Divergence, convergence: Buddhist-Christian encounters.
(includes related article on a meeting between Thomas Merton and
the Dalai Lama, and on other meetings between Buddhists and
Christians)(Cover Story)
Leo D. Lefebure
The Christian Century
Vol.113 No.29
Oct 16, 1996
pp.964-971
COPYRIGHT @ 1996 Christian Century Foundation

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            A Zen Buddhist teacher sets a statue of Jesus on an altar alongside 
            the Buddha and lights incense to both. A Catholic priest sits 
            cross-legged in meditation and attends to his breathing as he has 
            been instructed by Zen teachers. Increasingly, Buddhists and 
            Christians are borrowing from each other's traditions, and the 
            results present new opportunities and new questions for both 
            religions. 
            Generations of Christian missioners journeyed to Asia to proclaim 
            the gospel of Jesus Christ. Some discovered in the religions they 
            encountered there an experience of meditation so powerful that it 
            changed their lives. Buddhist teachers, in turn, came to Europe and 
            the U.S. to share the wisdom of the Buddha, and some found their own 
            practice transformed by the witness of jews and Christians. The 
            effects of these encounters have been felt across the world, as many 
            Westerners have turned to Buddhist and other Asian forms of 
            meditation, seeking peace and personal integration in a frenetic and 
            fragmented world. Buddhists, in turn, have pondered the meaning of 
            social justice and action - partly in response to questions from 
            Christians. 
            The encounter of Christianity and Buddhism is affecting members of 
            both religions, and Buddhism is leaving more and more traces even on 
            secular American culture. Phil Jackson cites his use of Zen 
            practices as coach of the Chicago Bulls. In 1993 Bill Moyers's 
            television series and book Healing and the Mind featured stress 
            reduction programs that use techniques of Buddhist meditation and 
            yoga as part of holistic health care programs. In one interview, 
            John Kabat-Zinn, author of Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom 
            of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, described 
            his attempt to take the art of cultivating awareness from Buddhist 
            and Hindu meditation and make this available to Americans. Recent 
            scientific research has confirmed many of the beneficial physical 
            and psychological effects of sitting and walking meditation, whether 
            these practices are done in a religious context or not. 
            Westerners have turned to Buddhism for a variety of reasons. For 
            some, Buddhist meditation practice offers a concrete, pragmatic 
            method for facing anxiety, healing emotional wounds, dwelling in the 
            present, and developing a deeper sense of peace and loving-kindness. 
            People alienated from the traditional theistic beliefs of 
            Christianity or judaism may be attracted to a frame of reference 
            that does not include a creating and redeeming God. Some converts to 
            Buddhism have complained that Christianity merely talks about a 
            loving God, whereas Buddhism offers effective strategies to change 
            one's awareness and cultivate a peaceful, loving attitude. 
            The appearance of Zen and other forms of Buddhism in Christian 
            prayer raises questions about the relation between Buddhist practice 
            and Christianity, especially the Christian mystical tradition. Do 
            the two traditions converge in a profound way, or are they radically 
            different? Is it possible to appreciate the distinctiveness of each 
            tradition and also find a common basis for understanding and action? 
            Is it possible to practice both religions at the same time while 
            maintaining religious integrity? 
            Christian understandings of creation set the framework for aR 
            aspects of Christian faith and theology. Christian language about 
            sin and grace, redemption and forgiveness, assumes a God who created 
            a world that is different from God yet intimately related to God. 
            For Buddhists, everything in the universe is interdependent, and 
            there is no creating God who radically transcends the world. While 
            Buddhists have many different perspectives on cosmology, they agree 
            that everything arises in mutual relation to everything else. Amid 
            the variety of Buddhist symbols and expressions for the 
            unconditioned or the ultimate, the principle of nonduality asserts 
            that ultimate reality is not other than this world. Ultimate reality 
            is just this present moment, as it is related to all other moments. 
            Some have claimed that the experience of the ultimate is 
            fundamentally the same in both religions and that the difference 
            between Buddhist and Christian perspectives is merely a conceptual 
            distinction. Others stress@rightly, I would say - that the concepts 
            and symbols used by a religion profoundly shape the experience of 
            its followers, and thus cannot be dismissed as unimportant. While 
            some hold that both religions share a common mystical core and 
            others claim that the religions are so different that there is no 
            basis for mutual understanding, it seems more likely that there is a 
            complex intertwining of similarities amid differences. 
            One of the pioneers in the 20th-century Christian encounter with 
            Buddhism was a German Jesuit priest, Hugo Enomiya-Lassalle, S.J. 
            (1898-1990). He established for many Christians the tone and 
            framework for approaching Buddhism. In 1943 Lassalle, who would 
            later be a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima, decided to study 
            Zen so that he could understand Japanese culture more deeply and 
            evangelize it more effectively. He went through rigorous training 
            under Zen monks in Japan, and was acknowledged by his Zen teachers 
            as a master. Lassalle became convinced that Christians could 
            experience satori or enlightenment and that they should integrate 
            that experience into Christian life and practice. While Lassalle 
            tended to regard the experience of the Zen Buddhist and the Catholic 
            mystic as identical, he always remained firmly rooted in his own 
            Catholic faith. 
            After the publication of his first book, Zen: Way to Enlightenment 
            (published in German in 1958, in English in 1968), Lassalle was 
            ordered by Rome not to publish anymore on this topic. Though his 
            Jesuit superiors acknowledged that he had to obey the order, they 
            also encouraged him to be faithful to the values he had discovered 
            on his spiritual path and "just go on quietly sitting." Meanwhile, 
            Buddhists wondered about the legitimacy and meaning of Lassalle's 
            experiment, some judging it be a heretical form of Zen. 
            With the Second Vatican Council a new atmosphere of openness and 
            dialogue arose in the Catholic Church. Lassalle wrote additional 
            books and journeyed across the world, leading Christians in intense 
            Zen retreats called sesshins. Toward the end of his long life, 
            Catholic authorities again expressed concern about the use of 
            Eastern techniques of meditation in Christian prayer. In 1989, when 
            Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger issued a letter to the Catholic bishops of 
            the world, warning them against abuses of Christian prayer through 
            Eastern forms of meditation, many Catholics in Asia were disturbed. 
            Lassalle recounted his earlier experience of being silenced and 
            advised: "Just go on quietly sitting." 
            What is most striking from a broader historical perspective is not 
            that Ratzinger expressed reservations about Christian-Buddhist 
            interaction but that the cardinal prefect of the Congregation for 
            the Doctrine of the Faith accepted many basic premises of Lassalle's 
            practice. Ratzinger's primary aim was to safeguard the integrity of 
            Christian prayer to the triune God through Jesus Christ. Although 
            his tone toward Buddhist and other Asian methods of meditation was 
            largely suspicious, Ratzinger expanded upon the principle of Vatican 
            II: "Just as the Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and 
            holy in these religions Vatican II, Declaration on the Relation of 
            the Church to Non-Christian Religions, n.2], neither should these 
            ways be rejected out of hand simply because they are not Christian. 
            On the contrary, one can take from them what is useful so long as 
            the Christian conception of prayer, its logic and requirements are 
            never obscured" ("Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on 
            Some Aspects of Christian Meditation," n. 16). 
            Ratzinger's central concern was that the structure of Christian 
            prayer not be compromised and that the natural effects of physical 
            techniques not be mistaken for the signs of grace. While much of the 
            ensuing discussion focused on the admonitory tone of the letter, 
            Ratzinger explicitly accepted the legitimacy of Catholic Christians 
            employing meditation practices from the great non-Christian 
            religions. One can imagine his stern predecessor, Cardinal Alfredo 
            Ottaviani, turning over in his grave at this. 
            The questions that surrounded Lassalle's practice hover around the 
            recent works by a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk and an Irish Catholic 
            jesuit priest. Thich Nhat Hanh and William Johnston, S.J., have 
            examined the resources of the other tradition and consider 
            themselves enriched by the experience. Moreover, each author moved 
            from his native land to live for decades in a culture shaped by the 
            other religious tradition. 
            Johnston, who was born in Belfast in 1925, joined the Society of 
            jesus and went to Japan in 1951. He taught for many years at Sophia 
            University in Tokyo, where he was director of the Institute of 
            Oriental Religions. For Johnston, the move was transforming. "Had I 
            remained in my native Ireland instead of coming to the East," he 
            reflected in 1971, "I might now be an intolerant and narrow-minded 
            papist hurling bricks and bottles at my Protestant adversaries in 
            the cobbled streets of Belfast. Contact with Zen, on the other hand, 
            has opened up new vistas, teaching me that there are possibilities 
            in Christianity I never dreamed of." 
            In his early studies johnston concentrated on the medieval mysticism 
            represented by The Cloud of Unknowing, a work that prepared him to 
            appreciate Zen practice. During the years before Vatican II, 
            Johnston became interested in Buddhist practice and thought, and he 
            practiced Zen meditation under the direction of Buddhist monks. When 
            he began, it was still unusual for a Catholic priest to attend a Zen 
            retreat, and he later recalled that Japanese Christians were 
            "vaguely pleased but vaguely puzzled." 
            Johnston came to understand Buddhism under the direction and 
            discipline of Japanese Zen masters who challenged and prodded him to 
            experience reality directly, apart from concepts and images. While 
            Johnston does not place the Buddha on a par with Jesus, he does 
            consider his experience of Christian prayer to have been deepened by 
            his Zen teachers. He expressed the fruits of his encounter in his 
            writings and became well-known as the author of The Still Point: 
            Reflections on Zen and Christian Mysticism (1970) and Christian Zen 
            (1971). 
            Johnston rejects the distinction sometimes made between the 
            "prophetic" monotheistic religions and the "mystical" Asian 
            traditions. The biblical tradition itself, especially in such 
            figures as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Elijah, John and Paul, is the 
            source of Christian mysticism, and the Christian,s ultimate goal and 
            norm is dying and rising with Jesus Christ. For Johnston, the 
            experience of Buddhist meditation led him not away from the Bible 
            but into a deeper appreciation of the mystical element in the 
            biblical witness itself. 
            Thich Nhat Hanh was born in Vietnam in 1926, and at the age of 16 he 
            entered a Zen monastery. The war in Vietnam changed his life, 
            convincing him that Buddhist monks and nuns had to be involved in 
            relieving the suffering of the people. He and his colleagues 
            organized a movement known as Socially Engaged Buddhism because it 
            stressed the responsibility of Buddhists to be practically engaged 
            in addressing social questions. Since he and his followers refused 
            to take sides, they were looked on math suspicion by both communists 
            and Americans. 
            In 1964 Nhat Hanh founded the School of Youth for Social Service, 
            Vanh Hanh University, the La Boi (Palm Leaves) printing press, and a 
            new order of Zen Buddhism, the Tiep Hien Order (the Order of 
            Interbeing). Then in 1966 he came to the U.S., hoping to influence 
            American leaders and public opinion to end the war. His book 
            Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire (1967) sought to change the 
            awareness of the American public by introducing Vietnamese culture 
            and tradition as the background of the conflict. He later became the 
            leader of the Buddhist delegation at the Paris peace talks, and 
            after the war he was involved in helping refugees and boat people. 
            When the Vietnamese government did not allow him to return to 
            Vietnam, he settled in France. He is currently the leader of the 
            Plum Village monastery near Bordeaux. 
            Nhat Hanh's earliest impressions of Christianity were shaped by his 
            negative experiences with Christian missioners who sought to 
            eradicate Buddhism from Vietnam. His later understanding of 
            Christianity was decisively shaped by American Christians such as 
            Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Merton and Daniel Berrigan. He shared 
            many of their concerns and values, and thanks to their influence he 
            came to consider Jesus a spiritual ancestor. He now has statues of 
            Jesus and the Buddba together in his room at Plum Village, and he 
            lights incense to both figures. 
            Nhat Hanh is aware of the centrality of God in Christianity, but he 
            does not believe in God. For him, the Christian experience of 
            resting in God is "the equivalent" of what Buddhists experience in 
            touching nirvana. Thus he sees differences in emphasis between 
            Buddhism and Christianity, but no insoluble conflicts. The concept 
            matters little if one has the experience. 
            Both Johnston and Nhat Hanh locate the primary area of dialogue 
            between the two traditions in religious experience. Both authors are 
            steeped in the Buddha's instructions on breathing and walking 
            meditation and in later Zen Buddhist meditation practice; both cite 
            Gregory of Nyssa and Basil the Great, the early Christian desert 
            fathers, Eastern Orthodox mystics who attained to a sacred quiet 
            through prayer and meditation, and later Christians mystics who gave 
            practical instructions to their disciples on persevering in the life 
            of prayer. 
            Both Johnston and Nhat Hanh are somewhat distrustful of concepts and 
            turn to the mystical, apophatic tradition in Christianity as a point 
            of contact with Buddhism. Both insist that what is most important is 
            not to define ultimate reality but to experience it and allow it to 
            transform one's life. 
            Johnston finds this principle exemplified in the teaching of St. 
            John of the Cross on the dark night of the soul, in which all images 
            and concepts disappear and God is experienced as nada (nothing). 
            Following the path of John of the Cross, Johnston advises Christian 
            mystics to stay with reasoning and thinking as long as these 
            processes are fruitful, but to be ready to abandon all such natural 
            activity at a certain stage to allow "the silent inflow of the 
            Spirit." Christian emptiness is an experience of absolute love and 
            compassion. Mystical knowing for Johnston is "obscure, dark, 
            formless knowledge in a cloud of unknowing. It is knowledge that is 
            experienced as nothingness or emptiness or the void," an experience 
            Johnston compares to Buddhist meditation practice. 
            Emptiness (shunyata) or nothingness and the abandonment of concepts 
            have long been important for Mahayana Buddhists. For Nhat Hanh, the 
            Heart Sutra, which paradoxically *negates the Four Noble Truths and 
            other fundamental Buddhist teachings, expresses the center of 
            Buddhist wisdom: emptiness means that nothing exists by itself 
            alone, all things "inter-are," arising in mutual interdependence and 
            flowing into future occasions. Appropriating this vision requires us 
            to stop clinging to concepts and notions; they cannot pin down 
            reality. For Nhat Hanh, it is not only the Christian God that cannot 
            be described in concepts, nothing in the universe can be talked 
            about in concepts, because concepts arise from wrong perceptions. 
            Both traditions seek to transform the consciousness and lives of 
            their practitioners through practical disciplines. Nhat Hanh finds 
            much to praise in the Christian desert fathers and the Eastern 
            Orthodox mystics. Johnston compares the Christian via purgativa, the 
            way of purification, especially as described by The Cloud of 
            Unknowing, to Buddhist practices of purification. Though he 
            acknowledges an irreducible difference in Christian purgation, which 
            is "primarily a following of Christ," he nonetheless finds a common 
            experience in detachment: poverty of spirit is "the kenosis of 
            Jesus... the mu [nothingness] of Zen ... the nada [nothing] of St. 
            John of the Cross." Johnston also compares the Christian experience 
            of dying with Christ to the "great death" in Zen Buddhism which 
            leads to enlightenment, "to a state where ones true self acts 
            spontaneously without thinking and reasoning and planning." 
            Nonetheless, for all his attempts at rapprochement between the two 
            traditions, Johnston acknowledges that Christians cannot identify 
            their own experience of God with Buddhists, experience of satori 
            (insight or enlightenment) or nirvana (the cessation of suffering). 
            Christian enlightenment, based on the gospel, remains irreducibly 
            different from Zen or any other form of Buddhism. 
            Johnston underscores the radical transcendence of God for 
            Christians, including Christian mystics who use the language of 
            nonduality. The climax of the Christian mystical journey is 
            identifying with the Son and being filled with the Spirit and crying 
            out: "Abba, Father!" At least on the level of expression and 
            religious self-understanding, this is very different from Buddhist 
            perspectives on nonduality, which do not address a transcendent in 
            personal terms. Johnston supports the practice of Christians who 
            learn meditation practice from Zen monks but do not call their 
            practice Zen." 
            Thich Nhat Hanh, by contrast, views such distinctions as themselves 
            preliminary and unimportant. For him, Buddhist and Christian 
            concepts differ, but direct experience is the same. Nhat Hanh 
            expresses his understanding of this issue partly in response to Pope 
            John Paul II's remarks concerning Buddhism in Crossing the Threshold 
            of Hope - remarks that were perceived by many Buddhists as 
            misleading and even insulting. 
            Nhat Hanh interprets John Paul II's statement that "the pope prays 
            as the Holy Spirit permits him to pray" at being equivalent to the 
            Buddhist practice of mindfulness: "For me, the Holy Spirit is 
            mindfulness itself." While Nhat Hanh applauds the popes prayers for 
            and with those who suffer, he draws a radically different 
            conclusion. For Nhat Hanh, embracing requires us to surrender dogmas 
            "that constitute obstacles for working toward the cessation of the 
            suffering. 
            After urging the pope to abandon all dogmas, Nhat Hanh proceeds to 
            instruct the pontiff on Christology and trinitarian theology. He 
            quotes John Paul II's insistence that Jesus is the only Son of God 
            and is unique among the religious leaders of humankind, and protests 
            that the popes claim "does not reflect the deep mystery of the 
            oneness of the Trinity. It also does not reflect the fact that 
            Christ is also the Son of Man." 
            Nhat Hanh understands the uniqueness of Christ as being on the same 
            level as the uniqueness of every other human being. According to the 
            principle of nonduality, all beings are not other than the timeless, 
            the unconditioned, thus all who are enlightened can say: "Before 
            Abraham came to be, I am." 
            In this perspective, the Trinity exemplifies nonduality, baptism 
            expresses our common capacity to manifest the qualities of being a 
            Buddha or a child of God, the Holy Spirit is mindfulness, 
            resurrection and reincarnation are assimilated to each other, and 
            all dogmas are inherently suspect as causing division. Nhat Hanh 
            rejects the pope's affirmation that Christianity is the only way of 
            salvation: "This attitude excludes dialogue and fosters religious 
            intolerance and discrimination. It does not help." Nhat Hanh blames 
            lack of genuine experience for the intolerance that has plagued 
            religious history. 
            Nhat Hanh's central message is to breathe with mindfulness, to be 
            attentive to the present moment and allow the deep wisdom and peace 
            within us to unfold. He offers very concrete and helpful strategies 
            for addressing and overcoming conflicts within and without. His 
            reflections on Buddhist wisdom in Living Buddha, Living Christ 
            recapitulate his numerous other writings. There is a profoundly 
            healing wisdom in Nhat Hanh's reflections on meditation and living 
            in the present, and Christians have much to learn from his rich 
            experience. 
            Nonetheless, one wonders whether Nhat Hanh has really encountered 
            the distinctive features of Christian faith. As he takes up 
            Christian themes and recasts them in light of Buddhist perspectives 
            on nonduality, the otherness of the God who appears in Jesus Christ 
            disappears. Christological and trinitarian affirmations that were 
            forged to express the uniqueness of the Christ-event are interpreted 
            as examples of the experience of everyone. Nhat Hanh ends up 
            presenting a very Buddhist version of Christianity, one which many 
            Christians would not find faithful to their tradition. 
            For Johnston, the wisdom of John of the Cross is fully comparable to 
            the paradoxes of the Heart Sutra, but he notes that John of the 
            Cross interpreted the paradoxes in light of a Thomistic metaphysics: 
            God is all; the creature is nothing. He finds a Christian nondualism 
            in John of the Cross's principle that the just person is a law unto 
            himself, but he recognizes the difference between Buddhist and 
            Christian expressions of nonduality. He expresses the hope: "Can we, 
            then, see a beautiful similarity between compassionate, dynamic 
            sunyata and a Father who so loved the world as to give his only son? 
            Can the Buddhist and the Christian join hands and lead one another 
            to transcendental wisdom?" Johnston wants to preserve the uniqueness 
            of each religion and also find a common ground for learning from one 
            another. It is only after realizing that Christianity and Buddhism 
            are not the same that we can see ways in which they may not be 
            different.