BUDDHISM DOES NOT CONTRADICT CHRISTIAN FAITH

 BUDDHISM DOES NOT CONTRADICT MY CHRISTIAN FAITH 

 Although Buddhism has been one of the greatest passions of my life, I almost never talk about it. Few of my colleagues are aware that my first research degree was in Buddhist philosophy. Few of my Christian friends are aware that my first religious practice was Zen. 

My reticence stems from the way contemporary Western culture constructs Buddhism. The reaction of one of my students to an undergraduate course I taught was typical. “But when are we going to study Buddhism?” “This is a course in Christian thought. We won’t be looking at Buddhism.” Her face fell. “But I’m only interested in Buddhism.”

Buddhism for most of us in the West has a glow of mystery and romance about it. It possesses an exotic, mystical appeal that we do not sense in our own religious heritage. This effect is multiplied by the perception that in Buddhism, “You don’t have to believe anything” – it is simply a practice, floating blissfully free of any binding claims to which we might have to subscribe. Popular Buddhist leaders contribute to this perception, as in the Dalai Lama’s comment: “My religion is simple. My religion is kindness.” For the dogma-phobic culture of the post-1960s generation and liberally educated youth, Buddhism spells liberation from the straitjacket of doctrine.

But it takes only a brief acquaintance with early Buddhism, and with Buddhist practice in countries to which it is indigenous, to grasp what a mirage this image is. Native Buddhist institutions in south Asia, for example, are authoritarian, dogmatic (I do not use the word as an insult) and extremely creedal. Sri Lanka’s Theravada tradition makes the Catholic Church look like a hotbed of feminism. The cult of the Dalai Lama was about as brutal as any medieval feudalism, with gangs of monastic thugs to enforce submission, refined methods of torture, and armed clashes with rival sects. Zen demands a degree of conformity and obedience that would raise the hackles of any self-respecting child of Western modernity.

I say all this not in the slightest to impugn Buddhism. It is the exceptionalism with which Westerners often view Buddhism that irks me, not Buddhism’s own complicity in the general sin and ambiguity of humanity, which is rather curiously reassuring.

But there is one sense in which I think Buddhism is exceptional: it seems to me the finest natural philosophy there is. Nowhere else have I found the human mind so exactingly dissected, its pathologies diagnosed with such electrifying insight. Its analysis of the world of experience, of the realities we make for ourselves, seems to me one of the pinnacles of human intellect.

My admiration for Buddhism’s acuity of observation and analysis does not contradict my Christian faith, which came to me, as it happens, in the very midst of studying and practising Buddhism. I see Buddhism as simply a spiritual expression of modern medicine: it describes and diagnoses the suffering human being.

The pressing contradiction is rather in the treatment that it offers, and I maintain, against the hopes of well-meaning syncretists and perennialists, that it is a real contradiction. The Buddha’s medicine is meant to give us a mind that will no longer suffer. Correct spiritual practice will make us suffer less, and eventually not at all, as we come to perceive that suffering is a mistaken reaction to this world, a misperception.

But the Gospel, in flagrant defiance of such a reasonable course of treatment, makes us more susceptible to suffering, not less. I do not mean simply that we are invited to put ourselves in the way of pain and death for the sake of Christ. I mean that, taking Christ as our example, the holy response to situations of loss and agony is quite simply to suffer: to fall upon the ground and weep, to beg for deliverance, to sweat drops of blood. Nowhere in the foundational Buddhist texts would the realised practitioner suffer in this way. There it would signify a poor level of spiritual attainment indeed.

In one classic Buddhist text, the world is a burning house, and the Buddha shows suffering humanity how to escape from it. In the burning house that is a world of sin, Christ offers no escape, but rather, a command to remain in the fire, until it be extinguished.

I know which of these two is the most tempting. But something in me knows that suffering is a truthful response to this world. So I am not a Buddhist.

Carmody Grey is a doctoral student in theology at the University of Bristol.