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)

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.”

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.

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.

That’s quite an achievement.  Finding a common word about the economy between Buddhists and Christians who share few common words about “theology” (Buddhists are uncomfortable with the word, theology) will be surprising to many.  It’s an indication, I think, that religions can more easily find agreement about ethics than they can about doctrine.

In any case, our “Common Word” will soon be announced once it has been vetted by the organizations who sponsored our dialogue (the World Council of Churches and the Lutheran World Federation).

For the moment, I can offer a preview of the content of our Common Word under the slogan: “The Way to the Global Is through the Glocal.”  That’s cutesy, I know. But it contains a powerful insight.  Let me try to explain briefly.

Throughout our conference, as I tried to make clear in earlier blogs, we – both Christians and Buddhists – agreed that to understand and do something about the financial crisis that now surrounds us, we cannot talk only about personal or individual greed.   Rather, we have to recognize and grapple with the reality of structural greed. Personal greed takes on the form of structural greed, and structural greed takes on a life of its own.  So to prevent similar economic catastrophes from happening in the future, we have to deal with the greed that has become incarnated in the structures of the global economy.

But how do that?   These structures of greed are incredibly powerful, living as they do, not just in the neoliberal economic policies of Wall Street, but also in the politics of Washington, Berlin, London, Tokyo –as well as in the public media that determine how people think of their nation and its economic policies.

So it’s not very promising to start from the top of the economic, political, and media systems.  It seems impossible to start with trying to dismantle greed in its structural forms.

But that doesn’t mean that we should therefore simply start from the bottom – that is, from the level of personal greed.  Of course, we must always seek to transform individual hearts. But that is not enough to change structures.

Therefore – and this gets to the heart of our Common Word – we should focus our energies not on the structural level, nor on the personal-individual level – but on the local level.

On the grassroots level, in our local communities, at the roots of civil society we should try to create structures that will insure economic policies and practices that will promote the democratization of the economy – that will prevent economic power from being concentrated in the hands of a few, that will provide a process of checks and balances for economic transactions.

We identified four examples of such local efforts that are already taking shape in different parts of the world: local exchange and trading systems (LETS) in which trading is done in local and regional currencies, cooperative banking, decentralized energy, and localizing the production and exchange of goods necessary for basic needs such as water and food.

Such local efforts, which are based in personal values  and which try to create local structures of greater economic participation, will not remain just local.  As these local realizations of a new way of organizing the market and the production and exchange of goods increase, and especially as they network with each other, they will have a transformative effect on global structures.  They will become “glocal.”

But, at the end of the process, the Buddhists reminded us Christians, that all these efforts on the “glocal” level meant to transform the “global” level, won’t really work unless we are also continuously working on the “personal” level.  Our efforts to transform the world have to be rooted in our efforts to transform our own hearts.

As Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us:  We cannot make peace unless we are peace.

So the message of our conference is this:  As we all seek to transform our hearts from self-centeredness and expand our hearts toward compassion for others, we work on the local level, trying to create new ways of organizing our local economy that, we hope, will gradually transform the global economy.   Our focus is the local. Our goal is the global.  We act glocally.

The Christians responded to their Buddhist partners: “Yes, we certainly agree, but you can’t forget that greed can take on structural forms and become part of the very economic system of free-market capitalism.”

And so the first day of our Buddhist-Christian dialogue began.

After a good bit of back and forth, we came to a working consensus:  We have to make a distinction between individual greed and structural greed.  Though the two are very much related, there is a difference.  Getting rid of one, does not necessarily mean getting rid of the other.  I can remove all (or to be realistic, most) of my own individual greed and still be part of a greedy system that leads me to act greedily, whether I’m aware of it or not.  My heart may be full of love of others, but if I buy a pair of pants made in a sweatshop in El Salvador, I’m part of a greed-based system that is exploiting some people for personal wealth.

But at the same time, we can pass all kinds of regulatory laws that constrict the greedy actions of Wall Street, and still, greedy individuals will find ways around the laws.

A simple analogy was used: Individual greed is like the air that a greedy person blows into a balloon. The balloon represents the greedy structure or system that results from the greedy individual.  The Buddhist point is that without the greedy individual blower we would not have the “structural” greedy balloon.  But the Christians respond that sometimes, the balloon ties itself closed, as it were, and floats away from the blower. Then, even though the individual blower stops blowing, the balloon is still floating around. The balloon, even though it originated from the blower, assumes an existence of its own.

So we came to a Buddhist-Christian consensus:  to do something about the financial mess we are in, we have to try to remove, or at least reduce, both individual greed and structural greed at the same time.   To deal with only one, won’t work. It won’t really bring about any change.

This is the point that was made powerfully by one of the speakers this morning, Sulak Sivaraksa, one of the world’s leading socially-engaged Buddhists (who over the past 30 years has been  on a number of occasions either imprisoned or forced into exile because of his criticisms of economic exploitation in Thailand).

Sulak said pithily: “Without inner peace there cannot be outer peace.” That’s the Buddhists’ point: you have to work on changing your heart and attaining the peace of enlightenment before you can be an effective social activist.  But he immediately added:  “But inner peace can be achieved at the expense of outer peace.”  That’s the Christian point:  To think that we have done enough by overcoming our individual greed and attaining peace of heart is to exonerate ourselves from the necessary job of changing the greedy structures that prevent social peace.

We Buddhists and Christians are realizing that we have so much to learn from each other.

We’ve come together to talk about the financial tsunami that moved out from Wall Street in 2007 and covered most of the world. Our questions: why did it happen? And especially: What can we do about it?

We start this evening, Sunday, and will be talking and deliberating – as well as praying and meditating – together for the next four days.

This is exactly the kind of dialogue that I, with many others, have been trying to move along – dialogue based primarily on solidarity with all suffering sentient beings. In this case, the sentient beings are suffering because of economic conditions that have led to a horrible and deplorable disparity in the way the goods of the world are shared.

This is the kind of dialogue that certainly doesn’t exclude the hard work of studying and learning about each other’s traditions and the inspiring work of sharing in the spiritual-mystical treasures found in the religions of the world.  But it sets the context, or prepares the ground, for such theological and spiritual sharing by first deliberating and acting together to address eco-human suffering.

What counts most, what presses most, is, as Buddha told us, to remove suffering.  In trying to do that, we prepare for everything else.

In the following days, I’ll try to report on what happens here in Chiang Mai – how Buddhists and Christians can complement each other in addressing the immediate financial crisis and the deeper causes that brought it about.  And how this practical “dialogue of solidarity” might lead us to a deeper “dialogue of learning” and a “dialogue of spirituality.”

What a privilege it is to be here.

That’s what I felt as I rode the train back from Washington, D.C. the night of June 7, after attending a meeting at the White House on “Advancing Interfaith and Community Service on College and University Campuses.”  It was organized by the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

It made clear to me, and I dare say to all of the 110 invitees, that those of us who are committed to promoting better relations and more effective cooperation between the religious communities of this country (and the world) have a friend in the President who now lives in the White House.

That’s a statement I don’t make easily.  I travelled to this meeting with my left-leaning guard up:  politicians are keen, and experienced, at using religion and religious leaders for their own political purposes.  If religion is supposed to be one of those sources of truth spoken to power, it suits “power” to befriend, and soften, “religion.”

I soon lowered my guard and opened my mind and heart.  Joshua DuBois, former Pentecostal minister, and presently Executive Director of the Office on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, together with his energetic and articulate Deputy Director, Mara Vanderslice, made it clear to us, in both the content of what they said and the way they said it, that they were genuinely interested, as Vanderslice put it, “to increase collaboration between universities, colleges, and seminaries in their interfaith activities and White House efforts to call religious communities to cooperate for the greater good of our society and the world.”

Mara Vanderslice, Deputy Director, White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships; Joshua DuBois, Executive Director of same, Rev. E. Terri LaVelle, Director of Veteran Affairs.

DuBois made it clear, especially for secular critics who fear transgressions of church-state borders, that this effort of the Obama Administration places its focus on bringing religions together not on the basis of shared beliefs but on the basis of shared action. This reflects what President Obama said in his first talk at a National Prayer Breakfast: he clearly recognizes the enduring differences between religions; he’s not out to boil those differences down to one common religious soup.  But Obama, and his administration, believe that the religions do have one thing in common: the desire to serve – the desire to respond to human needs and problems and do something.

This is where, the White House believes, religious believers, despite their real differences, can come together – and even be joined by secular humanists who also want to serve: they all can stand and act shoulder to shoulder in imaging and achieving “what good might look like.”

That last phrase came from Eboo Patel, the young, dynamic Muslim founder of the Interfaith Youth Core and one of the 25 members of Obama’s “Council of Advisors” for the White House Office on Interfaith. Patel delivered a short keynote address to launch the meeting and further conversations.

His main point was that “Interfaith, ” – the one-word designation for the dialogue and collaboration of religions that must replace the competition and clash of religions – is at what Malcolm Gladwell would call “a tipping point.”  Our society is coming to the realization (but is not quite there) that if our nation, as well as the community of nations, is going to effectively deal with the problems confronting us, religions are going to have to get along with each other and make their contribution.  That means that whether you’re a religious believer yourself or not, you’re going to have to deal with religion – with religions in the plural.

This is where Steven Prothero, Professor of Religion at Boston University and well known author of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, and Doesn’t, offered his input. He highlighted both the growing awareness that “religious literacy” is today becoming an essential part of being educated.  When one goes to college one should expect just as much to learn about religious diversity as one expects to learn how to dissect a frog.  The term “interfaith” must become as much a part of our general knowledge and concerns as “ecology” and “human rights.”

And for religious believers themselves, Patel pointed out to the affirming nods of all participants, this presents a challenge.  Religions today stand before four possible paths: 1) religious communities can become bubbles, and try to shut off the rest of the world; 2) they can become barriers and by insisting that “my God is better than your God” increase the tensions among nations; 3) they can become bombs, and actively call their followers to resort to violence to defend their identities or supremacy; 4) or, they can become bridges of mutual respect and collaboration.

Clearly, the reason why the White House called us religious types together, and the reason why we all responded eagerly and hopefully, is that we share the conviction that now more than ever we can, and we must, make sure that at this “tipping point,” religious believers and religious leaders become bridges – or in the terms of the White House, partners in service.

The religious experts, leaders, scholars and organizers who attended this meeting felt that what they were trying to do was confirmed and affirmed.  It was a relief and a reassurance to know that this President understands “faith-based initiatives” to mean “multi-faith based initiatives”  — with the emphasis on service.

Personally, I found this meeting to be a confirmation both of what I have been trying to do as a scholar over the past 40 years and of what we are trying to do here at Union with the redefined Paul Tillich Chair.   As I tried to lay out in my 1995 book, One Earth Many Religions, the most promising and the most urgent kind of interreligious dialogue doesn’t begin with interreligious conversations about what we believe; it begins with interreligious collaboration about issues that concern us all.  If we start there, if we can become friends in such solidarity of action, we will create the spaces of trust and respect in which we can, and will want to, talk about the beliefs that ground us and animate us in our efforts to serve.

When I summarized this at the end of the meeting, Mr. DuBois pronounced a Pentecostal “Amen.”

I rode the train back to New York with a palpitating sense of gratitude – and hope.

Although I am a Christian theologian, I contend that a just social order must be accountable to not one but many religious communities. If we are going to create a society that is responsive to the humanity of all, then we must not view one religious faith as absolute. Ultimate reality, to which all things are subject, is too mysterious to be exclusively limited to one people’s view of God. Any creation of a just social order must take into account that God has been known and experienced in many different ways. Because we have an imperfect grasp of divine reality, we must not regard our limited vision as absolute. Solidarity among all human communities is  antithetical to religious exclusivism. God’s truth comes in many colors and is revealed in many cultures, histories, and unexpected places. — (James H. Cone, “Black Theology and Solidarity” in Lorine M. Getz and Ruy O. Costa, eds. Struggles for Solidarity: Liberation Theologies in Tension, Minneapolis, M.N.: Fortress Press, 1992, p. 47.)

What a ringing endorsement of the need for inter-religious dialogue and for a more “pluralist” Christian theology of religions!  And it’s coming not from a scholar of comparative religions or from a John-Hick-type philosopher of religion — but from the father of Black Liberation Theology. His words are powerful and challenging for any Christian theology: there can be “no just social order” unless many religions are contributing to it…Ultimate Reality is too big for any one religion… liberating solidarity is “antithetical to religious exclusivism” …  the Christian vision, like all religious visions, is “limited” and cannot regard itself as “absolute.”

Well, if James Cone has served up this endorsement of a more pluralistic theology and dialogue of religions, I would say that the ball is now in the court of us so-called theologians of religions and inter-religious dialoguers.   Cone is basically saying that there cannot be any effective liberation without interreligious dialogue.  I believe that those of us given to the dialogue of religions must respond with the admission that there can be no authentic dialogue without liberation.   If a truly world-wide struggle for liberation calls for the dialogue of many religious communities, then the dialogue of religions must respond by making sure that when religions get together to talk, they don’t just talk about religion.  They have to also talk about the realities of human and environmental suffering due to injustice.

When religious people come together to “dialogue,” the topics must be not only “ultimate reality,” “life after death,” “prayer and meditation;’  the dialogical agenda must also include human rights, poverty, housing, economic disparity, political policies.  And as Jim Cone told me in one of our first conversations after I came to join the faculty here at Union Theological Seminary,  inter-religious dialogue here in the United States must also talk about White Supremacy.

And of course, when religious people come together to talk about liberation and overcoming injustice, they can’t just talk.  They will also have to act — to walk the talk together.   James Cone, occupied all his life with the reality of racial and economic injustice, recognizes that he also has to engage in inter-religious dialogue.   Christian theologians of religions (also called “comparative theologians”), occupied with the need for dialogue, must recognize that they have to engage in efforts toward liberation.

“Liberation and dialogue” — the two have to go together.  James Cone realized that back in the early 90s.   I hope that more and more people — theologians or whoever — can share that realization.