Reading Kadowaki: Zen and the Bible* on the similarity between Zen and Christianity. He compares the Buddhist ‘elusive passion’ (klesa) with the effects of original sin. As an aside he says that original sin cannot be known from experience. It is a datum of revelation. He goes on to say that man went against what he was originally meant to be. All this I find surprising and hard to accept now, though once I took it all uncritically. Many questions come to mind. How can one know what was ‘originally meant to be’? Even if one accepts the original paradisical situation of man as a revelation of what God intended can one go on to say that its passive, non-self-conscious existence was God’s final intention for man? Surely the state of ‘original sin’ is no more than the alienation which must inevitably result from individual self-consciousness. Again we come back to the question of what it means to be a human person.
*Kadowaki, J. K., Zen and the Bible: A Priest’s Experience, Routledge, London 1980