The Chinese Catholic jurist John C.H. Wu pointed out that if the philosophy of cogito, ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”) has driven the cerebral West, then the philosophy sum, ergo cogito (“I am therefore I think”) of Zen Buddhism offers a perhaps necessary tonic.11xJohn C.H. Wu, The Golden Age of Zen (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2003), 34. Nietzsche offered a similar refutation of Descartes in The Gay Science (aphorism 276), but the Catholic theologian Franz Xaver von Baader came first (see note 29). The allure of Zen is irresistible for many, and—as countless local North American sanghas (Buddhist communities) can testify—it is not going away, even if its initial countercultural buzz has dissipated since the sixties. And since Christianity is not going away either, the necessity of a genuine exchange (not just fatuous “dialogue”) between Christians and Buddhists is as important as ever.
Although I can’t recall where I read it, the most instructive analogy I’ve come across to describe Buddhist-Christian discussions in the past sixty years comes from beekeeping. Apparently, when one attempts to merge two hives, if newspaper is not judiciously employed, the colonies are launched into total war. However, when a newspaper barrier is carefully deposited between the two hives, the competing colonies have a chance to get used to one another’s pheromones. This happens as they slowly chew through the newspaper.
Lacking such a prophylaxis, exchanges between American Buddhists and Christians—who are competing for the spiritual share of the same democracy—have gone awry during the past several decades, with venomous stingers being unsheathed on both sides. Perhaps the best-known of these angry bees is Alan Watts (1915–1973), whose popularity has been lately renewed thanks to popular reprints of his books and the reissue of his captivating lectures and seminar discussions in podcast form.
A young British convert to Buddhism, Watts became the secretary of London’s Buddhist Lodge when he was only sixteen. When Ruth Fuller Everett, a pioneering Buddhist from Chicago, visited the lodge, Watts fell in love with her daughter Eleanor and subsequently made his way to America. Watts never fully submitted to the Zen koan training of Ruth’s future husband Sokei-an, the Japanese monk who founded the Buddhist Society of America. But Watts did, in his own words, manage to “fit myself into the Western design of life by taking the role of a Christian minister.”22xAlan Watts, In My Own Way (Novato, CA: New World Library, 1972), 157. He was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1944 and secured a chaplaincy at Northwestern University. “It is difficult not to feel a twinge of cynicism about this scheme,” writes Watts’s sympathetic biographer, Monica Furlong. “A young man who has been a Buddhist for the past ten years of his life suddenly decides to become a Christian priest, not from any sudden conviction that Christianity is the ‘way of liberation,’ but because, to put it bluntly, it provides a convenient way of earning a living.”33xMonica Furlong, Zen Effects: The Life of Alan Watts (Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths, 2001), 86.
The dazzling chaplain and his young wife Eleanor struggled in their early marriage. Watts was immensely popular with the students. His discovery of the Christian mystics, and the unexpected contact points with Buddhism, resulted in a burst of energy for both his ministry and his writing. Occupied with the care of two young children, Eleanor did not take well to motherhood and grew depressed. As the parsonage parties grew more experimental, and as Eleanor’s condition worsened, Watts found monogamy to be out of step with the “natural needs of the male.”44xIbid., 115. When confronted by Eleanor, Watts encouraged her to experiment as well, and she eventually had her own affair.
The Episcopal Church frowned upon such behavior from one of its clergy, and Watts was defrocked. His response was to attack the church itself for the “unfortunate moral self-consciousness which has so long afflicted our civilization” and for the absurdity of expecting clergy to be moral exemplars.55xIbid., 122. Wallace Conkling, bishop of Chicago, stood firmly by his decision, and concluded their correspondence with the words, “I commend you to the justice and mercy of God.” After divorcing Eleanor, Watts sought new horizons of experimentation, moving to the West Coast, as well as trying new drugs and new marriages. Famously, in 1967, he convened a summit on his houseboat with the leading lights of the counterculture, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder. Watts had become, in his own words, a “philosophical entertainer,” or “genuine fake.”
However spellbinding a speaker, Watts should never be held as the ideal promoter of interreligious dialogue. “He never learned to be ordinary,” the Anglican priest and poet Malcolm Guite once said of Watts, in telling contrast to the words of D.T. Suzuki: “[A]t the end of Zen training, when one has become ‘absolutely naked,’ one finds himself to be the ordinary ‘Tom, Dick or Harry’ that he has been all along.”66xCited in Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New York, NY: New Directions, 1968), 118. Alan Watts could not just be Alan. As historian of religion Huston Smith puts it, “Watts was the guru of Zen who advised everyone to meditate but did not bother to do it himself. He was, however, an excellent companion to go drinking with.”77xHuston Smith, The Huston Smith Reader (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 82.
And it was the drinking, eventually, that did Watts in. The lectures that have made him famous again today were frequently delivered drunk. “That’s how I am,” the prophet of cosmic fluidity sadly confided to a visiting friend during a hospitalization. “I can’t change.”88xFurlong, Zen Effects, 199. Another aspect of his inability to change featured picking up college women on university campuses during his speaking engagements, because he “could not bear to sleep alone.”99xIbid., 191.
One consequence of his spiritual and recreational intemperance was that the same Watts who wrote Behold the Spirit (1947), a marvelous manifesto of Anglican Christian nonduality illuminated by Buddhism, had to repudiate his own writing. He denounced the religion that had the audacity to name his affairs an infidelity. In his book Beyond Theology, Watts got his revenge on the “uncompromising, ornery, militant, rigorous, imperious, and invincibly self-righteous” thing called Christianity.1010xAlan Watts, Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2022), xiii. Granted, there was yet no such thing as what is now called “engaged” or “critical” Buddhism. Zen at War, a 1997 book that uncovered the entangled relationship between Zen Buddhism and Japanese militarism, had yet to be published. It might have caused Watts to consider how teachings of all faiths have been twisted to questionable ends. But even if he had investigated how Zen fueled Japanese imperialism, Watts probably would have excused it. The errors of Christianity, he declared, “cannot be shrugged off as temporary distortions or errors. They play an essential part in the Christian way of life….”1111xIbid., xiii. In short, Watts concluded that the queen of the opposing colony must die. So he stabbed her repeatedly with his pen.
A Settled Affair
Killer bees like Watts proliferate today. These include Christians animated by caricatures of Buddhism and Buddhists, and even Zen masters, who perpetuate caricatures of Christianity. The twentieth-century Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton, by contrast, kept the religious lines clear and distinct in his published dialogues about Buddhism, consistently highlighting the uniqueness of his own Catholic tradition. While young Merton hurled himself into the rigors of monasticism following the excesses of his youth, the mature Merton believed that engagement with Buddhism contributed to a necessary broadening of his faith, even while he retained his commitments both to theological orthodoxy and to his chosen monastic community. Merton, like Watts, also made missteps in his personal life, including a brief clandestine affair with a nurse he met while recovering from a back injury. But unlike Watts, Merton repented and held—following a great struggle—to his vows.1212xJim Forest, Living With Wisdom: A Life of Thomas Merton, revised edition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008), 201–202. Some of the late Merton’s sentiments echo Watts’s critique of Christianity. “This whole attitude of abstraction, of hatred and denigration of the body,” Merton wrote, “has finally led to a pathological and totally unrealistic obsession with bodily detail… [But]…It is precisely in [the] spirt of celebration, gratitude, and joy that true purity is found” (203). Ultimately, however, Merton found such purity was consistent with his vows to celibate monasticism. He terminated an intermittent relationship with Margie, his nurse, deciding “the whole thing has to be given up” (200) and solemnly vowed to become a hermit. “It was among the hardest choices of his life,” Forest concludes. “His love for Margie hadn’t ended” (202). His journey to Asia was undertaken in his capacity as a hermit, with permission of his abbot, Dom Flavian (217). “The paradox,” wrote Merton to a friend, “is that it is to a great extent because I am here that I am invited to go” (212).
Some have implied, however, that The Asian Journal, the record of his final writings, leaves room to doubt the genuineness of Merton’s Catholicism. Was Merton, privately at least, convinced of the superiority of Buddhism? Eight days before his death, he related the thoughts that ran through his mind at Polonnaruwa, a Buddhist site in Sri Lanka, as he stood before a statue of the reclining Buddha, which he had approached with feet unshod:
The great smiles. Huge and yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional resignation but of Madhyamika [the Middle Path], of sunyata, that has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything—without refutation—without establishing some other argument…. Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious….1313xThomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New York, NY: New Directions, 1968), 233–234.
In that same year, Merton had offered counterarguments—very effective ones—to Buddhist philosopher D.T. Suzuki’s misunderstandings of Christianity. Was Merton suggesting, in private, that such arguments were misguided? “I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for,” he wrote. Had Merton secretly buzzed off to another hive?
For what it’s worth, I am on the side of those who are convinced that Merton had “settled the affair” with Buddhism. His last book was in fact on Cistercian monasticism, and all indications suggest that he was prepared to live the rest of his life in the Abbey of Gethsemani, the Trappist monastery in Kentucky that he had joined more than twenty years earlier. If the myth of Merton-the-secret-Buddhist endures, it is one that can be easily refuted by close attention to his own writing. (The revised version of Jim Forest’s biography, Living With Wisdom, is an excellent guide in this respect.)
What I aim to add to the discussion, however, is what both Watts and Merton might have availed themselves of: that prophylactic newspaper sheet that most modern authors navigating the terrain between Christianity and Buddhism seem to lack.
The Jesus Sutras
I am referring to the early medieval “Jesus Sutras”—also called the Jingjiao Documents—that originated with the missionary efforts of the Church of the East. The Church of the East has unfortunately been neglected in the intellectual and spiritual development of Western Christianity. There are historical reasons for this. Although the Church of the East flourished in the centuries following the Council of Nicaea in 325, it became separated over dogmatic disagreements about, among other things, precise metaphysical definitions of the Incarnation and whether the Blessed Virgin Mary should be called the Mother of God. Its patriarchate, originally in Edessa and then Baghdad, facilitated the spread of Christianity into India, Sri Lanka, Central Asia, and China. The rise of Islam and, later, Ottoman Imperial and Soviet rule in the places where the Church of the East was once strongest further isolated it from the development of modern Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy.
One important step in the rediscovery of the deep theological traditions of this church was the 1907 finding of the Jesus Sutras at the Mogao Caves along the Silk Road in the Gansu province of China. The manuscripts were subsequently published but made available in an English translation only since 1951. Martin Palmer’s 2001 book, The Jesus Sutras, explained the Church of the East’s mission in China, including its architecture and imagery, while Sinologist Matteo Nicolini-Zani’s 2022 book, The Luminous Way to the East: Texts and History of the First Encounter of Christianity With China, provided critical editions and fresh translations of key documents and a new overview of this history. This delayed arrival explains why the Jesus Sutras have been neglected in Buddhist-Christian discussions. But it is now certain that these documents attest to early and significant interactions among Confucians, Taoists, Buddhists, and Christians in Tang dynasty China (618–907), interactions that make much recent American dialogue between Christianity and Eastern religions look elementary at best.
Both narrowly traditionalist Christians and New Age popularizers have argued that these documents are syncretistic or less than authentically Christian, a judgment that reveals only how poorly they have been read. Consider, for example, that in the classic short Buddhist treatise called the Heart Sutra, the organs of physical and mental perception (called the five skandhas) are famously declared to be empty. In the Jesus Sutras, however, the five skandhas are said to be destined for revitalization in the resurrection of the dead. In other words, the Sutras propose a grace beyond Buddhist law: “God suffered terrible woes so that all should be freed from karma….”1414xMartin Palmer, The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity (New York, NY: Ballantine, 2001), 161.
Buddhist studies scholar Huang Xianian argues that the phrasing of these Christian insights is so Buddhist that it is fair to conclude that “Buddhism became the vehicle for the entry of Christianity into China.”1515xMatteo Nicolini-Zani, The Luminous Way to the East: Texts and History of the First Encounter of Christianity With China (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2022), 178. Nicolini-Zani, the aforementioned scholar of Christianity in China, even calls the Church of the East’s missionary strategy “a method of evangelization based on interreligious dialogue that was virtually unknown in the subsequent history of Christian missionary activity in China.”1616xIbid., 179.
The sutra that I find most helpful for navigating Christian-Buddhist relations today is the Sutra on Mysterious Rest and Joy. Dating to 720, it has also been called the Sutra on Returning to Your Original Nature. “Original Nature” is a phrase used by the Taoist thinker Chang Tzu (fourth century BC) to describe our deepest essence, which undue desire alienates us from. But this sutra is attributed not to Chang Tzu but to Jesus. Theologian Martin Palmer, one of the English translators of the Sutras, sees in this text a counterbalance to the Latin overemphasis on Original Sin.
In the same way that the Buddha responds to questions in classic texts such as the Lotus Sutra, here Jesus responds to the questions of Simon Peter almost in the manner of a Zen master advising meditation: “Without yearning or [mental] activity, one can be limpid and pure.”1717xNicolini-Zani, The Luminous Way, 283. The Sutra also paints an image of a jade forest atop a mountain—an image of Enlightenment. But instead of the climber being tasked with scaling it on his own, Jesus, “the true spiritual friend,” carves a staircase into the mountain. Which is to say, in the Jesus Sutras, Tang dynasty missionaries confidently responded to Buddhism with a clear message of Christian grace.
The Sutra on Mysterious Rest and Joy attributes to Jesus a list of four spiritual laws. Each of the several English translations of these dicta renders them differently. Palmer’s is straightforward: “No wanting, no doing, no piousness, no truth.”1818xPalmer, Jesus Sutras, 187. Another conveys what might be called New Age–friendly language: “no desire, no action, no virtue, no truth.”1919xRay Riegert and Thomas Moore, eds., The Lost Sutras of Jesus (Berkeley, CA: Ulysses Press, 2003), 78. Although this abridged edition inaccurately downplays the distinctive Christianity of the Jingjiao Documents in an attempt to appeal to modern audiences, it is right to point out that the documents teach that “Ego, psychology, practicality and self-interest will not take you where you want to go” (130). The most recent translation, by Nicolini-Zani, offers a different variation: “the absence of desire, the absence of [mental] activity, the absence of merit, and the absence of realization.”2020xNicolini-Zani, The Luminous Way, 287. Each of these translations has its virtues, but rendering the four laws into categories that are more familiar to both the Christian and Buddhist spiritual traditions will help reveal what the Church of the East has to offer us today. And that is why I favor this translation: “No want, no effort, no merit, no judgment.”
Consider the question of desire. There is an important difference between understanding the first law as “no want” or “no desire.” The latter translation risks casting all desire in negative terms. As Augustine argued, the answer to lesser desires is not the extinguishing of desire but desire’s transfiguration by a deeper desire for God. “No want” signifies a profound contentment and also echoes the most famous translation of Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”
“No effort,” my preferred translation for the second law, is the exact equivalent of the wu wei (actionless action) of the Tao Te Ching, which this sutra audaciously attributes to Jesus. To render this phrase “no action,” however, could be misleading, as the same sutra’s Jesus advises the right kind of action, action that arises not from a lust for vainglorious accomplishment or success. To translate this law as “no effort” instead restrains excessive action, or the frenzied, ceaseless activity that characterizes so much of modern life.
I am drawn to the translation of the third counsel as “no merit.” Jesus tells Peter in this sutra, “Those who have no merit or fame but rather assume a compassionate mind toward all sentient beings will be completely freed.”2121xIbid., 285–286. This suspicion of the accumulation of merit not only has a home in the Church of the East but also among Catholic luminaries such as Gasparo Contarini or Thérèse of Lisieux, to say nothing of more obvious Protestant thinkers such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Cranmer, and Peter Martyr Vermigli.
And finally, there is “no judgment.” To render this as “no truth” (as some have), is completely at odds with the clarity about the Gospel that the Jingjiao Documents go to great lengths to establish. To render this phrase “no judgment” corresponds with the metaphor that accompanies this dictum: the mirror, which sees things clearly, as they are, without imposing assumptions and projections. This translation also echoes the well-known words of Christ, “Judge not, that you be not judged” (Matthew 7:1).
In sum, translating these phrases as “no want, no effort, no merit, no judgment” keeps the accent on the original nature of blessedness into which Christ calls us to settle through meditation and prayer. In the time of silence, all the pestering wants, the agitated efforts, the attempts to tally our merit, and the ways we project our judgments—the telltale signs of Original Sin—dissipate, and we find the mysterious rest and joy.
The Zen of Mary
Perhaps the fulfillment of these four spiritual laws is best exemplified by the very figure whom Western Christians have long assumed the Church of the East—because they did not prefer the term Theotokos (Mother of God)—avoided, namely the Virgin Mary.2222xI might add that as an Anglican Christian whose communion has a long-standing relationship with the Church of the East, I happily subscribe to the term Theotokos myself. For the history of Anglican–Church of the East relations, see J.F. Coakley, The Church of the East and the Church of England: A History of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Assyrian Mission (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1992). Even so, Mary is spoken of with great reverence in the Jesus Sutras, where she is named the “queen of doctrine.” But not only did these Christians write about Mary. It just so happens that an image of Mary from the Church of the East also survives.
The image of Mary made by the Church of the East in Tang dynasty China is located at the Da Qin Pagoda, which was once a Church of the East monastery. The monastery is suitably close to the place where—legend has it—the Tao Te Ching was first recited. This monastery is the physical evidence of translation centers that not only produced texts such as the Jesus Sutras but also gave Christian assistance to Buddhist translators of Buddhist texts. In The Lost History of Christianity, Baylor University historian Philip Jenkins even argues that all the major texts of Japanese Buddhism, including Zen and the Pure Land, can be traced back to the translation efforts during the Tang dynasty, made possible in part with the assistance of the Christian translators from the Church of the East.2323xPhilip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2009), 65.
The image of Mary survives in an upper floor of the Da Qin Pagoda. Martin Palmer suggests that this image is akin to Orthodox icons of the Nativity. Mary’s bent leg also resembles the famous bodhisattvas of compassion in Buddhist art, such as Guanyin, whose legs are also famously bent. Mary’s restful reclining—her surrender of excessive desire, frenetic effort, meretricious action, and ill-formed judgments—seems to illustrate all the insights in the Sutra on Mysterious Rest and Joy.
Additional artistic details in Orthodox icons of the Nativity further illuminate the wisdom of the Sutras. The phrase “no want” is illustrated with an image of damaged roots and, conveniently, in the classic Orthodox Nativity icon there is a withered tree just next to the shepherds. In the Sutra, “no effort” is illustrated with a wind-tossed ship. And in the upper left of the icon, the wind-tossed cape of the magi calls to mind our own ceaseless striving, sometimes as directionless as the wind itself. But the magi too, of course, have been drawn to the Christ child who gives desires rest. As the account of the Annunciation in the Jesus Sutras relates, “the Honored One of Heaven had sent the Sweet Spirit to a virgin whose name is Mary.”2424xNicolini-Zani, The Luminous Way, 275.
Next comes “no merit.” On the bottom left of the icon is Joseph, who, traditional Christian orthodoxy and the Church of the East insist had nothing to do with Mary’s pregnancy. Which is to say, his merit is not involved in salvation. Nor is anyone else’s. Because of this he sits to the side, but in this quiet contemplation, the food of the earth springs up nonetheless—that being precisely the image employed in the Jesus Sutras to illustrate the dictum of “no merit.”
The last counsel of the Sutra on Mysterious Rest and Joy is “no judgment.” We can append this dictum to the midwife Salome in the lower corner, who had to seek forgiveness for, as apocryphal Gospel of James describes, denying the possibility of a virgin birth. The water being poured into the vessel to clean the Christ child recalls the mirror that illustrates this counsel in the eighth-century text. The mirror that enables us to perceive reality cleanly and clearly, without judgment, as it is. It is tempting here to contrast this with the “black mirrors” of contemporary cellphones, which often provide the opposite.
And then there is Mary herself, in the center—she can represent for us not only the historical Mary but also the person who has found the meditative rest to which the Jesus Sutras summon us. The depth of the cave is many things—the literal place of the Nativity in Bethlehem, but also perhaps the Mogao caves where the Sutras were found, and maybe even the believer’s heart. It is not by accident that Merton (borrowing from Louis Massignon) called that “point at the center of our being…a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God,” le point vierge.2525xThomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 158. Mary here reminds me of the words of D.T. Suzuki: “It is out of this zero that all good is performed and all evil is avoided. The zero I speak of is not a mathematical symbol. It is the infinite—a storehouse or womb (Garbha) of all possible good or values.”2626xCited in Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite, 107. From her emptiness comes Jesus, who the Jesus Sutras felicitously name “Lord of the Primordial Void.”2727xPalmer, Jesus Sutras, 223.
The Orthodox icon of the Nativity might also help us understand Merton’s epiphany at Polonnaruwa. “Knowing everything” matches with “no want” of the Jesus Sutras. Merton tells us that he “reject[ed] nothing,” which corresponds to “no effort.” His “without trying to discredit anyone” corresponds to “no merit,” even if there still remains a proper place for reason and disputation. And his words “questioning nothing” matches the “no judgment” of the Jesus Sutras. And as to Mary in her cave at the center of the icon, Merton’s description matches both the reclining Buddha of Sri Lanka and the reclining Virgin in the cavernous icon of the Nativity: “I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves became evident and obvious.” Mary’s smile, if one looks closely at well-written icons of the Nativity, is “huge yet subtle,” as is the reclining Buddha at Polonnaruwa, which is fitting for the queen of the Christian hive.
Lest this seem like an attempt to contort Merton’s words, it turns out a small icon of the Virgin was among his possessions at the time of his death. On the back of it he had written words in Greek from the Eastern compendium of Christian contemplative writings known as the Philokalia, “…let us present our spirit naked to God.”2828xForest, Living With Wisdom, 240. The Jesus Sutras and the surprising survival of the Virgin Mary at the Da Qin Pagoda confirm the wisdom of the Virgin in Merton’s pocket. How fitting that in his Asian Journal, Merton writes of “nonviolent Himalayan bees” that landed on him without stinging, “picking up sweat for some eclectic and gentle honeycomb.”
It is certainly true that cogito, ergo sum is a dead end—but even more powerful than the Buddhist sum, ergo cogito is the Christian message, which German theologian and philosopher Franz Xaver von Baader rendered as cogitor ergo sum (“I am thought of—and loved by God—therefore I am”).2929xJoris Geldhof, “‘Cogitor Ergo Sum’: On the Meaning and Relevance of Baader’s Theological Critique of Descartes,” Modern Theology 21, no. 2 (April 2005): 237–251. This is the message long stewarded by the Church of the East among the Buddhists of Tang dynasty China, and which continues in that communion today. In fact, many members of this church reside in the Chicago area, where so many of them have fled following recent conflict in the Middle East. On occasion, my students and I enjoy the privilege of joining them for worship. Had Alan Watts stayed his course as a chaplain at Northwestern University, he might even have met them. They might have taught him to be faithful and ordinary, imparting Eastern Christian wisdom—“no want, no effort, no merit, no judgment”—that might have saved his life.