Buddhism at the 1893 Parliament of World Religions

Chicago World Fair

Gentrain

Stephanie Spoto

Parliament of World Religions, Chicago 1893

• An attempt to create a global dialogue of faiths
• Event was celebrated by another conference on its centenary in 1993
• In 1893, the city of Chicago hosted the World Columbian Exposition → an early world's fair
• So many people were coming to Chicago from all over the world → many smaller conferences, called Congresses and Parliaments scheduled to take advantage of such a large gathering

Buddhist delegates at the Parliament

• Included a number of Buddhist delegates
• Zen Master Soyen Shaku, the Japanese layman Hirai Kinzo, and the Sri Lankan Buddhist reformer Anagarika Dharmapala
• Organized by diverse group of Protestant and Unitarian leaders → that the world’s religions demonstrate the unity of humankind
• Christianity, ultimately, had the unique capacity to embrace this unity
• Sometimes seen as the birth of the interfaith movement

"First American Ancestor" of Zen

• Buddhists present were eager not only to participate → wanted to challenge the Western Christian notion of what the true characteristics of a “world religion” might be
• Soyen Shaku’s sharply challenged Christian notions of God as “prime mover”
• Purposely constructed arguments to appear “rational” and “nontheistic” to his Western audience
• Buddhist principles of karma were completely compatible with modern science
• Both its content and style challenged many Christians’ ideas about what constitutes “religion”

Challenging Christianity as “Universal Religion”

• Buddhist reformer Anagarika Dharmapala challenged the organizers’ understanding of Christianity as the great “universal religion”
• “Universal” teachings of the Buddha, who taught long before the time of Christ
• Focused on Buddhist ideals of tolerance and gentleness as crucial for the world’s religions in modern times
• Audience impressed by presentation
• At meeting of Theosophical Society of Chicago, presided over the initiation of the first person to become a Buddhist on American soil, Charles T. Strauss, a New York businessman

Criticism of Conference

• Hirai Kinzo criticized conference (joined by other Japanese Buddhists)
• Pointed to anti-Japanese racism in America
• Saw signs that said “No Japanese is allowed to enter here”
• Kinzo: “If such be the Christian ethics— well, we are perfectly satisfied to be heathen.”
• The Japanese were not so concerned with labels, e.g. Buddhist, a Shintōist, or a Christian
• Kinzo: “the consistency of doctrine and conduct is the point on which we put the greatest importance.”

“What is Buddhism?”

“Some pious people are apt to consider their religious belief to be absolutely fixed and unchanging since the dawn of human consciousness; but they have forgotten, in my opinion, the fact that the human mind is still keeping on unfolding itself, that it has not yet exhausted all its possibilities, that it is constantly coming to a clearer consciousness as to its own nature, origin, and destiny. But what I firmly believe is that in the Buddhism of Japan to-day are epitomized all the essential results reached through the unfolding of the religious consciousness during the past twenty or thirty centuries of Oriental culture.”

Read before the National Geographic Society, Washington, D. C., April, 1906.

Mind is like the universe

“If we open our eyes and look at the universe, we observe the sun and moon, and the stars in the sky; mountains, rivers, plants, animals, fishes and birds on the earth. Cold and warmth come alternatively; shine and rain change from time to time without ever reaching and end. Again, let us close our eyes and calmly reflect upon ourselves. From morning to evening, we are agitated by feelings of pleasure and pain, love and hate; sometimes full of ambition and desire, sometimes called to the utmost excitement of reason and will. Thus the action of mind is like an endless spring of water. As the phenomena of the external world are various and marvelous, so is the internal of the human mind.”

Law of Cause and Effect

“Shall we ask for the explanation of these marvelous phenomena? Why is the universe in a constant flux? Why do things change? Why is the mind subjected to constant agitation? For these Buddhism offers only one explanation, namely, the law of cause and effect.”

The nature of cause and effect as taught by Buddha

• The complex nature of cause.
• Uses the example of fire → complex causes and requirements
• An endless progression of the causal law.
• “Thus if we investigate the cause of a cause, the past by tracing back even to an eternity we shall never reach the first assertion that there is a first cause is contrary to the fundamental principle of nature”
• The causal law, in terms of the three worlds (Past, Present, and Future)
• Past lives impact our present lives. Present lives will impact future lives.
• Self-formation of cause and effect.
• We enjoy happiness and suffer misery, our own actions being causes; in other words there is no other cause than our own actions which makes us happy or unhappy
• Cause and effect as the law of nature.

Cause and Effect as Law of Nature

“According to the different sects of Buddhism more of less different views are entertained in regard to the law of causality, but in so far as they agree in regarding it as the law of nature, independent of the will of Buddha, and still more the will of human beings, the law exists for an eternity, without beginning, without end. Things grow and decay, and this is caused not by an eternal power but by an internal force which is in things themselves as an innate attitude. This internal law acts in accordance with the law of cause and effect, and thus appear the immense phenomena of the universe. Just as the clock moves by itself without any intervention of any external force, so is the progress of the universe.”