Light of Salvation: On Shakyamuni and the Savior

To be truly useful to me personally, a religion needs to be both salvific and illuminative. This is, for sure, the case with me, but (I’ll make bold to say) it might apply to a great number of practitioners. By salvific, I mean delivering its adherents from obstacles, whether it be their interior darkness, or some societal foe. By illuminative, I mean that a philosophy shedding light on the naked facts of existence.

Christianity emphasizes the salvific more than the illuminative, but a student of the Way will neglect neither. Judaism is theistic, and Israel itself is a nation, and as such, in need of defense from enemies. Its virtues are numerous, but because of this configuration, spiritual bypassing must be added to its liabilities. St. Paul is proof enough that students of Judaism could use the religion to bypass or whitewash their own psychological lives. We here at Under the Influence know well that such a liability isn’t unique to Judaism, but a theologizing of a personal flaw.

For Christ’s part, he had to call people away from a paradigm of Messianism that came from the book of Judges, one whose primary feature was deliverance from occupying powers. It was to easy to forget that deliverance from enemies came from cleaving to God, and that Judaism’s particular name for God was “I am” for a reason. God was the True self, so undifferentiated from the Godhead that the distinction of self and divinity was ultimately useless. Jesus had to deal with the raw amount of time practitioners would spend thinking about Nationalism, God and Self, rather than just being themselves with God, allowing national security to take care of itself, as Jewish history had previously, consistently seen that it would.

After the Edict of Milan proclaimed the toleration (and thereby wholesale watering-down) of Christianity, in the cities, rationalism and statecraft got their hooks in the Christian vision. This developed the intellectual life a great deal: several of the initial important councils did good work, but they were convened by emperors who saw themselves as the guardians of revelation. To be sure, the fruit of the councils was great benefit, but a pyrrhic victory when the connection to the interior life is obscured, as largely was in this case.

In the burbs along the Nile, The Desert Ascetics began an all important fringe movement—one whose attempt was a focus on resolute consecration of the self to God. It bore fruit of the first truly cohesive account of the interior life in Christian history. They proposed that the “eight evil thoughts,” compulsive obstacles that obscured the always available communion with God.

Later mystical tradition, in an effort to resurrect some of that connection, enumerated three movements toward inner stillness. Vocal prayer used voice, words, images and perceptions to get the ball rolling. When I let go of speaking, in meditation I bat thoughts, emotions and sensations around for a while. That can help in progressing toward God, but clinging to it can keep me from the goal. So eventually I have to give up all form of perception—of God, religion, self, bodily sensation. This is called contemplation, but mark my words, as soon as it’s identified as such, it will end.

There is a tendency to ennoble ourselves and deflect our faults that hides easily in theistic religions. If I’m religious, that’s good. If I’m selfish, I can spend some time thinking it’s a demon I’m valiantly struggling against. The fact is, religion isn’t a merit badge, and as soon as I’ve gained any sort of distance from my egotism, it is as much my fault as the selfishness that buttresses it.

Followers of the way struggle to uncover the legitimate needs that the eight evil thoughts egotistically misuse. They attempt to experience and let go of the different states of prayer. This is all good and well. But there’s more going on here, and Christianity lacks a systemized language to talk about it. In the throes of the spiritual life, practitioners come out of denial about the falseness of their respective selves.

As I said in the three post series “Drawing from the Old Wells”: If distance from ego is anything more than momentary, Christianity calls it humility. Benedict formulated 12 steps, twelve behavioral marks by which humble practitioners might be known.

At present, masters must be great intellects, and acceptance of intellectual propositions stands in for surrender as the core of what it means to be faithful. There is a great need for those steps to be used in evaluating students and teachers of the Way.

Christianity entirely lacks a way to talk about the permanence of distance from self. This is a failure of the early church to dwell on the Emaus experience, to identify what strangers look and act like, in whom it’s later said Christ himself appeared. So when the Church speaks of obedience and it points to Christ, we have no idea what that might look like in ourselves. When the church speaks of humility and it points to Christ, we have no idea what that might look like in ourselves.

Obedience is called “positive samadhi” in buddhism. Shakyamuni’s followers recognize him as the articulator of the teaching, but more importantly, they know the signs of disposition and can recognize it in others. The 12th step of humility is identified as absolute samadhi, and buddhists can recognize it in a practitioner.

So we can speak of moving out of vocal prayer and parting with verbal capacities. We can speak of moving out of meditation and parting with mental image, emotion and perception. We can speak of moving into contemplation and losing a dualistic sense of self. We can say that Martha was worried about many things, that Mary was not, and that Mary was the ideal. We can say that the Gerasene demoniac was tormented when he was gashing himself with stones, and in his right mind when he was clothed and seated next to Christ. But we can’t say why: Christianity entirely lacks a theory of cognition.

Christianity has no equivalent of the Buddhist Nens. Buddhists might say that Mary ceased mental activity at the first nen of "pure perception.” They might say that Martha was caught up in all three nens, that she’d bypassed the pure perception of the first nen for the labels and interpretations of the second and the third.

There’s an important distinction to be made here, though. While the buddha himself is said to have triumphed over Mara, the demonic embodiment of the appetites, there is no such thing as absolute evil or the demonic in buddhism. I’ve been hard pressed to find buddhist examples of malevolent and intelligent beings possessing people. Buddhist miracle workers like Padmasambhava tamed demons and converted them into defenders of Dharma. This is ultimately similar to the desert fathers: the eight evil thoughts were originally seen as demons, the struggle with whom bore fruit of virtue. Later systemizations of Christian thought acknowledged that the vices were what later tradition would call “compulsive thought”—a place of vulnerability to the demonic, perhaps, but not intelligent beings themselves. These vices were converted into virtues after long struggle.

Christianity is deficient in articulating “orthomorphosis” or right transformation. Like all western traditions, it turns on reason. Gods name is “I AM,” but because of that reason, dualism is the monkey it must always get off the back of its god concept Christianity ultimately sees humility as “passing through” the divine on its way to heaven. This ceases in ways we’re not aware of. No Pope has sent spies to that promised land to report on its low-hanging fruit. It wouldn’t be called this, but Orthomorphosis is a more fully articulated tradition in Buddhism. It's a monistic religion: one in which the purpose is present in the path to that goal. Ultimately, it sees enlightenment as “passing through” the self on its way to non-self. This ceases only when rebirths do, in Nirvana.

So Christianity has a social ethic but lacks interiority. Jesus is the Savior par excellence, and Christianity Salvific, precisely becauseChrist saved us from the worst parts of ourselves. But we westerners get dualistic in a hurry, so the ways Christ’s teaching is self-illuminative as well are projected onto a distant God and lost on Christians from the start. Buddhism has struggled to sustain positive samadhi. Recent efforts, (by Thich Nhat Hanh, for instance,) to revive methods of walking meditation aim at maintaining centeredness in the midst of service. Nhat Hanh invokes interbeing. He says we all inter-are: that, in the same way we cradle one hand in another when we burn ourselves, we each reach out to the other when we’re wounded.


In the end, we're dealing with two religions, each flexing muscles that have atrophied in the other. I suppose this is why I’m drawn to both. When I struggle to extend myself to others, I lean on Jesus teaching. When I struggle to cope with my own darkness, I fidget next to buddha under the Bodhi tree until I lose him entirely and find him in myself. The illuminative and salvific paths are both necessary when it’s my own darkness keeping me from generosity. I hope I can let the tension do its work.