One of my Neighboring Faiths middle schoolers recently asked me, with a raised eyebrow no less, “So, do you have to be a Buddhist to attain enlightenment?”  

     Well, do you?  

     We want simply to answer, “No.  Enlightenment is available to everyone, regardless of their religious disposition.”  But, this answer is misleading--and, frankly, harmful.  While, yes, enlightenment is certainly available to everyone, not everyone can attain it without committing to a set of traditions and practices that are culturally shaped by the wholly Eastern religious tradition we call Buddhism.

     There is a modern impulse to generalize religious meaning.  We say, “All religions, when you boil them down, are about this or that.”  When we default to this kind of thinking, it only serves to quell our own anxieties about religious difference.  True inclusivity is indeed curious about and open to religious difference.  Religion, among other things, is a cultural expression of a people, and we do people harm by generalizing and negating the expression of their culturally specific lived experience.

     Consider food.  We all need nourishment, but we consume a vast array of different foods to nourish our bodies. Moreover, we grow, process, and cook  food in myriad different ways.  

 For instance, tandoori chicken cannot be made on a stovetop.  The dish is what it is precisely because it’s cooked in a tandoor - a cylindrical clay oven.  We can call what we approximate in our American kitchens “tandoori chicken,” but it’s just that--an approximation that falls short of how the dish looks, smells, and tastes as a specifically Punjabi culinary expression.  When I want real tandoori chicken, I go to an Indian restaurant that uses a tandoor.

     The middle schooler was seeking spiritual nourishment--an answer to a truly universal question about what happens when we die.  Different cultures express answers to that question sometimes in substantively different ways.  In fact, how we answer that question may actually shape our experience of death--how we anticipate it, prepare for it, and encounter it.  (How we differently prepare the same food has a significant impact on how it tastes.)

     Eastern concepts of enlightenment and Western concepts of heaven frame and understand the afterlife differently, and those differences are worth exploring.  We may find the differences are important for choosing a spiritual path.  Or, we may find the differences intellectually fascinating, and we are enriched simply by a deeper understanding of different expressions of religious meaning.