The Divine Other as Person

a.k.a.: Why I’m not a Buddhist

The other day I received an email from someone asking – after reading my previous post on the Noble Eightfold Path – why I didn’t just stick with Buddhism.  I thought I made myself clear in my post that I am in no way, shape, form, or fashion a syncretist, but apparently that’s not the case.  The danger, I suppose, in writing something such as a post on the Eightfold Path is that readers, unfamiliar with either Buddhism or Orthodoxy, will come to the conclusion that either one of them is good, that either one of them is okay – why not just use them interchangeably.  (And there are plenty of writers – Buddhist and Christian – who say just that kind of thing.)

But I’m not one of them.

Buddhism and Orthodoxy are different – as Bikkhu Bodhi so succinctly puts it in the previous post.  So why am I Orthodox?  And why not Buddhism?

First off, and let me be as clear as possible, I learned a lot from Buddhism (and from Taoism, too, for that matter).  But in the end, it just didn’t work for me.  And, truth be told, I don’t think it will work for anyone else, either.  Not because it’s necessarily wrong, but because it’s incomplete.  Why?  For me to explain that, then the rest of this post is going to have to be personal.

I’m not going to lay out the details on any Orthodox catechism or apologetics.  Those too often come from the head, and – quite frankly – stay in the head.  What I have to say comes from the heart.  If what I say appeals to you, leads you into an intimate relationship with Christ, leads you into the depths of the Orthodox faith, then good.  If, however, it doesn’t, that’s okay, too – there are other ways to make your journey into Orthodoxy, and therefore into the heart of the true Christian faith.  As Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnika puts it, there are many ways to scale the mountain, but there’s only one mountaintop.  There is the way of the priests, the martyrs, the ascetics, the apostles, etc.  What I offer here is my way. (Maybe we’ll call it the way of the bedraggled, the broken, and the burned-out.) It works for me.  It may not work for you.

It Started With a Meditation

For a few months, I had been reading all I could get my hands on with regards the mystics of Christianity.  It didn’t take me long to realize that Protestantism held no sway over me – I had given up on that when I had given up on Christianity almost 20 years ago; which left me with Catholicism and Orthodoxy.  It wasn’t easy to get my hands on much Orthodox stuff, so I mainly read Catholic writers (I really enjoyed Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Avila) and the occasional Eastern Christian stuff that would come my way.

Despite all of this, I was still essentially Buddhist.  I sat in meditation every morning and each night.  I still read a lot of Buddhist literature, and held a very Buddhist worldview.  (The Buddhist view of the world and reality, I must admit, is at least better than a lot of what passes for a Christian worldview in this country.)  As much as I enjoyed reading the mystics of Christianity, there was one thing that I really had a problem with: the idea that God is a Person.  It was easy to take from some of the medieval mystics (Meister Eckhart, for example) and even easier from a lot of modern-day Catholic contemplatives that God was an Impersonal Absolute.  You could get intimate with this Absolute, sure, and you could feel a very personal relationship (in some ways, at least) with this Absolute, but it was still a stretch for me to believe that God was a Person who loved me and cared for me.

But, one night, everything changed.

I sat down on my zafu and zabuton for meditation.  After about 15 to 20 minutes of following my breath, and once I had sufficiently calmed my mind, I stopped following my breath to allow my consciousness to rest in open, vast awareness (that’s neo-Buddhist jargon).  As I did, something happened, something I was in no way prepared for.  In my room was a Presence.  This Presence wasn’t just in the room.  It was in me.  It was in me, and yet It was beyond me.  It was beyond even the Transpersonal That which I had taken to be the end of the road –as far as contemplative practice goes.  This Divine Other wasn’t just beyond everything, and It wasn’t just in everything, including me.  This Divine Other loved me – in fact, the Divine seemed to love me with a reckless, raw intensity.  It didn’t love me for what I wasn’t, and It didn’t love me for the great contemplative that I was trying so hard to be (as if that was going to happen).  The Divine Other was a Person who loved me just as I was.

At first, I didn’t want to think about it, but I knew the truth: this Person was Christ.  I knew it in a way beyond what any words can possibly describe – try as I might in these pages.  Christ loved me, prodigal son that I was (and still am).  For the first time, I knew what Saint John the Theologian meant when he wrote, “God is love.”

My eyes watered.  Tears found my face.  God, I don’t deserve to be loved like this, I thought.

Here’s another truth that I didn’t want to admit to myself at the time: Despite all my hours of meditation, despite the fact that I could enter deep meditative states where it seemed as if time and space fell away for an hour or more at a stretch, I was not a very changed person.  I was still capable of being the same irascible jerk as before my Buddhist practice.  I was still capable of being completely selfish and unkind to others.  I was still capable of being rude to co-workers, friends and family.  I was still broken.  I was still one screwed-up individual.

But Christ loved me.  He loved me in all of my screwed-up brokenness.

Only the religion of Christ offers a God that loves unconditionally, and wants you to join in intimate union with Abba – a word best translated as “papa” or “da-da.”  This is the God of Christ; the God who craves intimate union with me, with you, with all of His creation.

The Buddha was a great teacher.  But he was before Christ, before the Logos (the Dao, the One Who Was, Is, and Forever Shall Be) became flesh and walked among us.  He, as with other great teachers from Asia, knew Christ only indirectly, whereas we can know him directly, intimately, and can attain theosis with the One who made us in His Image and Likeness.