Emptiness and Grace

Jesus and Buddha: Practicing Across Traditions.   A film by Jon Ankele.  With Paul Knitter, Father Robert Kennedy, Chung Hyun Kyung.  Available at Amazon Prime. *****

I’m obsessed with the Buddhist-Christian dialogue.  That’s partly because I’m married to a Catholic—a highly unconventional one—but also because I was raised in the Christian tradition and never shook it off.  From the time I discovered Buddhism in 1991, meditating avidly (like a man who was spiritually drowning, which I more or less was), various aspects of Christian teaching came to me as I sat and I understood them in a way I never had.  Also, the figure of Jesus, always powerful for me, never disappeared from my consciousness.  In some ways I was drawn to him more than to the Buddha.  We know much more about him as a person, of course; his story is part of the teaching in a way that it isn’t with the Buddha, who often seems, at least in the Pali Canon, not quite human.  Jesus has many human moments.

Years ago, when I was studying the Bible at Duke University and told my New Testament professor that my brother-in-law was practicing Zen,[1] he told me that a Westerner could never be a Buddhist.  I had to find religion in my own tradition.  I tried to do that for years.  The contortions I went through trying to find a Christian denomination that worked for me would be comic if they weren’t so desperate.  For a while when I attended a Presbyterian church in Winston-Salem I jogged with a minister, Stimp Hawkins, who went to the early Buddhist-Christian meetings in Colorado and told me about them.  I wasn’t much interested.[2]  It was Christianity or nothing.

That well-meaning professor was entirely wrong; there’s nothing Eastern about sitting on a cushion and connecting with your body.  The Buddha’s teachings weren’t exclusively for Asians; they’re for all humankind.  It surprised me that Christian teachings came up as I meditated, but I had a lot to draw on; in addition to reading the Bible at Duke, I’d read various theologians through the years, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Hans Kung.  Then a few years ago I was talking with Shohaku Okumura, and he told me that Kosho Uchiyama—one of my Buddhist heroes—had read the Bible not just when he was a young man and teaching at a Catholic school.  He continued to read it all his life, alongside all the Buddhist teachings.  That news propelled me back into the Bible.  I have my wife to talk to, as well as my brother, a scholar of the Bible and of Biblical languages.  I continue to read in both traditions.  The religion I practice is Soto Zen.  I learn from anything I can get my hands on.

Many books that transcend the two traditions aren’t much help.  Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama try manfully to comment on Christian teachings, but don’t know what they’re talking about.  The three people profiled in this graceful, beautifully-made documentary—Paul Knitter, Father Robert Kennedy, and Chung Hyun Kyung—are different.  Kennedy is a lifelong Catholic, and a priest; he was sent as a missionary to Japan and encountered the famous Zen teacher Yamada Roshi, who trained any number of Westerners.  Kennedy later studied in this country with Maezumi Roshi and Bernie Glassman.

Paul Knitter also studied to be a priest, but his particular history is a little fuzzier in the film; he’s now a layman, married to a Buddhist woman, and author of the book Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian.  Both of those men are eloquent in connecting the two traditions.  But Chung Hyun Kyung, a Korean woman I’d never heard of, is the person I connected to the most, perhaps because she’s less wedded to theological language, talks more from the standpoint of human experience.

She, like me, was raised a Presbyterian, says she went to church every morning and on Sundays (Koreans tend to be rigorous in their religious practice[3]).  She was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts as an adult when she came to a crossroads, facing a decision about getting divorced.  She found a Korean Zen temple in Central Square (just a block from the house where I lived there), got meditation instruction and met Zen Master Seung Sahn, who was the first Buddhist teacher of my own teacher, Larry Rosenberg.  She poured out her sorrows about her situation but he seemed unmoved, surprising her.  He said the first Noble Truth of Buddhism is that life is suffering and she spoke as if she were the only person who ever suffered.  He told her to practice with the question Who am I? and come  back when she had an answer.  Inhale Who am I? and exhale Don’t Know.

He didn’t expect to see her anytime soon.

That question comes up even when nobody assigns it to you.  You sit wondering who you are and can’t come up with anything.  That can be, as Chung Hyun Kyung points out, anxiety-producing.  But over time you settle into it.  You learn to live with the fact that you don’t know.  You come to trust that Don’t Know mind.

What you have discovered is the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness.  Chung Hyun Kyung is eloquent on that subject.

“It is very difficult for young Western students to understand emptiness. They think emptiness is feeling lonely or unloved, but Buddhist emptiness is not meaningless or nihilistic — it is really fullness, a vortex of life energy where everything is interconnected and everything comes out of it. You’re wide open and you say, ‘Ah, wow! This is new, how interesting.’ That is emptiness!”

Knitter has his own take on things. “Gautama Became Buddha because he woke up. Jesus, the son of Mary, became Christ, the Son of God, because he woke up to the divine spirit that was given to him in his very being. What it means to be human is to wake up to, to be open to, the spirit of God that is given to us in our very beings. Our problem is that we don’t know it. We don’t trust it. But when we realize it, it becomes power, energy, transformative, or what Christians call ‘grace’!”

Father Kennedy agrees.  “Grace is the very presence of God within us.  Enlightening us.  Humanizing us.”

I’m fighting the temptation to quote every speech these three people make.  I watched this movie twice and can’t recommend it too highly.  There’s not a wasted moment in it.

[1] Incorrectly, as it turns out.  He was meditating according to a system devised by an Indonesian teacher.  I think my sister called it Zen as a kind of shorthand.  Some weird exotic thing, she meant to say.

[2] Years later we got together and rectified that.  He’s met all kinds of people.  Father Thomas Keating.  Trungpa.

[3] Pardon that generalization, but if you don’t believe it read First You Shave Your Head.  I encountered a Korean Presbyterian in Korea who went to the church every morning at 4:00 AM to pray for two hours.  And I once spoke of Korean spiritual ardor to a young Korean woman of my acquaintance, daughter of a minister, and she agreed.