Insight Spring 2020

Power in Buddhism and Islam: Jailer, Prisoner, or Both?

Matthew Kutam ’22 From the Gaza strip border to the airstrikes on the Kashmir border to the 2019 Christchurch shooting, the world’s religions appear in constant conflict against one another. In these acts of violence, the perpetrators believed that only their form of religion could lead them up a metaphorical mountain of truth and enlightenment while other religions, or paths, fall short in that quest (Prothero 30). By analyzing one religion through the lens of another religion, nevertheless, one can begin to see something special in one religion that only uncovers itself via this comparative analysis. One religion’s views on, for instance, the role of women or life after death, derive from its worshipped oral tradition and written text, so comparing these sacred works provides a way to perceive a religion’s beliefs more closely. This paper seeks to understand the power and role of the individual in Buddhism by contrasting the Sutras, brief aphorisms of Buddhist principles, with written Islamic beliefs. In reading the Dhammapada, a minor Sutra, through the lens of Qur’an and Tafsir readings, the teachings of Buddha accentuate how only the Buddhist individual has the capability to control themself and jail their own desires, not how the individual lies at the mercy of an ultimate jailer, God. One must play the believing game, “the disciplined practice of trying to be as welcoming….to every idea we encounter,” at first when comparing the two religions and their religious texts (Elbow 134). The believing game helps find parallels in the Dhammapada and Islamic texts, parallels that will serve as a control for which the paper will expound upon and then discover telling differences regarding the individual’s power in Islam and Buddhism. For one, both the Dhammapada and the Tafsir readings call for the individual to achieve a high level of wisdom, one that transcends the living world entirely. In the Dhammapada’s chapter about the Wise, Buddha tells that “those who have well developed with right mind the factors of complete awakening….are emancipated in the world” (Dhammapada 89). His instruction here calls its readers to think and to meditate in order to achieve “complete awakening.” Buddha places the emphasis on wisdom as a way to free oneself from worldly human suffering. In the Eightfold Path, wisdom, or Panna, even encompasses the first two parts of the “Right Understanding” and “Right Resolve,” demonstrat50