How Buddha saved Christ

When I was an undergrad in college, I wrote this paper on Plato, which I titled “The Erotic Love of Wisdom.” It was supposed to be my undergraduate thesis paper but in reality it was probably just me jerking off on paper.

Someone proof read the paper for me, probably a professor, but I don’t remember who, and told me that the ideas I was championing in the paper reminded them of a video that had recently watched on Gnosticism. I had never heard of Gnosticism so I went and rented the video.

There really isn’t anything worth reporting about that movie. It was a shoddy piece of documentary video shot by a new age production company championing their own esoteric brand of Christianity, and using the discover of Gnostic texts in Egypt to support their outlandish claims. Needless to say I was under impressed, but I was interested to learn more about the discovery of never before seen texts written by Christians about Christianity from within a few hundred years of the death of Jesus.

I bought myself a copy of the Nag Hammadi Library; the collection of texts referred to in the movie and set about reading them. Fascinated, looked in the front of the book and learned that the book had been published in connection with the Claremont Graduate School in Claremont C.A. Called them. Got an application, and Voila I was in Graduate school studying the first four hundred years of Christianity.

You could say my interest in ancient Christian texts is a by-product of my brand of Christianity. That is, for me Christianity begins with the revelation. In the beginning was the word, and while it is over simplified, one could understand Christianity as a kind of explanation of the revelation, communicated to us in words and statements that depend on the believer’s acceptance of these statements.

After all, one thing that the Nag Hammadi discovery had shown us is that Christians have always been profoundly concerned with these statements: with the accuracy of their transmission from original sources, with the precise understanding of their exact meaning, and with the elimination and condemnation of false interpretations. At times this concern with the words of Christianity has been exaggerated to the point of obsession, accompanied with the arbitrary and fanatical insistence on hairsplitting distinctions and the purest niceties of theological detail.

My study of Gnosticism in Graduate school was cut short when I decided to drop out and follow the love of my life. But my time in graduate school opened for me an awareness that the obsession with doctrinal formulas and ritual exactitude has made people forget that Christianity is a living experience which transcends all conceptual formulations. I know that I am guilty of this behavior, stopping short at a mere correct and external belief expressed in good and moral behavior, instead of entering into a relationship with God as the word made flesh.

Actually it took learning more about Buddhism for me to even begin to understand what that relationship would look like. Let me first say that the Buddhist metaphysic is not a doctrinal explanation in either the philosophical or theological sense. You don’t have to believe in the enlightenment of the Buddha as a solution to the problem of the human condition, and the experience of Enlightenment is not a revelation of how the universe came into existence, what will eventually happen to it, what the purpose of life is what are the moral norms, what will be the reward of the virtuous, and so on. To try to pigeonhole either Christianity or Buddhism in these terms is to reduce it to a mere world-view. Yet this is how Christian theologians frequently view Buddhism and sadly it is how I once viewed Christianity, not as a living theological experience but as a sense of security in my own correctness, a feeling of confidence that I am saved. A confidence, I may add, that is based on my correct view of creation and a merit system peppered with the anxious hope that the right answers will present themselves and that life is really a struggle to attain this sense of righteousness even as my desperate recourse to sacrament or understanding of the word cause me to continually fail, fall and struggle to rise again.

What Buddhism taught me about Christianity and ultimately about my own spirituality is that Zen does not need to explain the universe as much as Zen wants me to pay attention and to become aware, to be mindful and to develop a certain consciousness which is above emotional deception. Deception of what? Of life as it truly presents itself, and not life as my consciousness wants it to be. Because Zen, less a philosophical system about nothingness, rejects systematic elaborations in order to get back to a moment of pure unarticulated direct experience of Life itself. What is this "I" that exists and lives and what is the difference between an authentic experience of life, and the illusory awareness of the self that exists? Zen is not an idealistic rejection of sense and matter in order to ascend to a supposedly invisible reality, which is alone real. The Zen experience is a direct grasp of the unity of the invisible and the visible, a radical awareness of experience that does not require of explanation, but awareness.

In researching these thought I encountered a website that rejected the comparison of Buddhism and Christianity because, “Buddhism believes neither in the existence of a loving and living God nor in a substantial self, so the compassion of a Bodhisattva cannot be accorded with any ontological reality while Christianity treats love both as a means and as a goal of life. Moreover, love is seen as the very nature of God. As love has its source in God, so we are asked to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and this love found its ultimate expression when offered himself as a victim upon the cross for the remission of sins of mankind.”

To which I would say that this is a terrible misreading of Buddhism and that the Buddhist does not rejoice in the escape of the phenomenological world of suffering or try to negate it. Instead the Bodhisattva elects to remain in the world and find Nirvana, or pure awareness, not by reason but by the same compassionate love that identifies all sufferers in the world of birth and death with the Buddha, whose enlightenment each person potentially shares. Christian charity is exactly like Buddhist compassion as both seek not only to be free from suffering, but to eliminate that suffering wherever and whenever it is found.

The thing is, it took me a long time to get out from under the idea that I had to understand Christianity to get it. Stories of the virgin birth, walking on water, and the crucifixion became puzzles for me to solve, and having thought I solved them or at least having come to reconcile them with my faith or the lack thereof made me feel no closer to god. Instead, it took my discovery of Buddhism to understand that I didn't need all of these stories, or or that matter to understand them, in order to have a profound experience and relationship with the higher power of my choosing. I don't understand the whole pascal lamb, and the eucharistic host, and finally I don't have to. For me, Buddha saved Jesus