The Four Gospel Seals

His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, my upa-guru
and the14th Dalai Lama

In the monastery, I had a dried leaf on my desk for years.  It was blessed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.  To make a long story short, I'd been sent to a monastic conference, where I met a buddhist monk named Tsering.  He was on a speaking tour, in hopes of raising money for a building project at his monastery.  I gave him a bit of the travel money my monastery had given me, and he fished the leaf from his backpack.  But our interactions stuck with me for reasons unconnected to foliage. During a Q&A with a group of simply professed monks--monks in training, of whom I was one--someone asked Tsering to give them a piece of advice, to help them live as better monks. [bxA]

Counting on his fingers, Tsering had outlined the central tenets of Buddhism: the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Four Dharma Seals.  I've always remembered that.  The way Tsering encapsulated his tradition was crisp, clean and efficient--a method for which Catholicism had no equal.  We had a catechism. But even that concise statement of Catholic belief was a 500 page book.

Later, when I got into teaching Catholic High School students the finer points of theology and religious history, they'd often ask "what's the bare minimum Jesus taught" or "what's the least we have to do in order to be Catholic."  It took me about 4 years, but I began developing answers for those questions that fit a high school attention span.  Some of it was difficult to do--the Catholic Church had spent hundreds of years coming up with its first creed--but even that fell short of "a short version of what Jesus taught." Instead it was a short version of "what the church taught about Jesus."

So I found myself remembering Tsering.  I needed, in short, an equivalent to the four dharma seals, teachings I could count on my fingers.  As I understand it, the dharma seals are teachings with which all teaching must agree in order to be buddhist.  I needed teachings so central to Jesus' message that whatever was contrary to that ceased to be Christian. 

Eventually, between my reminders to stop drawing on desks and my students' requests that I solve their boredom with restroom passes, this is what I passed on:  in order to be Christian, a teaching had to agree with these four central principles of Jesus teaching.

Jesus, my sat-guru, rendered a bit differently 
than history remembers him.

The first is impermanence.  The point to make about this one is that impermanence goes side by side with dignity.  Jesus said "Consider the lilies, how they grow.  They do not toil or spin...even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these."  In saying this, Jesus was taking his place in a tradition that believed "All people are grass, and their constancy is like the flower of the field."  Jesus knows "that he'd come from God, and was going back to God." But that's a  reason for compassion--the quote just mentioned preceded the mandatum, the washing of the feet that, in John's Gospel, takes the place of "this is my body"--the famous words instituting the Eucharist.  In the end, early Christians understood even even heaven and the entirety of Jesus ministry is impermanent.  Corinthians said "then comes the end, when [Jesus] hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every authority and power."  We are all, in the end, consciousnesses merging back into divine consciousness.

The second teaching all Christian doctrine has to agree with is non-self.  Jesus says "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow."  A great deal of how non-self is talked about is overshadowed by the importance of bearing the cross's difficulties.  The point remains: "self" is malleable, and Jesus asks for its renunciation.  Early Christianity doesn't quite figure out what substantive thing is left after self renunciation.  St. Paul comes closest.  He says his "true self is hidden with Christ in God."  He says "I live, but no longer I--Christ lives in me."  I suppose the larger point is to be made here is that Christ has totally accepted his own impermanence, so whatever non-self consists of, it is comfortable letting go of all that is.  In the larger  atmosphere of Christian mysticism, where unknowing is used as a tool to return all we know to God's mystery, I'd be comfortable saying that, ultimately, what I am is the "nada" John of the Cross found on the mountain.  Life doesn't always have to be about self: and our life can only be about diving to God's mystery and serving others to the degree that we've given it up.

The third teaching all Christian doctrine has to agree with is acceptance.  Jesus freely accepted the limits of an incarnation.  He accepted people fully, and healed those with the willingness to be healed.  He fully took the sins of the world on himself, accepting the role of the suffering servant.  He carried the cross.  He may have displayed some of the emotions common to a grieving process--anger that the temple was being used as a marketplace, sadness at the death of Lazarus.  But ultimately, in Gethsemani, the emotional turmoil of finding willingness ended in acceptance of a violent death.  And that acceptance was the foundation of a work in which the Father and the Spirit were much, much more active.

The fourth teaching all Christian doctrine has to agree with is interbeing.  This is a buddhist term, but it's very much something Jesus taught.  It means "everything is in everything else."  Jesus said "whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me."  In prayer to the Father, he said "I [am] in them and you [are] in me...so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.  Jesus' post-resurrection appearances, where he was a stranger till he was suddenly familiar were designed to teach that whomever we come in contact with is Jesus, though they don't resemble him in the least.  Given all of this, it's even reasonable to assume that when Jesus said "I am the sheep gate" he wasn't speaking metaphorically.  It seems he meant to make himself literally present in physical objects other than bread.  It's on the basis of things like this that folks as reputable as Richard Rohr name their conferences "The Universal Christ: Another Name for Every Thing."  After Christ, when the scales fall from our eyes, God is all things, and is in all things.  Full stop.

Impermanence, Non-Self, Acceptance, Interbeing.  It seems as if playing fast and loose with these teachings renders the gospel hollow and rotting from the inside. Not only that, backing down from some of the positive affirmations attached to these causes a great deal of suffering.  Impermanence and dignity must live together.  Non-Self and the safety of total surrender must go hand in hand.  Acceptance and the importance of death are rarely separate.  Interbeing actually quotes the Baltimore catechism when it asks "Where is God?" Nothing less than a full throated Everywhere will suffice.

Theologians will argue.  But I am a theologian who says these four things are the most important teachings of Jesus.  In my theological training, we were taught the centrality of the "elevator pitch."  If you can't sum something up, it says, in the time it takes to ride an elevator, you haven't assimilated your subject matter.

I love a great elevator pitch.  But to me, a dry leaf does the same thing.  When I departed from the monastery, I returned the Dalai Lama's blessed leaf to the earth.  Something about forever preserving an object blessed by a man who has, himself, taught impermanence for 13 previous lifetimes--it just didn't sit right with me.  Something about clinging to a leaf when my teacher didn't cling to his own life seemed blasphemous.  I was clingy and I still am.  It's a huge frustration.  But the frustration diminishes when I leave the "I" who is frustrated behind.  After all, bearing the cross is impossible for one whose hands are full of, well, anything.

So: breathe, feel, let go.  Nothing could be safer, friends.