Conscious Choice: Bridging the Infinite

November 1998

Bridging the Infinite

Christians and Buddhists in Conversation

by Wayne Teasdale

America seems to be flirting with Buddhism. It is evident in films, like Seven Years in Tibet, and Kundun, although the relationship at this early point is tenuous and superficial. There is an infatuation with the Dalai Lama and everything Tibetan. How long this will last is uncertain, but people are more aware of Tibet’s agonizing struggle and the Buddhist principles that underpin the life of this unusual culture. The good heart and spirituality that characterize this Himalayan nation are becoming more familiar to us all. Something of the indomitable, noble spirit of Tibet and of Buddhism are likely to be permanently ingrained on the American psyche through these films, the Dalai Lama’s frequent appearances in the West, visits by other Tibetan teachers, interviews, articles, and books.

The British historian Arnold Toynbee once remarked to a Buddhist thinker, Daisaku Ikeda, that the most significant event of our period in history is the meeting between Buddhism and Christianity. These prophetic words are often quoted in various forums around the world devoted to the encounter between these two venerable traditions. These two traditions are so different that this is a momentous suggestion. If Christianity can be taken as representative of all theistic traditions, and it is related creatively and fruitfully with Buddhism, a non-theistic religion, and somehow their differences can be reconciled, then all the faiths can similarly be brought into harmony. If they can maintain their mutual openness, trust, and respect in dialogue in the decades ahead, such a breakthrough will become a reality.

If this is to happen, however, the conversation or dialogue has to be among equals. Dialogue presupposes genuine equality, with no hidden agendas operative below the surface, or behind the scenes. The old exclusivity of Christians, especially Catholics, and the unacknowledged spiritual imperialism of some Western Buddhists, must give way to a symbiotic understanding that transcends the dominance of one over the other. Some Americans have made a fetish of Tibetan Buddhism, and smugly think everything else is either false or naive. They perhaps regard those who believe in God in such a way. That attitude is itself more naive than those they accuse. It’s important to avoid this polemical attitude if we are to proceed with the work of generating vision. Many Western Buddhists are former Jews and Catholics, and most of them look down their noses at their erstwhile faiths. The question is: did they ever really adequately comprehend them? I doubt it!

To be fair, it isn’t just these new Buddhists who have the secret agenda. There are those who regard Buddhism with suspicion, and even contempt. There is the example of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in Rome, the prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the department that ensures orthodoxy is maintained. He granted an interview to the French weekly L’Express more than a year ago, and in "off the cuff" remarks, stated that Buddhism was "spiritual, mental autoeroticism," or mental masturbation! He went on to quote an unnamed writer who had said in the 1950s that Buddhism would be the undoing of the Catholic church. Vatican officials are not in the habit of making such "off the cuff" statements unless they are calculated for publication. The views that he expressed seem to emanate from fear and ignorance, not from any genuine understanding. They certainly do not promote mutual respect and trust. They reveal a fear of an intellectual challenge from Buddhism itself in some officials of the Holy See, perhaps even including the Pontiff himself. Rome has never regarded Islam in the same way, concerned primarily with its military and political power. It hasn’t interpreted Islam as quite on the same level as that of Christianity. Buddhism is another matter. It’s not so much that it believes it to be equal or superior to the Christian faith, rather it is worried about Buddhist inroads among certain influential segments of the population in Western countries, principally here in America, Europe, and Australia.

I am convinced that Christianity and Buddhism together have a unique opportunity and responsibility to enter into a sustained dialogue on all matters. It is crucial that caricatures, negative attitudes, remarks, misunderstandings etc. be avoided on both sides, because such things produce an atmosphere that is strained, or worse, that poisons the relationship. If the two traditions work together on resolving the critical issues facing the planet, and if they commit themselves to an open-ended dialogue process in which mutual influence on each other occurs in the areas of belief or view, prayer, and social engagement, they will make an enormously precious contribution towards the communication of a new consciousness all around the world.

The Pioneers of Harmony
The effort to reach out to Buddhism through contacts with Buddhists from various schools, i.e., Zen, Theravadan, and Tibetan, in modern times goes back to the example of Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and writer who made his own journey to the East in the last months of his life in late 1968. For some ten years prior to this fateful trip, he had been absorbing Eastern classics, and achieved some depth of understanding of Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism. Merton visited the Dalai Lama in November 1968, and remained a week in Dharamsala as his guest. Conversations between the two are recorded in The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton.

Likewise, Bede Griffiths, an English Benedictine monk, spent 38 years in India, and when he was departing for the subcontinent in 1955, he wrote to a friend: "I’m going out to India to seek the other half of my soul," the intuitive, mystical half. He found it, and his life was enormously fruitful in the icon of integrity that he became, and in the 15 books he wrote. Griffiths discerned that this "other half" related to the ultimate forms of mystical consciousness in the Christian tradition, as well as Advaita, or non-duality in Hinduism, and baqa, or unitive integration with the Divine in Sufism, or Islamic mysticism.

Thomas Keating also is a significant voice in the dialogue in our time. Keating has met and spoken with the Dalai Lama on at least six or seven occasions. He has grasped the subtleties of Buddhist spirituality, and has entered into long and fruitful dialogues with Buddhist teachers at the Naropa Institute, a Tibetan Buddhist graduate school in Boulder, Colorado. Some years ago, he established the Snowmass Conference, composed of fifteen members, each of whom is a spiritual teacher in one of the world religions. They have been engaged in significant conversations since the early eighties, and produced what they call The Guidelines for Interreligious Understanding, the fruit of their long deliberations and mutual sharings.

It was Bede Griffiths who inspired my own desire to go to India. He and I had corresponded since 1973, and we met for the first time in 1979, then in 1983. With his encouragement, I drank profusely from the well of Indian mysticism, then discovered the Buddhist tradition firsthand. In April, 1988, I took part in a Buddhist/Christian monastic dialogue, which lasted a bit more than 70 minutes. Through this conversation, I met the Dalai Lama for the first time, and I remember vividly the impression I had on that extraordinary day: in our meeting, through us, Christ and the Buddha are also meeting.

Since then, I have puzzled over Toynbee’s observation, asking myself why the meeting of Buddhism and Christianity would be the most significant event in our history. Now I believe I’m onto the answer. Toynbee’s comment is related to Hegel’s insight regarding Plato’s Dialogues. Hegel read Plato’s Dialogues with great attention, and noticed that the position of an interlocutor would change as a conversation progressed. He realized that understanding is a dynamic operation of thought, which requires the tension of opposites in order to unfold. The name given to this principle is dialectic.

For example, the tension between the medieval church and the state led to struggles that resulted in the emergence of the modern state, and then, to democracy. This same process is underway in the conversation between Buddhists and Christians. If Christianity can represent, in this relationship, the position that God exists, while Buddhism negates this view or is silent about the existence of God, then the honest, open, patient, and generous dialogue about these issues will lead to a breakthrough in spiritual understanding and a higher level of awareness. What does emerge will be a new view that both can embrace‹yet it will go beyond both Buddhism and Christianity in their present views.

The implications for the human family are far-reaching. Yet this scenario is not unrealistic when we consider that religions are not static systems, but living social organisms capable of unlimited growth. I have often felt that Buddhist mysticism begins and ends at that point where Christian mysticism ends: in unitive consciousness. Buddhism speaks of non-dual awareness as the truth, and this is the ultimate level of reality. Christian mystics refer to that same level of consciousness beyond duality. Meister Eckhart, for instance, tells us of the soul’s return to the Godhead, the God beyond God in the usual sense. He says: "When I go back to the divine ground, back to the Godhead, nobody asks me where I’ve been, and God passes away."

How can we speak of God when there is only God? The Divine Reality, the Ultimate, the Absolute, God, Godhead, Nirvana, the Wakan Taku of the Dakotas, is a vast, or infinite awareness, a boundless consciousness. All reality, life, being, and cosmos exists within this vast awareness. For centuries in the Western world we have labored under the conception of dualism, that somehow we were separate and distinct from what we perceived and observed. With the advent of quantum physics and relativity theory this dualistic approach has broken down. We know know that each one of us inhabits, rather than possesses, what can be called local awareness. It makes our life tangible by filtering it through parameters of knowing and being that allow for this local type of consciousness, this knowing person here and now who is self-aware. When someone has a mystical experience, he or she is propelled into a cosmic kind of perception. The enlightened are those who have broken out of their local and regional, or individual and species awareness and have discovered other realms of consciousness beyond this sphere.

This approach to the Divine and the human through consciousness gives us a framework to reconcile Buddhism and Christianity, and in their harmony, the possibility of relating all the religions of the world in an equally accommodating integration that preserves the identity and truth of each. It breaks down the old barriers erected over the millennia‹and one of the root causes of wars between the religions. For far too long we lived in splendid and not so splendid isolation in our cultural ghettos. We can no longer afford the luxury of being ignorant of the other traditions, since together, we have, as the Dalai Lama puts it so eloquently, "a universal responsibility" towards one another and the earth itself. This responsibility is both individual and collective; it must be exercised by each one of us, and by the entire human community.

If Christian attempts to span the infinite with Buddhists are to be meaningful, they will have to walk with Buddhists in the darkness of suffering and death. If not, all the rest is words, words, and more words. Two years ago, the Catholic Church in France apologized to the Jewish community there for its silence during the Nazi occupation and deportation of Jews to death camps. Eventually, Rome will follow suit. If Rome fails to respond to the Tibetan challenge, will the pope in 2050 apologize to the XVth Dalai Lama and to the Tibetan People? Let’s hope that won’t be necessary. History watches while the world waits, and history will exact its price from Rome!

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