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Imagining a Christian Buddhist
My friend Michiko is a Christian Buddhist. I ask her what this feels like from the inside, and she encourages me to imagine someone receiving medicine from two intravenous tubes, one Buddhist and one Christian. I ask her what the medicine are, and if they are compatible, and she says "yes." Not all liquids received from Buddhism and Christianity are compatible, she adds, but some are.
What medicine does she get from Buddhism? She says "mindfulness in the present moment, a sense of deep connectedness, a willingness to let go of things when they pass away, and gratitude for the sheer suchness of things." And what medicine does she get from Christianity? She says "a sense of friendship and community with others, hope for the future, a desire to help create a better world, and trust in a God of boundless love."
And these medicines are compatible? 'Yes, they come from different sources, but they stir together.'
I am especially interested in whether, in her view, belief in a personal God and belief in impermanence and inter-becoming are compatible. She reminds me of the millions of Pure Land Buddhists around the world who believe in a loving Bodhisattva who embraces all living beings. "God is that Bodhissatva," she suggests. And where did you get this idea? I ask. "From process theology," she says,
*
The more we talk, the more I realize how important the stirring is in her life. Her path is not "Christianity" and "Buddhism" scotch-taped together. And she does not hide from differences, real or imagined, between traditional Christian teachings and traditional Buddhist teachings. But she does believe that many of those alleged differences are complementary rather than contradictory. And she finds Christian process theology an especially helpful framework for appreciating the complementary aspects. "
Like John Wesley, like Jane Goodall, like Mother Teresa, like Martin Luther King, Jr., the Christian Buddhist trusts in a God of unbounded Love. She seeks to live from this trust, day by day, moment by moment, sensitive to the gift of being loved by God, as received in faith and gratitude.
The Christian Buddhist does not believe in a God of fear or vanity, a God who is preoccupied with being flattered or receiving metaphysical compliments.
She believes in a God of love whose compassion was revealed but not exhausted, in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus: a Jewish Bodhisattva who died on a cross and who beckoned his disciples to help create a kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven, where love not hatred would be the ruling spirit.
She seeks to share in Jesus' journey through concrete acts of love, listening to the many voices of the world as if
they were her own, loving her neighbors as she loves herself, knowing that her neighbors are part of her self, part of who and what she is.
She speaks of her Christian path as "a perfection of love" and a "walk with Christ" -- her favorite phrases for describing the Christian life she seeks to live.
She turns to Buddhism that she might better walk with Christ and grow in love. She meditates and prays, neither to the exclusion of the other, both essential to the walk.
The Amida of Pure Land Buddhism reminds her that the God in whom she trusts is a cosmic Bodhisattva, seeking to save all sentient beings, with a thousand arms of compassion.
For her God is Jesus-like, not Caesar-like: more like a caring grandmother than a fearsome bully in the sky, more like a suffering servant than a vain king on a throne.
More like a silent sage walking the paths of India, helping people awaken to the fact that they live in a world of mutual becoming, where all things reflect all others
like gems in Indra's Net, or drops of dharma rain, or green mountains walking, or stained glass windows in a small Methodist church, each window different, each window unique, but all gathered together, and illuminated by a Light within light.
For the Christian Buddhist, God is this Light: felt but not grabbed. God is the Abba of Jesus, the Amida of Pure Land Buddhism, the Grace in whose light the universe lives and moves and has its being: a Grace beyond words, like the light of the moon.
She feels called by this Grace, this Amida, this Abba, this Light to create pure lands on earth as they exist in heaven, for the sake of other people, other animals, and the earth, and for the sake of herself. She tries to walk one mindful step at a time, one drop of experience at a time,
lovingly and creatively, with courage and kindness, with playfulness and humor, able to hold on and to let go,
as Christian Buddhist.
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Confessions of a Methodist Buddhist
A friend tells me that I’m a Methodist Buddhist. Or a Pure Land Methodist. I think she’s right.
The Holy Spirit and the Perfection of Love
I am Methodist for at least two reasons. I am a communicant in a local Methodist church appreciating its rituals, community, and fellowship. And, more deeply, I believe that the whole purpose of life is to grow into a perfection of love, as best you can, with help from God’s holy spirit, which is always at work in the world and in the heart, whether we know it or not. I learn from John Cobb in Grace and Responsibility: A Wesleyan Theology for Today that the latter belief is at the heart of John Wesley’s theology, and he was the founder of the Methodist movement. I learn from Cobb and others that Wesley believed God’s deepest nature is love, and that this love was revealed but not exhausted in Jesus of Nazareth, so I guess that makes me a Methodist Buddhist for still another reason. I believe that God’s deepest nature is love. My aim in life is to walk with Christ: that is, to share in his journey in my way and time, in community with others, who seek to do the same.
For me, the perfection of love includes, but is more than, one-on-one relations with other people (and with myself) through lovingkindness. Love approached perfection when its horizons are widened to include other animals and the earth, and when it works toward building communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, multicultural, humane to animals, and ecologically wise – the no one left behind. What makes me Methodist is that I want to do my part to help build these communities. I realize that other Christian communions can do this, too. I feel part of a larger community of life-minded souls who want to share in Christ’s journey and extend his healing ministry.
It’s All Interconnected and Changing
My friend adds that I am a Buddhist, too. I think she’s right. There are so many things in Buddhism that I believe in: the interconnectedness of all things, the reality of impermanence, the fact that we all carry within ourselves a propensity to live with wisdom and compassion, and the idea that it is good to live mindfully and gratefully in each present moment. And added to that, I practice Buddhist meditation as an adjunct to my walk with Christ. When you add all these things up, it means that there is a large part of how I think and try to practice my Christianity that is, well, Buddhist in flavor. I am not a Buddhist in a formal sense. I have not taken refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. But I suppose I am Buddhist in an informal sense. When people ask me about my religious identity, I say that I am a Christian-influenced-by-Buddhism. I could as easily say that I’m a Methodist influenced by Buddhism: a Methodist Buddhist, if you will.
Can a Christian be a Buddhist, Too?
For a time in my life I wrestled with the question of whether I should choose between Methodism and Buddhism. You can read about my own pilgrimage in Can a Christian be a Buddhist, Too? I knew that many Christians believed that, if you truly want to walk with Christ, you should learn only from recognizably Christian sources and practices: the Bible and Christian traditions. Some, like the Methodists, add that you can learn from some additional sources: personal experience and reason, including science. Thus the Methodists were generally friendlier to the idea that I might be a Methodist Buddhist than other Christians. A few knew that my own experience of Buddhism (I was the English teacher for a Zen Buddhist monk) could be a source of wisdom for me. See On Being an English Teacher for a Zen Master.
But what about God?
Deep down some of the Christians, maybe even including the Methodists, had another reason for questioning the Buddhist side of my life. It came down to two things. The first was that Buddhists do not believe in a creator God akin to that of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. And the second was that they deny the existence of a soul, understood as a substantial self. I wrote an article in Open Horizons in response to the second critique; see Can a Christian Believe in No-Self? But still there was the “creator God” problem. Here’s how an especially traditional Christian put it to me: “We Christians believe that God depends on nothing and created the world out of nothing. Buddhists believe that nothing is independent like this, and they don’t believe that God created the world out of nothing. You can’t have it both ways!”
Creation out of chaos not out of nothing
I disagreed with him. I knew enough about theology, including biblical theology, to know that the image of God creating the universe out of nothing was itself not a biblical idea. I had read many theologians who propose, along with process theologians like me, that the biblical idea is of God creating the universe out of a pre-existing chaos, not out of nothing. One of my Jewish mentors, Rabbi Bradley Artson, explains it in his God Almighty? No Way!
In order to uncover a deeper answer to this age-old question, we have to revisit the dogma of creation from nothing, a teaching derived from Aristotle and one that makes belief in God’s goodness so difficult for so many. What the Torah actually says is, “When God began creating heaven and earth, there was tohu va-vohu (chaos), and the ruach (wind/breath/spirit) of God was vibrating over the face of tehom, the deep, and God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” According to the Torah, was there tohu va-vohu, chaos, before God started creating? Yes. Unambiguously yes. At the instant God began creating, tohu va-vohu was already existent, and the ruach of God flutters over tehom (that had to be there already for the spirit of God to be able to flutter over it). The simple meaning of Genesis 1 is that there is pre-existent darkness and chaos. The tehom, the chaos, already exists — bubbly, uncontainable and undomesticated. God’s creative act is not the special effect of something from nothing, but the steady chesed (lovingkindness) of converting chaos into cosmos. Tohu va-vohu and the tehom have always existed, and threaten still. God has always been, and is still, inviting/commanding the chaos into cosmos. We have misunderstood the nature of Divine creativity and power.
So here’s the point. Process theologians like Bradley Artson and, for that matter, like me, believe that God does create the world, not once and for all from a distant past. We think the universe has no temporal beginning, and that God’s creativity is a continuing process, and we believe that we create along with God, speaking of our relation to God and God’s to us as co-creativity. Or, if you have Buddhist leanings dependent co-origination (pratitya samutpada).
Justice-Loving Anger
But I also sensed, and still sense, that there is more to the idea of a “creator God” than the idea of creating out of nothing. There is the sense that this creator God is simultaneously a lawgiver and judge, that “he” can do anything he wants, and that he’s angry at least half the time.
My progressive Christian friends would emphasize that “he” is angry about the injustices of the world: rape, murder, prejudice, cruelty, indifference. They wanted to affirm this kind of anger – they would call it righteous indignation – and yet they’d have their doubts that it could be reconciled with Buddhism. One friend put it this way: “In Buddhism any kind of anger is considered an unhealthy and unwholesome emotion, to be purged or transformed through mindfulness. But we Christians believe that God has this kind of anger. It’s a justice-loving anger. Can a practice of Buddhism include justice-loving anger?”
I think it can, but I also think that Christians have emphasized this kind of anger a bit too much, almost making a god of it. There is point when what they – we – call justice-loving anger becomes resentment and a desire for vengeance. We want the bad people to get their just deserts. Truth be told, I don’t think this kind of anger is compatible with Buddhism or, for that matter, with the way of living to which Jesus invites us, which includes the idea that we should love our enemies. I don’t think you can love your enemies and, at the same time, be filled with resentment.
God as Amida Buddha
Back, then, to God. For me, the most plausible way to think about God was by means of process theology: the kind developed so beautifully by John Cobb, Marjorie Suchocki, Bradley Artson, and Patricia Adams Farmer. Here was a way of thinking about God that made sense to my Methodist heart and my Buddhist mind: a God who loved the universe and each sentient being within it, who responded ever anew to each new situation with loving-kindness (like a Buddhist bodhisattva), who shared in the sufferings and joys of all, and who listened to the voices of all with a spacious heart. As I put it in an essay: A God with a Spacious Heart.
Does this God experience righteous indignation? The simple answer is: I don’t know. What I think I know is that, if this God does, it is indignation shaped and undergirded by boundless compassion, limitless love, like a Buddhist bodhisattva. Indeed, like the deity of Pure Land Buddhism: Amida Buddha. Amida is generally understood as a living presence beyond the world who forever reaches into the world, anytime and all the time, with limbs of compassion. Those of us in the process world speak of these “reachings” as initial aims or fresh possibilities that come from God: possibilities: possibilities for peace of mind, for imagination, for wonder, for playfulness, for listening, for courage. and, of course for kindness and compassion. They are tailored to the situation at hand. And at the same time that Amida reaches into the world, the world becomes part of Amida: its joys and sufferings, its beauty and tragedy. Amida’s purity is not that of a stainless steel sink, but that of a horizon of grace, of love, that includes all within its compassionate embrace.
Can a Buddhist be a Methodist, Too?
Thus the question is raised: Might a Methodist Buddhist like me, or for that matter a Pure Land Buddhist, see the life and teachings, the death and resurrection of Jesus as a window to Amida, a window to God. Can a Buddhist be a Christian, too? The answer, I believe, is yes. John Cobb wrote a book to this effect many years ago: Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism. He proposed that Christianity could be transformed in a constructive way by learning from Buddhism, and also that Buddhism could be transformed by learning from Christianity.
In North America and Europe, the most influential forms of Buddhism for non-immigrants are Vipassana, Zen, and Tibetan. I suspect that this is because the Pure Land form seems to resemble Christianity (and Judaism) in troublesome ways. By contrast, immigrant Buddhist communities are sometimes drawn toward Pure Land forms, with their devotion of bodhisattvas. What I find myself hoping is that, in time, Western Christians will come to understand and appreciate Pure Land Buddhism with all that it has to offer, including an emphasis on a God whose nature is love. Sounds like process theology to me and, indeed, like Wesleyan theology. How strange, how delightful, that the very founder of Methodism, in his uniquely Christian way, gives us new eyes for Pure Land Buddhism. Who would have thought that a pathway to Methodism lies in Buddhism and a pathway to Buddhism lies in Methodism? Yes, who would have thought?
-- Jay McDaniel
The Holy Spirit and the Perfection of Love
I am Methodist for at least two reasons. I am a communicant in a local Methodist church appreciating its rituals, community, and fellowship. And, more deeply, I believe that the whole purpose of life is to grow into a perfection of love, as best you can, with help from God’s holy spirit, which is always at work in the world and in the heart, whether we know it or not. I learn from John Cobb in Grace and Responsibility: A Wesleyan Theology for Today that the latter belief is at the heart of John Wesley’s theology, and he was the founder of the Methodist movement. I learn from Cobb and others that Wesley believed God’s deepest nature is love, and that this love was revealed but not exhausted in Jesus of Nazareth, so I guess that makes me a Methodist Buddhist for still another reason. I believe that God’s deepest nature is love. My aim in life is to walk with Christ: that is, to share in his journey in my way and time, in community with others, who seek to do the same.
For me, the perfection of love includes, but is more than, one-on-one relations with other people (and with myself) through lovingkindness. Love approached perfection when its horizons are widened to include other animals and the earth, and when it works toward building communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, multicultural, humane to animals, and ecologically wise – the no one left behind. What makes me Methodist is that I want to do my part to help build these communities. I realize that other Christian communions can do this, too. I feel part of a larger community of life-minded souls who want to share in Christ’s journey and extend his healing ministry.
It’s All Interconnected and Changing
My friend adds that I am a Buddhist, too. I think she’s right. There are so many things in Buddhism that I believe in: the interconnectedness of all things, the reality of impermanence, the fact that we all carry within ourselves a propensity to live with wisdom and compassion, and the idea that it is good to live mindfully and gratefully in each present moment. And added to that, I practice Buddhist meditation as an adjunct to my walk with Christ. When you add all these things up, it means that there is a large part of how I think and try to practice my Christianity that is, well, Buddhist in flavor. I am not a Buddhist in a formal sense. I have not taken refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. But I suppose I am Buddhist in an informal sense. When people ask me about my religious identity, I say that I am a Christian-influenced-by-Buddhism. I could as easily say that I’m a Methodist influenced by Buddhism: a Methodist Buddhist, if you will.
Can a Christian be a Buddhist, Too?
For a time in my life I wrestled with the question of whether I should choose between Methodism and Buddhism. You can read about my own pilgrimage in Can a Christian be a Buddhist, Too? I knew that many Christians believed that, if you truly want to walk with Christ, you should learn only from recognizably Christian sources and practices: the Bible and Christian traditions. Some, like the Methodists, add that you can learn from some additional sources: personal experience and reason, including science. Thus the Methodists were generally friendlier to the idea that I might be a Methodist Buddhist than other Christians. A few knew that my own experience of Buddhism (I was the English teacher for a Zen Buddhist monk) could be a source of wisdom for me. See On Being an English Teacher for a Zen Master.
But what about God?
Deep down some of the Christians, maybe even including the Methodists, had another reason for questioning the Buddhist side of my life. It came down to two things. The first was that Buddhists do not believe in a creator God akin to that of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. And the second was that they deny the existence of a soul, understood as a substantial self. I wrote an article in Open Horizons in response to the second critique; see Can a Christian Believe in No-Self? But still there was the “creator God” problem. Here’s how an especially traditional Christian put it to me: “We Christians believe that God depends on nothing and created the world out of nothing. Buddhists believe that nothing is independent like this, and they don’t believe that God created the world out of nothing. You can’t have it both ways!”
Creation out of chaos not out of nothing
I disagreed with him. I knew enough about theology, including biblical theology, to know that the image of God creating the universe out of nothing was itself not a biblical idea. I had read many theologians who propose, along with process theologians like me, that the biblical idea is of God creating the universe out of a pre-existing chaos, not out of nothing. One of my Jewish mentors, Rabbi Bradley Artson, explains it in his God Almighty? No Way!
In order to uncover a deeper answer to this age-old question, we have to revisit the dogma of creation from nothing, a teaching derived from Aristotle and one that makes belief in God’s goodness so difficult for so many. What the Torah actually says is, “When God began creating heaven and earth, there was tohu va-vohu (chaos), and the ruach (wind/breath/spirit) of God was vibrating over the face of tehom, the deep, and God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” According to the Torah, was there tohu va-vohu, chaos, before God started creating? Yes. Unambiguously yes. At the instant God began creating, tohu va-vohu was already existent, and the ruach of God flutters over tehom (that had to be there already for the spirit of God to be able to flutter over it). The simple meaning of Genesis 1 is that there is pre-existent darkness and chaos. The tehom, the chaos, already exists — bubbly, uncontainable and undomesticated. God’s creative act is not the special effect of something from nothing, but the steady chesed (lovingkindness) of converting chaos into cosmos. Tohu va-vohu and the tehom have always existed, and threaten still. God has always been, and is still, inviting/commanding the chaos into cosmos. We have misunderstood the nature of Divine creativity and power.
So here’s the point. Process theologians like Bradley Artson and, for that matter, like me, believe that God does create the world, not once and for all from a distant past. We think the universe has no temporal beginning, and that God’s creativity is a continuing process, and we believe that we create along with God, speaking of our relation to God and God’s to us as co-creativity. Or, if you have Buddhist leanings dependent co-origination (pratitya samutpada).
Justice-Loving Anger
But I also sensed, and still sense, that there is more to the idea of a “creator God” than the idea of creating out of nothing. There is the sense that this creator God is simultaneously a lawgiver and judge, that “he” can do anything he wants, and that he’s angry at least half the time.
My progressive Christian friends would emphasize that “he” is angry about the injustices of the world: rape, murder, prejudice, cruelty, indifference. They wanted to affirm this kind of anger – they would call it righteous indignation – and yet they’d have their doubts that it could be reconciled with Buddhism. One friend put it this way: “In Buddhism any kind of anger is considered an unhealthy and unwholesome emotion, to be purged or transformed through mindfulness. But we Christians believe that God has this kind of anger. It’s a justice-loving anger. Can a practice of Buddhism include justice-loving anger?”
I think it can, but I also think that Christians have emphasized this kind of anger a bit too much, almost making a god of it. There is point when what they – we – call justice-loving anger becomes resentment and a desire for vengeance. We want the bad people to get their just deserts. Truth be told, I don’t think this kind of anger is compatible with Buddhism or, for that matter, with the way of living to which Jesus invites us, which includes the idea that we should love our enemies. I don’t think you can love your enemies and, at the same time, be filled with resentment.
God as Amida Buddha
Back, then, to God. For me, the most plausible way to think about God was by means of process theology: the kind developed so beautifully by John Cobb, Marjorie Suchocki, Bradley Artson, and Patricia Adams Farmer. Here was a way of thinking about God that made sense to my Methodist heart and my Buddhist mind: a God who loved the universe and each sentient being within it, who responded ever anew to each new situation with loving-kindness (like a Buddhist bodhisattva), who shared in the sufferings and joys of all, and who listened to the voices of all with a spacious heart. As I put it in an essay: A God with a Spacious Heart.
Does this God experience righteous indignation? The simple answer is: I don’t know. What I think I know is that, if this God does, it is indignation shaped and undergirded by boundless compassion, limitless love, like a Buddhist bodhisattva. Indeed, like the deity of Pure Land Buddhism: Amida Buddha. Amida is generally understood as a living presence beyond the world who forever reaches into the world, anytime and all the time, with limbs of compassion. Those of us in the process world speak of these “reachings” as initial aims or fresh possibilities that come from God: possibilities: possibilities for peace of mind, for imagination, for wonder, for playfulness, for listening, for courage. and, of course for kindness and compassion. They are tailored to the situation at hand. And at the same time that Amida reaches into the world, the world becomes part of Amida: its joys and sufferings, its beauty and tragedy. Amida’s purity is not that of a stainless steel sink, but that of a horizon of grace, of love, that includes all within its compassionate embrace.
Can a Buddhist be a Methodist, Too?
Thus the question is raised: Might a Methodist Buddhist like me, or for that matter a Pure Land Buddhist, see the life and teachings, the death and resurrection of Jesus as a window to Amida, a window to God. Can a Buddhist be a Christian, too? The answer, I believe, is yes. John Cobb wrote a book to this effect many years ago: Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism. He proposed that Christianity could be transformed in a constructive way by learning from Buddhism, and also that Buddhism could be transformed by learning from Christianity.
In North America and Europe, the most influential forms of Buddhism for non-immigrants are Vipassana, Zen, and Tibetan. I suspect that this is because the Pure Land form seems to resemble Christianity (and Judaism) in troublesome ways. By contrast, immigrant Buddhist communities are sometimes drawn toward Pure Land forms, with their devotion of bodhisattvas. What I find myself hoping is that, in time, Western Christians will come to understand and appreciate Pure Land Buddhism with all that it has to offer, including an emphasis on a God whose nature is love. Sounds like process theology to me and, indeed, like Wesleyan theology. How strange, how delightful, that the very founder of Methodism, in his uniquely Christian way, gives us new eyes for Pure Land Buddhism. Who would have thought that a pathway to Methodism lies in Buddhism and a pathway to Buddhism lies in Methodism? Yes, who would have thought?
-- Jay McDaniel