Celebrating Christmas Day without a founder: Jesus, Śākyamuni Buddha and the Great Life

Early depictions of Christ (left, Asia Minor, Roman period), and the Buddha (Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhara)

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Kiitsu Kyōkai and the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of a shared Christmas Day Zoom Gathering 

(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)

Today is Christmas Day, the day upon which, most people would probably agree, we celebrate the birth of the founder of Christianity, Jesus of Nazareth. But what does the day mean for those of us seeking to practise free-religion, of which there is no founder?

To begin to answer this question we need to be clear that many of the so-called founders of the world’s religions seem to have offered their followers, not a new religion with its own prescriptive, dogmatic beliefs, but a creative, inquiring and liberative spiritual or free-religious mode of being in the world. Such a mode of being allows people to enter life in the fullest way possible, and in so doing, always to find ways to go beyond, or transcend, their initial teachers.

In the case of Jesus, we can point to the fact that he went beyond his own first teacher, John the Baptist. And we can also point to the memory of Jesus’ early followers, who told us that he once told taught them something like:

“Amen, amen, I tell you, whoever has faith in me, the works I perform he will perform also, and will perform greater works than these” (John 14:12, trans David Bentley Hart).

And, again we can point to the fact that Śākyamuni Buddha forbade his disciples from viewing him as a religious founder, and instead urged them fully to develop their own autonomous selfhood and creativity. The most well-known example of this being his teaching that:

“Be lamps unto yourselves, be a refuge to yourselves. Take yourself no external refuge. Hold fast to the truth as a lamp. Hold fast to the truth as a refuge. Seek no refuge elsewhere” (Mahaparinibbana Sutta (Digha Nikaya 16)).

As the 20th-century advocate of free-religion Imaoka Shin’ichirō-sensei pointed out, the reason that there can be no founder of free-religion is because the “quintessence of religion” [宗教の神髄] lies in grasping the meaning of “the Great Life of free and unobstructed creative evolution” [自由で無碍な創造的進化の大生命] (“The Position of a Free-Religious Person”, 1951). That is to say, true religion is about grasping something fundamental and perfectly natural about how a life such as our own — in fact any form of life — gets going in the first place and then develops and changes as it does. Only when a person has an understanding of life can a truly good and fulfilled life develop. And is this not what Jesus and Śākyamuni were primarily concerned to teach us?

I do not think it is coincidental that another great free-religionist, Leo Tolstoy, begins his Gospel in Brief by saying Jesus’ announcement, that is to say his Gospel or Good News, “replaced the belief in an external God by an understanding of life” and that “the understanding of life is at the basis and the beginning of all. The understanding of life is God.”

It’s important to realise that Imaoka-sensei felt religion can be compared to life because it, like life, “is something that continually develops and evolves, never ceasing to grow.” Naturally, in the process of the development of life, life must always take on some specific form and, therefore, there can be “no such thing as life without form.” And in an essay from 1963 called “What is Free-Religion?” here’s what he goes on to say about this:

“Accordingly, this form undergoes change, shedding of its old state, and undergoes metabolism/renewal; it is by no means something that is eternally fixed or immutable. It is said that the human body undergoes a complete renewal every seven years. Forms, when considered as temporary, are provisional. However, just because something is provisional or temporary, that does not mean its value should be disregarded. No matter how fleeting something may be, at its given moment, it remains indispensable and the most vital form it can take. Accordingly, the concept of free-religion . . . is nothing less than the fundamental and holistic unfolding of human nature. For this reason, it is even more [energisingly] vital [ヴァイタル)] [for us] than biological life itself. It is dynamic, creative, and autonomous, ceaselessly shedding its old skin, undergoing metabolic renewal and growing and developing endlessly. This is nothing other than what Christ referred to as eternal life. From the beginning, all true religion has been of this nature. Free-religion is, in fact, true-religion itself. However, both in the past and the present, there have been far too many conservatives and traditionalists who have taken such a dynamic religion and rendered it static. They have frozen forms that should have been temporary and relative, and made them into something eternal and absolute. Because of this, we have no choice but to raise the banner of free-religion” (What is Free-Religion, 1963).

So, this morning, speaking personally, I find that as a free-religionist I am not celebrating Christmas Day as the birthday of Jesus as founder of the Christian religion, but as a day when we remember the birth of one of humanity’s greatest free-religious teachers, a man who, in his own way and time, reminded us of the need to reconnect directly and daily with “the Great Life of free and unobstructed creative evolution” that always already underpins everything.

Thank you, and I look forward to hearing your own thoughts and criticisms of my talk following our short piece of music . . .