The truth is out: I am not a “Christian.” Never was^. Never will be. I see myself now as a “Buddhist” belonging to Jesus, who is for me the Christ. This is a conclusion I have reached as a result of immersing myself in nine years of biblical and theological studies, Christian spiritual formation, church participation and service, pastoral ministry, sacrificial giving and faithful tithing, and missional contributions. In short, the works.
Bluntly speaking, I have found myself an outcaste in a “Christian” church dominated by the fundamentalist, conservative, and evangelical strains. As a serious and dedicated Buddhist practitioner, meditator, and scholar for over four decades, nearly five, I am not the typical creature ripe for and susceptible to typical Christian dogmatic indoctrination. Many of my church peers and pastors seem to have great difficulty accepting me for who I am, overtly or implicitly (whether consciously or not). I have felt a canopy of pressure from religious authority and peers to excise a majority chunk of my personal history so as to fit neatly into a preconceived religious box. It is a box that I have identified as a go-getting, corporatist, and fundamentalist American churchianity, not the gospel of Jesus Christ as I understand it. It is essentially a western Anglocentric theological and religious box that evinces a one-size-fits-all version of “biblical” faith, as they call it.
It is simply not a box for me. I simply cannot fit into that prison touted by some as the “gospel-shaped” and “loving body of Christ” when in fact it is an artefact of western religious enculturation. In my neck of the woods, I see Asians around me seemingly pretending to be Anglo-Americans, completely conditioned into a western capitalist mode of being, knowing, thinking, and living. I see Asian arrivistes adopting an alien culture with gusto and conflating it with the gospel. Even what they claim to be the “gospel” is so thoroughly soaked with and formed by western theological elements stemming from the American and European soils. When one is skull deep in the thick of culture, one is blindsided into thinking that one is truly espousing the countercultural gospel when the opposite is true. What I perceive is more Caesar than Christ, more Rome then Galilee, more Empire than Kingdom, more ambition than humility, more bravado than meekness, more domination than love. I do not want any of this — a toxic distorted cocktail of prevailing western hegemony. It is enough that we live in a global market society colonized and hijacked by predatory neoliberal capitalism with historical roots in the Industrial Revolution and materialist capitalism inextricable from the proverbial Protestant work ethic. I have not the slightest wish to imprison myself in the self-same predatory capitalistic paradigm of “faith” conflated with Jesus of Nazareth and his trans-cultural, non-worldly gospel of the Kingdom of God. Enough is enough.
It has taken me a roundabout journey to come back to where I started, to know the place for the first time — as a Buddhist. I have come to re-appreciate, re-cherish, and re-celebrate all that is good, true, and beautiful in the ancient paradigm of the Buddha Dhamma. And to re-honour its illustrious and peerless founder, Gotama the Buddha. In a sense, I never left the Dhamma. Nor has the Dhamma ever left me. For the Dhamma, as the timeless teachings of the Buddha on awakening based upon morality, meditation, compassion, and wisdom, is in essence nothing but pure and pristine truth. As all truth is God’s truth, I see no inherent conflict between the Dhamma and the gospel of Jesus Christ. The immense treasury of ethical training principles and methods, meditative realizations and approaches, and analyses of reality and modes of knowing is without parallel in world religious and intellectual literature. These teachings of the Dhamma evince a depth, scope, extent, richness, and rigour of intellect and spirituality that is second to none in our collective human spiritual heritage.
That said, I must qualify my self-description as a “Buddhist.” By that term, I do not mean a traditional Buddhist who believes in and practices the totality of Buddhist traditional religiosity and ritualism. No. For one, I do not believe in the Buddhist cosmology of cyclical rebirth and infinitely repetitive after-lives. Nor do I believe in the actual historical existence of Buddhism’s plethora of enlightened deities (buddhas and bodhisattvas in Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism^^). I do not believe in nor do I practice the repertoire of Buddhist religious rituals such as extensive and costly material offerings to Buddhist deities, building of gigantic and expensive Buddha statues or stupas, devotional prostrations before monastics, bathing Buddha statues, or wearing white on special religious days or during special religious occasions. It has been thus for me since I was a five-year old boy seeking spiritual solace and illumination . I am not dogmatic about the necessity for a celibate ordained monastic Sangha. I am not against it either. I have no opposition to those who choose traditionalism. And I maintain a posture of agnostic openness to Buddhist metaphysics even though I am not persuaded of the truth of rebirth and its associated cosmology.
Rather, my main focus is on the ethical and meditative dimensions of the Dhamma, with applied focus on social engagement in and existential application of the Dhamma. I adopt a critical stance to Buddhist teachings and practices, seeking to inquire without fear or favour into the quintessential truth of the Dhamma. Historical sociological, psychological, and philosophical analyses inform the way I approach the study of Dhamma, even as I engage in careful etymological, linguistic, and phenomenological exegeses. I adopt a dialogical textual hermeneutics that does not eschew deconstruction and reconstruction but does so in careful and deliberate ways. Overall, my approach to Buddhism is not a popular or populist one but one that is likely to estrange me from the majority of “Buddhists.” Despite this, I believe that this is the only tenable choice for me, to be true to myself and true to what I perceive as the Buddha’s injunction for us to be intelligently inquiring and not blindly believing. In the Dhamma, faith (saddha) is not mere half-blind cognitive-emotional assent to propositions but serene confidence in reality born out of careful investigation through reasoning and experience.
Apart from critical reflexivity in the Dhamma, I also see myself as a Buddhist contemplative. That is, I am deeply committed to a contemplative approach to life and spirituality. Meditation constitutes the heart and lifeblood of my spiritual life. I cannot separate myself from meditation. Touch me and you touch meditation. For more than four decades, I have trained in and practiced Buddhist meditation in its diverse forms guided by highly qualified teachers across the major Buddhist traditions. I am forever grateful to all my teachers of Dhamma and meditation, many of whom have since passed on. This contemplative dimension of my Buddhist life attunes me to what some might call a mystical orientation to matters of faith and religion. I look into the heart of world religious faiths and seek to recognize and appreciate their mystical essence. I believe this is where lasting peace and harmony can be found in our pluralistic world, if ever was there any hope of world peace.
My contemplative stance towards Buddhism also renders me a scholar of the theory and practice of Buddhist meditation across various transmission lineages. It sensitizes me to and primes me for a contemplative hermeneutical lens as I engage in textual reading and exegesis. As for interpretive bias coloured by this contemplative trace, I admit to being guilty as charged. I can only acknowledge the biases of my interpretive horizon as honestly as I can, leaving others to their own judgments. I will say this much: for anyone to assume that they can engage in textual interpretation without any trace of bias, like an innocent blank slate, is to indulge in a fallacy and a lie. For every reading, every translation, and every exegesis is an interpretation. And every interpretation is inescapably filled with presuppositions. There is simply no such thing as a presuppositionless exegesis or hermeneutic.
All in all, I am hence a critical contemplative Buddhist, for want of a better phrase. This automatically renders me, I assume, an outsider of sorts though also somewhat of an insider. I see this space as liminal and intertextual, but one that is also highly fertile and creative. Furthermore, flowing from my life-changing encounter with Jesus during my sabbatical meditation retreat nine years ago, I know with certainty that I belong to Jesus, whose presence is unabatedly the air “I” breathe, the consciousness by which “I” know, the love that stirs in “my” heart, and the immaculate wisdom shining through “me.” That said, I do not by default accept uncritically traditional Christian theologies of Jesus, God, church, creation, end times, after life, eternal heaven and hell, and all else associated with classical Christian belief.
I am skeptical of hand-me-down beliefs and see them mostly as products of human constructive imagination driven by deeply emotive agendas. The acid test of these doctrinal beliefs is in how well (or not) they align with my direct immediate personal revelatory illumination of Jesus Christ, not the other way round. My Jesus encounter left me with an utter release from any trace of sin-induced guilt, condemnation, and shame. I also was inwardly enlightened to the person and nature of Jesus as the Christ who irrevocably saves. My knowledge of Jesus derives from experience, not text. I have written about my disavowal of the dogma of scriptural inerrancy and all its underlying assumptions elsewhere and will not repeat my arguments here.
Let me conclude with an elevator statement of my life mission thus: witnessing Christ, I teach the Dhamma; teaching the Dhamma, I witness Christ. This is in short the mission of my singularly unique life here on this planet. A life which, by the way, is but a tiny insignificant blip in an incredibly vast and ancient cosmos. No one else needs to agree with or endorse it except me. And my Lord.
To Christ be all the glory.
NOTES: ^ Since my faith encounter, I had always thought of myself as a "Christian" who tried his level best with all sincerity to fit into "Christianity" and all its trappings. But in truth, I could never fit in for the "Christian" church could never truly accept me for who I was and am. A cookie-cutter churchianity is just not a good fit for me.
^^ My view of enlightened Buddhist deities is that of creative imaginaries born of spiritual culture infused with depth and richness of symbolism and meaning. These archetypal buddhas and bodhisattvas serve a pedagogical and contemplative purpose in embodying certain superlatively virtuous qualities like compassion and wisdom, eliciting and fostering these same qualities in the minds of those who meditate on them as archetypal enlightened figures.
Image credit: Pexels (Eky Rima Nurya Ganda).