008/12/14/when_jesus_met_buddha/?page=full
The Boston Globe
When Jesus met Buddha
Something remarkable happened when evangelists for two great religions
crossed paths more than 1,000 years ago: they got along
By Philip Jenkins | December 14, 2008
WAS THE BUDDHA a demon?
While few mainline Christians would put the matter in such confrontational
terms, any religion claiming exclusive access to truth has real
difficulties reconciling other great faiths into its cosmic scheme. Most
Christian churches hold that Jesus alone is the Way, the Truth, and the
Life, and many also feel an obligation to carry that message to the world’s
unbelievers. But this creates a fundamental conflict with the followers of
famous spiritual figures like Mohammed or Buddha, who preached radically
different messages. Drawing on a strict interpretation of the Bible, some
Christians see these rival faiths as not merely false, but as deliberate
traps set by the forces of evil.
Being intolerant of other religions – consigning them to hell, in fact –
may be bad enough in its own right, but it increasingly has real-world
consequences. As trade and technology shrink the globe, so different
religions come into ever-closer contact with one another, and the results
can be bloody: witness the apocalyptic assaults in Mumbai. In such a world,
teaching different faiths to acknowledge one another’s claims, to live
peaceably together side by side, stops being a matter of good manners and
becomes a prerequisite for human survival.
Over the past 30 years, the Roman Catholic Church has faced repeated
battles over this question of Christ’s uniqueness, and has cracked down on
thinkers who have made daring efforts to accommodate other world
religions. While the Christian dialogue with Islam has attracted
most of the headlines, it is the encounters with Hinduism and especially
Buddhism that have stirred the most controversy within the church. Sri
Lankan theologians Aloysius Pieris and Tissa Balasuriya have had many
run-ins with Vatican critics, and, more recently, the battle has come to
American shores. Last year, the Vatican ordered an investigation of
Georgetown University’s Peter Phan, a Jesuit theologian whose main sin, in
official eyes, has been to treat the Buddhism of his Vietnamese homeland as
a parallel path to salvation.
Following the ideas of Pope Benedict XVI, though, the church refuses to
give up its fundamental belief in the unique role of Christ. In a widely
publicized open letter to Italian politician Marcello Pera, Pope Benedict
declared that "an inter-religious dialogue in the strict sense of the term
is not possible." By all means, he said, we should hold conversations with
other cultures, but not in a way that acknowledges other religions as
equally valid. While the Vatican does not of course see the Buddha as a
demon, it does fear the prospect of syncretism, the dilution of Christian
truth in an unholy mixture with other faiths.
Beyond doubt, this view places Benedict in a strong tradition of
Christianity as it has developed in Europe since Roman times. But there is
another, ancient tradition, which suggests a very different
course. Europe’s is not the only version of the Christian faith, nor is it
necessarily the oldest heir of the ancient church. For more than 1,000
years, other quite separate branches of the church established thriving
communities across Asia, and in their sheer numbers, these churches were
comparable to anything Europe could muster at the time. These Christian
bodies traced their ancestry back not through Rome, but directly to the
original Jesus movement of ancient Palestine. They moved across India,
Central Asia, and China, showing no hesitation to share – and learn from –
the other great religions of the East.
Just how far these Christians were prepared to go is suggested by a
startling symbol that appeared on memorials and stone carvings in both
southern India and coastal China during the early Middle Ages. We can
easily see that the image depicts a cross, but it takes a moment to realize
that the base of the picture – the root from which the cross is growing –
is a lotus flower, the symbol of Buddhist enlightenment.
In modern times, most mainstream churches would condemn such an amalgam as
a betrayal of the Christian faith, an example of multiculturalism run
wild. Yet concerns about syncretism did not bother these early Asian
Christians, who called themselves Nasraye, Nazarenes, like Jesus’s earliest
followers. They were comfortable associating themselves with the other
great monastic and mystical religion of the time, and moreover, they
believed that both lotus and cross carried similar messages about the quest
for light and salvation. If these Nazarenes could find meaning in the
lotus-cross, then why can’t modern Catholics, or other inheritors of the
faith Jesus inspired?
Many Christians are coming to terms with just how thoroughly so many of
their fundamental assumptions will have to be rethought as their faith
today becomes a global religion. Even modern church leaders who know how
rapidly the church is expanding in the global South tend to see European
values and traditions as the indispensable norm, in matters of liturgy and
theology as much as music and architecture.
Yet the reality is that Christianity has from its earliest days been an
intercontinental faith, as firmly established in Asia and Africa as in
Europe itself. When we broaden our scope to look at the faith that by 800
or so stretched from Ireland to Korea, we see the many different ways in
which Christians interacted with other believers, in encounters that
reshaped both sides. At their best, these meetings allowed the traditions
not just to exchange ideas but to intertwine in productive and enriching
ways, in an awe-inspiring chapter of Christian history that the Western
churches have all but forgotten.
To understand this story, we need to reconfigure our mental maps. When we
think of the growth of Christianity, we think above all of Europe. We
visualize a movement growing west from Palestine and Syria and spreading
into Greece and Italy, and gradually into northern regions. Europe is still
the center of the Catholic Church, of course, but it was also the
birthplace of the Protestant denominations that split from it. For most of
us, even speaking of the "Eastern Church" refers to another group of
Europeans, namely to the Orthodox believers who stem from the eastern parts
of the continent. English Catholic thinker Hilaire Belloc once proclaimed
that "Europe is the Faith; and the Faith is Europe."
But in the early centuries other Christians expanded east into Asia and
south into Africa, and those other churches survived for the first 1,200
years or so of Christian history. Far from being fringe sects, these
forgotten churches were firmly rooted in the oldest traditions of the
apostolic church. Throughout their history, these Nazarenes used Syriac,
which is close to Jesus’ own language of Aramaic, and they followed Yeshua,
not Jesus. No other church – not Roman Catholics, not Eastern Orthodox –
has a stronger claim to a direct inheritance from the earliest Jesus
movement.
The most stunningly successful of these eastern Christian bodies was the
Church of the East, often called the Nestorian church. While the Western
churches were expanding their influence within the framework of the Roman
Empire, the Syriac-speaking churches colonized the vast Persian kingdom
that ruled from Syria to Pakistan and the borders of China. From their
bases in Mesopotamia – modern Iraq – Nestorian Christians carried out their
vast missionary efforts along the Silk Route that crossed Central Asia. By
the eighth century, the Church of the East had an extensive structure
across most of central Asia and China, and in southern India. The church
had senior clergy – metropolitans – in Samarkand and Bokhara, in Herat in
Afghanistan. A bishop had his seat in Chang’an, the imperial capital of
China, which was then the world’s greatest superpower.
When Nestorian Christians were pressing across Central Asia during the
sixth and seventh centuries, they met the missionaries and saints of an
equally confident and expansionist religion: Mahayana Buddhism. Buddhists
too wanted to take their saving message to the world, and launched great
missions from India’s monasteries and temples. In this diverse world,
Buddhist and Christian monasteries were likely to stand side by side, as
neighbors and even, sometimes, as collaborators. Some historians believe
that Nestorian missionaries influenced the religious practices of the
Buddhist religion then developing in Tibet. Monks spoke to monks.
In presenting their faith, Christians naturally used the cultural forms
that would be familiar to Asians. They told their stories in the forms of
sutras, verse patterns already made famous by Buddhist missionaries and
teachers. A stunning collection of Jesus Sutras was found in caves at
Dunhuang, in northwest China. Some Nestorian writings draw heavily on
Buddhist ideas, as they translate prayers and Christian services in ways
that would make sense to Asian readers. In some texts, the Christian phrase
"angels and archangels and hosts of heaven" is translated into the language
of buddhas and devas.
One story in particular suggests an almost shocking degree of collaboration
between the faiths. In 782, the Indian Buddhist missionary Prajna arrived
in Chang’an, bearing rich treasures of sutras and other
scriptures. Unfortunately, these were written in Indian languages. He
consulted the local Nestorian bishop, Adam, who had already translated
parts of the Bible into Chinese. Together, Buddhist and Christian scholars
worked amiably together for some years to translate seven copious volumes
of Buddhist wisdom. Probably, Adam did this as much from intellectual
curiosity as from ecumenical good will, and we can only guess about the
conversations that would have ensued: Do you really care more about
relieving suffering than atoning for sin? And your monks meditate like ours
do?
These efforts bore fruit far beyond China. Other residents of Chang’an at
this very time included Japanese monks, who took these very translations
back with them to their homeland. In Japan, these works became the founding
texts of the great Buddhist schools of the Middle Ages. All the famous
movements of later Japanese history, including Zen, can be traced to one of
those ancient schools and, ultimately – incredibly – to the work of a
Christian bishop.
By the 12th century, flourishing churches in China and southern India were
using the lotus-cross. The lotus is a superbly beautiful flower that grows
out of muck and slime. No symbol could better represent the rise of the
soul from the material, the victory of enlightenment over ignorance,
desire, and attachment. For 2,000 years, Buddhist artists have used the
lotus to convey these messages in countless paintings and sculptures. The
Christian cross, meanwhile, teaches a comparable lesson, of divine victory
over sin and injustice, of the defeat of the world. Somewhere in Asia,
Yeshua’s forgotten followers made the daring decision to integrate the two
emblems, which still today forces us to think about the parallels between
the kinds of liberation and redemption offered by each faith.
Christianity, for much of its history, was just as much an Asian religion
as Buddhism. Asia’s Christian churches survived for more than a millennium,
and not until the 10th century, halfway through Christian history, did the
number of Christians in Europe exceed that in Asia.
What ultimately obliterated the Asian Christians were the Mongol invasions,
which spread across Central Asia and the Middle East from the 1220s
onward. From the late 13th century, too, the world entered a terrifying era
of climate change, of global cooling, which severely cut food supplies and
contributed to mass famine. The collapse of trade and commerce crippled
cities, leaving the world much poorer and more vulnerable. Intolerant
nationalism wiped out Christian communities in China, while a surging
militant Islam destroyed the churches of Central Asia.
But awareness of this deep Christian history contributes powerfully to
understanding the future of the religion, as much as its past. For long
centuries, Asian Christians kept up neighborly relations with other faiths,
which they saw not as deadly rivals but as fellow travelers on the road to
enlightenment. Their worldview differed enormously from the norms that
developed in Europe.
To take one example, we are used to the idea of Christianity operating as
the official religion of powerful states, which were only too willing to
impose a particular orthodoxy upon their subjects. Yet when we look at the
African and Asian experience, we find millions of Christians whose normal
experience was as minorities or even majorities within nations dominated by
some other religion. Struggling to win hearts and minds, leading churches
had no option but to frame the Christian message in the context of
non-European intellectual traditions. Christian thinkers did present their
message in the categories of Buddhism – and Taoism, and Confucianism – and
there is no reason why they could not do so again. When modern scholars
like Peter Phan try to place Christianity in an Asian and Buddhist context,
they are resuming a task begun at least 1,500 years ago.
Perhaps, in fact, we are looking at our history upside down. Some day,
future historians might look at the last few hundred years of Euro-American
dominance within Christianity and regard it as an unnatural interlude in a
much longer story of fruitful interchange between the great religions.
Consider the story told by Timothy, a patriarch of the Nestorian
church. Around 800, he engaged in a famous debate with the Muslim caliph in
Baghdad, a discussion marked by reason and civility on both sides. Imagine,
Timothy said, that we are all in a dark house, and someone throws a
precious pearl in the midst of a pile of ordinary stones. Everyone
scrabbles for the pearl, and some think they’ve found it, but nobody can be
sure until day breaks.
In the same way, he said, the pearl of true faith and wisdom had fallen
into the darkness of this transitory world; each faith believed that it
alone had found the pearl. Yet all he could claim – and all the caliph
could say in response – was that some faiths thought they had enough
evidence to prove that they were indeed holding the real pearl, but the
final truth would not be known in this world.
Knowing other faiths firsthand grants believers an enviable sophistication,
founded on humility. We could do a lot worse than to learn from what we
sometimes call the Dark Ages.
Philip Jenkins is Edwin Erle Sparks professor of the humanities at Penn
State University. He is author of "The Lost History of Christianity: The
Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia
— and How It Died," published last month.
© 2008 The New York Times Company
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
