"No need to define truth" -- Ric Dexter

RIC DEXTER: Soka Gakkai North Texas Area Leader

Cardinal Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious dialogue explained “Inter-religious dialogue helps us to correct our incredible ignorance and to avoid the constant clash of civilizations. We should avoid the clash of ignorances.”

As a Buddhist in a nation mostly populated by people raised in western religious traditions I find that, more often than not, determinations of the validity of my faith are based on either misinformation or a lack of information about my tradition. It involves neither “contemplating my navel” nor “worshiping the Buddha.”

We can’t look at two opposite viewpoints and ask if our goal simply trying to understand one another or to finally come to a single belief. As always, I propose the answer is the middle path. The middle path is not something halfway between two opposing truths. It is the way that incorporates both truths.

Daisaku Ikeda, spiritual leader of the Soka Gakkai International pointed out “Interfaith dialogue can serve to help bring out the most positive potentials of each faith tradition, keeping them vital and preventing a lapse into empty formalism or dogmatism. And like any dialogue, interfaith conversations are meaningful only when they are based on a frank recognition and acceptance of difference; they can otherwise fall into a trivializing search for superficial commonalities.” My teacher once said that if Muhammad, Jesus, Abraham, and the Buddha sat down at one table they would find more upon which they agreed than upon which they disagreed.

I was once told by a friend of another faith tradition that there was nothing regarding religion upon which she or I could agree. Participation in Texas Faith has shown me how wrong she was. While there are great differences in our practices and beliefs, there are many principles of faith and articles of wisdom regarding how one should live their life that are only different in the words we use or the reason we believe them to be true. Understanding this has only strengthened my faith.

Nichiren Buddhism uses the term Kosen Rufu, it is loosely translated as world peace. Literally it means to “declare widely and promulgate the flow.” It doesn’t refer to an end point, a place and time where everyone practices the teaching, it is the flow itself, the very pulse of living Buddhism within society.

The pulse of living Buddhism within society, as it was once explained to me is that “there will be a portion of society that will practice these teachings, but not everyone. There will be a portion of people in the world that will know of the practice but will follow other faiths. There will be a portion of the people who know only of other faiths, or have no faith tradition. Within all those people the truth exists and at the point of Kosen Rufu most people will begin to live their lives according to that truth.”

Of course the way you may define truth and the way I may are different. My understanding is by trying to define it we can only limit it. Interfaith dialogue can only open the gate to that middle path of understanding others while awakening the positive potentials within our own life. It is up to us to follow the path.