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Common Ground - Islam and Buddhism

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Oneness: The Highest <strong>Common</strong> Denominator<br />

is thus inevitably, <strong>and</strong> a fortiori, praise for the very nature of God—<br />

the Face as such, independent of the mirror reflecting it. It is in this<br />

way that remembrance of even a single attribute of the Prophet becomes<br />

remembrance of God, <strong>and</strong> thus rejoins the very purpose of all<br />

worship, which in turn is the purpose of creation: I created the jinn<br />

<strong>and</strong> mankind only that they might worship Me (51:56). 89<br />

Images of the Buddha, Blessings upon the Prophet<br />

The citation above from Ibn ‘Atā’Allāh, together with the hadīth<br />

qudsī describing the saint, helps one also to underst<strong>and</strong> how it is that<br />

contemplation of the images of the Buddha—one of the central acts<br />

of devotion in the Buddhist tradition—can be regarded as a mode<br />

of ‘remembrance of God’. For if it be accepted that the Buddha was<br />

one of the Messengers of God, <strong>and</strong> if remembrance of one of these<br />

Messengers is a form of remembrance of God, then the act of contemplation<br />

of the Buddha’s image may be seen as a legitimate form<br />

of remembrance of God—especially given the fact that, unlike in<br />

<strong>Islam</strong>, there is no prohibition on the use of images in <strong>Buddhism</strong>.<br />

The vast kaleidoscopic universe of Buddhist iconography can thus<br />

be viewed not as a temptation to idolatry but as a form of remembrance.<br />

It is a form of devotion which passes through contemplation<br />

of the Buddha to remembrance of that ultimate Reality—the Dharma—which<br />

the Buddha had realized. The various forms of Buddhist<br />

contemplation are far from idolatrous fixations on the form of the<br />

Buddha; for this form is utterly ‘empty’. The images which the dev- dev-<br />

otee contemplates are described in the Tibetan Vajrayāna tradition<br />

as ‘apparent but empty’. 90 The images ‘appear’ in this domain of<br />

manifestation, but they are transparent, allowing the devotee to see<br />

through them to the formless essence of which they are transient images—images<br />

which appear <strong>and</strong> thus, like all formal manifestation,<br />

disappear. Appearance implies disappearance, on the one h<strong>and</strong>; the<br />

manifested form implies the supra-manifest Essence, on the other.<br />

Such contemplation is in fact an invitation to contemplate, cultivate<br />

<strong>and</strong> assimilate the ultimate content of the enlightenment of the Buddha,<br />

<strong>and</strong> not simply to marvel at his superhuman beauty, although<br />

89. According to Ibn ‘Abbās—<strong>and</strong> following him, the majority of Qur’ānic commentators—the<br />

word ya‘budūni (‘they worship Me’) here means: ya‘rifūni (‘they<br />

know Me’).<br />

90. See Reginald Ray, Secret of the Vajra World (Boston <strong>and</strong> London: Shambhala,<br />

2002), p. 214.<br />

73

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