Page 151 - Islam and Buddhism

Buddhism and Materialist Western Culture

But why? To answer this question, we must first determine the

basic characteristics of Western materialism. This culture's founda-
tions were laid in the 18th century; its theoretical framework was es-
tablished in the 19th and—despite the gradual erosion of the
theoretical framework—it became a mass movement in the 20th.
Essentially, it:
- denies the existence of God and believes the universe to be the

result of chance.
- believes that living things arrived at their present state through
evolution, and that Darwinism explains the phenomenon of life and
the "origin" of species.
- believes that human beings are simply a higher species of ani-
mal and downplays the existence of any human spirit.
- rejects the idea of life after death, resurrection, Judgment Day
and the existence of an eternal Paradise and Hell.

These assumptions of a materialist culture, every one of them
false, naturally contradict all revealed religions. But significantly, all
these erroneous assumptions are shared by another culture—
Buddhism.

Huxley's Discovery of Buddhism
H u x l e y ' s D i s c o v e r y o f B u d d h i s m
An atheist religion, Buddhism doesn't accept the existence of
God, an everlasting hereafter, Paradise, or Hell. It supposes that the
human spirit is no different from that of an animal and believes in
continual karmic returns to the natural world. According to
Buddhists, a fish could come back as a mammal in a later life, and a
human could come back as a worm. This idea of the "transmigration
of souls" between species has important parallels with Darwin's the-

ory of evolution.
One Buddhist researcher has described as follows the relation

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