Over two thousand years ago, a baby was born who was raised to care about his people. He lived at time when the machine of Roman conquest had reduced Israel to a feeder colony for the most highly organized global economy known to man until recently. As he grew older, he became concerned for the erosion of his people’s native traditions and spiritual values. He saw the Temple of Jerusalem become a tool used to manipulate his people as a corrupt Sanhedrin sought to sell their spiritual influence to the Romans in exchange for a share of the enormous wealth of Rome. His world was marked by political corruption, spiritual decay and the sloth of affluence that tainted the motives of the ruling class that no longer found it convenient to benefit the very people who gave them the right to rule.
Jesus was one of many people in history who was born with the gift of empathy and raised in the discipline of commitment. By all accounts, he cared deeply for people, all people, including gentiles, for whom he was willing to devote his life to helping by inviting them see through the delusion of crass materialism and seek fulfillment in ideas truly worthy of human devotion. Say what you will about this man. Say that his followers corrupted his message and twisted his words. Say that the church that came to institutionalize his message merely replaced the Sanhedrin as an all-corrupting influence over the Western world. These sins had nothing to do with him. They indict only human nature and the inevitable process of social organization that produces wealth and is inevitably followed by greed and manipulation. The avaricious will always place the accumulation of wealth above compassion. The greedy will always use our own altruism against us to bend the kind hearted and good natured to their will as a way to take more for themselves and consolidate their political power. This is as it has always been. Human beings organize, create efficiency, create wealth from this efficiency and watch it accumulate in the hands of a few. The masses will always hand over their small share of resources to a few shrewd people who audaciously believe they are entitled to more and will create a mythology to prove that they deserve it. They used to claim it was a divine right to rule and be wealthy. Now they say that we must give them all our money so that they can create jobs for children in sweat shops in Malaysia.
It is the same great lie that Jesus stood against.
The divinity of Jesus will be debated ad absurdum for eternity and occurs to me like an argument as superfluous as a debate over who the best baseball pitcher of all time might be. In the process, we miss the practical essence of messengers like Jesus, Buddha, Ghandi, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King and others. Their most urgent and immediate benefit to the human race is to challenge us to answer a most important question: for what shall we live our lives? As beings in the karmic cycle of earthly cause
This is the meaning of Christmas. It is one of the days of the year whereupon we celebrate the birth of one of these extraordinary messengers – the birth of one who transcends delusion and comes to free us from the slavery of our own minds. Thoughtful people will set aside their sectarian views and see the meaning of this day, like Vesak and Mawlid, as a day to remember when humanity produced an antidote for its own foolishness. Regardless of the color of the prophet, humanity benefits when it is compelled to stop and think about what we stand for and contemplate how we should live. and effect, these people of extraordinary compassion come to us when we need them most; when we have lost our way almost entirely. They are a seed of yin at a time of the domination of yang. Call them prophets, messiahs, seers or simply leaders, they are created by their times. They come when humanity calls. They give new life to empathy when the world is choking on its own selfishness. They are the possibility of altruistic renewal.
And so it is that this Buddhist comes to wish you all a very, merry Christmas. May it be a day of peace that inspires you to a lifetime of compassion.
Bodhi so ha. With metta,
Rinchen Dorje
