spiritual seekers once asked the Buddha how to decide between competing religious claims. He repled, 'Don't believe something because it is part of a tradition, because others believe it, or because it's found in a holy book. And it isn't enough that something sounds convincing, or that you're used to thinking in that way, or even that you've worked it out through reason.'

The test the Buddha proposed was whether a teaching promotes the welfare and happiness of oneself and others. Beliefs that do so, he suggested, spring from kindness and a deep understanding of life. What matters is not whether one believes in God, or life after death, or the Buddha's Enlightenment, but the inner needs that are met by that belief. That may be a need for certainty that's born of fear, or a desire for freedom that accepts life's unknowability and interconnectedness.

Whatever religious tradition asks us to think, in the end, our beliefs are our own, and our character is established by how we hold them. Buddhists, like followers of other faiths, have sometimes been led to an inappropriate attachment to tradition to promote it in ways that create suffering. Religion often teaches that people should serve the ideals that it upholds; what we need are religions that truly serve people.

Is there a religion that has always promoted the welfare and happiness of others? It seems not. None of the recognised religions has even maintained unity amongst its followers. All have split into competing factions which fight among themselves, often in brutal ways. Buddhists may, on the whole, be very peaceful people, but, ignoring the Buddha's teachings, some Buddhist teachers introduced the notion of karma, a system of rewards and punishments which creates guilt, fear and misery just as great as that created by the Christian notions of original sin, heaven, hell and salvation. It does seem that Buddhists are not so prone to committing the deadliest of the seven deadly sins as are Christians, Jews and Muslims. Buddhists tend not to claim that they alone are God's chosen people, which in itself is not a doctrine which promotes the welfare of all other people.

John Humphrys himself would not have been able to present such a succinct and powerful criticism of the religions whose representatives contribute to Though for Today. Yet in all his contributions to Thought for the Day (to date, five in all) Vishvapani speaks with a calm, quiet reasonableness that gently chides yet encourages us all to find the courage to live with uncertainty and not to take refuge in some imagined absolute truths which in the end bring nothing but suffering to us all.

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/

Western Buddhist Order www.LBC.org.uk