WHAT IS HINDUISM?
Yet what about Buddhism? The great religious drama
that was seeded by the life of Gautama Buddha and the
whole subsequent evolution of ‘Buddhism’ in all its stages
can be seen as a first attempt to give birth to a ‘new’
Hinduism freed of ethnic, racial and caste distinctions –
and freed also of crude ‘theistic’ understandings of God as
a single being and of the Universe as a mere multiplicity of
self-subsistent things. Yet like the birth of a universalist
Christianity from an ethnically rooted Judaism, the ‘birth’
of Buddhism from ‘Hinduism’ - from Indian Vedic and
Brahmanic culture –- also ended up as a miscarriage. Put
simply, Buddhism threw out the baby of true religious
feeling and connection with the Divine with the bathwater
of crude ‘theistic’ understandings of the Divine – whether
‘monotheistic’ or ‘polytheistic’.
Instead of acknowledging the Divine as an Awareness
with both a wholly trans-personal and transcendental
nature and a personal face and faces, Buddhist philosophy
sought to do away with the whole idea of beings, whether
human beings or gods. Doing so however, it found itself
forced to eventually replace them with numberless
‘Buddhas’ – each with their own highly individual character
and qualities of awareness! Yet in place of the Divine
Universal Awareness – itself ‘no-thing’ – it substituted the
idea of a Nothingness that was not only empty of all things,
but also empty of awareness.