“If God lies at the heart of all things; and if … he is no kind of entity at all but a sublime abyss of pure nothingness; then what sustains phenomena is a sort of néant or abyssal void. … To say that things lack substance is to say they are the eloquent discourse of the divine.  God — sheer  nothingness — is of their essence. The elusive object known as substance is simply a fantasy object filling out the void of the Real — which is to say … the unbearable presence of the Almighty. And since God would have no tangible presence on earth without the ceaseless deciphering of his discourse which is human perception, our own existence is necessary…”

Would Eagleton, who at his core is still a committed though critical Christian,  be offended if I called him “an anonymous Buddhist”?  I hope not. I think not.

Today’s “Glimpse” helps me, I think, come to a deeper sense of what it means to be a Christian, or of what it means to call Jesus Christ my savior.

Tibetan Buddhism understands the relationship between the disciple and the master like this:

When you have fully recognized that the nature of your mind is the same as that of the master,  from then on you and the master can never be separate, because the master is one with the nature of your mind, always present, as it is.

When you have recognized that the master and you are inseparable, an enormous gratitude and sense of awe and homage is born in you.

“Nature of your mind” would be another way of trying to refer to “our deepest self” or “my self-consciousness.”  For Tibetan Buddhists, the relationship between Master and disciple is to experience that one’s deepest self-awareness is really the same as the self-awareness of the Master. There is so separation.  The source of who I am and the source of who the Master is are both different and yet the same, distinct but not in any way separable.

When the student realizes this, there is a transformation of the sense of self. There is an awareness that who I am is so much greater that what I think I am or what I feel I am. To come to the awareness that “who I am” is “the same as that of the master” is to experience, within myself, a resource of peace, of freedom, and of compassion for myself and for others.

Once again, Buddhism offers Christians the opportunity to understand a little more deeply what St. Paul was trying to get at when he told the Galatians: “It is not longer I that live but Christ who lives in and as me.” (2:20)

“To each individual the manifestation of the Spirit is given for some benefit. …. we were all given to drink of one Spirit.”  I Cor 12: 7, 13

The Spirit is real.  The Spirit is given as drink.  Drink the Spirit.  And let the Spirit manifest in me, as me.

The Spirit needs me to be Spirit; I need the Spirit to be me.

No me, no Spirit.  No Spirit, no me.

Without me, the Spirit could not be this particular manifestation.  This particular manifestation is the Spirit.

Let the Spirit manifest; let the Spirit be – be me.

Know that the Spirit is real.  Let the Spirit be real.  Let the Spirit be me.

This is who I really am – Spirit.  Not the thoughts of myself; not the feelings I have about myself, as real as those thoughts and feelings are.  But they are not what I really, truly am.  My real I is Spirit, Christ-Spirit.

When we recognize a feeling of fear or discouragement or inadequacy or hatred, when we recognize a thought that tells us that this person doesn’t like me – when we identify such feelings as thoughts and, as it were, look them squarely into the eyes and face them for what they are – just thoughts or feelings –- then the miracle can happen. They lose their reality; or at least, they lose their power to identify who we think we are, or who we think other people are.

And when they lose their power to identify, something else can take their place.  “Something else” – that’s the mystery part of this experience; it’s something else that brings peace, or strength, or reassurance.

This is where “mindfulness” and my Christian experience seem to connect.  St. Paul identifies what it means to be a Christian in his powerful, pithy statement: To be a Christian means to realize – with a realization that is a transformation – that “it is not I who live but Christ who lives as me.” (Gal. 2:20) This is where mindfulness can perform its miracle for Christians, for in the practice of mindfulness, as Buddhists teach it, the exercise of being mindful of what I am feeling or thinking is an exercise that identifies this thought as “not I” –this is not who I really am.

Mindfulness, in other words, clears my consciousness of “I” so that the consciousness of “Christ” can move in.

Mindfulness is a means that Buddhism offers Christians to really allow the “it is not I” to be felt, to be realized.  And once that begins to happen, then the realization can take place that what really defines me, what I really am, is “not I but Christ.”

For Christians, to be truly mindful is to be “in Christ Jesus.”

Back on June 8, 2010, I did a blog titled “We’ve Got a Friend: Obama and Interfaith.” It summarized a meeting I attended at the White House, along with about 100 other religious scholars and leaders, organized by the “White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.”  The focus of the meeting was how to advance interfaith and community service on college and university campuses.

Well, Obama has carried through on the commitments he and his Office made back in June.  A few days ago, on March 17, he announced  the “President’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge.”   As stated on the website of the Office of Faith-Based Partnerships, it is “an initiative inviting institutions of higher education to commit to a year of interfaith cooperation and community service programming on campus.”

Obama’s challenge lays out concrete steps calling on students and staff, teachers and administration, of higher education to promote specific programs that will enable their learning communities to become interfaith learning-through-serving communities. And there will even be awards for the most creative and effective projects.

Amid the turmoil swirling around the world and in the White House offices – the tragedy in Japan, the violence in the Middle East – clearly this interfaith initiative does not rank anywhere near the top of the list of hot news items.  But it may be one of the most significant in its long-range promise.

Obama is calling for greater religious literacy.  But he is doing so by calling, first, for greater religious cooperation.  The ideals that motivate him are the same that motivate many of us who are trying to promote more effective interreligious dialogue through interreligious cooperation.

Becoming multi-religious friends in mutual efforts to help others is an effective way of deepening not just our tolerance of each other, not just our understanding of each other, but also our ability to learn from each other.   Academics use some fancy, but engaging, language to express this dynamic:  dia-praxis leads to dia-logue. Doing leads to learning.

Religious people who act together stay together in continued learning and respect for each other.

My hopes for universities and colleges across the country reflect my hopes for our community at Union Theological Seminary – that next academic year we will all take up President Obama’s challenge and engage in specific, interfaith collaborative projects in order to meet the needs of our city and country.

By walking and acting together, we will talk and learn together.

With this Guest Blog, I’m delighted to introduce the newest addition to the Union Theological Seminary faculty, a close friend,  and a fellow “comparative theologian” and “double-belonger.”  These are his reflections on “Learning from Multiple Religious Participation.”

I am a Christian theologian who loves Buddhism.

Unlike some who turn to Buddhism because of trauma from a toxic or inadequate version of Christianity, my love for Buddhism is not a product of alienation. My religious family of origin is not ideal — no family is — but my first Christian home, the Mar Thoma Church, and now the Episcopal Church, have done right by me. They both convey to me a progressive, justice-seeking, and reflective Christianity, one that never demands that I sacrifice intellect in order to embrace faith.

So why the fascination with Buddhism?

I am drawn to Buddhist traditions not to correct felt deficits in my own tradition, but to deepen my experience of the world by entering into another way of understanding and living. I seek a new kind of wisdom that our age requires.

In an older era, a person was accounted wise if he or she attained to a practical mastery of one tradition. Think St. Francis of Assisi. But our age requires also (not instead of) a new kind of wisdom: the capacity to see the world through more than one set of religious lenses and to integrate into one life, insofar as possible, what is disclosed through those lenses. Think Mahatma Gandhi. His theory and practice of nonviolent resistance integrated ideas and practices drawn from Jainism, Christianity (Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in particular), and, of course, Hinduism.

For lack of a better phrase, I call this binocular wisdom, an extension from binocular vision, vision generated by both eyes, the only kind that yields depth perspective.

We need the depth perspective of binocular wisdom for many reasons. First, increasingly many among us incorporate into our lives religious practices drawn from more than one tradition. Christians who do vipassana meditation or yoga are increasingly the norm. What is less common is reflection about the meaning of multiple religious participation. Few ask how, for example, the Buddhist wisdom that drives vipassana and Christian wisdom enacted in the Eucharist might be held together.

We also need this kind of wisdom because interfaith marriages are becoming routine. A great temptation here is to downplay religious matters for fear of conflict. Or, the most insistent parent is permitted to win: all right, the kids can go to church and not synagogue. But might this kind of double life be a source of promise and not a divisive problem? We need binocular wisdom to pull this off.

And, of course, we also need binocular wisdom to address the vast global crises of our time such as the growing gap worldwide between the rich and the poor and ecological problems that no tradition can navigate alone. Christian teaching about the natural world as God’s good creation when taken together with the Buddhist quest to end self-seeking desire promises more than either tradition can offer alone.

How might such wisdom and integration work?

Let’s begin with a small example: “Life hurts.” That is my working, albeit non-standard, translation of the Pali phrase sabbham dukkham, the First of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, which is customarily translated, “All is suffering.” The latter is the more accurate translation, literally speaking, although it suggests that neither pleasure, satisfaction, nor contentment is possible in life. That is a manifestly mistaken reading of Buddhist wisdom. One need only spend a few minutes around Tibetan Buddhist monks or enter a vast lecture hall in which the Dalai Lama is speaking to feel in one’s bones the profound joy that marks the lives of advanced practitioners.

So, what does the First Noble Truth show me as it is lived out in practice?

To say that life hurts is to name a truth that most of us spend every waking moment avoiding. Through mindfulness practice which, counter-intuitively, is the practice of leaning into life’s hurts rather than running away from them, I am coming to see daily just how much time I spend in futile attempts to evade regular visitations of pain. The memory of a lost love, the sudden intrusion into mind of some personal failing, the nagging anxiety of the undone task — mindfulness practice helps me to recognize and abandon my unrealistic quest either to avoid or to anesthetize myself from these jabs of hurt that visit me, often many times a minute.

By holding my aversion to pain in gentle, compassionate, and attentive regard — another way to understand mindfulness — I gain a measure of liberation (the standard translation of “nirvana”) from the conditioned, even addictive patterns that drive my behavior. Still more, the practice of compassionate regard is happily addictive, and it bleeds over into my disposition toward others. I am reminded that others too are making their way through twinges, jabs, and outright blows of suffering. The irritations, failings, and even the flat out nastiness of others are not about me but the disturbing fruit of unaddressed hurt.

What does this practice mean for my Christian life? As my own vipassana teacher, Gordon Peerman, an Episcopal priest who is also an advanced Buddhist practitioner, loves to say, “Buddhist practice enables me to operationalize the Christian calling to love my neighbor.” That sounds exactly right to me because it is confirmed in my experience.

I am no saint. But I am now somewhat less prone to irritation when my tween daughter insists on winning an argument. That is no advanced accomplishment on the road to mystic vision, but it is a lovely gift on the way toward a gentler life, a life that is all the more Christian for being Buddhist.

One could say much about what we Christians — especially we Christian activists or liberationists — have to learn from the Buddhist insistence that unless we spend time, lots of time, sitting under a Bodhi tree and seeking enlightenment, we’re not going to be able to really change the world and its structures.  That message came through again and again in my dialogues in Korea.  And I know I have not yet fully understood what it is telling me.

But I’m not sure whether the Buddhists I spoke with really grasped what I think is one of the DISTINCTIVE ingredients in what Jesus discovered about the Mystery he called God/Father.  It’s contained in the cross.

I recently came across a powerful expression of this distinctive message of Christianity in a book by Terry Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics. (Wily-Blackwell, 2009):

If God is indeed in one sense utterly other, he is also made manifest [for Christians and for the world]  in the tortured body of a reviled political criminal … The ghastly good news of the gospel is that being done to death by the state for speaking up for love and justice is the status to which we must all aspire. The message of the New Testament is that if you don’t love you are dead, and if you do, they will kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky and your opium of the people. It is a message scandalous alike to the civilized liberal, the militant humanist and the wide-eyed progressive.  (p. 256)

Eagleton’s statement is strong.  I would change his “the status to which we all must aspire” to “for which we all must be ready.”  Still, his (and my) understanding of the Gospel as not only calling us to have compassion and love our neighbor (that the Buddhists would readily agree with) but to also confront the systemic powers that be (the state or the economic system) and be ready to accept the uncomfortable or deadly consequences — this is a message that the Korean Buddhists I talked with found difficult to comprehend.

Which means that “the sitting Buddha” and “the crucified Christ” have a lot to learn from each other.

New Year Talk

For the past eight days, my wife Cathy and I have been rushing – or better, have been gently rushed – around the peninsula of South Korea as part of a project aimed at promoting a more fruitful dialogue between Buddhists and Christians.  The seed of this venture was planted, and then nurtured, by my Korean doctoral student, Mr. Kyongil Jung.  But because of unexpected political and religious developments, the seed produced a sprawling tree, rather than just a healthy bush.

The unexpected circumstances had to do with fundamentalist Korean Christians who over recent months have invaded Buddhist temples in Seoul and Daegu in an effort to exorcize the “demonic powers” there and proclaim the eventual triumph of Christianity.

So in the midst of this turmoil, a septuagenarian Christian scholar from New York arrives to talk about the value and need of Buddhist-Christian dialogue and to speak about his recent book Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian. To talk about dialogue in the midst of such conflict had the semblance of urging relaxation in the midst of an earthquake. Still quaking, the Chogye Order of Korean Seon (Zen) Buddhists held to their invitation and asked this foreign Christian to come and talk.

Dialogue with Zen Master Jinjesunim

The media reacted with what seemed to me a journalistic feeding frenzy. With their cameras and recorders and interview-teams, they were swarming around almost constantly, eager to determine not only what I, the Christian theologian and foreigner, had to say, but also, and especially, what the Buddhist monks and laypersons were asking and how they were responding.

There were one-on-one dialogues with Seon Master Jinje-sunim,  the  most respected Buddhist teacher in Korea.  There were panel and community discussions with monks at the temples of Donghwa-sah (in Daegu), Haewoonjung-sah (in Pusan), and Gilsang-sah (Seoul) and many casual, but sometimes intense, conversations over meals.

The core of our conversations crystallized, I believe, in three different events.  On two different New Year’s celebrations (Jan 1 and 4), I was asked to follow the official Dharma talk of Jinje-sunim and address packed audiences of Buddhist lay people.  One of these talks took place at the very spot where Christians had invaded and desecrated.  So here was the Buddhist community responding to Christian hatred by inviting a Christian theologian and practitioner to speak to them – to enter into a dialogue with them!

And I was moved, almost to tears, when, after I assured them that many, many Christians disagreed with what these extremist Christians had done, and after I asked them to forgive and have compassion on these Christians – they responded with affirming bows and applause.

The other crystallized moment came when the abbot of Haewoonjung-sa asked Cathy to lead the monks and an assembly of about 50 laypeople, who were there for their 30 day winter retreat, in meditation!  They knew that she practices and teaches a form of Tibetan meditation that is quite different from their Zen practice. Still, they wanted to show their hospitality and their openness to learn.

With Executive Chief of the Korean Buddhist Chogye Order

The final event of our line up of dialogical encounters came on our last evening in Seoul, at the recently built and beautiful International Seon  Center.  There was a panel of four Buddhist and four Christian teachers/scholars who responded to my questions about with how to deal with Christian fanaticism and, more importantly, how to promote greater interreligious dialogue and conversation.  It was a fervent, forthright, and sometimes tense conversation. But there was agreement on the basics: the need for broader education and understanding of one’s religious neighbors, and the urgency and opportunity to bring Buddhists and Christians together to address these conflicts and to show that religion can be a greater source of peace than of violence.

The conversation at the Seon Center went on for almost three hours, with some 300 people in the audience, all of us sitting cross legged! (I managed the sitting part, but then could not get up afterwards!).

As I realized over the course of these few but intense days, the Korean Buddhists of the Chogye Order had invited me not only to learn more about Christianity but also to ask that I help make their teachings better known in the United States.  Having witnessed the seriousness of their practice, having been moved by the openness and compassion with which they reacted to the hatred of some of their fellow Christian citizens – I am extremely happy to do so.

The first question asks about the very nature of the self.

The second seeks to understand the positioning of the self, suspecting that if we know where we fit in, or what we are part of, we will better grasp what we really are.  Location reveals nature.

Buddha and Jesus answer that second question – “Where the Heck Am I?” – a bit differently, without contradicting each other.

The Buddha’s answer is contained in today’s (4 October) “Glimpse of the Day” which I receive every day from the Tibetan school of Buddhism that I try to practice:

• “Imagine an empty vase. The space inside is exactly the same as the space outside. Only the fragile walls of the vase separate one from the other. Our Buddha-mind is enclosed within the walls of our ordinary mind. But when we become enlightened, it is as if the vase shatters into pieces. The space “inside” merges instantly into the space “outside.” They become one: There and then we realize that they were never separate or different; they were always the same.”

I think that Jesus’ answer would be best captured by St. Paul’s announcement in his letter to the Galatians:

• “It is no longer I who live but Christ who is doing the living in me, as me.” (2:20)

Both answers are getting at what I think is the heart of all religious experience: the realization that we are part of a much bigger picture, and that our lives find purpose and energy when we allow that “big picture” to, as it were, take over.

But there’s a difference between Buddha and Jesus.

• For Buddhists, the “vase” is broken and disappears.
• For Christians, the vase becomes transparent, or porous.

For Buddhists, we are the big picture (Buddha-mind).

For Christians, the big picture (Christ-mind) is us.

No big difference between the two.

But all the difference in the world when we wake up to either.

Raimon Panikkar

Read this beautiful commentary on a man who was one of the greatest influences and inspirations in my life. For me and for my wife Cathy, one of the most telling tributes to the kind of person Panikkar was came from our kids, John and Moira. We visited him in 1991, on the long trip through Europe on our way to my sabbatical in India. Of all the many theologian-friends of mine whom John (14 at the time) and Moira (11) met as we tramped our way through Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, Raimon was the only one they really enjoyed. He connected with them and engaged them. We still have a photo of Raimon showing John how to drink from a Spanish skin-canteen. … His dream of a world of greater interreligious and intercultural dialogue goes on through all the people whose lives he touched and inspired.