Zen and Christianity

The relationship between Zen and Christianity is complementary. Since they begin as polar opposites in the theological sense, their mystic convergence is more difficult to uncover, but quite striking once apprehended.

Christianity is a religion of the revelation, as testified to in Scripture, of God to man through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Its doctrine is centered in objective truth and historical occurrence whereby, through the “hearing of the Gospel,” one arrives at conviction, belief, surrender, and salvation.

Salvation is not the end of Christian life, but its beginning. For the Christian mystic, the journey continues towards the “mystical marriage,” the union of the soul with Christ through the progressive annihilation of the ego and its surrender to the lordship of Christ.

Zen is not a religion of revelation and, as such, is not anchored to its scriptures or even its doctrine. Zen is based on a direct experience or intuition (prajna); that is, seeing into one’s original nature, none other than the ground of being, reality itself.

One’s original nature is beyond all conceptual thought and prior to all names and categories. “The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.” Since Zen is not tied to scripture and doctrine, one can be fully Christian and also a practitioner of Zen.

The convergence between Zen and Christianity begins to emerge as the Christian approaches union with Christ through contemplative prayer and meditation. The Christian begins to apprehend that one’s original nature is in fact the Christ nature that resides in him or her and is communicated through the Holy Spirit. Our Christ nature within us then leads us towards the Heavenly Father–the Godhead: the ground of all being. Thus, having begun at opposite directions, we arrive at a point of convergence between the experience of Zen and Christian mysticism.

We can also compare St. Paul’s experience of having the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:15) to the Zen experience of the Buddha mind that exists in prajna, the mystical insight of Zen. The experience of prajna can also be spoken of as giving one the eye of the Buddha or the Zen eye. As D. T. Suzuki noted, the Zen concept of prajna can also be expressed in the words of Meister Eckhart: “The eye wherein I see God is the same eye wherein God sees me.”

God bless.

Jonathan Edwards: Mystic, Interspiritual Christian

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), a key figure in the American Great Awakening of the 1740’s, is famous for his Calvanistic sermon entitled, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741), which imprinted upon the American imagination graphic descriptions of the terrors of hell.

Few Christians realize, however, that he and his wife Sarah were both mystics; fewer still, that Edwards was probably the first American Interspiritual Christian and, therefore, hundreds of years before his time. There is no little surprise in this since he is such a towering figure, impeccably credentialed, and a stallwart hero of evangelical Christianity.

Jonathan Edwards was both the son and grandson of Congregational pastors. He graduated at the age of seventeen from Yale University at the top of his class. In 1739, Edwards wrote of his “two seasons of awakening” in his Personal Narrative.

The first awakening occured as a boy, during a period when he prayed five times a day, retiring to a solitary place in the woods. The second awakening took place during his last years at Yale:

There came into my soul, and was as it were diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the divine being….I thought with myself…how happy I should be, if I might enjoy that God, and be wrapped up to God in heaven.” (Pg. 193, Steven Fanning: Mystics of the Christian Tradition)

Thereafter, and throughout his life, Edwards experienced

a new kind of apprehension and ideas of Christ…an inward, sweet sense of these things…and my soul was lead away in pleasant views and contemplations of them. (Pg. 194, Fanning)

He often read the Song of Songs; and he would take solitary walks in the woods, because God

seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds, and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, and trees; in the water, and all nature. (Pg. 194, Fanning)

Jonathan Edwards was ordained in 1727, and he also married Sarah Pierrepoint. In 1729, Edwards succeeded his grandfather as pastor of Northampton Church, where he stayed until 1750. He then moved his family to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he served as a missionary to Indians and pastor to settlers. He died in 1758, shortly after becoming the president of the College of New Jersy (Princeton University).

As for the interspiritual thought of Jonathan Edwards, he believed that–beyond God’s revelation to Christians and as testified to in the Bible–God also reveals himself to every religion and every culture in the world. He further held that there were non-Christians who were gifted by God with an “inner religious consciousness,” and that this was “the only prerequisite to salvation.”

He therefore did not restrict salvation to Calvanists or even Christians in general, but held that salvation was possible, through the agency of God, for all peoples.

It is amazing that this great precursor of evangelical Christianity held interspiritual views. Equally amazing is that he arrived at the apprehension of salvation in other religions over 200 years before Vatican II.

God bless.

The Unity of Religion in the Interspiritual Age

One goal for this interspiritual Christian weblog is to make the case that one can be wholly Christian without having to be exclusive. It is my hope that there are interspiritual Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, etc. who are making the same case for their own faiths.

We now live in a time when the influences of exclusive religion on milatarist thinking poses an actual threat to the survivability of the human race. This is because religion needs to be leading the way towards peace instead of apocalypse.

For example, whatever case I hear being made for an exclusivist Christian faith or an exclusivist Islamic faith, I am absolutely certain that neither case is within the will of God, whether I address Him as Allah or Jehovah. Whatever name I use, He is still the All-Merciful, All-Compassionate One who seeks to save.

The Interspiritual Age we live in necessitates that every religion must re-examine itself and its Scriptures in the light of the present state of human affairs. See “On The Nature of Scripture” as an example.

I pray for prophets of peace within all religions–such as were found in Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.–to replace the prophets of apocalypse. No doubt such prophets will be persecuted, first and foremost by the religionists in their own faith. It is to be recalled that Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu terrorist for seeking Hindu-Muslim unity.

There are serious obstacles to the interspiritual movement, and they must be faced with the overwhelming power of love. The unity of all religion is to be found in love. The tribalism of the past must be absorbed into love; tribalism always takes the relative view whereas love is universal.

God bless.