Do You Believe in Miracles?

Do you?

I know a lot of Buddhists who do. I was fortunate to be asked by Buddhadharma: the Practitioner’s Quarterly to participate in a discussion on the topic with Judy Lief and Ari Goldfield. Here’s a excerpt. A link to the pdf file is below.

Buddhadharma: When you say that miracles were a part of what people perceived all of the time in older cultures, did you mean that more of what we would call miraculous events were actually occurring, or that their worldview encompassed a more miraculous perception of ordinary events?

Judy Lief: In many cultures not so based on scientific materialism, people perceive a much thinner veil between different modes of reality. In the modern world, we have much stronger borders around our defined reality. Spirits, unusual energies, magic and black magic, and so forth are just part of the web of ordinary reality in many cultures and have been for a very long time. So you have to wonder whether all those people are out of their minds, or if there is possibly a different reality happening.

Glenn Wallis: Or is it possible that we’re just talking about figures of speech, ways of speaking? Is it possible that talking about gods and so forth is just an indispensable element in people’s vocabulary? We have lots of these in our own language. “God bless you,” for example, does not necessarily profess any belief in God and the conveying of blessing. Or when we talk about having love in our heart, it is more poetic in function. It would be a mistake for some future historian to look back and say that we believed that love dwells in the actual physical heart. In the literature of ancient India, it was necessary to advertise supernatural possibility. I just listened to a swami give a talk last week, and she started out talking about the clairvoyance and clairaudience of her teacher and how she herself also had such capacity. It occurred to me that her talk followed the rhetorical structure of an ancient text. It began by laying out supernatural wonders. I’m supposed to feel there’s tremendous power in these teachings and that she therefore deserves my patronage and participation. But it never seems to come down to actually working with what’s being posed in the claim. It ends with the claim itself, and that’s what makes me wonder if ancient peoples just tended to talk in these terms, as more poetic, evocative ways of expressing themselves, rather than that they actually saw spirits and experienced miracles.

Here’s the entire discussion:

Do You Believe in Miracles?

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