Buddhist and Christian?

An Exploration of Dual Belonging

Rose Drew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138785212
• eBook ISBN: 9781136673269
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhism

The last century witnessed a gradual but profound transformation of the West's religious landscape. In today's context of diversity, people are often influenced by, and sometimes even claim to belong to, more than one religious tradition. Buddhism and Christianity is a particularly prevalent and fascinating combination. This book is the first detailed exploration of Buddhist Christian dual belonging, engaging - from both Buddhist and Christian perspectives - the questions that arise, and drawing on extensive interviews with well-known individuals in the vanguard of this important and growing phenomenon.

The book looks at whether it is possible to be authentically Buddhist and authentically Christian given the differences in beliefs and practices. It asks whether Buddhist Christians are irrational, religiously schizophrenic or spiritually superficial; or whether the thought and practice of Buddhism and Christianity can be reconciled in a way that makes possible deep commitment to both. Finally, the book considers whether the influence of Buddhist Christians on each of these traditions is something to be regretted or celebrated.

1 Introduction

Can a person be both Buddhist and Christian? Today it is no longer unheard of in the West for people to identify themselves as belonging to both traditions. But how is this possible when, for example, God is so central to Christianity yet absent from Buddhism; when Christians have faith in Jesus Christ while Buddhists take refuge in the Buddha; when Christians hope for heaven and Buddhists hope for nirvāṇa; and when Buddhists and Christians engage in different practices?

According to Keith Yandell and Harold Netland, ‘if each religion is taken seriously on its own terms, as understood by traditional Buddhists and Christians, it is clear that the two religions offer very different perspectives on the religious ultimate, the human predicament, and ways to overcome this predicament’.¹ Surely, then, one cannot hold both perspectives. Yet increasingly we hear of individuals who claim precisely to hold both.² Perhaps the most prominent recent example is theologian, Paul Knitter. A practising Roman Catholic, Knitter declares that he is also ‘a card-carrying Buddhist’.³ Indeed, the title of his recent monograph goes so far as to proclaim that, without the Buddha, he could not be a Christian.⁴

So what's going on? Are those, like Knitter, who identify themselves as belonging to both traditions profoundly irrational, religiously schizophrenic or spiritually superficial? Or is it possible to somehow reconcile the thought and practice of Buddhism and Christianity in such a way that one can be deeply committed to both? And if it is possible, will the influence of Buddhist Christians on each of these traditions be something to be regretted or celebrated? John B. Cobb, Jr. asked more than 30 years ago, ‘Can a Christian be a Buddhist, Too?’ (1978) and ‘Can a Buddhist be a Christian, Too?’ (1980). But it is really only in the last decade or so that the question of dual belonging has begun to receive the academic attention it warrants and, until now, there has been no in-depth study. This book is such a study. It focuses on Buddhist Christian dual belonging, engaging the theological issues from Buddhist and Christian perspectives, and drawing on interviews with individuals in the vanguard of this important and growing phenomenon.⁵

A number of thinkers have rightly noted that, at this early stage in the academic attempt to understand the phenomenon, close attention must be paid to the experience of dual belongers themselves.⁶ But, so far, there has been little thoroughgoing theological exploration which draws on their testimony. Hence, this book's empirical dimension is important. We will explore the questions to which this phenomenon gives rise within the concrete context provided by the reflections – in interviews and in print – of six individuals who have publicly iidentified themselves with both traditions. They are the late Roger Corless, Sr Ruth Furneaux, Ruben Habito, John Keenan, Sallie King and Maria Reis Habito.

Before we embark on our exploration in earnest, I shall in this chapter say a little more to get the phenomenon of dual belonging into focus. I'll then identify what I take to be the central aspects of the challenge facing reflective dual belongers. And, finally, I shall note some crucial points about this study's methodology, before introducing my interviewees in more detail in Chapter 2.

Getting dual belonging into focus

The last century witnessed a gradual but profound transformation of the West's religious landscape. Fast global travel, mass communication, immigration and advances in technology mean that we're no longer confronted with just one religious option: Christianity.⁷ Today we encounter an array of religious traditions, originating from all around the globe and taking numerous forms. In this newly heterogeneous landscape, it is not necessarily the lone voice of a single tradition which influences us. More than one voice may come to command our attention, perhaps because we have been raised by parents belonging to different traditions, or have studied another tradition in depth, or have spent time living in a community of practitioners of that other tradition. Hence, mixed religious identities are increasingly common, i.e. religious identities which are formed under the influence of more than one religious tradition.⁸ This phenomenon has been described as ‘multireligious identity’ and, especially in its more radical forms, as ‘multiple religious identity’, ‘multiple religious belonging’, ‘hyphenated religious identity’ and ‘bi-religious appartenance’.⁹ It is a phenomenon currently receiving growing academic attention,¹⁰ and deservedly so, since its implications for the way in which we think about religious belonging and identity, and about the future of the religious traditions and the relationships between them, are profound.

There have long been religiously plural societies in Asia. Unsurprisingly, then, the phenomenon of multireligious identity is not new. Indeed, Catherine Cornille suggests that, ‘[i]n the wider history of religion, multiple religious belonging may have been the rule rather than the exception, at least on a popular level’ (2002b: 1–2). In India and Nepal, for example, people pray at shrines connected with various religious traditions, deities and saints. And, in Japan, many visit Shinto shrines on auspicious occasions, Christian churches for weddings and Buddhist temples for funerals. Still, it is potentially misleading to apply the term ‘multiple belonging’ both to Japanese religiosity and to the religiosity of those Westerners who are committed to more than one tradition. For, as Jan Van Bragt notes, in Japan the different religions are traditionally seen as fulfilling different functions, hence multiplicity in the Japanese context constitutes something of a unified system and is not considered anomalous. In the West, by contrast, ‘multiple belonging is perceived as fundamentally at odds with the traditional understanding of religion. It appears as a deviating state of affairs’, set against ‘a presupposed normative pattern: exclusive belonging to a single religion, conceived as a particular system of beliefs in a bounded community’ (Van Bragt 2002: 17).

In any case, even though there are countries in which multireligious identities have long been the norm, the question of how the phenomenon of multireligious identity is to be assessed from a theological perspective has only just begun to be discussed. The present study is an attempt to contribute to this theological assessment, focusing on the Western context and, in particular, on the combination of Buddhism and Christianity in the lives of individuals who were raised in a Christian context and came to Buddhism later.

There can, of course, be various degrees and kinds of Buddhist Christian identity. At one end of the scale there are the commoner, softer forms of the phenomenon. Here we find individuals who are influenced by both Buddhism and Christianity but nonetheless identify much more with, and have a stronger sense of belonging and commitment to, one rather than the other. For example, one might identify oneself as a Christian while at the same time practising a Buddhist form of meditation or being consciously influenced by some Buddhist ideas through reading popular Buddhist books by the Dalai Lama, say, or Thich Nhat Hanh. One might even incorporate into one's Christian doctrinal framework some Buddhist beliefs, such as belief in rebirth, for example, while at the same time remaining primarily Christian. At this softer end of the scale, there may also be people with no particular sense of rootedness in either tradition, but who select ideas and practices from both, perhaps along with elements of other traditions, as would be typical of some forms of New Age religiosity. And it is also at the softer end of the scale that we find those Thomas Tweed calls ‘nightstand Buddhists’.¹¹ As Carl Bielefeldt explains, nightstand Buddhists are those who read about Buddhism, find what they read attractive and perhaps even describe themselves as Buddhist, but who don't belong to any Buddhist organisation (2008: 2). ‘We might also call them “Buddhist sympathizers”’, suggests Bielefeldt, ‘and … their nightstand reading as “public Buddhism” or “media Buddhism”’.¹²

It would be at best misleading to classify multireligious identities at this softer end of the scale as cases of dual belonging. Being immersed in one tradition and adopting the odd belief or practice from another does not imply belonging to that second tradition. In the case of New Age religiosity, moreover, it might be better not to think in terms of religious belonging at all.¹³ Instead, then, I shall restrict the terms ‘multiple belonging’ and ‘dual belonging’ to multireligious identities at or near the harder end of the scale. At this end, people are firmly rooted in – and identify themselves as committed adherents of – more than one tradition. In the most unequivocal cases of Buddhist Christian dual belonging, people practise within both traditions, belong to a Buddhist and a Christian community, identify themselves as fully Buddhist and fully Christian and have made a formal commitment to both traditions (usually through baptism and the taking of the three refuges).¹⁴

How does this strong sense of identification with a second tradition come about? Often it is through participation in deep interreligious dialogue, involving serious and sustained engagement with another religious tradition and its teachings. In the most profound dialogue, a person attempts to experience another tradition as it is experienced by its adherents, ‘from the inside’ as it were. As Wilfred Cantwell Smith emphasises, understanding the faith of Buddhists requires more than looking from an outsider's perspective at something called ‘Buddhism’; one must try to see the world through Buddhist eyes so as to learn why the Buddhist believes what he or she does.¹⁵ To some extent, one's understanding will be limited by one's cultural and religious presuppositions, but through the process of dialogue one becomes increasingly aware of these presuppositions and hence freer to explore ways of experiencing and understanding reality which are not bound by them. In Buddhist–Christian dialogue, the Christian must get inside the Buddhist's experience of being Buddhist, and vice versa. This might be attempted purely at the cognitive level, by trying to understand another's teachings as they're understood by those who accept them and imagining what it would be like to see the world in terms of those teachings; or, in some cases, at the practical level too, by immersing oneself in a community of practitioners and joining them in their religious observances.

Aloysius Pieris advocates what he calls ‘core-to-core dialogue’. The liberative experience at a religion's core, says Pieris, is ‘ineffable and incommunicable but realizable’.¹⁶ He recommends that Christians and Buddhists actively participate in each other's religious observances (1988a: 122). Both should temporarily leave behind their own religions, as far as is possible, practising the other religion as if it were their own, under the guidance of an authoritative practitioner of that faith. John Dunne describes the temporary adoption of a religious perspective other than one's own in terms of ‘passing over’ and ‘coming back’. This idea is now well known to those involved in interreligious dialogue, and it is an experience with which many are familiar (though perhaps not to the dramatic degree experienced by Pieris himself).¹⁷ ‘The holy man of our time’, writes Dunne, ‘is a man who passes over by sympathetic understanding from his own religion to other religions and comes back again with new insights to his own. Passing over and coming back … is the spiritual adventure of our time’ (1972: ix).

For some Buddhist Christian dual belongers, their identity is the result of a process (or many processes) of passing over and coming back in which they have found it neither possible nor desirable to return to precisely the place which they left, for they find themselves and their understanding changed by this process to such a degree that the religion of the other is no longer perceived as ‘other’, and passing over to it comes to seem as much a return home as the return to the perspective and practices of the tradition in which they were raised. It is not difficult to imagine that if one has really succeeded in making another tradition one's own and believes one has experienced its truth and salvific/liberative power, one might not feel able to relinquish one's adherence to it. Then, if one is also utterly at home in the tradition in which one was brought up and takes oneself to have felt its salvific/liberative power too, one might end up considering both traditions one's own. In the process of striving to see the world from the perspective of the ‘other’ in dialogue, therefore, one may increasingly come to identify with that perspective oneself. If one comes to identify with it more than with one's original perspective, one may convert to the other tradition; but in other cases, one may identify roughly equally with both perspectives, as the dialogue between them becomes internal.¹⁸

Even if one's growing identification with a second tradition does not go as far as full-blown dual belonging, one's religious identity may nevertheless be profoundly changed by the process of ‘passing over’. Indeed, King suggests that all those ‘who take Buddhist–Christian dialogue seriously are … some kind of a mix of the two traditions’ (1990: 122). Elizabeth Harris, for example, does not self-identify as Buddhist and Christian, but as ‘a Christian … who draws deeply from the wisdom of another faith as well’ (2010: 160–61). She describes going through the disorientating experience of letting go of Christian concepts in order to enable ‘what was beautiful and distinct in Buddhism’ to arise, ‘as something perfect in its own right’ (2004: 336). She explains: ‘The “other” became part of me … And there was a cost, the cost of not “coming back” to the place that I had started from’ (2004: 345). Buddhism and Christianity, says Harris, now lie in ‘creative tension’ within her (2002b: 17; 2004: 332):

I can say with utter sincerity that I revere the Buddha and take refuge in his teachings. I remain a Christian, one who seeks to follow the self-sacrificial path of Jesus of Nazareth, but I also feel at home in a Buddhist meditation centre.¹⁹

In other cases, the change goes even further and does result in full-blown dual belonging in the sense of identification of oneself as Buddhist and Christian. As Michael Amaladoss says, ‘double belongingness enters into the picture when people really feel called to be loyal to two religious traditions’ (2002: 307). Self-identfied ‘Christian Buddhist’, John Malcomson, writes: ‘Both of them are part of who I am. I cannot give up the way both of them speak to me. … For me to practice only Buddhism or Christianity would be denying part of who I … have become’ (2007b: 3–4). And Fabrice Blée says, ‘I didn't decide to simultaneously tread on the Christian and the Buddhist paths. I rather found myself in that situation after the event’ (1999: 1). Blée sought refuge in the three jewels, was initiated in a Buddhist tradition, pledged allegiance to a Tibetan Buddhist Master and a Buddhist community, and took Buddhist vows. But he explains: ‘This conversion to Buddhism … did not translate itself in the rejection either of my Catholic faith or of my belonging to the Christian community’.²⁰

It is likely that the majority of those involved in dialogue continue to identify first and foremost with one religious tradition and to judge what is learned of the other according to its criteria. In other words, it is likely that one tradition retains normative priority, establishing a standard of correctness in thought and deed against which the other is measured.²¹ As Cornille notes, one might identify with bo...

Table of contents

• Buddhist and Christian?
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Interviewee profiles
• Part I
• Part II
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index