Sakyamuni Buddha

People St. Augustine has met in the Spiritual World

Sakyamuni Buddha

When my life ended on earth and I came here to this kingdom, I clearly saw that my works had been written from a very narrow and parochial perspective. When God created human beings, He was their only master and creator, but as their lives, circumstances, and living methods changed, they came to have new masters, one after another.

In human history, people have served many different gods other than God. Why, then are human beings unable to live independently, without serving a god? How did they come to have a desire for something ultimate? Why do they have feelings of nothingness and incompleteness in life? Why do they want to rely on a god? People had to seek God or other gods in order to solve these questions.

Whether on earth or in the spiritual world, how long do people have to live in separate groups? I have realized many times that this is not God's will. I also have seen that God does not always have a bright and joyful look. While considering many different aspects of God, I decided to meet some of the world's saints. I first met Sakyamuni Buddha in order to compare Christian and Buddhist perspectives on God.

Buddha was very gentle and humble. Before becoming a religious man, he had been a man of character He opened wide the door of conversation for me, and from our first meeting we could talk over many things in a bright atmosphere, without a bit of awkwardness.

First, I asked him, "I would like to hear about the God you have been sewing," and he answered as follows: "We human beings desire to be liberated from many dimensions of mental struggle about life. We want to be liberated from the human realities of birth, death, old age, and sickness and solve the problems of life." Although Sakyamuni put himself through many torturous ascetic practices on earth, still he could only conclude that humans are incomplete beings who can neither resolve nor escape from the agonies of birth, old age, sickness, and death. In efforts to solve this problem, he struggled intensely for countless days, striking his body and concentrating his mind, and yet no clear solution emerged. He had no interest at all in the world, for he thought that life in this world was but an instant, and thus the riches and fame, joys and sorrows of the world were meaningless.

He continued: "Today, many Buddhists admire me and worship me, but I am just like them, an incomplete and humble being, the only difference being that I discovered it before others. In order to bring myself to completion, up from a self with defects and contradictions, I struggled hard before others did. In this process, by the help of an unknown Buddha, I felt my mind spinning around and experienced a state of no self (emancipation). Through this, I came to see that the human being is an extremely small self-emanating from a certain being. But if I express this by saying that we are a self-emanating from some God.

Sakyamuni paused for a short meditation and continued "Simply speaking, if we are small beings emanating from some God, I should be able to terminate this self and rise to the state of self-renunciation through spiritual cultivation and training. Then, when at that time I receive another being from God, from whom my being has emanated, I think my small self can appear as a small part of God." Buddha also explained: "If, through that emancipation, I solved my life's problems in some way, I think the reason lies in my having experienced in that state that I am a part of God who is being helped by Him. I believe that all human beings can experience that they are a part of God who can serve God and that they are being helped by God. When we have such an experience, worldly desires and individual greed diminish and disappear in our heart, and we come to have some freedom in which to think about the other world. Therefore, self-reflection is absolutely necessary for us."

My hearing these words of Sakyamuni led me to the following thought: what all people including Buddhists, Christians, and Catholics instinctively feel in common is the fact that the people seeking God are surely incomplete and limited. I believe that when we find God and live with Him in accordance with the desire of our original mind, we will be able to have eternal happiness.