Can Buddhists Celebrate Christmas?

Buddhist Christmas

Bah Humbug!

Other non-Christian religions can get a bit uptight about Christmas, but Buddhism is fairly laid back.
 
A few years ago the city of Birmingham renamed Christmas to 'Winterval' as a result of protests by non-Christian faith communities, but as far as I'm aware it wasn't the Buddhists who were complaining. 

Of course, there are aspects of Christmas which a Buddhist might have reservations about - rampant consumerism and so on, but these are the same excesses that are often denounced by Christians who complain that in recent years the spiritual aspects of Christmas have been replaced by a credit card frenzy.

But in general Buddhists are quite happy with Christmas and have no hangups about hanging up Christmas decorations and enlightening Christmas trees.



Presents under the Bodhi Tree

In the Simpsons episode She of Little Faith , where Lisa converts to Buddhism, Reverend Lovejoy tries to dissuade her by saying that she can't celebrate Christmas because "Santa doesn't leave presents under the Bodhi tree". Richard Gere puts things right by explaining that Buddhists believe that those religions that are founded on Love and Compassion are valid spiritual paths.




So you can eat your Christmas cake and still be a Buddhist, though of course you can never finally have the cake whether you eat it or not (all cakes are compound phenomena and thus subject to impermanence).
Excessive consumption of Christmas cake may also promote the realisation that there is no inherent difference between an object of attachment and an object of aversion. ("Can't you manage just one more slice? Look here's a nice piece with extra thick icing... What's the matter, aren't you feeling well?")





Was Jesus a Buddhist?
Many Buddhists believe that Jesus was a High Bodhisatva or manifestation of Enlightened Mind. There is also some evidence that in the 'lost years' Jesus travelled to the East and studied Buddhism - certainly you can't get any more Buddhist than the traditional Christmas message of 'Peace on Earth - Goodwill to All'. And who exactly were the Wise Men and where did they originate? Were they Buddhists?



A Buddhist Christmas Carol
Dickens' well-loved story A Christmas Carol sometimes upsets the more fundamentalist Christian evangelicals with its 'ghosts' (to an evangelical all such spirits are apparitions of Satan). But from a Buddhist perspective the story makes perfect sense:

Chains of attachment to money-boxes

Marley's miserliness has resulted in him becoming a Preta (ghost) after death. His attachment in life was to money, and in the Preta realm his attachment manifests as fetters to chains of money-boxes, keys, ledgers and heavy purses. 

In order to help purify his karma, Marley sets out to warn Scrooge that the same destiny awaits him. Marley is assisted in his task by two peaceful Buddhas (Christmas Past and Christmas Present - Buddhas can manifest in any form that is beneficial to sentient beings), and one wrathful Buddha ('Ghost of the Future!' I fear you more than any spectre I have seen'). 

Buddhas can appear in any beneficial form

The Buddhas take Scrooge through a sort of mini-Bardo experience, where he reviews his life from the perspective of what he has done to others, or not done for others, rather than what he has done for himself. He awakens into a state of mind transformed by compassion and generosity.



Ho Ho Ho ... Hotei! The Buddhist Santa Claus

I'm a mince pie junkie, so when it comes to the the annual Christmas Battle of the Bulge, I've long ago taken Langri Tangpa's advice and adopted the practice of 'accepting defeat and offering the victory'.

Unfortunately, this does have a slight problem with the self-generation visualisations. Most of the Buddhas are portrayed as young, slender and sitting upright, which means that those of us with a more Homeric appearance (in the Simpsonian sense) need rather vivid imaginations to 'bring the result into the path'.

So I was quite pleased when I discovered a Buddha with whom I could easily identify - Buddha Hotei - a manifestation of Buddha Maitreya with an amply proportioned physique (The Wikipedia article rather unkindly calls him 'fat').

Buddha Hotei is very popular in China and Japan. He's often portrayed sitting in a semi-reclining posture and laughing uproariously, while distributing presents to children out of an inexhaustible sack. The similarities with Santa are quite intriguing, see Hotei_1, Hotei_2, Hotei 3





The winter solstice

Of course the origins of Christmas long pre-date Christianity. The majority of the world's religions originated in relatively low latitudes (around 30°N) where the difference in day length between Summer and Winter is not particularly noticeable. However, for us folks who live further from the equator, the long dark nights and short dull days of midwinter are definitely a big psychological issue. That is why the Winter solstice has always been of such importance to Northern Europeans. It symbolises, if not the rebirth, at least the conception of the new year. In the Celtic calendar Imbolc (Candlemas) was the actual birth of the New Year, with the appearance of the first lambs and green shoots.

The early church failed to suppress the solstice celebrations and instead adopted them (much as they planted churches on pagan sacred sites), overlaying the scarcely concealed Druidic symbolism with Christian attributes. There is actually no historical evidence that Jesus was born on the 25th December.

The Celtic annual cycle of Imbolc, Halloween and Winter Solstice offers a rich source of symbolism and analogy for the process of rebirth, life, death, bardo and conception that would not be as apparent in traditional Buddhist countries, which are mostly at lower latitudes. So it is likely that as Buddhism continues to spread in the Anglo-Celtic cultural areas, it will adopt some of the Winter Solstice customs. There is no reason for in not to do so, for it is often remarked that unlike most other religions, Buddhism is not tied to a particular culture. 

Because of its strong philosophical foundations, Buddhism is universal.   It is effective for any sentient being, anywhere, any time.

In Praise of Jesus - a Buddhist Perspective
 

Christmas Eve at Vajralama Center Seattle

Photo by Dean Forbes (some rights reserved)

- Sean Robsville



Read more at Buddhist Philosophy




 


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Buddhist Halloween

Buddhist Halloween?

Should Buddhists celebrate the ancient Celtic Druid festival of Halloween?

What's the connection between this pre-Christian Druid festival and Buddhism?

Buddhism teaches that the mind is not a physical entity.

Consequently,  physical factors can neither create nor destroy it.



The mind exists before conception, and survives after death to be reborn into another body.

The Druids were ancient Celtic priests who shared the Buddhists' belief in rebirth and the indestructibility of the mind.




They regarded the seasons of the year as being a metaphor for the death and rebirth of the human being.

Halloween represented the death of the old year and was believed to be the time of year when the veil separating the human and ghost realms was at its thinnest.



Yule (the winter solstice) was the time of conception of the coming year and Imbolc (Candlemas) was the actual birth of the New Year, with the appearance of the first lambs and green shoots.

The period between Yule and Candlemas was the gestational period when the new animal and plant life, though growing and stirring, was still hidden in the body of its mother, or in the case of vegetation within the body of mother earth.


The significance of Halloween to Buddhists now becomes clear. In the Druid system the period of seven weeks between Halloween and Yule is the gap between death of the old and conception of the new year. This corresponds to the 49 days of the bardo.


Halloween thus symbolises the entry of the disembodied consciousness into the intermediate state between leaving one body and occupying another.

In traditional Buddhist beliefs the bardo-consciousness will experience hideous apparitions - ghosts, demons etc.


If the mind reacts with panic then a samsaric rebirth, possibly in unpleasant realms, is inevitable.

However if the bardo-being recognises these apparitions as hallucinations - projections and reflections of its own negative karma resulting from evil actions - then liberation remains possible.



The reasons for the Druidic custom of dressing up as ghosts, demons and so on may be to symbolise that these scary bardo apparitions are in fact nothing other than aspects or appearances of the person's own self.

In tantra, gruesome visualizations are used to purify negativities






Among Western Buddhists, the festival of Samayatara, the female Buddha of the Northern direction associated with midnight and the wisdom of action, is commemorated at Halloween.

From Buddhizing Halloween by Ataraxia

"...The point here being, of course, that as Buddhism has moved into new cultural spaces it has adopted the forms of those cultures, using them to express peculiarly Buddhist themes and sometimes supplanting their original meanings entirely [1].  Naturally, as Buddhism becomes rooted in the West we should expect the same treatment to be applied to Western cultural forms, even though by all accounts it appears to be appalling to many culturally conservative Buddhists that Westerners should want to practice and celebrate Buddhadharma in ways that resonate for their own cultures.  But, speaking for myself, I see this as a good thing - I am not Tibetan/Japanese/Chinese/Thai/etc. and I do not wish to be [2].

Which brings me to an upcoming and super-fun holiday: Halloween [3]!  If there is any holiday that I want/is a good candidate for being Buddhized, this is it.  There are several reasons why this is so:

• Although the broad outlines of the origins and meaning of Halloween are known, they are not believed in.  The holiday is widely celebrated by Western (at least, North American) society, but is largely devoid of meaning.  Indeed, the actual meaning of “trick or treat” never occurred to me until I was an adult – it had always just been a phrase that got you candy (which was good enough).
• More specifically, Halloween has no Christian content, which makes Buddhization much easier for two reasons.  First and most importantly, to Buddhize Halloween will not cause outrage among/backlash from the Christian community.  Secondly, there’s no metaphysics that will need abandonment or difficult reworking in order to fit with Buddhist thought.
• The West needs to take the dark side of life more seriously.
• There are tantalizing hints of existing traditions that could, by mere suggestion, be transformed from simple fun into meaningful ritual.
• It’s so so so fun.

I can think of a few obvious ways this could be done:

• Teachings about hungry ghosts/hell realms.
• Pointing out the emptiness of ‘external’ perceptions (what’s behind the mask?).
• Transforming emotional reactions, demonstrating purity of the world (the old peeled grapes as eyeballs, spaghetti as brains, etc.).
• Chod practice!
• Death and rebirth teachings/meditations."

Dr Yutang Lin blessing a ghost to leave a haunted house and be reborn in the Pure Land

Giving of fearlessness - bringing peace to haunted houses





Festival of the Hungry Ghosts





The Halloween Monk



Halloween Asian Style



Halloween and World Religions

Buddhist Blog on Halloween


Tibetan Buddhist Halloween

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Tantric transmutation visualizations
In Buddhist tantric practice, impure substances such as urine and dead dog's flesh, symbolising mental afflictions, are visualized as being transmuted to pure nectar of enlightenment by the power of a fierce wind-blown fire. The reaction is 'catalyzed' by addition of seed letters (These are actually syllables, as Tibetan uses a syllabary rather than an alphabet). The visualized vessel of transmutation is a skullcup, known as a kapala in Sanskrit:

Kapala - Tantric Vessel of Transformation

In Anglo-Celtic culture this imagery summons up associations with folk traditions of the witches' cauldron, into which all kinds of impure substances were added (think Macbeth) and then transmuted by recitation of spells . So is it possible that the witches were practising a form of alchemical tantra?


Wicca
The female medieval peasant Wiccans ('witches') were demonised and persecuted by the Church, whereas the upper class male alchemists usually got away with their mind-expanding practices, by claiming they were engaged in transforming base metals into gold.

Despite what some Christians still claim, Wicca has nothing to do with Satanism. Wiccans no more believe in Satan than do Buddhists. Satan is a bogey-man dreamt up by Christian theologians to explain why, if God is loving, omnipotent and omniscient, there is evil in the world. Satanism is thus an offshoot of Christianity, and many of its rituals involve perversions or parodies of Christian rites.

As demonised by the Church

Karma in Wicca
Wiccans do not sacrifice any living thing, human or animal. They are specifically forbidden to cause harm to sentient beings and they believe in threefold karma - any evil they do will return to them three times over in this life or future lives. Neither do they drink blood, indeed many are vegetarian.

Wiccans may be organised into covens, though many are solitary practioners. The belief that a coven must have thirteen members is a pernicious fiction spread by the medieval Church in order to associate Wicca with Satanist parodies of Christ's Last Supper. Wicca has its origins in ancient Celtic beliefs and pre-dates both Christianity and Satanism.


Celtic Chalices, Cauldrons and Grails
In Celtic traditions, cauldron, grail and chalice symbolism abounds, so it is no surprise that the medieval witches are associated with use of 'vessels of transformation'. The story of the Holy Grail is a Christianised pre-Christian Celtic legend.



The Gundestrup Cauldron is also clearly a ritual vessel.



Healing potions
Wicca is a pagan healing religion. In pre-Christian times the knowledge of the healing power of herbs and psychological healing techniques was the province of the wise woman (or sometimes cunning man) of the village. Throughout the Middle Ages most of rural Britain, especially the wilder western Celtic areas, was only nominally Christian with ancient folk beliefs continuing to thrive.



It is interesting to note that the word 'pagan' derives from the Latin for 'countryman', and 'heathen' from those who live on the heaths (the heather-clad fells and moors of western Britain). For utilitarian purposes as well as magic, the wise women would have used cauldrons to extract the active ingredients form their herbs.

Towards the end of the Middle Ages political unrest, religious schisms and plagues led to a period of paranoia when all dissent was punished with sadistic severity. Many hundreds of thousands of traditional healers (and some early scientists) were arrested and burnt at the stake for being in league with the devil. This period is known as 'the burning times' by modern Wiccans.


Secret Wicca
The old beliefs went underground and survived in isolated areas of Britain and Ireland from the end of the sixteenth century until the repeal of the anti-Wiccan laws in 1951 (Wicca was still illegal in Britain until after World War Two !). The religion slowly emerged from obscurity and re-established strongholds in its traditional Celtic homelands (for example Glastonbury - the original Avalon of Merlin and the Arthurian legends). It arrived in the U.S. sometime in the late 1960's and found a fertile field for growth in the hippie counter-culture of that period.


Its growth then appears to have been steady but unspectacular until the mid nineties, when a combination of cultural factors and the growth of the internet led to a massive increase in numbers. There may now be as many as three million Wiccans and Wiccan sympathisers through the English-speaking world. Wiccans in the U.S. are still subject to prejudice, and many of them dare not 'come out of the broom closet'. The situation in Britain is normally more tolerant, as paganism in some parts of rural Britain has never been far below the surface.



Divine Feminine
Wicca is not a patriarchal or oppressive religion. There is no jealous, punitive sky-God. Wicca particularly venerates the feminine aspects of spirituality. In contrast, there is little or place for the feminine aspects of spirituality in standard Abrahamic monotheism.


Wicca celebrates the divine feminine with colorful ceremonies, symbolism and rituals. (Many Wiccans are accomplished artists and designers). The non-macho nature of Wicca extends to welcoming gays and lesbians, who are still treated as abominations unto the Lord by the Abrahamic religions.

In Harmony with Nature
Wicca is a nature-based religion which offers an escape from the soulless, stressed-out, dehumanised, over-regulated and proceduralised existence which is modern urban life. Nature festivals and rituals are extremely important in Wicca. There are eight of these representing turning points of the year which are the two solstices, the two equinoxes, and the four pivotal Celtic festivals:

• Candlemas on February 1st - 2nd. Offering of lights to the Goddess in the aspect of the Maiden. Lengthening of the days becomes perceptible.

• Beltane or May Eve on April 30th - May 1st. A fertility festival. Offerings of garlands to the Goddess in the aspect of the Mother.

• Lammas 31st July - 1st August - beginning of the harvest.

• Halloween 31st October. The death of the year. Festival of ghosts and spirits. Fires, lanterns and fireworks.

The turning of the year also symbolises the processes of birth, death and rebirth of the individual. To the jaded city-dweller, these ancient numinous festivals with their evocative names and customs seem to offer a glimpse of a long-lost pastoral idyll.

Seasonal festivals of the Prajnas
The FWBO has a program of ritually celebrating the female Buddhas, or Prajnas, on the day and time of the year associated with each of them. The cycle begins with the Summer Solstice and female Buddha Mamaki.

The Autumn Equinox, is a ceremony dedicated to Pandaravasini, the female Buddha of the Western direction associated with dusk and the wisdom of uniqueness.

Later in the year it is the turn of Samayatara, the female Buddha of the Northern direction associated with midnight and the wisdom of action (Halloween/Samhain); and Akasadhatesvari, the female Buddha at the centre of the Mandala beyond time and space. She is associated with the ineffable wisdom of the Transcendental. Her ceremony takes place at the time of the Winter Solstice.

 More information on Tantra in Volume 2 (downloadable) of

Modern Buddhism:  free eBook downloadable for Windows, Mac, Kindle, Sony Reader, Nook and Android

- Sean Robsville


Read more at Buddhist Philosophy



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RESOURCES FOR SYMBOLISM

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Buddhism Subject Index

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Celtic and Buddhist symbolism - triskelions, triskeles.

The triskele or triskelion symbol, which resembles three commas or teardrop shaped beads chasing one another round a circle, is a Buddhist meditational symbol that represents the three aspects of Dependent Relationship which give existence to all functioning things.

The Buddhist teaching on Dependent Relationship states that phenomena exist in three fundamental ways. Firstly, phenomena exist by dependence upon causes and conditions. Secondly, phenomena depend upon the relationship of the whole to its parts and attributes. Thirdly, and most profoundly, phenomena depend upon designation by the mind [1].  The mind is a non-physical aspect of the universe that is not reducible to matter.

The appearance of motion of the three swirling teardrops symbolises that the impermanence of all compound phenomena arises from these three ever-changing relationships.

In traditional Buddhist art, triskeles are frequently seen in the centre of Dharma wheels, four-pronged vajras and auspicious symbol mandalas.

The triskelion magatama symbol is also a common feature of Celtic sacred art such as stone carvings, enamel ornaments, book illumination and knotwork.

This metaphysical symbol is probably the 'Caer Sidin' which was the object of meditation by the Druidic bard Taliesin, as he explains in this verse:

Mi a fum ynghadair flin
Uwch Caer Sidin
A honno ya troi fydd
Rhwng tri elfydd
Pand rhyfedd ir byd
Nas argennyd

Which is translated as:

I have presided in a toilsome chair
Over the circle of Sidin
Whilst that is continuously revolving between three elements;
Is it not a wonder to the world,
That men are not enlightened? [2]

The untranslated term 'Sidin' is not explained. Could it be related to the Sanskrit Siddhi ?

According to the article by John Michael Greer, the 'three elements' of Druid metaphysics to which Taliesin refers are known in old Welsh as Gwyar (change, causality), Calas (structure) and Nwyfre (consciousness).

Buddhist Triskeles

An Indian Dharma wheel with a triskele at the hub

Japanese Buddhist Dharma wheel

Dharma wheel - Manjushri Center, Cumbria

Four pronged vajra with central triskelion (click to enlarge)
Manjushri Center, Cumbria

Celtic Triskele Symbols

Scottish Carved Stone 1

Scottish Celtic sculptured stone - inner and outer triskelions

Silver object (function unknown) from Saint Ninian's Isle Treasure, Shetland

Irish metalwork showing interleaved triskelions, second century A.D.

Central triskelion surrounded by three triskelions on Celtic enamel ornament from Derbyshire

The Laxey Wheel Triskelion Isle of Man

Buddha's bunnies - the three hares/rabbits symbol

In the three hares/rabbits triskelion, the aspect of motion is especially apparent, emphasising that all phenomena arise from the three dependencies and are thus inevitably impermanent and devoid of any essence.

This symbol was originally Buddhist, but travelled westwards along the silk routes and can be found in European medieval church ornamentation.

In Buddhism, as well as Druidism, mind is a primal aspect of reality that is not reducible to matter.  For a discussion of why the mind is a non-physical, fundamental aspect of the universe which is not derived from anything else, see Confronting Materialism and the Delusion of the Mechanical Mind.


- Sean Robsville


Read more at Buddhist Philosophy



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Tantra 

RESOURCES FOR SYMBOLISM
 


References:

[1] Victor Mansfield 'Time and Impermanence in Middle Way Buddhism and Modern Physics'. Talk at the Physics and Tibetan Buddhism Conference, University of California, Santa Barbara January 30-31, 1998

[2] Stewart, R. J. and Williamson, R. (1996) Celtic Bards, Celtic Druids , ISBN 0-7137-2563-X, publ Blandford, London, p 146.