If You Dislike Christianity,
You'll Hate Buddhism!
You'll Hate Buddhism!
Robert M. Price
As a teacher of comparative Religion courses over
many years, I have come to notice some surprising and even paradoxical
things. It is no surprise to me when certain students keep their minds
as closed as a clenched fist because their fundamentalist upbringing
demands it. I know to expect it, especially since I felt that way myself
when I was their age. I try not to let it rest that way, though. I have
no trouble respecting various points of view, because I have no problem
respecting individuals as persons, and their most intimate beliefs are a
part of them. I think Rousseau had the same thing in mind when he
observed that one cannot live in harmony with one's neighbor so long as
one really believes one's neighbor is damned to Hell. But accepting
their belief insofar as they cherish it is another thing than accepting
it as on a par with other options when the belief has nothing going for
it, no leg to stand on. For instance a servant of truth simply cannot
dignify Creationism by treating it as a scientific alternative deserving
equal time in the class room. Anyone who knows the first thing about
scientific method and the nature of theorizing knows Creationism does
not belong in the game. You don't enter a horse in a dog race. Thus as a
teacher, your responsibility is to use Creationism as a foil to
demonstrate what the scientific approach really is, and it is not a set
of particular conclusions but rather a method of arriving at
(tentatively held) conclusions.
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In the same way, if education is your game, you
cannot allow it to appear that you respect and thus appear to legitimate
narrow-mindedness. Like a good Zen Master, your business is to ask
disturbing Socratic questions, to coax the truth out from within the
student. For instance, I like to suggest that the person who says "I've
made up my mind; don't confuse me with the facts," is making me think
the opposite of what they want me to think. Do they have great faith?
Instead, I can't help but think that deep down, they already know the
jig is up! You don't lock up the barn that tight unless you know the
horse wants out! They must know their faith would never survive a close
look at certain facts. Trying to preserve the illusion, they are only
making it more obvious that they know it is an illusion after all. I
merely point this out.
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As I say, I am not too surprised to find this
attitude prevalent among fundamentalist Christian students. But it has
surprised me on occasion to discover the same sort of mind set present
in other quarters. For instance, there are plenty of fundamentalist
nonbelievers: people who have left fundamentalism behind in terms of
doctrine, but who have only redoubled it as an attitude. Just scan the
letters pages of certain Rationalist and Free Thought periodicals. Once I
read a letter from an ex-fundamentalist boasting of his various efforts
at propagating the lack of faith. This poor fellow was making a
spectacle of himself by passing out atheistic handbills on the street
corner, printing up atheist bumper stickers, etc. In short, he had given
up religion only to preserve what most of us would consider its most
odious and onerous aspects! For such a person, the tag
"ex-fundamentalist" denotes merely another sub-type of fundamentalism,
like "neo-fundamentalist" or "hyper-fundamentalist." But, again, I can
empathize with this one, pathetically ironic as it is, because I have
succumbed to this one, too.
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But we seem never to learn. I can remember some
fifteen years ago when my wife Carol and I dropped by to visit Maryanne,
a classmate of my wife, and her husband. Carol had told me she was a
convert to Buddhism--which today may mean anything, often denoting more
of a New Ager than any traditional sort of Buddhist. After all, if you
really believe Cyril Henry Hoskins, AKA Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, is a
Buddhist, you may think you are, too, even if you are as far from the
Dharma as he was. As we opened a polite conversation, it rapidly
developed that Maryanne took a rather non-Buddhistic stance toward
Christianity. That is to say, her third eye was somewhat jaundiced when
it came to Christianity. She proceeded to fulminate bitterly against its
psychological and theological inadequacies. You can imagine the usual
line about the destructive self-hatred and guilt over the physical body
that Christianity fosters. Then she went on to denigrate the bloody
superstition of the substitutionary atonement of Christ on the cross.
Let's get one thing straight. I agreed with these
critiques. At the time I still maintained some sort of vague Christian
identity myself, albeit of a rather left-wing Tillichian brand. My
approach then was to try to "purify" Christian existence from these
various phobias and superstitions, get to the
philosophical/psychological meat of the thing. I have since given up the
enterprise. But I felt the gauntlet had been thrown down and I made
ready to reply. I figured the best defense was a good offense. Thus I
sought not to defend Christianity (I couldn't have defended those
aspects in good faith anyway). But neither did I consider attacking
Buddhism, which then as now I revere as a true religion. My chosen
strategy was to show how she was reading Buddhism even more selectively
than she was reading Christianity.
Surely, I ventured, she could not be unaware of the
fact that the very doctrinal features she despised in their Christian
avatars were not only present in but absolutely central to historic
mainstream Buddhism! I'm not sure what she took Buddhism to mean, but
it's a safe bet all the Buddhist faithful in China, Mongolia, Tibet,
Sikkim, Bhutan, Nepal, Korea, and Japan (to say nothing of that ancient
stronghold of Oriental mysticism, Colorado) would not agree with her.
For Mahayana Buddhism is solidly based on the Bodhisattva doctrine.
Southern Asian Buddhism, Theravada (or Hinayana, as the Mahayana call
it), is a spare and logically simpler scheme of attaining Nirvana
through self-effort aimed at extinguishing the apparent self, or ego.
But the Lords of the Mahayana rejected such a goal as
selfish in aim and in means. Instead, they believed, all Buddhists
ought to emulate Gautama Buddha himself who, after all, did not yield to
the temptation of Mara that he should leave this poor world behind and
pass forever into his own Nirvana at once. For the sake of poor mortals,
Samsara addicts, the Lord Buddha deferred his own rightful Nirvana. And
so should we!
And given the fact that all beings share the Buddha
nature and are thus capable of eventual Buddhahood, it is finally
nonsensical to suggest that I can be saved without you and everyone else
being saved. It's all or nothing. This means, as the Buddha is made to
reveal to his disciples in the Saddharma Pundarika (The Lotus of the
True Law), that even the 24 previous Buddhas (including Dipankara, the
one under whose tutelage Gautama Buddha first heard the Dharma preached
many ages before) are still active behind the scenes in the Sambogkhya,
the penultimate realm of existence where the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas
dwell like celestial gods, answering prayers and otherwise aiding poor
mortals who need a hand up.
One ought to take the vow to embark on the path to
Buddhahood, and once one does so, one counts as a Bodhisattva (a
Buddha-to-be). This is a long and hard row to hoe, but you'd be spending
the time in pointless reincarnations anyway, so why not? Through
countless lifetimes of toil and self-sacrifice for the good of others,
the Bodhisattva earns good karma far in excess of that necessary to win
his wings (as Clarence does in It's a Wonderful Life). He has to be in
the business of doing good works to become worthy of Bodhisattvahood.
Now, who's the Bodhisattva to do these good works
for? This works out rather well for the vast majority of Buddhist laity
who have not the stamina to undertake the Greater Career. They are doing
their bit by financially supporting the earthly Bodhisattvas (as they
did the Theravadin monks down south) and by praying to the heavenly
ones, as their ancestors used to pray to the Vedic gods. Eventually the
store of supererogatory merit amassed by the Bodhisattvas was believed
so great that they could grant not only worldly boons but actual
salvation itself! We think that the Buddha taught that there was no
grace upon which to draw to gain Nirvana, since the whole idea was to
change your own frame of mind, nullify the ego, which in the nature of
the case only you can do. But by hook and by crook, Mahayana Buddhism
eventually evolved a salvation scheme by which certain virtuosos, like
the Buddha himself, might in fact offer such saving grace to those
calling upon them in faith. By such an act of receptive faith the
believer is allowed to draw upon the store of good Karma gained by the
Bodhisattvas by their good works. It will be transferred to the
believers' accounts as if it had been their own achievement. Does this
sound familiar? It will sound even more so. For some Bodhisattvas, in
order to gain still more abundant good Karma, will voluntarily submit to
the tortures of the numerous spectacular Hells of Buddhist eschatology.
Avalokiteshvara and his brethren are in this fashion undergoing
expiatory suffering in your place and for your benefit.
In Pure Land Buddhism, fantastically popular in
Japan where it spread from China and India, we witness the ultimate
spinning out of the logic of this redemptive theology. A long succession
of Pure Land patriarchs, basing their teachings on the Longer and
Shorter Sukhavati Sutras (= Pure Land Scriptures), sought to
refine the meaning of salvation by grace through faith alone. Their
Sutras have Gautama taking the role of John the Baptist, singing the
greater glories of Amitabha Buddha, an ancient king who, hearing the
preaching of a contemporary Buddha, renounced the throne and took up the
discipline of the Bodhisattva. His strategy was to put all of his
accumulated Karmic green Stamps toward the creation of a "Pure Land," a
world in which one need only be reborn to achieve the stage of
non-returning, the seventh stage of the Bodhisattva path (something that
would otherwise take unthinkable eons of good works, as it did in the
case of Amitabha himself). At the end of one lifetime in the Sukhavati,
one would infallibly attain Buddhahood.
And how was to one guarantee one's reservations?
Aye, there's the rub. The text said one need only call on Amitabha's
name three times, and that would do it. But the various patriarchs
sought to determine, with all the introspective microscrutiny of a
medieval penance manual, precisely what mental condition constituted
saving faith. What meditations and attitudes were required? As always
happens with introspective pietism (read Watchman Nee, Andrew Murray,
etc.) what looked easy turns out to be arduous and confusing--or is made
to be so. Each subsequent patriarch narrowed the range of activity
required, recognizing that the more a successful faith hinges upon one
fulfilling certain conditions, the more salvation after all depends on
one's own works ("Self-Power"). And this is incompatible with the
doctrine hat one needs grace to be saved in the first place. On the one
hand, we are so crushed beneath a burden of bad Karma that we would have
no hope of ever working it off ourselves. On the other, we live in a
degenerate age when the Dharma is but dimly understood. Facing Scylla
and Charybdis in this way, we must be saved by grace ("Other-Power"), or
we will not be saved at all. Hence the Pure Land theologians tried to
circumvent the clever subterfuges of the self-exalting ego by placing
complete and utter reliance on the Other-Power of Amitabha Buddha.
In the end, the Japanese patriarch Shinran wound up
recapitulating Martin Luther and John Calvin: he taught that the first
inkling of an inclination one felt to call upon the name of the Buddha
was itself proof of Amitabha's prevenient grace. One could never have
even sought such salvation without already having been given it! We
cannot even seek to repent unless we have already been regenerated by
the unilateral grace of God. If we were still sinners, we would think of
nothing but continuing to sin. There is no question of subtle Christian
missionary influence. It is just that the logic of piety, taught not to
believe in its own power, and yet having to do something, however
minimal and passive, always issues in the same solution, as it did also
in Visistadvaita Vedanta Hinduism, which divided into the monkey school
(believers must hang on to God's grace like a baby monkey carried by its
mother) and the cat school (momma cat simply carries her kittens by the
scruff of the neck, like it or not).
Is all this a betrayal of Buddhism with its doctrine
of self-reliance? They say no, since a religion based on the negation
of self can hardly rely for its success on Self-Power! Interesting
point.
So here we have a religion containing the features
of crippling original sin, bankrupt and worthless selfhood, salvation by
passive faith in the vicarious sufferings of a redeemer (actually a
whole stable of them, as in the Catholic calendar of saints), and all of
this derived from an infallible scripture, not from one's own cherished
intuitions. What is this religion? Buddhism. Christianity. Take your
pick. If you prefer something less complex, something more self-reliant,
you can always find revamped, streamlined versions of either religion.
But, as they stand, neither is all that much different from the other in
broad outline. When Maryanne embraced what she called Buddhism as an
alternative to Christianity, she had merely exchanged six of one for
half a dozen of the other, though she didn't know about at least three
of them!
One might contend that Mahayana is a corrupt form of
Buddhism, one that has lost sight of the vision of its Founder, whereas
Christianity's corresponding doctrines are in continuity with the
central vision of its Founder. But this is the worst kind of special
pleading. If it happened to the one, it would be surprising if it hadn't
happened to the other, too.
Max Scheler thought that both religions
inevitably suffered the same fate because of the ever-recurrent pattern
of religions that exalt a charismatic founder. The founder is first
lionized because of his summons for all to follow him in the heroic
path. He dies, and the followers form a sectarian community, living out
his heroic ethic, necessarily in alienation from the conventional world
around them. But time passes and no one finds it any more so easy to
live at such a fever pitch of piety and social radicalism. They come to
assimilate themselves to the world again, rationalizing this by means of
deifying the founder. Now that the life style he taught seems so far
beyond the reach of even believers, they conclude his own heroic life
must have been the result of his being a superhuman god. Thus no one can
be expected to emulate him, and his heroism ceases to be a role-model.
Instead, the believers come to regard it as an act done on their behalf
so as to absolve them of the sin of not being able to do it! Mediocrity,
here we come! And then Luther, Shinran, and the others start in trying
to eliminate any vestige of self-effort as impious, even though at first
it had been the very basis of the founder's teaching! Such a decline,
plainly recognized, at least on some level, in Buddhism, is more
characteristic neither of Christianity nor of Buddhism.
Why had my wife's friend been oblivious of all this?
My guess is that, like many today, she had really adopted some form of
Western pop self-realization therapy and, ironically, called it
Buddhism. Harvey Cox foresaw this trivializing trend in his 1977 book Turning East. Shirley MacLaine can call it Buddhism, like Jim Bakker calls his religion Christianity, but neither is fooling me.
It might be better to do what Herman Hesse advocated in his novel Siddhartha:
follow the Buddha's path not by slavishly aping him, but by striking
out on your own authentic dharma just as he did. How else are you to
imitate a great non-conformist except by refusing to conform to him?
Have the courage of your own convictions! Don't hide behind supposed
authorities by bottling your own product and putting the Buddhist (or
Christian) label on it.
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