Matteo Ricci, Mandarins, and Moksha...

So, R. gave me a copy of What Makes You Not a Buddhist, which is a brilliant little book that brilliantly feeds into my particular prejudices, except that it lays out a solid argument for what I get too cranky to articulate beyond the level of whininess. Moreover, it is written by a Tibetan Buddhist, and 'Tibetan Buddhism' is at the moment the preferred flavor for those who are too young to have been 'Zen' before its huarache-wearing disciples were supplanted by 'Tibetan' flocks in Tevas and Birkenstocks. What binds the two groups beyond their shared fondness for open-toed shoes is a distaste for 'organized religion,' 'dogma,' and a purportedly mediated experience of the Divine, as well as the sense that what they perceive as lacking in Christianity can be found in a bastardized version of a tradition that, being exotic, they have no bad memories of.


I have been wanting to write a semi-sensible rant on this for a while, because it ties together Chesterton and the Dalai Lama, which not so many things do, really, if you think about it, and also because it fleshes out to an extent what I have said about the secularized (and thus inaccurate/irrelevant) and largely pernicious vestiges of Calvinism that haunt even a stolid, fourth-generation atheist in this country. What Chesterton had to say on the one hand was this little nugget: 'The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.' In The Everlasting Man he also said this:

'They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith. Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best thing is to be far away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian.'

And the reverse of the vantage point of that Confucian to a distant and exotic Christianity is what we take with us as we look at Buddhism, or Tibetan Buddhism specifically. Our parents never threatened us with bardo if we misbehaved; we were never disappointed with Tara if our entreaties to the Eternal appeared to go unanswered. We can approach Buddhism with open arms and hearts because we have no (substantive or distorted) history with it, whereas we cannot even view a (likewise quite distant) thirteenth-century Christian contemplative from a perspective untainted by our views on the Reformation, the Inquisition, colonialism, or even every terrible or just mediocre pastor or believer we've ever known.



Chesterton again:

'The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda' (super-double-bold-italics mine).

But metaphors can only go so far, and I would quibble with Chesterton's only to the extent that even as our Londoner looks more charitably on a Confucian or a pagoda than he does on a Christian or a cathedral, he still does so ineluctably from the balcony of his apartment or the front porch of his Georgian, or Queen Anne, or 'Tuscan' home. He comes into life with a Judeo-Christian weltanschauung from within which he can never fully remove himself, however many embroidered Hill Tribe jackets his closet holds. Whatever sympathy he may find himself to hold for the precepts of karma and moksha, and whether he decides he ascribes more to the concept of atman or of anatman, he is, like Matteo Ricci under his Confucian silks, ever and always a Westerner, regardless of the extent to which he claims, or purports to reject, his own spiritual heritage.


As the Dalai Lama asserted many times in the 1994 John Main Seminar (The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus), though there are many similarities between teachings in the Gospels and Buddhist works, just as there is no one type of man, nor no one type of spirituality or spiritual practice suited to every individual equally, there can be no one tradition that incorporates all the teachings of all the world. The Trinity is not equal to the three kayas - but there are 'parallels and similarities,' just as there are between mahabrahman and the Christian God when viewed in His aspect as ultimate ground of being. The Dalai Lama acknowledges that reaching too far abroad for spiritual insight frequently creates more confusion in the seeker than wisdom or equanimity. To gloss over these significant differences and the culturally-specific origins of Tibetan Buddhism is to demean both the Tibetan tradition and the Western would-be bhikku. What he likely adopts under these conditions is neither Christianity nor Buddhism. He cannot extricate himself from his patrimony - however ill understood it may be in his case - nor can he successfully through sheer force of will insert himself into the story of millennia of Himalayan spiritual inheritance. He begins with misunderstanding his own religion and ends with exoticising, romanticising, cheapening - and misunderstanding - a different one.

I didn't get to the eminently sensible Buddhism book (written by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, originally from Bhutan). But now I fully intend to, since I was at least able to start. This has been simmering a long time. Like, years and years. It's good to let it go.