Essay #23: An Apology: from Jesus to Buddha

There is no ground beneath my feet,
But Jesus showed the way:
Not a thing I do will be complete,
And the sun will shine today.

Of Jesus’s modes of transportation, we know very little.  Only three are mentioned in the Gospels.  He walked on foot from place to place.  He traveled in a boat.  And toward the end of his life he rode a mule.  That is all we know.  Or, rather, it is almost all.  We also read that at one point Jesus walked on water to the boat his disciples were holed up in during a gale.  His disciples were terrified when they saw him, believing he was a ghost.  But Peter, just recognizing him, asked him to allow Peter, too, to walk on the sea.

Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus.  But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!”  Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?” (Matthew 14: 29-31) 

No doubt centuries of traditional interpretation have had us read Jesus’s question to Peter as a mild scolding or expression of criticism.  After all, Jesus was well aware of Peter’s volatile temperament and even of his wavering heart, as are we.  One could understand why Jesus might be just a little disappointed in Peter and given to scolding.  However, if we take at all seriously the esoteric dimension of Jesus’s teaching as explored in many of the above essays, then we must at once recognize this as a too facile interpretation.  The Jesus who left hidden keys to the gates of the kingdom would not be interested in merely scolding Peter or us but in inquiring quite literally, “Why did you doubt?”  In other words, why did you doubt so that you began to sink into the waters of your own neurosis or delusion or “sin”?  Or we could paraphrase, what was the state of your mind that left you defenseless against your bugaboos?   With the help of the previous writings, we could clarify, what missteps in which quadrants of the cross have you taken that might be corrected by the specific practices associated with those quadrants?  Thus Jesus’s question to Peter is seen as the helpful initiator of a process of inquiry meant to heal, and not as a loose-ended barb that leads nowhere.

The setting of Jesus’s question is all too specific.  It occurred out on the water.  The irony is that Jesus successfully walked where there was no ground to walk on, then challenged Peter for not continuing to walk there also.  In a further irony, Peter begins to sink as soon as he takes notice of the wind and becomes afraid—obviously afraid of what he believed to be the real dangers of water and wind—whereas he was fine as long as he indulged in what must seem to us to be the utter unreality of walking on water.  On an esoteric level, we are thus strongly pressed by Jesus and the writers of the Gospel into a conflation of reality with unreality.  What we believe is real may actually harm us.  What we long considered to be unreal and impossible—or at least what was for us an unthinkable state of affairs—may actually save us.  That which we fear, and hence, shy away from, may contain a hidden path.  And we may have to climb out of our familiar boat to find it.  Spiritual conversions are not without travail.  The wind is howling while Jesus and Peter are out there.  The same word for “wind” means “spirit” in the Greek of the Gospels.  We may note that the writer makes a point of telling us:

And when they climbed into the boat, the wind died down. (Matthew 14:32)

In other words, the transforming spiritual experience ended when they re-entered familiar territory.  The grounded place the mind takes as familiar may be a place of comfort but it is not necessarily a place of growth nor even of true security.  (As all seamen know, security felt in a boat is at most relative security.)  Jesus wanted to know why Peter doubted when he was out on the water, not when he was safe in the boat.  He knew that the kind of inquiry he was after was difficult under the disorienting conditions of walking on water.  But it was nearly impossible within the confines of one’s familiar world and one’s “comfort zone.”

The moral of the story is that there really is no ground underneath our feet.  How could there be if Jesus walked on water?  The traditional interpretation begs us to categorize Jesus’s feat as a bit of “supernaturalism,” which is just a nice way of saying that it does not chalk up with what we consider real in this natural world.  This categorization quietly allows us to dismiss Jesus’s act as something remote from us.  But if we are to take it seriously and read between the lines, as it were, to assist us in doing so, then his feat must have precisely the reverse effect.  That is, his ability to walk on water calls everything into question about our ability to walk on the ground.  We can radicalize this by saying, if Jesus was able to walk on water as if there were ground, then we truly cannot walk on ground as if it is not water!  In other words, we have to question our assumption not only that just solid ground can be walked on but that it is solidity itself that guarantees our ability to walk.  And if it is not solidity, then the ground may just as well be water!  Jesus is really calling Peter and ourselves to start all over and ask just what is beneath our feet.  More than that.  He is teaching us that there absolutely is no ground beneath our feet.  Whatever we may have assumed it was—that’s not it.  Furthermore, he demonstrates that it is by staying in direct connection with this groundlessness that one is most secure.  He essentially asks Peter, “Where did you lose contact with it?”  For it is just where Peter doubts and cleaves to his mental constructs about what is safe and what is not—or we could say, what is grounding and what is groundless—that he gets into serious trouble.  Back in the boat he is temporarily removed from trouble.  But he has trouble of another kind: 

And when they climbed into the boat, the wind died down. Then those who were in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.” (Matthew 14:32-33)

As we have been saying, his opportunity for spiritual transformation moved off with the winds.  Moreover, Peter and the other disciples entered back into a merely worshipful attitude towards Jesus instead of a fully participatory one.  It was not accidental that Peter framed his request to come walk on water as a means of confirming who Jesus was:

“Lord, if it’s you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.” (Matthew 14:28)

He knew or intuited that by participating in Jesus’s actual activity and sharing in the same power could he best know who Jesus was.  That intuition and the experience that issued from it offered a much more intimate knowledge of Jesus than the external witness of Jesus’s ability to command the wind and the waves.  The external witness surely led to a worshipful attitude.  But the intimate experience offered Peter the exhilarating opportunity to do as Jesus did by being as Jesus was.  We could say that what is being demonstrated here is the difference between knowledge that is a priori as opposed to knowledge that is a posteriori.  The knowledge that Jesus’s disciples had of him came after the experience of witnessing him walk on water.  It was a posteriori.  It led to a worshipful attitude.  The knowledge that only Peter had of Jesus was a priori.  That is, there was nothing that Peter witnessed in what Jesus did that taught him how to walk on water.  Jesus’s lesson was not about how.  His lesson was about that.  Not how you could do it but that you could do it.   His question to Peter was not how did you just do that but why did you doubt you could do it–i.e., what got in your way or what distracted you?  Had Peter been able to follow this line of inquiry, his first inclination would probably not have been to worship Jesus.  More likely it would have been to identify with him. Especially if Peter had been able to maintain his connection to whatever it was that let him walk on water, Peter would have been drawing from the same well as Jesus.  He would, in essence, have discovered Jesus in himself.  Or we could say that he would have discovered the common root from which both he and Jesus had sprung.  In Christianity, that creative aspect of the Godhead is designated as “Father.”  The springing or emergence of life from that root could be assigned to “the Holy Spirit.”  Peter in that awareness would have dwelt in oneness with the Father just as Jesus was in the Father, and hence he would have fulfilled Jesus’s prayer (see John 17:21) that we should be both in him and in the Father.

In terms of our earlier discussions, a posteriori knowledge corresponds to understanding and a priori knowledge corresponds to true knowing.  Jesus was attempting to lead Peter to true knowing.  And he was demonstrating both to Peter and to us that true knowing can only be approached through groundlessness as opposed to the mental constructs and interpretations of the understanding.  As comfortable and familiar as the worshipful attitude is, Jesus was ultimately leading Peter to an experience that we can only describe as prior to worship.  That which we are identified with or identify in ourselves we do not worship.  We may honor it and we may be grateful for it, but we do not worship it.  That Jesus knew well our inclination to worship him we should not doubt.  And he also gently discouraged it on more than one occasion.  When a certain ruler called him “good,” he refused the title and referred it to God alone (see Luke 18:18-19).  Later on, he told his disciples that it was good for him to go away, “for unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you” (John 16:7).  We may interpret this to mean that as long as Jesus himself stayed around as an external representation of the Spirit, understanding itself would prevent the arising of true knowledge, symbolized by the arrival of the Counselor.  The worshipful attitude would prevail to the detriment of what has been called “self-realization.”  Finally, Jesus close to the time of his execution told his disciples that

“they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father” (John 14:12).

He clearly meant for those who believed in him to see such faith as independent from his physical or earthly form and to see it as the source within themselves of the same kinds of feats—and even greater ones—than Jesus himself was capable of.  These are hardly the expressions of a personality bent on maintaining an earthly following of worshippers.  Jesus never seemed to seek fame or power—let alone fortune—for their own sake.  He eschewed recognition, telling those whom he had healed to keep quiet about it lest they stir up too much of the wrong kind of attention.  This he always defined as too much interest in the exterior.  One result of this was that “Jesus could no longer enter a town in plain view” (Mark 1:45) because of the swarm of interest.  Instead, he preferred to remain in “lonely places” presumably freer from dangers and distractions.

Here and in many other comments Jesus exhorted us to pay attention first to our interior.  He told us to take care of the beam in our own eye in order to see clearly before worrying about the speck in someone else’s (Matthew 7:5).  He told us to guard our hearts, for what shows up in the heart (such as adultery) is more likely than not to find its way into the world as action (see Matthew 5:27-28).  And he told us not to worry, that worrying will not add a single hour to our lives.  Moreover, “there is more to life than food” and “more to the body than clothes” (see Matthew 6:25-33).  All of these reflections take the common theme of relating the internal to the external and the external to the internal and giving clear priority to the internal.  About this he was quite unmistakable:

“First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean” (Matthew 23:26).

The spiritual practices that we associated with Jesus in the middle writings are all primarily interior practices.  Even where they call for increased or decreased effort expressed out in the world they do so always with reference to an interiority that cannot be fully described or expressed.  In terms of the Quadrants of the Cross, remaining at the center of the cross with Jesus has more to do with what one is not doing that might distract one from staying there than with what one is doing.  It has more to do with non-action than with action.  This is why it was so appropriate for Jesus to ask Peter, “Why did you doubt?”  This was the same as to ask, “What drew you away?”  Away from what?  From Jesus himself, from the knowledge of Jesus, the vantage point of Jesus, and that reference itself which comprises both the knowing and the knowledge.  This is what Peter would have appropriated within himself had he remained on the water and in the wind (Spirit).  Far from making it extraordinary, Jesus wonders aloud what caused Peter to lose it.  Jesus does not draw attention to himself nor seek to create a spectacle by walking on water.  He simply walks.  Likewise, he does not regard Peter’s request to walk as extraordinary either, but simply says, “Come.”  Thus he acknowledges in Peter what is both the most natural and also somehow the most difficult thing for him to gain access to.  This—for want of better words—is his “groundless nature.”  Or we could just as well say “the fundamental groundlessness of nature.”  Perhaps we should not expect to be able to learn any more from Jesus about what he was pointing to with such a carefully crafted use of symbols in the water, wind, walking, fearing, sinking, and boat of the story.  Nevertheless, we can look for  further clues.

Jesus in his very prayer that we should become one in him and one in the Father suggests a groundlessness that extends into our very identities as separate individuals.  For what might it mean to become fully one in him or in the Father while retaining our separate identity?  If God provides for us now while separated from him better than for the birds and all his other creatures, then what can we think of that we might still need if we were one in him?  For what reason or purpose would we stay invested in a separate identity?  Or if not two—but not entirely one either—since Jesus continues to speak of an “us” who are one in him and in the Father, then what would be the ultimate nature of our “groundless nature”—divine, human, one-with-everything?   Jesus himself does not specifically say.  He does often talk about the interrelatedness of all things in ways that suggest oneness—or we could say a kind of mutual arising or common origin in groundlessness—as when he says

“He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45).

Moreover, he exhorts us “to love our enemies” specifically “that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:44-45).  In light of the foregoing, we may interpret this to mean that by loving our enemies we somehow partake more of what it is to dwell in and be one with the Father.  Groundlessness, it seems, is not exclusive but inclusive even of the kinds of divisions and categorizations we are used to using in order to exclude.  Jesus seems to be saying more than just “think of the big picture.”  He is exhorting us to think of the one and only picture with everything included all the time.  The boat has artificial boundaries and a kind of false footing, which reflect the artifice of the mind that created it.  The water is something else again.  Jesus often used it–as in this incident–as a symbol of both of the entrance to and the substance of a radically different state of awareness.  We have discussed other instances of this symbolism in earlier writings already.

Now, however, it behooves us to take our leave of Jesus as we attempt to venture deeper still into the well of knowing itself.  Not that we shall ever fully leave Jesus insofar as he remains a visionary ideal and a universal spirit.  However, insofar as he is connected with a particular human life and particular writings about him, we take our leave in order to be guided by another bright light who lived actually 500 years before Jesus.  This is none other than Gautama, the Buddha, also known by the names Siddhartha and Shakyamuni.

Like Jesus, the Buddha eschewed worshippers.  And like Jesus, the Buddha emphasized the interiority of the spiritual life.  However, unlike Jesus, the Buddha was born into great wealth and lived a life that was not earmarked by persecution, but rather by the relative luxury of being able to work his enlightenment out at his own pace.  Whereas the story of Jesus almost always unfolds under the shadows both of the shortness of his life and of his horrible death, the story of Buddha is mainly defined by the event of his discoveries about enlightenment.  His death from a piece of tainted pork is like an epilogue to the glorious story of his careful workings out of enlightenment and ways to teach others how to achieve it.  The shortness of Jesus’s life almost forced him to teach in a highly-compressed, multi-layered, and often esoteric fashion.   The result is something of a jumble of stories, parables, sermons, and teachings which are not systematically arranged and do not obviously adhere to a thoroughly developed schema.  That such a schema exists it has been the goal of the middle writings to elucidate.  We will have occasion to reflect back on the Christology discussed there as we move forward.  What it is meet for us to do now, however, is to immerse ourselves in the teachings and guidance of the Buddha in order that we might become assimilated still more fully to that groundlessness into which Jesus beckoned Peter to come.  Seeking not completeness, but greater immersion into the experience itself, we turn to the Buddha—purveyor of the Middle Way–as to the guide who will take us further and actually deeper inside of the vast primordial space to which Jesus so boldly called us.

Strange as it is to say, if Buddha had lived at the time of Jesus, he might have been the disciple who took Jesus’s esoteric spiritual methodology and worked it out on the exoteric level.¹  In any case, we can discern in the teachings of Buddha finer details of of a methodology for enlightenment than we can easily make out in the parables, analogies, and symbolism of Jesus’s  highly-veiled esotericism.  If the Quadrants of the Cross gives entrance into a practical mysticism that promises a return trip to one’s fundamental nature,  Buddha’s teachings survey that nature in great detail.  What’s offered, however, is more than a map.  Original nature flowers and grows up as its map is explored, since the map is a guide to self-exploration.  Buddhism calls original nature bodhicitta.  What the Buddha guides and nourishes is the flowering of bodhicitta.

The way of Jesus was like the fierce, fiery, and quickly accelerating first stage of a rocket designed to blast us into space.  Its G-force was extreme.  We crossed through many atmospheric layers almost more quickly than we could notice.  Almost all at once we were far, very far from where we began.  We obtained a new vantage point from which to see all of Earth and all of Mankind.  With Buddha, we fire the second-stage rocket that takes us fully into Earth’s orbit.  We move more slowly, deliberately, and methodically.  We settle into a somewhat rhythmic circumnavigation of ourselves and our world content to take our time and soak in all the small details.  Among those details we hope to observe closely is our very feeling of weightlessness.  In a sense, up here we are already walking on water and getting more and more used to the idea.  Let us see what we can see as we tiptoe across the waves and greet the sun beyond the next horizon.

 

Notes:

1. The very anachronicity of this may demonstrate for us that truth cannot be separated from truth even by 500 years in time. Jesus could just as well have been Buddha’s disciple. In fact, as we noted in an earlier essay, there is a Tibetan tradition that during the years of his life about which the Gospels are silent Jesus was taken to the Far East to study with master teachers of enlightenment. We are not the first to detect a close relationship between the teachings of Buddha and Jesus. (See, for example, Thich Nhat Hanh’s Living Buddha, Living Christ, and Paul Knitter’s Without the Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian.)

Coming first to Jesus, we find still deeper access to true knowing through the guidance of Buddha. Some may perhaps come to Jesus through Buddha. Still others may go from Jesus to Buddha and “pass back” to Christianity with deeper insights. (This is just the path that Paul Knitter takes in his book.) Each person must be allowed their own path and their own intersection with the truth. Whether this follows Buddhist, Christian, Taoist, Muslim, Jewish, or Confucianist lines matters less in this regard than the recognition of a reference point common to all these paths. Once recognized, this reference point allows us to approach truth along any number of trajectories. Certainly, not all paths lead to Rome and not all launches achieve orbit. But if we are finding complementarity between teachers and paths as seemingly distant and diverse as Jesus and Buddha, then we should expect also to be able find at least latitude and tolerance between any of the great upward arcs toward truth.