Close Encounter of the Ironic Kind
Yesterday, as I walked through my local Catholic bookstore, my eyes came across a very strange title. It read, Taking Jesus Seriously: Buddhist Meditation for Christians. Talk about irony!
Needless to say, some people just have an urge to mix the Faith with odd oriental philosophies and religions. I haven’t ever been able to understand why this is. As someone who has studied Buddhism, I honestly can’t find anything that would recommend its practices for a follower of Christ. Our own Tradition already contains all that is good in Buddhism, and we can live without all that is bad.
Some of you are probably wondering what’s bad in Buddhism. I’ll tell you.
In essence, Buddhism is the means by which one attains ultimate death of the soul, or “Nirvana,” as it’s called. Indeed, Nirvana literally means, “to put out the fire,” to extinguish that divine spark or spirit within us; to shatter our dreams and destroy our hopes.
But why? Why do some people want to literally kill their essences?
In many schools of Indian thought, existence itself is viewed as evil. Hence eternal, unconscious slumber is seen as synonymous with paradise (due to the absence of all experience and thought).
Let’s frame this in lighter terms, if that’s even possible.
Suppose the human soul is like a melodramatic teenager girl stressing over some trivial and insignificant “romantic tragedy,” which recently separated her from the “love of her life.” The Buddhist is like the wise-guy, who, after listening to this poor girl’s whining and moaning for over an hour, sarcastically remarks, “Well if it’s that bad, why don’t you go and kill yourself?” Except the Buddhist means what he says.
G.K. Chesterton makes this point much more eloquently than I do:
I can understand that Buddhists might resent the view that Buddhism is merely a philosophy, if we understand by a philosophy merely an intellectual game such as the Greek sophists played, tossing up worlds and catching them like balls. Perhaps a more exact statement would be that Buddha was a man who made a metaphysical discipline; which might even be called a psychological discipline. He proposed a way of escaping from all this recurrent sorrow; and that was simply by getting rid of the delusion that is called desire. It was emphatically not that we should get what we want better by restraining our impatience for part of it, or that we should get it in a better way or in a better world. It was emphatically that we should leave off wanting it. If once a man realized that there is no reality, that everything, including his soul, is in dissolution at every instant, he would anticipate disappointment and be intangible to change, existing (in so far as he could be said to exist) in a sort of ecstacy of indifference. The Buddhists call this beatitude and we will not stop our story to argue the point; certainly to us it is indistinguishable from despair. I do not see, for instance, why the disappointment of desire should not apply as much to the most benevolent desires as to the most selfish ones. Indeed the Lord of Compassion seems to pity people for living rather than for dying (The EverLasting Man, pg. 133).
In short, Buddhism’s notion of “Enlightenment” is akin to the light-headed feeling a man gets after losing half his blood. No Christian should fall for new age spiritualities that try to make such a stark vision of beatitude more palatable.
