A religious scholar recently quoted U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's "elephant test" for defining obscenity, claiming that it also applied to religion. In 1964 Justice Stewart observed that, while he found it hard to define hard-core pornography, he "knew it when he saw it." The name derives from the fact that, while one might find it difficult describe an elephant to a person who has never seen one before, nevertheless, he has no trouble identifying the animal when he encounters it. For those familiar with Buddhism, however, the "elephant test" may call to mind a famous story.
Once a wise raja brought all of the blind men from his kingdom together to see what they would say about an elephant. Unable to see the beast whole, however, each blind man could only describe the elephant in terms of the part he had actually touched with his own hands. The one who touched the leg said that an elephant was exactly like a tree. The one who had touched the ear said it was like a fan. The one who held the tail said it was like a whisk for brushing away flies.
Both "elephant tests" tell us something of the difficulty of defining religion, and in both cases the lesson is essentially the same: We may be able to describe the animal in terms of its parts, but when it comes to seeing the beast as a whole, we are out of our depth.
Or are we?
When it comes to religion, the problem seems to be a lack of perspective. Because we have no distance on religion--and nothing to compare it to, since no other area of human knowledge or experience claims to represent the totality of experience to the degree that religion does--it becomes difficult to see its fundamental scope. If only we could stand back far enough we might be able to see its contours.
With enough distance, we might be able to get some sense of the overall shape of religion--like standing far off from a mountain so that we can see its outline against the sky. The problem is, we're all blind men where religion is concerned--hikers along the trail who have no sense of the mountain they are on simply because they're too close to it to see more than what is directly before their feet.
This is where Green Meditation is helpful. Green Meditation is all about seeing the big picture and allowing our minds to be changed by what we see.
The big picture shows us that, however diverse religious experience seems to be, it is unified by a single pervasive theme, which is anthropocentrism. Religion is, at bottom, about the meaning of human life as it emerges against the ground of Nature as a distinct figure on its own. Therefore, all religions are fundamentally at odds with Nature, if only because they focus on human salvation rather than the salvation of the whole.
From a purely natural standpoint, all beings are saved already by virtue of their inclusion in the whole. Nothing more needs to be done. Nature gives rise to all beings; nurtures all beings while they are alive; and accepts all beings back into itself at death. And Nature accomplishes all of this without thought or discrimination. Nothing is excluded. Nothing is wasted. Everything is saved.
Not so with religion. Religion sees certain rituals, beliefs, practices, or customs as being necessary for salvation. At the very least, it claims that a religious understanding, or some sort of profession of faith, is necessary in order to be saved. It also maintains distinct boundaries, including those people who fall within its norms, and excluding those who do not. The reason for this is clear: Feeling themselves to have fallen out of harmony with Nature's plan of salvation, human beings have undertaken to create various plans of salvation of their own. That is what religion is--a plan for human salvation that replaces Nature's plan.
The problem with this, of course, is that it is virtually always based on a limited picture of reality--treating the ear as if it were the elephant, the trail as if it were the mountain itself. No wonder religions fight amongst themselves. And no wonder we find hypocrisy when we look to see what is swept under all their various rugs.
Expect a religion to do Nature's work, and how can it do anything but fail? But in one respect religion teaches us an essential lesson, because all religions teach us that there are profound lessons to be learned in failure. They just don't tell us that religion is a failure in itself.
