@SW-User
I am sorry, but what is your most erudite text have to do with the topic, "Are Buddhists really atheists?"
TelegramSam · 70-79New
Christianity is dualistic. Theistic. Buddhism is born from non-dualism. The Dharma knows no creator.
Yet when reading one or two of the great Christian mystics I wonder exactly where there is a true "dividing line". In the "negative way" of Christianity God is the great "incomprehensible"....beyond thought. Meister Eckhart in his Sermon on "True Poverty" speaks this way of God:-
Nothing that knowledge can grasp, or desire can want, is God. Where knowledge and desire end, there is darkness; and there God shines.
St John of the Cross, speaking of the "final arrival" (to give it a name) writes:-
On that glad night in secret,
for no one saw me,
nor did I look at anything
with no other light or guide
than the one that burned in my heart.
This guided me more surely
than the light of noon
to where he was awaiting me
— him I knew so well —
there in a place where no one appeared.
Where no one appeared?
Getting back to Eckhart and the same Sermon (German Sermon 22) there is:-
Now listen carefully! I have often said, as great masters have said, that we should be so free of all things and all works, both inner and outer, that we become the place where God can act. But now we put it differently. If it is the case that someone is free of all creatures, of God and of themselves, if God finds a place to act in them, then we say: as long as this exists in someone, they have not yet reached the ultimate poverty. For God does not intend there to be a place in someone where he can act, but if there is to be true poverty of spirit, someone must be so free of God and all his works that if God wishes to act in the soul he must himself be the place in which he can act, and this he is certainly willing to be. For if God finds us this poor, then God performs his own active work and we passively receive God in ourselves and God becomes the place of his work in us since God works within himself. In this poverty, we attain again the eternal being which we once enjoyed, which is ours now and shall be for ever.
So, in experience, where is the dividing line between dualism and non-dualism? Between - using other words - "emptiness" and "theism"?
