Here follows my perspective on Christianity’s intersection with Buddhist practice – a perspective hard won by devoting much of my free time for the last while to a study of the latter.
I know what you’re thinking – Christianity and Buddhism, they’re rivals, mortal enemies, competing religious and philosophical systems, that kind of deal. Actually I’ve been getting a feel for the commonalities as well as the contrasts between the two. My studies have made me more keenly aware of some life truths which have been thrown into sharp relief by the ideological clash.
I lay my bias card face up: I am a Christian. I think Christianity is more true than Buddhism, and I’ll explain some of why below. But I’ve found that Buddhism contains valuable truths too, which I can absorb without becoming a pluralist or a syncretist.
Underlying realities; doctrinal disparities
In working my way through Paul’s letter to the Romans, I find there is a lot more common ground between the way of the Christ and the way of the Buddha than I at first thought. Paul, with palpable emotion, describes how ‘I’ am in fact two. There is the old me, bound up in sin and liking it, fixed on rebelling against God just for the literal hell of it. But when I became a Christian, a new me was born – a self who loves God and His ways and His word, and who passionately wants to do the right thing just to please Him. The Christian life, then, is an ongoing struggle between these two selves. Thanks to Jesus’ victory over sin and death on the cross, and thanks to the daily power of the Holy Spirit at work in us, it is a fight that the Christian can be utterly sure of winning. And throughout life, with the exercise of discipline by the grace of God, the Christ-like me gets stronger and more dominant, and the old man shrivels up and loses his control.
Buddhism grasps at some of the underlying realities here. The Buddha teaches that what we think of as ‘self’ is actually non-existent. He dispenses with ‘self’ as an obstructive and inaccurate philosophical concept, and Buddhist scholars down the line have favoured its replacement with a bunch of internal motivational forces working in tandem to produce the functions we typically ascribe to the self. So it’s not a direct match, but it’s getting at the idea of a civil war of the self – of viewing undesirable thoughts as not actually a part of my self, but as independent agents which can be resisted.
By faith alone: salvation or self-improvement?
Buddhism places much more focus on the importance of self-discipline than Christianity does. According to Buddhist teaching, the practice of meditation is intended to free the practitioner from the delusions which are pervasive to the human experience, and facilitate a clear view of reality. Meditative observation aims to bring freedom from craving, which is the cause of duhkha. In achieving increasing freedom from craving, the practitioner will ideally become more free to act in a way unbound by delusions or conditioning, and will become more able to live morally, in accordance with the Noble Eightfold Path.
You see, Buddhism and Christianity both make the default human assumption that the universe is founded on a moral order, that behaviour in accordance with that order is life’s purpose, and that consequences exist for those who fail to live in accordingly.
But Buddhism has less bite, I think. Buddhists have no God, and as such cannot appeal to any higher power for intervention or edification. For the Buddhist, my (not)self is all I’ve got. Reader, you will no doubt be aware that self-discipline is a tricky business. It’s hard enough to get my body to do what I want it to do, never mind my mind. How much trickier then is self-salvation? To discipline the body and mind to total moral perfection – that is the only hope laid out for us by the Buddha. Anything less than Enlightenment, and we remain trapped in the endless cycle of rebirth and suffering. It’s not exactly a realistic ask. It’s salvation for the elite, for only the cream of humanity’s crop.
The reader might begin to twig as to why I prefer the Way to the Path. I don’t think there are any plausible grounds for faith in our ability to save ourselves. When the moral bar is set at total mental discipline, never thinking an angry or bitter thought about another person, never lying, etc – then that bar is far too high for us, and our efforts are far too measly. The only reasonable solution is one which does not rest on our accomplishments, and which does not fall victim to the utter folly of offering self-improvement as salvation. In short, though your acceptance of this statement will depend upon whether you think the existence of such a God possible, the only reasonable solution to the human problem is a God who intervenes on our behalf. We require a God who lives the perfect life we could never live, who bears the consequences for our failed moral lives. A God who, miraculously, with grace too wide to comprehend, offers to switch legal records with us – our sin for His perfection. All our innumerable acts of moral carnage get deleted from the legal system, and instead, a perfectly lived life gets credited to our account. This is the only salvation, the only way that solves the problem.
And not only does it make sense, but it’s infinitely better! All you can hope for in Buddhism is maybe eventually a top-notch incarnation so you can maybe eventually be disciplined enough to maybe eventually wiggle free of a vicious cycle of duhkha-ful incarnations. If you’re a Buddhist, life is so devoid of any lasting good that all we can hope for is the chance to escape it altogether – to flee into a state of blissful non-existence. Christianity fields a better offer – a God who saves us, who does all the work for us at enormous personal expense, and who does it just so we can enjoy His presence forever, and so He can enjoy us. Rather than looking forward to a whole pile of tasty nothingness, the Christian eternity is a person who delights in us, and who is Himself the most delightful stimulus imaginable.
Christianity also makes more sense of the human experience. I mean, it’s all well and good to say that life is futile and ought to be escaped, but very seldom do you come across a person who acts as though this is true. Doesn’t it run contrary to the basic testimony of every life? We desperately crave for our lives to be validated and filled with purpose. Our friend the Buddha might tell us that this craving is the very prob, and that it is based upon, and is itself a source of, delusion. But to me, an answer which makes sense of our innate experience of life and our most deeply held desires is superior to an answer which dismisses them as illusory. I am of the school of CS Lewis who argues that desires indicate the existence of something which can fill them. It’s a choice-of-belief that you have to make: does the existence of our deepest desire for a purposeful life mean that we are a broken machine which needs to be switched off, or a vessel which can be filled – a nomad searching for his home?
Let’s talk about morals
Secular/naturalistic Buddhists argue that Buddhist practice and belief contribute to the moral life by facilitating perceptual experiences which (ideally) undermine selfish and prejudicial behaviour. Experiencing permeability and continuity between oneself and the universe in meditation degrades the evolutionary logic of selfishness. Likewise, experiencing formlessness in meditation may help people surmount group bias by transcending the group-based species perspective instilled in each of us by natural selection. And an understanding of the not-self doctrine encourages an individual to analyse their internal motivations, potentially facilitating behavioural control and allowing an individual to enact behaviour which is less selfish and less ‘groupish’.
But alas, for the rub approaches. Neither the Eightfold Path nor naturalistic meditative practice are very concerned with encouraging behaviour which has a positive impact on others, instead dealing solely with the expulsion of one’s own selfish behaviour. A valid moral tradition should encourage its adherents to act for the good of others. The Buddhist morality is instead concerned only with achieving behavioural limits through introspection, rather than with stimulating outward acts. And so it falls short of fostering meaningful moral living.
I also think that the moral logic of Buddhist doctrine is more likely to encourage morally apathetic behaviour towards others rather commitment to moral action. Believing in an illusory world which lacks a substantive essence will surely lead to apathy about the suffering of others. Believing in an impermanent reality will surely encourage the fatalist belief that nothing really matters, leading to a loss of urgency to act and advocate for social justice. Believing in a worldview which undermines the substantial existence of the self will surely lead to a loss of moral agency and lessen the felt impact of a person’s moral actions. And a cooling of the emotional affect associated with the experience of formlessness will eliminate valuable emotional motivators for moral action.
For Christians, all of creation is a (now imperfect) gift of God which will one day be perfected. Creation is to be delighted in as it reflects the Creator. For Christians, emotions can be born out of rebellion against God, but they can also be good and right and justified. Righteous anger, attachment, love – these are not sensations to seek dissociation from! Rather, they are good and godly and helpful experiences, experienced by God as a man, and even modelled in the Bible by a personified, personal God. Creation is real, it is substantial, and the events which occur in this life, including our actions towards others and our personal choices, all conspire in God’s grand providential scheme to bring human beings closer to God, or further from Him. As Lewis says, every action towards others is helping them on their way to becoming either a heavenly creature of unimaginable beauty, or a self-obsessed, sin-contorted atrocity for all eternity.
Christianity does not deny but validates fundamental aspects of the human experience like selfhood and the substantiality of the world, and as such is more likely to impel a person towards moral action. It gives real and eternal importance to our actions. It affirms peoples’ innate convictions about their personal responsibility and the meaningfulness of their actions, and so allows them to take moral action more seriously. I don’t think that anything less than this can provide a sufficient account of how people are to engage in moral action.
Some of my best friends are Buddhists
Studying Buddhism has introduced me to really useful therapeutic practices and really handy lenses through which to think about myself and the world. I have one word for you: meditation. They’re really on to something there. When my mind is running on autopilot, it tends to adopt a certain perspective – of total fraternisation with my worries and problems, of intimate attendance to loud environmental stimuli, of conjuring projections of all the potential things happening in the future. My mind is rarely a quiet place. Meditation is so helpful in slowing everything down, in quieting the mind, in stepping back from stimuli and re-prioritising mental space. And it really helps to me to remember and practically experience my unwholesome motivations and thoughts and feelings as distinct from the actual me.
On the motion
I am really valuing the resurgence of Buddhism in the Western world. On my journey across the Internet, I’ve encountered scientists and philosophers turning to mysticism and to Buddhist practice because they realise that the scientific worldview is, at core, insufficient. A materialistic positivist belief system has nothing to say about the immaterial essence of reality – it can’t help us explain it or access it. Our culture is materialistic, and so our spiritual selves are starved and cry out for something to fill the void. Enter secular Buddhism, offering up a liberal, popular spiritualism to tickle our fancies and satiate some of that hunger with some spiritual practice. It’s tolerant and inclusive – it embraces all faiths and religions, and condemns no thoughts or lifestyles (in popular Western practice, at any rate). As Gethin puts it, “Buddhism [is] the answer to the modern world’s ‘crisis of faith’: a religion devoid of belief in God and the saving power of rituals, whose truths are not accepted on the authority of scripture, but verified by direct experience”. Buddhist practice goes some way to filling man’s inner void, but it lets him hold on to all of his assumptions about his individuality and his rights. He remains his own means of salvation. And so it’s a spirituality which fails to orient the man to the source of his spirit – his Creator, the true Reality and Source of all things; God.
Alright, some of that sounded pretty negative. But this movement is actually a really positive sign. People just feel that there is more than the material – a feeling borne out by philosophical inquiry and scientific insufficiency (in eg. the problem of consciousness). So the world finds itself in need answers which are (in some sense) supermaterial, supernatural.
At heart, the resurgence of Buddhism is the story of people across the world feeling loss – the loss of something which our pseudoscientific-atheistic-internet-culture can’t account for, and won’t countenance a discussion about, and will only mock. It’s the rekindling of the recognition of the Reality behind reality. The search for the sacred is on again.
chumpishly 