Buddhism and Christianity: a Christian Contemplative Perspective

Here’s an excerpt from an excellent interview with a Christian “contemplative” regarding the differences btw. Christianity and Buddhism. I found he or she did a nice job giving the Christian perspective while adequately describing the Theravadan Buddhist view.

The interview was found here. It’s nice website, representing a sincere, traditional Catholic perspective.

Buddhism is a very popular substitute for Christianity nowadays. It has a robust moral core and a demanding contemplative discipline. It has proven attractive to many who look for a “spiritual” alternative to Christianity without the trappings of Christianity. Could you comment on that?

Yes, I can. But this will take some elaboration. The core claim of Christianity derives from the one in Judaism: that the source of creation is Personal: “I am that I am” the Lord told Moses. His very Name (“YHWH,” commonly pronounced “Yahweh”) points to this reality. The Bible designates Moses as the first receiver of this revelation. We may speculate that Moses, having received the traditional belief in One God from the people of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saw his understanding completed through his own contemplation of the mystery until God, in his utter freedom, revealed Himself to Moses in that Name. Moses’ contemplative journey sets an example for all of us: as all the external noise and internal cacophony quieted in Moses, he was able to hear but one voice, the One that then said “I AM.”

It is known that Buddhism denies the existence of any substantive personal core in human beings, or behind the cosmos. Their disciplines to quiet the senses and the mind conform to a relentless teaching insisting on the depersonalization of the adept’s consciousness and on its ability to become a detached observer of manifold perceptions and mental states, each one independently analyzed as to its origin, duration, and end, and labeled as such. Buddhist teachers also stress that the “Devas” (or “gods” in Hindu religion) are also subjected to this tight law of causality and the Buddhist adept is trained to observe their chatter and learn to dismiss it as part of the contingent nature of things. I posit that Buddhist contemplatives reject the existence of one personal God because they can’t tell His voice apart from their own voices; the voice of God that Moses heard would be for a Buddhist practitioner just another subjective mental state to be detached from in order to avoid suffering or dukkha.

So you are saying that, when confronted with the voice of God, Buddhist practitioners basically chose to deny the objective existence of the voice of God within and with it the relevance of a personal God.

Pretty much, yeah. They choose consciously and pretty much for the same reasons that a Western atheist denies the existence of God: any claim made in this respect is merely subjective, ultimately illusory, and the product of deluded mental states held by people attached to a wrong view of reality. This is also why so many Western agnostics and atheists embrace Buddhism because Buddhism allows them to be “spiritual” without turning to God. But, unlike Western skeptics, Buddhists don’t arrive to their convictions by mere theoretical formulations; they claim a direct insight into the nature of reality, one in which the willful denial of the existence, importance, relevance and dismissal of a personal God is central to their method. The differences between Buddhism and Christianity and between their schools of “contemplation” are as deep as they are fundamental: an honest Christian can’t be a Buddhist and an honest Buddhist can’t be a Christian. One affirms “I AM” while the other one affirms “everything is emptiness and emptiness is all.” God, being the gentleman that He is, bows before the insistent effort on the part of the Buddhist adept to dismiss Him from his inner sanctum once and for all, and so He leaves. In this tragic sense, the Buddhist contemplative experience as one without God corresponds to their claim. God remains quiet on their soul, but He never really leaves, thankfully. He awaits patiently the invitation to come back in and talk.

For all the Byron Katie fans out there…

Have a gander at this.

http://janakisstory.wordpress.com/

Also, make sure to read my earlier “Critique of Byron Katie”.

Going back to grade school

I’ve been away from this blog for awhile. I might start writing more from time to time. I’ve been involving myself more heavily into Korean Buddhism, especially chanting sutras and studying. I’ve found chanting to be a suitable practice at this point. My mind is too restless to pursue vipassana or zazen.

Lately I’ve been enjoying studying the ancient Chinese of the classic East Asian Buddhist sutras: Amitabha Sutra, Heart Sutra, and Thousand Hands Sutra. The Chinese is so terse and poetic. It allows for one to develop a deeper appreciation of the text and to delve into various shades of meaning. I’m learning the Chinese from my wife, who’s Korean. Koreans study the Chinese characters in grade school. 

My favorite sutras at the moment are the Amitabha Sutra and the Thousand Hands Sutra. I occasionally skim through the Diamond Sutra, but I find my mind isn’t attuned to the emptiness teachings at this point. I feel like I spent much of my twenties immersed in the nondual and emptiness teachings, so much so that I almost became trapped in it, which according to some Buddhist sources, is the worst teaching to be attached to!  At any rate, I find satisfaction in the simple, devotional teachings. In some ways it feels like I was a twelve year old attending graduate school classes, grasping what a child could grasp, distorting the information, and forgetting that there was a lot important stuff I was missing which I could’ve learned in middle and high school.  Almost all of the Buddhist schools agree that a practitioner should start with the basics: a solid base of refuge, the five precepts, and a hearty engagement with the six perfections before one moves onto the “graduate school” teachings of shikantaza, dzogchen, and mahamudra, all of which are quite similar and difficult. I’d throw vipassana in that graduate school mix too. The Six Perfections and Five Precepts soften the mind for the more advanced practices. I heard this many times and thought it was a load of rubbish. I learned the hard way, the way in which I usually choose to learn.

I remember being irritated because a friend/teacher of mine wouldn’t teach me the Madhyamika. I was studying it alone, which is absurd, by the way, and he’s an expert on it. He told me he wouldn’t teach me until I took refuge and became a serious Buddhist, not one of these pseudo-intellectuals trying to add another new philosophy under their belt to impress their friends at cocktail parties. Well, I wasn’t having that, and continued studying on my own. He’s much wiser than I.

In the future I want to write about these sutras that I’m studying and Korean chanting. The bell rang — time to study!

Great Pure Land Shin Blog

I came across an excellent Pure Land blog called Shin Ugly. The writing is clear, to the point, and direct. The author is an uncompromising Amitabha devotee. There’s no fancy philosophical gibberish here, like you’ll find on my blog, just “plain talk” for “plain people.” Highly recommended! Click here.

A Follower of the Way Things Are

Driving through Seoul traffic, I found myself reflecting on what it means to be a Buddhist. I have a problem identifying myself as a Buddhist for various reasons, which I won’t go into here, because I want to focus on some of the fruits gathered via reflection.

The word “Dharma” has various shades of meaning. The Truth and the Laware two shades of meaning. One may not be so much a Buddhist as a follower of the Dharma. If the Dharma is the Truth or the Law (of the way things are) then one does not really belong to a particular religion, in this case, Buddhism. One is simply a follower of the way things are.  Of course, this begs the question of who determines the “way things are”.

This brings me to the second contemplation, and that is Buddha, for the most part, didn’t teach anything too controversial, at least not in my opinion. His conclusions square completely with science and the truths we’ve uncovered through the humanities (sociology, psychology, etc.). Many of us have discovered that all things are transient and always changing. We know that things aren’t really thingsat all but rather interdependent processes coming together and disintegrating according to various natural laws. And it doesn’t take a genius to realize that putting all your happiness-eggs into the basket of transient, disintegrating “things” will inevitably lead to suffering and unhappiness. Furthermore, psychologically it’s clear that the more we cling and desire, the less peace we have.  You can investigate for yourself the next time a desire arises for anything. How does it feel to desire? What sensations appear? Desire is experienced as a proverbial thorn in the side. When you don’t want anything, you’re happy and at ease. This is fairly clear after spending some time observing the process of desire arising, desire being fulfilled, and the absence of desire at all.

The moral precepts, which are the foundation of the Buddha’s teaching, are hardly controversial, and as such, qualify as being the Law. According to the Law, when you break the precepts or law you suffer, and so it goes that breaking the five precepts almost always leads to suffering. On the flipside of things, cultivating the opposite of the precepts, namely: generosity, kind speech, preserving lives, ingesting healthy substances, and treating the sexual impulse with respect brings one a lot of happiness and peace.

Karma is one of the Buddha’s key teachings as well. Karma, from the perspective of this life, is blatantly obvious. It’s obvious that where you stand now is the direct result of all the choices you’ve made in your life. How you react to your current situation will determine your future status. This is karma. As far as past and future lives are concerned, this teaching is not obvious and one needs to use reasoning and faith to come to a conclusion about whether or not the Buddha was correct in his teaching about rebirth.

So, in wrapping up this essay, I feel that you don’t have to be religious to be a Buddhist. Even being a Buddhist is a statement fraught with assumptions: the assumption that Buddhism is best classified as a religion, the assumption that there is one, fairly static thing called “Buddhism”, etc. What if you conceive of being one who’s in accord with the way things are? How does it feel to try on that conception? I like it. The Buddha is like a scientist who discovered the way things work and how to navigate through the flow of life without being burned. He showed how to maximize true enjoyment (sukha) and the pitfalls of living an undisciplined and hedonistic lifestyle. On a higher level, he sublimely pointed out the way we create subtle suffering with our ignorance of the three marks of existence and the psychological discomfort of associating any phenomena as “me” or “mine”.

I am one who follows the dharma, the way things are — I like that. It rings more true with me than declaring myself a follower of one of the world’s major religions.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s Study Guides

One of my favorite Buddhist monks and scholars is Thanissaro Bhikkhu of the Thai Forest tradition. I’ve been reading and listening to him via MP3 over the years. He’s American, has a university degree, and is a serious Theravadan monk, heading up a monastery in Southern California.

He’s done some incredible anthologies and study guides which are all free. I wanted to take this opportunity to let my readers know about him and his excellent study guides. You can find them here. His approach is very practice-oriented, down-to-earth, and scholarly.

The one I linked to is called “Merit”.  Here’s the beginning of it:

Of all the concepts central to Buddhism, merit (puñña) is one of the least known and least appreciated in the West. This is perhaps because the pursuit of merit seems to be a lowly practice, focused on getting and “selfing,” whereas higher Buddhist practice focuses on letting go, particularly of any sense of self. Because we in the West often feel pressed for time, we don’t want to waste our time on lowly practices, and instead want to go straight to the higher levels. Yet the Buddha repeatedly warns that the higher levels cannot be practiced in a stable manner unless they develop on a strong foundation. The pursuit of merit provides that foundation. To paraphrase a modern Buddhist psychologist, one cannot wisely let go of one’s sense of self until one has developed a wise sense of self. The pursuit of merit is the Buddhist way to develop a wise sense of self.

Writing on a different blog

I apologize to any readers who are expecting a new post. I haven’t written much exclusively on Buddhism. I also have a more personal blog, which definitely has a Buddhist flavor to it at http://josesiem.blogspot.com  I’ve written a few new posts there.

The Devaluation of Human Beings

Human beings are no more important than grass. This is Byron Katie’s view, as expressed in her out-of-print book Losing the Moon. In what has become somewhat of a famous passage, at least on the internet, BK argues that a nazi throwing a baby into the fire is God and it’s not evil, because there is no evil, there’s only “unexamined concepts”. Later on in the conversation, her and her disciples are discussing some more about the baby-throwing Nazi who incidentally had a family. He’d come home after murdering the Jews, play with his child, and crank up the Beethoven. It’s in this context which Katie asks (My comments are in red)

BK: Do you step on the grass? You step on the grass, and you move around the flower not to disturb it. Same. (It’s the same as the Nazi caring about his family but killing the Jews.)

Friend: I don’t get it. Yet. (And you want to get it?! Might be time to have your head examined.)

BK: The (Nazi’s) family is the flower. The grass are the Jews. How many times a day have you done it? If you bend down and start getting intimate with the grass, like if you’re out for a couple of weeks — the grass becomes your whole reality, your family… the mind starts attaching the whole Nazi good guy/bad guy thing onto the grass. And it will start its whole world there again with an inanimate object. Because it’s only the concepts that appear to live…  (In other words, human beings, “life”, the world, the holocaust, etc. are all concepts. There’s no reality to these other than thought.)

Friend: You take the Jews away from the Nazi, he’s going to start persecuting one of his family. (Hmmm, don’t know how many Nazis went home and started chucking their family members into a gas oven…)

BK: Exactly. There’s nothing sacred — only the concept arising in the moment. That’s what we hold sacred, that’s what we worship, until we don’t.

For Katie, everything and everyone are nothing more than concepts. This is her “freedom”.

There never has been evil and there never will be. Evil is simply a story about what is not… Evil is the story of what you think nature should be and what goes on in it, and it keeps you in the illusion of fear and separation… It’s got to be very dramatic to keep it going, otherwise there’s only peace. Like who would you be without it? Peace. And grace. (This is true, no thinking, no anxiety, fear, etc. None of those bad things we don’t like to experience. However, I wonder if those bad feelings arise for a reason? By following Katie’s teachings, we’ll deconstruct the reasons until the feelings don’t arise anymore. I wonder if this is a “good” thing?)

I see her reasoning. Arguing with reality, no matter how atrocious, leads to suffering. When you argue with what is, you lose. The only sane thing to do is to accept it.  Acceptance doesn’t mean inaction. It means acknowledging what is the case and not fighting with it. However, this teaching is hardly new. The famous serenity prayer says it even better:

Lord, Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

In my last post, I pondered the consequences of not seeing anything as good or evil. Likewise, I wonder about the devaluation of human beings. Since we’ve killed God, and I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing, we’ve also destroyed our sense of being special and unique. We’re just another carbon-based species among a billion others on the planet. Philosophies which are found in Buddhism, New Age thought, post-modernism, and scientism all reinforce this idea. The destruction of millions of potential human beings every year because they may create some inconveniences for a mother is one symptom of this devaluation; so are the declining birthrates throughout the industrialized nations. Here in Korea it’s only 1.6 — far below the 2.1 requirement in order to keep society stable.

Our friends, the Muslims, don’t have a problem with this. Their birthrates are soaring. We can look forward to mosque in every neighborhood of Europe within our lifetimes if events and projections stay on course.

My point in this somewhat meandering entry is that valuing people as no more important than grass, or pigs, or monkeys will have and is having massive social consequences. If you think philosophy is insignificant, you’re highly mistaken. It’s our underlying worldview — philosophy — which determines the actions we take. Views which have become popular in the past century all devalue the human being and there is a significant price to be paid for such change of mind.

A spiritual teaching which advocates dismantling all of your concepts because they cause you discomfort is dubious at best. That discomfort might be there for a reason! Perhaps it means it’s time to step up and doing something about the problem — or give it up — give it to God, as they used to say in the Baptist bible camp.

“Lord, grant me the serenity…”

There is No Evil: A Consideration of the Absence of Evil

The future can never come. Nothing is ultimately real, so when people talk about violence, I notice the violence their using right now against reality. Why would you be afraid of reality? Reality is benign for those who can see clearly.

 

To me evil means confusion. Anyone who thinks that evil exists is frightened and therefore confused. And I knew that everything is welcome here, everything… There is nothing terrible in the world. Evil is just one more story to keep us from opening to love. What I know is that God is everything and God is good.

 

 

 

These are quotes from Byron Katie’s book A Thousand Names for Joy. It’s an amazing and powerful book. I’ve read it through at least five times. One can dip into any paragraph of the book and it’s like receiving life-giving waters.

 

I’ve written both critiques and praises of Katie. I chose the quotes above to illustrate her view of evil. It’s not only her view but also the prevailing New Age and postmodern view of evil, which is basically that evil doesn’t exist. There are no absolute values. All values are thought-constructed. This is a natural consequence of society which lost faith in the Absolute. No God, no values, it’s simple. The monotheists are right when they maintain that without an absolute law-giver, all laws remain relative and subject to our whim and fancy.

 

Katie maintains there’s no evil in the world, it’s only our thinking that makes it appear so. I ponder this point and don’t know what to say about it. On one hand, I understand the reasoning. Without thought naming something so, it doesn’t exist in that way. This is Buddhist philosophy. It doesn’t mean that there’s no cause and effect (karma). In other words, if you kill, you’ll receive the appropriate karmic response; however, neither the killing nor the karma therefrom are inherently good or bad. The Buddha preferred the words “skillful” and “unskillful”, which are morally value-free words. They describe facts: it is unskillful to kill, meaning killing causes pain and suffering for oneself and others. There’s no value judgment there. Pain is pain. And we say it’s bad because we don’t like it.

 

But what to make of Katie’s view? Is there really no evil? Is the sex-trafficking of twelve-year old girls not evil? Are suicide bombings not evil? They’re “God” – certainly no God any Christian, Muslim, or Jew would recognize – but Katie calls these acts “God”. For her these acts constitute God as much as giving flowers to your mother on her birthday.

 

What happens when we sit at the door of a brothel in small shanty town in Cambodia and some twelve-year old girl who is a slave is being repeatedly raped day and day out? It’s reality, true. (It’s an empty tautology to say that “What is is reality.”) Are there any consequences to our “seeing through”, our dismantling of the notion of evil? Would we be less inclined to act in such circumstances?

 

I don’t know. But I do worry about deprogramming ourselves to see the world without conceptual filters. I worry that this teaching is so popular because it’s so easy and feels good.

 

And I wonder what would’ve happened two thousand years ago if Jesus taught what Katie taught. Because like Christianity or not, much of what we value about our culture comes from the teachings of that Nazarene preacher: human rights, charity, helping the poor, optimism about the future, fighting oppression, equality of all human beings, the arts, education, and philosophy.

 

What I’m getting at is ideas have consequences. I’m not sure what kind of world Katie’s ideas would produce. After our transformation into Zen masters, which Eckhart Tolle and many others of his ilk propose and say is happening now, will our culture survive? Will we be able to keep the birth rate up (if not, society will collapse)? Will be able to defend the freedoms and rights that we’ve fought so hard for and now take for granted?

 

Somehow I doubt it.

 

This bothers me, and it should concern you too.

 

 

 

Critique of Byron Katie Part 2

My initial critique of BK inspired the most comments of any entry on this blog. Some lauded the criticism, others came to defend. I thought of a couple of other problems with BK’s worldview, all my projection, of course, since according to BK there is no world out there — it’s all in our imaginations.

God is what-is: perhaps one of her most famous quotes. She says she has no concepts about the world, because all concepts are false, but this is one of her favorites, and she uses it as a teaching tool, not as an ontological statement. 

Surprisingly, I bought into this one for awhile. I say surprisingly, because it’s a ridiculous concept. God is normally and meaningfully thought of as the first mover or the first cause. God is also not limited to his creation, happening as it is. God must be something other than what’s happening right now. If God were only what-is, then what moved or caused creation in the first place? And how can a creator only be the creation?

Saying that God is reality is a meaningless statement. It’s actually nothing more than a tautology aimed at making people feel relieved. “Life is life” or “reality is reality” is more to the truth of what BK means. The “God” that’s in her statement is no God at all. I suspect it alleviates people’s guilt or sense of something missing. There’s no God to whom they have to live up or account. Everything’s okay, just relax. The message feels good, which accounts for her popularity; after all, we are probably the most narcissistic, undisciplined, and impatient society that’s ever graced the planet. I should know, I’m one of its prime examples!

The second problem: her worldview contains assumptions which she hasn’t noticed and which her followers also don’t notice. I call it immediatism. I don’t think it’s a word; I just made it up. Basically, it means that the only experience possible is this immediate one we’re having now. Anything else is just thought and therefore not as true — or not true at all — as this experience now. Therefore, this now is the only truth. You find this view in Zen, Taoism, and other forms of nondual philosophy. It’s a view that tries to escape having a view. It’s an extreme form of skepticism, quite similar to solipism.

The problem with it is simple. The belief or idea that there is no world aside from this experience now is a belief. It assumes that anything not experienced doesn’t exist. It’s absurdly easy to discredit. Microwave rays don’t exist — because I don’t experience them. When I do experience them, then they do exist. Basically, all phenomena are like this. Their existence depends on this mind co-creating them. There’s no way to prove this nor is there any compelling reason whatsoever to buy into this view.

The fact that BK is living in world with nothing should give people pause. She often viewed as an enlightened being, but it might be nothing more than severe brain-damage or possession by some odd spirit, if you believe in such things. Her change was radical. For years she’s severly depressed, then one day she wakes up and she’s a different person. That’s not normal and one should consider carefully the implications of her teachings. Ideas have consequences. What consequences would occur should a large group of people stop believing that their thoughts meant anything or represented true things or events?

Just some food for thought.