| > no one is actually the Buddha I'm an atheist, but I've studied this, and I think this is a matter of major disagreement in the different schools. In the west, more contemporary (and often secular) teachers talk about how everyone is a potential Buddha. There are also close parallels with the more hippie, Christian schools that arose in the 1960s-1970s era (intentional communities) which also taught (quietly I might add), that everyone is a potential Christ. While this might seem like a trivial point, we do see signs of these teachings arising in the past, from century to century. These ideas are generally criticized as heretical and repressed because they threaten the hegemonic, institutional nature of religion, which still maintains that the one true interpretation is that there is a single figure (Christ, Buddha, etc) that adherents should aspire to worship, and that they can never equal or match. The heretical version states the opposite. These adherents believe that Christ and Buddha (assuming for the sake of this argument that they are real, historical figures) did not teach so that they could be worshipped, they taught so that others could become like them. When you see the religions in this way, then yes, everyone is truly the potential Buddha and the potential Christ, and the vast institutional power of the church disappears, and the roles of priests and clerics vanishes with them. This kind of change has the effect of emphasizing philosophy over ideology, and places the onus of being a good person and doing good works on the here and now, not on some mythical afterlife or legendary heaven or hell. |
Historically, Christian mysticism has taught that for Christians the major emphasis of mysticism concerns a spiritual transformation of the egoic self, the following of a path designed to produce more fully realized human persons, "created in the Image and Likeness of God" and as such, living in harmonious communion with God, the Church, the rest of the world, and all creation, including oneself. For Christians, this human potential is realized most perfectly in Jesus, precisely because he is both God and human, and is manifested in others through their association with him, whether conscious, as in the case of Christian mystics, or unconscious, with regard to spiritual persons who follow other traditions, such as Gandhi. The Eastern Christian tradition speaks of this transformation in terms of theosis or divinization, perhaps best summed up by an ancient aphorism usually attributed to Athanasius of Alexandria: "God became human so that man might become god."[a]