Jean-Yves Leloup - Compassion and Meditation: The Spiritual Dynamic between Buddhism and Christianity

COMPASSION
AND
MEDITATION

THE SPIRITUAL DYNAMIC BETWEEN BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY

JEAN-YVES LELOUP

Translated by Joseph Rowe

Inner Traditions

Rochester, Vermont Toronto, Canada

To Father Seraphim

To Mount Athos

To the Dalai Lama, Ocean of Compassion

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

T here are questions that cannot be answered by reading books or listening to lecturesunless they lead us into practices or exerciseswhich exhaust the question, allowing the answer to spring forth from the very secret of our being and our breath...

Even more valuable are encounters with individuals who use various skillful means to undermine our own most clever responses. They introduce us to a path, which demands of us that we verify for ourselves, day-by-day, moment-by-moment, that the Real is indeed present in our experience. Then we see that the source of our deepest suffering is our habit of always being somewhere else.

After many wanderings and blind alleys, I had the good fortune to encounter such people and their teachings. I have recounted this in my earlier book in French, LAbsurde et la Grce (Absurdity and Grace).

Today, the question I am most often asked is this: in our contemporary world, what kind of practice is most essential and most capable of helping us to make sense of this world? My reply is unhesitating: the marriage of meditation and compassion. Without compassion, meditation tends to become a form of self-hypnosis, a subtle form of narcissism and escapism. And without meditation, compassion tends to degenerate into an activism with good intentions but lacking in depth and discrimination.

When I point this out, people often respond with the clich that the practice of meditation belongs to Buddhism, and the practice of compassion belongs to Christianityas if silence or love could be considered a kind of territory belonging to one religion or another! In this view, the practice of meditation together with compassion is reduced to a kind of syncretism: Buddhism combined with Christianity.

One of the first fruits of the regular practice of meditation and compassion is freedom from undue concern regarding the reductionist opinions and judgments of others. Nevertheless, we must insist that Christianity is also a tradition of meditation, and that Buddhism is an ancient practice of compassion.

I wish to thank the Philosophy Religion International Network for their work in the transcriptions of the cassettes of some of my lectures, which have been used in this book: at the Dojo Zen in Paris, on meditation; and those given at the Franciscan convent, Chant de lOiseau, in Brussels.

Thus in Buddhist contexts, I have spoken of Christianity, and in Christian contexts, of Buddhism. In doing this, my ground has always been the teachings and practices I have learned from those who have guided me in these two traditions. Therefore, I wish to express once more my gratitude and appreciation to these teachers. We can only transmit what we have received... never forgetting that what we have been able to receive is far less than the totality of what we have been offered.

The transcribers have deliberately preserved the informal style of oral communication and have avoided weighing down the text with the scriptural references that would have been appropriate in a more scholarly work. The goal of this work is to invite the reader toward a life of more silence and more love, inhabited by that wisdom and compassion, which are not the province of any particular religion but the ground of being of all humans, whatever their doubts or beliefs.

It is in this spirit that I have also been happy to participate in the conferences and pilgrimages of the OTU (Organisation des traditions in desert surroundings, at Bodhgaya in India, and on the shores of Lake Tiberiade in Israel. As the Archbishop Anastasios, Primate of the Orthodox Church of Albania, once said: More time and more means must be found to bring about true and spontaneous meetings so as to generate Friendship...

The Dalai Lama has also said: From my own experience, I have learned that the most effective method for overcoming conflict is close contact and exchange between people of different beliefsnot only on an intellectual level, but also through deep spiritual experiences. This is a powerful means of developing mutual understanding and respect. It is through such exchange that a solid foundation can be established to bring about true harmony.

Before we celebrate this understanding between our different sages, honesty compels us to briefly recall some of the quarrels and confusions of our different scribes. The history of relations between Christianity and Buddhism is of interest here, and we do not have to go very far back in time in order to find the most sectarian invective, as well as the most simplistic syncretism.

In 1735, J. B. du Halde, in his Description of the Empire of China, wrote of Buddhism as an abominable cult. P. Parennin, in his letter to M. de Mairan, went further: It is a plague and a gangrene. Chinese philosophers were right to combat it, not only as an absurd doctrine, but as a moral monster, which overturns civil society.

To Christians who claim that everything of value in the teaching of the Buddha was taken from the Law of Moses, Buddhists retort that, on the contrary, it was Jews and Christians who plagiarized Buddhist scriptures.

According to an anonymous work from 1881, revealingly entitled Jesus-Buddha, both the Essenes and the prophets of Israel are obviously Buddhists: the first prophetic schools were Buddhist monasteries. This Buddhism was altered by Esdras, but soon the Essenes restored the pure doctrine, in which they exalted Jesus in their monastery, rescuing him from ostracism. In this view, it was understandable that Jesus was opposed by the Pharisees as a bastard product of the ancient Law of Moses and the new Law of Buddha. Having preached this syncretism, Jesus became a Buddha after his death, exalted by his disciples. Another way of stating it is that Buddha became Jesus for Westerners.

What these different points of view all have in common is an air of dogmatic self-assurance whose degree of certainty is in direct proportion to the absence of any foundation for their claims. There are those who would reject both the polemics and the facile syncretism of these writings in favor of a subtler syncretism that is full of good intentions, yet, which remains a caricature of both religions. In The Perfect Way, another anonymous work from 1882, we find the following:

Buddha and Jesus are both necessary to each other. Thus in the complete system, Buddha is the intellect, Jesus is the heart; Buddha is the general, Jesus is the particular; Buddha is the brotherhood of the universe, Jesus is the brotherhood of man; Buddha is philosophy, Jesus is religion; Buddha is the circumference, Jesus is the center; Buddha is the system, Jesus is the point of radiance; Buddha is manifestation, Jesus is spirit. In sum, Buddha is man, or intelligence, and Jesus is woman, or intuition.... No one can be a true Christian unless he is first of all a Buddhist. Thus the two religions constitute, respectively, the exterior and the interior of the same Gospel. Buddhism is its foundation (for it includes Pythagoreanism), and Christianity is its illumination. Just as Buddhism is incomplete without Christianity, so Christianity is incomprehensible without Buddhism.