For many in the Protestant tradition there is a great fear of anything to do with New Age, Eastern religions, meditation, mysticism etc. All this is seen somehow as demonic. In the silence and stillness of meditation, they say, the devil can get at you. One person rang several Episcopalian churches and asked whether they had anyone who could give spiritual direction. The response was, ‘What do you want anything like that for? Just follow the Bible.’ Someone else summed up this whole question of other religions and cults versus Christianity by saying that Christianity is focused on Christ whereas the others are directed on self. In other words Christianity is about love of God and others and not self.
All this is much too simplistic. It reminds me of the arguments I used to have with Pierre Oriol, a remarkable self-taught philosopher and market gardner. ‘L’amour n’existe pas,’ he would insist. In other words all love was fundamentally selfish and, however obscurely, involved self-seeking. I, in my idealistic, youthful ignorance and determined to defend the ideas for which I was making such sacrifices, argued against him. There was such a thing as altruistic love with no hint of self in it. One only had to look at the example of Christ and the lives of the saints. But Pierre would have none of it. Ultimately all love is selfish, even when it seems to be self-sacrificial. What is done is done for self-satisfaction, for self-aggrandisement, to be a hero, or to gain merit, or grace, or salvation. I couldn’t argue against him then. There was no way one could know the inner dispositions of people and there was no guarantee that what they said – ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do now…’ etc. – bore any relationship to the truth. We were both locked into a definition of self as a unique and independent entity. And although Christianity has always preached an agapaic love, love for the other, whether God, enemy, or friend, for his own sake, it has also always had difficulty with this because it goes against the grain. Altruism does not come easily. Paul was not a bit shy about enumerating his many acts of self-sacrifice in exhorting people to be like him and ultimately like Christ who emptied himself. Was this a bit of self-glorification on Paul’s part? It could easily seem so. We tend to be suspicious of people who parade their virtues and self-sacrifices in public. As for Christ, how could one even begin to imagine the consciousness of the God-man? The total reversal of values of the Sermon on the Mount is a beautiful ideal, inspiring even, but not for the average person. So, to say that Christianity is better because it involves unselfish love of God is not as simple and straightforward as it might seem.
On the other hand to describe meditation as preoccupation with self and, worse, Buddhism as a sort of religious auto-eroticism, is a complete distortion of facts. As with Christianity Buddhism is about love. However the approach is different. Buddhism asks the questions, ‘Who is it that loves?’ and, ‘Who is loved?’ Christianity sees no need for these questions. The commandment is for the individual to love God and neighbour. But Buddhism asks, ‘Who is this ‘I’?’ and, ‘Who is this neighbour?’ The question of God, since he is not an object of experience, is left on one side. The surprising, and shocking, answer of Buddhism is that there is no ‘I’, and consequently, therefore, neighbour is not just an ‘other’. The private world of the self is a mental construction, an exclusive, non-public world with a distorted and myopic view of reality. Through meditation we can learn to penetrate the barriers which isolate us in our private subjective worlds. We come to see that the barriers are mental constructs and every bit as insubstantial as the self. We also begin to see that each of us is part of the Whole and, this is the strange and incomprehensible bit, at the same time we retain our identity as individuals.
Buddhists and Christians have a similar goal but each expresses it differently. Christians want to be able to say with Paul, ‘I live now not I but Christ lives in me.’ They want to be subsumed into the cosmic Christ, to become one with Him. What this means we do not know and those who have experienced it, like Paul, cannot describe it. This Christ, the Word of God, who already was in the beginning, is both the origin and the goal of the cosmic process. Christians take part in this process as individuals. The traditional Christian way of putting it is that we enter life maimed by Original Sin, which creates an existential gulf between the individual and God, and handicapped by its affects we have, first of all, to be made whole by Sanctifying Grace and then, by denying our natural human tendencies, through asceticism, mortification and self-denial, eventually achieve union with Christ.
The Buddhist view has nothing to say about the transcendent. It is concerned only with the fact that life is impermanent and is full of suffering and that there is a way to end the suffering, not negatively by denying life, but by transcending it. About the moment of transcendence, Nirvana, and what lies beyond, or whether there is, or is not, a beyond, it can say little or nothing. On the way to transcendence two facts become apparent. One is that there is no permanent, individual substratum called self. The other is that all creatures share the same nature. Out of the second arises a compassion akin to the Christian ideal of agapaic love. At a rational level the two religions seem poles apart. At the practical level of lived experience each has much to learn from the other.