Why I Say That Nothing Is Sacred
I am not merely saying that the Buddha is not sacred, or that the Buddha’s relics are not sacred. I do not believe that sacredness exists as an intrinsic property at all. I use the Buddha and relics because they are the most immediate examples for Buddhists. This is not an attempt to insult anyone or reduce everything valuable to something worthless. It is what follows when dependent arising is applied consistently: no person or object contains a self-existing essence called sacredness.
Consider a different life for Gotama Siddhattha. Suppose that he had not grown up as a prince among the Sakyans but had been abandoned in the mountains and raised by wolves without contact with human society. History contains reports of so-called feral children, and fiction gives us figures such as Tarzan. Had Gotama lived among animals without human contact, could he have become a Buddha?
One may imagine an exceedingly remote possibility in which he generated endless questions and answers alone and somehow reached the level of thought accumulated by civilization. In reality, it is nearly impossible. The reason we do not expect that child to become a Buddha is straightforward: he would not have entered the human network.
Civilization Is a Network of Questions and Answers
Human civilization consists of questions and the answers proposed for them. People ask what something is, why an event occurs, whether a plant is safe to eat, and whether there is a better method. They imagine, infer, and form hypotheses. When an accepted answer turns out to be wrong, another answer replaces it. Civilization is the accumulation of this movement between question and answer.
A solitary individual can pursue only a small number of questions in one lifetime. Yet every life is filled with implicit questions and answers: seeing clouds and judging that rain may come, deciding where to walk, or estimating whether a mushroom is edible. If every result remained sealed inside one individual, knowledge could develop only slightly.
Language changed that condition. One person could warn that a certain mushroom caused illness, while another could teach a better hunting method or a way to make a snare. Each discovered one thing, but after exchanging information both possessed two. Language made the exchange of information possible, connecting many separate cycles of questioning and answering into something like parallel computing.
The network also crosses time. The questions and answers of parents and grandparents pass to children and then to later generations. It crosses space as research and thought travel from the other side of the planet. The words of the Buddha from 2,600 years ago, along with the work of Nietzsche, Newton, and countless others, pass through many hands and reach a person living in the twenty-first century. Human beings become powerful not because an isolated individual is inherently extraordinary but because the network grows denser. It allows each of us to begin where no solitary lifetime could arrive.
Human greatness does not reside in an isolated individual. It resides in the network that carries questions and answers across space and time.
The Flower Called Buddha Bloomed from Human Civilization
Many lines of questioning already crossed one another in Gotama’s era. There were radical skepticism and materialism, ancient traditions of yoga and seated meditation, and teachers who trained him in the attainments called the sphere of nothingness and the sphere of neither perception nor non-perception. People had long asked whether their answers could be absolute truth, whether mind and body were separate, and whether there was an enduring self. Gotama encountered the Upanishadic and renunciant traditions and learned the answers circulating in his time.
Without this background, Buddhist awakening is easily misunderstood. One need not master every ancient school, but one must at least recognize the intellectual and contemplative soil from which Buddhism grew. The Buddha did not emerge alone from a vacuum. The flower called Buddha bloomed upon accumulated civilization and the many conditions Gotama encountered.
I make the point with deliberately harsh language: had he grown up running “with dogs” and never contacted human beings, he would have continued to bark and growl rather than speak of dependent arising and non-self at thirty-five. The wording is rough, but the argument is precise. Gotama’s awakening cannot be explained after removing him from the human network. It was one flower blooming within the whole of civilization.
Seeing Dependent Arising Makes Self-Sacralization Impossible
If the Buddha awakened to dependent arising, he would also have understood his awakening as dependently arisen. He could not coherently claim, “I awakened because I am inherently superior and divine, so everyone must worship me.” His insight depended on contemporary thought, teachers, language, earlier knowledge, and personal experience. Without those connections, the awakening would not have occurred.
Suppose I call myself an arahant today. If someone bows deeply, a reflex of pride may still appear. Yet seeing dependent arising, impermanence, and non-self also means recognizing at once that I did not awaken simply because I was superior. Someone else has not failed to awaken because of an inferior essence; the relevant conditions have not met. A result cannot appear without its causes and conditions.
The same is true of life itself. I cannot survive for minutes without air and could not be here without sunlight, water, food, parents, and society. Am I greater than the air? Could I live without the sun? I exist temporarily inside a network. The natural response to seeing this is not pride but gratitude: gratitude to the Buddha who opened a path, to those who carried his words, to one’s parents, to air, and to water.
One cannot see dependent arising and still claim, “I awakened because I am inherently great.” Awakening and life are both results of countless conditions.
An Arahant Still Responds to Conditions but Sees the Response
Awakening does not replace the human brain and body with different matter. A human is an animal, and even a Buddha remains human. Just as Pavlov’s dog salivated at a bell after it had been paired with food, human brains are conditioned. A song from the 1990s can bring back university days and quicken the heart because the song and those memories are linked in the brain.
We also absorb social judgments about beauty, greatness, and praise. Pride may surge when someone bows. The point is not to pretend that every conditioned response has vanished. An arahant sees, “I am responding to a condition,” “The wish to look impressive is rising,” or “This judgment was learned from society.” A momentary thought that one is great differs from accepting it as truth and constructing oneself as a sacred being.
When the pattern of one’s own existence is recognized, the understanding extends to others. If I awaken and fall into delusion according to conditions, so do they. What they have seen, heard, and experienced—their society, body, and memories—has contributed to their present conclusion. The basis for dividing people into inherently superior awakened beings and inferior deluded beings disappears.
Sacredness Is a Human Projection, Not a Property Inside Things
We can now return to the opening claim. It is not only I who am not sacred, nor only the Buddha. If every being is part of nature and arises through relationships, nothing possesses independent sacredness. People can agree that something is sacred and project emotions and wishes onto it, but that does not place a fixed sacred essence inside the object.
The Buddha was a flower that appeared while innumerable human questions and answers were being networked. Just as mutations arise as viruses divide and change, someone awakens amid the continuing exchange and transformation of human information. That person cannot sensibly announce, “I am a sacred virus.” He or she remains part of change and relationship. Because Buddhas and arahants see this dependent arising, they cannot make themselves inherently great and sacred or demand the bows of others.
I, too, lived without understanding for nearly fifty years before certain conditions allowed me to see something. There is no reason to curse my earlier self as essentially stupid and exalt my present self as sacred. Then I lived among the conditions of that time; now I live among the conditions of this time. When this is visible, conceit becomes difficult to sustain.
Are the Buddha’s Relics Sacred?
If Gotama Siddhattha and his awakening were not independently sacred, how could bones remaining after his cremation be sacred in themselves? People need objects of reliance and project many wishes onto them. Through that history, relics from the Buddha’s body became objects of faith. I do not deny that this religious role has existed.
But those seeking Buddhism as a path of wisdom must move beyond the belief that relics themselves contain sacredness. When awakening becomes a mysterious power and the Buddha, relics, or particular objects become inherently holy, dependent arising is lost from view. Instead of seeking an object to worship as sacred, we should examine the conditions and relationships through which it arose.
The world is dependently arisen. Nothing is sacred, yet there is no end to what deserves gratitude. We can be grateful for the people and knowledge that allow us to learn, the natural and social worlds that sustain us, and every condition reaching us today. Seeing dependent arising does not erase value. It abandons the illusion of isolated sacredness and reveals more clearly the connections that make our lives possible.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.