Buddhist attitude to brotherhood

I maintain that the religion of the Buddha with its conception of the Oneness of all Life is very bedrock for true fraternal relationship.

When we recognize the similarity of all life, we know that the life in one man is not different from the life in the other, or even in the animal, for the same consciousness is struggling for expression, though enmeshed in a form more crude.

When the knowledge dawns on humanity at large that every man is as noble or as vile, and as lonely as another, then man will seek to know his brother, will learn to forgive and love his fellow-creatures and will adopt a selfless attitude towards life; he will produce wealth for the equal enjoyment of all, he will enjoy nature without wishing to destroy life. No voice of distress will reach his ears in vain, no hand seek his aid without response.

He will find good in every faith that helps his fellow-man to lay hold on the higher things of life, and to see majestic meanings in all the multitudinous complexity of the Universe in whatever terms man has attempted to describe the indescribable. He will always remember that after all we cannot picture in spoken language those inner and deeper meanings of things belonging to planes which are other than physical, and are therefore nearer the reality.

When, therefore, we have made our Buddhist religion a real part of our lives, a living faith in the true sense of the word, we shall have made the greatest step possible towards the realization of Brotherhood.

Brotherhood, therefore, from the Buddhist point of view, is in its essence, the surrendering of self, the ceasing of hate, the recognition of the essential akinness underlying all diversity of caste, colour and race.

The Lord Buddha said, “I have the same feeling for the high as for the low, for the moral as for the immoral, for those holding sectarian views as for those whose beliefs are good and true.”

We read in the Buddhist scriptures: “In all the world there is not one spot, even as large as a mustard seed, where the Tathagatha has not surrendered his body for the sake of all beings.”

Source: Bhikshu Shinkaku, Essentials and Symbols of the Buddhist Faith, (Hawaii), 1952, p. 21-22.

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