THE INTRARELIGIOUS REALIZATION

Ruminations of an American Zen Buddhist

I threw up my hands when I was invited to respond to pronouncements by His Holiness John Paul II on the subject of Buddhism. I felt that his Christianity was so exclusive and evangelical, his views of Buddhism were so completely misinformed, and his words about prominent Buddhist leaders were so condescending and patronizing that I would not be able to reply from any kind of common ground. Here is his case for Catholic Christianity:

Christ is absolutely original and absolutely unique. If He were only a wise man like Socrates, if He were a "prophet" like Muhammad, if He were "enlightened" like the Buddha, without any doubt, He would not be what He is. He is the one mediator between God and humanity.

The Vietnamese Buddhist teacher and poet Thich Nhat Hanh cites this passage in his Living Buddha Living Christ, and comments:

Of course Christ is unique. Socrates, Muhammad, the Buddha, you, and I are all unique. The idea behind the statement, however, is the notion that Christianity provides the only way of salvation, and all other religious traditions are of no use. This attitude excludes the dialogue and fosters religious intolerance and discrimination. It does not help."

I agree. It is indeed an absolute, exclusive position. From there, His Holiness draws a bead on Buddhism:

The "enlightenment" experienced by the Buddha comes down to he conviction that the world is bad, that it is the source of evil and suffering for man. To liberate oneself from this evil, one must free oneself from this world....The fullness of such a detachment is not union with God, but what is called nirvana, a state of perfect indifference with regard to the world.

Quite the contrary, the Buddha did not declare the world to be the source of human misery. Instead the source can be found in the persistent, subjective errors that people make about the world and their place in it. It seems that in speaking of Buddhist notions of source and liberation, His Holiness was referring to the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, a Buddhist teaching that forms the foundation of Classical Buddhism, and from which the many schools of Buddhism have evolved. In that basic teaching, The Buddha said that dukkha is everywhere. Dukkha is a Pali word which is variously translated as unsatisfactoriness, suffering, anguish. This misery is everywhere among people. Its source is the human tendency to cling to notions of a permanent and exclusive self. Liberation from such erroneous attachment is nirvana, and can be found on a path of practice that begins with right views of impermanence and interdependence, and continues through eight steps of thought, speech and action, ending with right meditation.

The specific Zen Buddhist view about the human being and the world can be summed up in the final two lines of Hakuin Ekaku's "Song of Zazen": "This very place is the Lotus Land [Nirvana],/ this very body the Buddha." This world, where people are so unhappy, can be experienced as Elysium itself. You and I are already fulfilled. Our task is to realize such facts. One way or another, other Mahāyāna schools of Buddhism, and Vajrayāna schools too, would say something similar.

Having said all this, I must also acknowledge that fine words butter no parsnips. His Holiness can be holier than we Buddhists, and we Buddhists can fall into the same kind of invidious rhetoric. There is, in fact, more than a trace of truth in his generalizations. Buddhist teaching is of this world, but it is not a teaching that is significantly implemented in the world, at least not in Europe and in the Americas. Thich Nhat Hanh urges compassionate attitudes and actions in his talks and his many books. Various others (I include myself) write essays or entire books that set forth social critiques that are Buddhist in orientation. However, there are few manifest exemplars who are actually engaged in challenging a culture of disassociation, displacement, and alienation. The Buddhist Peace Fellowship is a forum and a coordinating agency for Buddhists interested in social change, but the many Buddhist communities in the Americas and Europe are by and large left with little defense against the norms of consumerism, which can exert a far more telling and salient influence than their religious practice. Until practice becomes praxis, Western Buddhists cannot claim truly to be of this world.

Moreover, Buddhists generally do not match the passion with which His Holiness Pope John Paul II addresses the horrors of child labor, widespread inter-ethnic murder and rape, and other large-scale depredations across the world. We cannot take much satisfaction in our metaphysics of mercy. For the most part, even inter-religious dialogues are sponsored, not by Buddhists, but by Christians or by consortiums of scholars.

His Holiness invites dialogue with non-Christians in his writings and by reaching out to them in colloquia, such as the assemblies of leaders of major religions sponsored by the Vatican in 1984 and 1991. Probably no major religious leader has done more to bring high priests and eminent scholars of the many faiths together for the purpose of mutual understanding. These are not just exercises in comparative religion, but are explicitly intended as dialogues of spiritual experience.

Even in the personal writings of His Holiness, so full of disingenuous perceptions of Buddhism, I can find an opening for communication. He cites with favor Nostra Aetate, a document of the Second Vatical Council on non-Christian religions:

"The Holy Spirit works effectively even outside the visible structures of the Church, making use of...semina verbi [seeds of the Word], that constitutes a kind of common soteriological root present in all religions."

"Seeds of the Word" would not be my expression, of course. But suppose it could refer to seeds of all religions in the spiritual womb in every person. An analogy would be the human talent for language. Like other people, I was born with the innate capacity to learn any language, and happened to grow up in an English-speaking family. Cultivating my ordinary human talent, I have learned other languages. Also, I grew up in a Protestant Christian family, but with my natural capacity to understand the heart of other religions, I cultivated my Buddhist potential. I am enriched as one whose Buddhism informs his Christianity, and whose Christianity informs his Buddhism.

Probably my upbringing in a tolerant setting has helped me to be this flexible. I am not an East European who battled for decades to protect his faith against benighted governments. I don't expect His Holiness to be able to embrace Buddhism as Ramakrishna could embrace Islam. I would simply hope that he might broaden and deepen his own Christian sympathy for others to the degree that he could, for example, allow Zen Buddhism a place among religions, rather than just a niche labeled "Eastern method of therapy." The encounter of religions sponsored by the Vatican could then become enlarged. We could get down to cases, and start to deal intimately and existentially with the possibilities of intrareligious realization.

Let me offer one such possibility from my perspective: I submit that the Holy Spirit, which in Nostra Aetate Pope John XXIII found working effectively outside the visible structures of the Church, is no other than the Bodhisattva Kuan-yin, not merely as a Christian angel of mercy in the guise of a Buddhist archetype, but Kuan-yin herself with her thousand hands serving the many beings--even as this same spirit is no other than Jesus preaching the Gospel and dying on his cross for our sins, with no connection whatever to anything Buddhist. And there are other ways Christian metaphors could be expanded. Nostra Aetate declares:

There is only one community and it consists of all peoples. They have only one origin, since God inhabited the entire earth with the whole human race. And they have one ultimate destiny, God, whose providence, goodness and plan for salvation extend to all."

Suppose this image were enlarged, and the one community could rather be one network, made up of people whose destiny is a common potential for spiritual fulfillment, not necessarily just within a monotheistic religion, but in whatever religion the people find themselves. Moreover the network could also include animals, plants, clouds, stars, and so on, all encouraged to find fulfillment in their own ways.

Conventional Christianity would have to be deepened, of course. At the end of the Gospel of Mark, we find Jesus saying:

Go into the whole world, preach the gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized shall be saved, but he who does not believe shall be condemned.

The Gospel of Mark has gone through many translations, but the essential message of this passage can still be discerned. We accept the Good News of liberation, our obligation to love selflessly, and our intimacy with our own wellsprings, or we are condemned to a living death, not by an angry God, but by the nature of reality and the human heart. That is just how it is.

World events and modern technology press these truths upon us. Chinese, Ruwandas, Chileans--all of us--speak to one another as though we were in the same room. In fact, we are indeed in the same room. It is not only possible but imperative to uncover our love for the many others. We either cultivate and implement profound reconciliation of outer differences once and for all, or by the crushing pressure of political, economic, and technological implosion we shall surely squash each other into a bloody pudding.

Reconciliation of seemingly implacable religio-political positions that divide our world is a matter of seeing into the metaphors of the other, sharing our own metaphors, and living the truths which theirs and ours illuminate. Far deeper, and far more inspiring than the literal, the motifs of folk stories, myths and poetry are cognate the world over. When I find the words of Jesus to his disciples to be my own truths, my misunderstanding of Christianity falls away. However, if I were to treat such words verbatim and interpret them within a closed system, I would be just reinforcing the bulwarks of institutional religion and ethnic justification.

All colleges offer a course in logic, as indeed they should. All colleges, and all secondary and primary schools and nurseries as well, should also teach metaphor as the Tao of liberation through folk stories, myths and poetry. When a young adult can be guided, say, to experience a wild duck as a thought, flashing out of sight in the mind of the boundless skull, the world will be saved in that moment--for that moment. All things will spring to infinite possibilities within their own spheres. The human skin will no longer be impervious, but will enclose all bodies. Alienation will for the duration of the realization be the only alien. Thereafter, the way to prove the experience again and again in praxis will be clear.

There is a venerable history of communication by metaphor. Long before Alexander the Great brought his troops to the kingdoms that are now Pakistan, tales and legends were carried by merchants, travelers and pilgrims from India to Turkey to Greece and back. They found common ground with their hearers. We find the same stories, which is to say, the same experiences, in Aesop's Fables and the Jataka Tales. The Buddha himself appears in the communion of Christian saints in the guise of Saint Josaphat, a prince who left his palace in search of enlightenment.

Intimacy between religions and their metaphors also developed in the oasis towns along the silk route connecting China with India and Persia. Archaeologists have discovered Nestorian writings dating from the eighth century that apply Buddhist terminology to Christian principles. Christian texts in Chinese call themselves sūtras, and employ Mahāyāna imagery and notions "almost to the point of losing their identity."

Yet by the time Jesuits entered Japan and China in the 16th century, no trace of understanding between Christians and Buddhists remained. Even knowledge of each other had died out. In Japan there was a brief interval of harmonious misunderstanding, but both sides were disillusioned very quickly. Eventually, for political reasons, Christianity was proscribed, with torture and violent death for the faithful. In China it became clear to the Mandarins that the Christians were interested in conversion, not in metaphorical interchange, and the mission that was established with such high hopes had to accept a tiny, marginal place in the panoply of Chinese religious culture.

In the nineteenth century, however, when Asian texts began to be available in European translations, thinkers from Emerson and Thoreau to Schopenhauer found inspiration in Buddhist and Hindu metaphors. The reverse took place in Asia, particularly with the acceptance of Christian social and educational ideals. Now at the end of the twentieth century, well-established societies of Buddhist-Christian interchange from the scholarly to the monastic flourish in Asia, North America, and Europe. Interest in the practice of Buddhism is also widespread in Western countries. Buddhist America, a standard directory, lists more than 500 Buddhist practice centers in the United States and Canada, almost all of them with lay membership. They represent the three major Buddhist schools: Mahāyāna, Vajrayāna, Theravāda. Spot-checking, I find that many prominent centers are not listed, so it seems that 500 is probably too low a figure. As His Holiness remarks "Today we are seeing a certain diffusion of Buddhism in the West" Indeed.

I can speak only for Zen Buddhism (with some hesitation, for even Zen is by no means monolithic). We can trace the "diffusion" of Zen among Roman Catholics in Europe and the Americas to the influence of Thomas Merton, Hugo Lassalle, Aelred Graham, David Steindl-Rast, William Johnston, Thomas Hand, and other Catholic monks, priests, and nuns who explored Zen practice to one degree or another and shared their experiences. Thomas Merton, through his friendship and correspondence with the Japanese Zen Buddhist scholar D.T. Suzuki, and through his writings about Zen, was particularly inspiring to his fellow cistercians. I remember taking tea after a Zen retreat with Catholics in Washington State about 1980. By way of introducing himself, a Trappist monk peeled off his robe to expose his T-shirt, on which was inscribed in bold letters, "Thomas Merton Monk."

In my own work, however, I find myself closest to Father Lassalle--Hugo Mabiki Enomiya-Lassalle (1898-1990). A Jesuit priest, he was a lifetime resident and naturalized subject of Japan who first explored the possibilities of Zen Buddhism in 1943, then took up the practice with Harada Sogaku Rōshi of Hosshin Monastery in Fukui Prefecture. After Harada Rōshi died in 1961, Father Lassalle continued his Zen Buddhist study with his heir, Yasutani Haku'un Rōshi, then with Yamada Koun Rōshi, Yasutani Rōshi's heir in turn, whose little center in Kamakura during the 1970s and early 1980s was crowded with Catholic priests and nuns who had been influenced by Father Lassalle's example.

Father Lassalle was a Christian who sought ways to become a better Christian through his practice of Zen Buddhism. Stephen Batchelor in his cogent study, The Awakening of the West, points out that Lassalle recommended Zen Buddhist practice for Christians as a way to the central experience of kensho, a realization that Lassalle viewed as "neither Buddhist nor Christian nor necessarily connected with any religious confession." He made it clear that he regarded kensho as a refined psychological experience that could lead to a vision of God.

Some twelve Christians who were influenced by Father Lassalle and became heirs of Yamada Rōshi are teaching Zen Buddhism in large communities in Europe, and also in Dallas, Manila, and Madras. They are part of the Sanbo Kyodan ("Order of the Three Treasures") that emerged from the Harada-Yasutani line and is administered from the temple that Yamada Rōshi founded in Kamakura. Most of these Christian teachers are Roman Catholic priests and nuns, but one is a Protestant minister, one a lay Catholic, and one a former priest.

Father Lassalle might have been their inspiration, but not all of them hew to his line. One who was inspired, Father Willigis Jager, now a central figure among Sanbo Kyodan teachers in Germany, insists that Zen itself is beyond any religion. It is on this very point that controversy has erupted among the Sanbo Kyodan teachers. The range of opinion seems to reflect the emphasis some teachers will place upon kensho as an experience that leads one back to deeper Christianity, and the importance others will place upon lifetime Zen practice--preparing the way for kensho, and clarifying and integrating it thereafter. Teachers at this latter end of the spectrum will affirm the unique nature of kensho in the fields of organized religion, and the place of Zen as a Buddhist tradition. Thus in a relatively small network, in a fairly recent tradition, there is complex diversity.

My own community, the Diamond Sangha, is another relatively recent tradition. Rooted in the Sanbo Kyodan, it is organizationally independent. At Diamond Sangha centers in the Americas, Australasia, and Europe, there is rarely an overt sign of Christianity. It is not absent, however. Speaking personally, as a teacher of Zen Buddhism in the Diamond Sangha tradition, I am a Buddhist, yet nonetheless I am also a Protestant Christian who never converted, in the decisive sense of that term, to Buddhism. I find the metaphorical language of Jesus and Old Testament figures rising to my mind when I speak to my students. Somehow such expressions as "Love never faileth," and "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you," maintain their archetypal power in the depths of my mind. I know that Jesus Christ is indeed the redeemer of all humankind. It is essential that we take up his cross and follow him. If everybody does, then the whole world will be redeemed. With my lineage as a Diamond Sangha master, I too am conducting a Buddhist-Christian dialogue at a certain place on the spectrum. Moreover, I and other Diamond Sangha teachers find Christians among our members, and indeed two of the Diamond Sangha teachers with full transmission are themselves Christian clerics, one Catholic and one Protestant: Father Patrick Hawk of Amarillo, Texas, and the Reverend Dr. Rolf Drosten of Leverkusen, Germany.

Some Catholic priests and sisters who are teachers of Zen Buddhism also lead Christian contemplative retreats. They too have become elements of Buddhist-Christian interchange. The participants in these retreats, unlike their counterparts fifty years ago, no longer sit in chairs with their chins on their chests. They sit up straight and count their breaths in good Buddhist style while they settle into their Christian meditation. They commonly sit on zafus, the Zen Buddhist cushions, in line along the wall on two sides of the room, leaving a third side free for the entrance, and the fourth for the altar, very much like Zen Buddhist meditation halls in Japan.

Thus Zen Buddhist teachers who are Christian are breaking new ground, and there are other possibilities. The Diamond Sangha has enlarged itself to include an "Affiliate Master," a Catholic Sister and retired community director, Pia Gyger of St. Katharina-Werke in Basel, Switzerland. Unlike Zen Buddhist teachers with Dharma transmission who are also Catholic or Protestant, she is a Catholic superior who is also fully qualified as a Zen Buddhist teacher. The difference is subtle but real, and she may ultimately be viewed as the founder of a new tradition within the edifice of the Church itself.

Under Sister Pia's influence, the members of St. Katharina- Werke have not only integrated Zen training into their Catholic community, but have also spun off programs to bring young people of warring areas of the world together for reconciliation, to work with the poor in the slums of Manila, and to speak truth to power in the halls of the United Nations. If Buddhism as a religion of this world lacks exemplars in the Americas and Europe, the religion of St. Katharina-Werk, by whatever name, offers one of its own.

There is still another model--scholars of the Buddhist- Christian dialogue who inform, and in many ways guide both Buddhists and Christians. Their translations, commentaries and original thinking offer invaluable insight and orientation to those of us sitting in our mediation halls. There is something far more visceral than academic research and learned exchange involved in the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies, with its substantial journal full of cogent disquisitions, and its hugely successful conferences. One of its leaders, John Cobb, has said that Buddhists "lack something of supreme importance when they do not incorporate Jesus Christ into their Buddhism." Such eminent Buddhist scholars as Masao Abe and Keiji Nishitani argue that shunyata, the potent vacancy realized in Zen Buddhist practice, is a positive remedy for the discouraging, if not terrifying nihility that some Christians reach in their devotions.

I understand Cobb, Abe, and Nishitani to be saying that a radical commitment to relate to, and take in metaphors of the other serves not just the cause of the Buddhist-Christian interchange, but also the profound human process of integration and peace. But perhaps there is a limit to such interchange. I have heard that after meeting for dialogue annually for a period of ten years, Christians and Buddhists in Kyoto found that they had nothing more to talk about. By unanimous agreement, they established an ecumenical program of prison visitation. This would be another model of applying the intrareligious realization: a community enlarged to include Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, working side by side in the prison, the hospice, the political demonstration, the school.

Integration in the realms of practice, interchange, and shared social endeavor is not a blend or a concoction. More than a millennia ago, Nestorian Christianity apparently attempted a kind of blanc-mange of religion, in which distinctions between Christianity and Buddhism were blurred. It died out, as it must inevitably, for the archetypal metaphors of both sides were obscured, and inspiration was thus lost. Though occasionally one will see conflation in contemporary Christian-Buddhist settings, it is generally deplored. I have heard, for example, that "Dharma," in its meaning "Buddhist teaching," was translated as "Good News" ("Gospel") by one Sanbo Kyodan teacher, and this was roundly condemned by others. The intrareligious realization encompasses: it is not a mixture. Christianity and Buddhism, not to mention Islam, Judaism, the various Yogas, Taoism, Confucianism, Shinto, and indigenous practices--each can mature the human heart-mind of the sincere student of religious mystery.

In the realm of mytho-history, the Buddhist-Christian dialogue began with the visit to the baby Jesus by the Three Wise Men from the East. Forgotten for so many centuries, it has revived and is taking a fascinating, complex course. How can the process be summed up? Where do we stand, and what might the future hold? It is evident that we have come to the place where John Cobb could feel comfortable in suggesting that Buddhists should learn Jesus, and where Masao Abe and Keiji Nishitani were safe in suggesting that Christians should learn that the twenty kinds of emptiness are themselves empty. The interchange and intrachange move on from there. Buddhists are beginning to experiment with co-housing and to stand with Catholic Workers and Plowshare activists in challenging the acquisitive system. Christians experiment with zazen and realize the dynamic and timeless oneness and its boundless, fertile ramifications.

Still, the end is by no means yet. For the most part, Buddhists and Christians remain in the phase of dialogue. Moreover, in the context of Buddhist-Catholic interchange, it is crystal clear that we will stay where we are officially, at least for a while. See, for countless examples, Interreligious Dialogue: The Official Teaching of the Catholic Church (1963- 1995), a collection of 199 pronouncements by John Paul II and his immediate predecessors, plus a number of other Church documents. Not only is the same patronizing message of Catholic faith repeated over and over, it does not deviate a bit from the historical method and purpose of missionizing which the Church has maintained for centuries. In 1982, at the fourth centennial of the establishment of Matteo Ricci's mission in China, Pope John Paul II cited with favor a comment in a letter from Fr. Ricci's companion, Michael Ruggieri, "We have become Chinese...to win the Chinese to Christ." Four hundred years have passed. In most ways we live in a different world, but fundamentally the way of Matteo Ricci and his colleagues has changed only in methods of technology and communication.

Make no mistake. Ramakrishna became a Muslim to become a Muslim, and thus enlarge his Hinduism. If he had a missionizing purpose, it was that enlarging is good for one's own religious practice. Pope John Paul II has a very different kind of missionizing in mind, and we must await a sea-change in the Church and its patriarchy before intrareligious realization can be possible on any scale.

Note: This essay was edited by Nelson Foster and Greg Mello. It was originally published in No Faith is an Island, by Pope John Paul II, edited by Harold Kasimow, Orbis, New York.

-Robert Aitken, 2000