A Flood of Bridges: Varieties of peace in interreligious dialogue
by Jeffrey Wattles, Kent State University
Published in Patricia Rife and Loretta Scott, eds., Peace Stories (Victoria, British Columbia: Trafford Press, 2008), 39-46.
The challenge of Buddhism for me was that it was the most radically different from Christianity of all the major world religions. Two experience-sequences connected with the rock garden at the Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto, Japan, have helped me as a person who professes to follow Jesus to enter dialogue with Buddhists. In the following narrative I pause to comment on the peace of the bright night, philosophic peace, psychic peace, the peace of utter calm, the peace of Jesus, the peace of compassion, and dialogic peace.
The setting
I have to explain some personal background first. Introduced to Christianity as a child, my early devotion waned with the onset of puberty, and I found myself in college searching in Plato and Nietzsche and Husserl; it was a displaced quest for spiritual vitality. In 1970, I had begun the practice of transcendental meditation, repeating a mantra was designed to take the mind to samadhi, "pure consciousness." The experience of meditation was attractive and restful, and I felt a number of good results in my life—more relaxed spontaneity, humor, keen perception, heightened mental clarity and concentration, fruits of the spirit. But the experience of samadhi, an absolute peace which I call, the peace of the bright night, and which I had for different "durations" on different occasions, raised a question which was for a few years the most urgent question of my life. What is the significance of that experience? What is ontologically disclosed in pure consciousness? Within Hindu philosophy there was a clear answer: it is the atman, the Self, non-different from Brahman, the absolutely unitary ultimate Reality. But I could never satisfy myself with that answer, because I was not persuaded by the reasoning I had been given and because I became committed to a concept of a supremely personal God (whose impersonal aspects may be meditatively touched). Thus I could not find philosophical peace about this experience. In addition, I had a question about the psychological effect of different practices in the realm of willing—decision and action. Life is, often, a rugged adventure, whose pleasures and bliss must not unravel our ability for and interest in willed encounter. In other words, there is a kind of psychic peace that seems to mask life rather than to live life.
In decision that engaged my total self, I finally chose to follow a single path of worship and service, rather than a dual path of combining my Christian spirituality with the cultivation of samadhi. I have not totally settled for myself of the meaning of samadhi, but I have had partially clear recurrences of the experience in the context of my deepest penetrations in thought of the Fatherhood of God, of God as absolute, and of the indewelling spirit. I have always assumed, however, that there should be nothing to worry about as long as such moments arose spontaneously within devotion and were not themselves cultivated as a religious goal.
The first visit
The first experience-sequence was part of a family visit to Japan in 1986. One day we came to visit friends at Ritsumeikan University, just a couple of hundred yards from the Ryoanji temple, where we went after our visit was over. Like other Buddhist temples in Japan, this one is more than a building: it includes dozens or hundreds of acres of wooded land, with a lake on the grounds and a mountain in the background, and many buildings for monastic use. The Ryoanji temple belongs to a sect of Zen Buddhism, and its garden of raked sand and rocks is world famous, even more simple on account of the absence in it of the small trees which are normally part of such gardens. Getting the feel of the grounds somewhat, I found myself attracted to this lovely center of monastic discipline and study. I had studied enough Buddhism to teach sections in world religion courses, but it had been the religion with which I was least able to empathize. Nonetheless, I had a long-standing interest in Japanese art as an avenue for a certain type of spirituality, and I sat down amid the quiet group of tourists to contemplate the renowned rock garden. I looked; I contemplated; and within a few seconds was suddenly invaded by a depth of peace that left me speechless. This peace I will call the peace of utter calm. The word "emptiness" is equally fitting. Perceptual experience of the scene did not cease, but contemporaneous with this perception was a thorough calm, an absolute calm.
Shortly I began to react to this calm, I became frightened and disturbed. I got up, moved about, put my theological mind into gear, and wandered back with my family to the bus stop.
The rock garden seemed to be carrying me toward that old peace with a velocity that far exceeded that of the mantra meditation. "What is this peace?" I wondered, as I returned to Osaka? All of a sudden, the old issue, resolved only in terms of daily practice, thrust itself forward anew. Let me emphasize that I did not re-enter samadhi at the rock garden; I simply felt the calming direction, the profound entry of a peace that did not fit within the context of my Christian religious theory as developed at that time. I also make no claim that my experience at the rock garden gives insight into Buddhism.
The next morning after the disturbing peace at the rock garden, I awoke with an experience of the peace of Jesus, a compassion that had warmth and color, uplift, and, somehow an answer. I had never before felt so strongly this peace that passes understanding with its loving specificity. That experience in no way answered my question about the meaning and value of samadhi, the calm anterior to all religious response. But I felt confirmed in what I had devoted myself to years before. It was indeed a striking sequence, but it faded in memory until two summers later.
Later I realized that there is a Buddhist interpretation of my dawn experience of peace: it is an example of the peace of compassion, a prominent quality of Buddhism. One can in fact engage endlessly in the intellectual exercise of viewing X through Y and Y through X. There is a certain diplomatic skill in being able to discuss different viewpoints. According to one philosophic perspective the peace of compassion is an essence which is interpreted in one tradition as the peace of Jesus and in another tradition as the peace of, say, Amida; these interpretations are viewed as accretions which are not essential, albeit no concrete experience can perhaps be had without some such accretions. Philosophic questions arise, however, that philosophy cannot answer. Are Christian or Amidist views mere interpretations of a more universal experience, or is "the peace of compassion" a name for the universal accessibility of the peace of Jesus (or of the Buddha)? Philosophy cannot resolve the last question, but it should understand what these questions are, rather than assuming one view or another uncritically. There is also the question of how close one person's experience is to another's, especially if they belong to different traditions, and how one could get any answer to that question and how important it is to find out. Intellectual exercise, however, is not where the peace is found. In maturity, the sublime peace should permeate intellectual activity (and all other activities), resulting in an enduring peace in life. And I suppose that sublime peace invades the intellectual life, in part, by being represented in major premises of one's philosophy.
The second visit
In June of 1988 I went again to Kyoto, wanting to meet someone from the Jodo Shin Shu tradition. I had heard of parallels between this sect of Buddhism and Christianity and wanted dialogue with a representative of that tradition. My motives were a mix of curiosity, adventure, enthusiasm, and evangelism.
I was to meet my contact at Ritsumeikan University, and, having arrived nearly an hour early, thought it well to go over to the temple to prepare somehow for our meeting. I did not want my diverse ambitions to spoil our encounter, and was praying to that end, somewhat unable to concentrate my prayer.
Wandering again with other tourists, I came to the rock garden. It looked small, unimpressive as I walked by. The sculptures of Rodin, say, are made to be dynamically attractive as one walks by them attentively; I put the rock garden to this test and found it that morning utterly lacking in such a feature. But I sat down again for a moment, lacking a strong focus for prayer and opened myself once again. And a second time came an invasion of peace, even more sudden and more profound, if possible, than before.
Getting up, utterly surprised at a repeat performance, at first I felt as though I had been "hit below the religion." (The phrase modifies the idiomatic expression, “hit below the belt,” the name for an unfair blow in boxing.) The peace came at a level which could not be reached by my religion. But this time, as I put my philosophic mind in gear, there were more resources. There was no need to seek a transcending peace of Jesus. I was able to incorporate the experience as a step of growth on my Christian path.
I am convinced that part of what our age is about is the realization of what I still call the brotherhood of man—and by that I mean the radical, spiritual equality of all people, women and men, rich and poor, Buddhist and Christian, etc. Religiously speaking, we are all the sons and daughters of God. It was easy to interpret my experience of calm and to facilitate the continuation of its power through the following thought. The realization of equality is not one that can be fully grasped by the desiring mind; it is a gift. It comes as an abyss that uproots manipulative intention. It heals self-abnegation. The abyss of calm induced by the rock garden brought a certain radical dimension of the experience of equality. I looked forward to the coming meeting not clinging to my religious identify, but drenched with the awareness of the power of the reality of the fact that the person I was about to meet was radically my equal, equal not by any measurement, but equal beyond measurement. I do not believe that all religions offer equally valid accounts of reality, but my beliefs about Buddhism and Christianity as religions have no standing on the abyss of that equality.
In the dialogue that followed, I asked for information about Jodo Shin Shu and was generously rewarded. I expressed my desire to build bridges between traditions, and my partner, Mark Unno, encouraged some of my efforts to compare western and eastern concepts. I realized that no theological merger was imminent, but that I was obviously in the presence of a young man of deep spiritual sincerity. As he was speaking about some theme, I experienced "a flood of bridges" rushing over from his side to mine—not just a thread of theory, but a massive spiritual unity. And he became interested in my religious philosophy as well. Thus my evangelistic goals (to share religious thoughts of my own), which had vanished, were satisfied. This experience I call dialogic peace. I have seen this peace make possible the transition from strained to living dialogue. Communion is in fact a much better word than dialogue, because the words, while by no means unimportant, are dwarfed by comparison with the Real that both are recognizing.
For me, then, there is an experience of an abyss of calm different from the peace I identify as having a Jesusonian quality to it. The experience of this radical abyss was induced by the Buddhist scene as I opened myself to it. That calm enabled me to succeed with the admonition, "Be not anxious," to be truly brotherly on my own standards, to treat my partner as I would be treated, to love him in openness. Along with the gift of this calm came the privative results: a falling away of hierarchal images of my relationship to my partner, indeed an utter emptiness of self. Through the mediation of a Buddhist garden could I fulfill my goals as a Christian. I have been able to return to readmit this abyss, with at least partial clarity, when I have needed to establish a straight relationship with another person.
I suppose that the drama of the onset of some of these experiences of peace results in part from the energy of submerged hostility which is being transformed in the moments of breakthrough. That hostility, perhaps never permanently released from human life, foments an ongoing need for peace-receiving. Lucid about the structure of the process, those who have received peace can be peace-makers. And the circle is that, our efforts to be peace-makers will, in their mix of success and failure, reveal our ongoing need to continue to receive peace. Furthermore, it is by extending ourselves in peace-making that we open ourselves to the invasion of peace. Finally, it is often through the human other that the divine Other can inject us with peace.
Given my religious commitments, I would now hazard the present organization of these kinds of peace. The supreme peace, the peace of Jesus, manifests the personal love of God, a compassion for all beings. The peace of the bright night is a glimpse of unity beyond all real differentiation. The peace of utter calm grounds equality in human relating (and, for that matter, healing in our ambiguous relation to nature)—a unity that annihilates religious intolerance. At some point effort at systematic philosophy is no longer serviceable. To go beyond philosophy is the only way to find real a beginning for philosophy and for life in peace. At least these experiences and interpretations may illustrate aspects of a typical effort of Westerners to somehow comprehend and/or embrace East Asian . . . and now words already fail: "experience" and "religion" bear connotations that are waiting to be rejected: "experience" sounds too subjectivistic; "religion" sounds too systematized.