By Bjorn Philip Beer
“Why do you have a statue of Jesus meditating next to a Buddha statue?” a friend asked as they looked at my small meditation nook in my basement. It is perhaps an odd scene: both Christ and Buddha sit around a candle, as if they were meditating around the same small camp fire.
It was a complicated question. I grew up Southern Baptist, but became an atheist when I visited Auschwitz. Meditation had been completely foreign to me growing up in fundamentalist Christianity. I began reading about the science of the brain after a psychedelic experience in my early twenties. Zen and the Brain by James H. Austin became my new Bible. For the next two decades, I ebbed and flowed in my daily Buddhist meditative practice. Yet, despite being a non-theist, I eventually found a renewed appreciation for the actual teachings of Jesus that seem very distant from most fundamentalist Churches today, but somehow very close to my Buddhist practice.
Fascinating comparisons between Jesus of Nazareth and Gautama Buddha have been made by thinkers like Joseph Campbell, Thomas Merton, Marcus Borg in Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings, and especially Thích Nhất Hạnh in Living Buddha/Living Christ. Both Jesus and Buddha engaged in a contemplative practice. After coming to profound insights, after confronting their own mortality, and after battling inner and outer “demons,” both returned to society to help their fellow human. Both were reforming their native faith tradition, Hinduism for Buddha, Judaism for Jesus. What strikes me in my own re-reading of the New Testament and also gnostic scriptures is just how mystical, eastern, and almost Buddhist some of Jesus’ words sound to me. Something resonates.
Active reflection on Jesus’ teachings also has added some depth to my loving-kindness meditation practice. Jesus commanded followers to love the other and love the unlovable. His message of love - which has played an inspirational role in many social justice and anti-racist causes - is something our country really needs right now. I see little downside to occasionally reciting the “Eight Beatitudes of Jesus” as a mantra about the mutual obligation to those who are suffering. Paradoxically, reflecting upon his teachings also helps me foster empathy towards many Christians who share some beliefs I find immoral. While they seem to follow the opposite of what Jesus actually preached, Jesus reminds me that I can still try to empathize with them. Perhaps there is some hidden wisdom when Jesus said “forgive them, they know not what they do,” or in the Gospel of Thomas when Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is “spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.” While I might find their politics objectionable, I can still honor the fact that they also share a “miracle” with me: we’re both inheritors via evolution of gift called consciousness on this small and fragile planet.
Yet on a personal level, seeing Jesus as a second spiritual advisor has helped me. Shame, fear, and guilt all play a role in the indoctrination of young people in fundamentalist Christianity. Even after 20 years, I still occasionally deal with some of the lingering shadows of this upbringing, which included being told - and believing - that I would face eternal damnation and torture if I didn’t believe accept a certain series of religious beliefs that defied logic and biophysical laws. Yet, today, as I see the Jesus statue prior to entering a meditative state, I feel acceptance of self and of my past. I accept both the bad and the good. Had I not experienced fundamentalism as a child, I would not have so strongly needed a foreign meditative tradition that was appealing exactly because it was so foreign. And, had I not found Buddhism, I never would have re-discovered the wisdom of Jesus that is worthy of contemplation, teachings that had ironically been lost on me as a fundamentalist.
Sometimes, seeing this plastic Christ, I smile and enter a lighter and more forgiving place. For example, I am reminded that Jesus was mistranslated when he said the word “hell” (which after all was a concept that entered Christianity years later via Greek thought). Instead, the word “gehenna” translated as “hell” actually was referring to a refuse dump outside of Jerusalem. That makes me laugh, and laughter helps heal. All this ongoing drama in my mind and currently in the minds of millions of young people over a garbage dump! A metaphor! This cycle of ignorance sounds eerily similar to samsara, if you ask to me. Maybe Jesus and Buddha are also alike in that they both had some wise things to say about getting out of such vicious cycles of unnecessary suffering.
Adding reflections on Jesus into my current Buddhist practice helps build some bridges in my spirituality. A bridge to my past, a bridge towards my neighbor, a bridge towards a future where humans might one day enter a more enlightened space to realize what sages like Jesus and Buddha were pointing towards, instead of just staring at their fingers. Building this bridge gets me from a space of either/or into a space of both/and. I can be a non-theist who follows practices and ideas of both the Buddha and the Christ. Once one is deep in a contemplative state, as one experiences union with the universe and a temporary respite from the chattering demands of the ego, does the name of the road that brought you there really matter? Deep in contemplation, all I see is two shadows and a bright light. Two important phases of my journey that merge by bringing me to This Moment.
I was lucky that I found refuge in contemplative practices through Zen meditation after escaping fundamentalism. But I realize that many young Christians - who are leaving the church in record numbers - might dismiss Buddhism because they are jaded and want to avoid “another religious experience.” My hope here is that young people struggling with a similar journey out of fundamentalism can realize there are many paths towards a rewarding contemplative practice, a practice that can embrace reality as revealed by science but also wonder and insight as revealed though contemplation. There is a beautiful tradition within Christianity that goes back to Jesus admonishing his followers to “pray alone,” the same Jesus who went into the desert alone for 40 days. Where I left Christianity for atheism, I’d instead encourage young Christians today to not throw out “baby Jesus with the holy water” and instead explore the rich contemplative and mystical tradition within Christianity.
For a young Christian, this native Christian mysticism could be an easier jumping off point into healthy spirituality, and slightly less of a big jump than diving into a practice from a foreign culture with new iconography, language, history, and practices. We’d even avoid risking cultural appropriation. Perhaps Christ as the symbol for Christian spirituality could be a gateway through which a young fundamentalist could more easily evaluate Buddhist practices and experience a more diverse universal human spiritual experience. As young Christians exit the Church with increasing speed, wouldn’t it be nice for them to land on some sort of contemplative practice - whether Christian or Buddhist? Or both? I’m pragmatic here: whatever invites the young fundamentalist out of the comforts of certainty is the right path.
Perhaps there are many different rafts that can be used to cross the same river. My spiritual practice seems more whole as two sages help me across on a daily basis, as their statues sit next to a flickering flame, next to the radon remediation pipe in a basement in a house in the Oregon woods. Separated by hundreds of years and thousands of miles, these figures both direct my attention to a beautiful truth hidden just beyond the self.
Bjorn Philip Beer is a writer outside of Portland, OR. Follow him on Twitter@BjornPhilipBeer.