The Wheel and the Way: Introduction

One of my favourite traditions in recent years here on the blog has been for my main Fall series to look at Christian theology through an external lens to better understand ourselves through the face of an other. This is not to ‘appropriate’ any idea as our own, but to use another worldview as a mirror to help us see ourselves better as Christians. In 2021 I did this with Integral thought, in 2022 with Indigenous spiritualities, and, in 2023, with principles of permaculture. Last Fall, I was so disturbed by the state of contemporary Christianity that I elected instead to use Jesus’ own teaching in the Sermon on the Mount as such a mirror. (And indeed, I’ve largely focused on the basics this year, with series on reading the Bible and on the Parables of Jesus.) But I still think it’s a fascinating and helpful exercise to use other sets of ideas as a mirror to more clearly see the possibilities within our own faith. And so this Fall, I’m bringing the format back, and will be using another of the world’s largest faith traditions, Buddhism, as such a mirror.

Why Are Mirrors Helpful?

In my younger days, I was quite antagonistic towards other religious traditions. I saw them only as competing sets of truth claims that stood in opposition to Christianity, and were therefore full of lies and misconceptions and had nothing good to offer. I recognize now that this attitude was grounded in nothing more than my own immature insecurities. All truth is God’s truth, and well-intentioned seekers from around the world and across history, were sure to stumble across it in their quests, even if imperfectly. (As Paul reminded the Romans, “Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made; so [we] are without excuse.”)

But moreover, over the years I’ve discovered that the differences between world religions are often found less in the answers they have to life’s big questions than it is in the questions they ask. Judaism essentially asks, “What does it mean to live as God’s people?” Islam asks, “How do we live at peace with God and each other?” Western Christianity asks, “How are we saved?” Eastern Christianity, “Given that we are saved, how can we know and be united to God?” Because these traditions frame the question differently, they aren’t in quite as much ‘competition’ as one might expect, and understanding our own tradition through their questions can be very ‘juicy’ and helpful. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams expressed this idea well:

Other stories and other confessions enrich the Christian’s commitment: a prolonged sharing with a Jew, a Marxist, or a Buddhist will uncover facets of the human world which conventional Christian speech seems unaware of. The challenge then becomes … to manifest that such insights are ‘at home’ with the vision of Christ as universal Logos. If he can be found at the heart of another truthful, visionary and compassionate human project, the Easter gospel can indeed be seen to be catholic [i.e., universal and all-encompassing].” (Resurrection, 65)

In other words, learning about another tradition opens us up to truths in our own tradition that we’ve missed, or for which it hasn’t developed a language. One example of this for me with Buddhism is in its in-depth language surrounding meditation. For my Master’s thesis, I had written on the hesychast movement in late Byzantine Christianity, a movement which used meditative prayer as a means of union with God. But, while it had a robust language for defending its outcomes theologically, it lacked effective ways of communicating the practical whats and hows of this kind of prayer. This simply wasn’t their concern. When I encountered Buddhist writings on meditation, I could see it clearly express exactly what those Christian monks were able to talk about only clumsily. This encounter did not change what those monks believed or experienced, but elucidated what they were trying to express without a technical language.

Why Buddhism?

What makes Buddhism a juicy ‘conversation partner’ is that, unlike the other Abrahamic faiths, its aims are far more down-to-earth, philosophical rather than theological. Its main question seems simply to be, “How might we survive having a human consciousness?” That’s a universal question, but one on which our Christian tradition has not focused. This psychological bent is both why Buddhism was able to spread so widely across East Asia and why its local manifestations often look and sound so different from one another. Because it’s more interested in human existential realities than metaphysics, Buddhism can be easily layered on top of any existing set of beliefs, and so is expressed today in as vastly different ways as the animism of Tibetan Buddhism and the quasi-atheism worldview of Zen Buddhism. And this means that, as Christians looking at Buddhism, we need not get tripped up over metaphysicial differences, and can focus on the heart of the Buddha’s teaching.

As people have done this in recent centuries, this has proven to be a fruitful conversation. Brother David Steindle-Rast, a Christian monk who lived for many years in Zen Buddhist monasteries, concluded:

On one level there are great cultural differences: the two traditions grew up in entirely different settings, and so are dissimilar in many respects. But the moment that you penetrate through the accidental cultural differences, you find a remarkable similarity …. Then you go deeper still and you discover profound differences in approach …. Basically, the Biblical tradition centers on the Word in the widest sense: the divine speaks to us, approaches us, and we have to respond; we’re burdened with responsibility…. In Zen the stress is not on the word, but on the silence — the silence that is so profound that you can go down into it forever and ever. Openness, emptiness, void — all this permeates Zen … But then, if you go still deeper down, … you can experience communion and unity between the traditions in the complementarity of the Word and the silence. (”Become What You Are,” Parabola 7.4, p.73)

In other words, when we look at Buddhism, it’s not a question of ‘oh this is just like us (and therefore we have nothing to learn)’ or “oh this makes truth claims directly opposed to our beliefs (and therefore we have nothing to learn).’ Instead, there’s a dialectic, a push and pull of similarity and difference. And that’s where we might learn the most, not in order to become Buddhists ourselves, but to become better Christians through deepening our understanding of the teaching of Jesus. (This is, as it happens, the Dalai Lama’s own attitude towards interfaith learning.)

But in the interest of intellectual honesty, I also have more personal reasons for being interested in using Buddhist thought as a lens to better understand Christianity. For Buddhism was instrumental in my own return to Christian faith following my ‘dark night’. The collapse of the life I had built for myself had left me completely adrift. But it also opened me up to interests and areas of study I had previously left unexplored. One of these was Buddhism, which I had previously only looked at in my undergrad days, through that very antagonistic and insecure lens I mentioned earlier. And in that time of my life, its simple, accessible, and practical truths acted as a safety net that kept me from free-falling. It stabilized my mind and healed my heart and eventually gave me the clarity to realize that, while the givens of my life certainly made my belonging within Christianity more difficult, I was still profoundly shaped by the Gospel message and that Jesus was still my shepherd and I was still his sheep.

So for me, Buddhism represents a perfect subject for the kind of encounter I like for these Fall ‘mirror’ series.

Next time, I’ll introduce the figure of the Buddha and the nature of his teachings and see how that story might shed light on our own founding mythology as Christians. Then, over the next few weeks, I’ll look at the basic elements of Buddhist thought and how they compare with, contrast, and even illuminate the Gospel teachings.