by James R. Moore
The critical discussion between religions has fallen on hard times. Due in large measure to what Francis Schaeffer calls “escape from reason,” men are coming to view religion as an exclusively non-cognitive activity, the doing of one’s “thing” which somehow infuses human life with transcendental significance.
The critical discussion between religions has fallen on hard times. Due in large measure to what Francis Schaeffer calls "escape from reason," men are coming to view religion as an exclusively non-cognitive activity, the doing of one’s "thing" which somehow infuses human life with transcendental significance. One observation in this regard is that made by Alan Watts with reference to his influential book, The Spirit of Zen: "a book… is something of a hoax in the respect that the more it succeeds in giving the reader an impression of intelligibility, the more it has failed to give understanding."1
But what results when men purchase religious understanding at the price of intelligibility? No less than outright and irremediable chaos. The list of those "teased out of thought" (to use Watts’ words) reads like a veritable cultic "Who’s Who": Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, Mr. and Mrs. Ballard and their I AM mumbo jumbo, Timothy Leary and the Neo-American church, Baha’ism, Nichiren Shoshu of Sokagakkai, and Zen Buddhism.2
Moreover, current theological fads-equally the product of doing one’s own irrational religious thing-are manifesting this trend no less decisively: Thomas J.J. Altizer identifies Nirvana with the Kingdom of God; Paul Tillich says that "Eastern wisdom . . . must be included in the interpretation of Jesus as the Christ"3 and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin advocates a Christic pantheism culminating in a universal "Omega," a kind of cosmic Nirvana.
What has all this to do with Buddhism? Simply that the attractive doctrinal credentials of fundamental (Theravada, Hinayana) Buddhism must ultimately have the greatest appeal to the irrational mind-set conditioned by the theologies and theosophies of our day. In an atmosphere of scientific empiricism, where a university student can attend a physics lecture immediately after engorging a psychotomimetic drug, it is a short step from the prevalent and facile monism of neo-western thought to the individualism, mysticism, and atheism offered in original Buddhist teaching.
In view of this eventuality the Christian cannot remain silent. Reason alone cannot overcome an unbending disposition to nonreason, let alone the hardness of a sinful heart. But "rational Christianity" administered by the Christian intellectual who "has access to both the reasons of the heart and the reasons of the head" will always prove remedial by God’s grace, because it sets forth the inescapable fact of Jesus Christ.4 In this article we shall explore both kinds of reasons as they bear on showing the inadequacies of fundamental Buddhism.5
HISTORICITY AND THE BUDDHA
"A history of Buddhist thought might be expected to begin with an account of the teachings of the Buddha himself, or at least of the beliefs current in the most ancient community. The nature of our literary documents makes such an attempt fruitless and impossible." This is not the statement of some axe-grinding Occidental, but rather the learned judgment of Edward Conze, a sympathetic Buddhist scholar and author of several books on Buddhist thought.6 In the end, it leads to crucial questions that a follower of the Buddha must honestly face. For example, how is it possible to assess the character of a religion’s founder whose biographies "are centuries later than the period of which they speak" and were "composed after the time when the movement had broken into separate schools?7
Or, can the original form of a religion be reconstructed whose primary documents, as we have them, "date back no farther then the Christian era," nearly 500 years after its founder’s death?8
What, more specifically, is this conclusion regarding the historicity of the Buddha? Edward J. Thomas has set it forth in his definitive Life of Buddha: namely, that "in the present state of our knowledge we cannot in any instance declare that Buddha said so and so. The fact that we start from is that we have a collection of documents, which were held some two centuries after Buddha to contain his utterances."10 We read on to discover that a comparison between the New Testament and the Buddhist scriptures is "extremely misleading." While recognizing that "the composition of the Gospels and the Epistles is not without problems," Thomas declares that "the questions concerning the origination and growth of the Buddhist Canon are far more complex."11 For example, Thomas asserts that "all of them [the legends] belong to a period far removed from the stage which might be considered to be the record, or to be based on the record, of an eyewitness."12 On the other hand, all of the New Testament records belong to the lifetime of both hostile and friendly eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus. Regarding Buddhism, Thomas concludes: "the only firm ground from which we can start is not history, but the fact that a legend in definite form existed in the first and second centuries after Buddha’s death."13
LANGUAGE, TRUTH, AND LOGIC
Nietzsche called Buddhism the only positivistic religion in history because of its unswerving commitment to the Four Noble Truths: (1) All life involves suffering; (2) suffering is the product of attachment to this world, and ultimately the product of ignorance; (3) eliminating the cause (attachment and ignorance) will eradicate the effect (suffering); (4) The discipline of the Eightfold Path will lead to this end. However, unlike contemporary philosophical positivism, Buddhism is forced to operate in a "closed circle" of confusion through neglect of the basic questions of truth, logic, and language.
It is clear from the Four Noble Truths that "the supreme concern of the Buddha was not truth but salvation." The Buddha began with a definite existential world view which subordinated the concern for discovering truth to the metaphysics of experiencing a priori truth, the achieving of freedom (moksha) in Nirvana. For in fact the two concerns are mutually exclusive: "Any hunger for truth that would keep a man awake at night and set his soul on fire would be a disease" -suffering something to be overcome through the discipline of the Eightfold Path.14
Where philosophically does fundamental Buddhism begin? Parting ways with Hinduism and monistic philosophies, Buddhism holds that there is no Brahman, no Absolute, and no persisting substance whatsoever in the universe. Instead "the most important of the conceptions which underlie the Buddhist religion" is that everything is momentary (kshanika).15 What appears to persist is no more than the momentary occurrence of things in certain patterns:
There is no other ultimate reality than separate, instantaneous bits of existence. Not only eternal entities, be it God or be it Matter, are denied reality, because they are assumed to be enduring and eternal, but even the simple stability of empirical objects is something constructed by our imagination. Ultimate reality is instantaneous.16
In the face of total flux the Buddha had to account for his premise that all life involves suffering. How did this predicament come about? The Buddha solved this problem (and avoided the pitfalls of the cosmological argument) by his theory of dependent origination. Causality in human life works in a circle. The chain begins in ignorance (that all is impermanent) and continues through the phenomena and epiphenomena of life, birth, old age, and death. The latter are once again the causes of ignorance. Hence A causes B causes C causes A. If A causes B causes C causes D, ad infinitum then of course one might ask the cause of A. This would require the admission of an uncaused cause, a persisting something that the Buddha felt must be avoided at all costs.17 Thus because of circular causality the Buddha could account for suffering by showing that it always existed.18
Yet the Buddha taught that moksha or freedom from this vicious circle was possible. Therefore his causal chain consisted of at least some links which are necessary but not sufficient conditions for following links. For if they were not (i.e., if the links were necessary and sufficient conditions), then the chain could never be broken. The absence of one link (e.g., desire) is a necessary condition for the absence of the preceding link, et cetera, until one reaches total freedom in Nirvana.
What can we say about this intriguing system? Is it logical? We might ask, to begin with, how one can guarantee that freedom is possible in a world where nothing lasts long enough to have anything happen to it. How can a person persist long enough to reverse the causal chain in order to gain freedom? But the real problem lies far deeper. Suppose that we are able to attempt to eliminate desire, for example. "To produce sufficient conditions for the absence of . . . desire, however, and to be sure that our efforts will succeed, we must be able to avoid a necessary condition for . . . desire."19 And in order to avoid a necessary condition for desire we would have to achieve the absence of the sufficient condition for the absence of that necessary condition, and so on, around the circle, ad infinitum.
We are in effect facing the question. . . how can the stream of events known as "I" enter into a chain of causation and produce, not another link in the chain, but just the opposite, the non-occurrence of that link? For that is what it will take to gain freedom . . . . the question. . . . remains at the end . . . . how can that which is by law [karma] supposed to produce A in fact be made to produce non-A?20
As if this were not a sufficiently large problem, the statement "suppose we attempt to eliminate desire" camouflages the final, inescapable contradiction. The contradiction appears full force if we say, "suppose we desire to eliminate desire"!
This entire discussion is enough to make one suspect a mistake somewhere. Buddhist religious philosophy does not "make a sharp distinction between a priori and a posteriori" and it simply does not believe "that philosophical problems can be resolved merely by closer attention to common language or thought."21 Within Buddhism terms "which concern the particularly sacred core of the doctrine [e.g., moksha, kshanika] disclose their meaning in a state of religious exaltation. To give them a precise logical definition would seem a task too trivial to bother about."22 However, if truth is one’s concern (which it seems not to be, ex hypothesi, in Buddhism), he simply must distinguish between the views and feelings he brings to an inquiry and the data arising from the inquiry itself. A religion which confuses a priori and a posteriors and requires mystic exaltation to define its crucial concepts, an understanding of which is prerequisite to committing oneself to mystic exaltation, is condemned to misapprehend the cosmos.
HUMANISTIC PRINCIPLES
We have been assuming to this point that some literary sense can be made of the logical complications in the Buddhist Scriptures. Continuing under this assumption we will do well to examine Buddhist views on man, society, and salvation, fully expecting to find humanistic ideals as unusual and inhospitable to Christianity as the ideas we have been examining in the historical and philosophical realms.
R.E. Hume, translator of the thirteen principle Upanishads and late professor of the history of religions at Union Theological Seminary, has listed fourteen elements of weakness in Buddhism, half of which concern human values: a low estimate of human life and the human body; a low estimate of woman and the family; checking of individual initiative; refusal of social responsibilities; an excessive emphasis on self-saving; a generally negative method of salvation; and an empty idea of a blissful Nirvana.23 Though careful examination of each of these baleful weaknesses is clearly beyond the scope of this article, it should be clear by now that the metaphysic of karma and kshanika underlies them. When the so-called ego is really only an agglomeration of point-in-time existences, ever changing through the cycle of causality according to the inexorable law of karma, then the foundation has been laid for the demise of man and his society. Buddhism, however, stops short of absolute pessimism by inconsistently embracing doctrines of self-salvation and Nirvana.
On the surface Buddhist teaching appears laudably self-effacing. The devout are instructed to "banish every ground of self which "shades every lofty good aim" and to "cut out the love of self." But the notion is summarily destroyed in the Buddha’s pessimistic analysis of the universe which offers as rationale for self-effacement the "fact and the fixed and necessary constitution of being, that all its constituents are transitory, . . . misery, . . . lacking in Ego."
Such a view has vast individual and social implications. Whereas a Christian is commanded to love others as he loves himself, the Buddhist is instructed to "cut out the love of self."
The essential thing, the thing that puts a gulf between Buddhist charity and Christian charity, is that in Christianity the neighbor is loved for himself. In Buddhism this is impossible. It is true that in both religions charity consists, at least in its early stages, in loving the other for himself; but since in Buddhism the ego is entirely illusory, or exists only to be destroyed, it can hardly be loved for itself. How then can anyone really be loved? Since it is not taken seriously, another’s personality can never be the object of any serious love.
"The insignificance of the individual is for the Buddhist a fundamental axiom, like the infinite value of the human soul for the Christian."24
Women, for example, are neither respected nor honored as they should be. The Buddha on one occasion asserted that women are easily angered, full of passion, envious, and stupid, and that they therefore have no place in public assemblies or in the professional world.25 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy concedes that "Buddhist thought gives honor [sic] to woman to this extent, that it never doubts the possibility of her putting off her woman’s nature, and even in this life becoming, as it were, a man."26 On the societal level Arthur F. Wright observed that in modern China Buddhism "seemed to many to teach a lesson of passivity or tolerant resignation at a time when the mood of the intellectuals and the political leaders called for a program of positive action." He cites the dissatisfaction expressed by Ch’en Tu-hsiu, a founder of the Chinese Communist party, with the abominable political and social state of Oriental peoples, and maintains that Tu-hsiu’s dubious cliches should not obscure the fact that he and others like him "were passionately seeking a solution for China’s ills, and that the Buddhist ethos as they understood it was anathema to them."27
Could the Buddha have understood that "in Christ . . . there is neither male nor female" and had Ch’en Tu-hsiu fully comprehended the positive connection between the Christian doctrine of man and the struggles of Western democracies for freedom and individual rights, then one might find today a liberated Orient, free from the impersonal shackles of Buddhist doctrine. Instead one finds war, slavery, poverty, and the starvation of anonymous millions.28
Buddhism escapes the pit of pessimism through a rigorous system of self-salvation and an empty hope of Nirvana. How close it comes to the brink can be measured by comparing Rhys Davids’ summation that men are "the mere temporary and passing result of causes that have been at work during immeasurable ages in the past, and that will continue to act for ages yet to come,"29 with Bertrand Russell’s infamous credo in his essay, "A Free Man’s Worship." On the surface Nirvana seems to mean the highest conceivable freedom from all disturbances, a passionless peace. However, "an utter extinction of personality and consciousness would seem to be implied by the fundamental principles of Buddhism and also by explicit statements of Buddha."30 On one occasion he allegedly said: "Those whose minds are disgusted with a future existence, the wise who have destroyed the seeds of existence, and whose desires do not increase, go out like this lamp." In other words, it seems that Nirvana is reached when somehow (the word carries a great ambiguity) the reborn pattern of events called an individual dissolves into the universal chaos of momentary occurrences. A body may appear to the eyes, but in reality, "within" the individual, total dissolution has occurred. Beyond this even the Buddha was silent.31 And could he have been otherwise? With Samuel Beckett we ask:
How am I, an a-temporal being imprisoned in time and space, to escape from my imprisonment, when I know that outside space and time lies Nothing, and that I, in the ultimate depths of my reality, am Nothing also?32
How is the chimerical hope of Nirvana realized? As indicated earlier, the Eightfold Path prescribed by the Buddha leads to this salvation. It is the way of high ethical conduct and stringent mental discipline.33 Indeed, we might have expected a doctrine in the sharpest possible contrast with Christianity, for Buddhism is a religion "which without starting with a God leads man to a stage where God’s help is not necessary."34 That is, in the absence of the Eternal and Immutable Personal, the conceptions of sin, alienation, and immorality have practically no significance. Thus the Buddha’s "salvation" needs only be a finite prescription for liberation from human discomfort.
No way of salvation could be more thoroughly opposed to the salvation purchased by Jesus Christ. In contrasting the (Mahayana but representative) Buddhist Saddharma-Punderika (The Lotus of the True Law) with the Epistle to the Colossians, one very perceptive writer puts it this way:
Buddha delivers ignorant men, not by some direct action on their behalf, but by triggering a mechanism of salvation within them. Their release from sorrow and ignorance emerges from within them. By means of artful deception, Buddha simply precipitates their inner resolves to escape. Obviously this understanding of deliverance is contrary to that of the Colossian letter. There the predicament needing divine remedy is both interior and exterior to men. They are helpless in two ways. Not only does the letter describe them as "alienated and enemies in your mind in evil works (1.21);" but it also suggests that they are hindered outwardly by the demonic influence of hostile "principalities" and "powers." Christ functions as their deliverer, not merely through a reconciliation wrought inwardly in his followers, but also through a "cosmic" reconciliation wrought throughout the whole creation. Whereas the Buddha introduces a new and saving truth, by means of which men find release, the Christ introduces a new and saving situation, under whose conditions men are reconciled and redeemed.35
We began this essay by considering the historical foundations of Buddhism. Again we have reached the historical level. Ninian Smart reminds us in his essay, "The Work of the Buddha and the Work of Christ," that "Christian soteriology has always been conceived as closely tied to history. God’s saving work is thought of as manifested in history (i.e., in the flow of human events) and as grounded in history (i.e., in historical evidences). On both counts, and in both senses of `history’," adds Smart, "Buddhism has a different attitude . . . . historical evidences are not vital where the truth is seen in inner experience."36 Furthermore, as we saw in the second section, this inner experience "precludes discursive knowledge."37 A religious philosophy which grounds its truth in non-historical legend and non-cognitive inner experience is thus bound to produce a way of salvation and a salvation itself far removed from "the Way, the Truth, and the Life" of Christianity.
Though many moderns may plunge into a morass of mysticism and irrationality, justifying themselves to a "Christian" society on the basis that Buddhist and Christian doctrines are "about the same," we must remember that a gulf yawns at once when we consider the roots and aspirations behind them. In one system Buddha’s sovereignty has practically no connection to history, whereas in the other, Christ’s eternal Lordship can be verified in history. In Buddhism the ultimate reality is found in an intuition of emptiness, while in the other it is in a personal God. In Buddhism a man’s liberating work is to bring men to an impersonal gnosis; Christ’s work is the reconciliation of men with men and with their loving Father.
Endnotes
1. The Spirit of Zen (New York. Grove Press, 1958), p. 14.
2. On Nichiren Soshu see the startling report in Life. January 9, 1970. For a general summary of the religious impact of the orient on America consult William Braden’s remarkable The Private Sea: LSD and the Search for God ([New York: Bantam Books, 1967], esp. pp. 66-79, 91-92), a book which shows that Eastern mysticism, especially the brand sold at the "psychedelicatessan," is currently offering a major challenge to orthodox theology (p. 37-40).
3. Tillich, in Harold E. Fey, ed., How My Mind Has Changed, Meridian Living Age Books (New York: World, 1961), p.164.
4. Elton Trueblood, Place to Stand ( New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 31.
5. Not only by reason of incipient popularity but "in fairness to Buddhism we ought probably to judge it, not primarily by its wilder perversions and developments, but on the merits of such views as can clearly be traced back to the founder himself." (David Bentley-Taylor, "Buddhism," in The World’s Religions, ed. by J. N. D. Anderson [3d. ed.; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1955], 135), On "the problems of ‘Original Buddhism’"… see Edward Conze, Buddhist Thought in India, Ann Arbor Paperbacks (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1962), pp. 31-33.
6. Conze, op. cit., p. 31.
7. Edward J. Thomas, The History of Buddhist Thought (2d ed., London. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), p.1.
8. Conze, op. cit., p. 31.
9. Edward J. Thomas, The Life of Buddha as Legend and History (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1956), p. 1,252.
10. Ibid., p. 251, Cf. p. 2.
11. Ibid., p. xviii.
12. Ibid., p. 1.
13. Ibid., p. 2.
14. Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy, Anchor Books (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1958), p. 262-63. Cf. Floyd H. Ross, The Meaning of Life in Hinduism and Buddhism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953), p. 95, 105, n.2.
15. T. W. Rhys Davids, Buddhism (3d rev. ed.; New Rochelle, N.Y.: Knickerbocker Press, 1896), p.123.
16. F. Th. Stcherbatsky, Buddhist Logic (2 Vols.; New York: Dover Publications, 1962), I, 204.
17. Cf. Thomas, The History of Buddhist Thought, p. 59, explained in greater detail in Ram Chandra Pandeya, A Panorama of Indian Philosophy (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1966), pp. 18-20.
18. See Karl H. Potter’s helpful discussion in Presuppositions of Indian Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp.102-4, 129-37.
19. Ibid., p.130.
20. Ibid., pp. 130-31.
21. Potter, op. cit., p. 52.
22. Conze, op. cit., p. 28. It should be noted in passing that "Eastern logics" offer no problems at all, for they are merely varieties of that universal system of inference based on the Law of Non-Contradiction which Westerners’ designate as "classical" or "symbolic" logic. I. M. Bochenski says of Indian logic, " that in quite different circumstances and without being influenced by the west, it developed in many respects the same problems and reached the same solutions" (A History of Formal Logic, trans. by Ivo Thomas [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1961], p. 447).
23. The World’s Living Religions (rev. ed.: New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), p. 82. See the chapter on Buddhism for specific supporting references.
24. Henri de Lubac, S.J., Aspects of Buddhism, trans. by George Lamb (London: Sheed and Ward, 1953), p.37.
25. Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism, Rev. by Dona Luisa Coomaraswamy, Harper Torchbooks (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 162.
26. Ibid., p. 164.
27. Buddhism in Chinese History (New York: Atheneum, 1965), 116-17.
28. Men inevitably reap the results of departure from religious reality. Thus Ernst Benz notes that Buddhism "has not produced a technological culture but has a distinctly anti-technological attitude in many of its schools" because "the fundamental religious premise of technological activity is the Christian concept of God as the Creator." (Evolution and Christian Hope, trans. by Heinz G. Frank, Anchor Books [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1968], p.122). Hume encapsulates the issue with this observation: "Buddhism teaches the salvation of the individual apart from society. Christianity teaches the salvation of the individual and of society" (op., cit., p.80.)
29. Rhys Davids, op. cit., . 127.
30. Hume, op. cit., p. 72.
31. Pandeya, op. cit., pp. 22-23.
32. Richard Coe, Samuel Beckett (New York: rove Press, 1 6), p. 18.
33. "'(I) First, you must see clearly what is wrong. (II) Next decide to be cured. (III) You must act and (IV) speak so as to aim at being cured. (V) Your livelihood must not conflict with your therapy. (VI) That therapy must go forward at the ‘staying speed,’ the critical velocity that can be sustained. (VII) you must think about it incessantly, and (VIII) learn how to contemplate with the deep mind.’" Quoted by Nancy Wilson Ross, Three Ways of Asian Wisdom, Clarion Books {New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968}, pp. 91-92.
34. D.T. Niles, Buddhism and the Claims of Christ (Richmond, Va.: John Knox, 1967), p. 27.
35. Irving Alan Sparks, "Buddha and Christ: A Functional Analysis," Numen, XIII (October, 1966), 199 (emphasis mine).
36. In The Saviour God, ed. by S. G. F. Brandon (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1963), p. 171. Sparks makes the exact distinction: "The difference in their relating history and eternity, then, is that whereas Buddha ‘enters’ history to exhibit compassion and to reveal a saving truth which is independent of history, Christ ‘enters’ history in order to accomplish and confirm by his death and resurrection salvation which is incomplete without such historical involvement" (op. cit., p. 195).
37. Smart, ibid., p.162.
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