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| The nun in front of me -- blurred because I probably shouldn't have taken this photograph |
I am studying here as a Christian, understanding the benefits of learning meditation. As “Vipassana Meditation: An Introduction” explains:
“Although Vipassana has been preserved in the Buddhist tradition, it contains nothing of a sectarian nature, and can be accepted and applied by people of any background. Vipassana courses are open to anyone sincerely wishing to learn the technique, irrespective of race, caste, faith, or nationality. Hindus, Jains, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, Jews, as well as members of other religions have all successfully practiced Vipassana.”
The Psalmist speaks about meditation a lot, but it seems something Christians have completely abandoned. It's unfortunate that Christians must come to Buddhists to learn meditation instead of the other way around, but I find many things about the way both faiths are practiced unfortunate.
Also I am here to learn more about Buddhism. But the more I learn the more I understand how thoroughly a Christian I am. Both Christians and Buddhists can accurately call themselves Dhammists. Dhamma is the essence of what Buddha taught, the “Way” or the “Path.” Christians were originally called “Followers of the Way,” and Buddhists were originally called Dhammists, as Buddha preferred.
He was also an atheist who forbade his disciples to make graven images of him, or any representations of the Dhamma wheel. Of course, they immediately begin making statues of him upon his death, and now Dhamma wheels in concrete line the walls of every Buddhist temple. In that, and in many other ways, the followers failed to listen to the teacher.
Some modern theorists believe Buddha isn't a religious figure at all, but a psychologist, an anachronistic proponent of cognitive-behavioral techniques. Desire causes suffering, because we cling to the object of desire. Detachment brings peace by preventing us from feeling the strong dug of desire. Detachment can be taught, using meditation techniques.
These ideas I agree with, but I do not agree with those modern theorists. There's a tendency in the west to idealize and water down eastern religion, to think of it as somehow more sacred and pure than our western Christianity, sullied by sex scandal and televangelists, but those who expound these beliefs as some kind of wishy-washy spirituality don't understand them.
So, as a corrective--Buddha's First Noble Truth of Suffering:
There are three kinds of suffering.
1. The suffering of physical and mental pain. Suffering that arises with birth, aging, and death, with sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair.
2. The suffering connected with change—due to clinging, even pleasant mental and physical feelings become a cause for suffering when they cease; “separation from the pleasant is suffering.”
3. The suffering within the aggregates of materiality and mentality—each aggregate is constantly arising and passing away, never the same from one moment to the next. From the smallest particle and most rudimentary form of consciousness to vast universes and entire realms of existence, all mental and physical phenomena are subject to the inexorable law of impermanence. This suffering is going on and around us all of the time.
In conclusion: pain is suffering. Change is suffering. Impermanence is suffering. Even happiness, or joy, are defilements, causes of suffering, because they are impermanent; they change, cease, and fade, thus causing suffering. Everything is suffering.
It turns out Buddhist nuns are just as judgmental as Catholic ones. That Buddhists are as unwilling to listen to their spiritual leader as Christians are. They sully their temples with money and earn merit by doing good deeds, intended to prevent them from going to hell (the lowest level of reincarnated life) and provide them access to a better after-life (perhaps, if they have very good kamma, the realm of devas). Buddhist nuns eye me askance as I walk to meditation. Heaven forbid that I wear mid-calf-length yoga pants to meditation, which might actually allow me to better meditate. No. I must wear an ankle-length longyi, no bright colors, forbidding my long shanks from opening wide, causing my knees and hips to cramp in pain.
As in most practiced Christianity, appearance is far more important than truth.
But Jesus' followers don't listen to Him much, either. “Sell all you have and give to the poor.” “Give to everyone who asks.” “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” “The Son of Man has come eating and drinking... a friend of sinners.” “Do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink.”
Because Christ came to overturn the law. The Ten Commandments are not the essence of Christianity. They're the essence of Jewish law, the law that Christ overturned, in favor of grace. “Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial.”
I am an ecumenalist in that I believe that Christians have a lot to learn from Buddhists and Buddhists to Christians, but I don't think anyone can learn anything if the spiritual truth at the heart of faith is converted into a list of rules. Don't dance, drink, or chew, as the Baptists used to say, or go with girls that do. Buddhist monks and nuns have a full list of 227 rules they have to follow, a list that seems to be expanding, from five precepts to nine, Eightfold Path and Threefold Training, each subdivided into additional stages including additional rules and imperfections. These include prohibitions against things like alcohol, drugs, and sex, of course, but also against eating any kind of meat, dancing, singing, music, all forms of entertainment, adornment, cosmetics, and "high and large (luxurious) beds."
It’s interesting that Jesus’ first miracle was changing water into wine, and for no especially important reason other than someone’s wedding. Other than a communal celebration, which involved food and alcohol consumption as part of a celebratory ritual. Or perhaps for no more important reason than for us to wonder why he chose this transformation as his first miracle. It’s an anti-gnostic miracle, one that celebrates and includes the fleshly material world and its desires, rather than shunning it.
Also interesting that he build an entire sacrament around the sharing of food and wine, flesh and blood, also—the living proof of a violent sacrifice. Thus negating three of the five Buddhist doctrines: the consumption of meat, the consumption of alcohol, violence.
Not that I accept all of these parts of Christianity without equivocation, either. But what I react against so strongly in both Christianity and Buddhism is judgment, especially towards things of the world. People don’t understand gnosticism that much, but what I love about the church is how it’s established gnosticism as a heresy—saying that Christ embraces both the physical and the spiritual world. It's as if Jesus is speaking to and rejecting the asceticism of the Jewish Sabbath--because he is coming to build not just a new heaven but a new earth.
"What Buddha teaches is dukka (suffering), and the escape from dukka." And maybe this is where I wonder if the ways are going the same direction. Because I believe what Jesus taught is grace, grace at the center of all things. I believe meditation can allow us access to that grace, the light at the center of all things.
Probably Christians and Buddhists will both be angry at me at my twisting of their doctrine. But I can't help it. Isn't that the job of each of us: working out our salvation, wrestling with our angel?
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