Buddhists, Catholics Find Common Ground

In search of common ground between the Buddhist and Catholic traditions of prayer and meditation, monks, nuns and religious scholars have come together at a monastery in the rolling hills of rural Kentucky.

The spiritual terrain they are exploring is fertile indeed, seeded with everything from the Dalai Lama’s ideas about balancing prayer and social action to a Japanese Buddhist’s likening of the crucifix to a “koan,” the mystical riddle used in Zen training.

“It is so important to see people can come to the same insights from different traditions,” said Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk who is moderating the weeklong conference, which concludes today. “It was so refreshing to see the Buddhists push through to insights we would never credit them with. The ground we share gets wider and wider and wider.”

The Gethsemani Encounter, building on decades of Buddhist-Catholic dialogue, is the largest monastic summit since a historic 1968 gathering in Bangkok, Thailand.

The event, hosted by the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani, honors its most famous resident, the late Thomas Merton, a monk, author and student of Buddhism. Merton spoke at the Bangkok conference just hours before he was electrocuted in a freak accident at the cottage where he was staying.

“I always considered him a strong bridge between Buddhism and Christianity,” said the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, who became fast friends with Merton in meetings just before the Bangkok conference. “His sudden death was a great loss. Today, here, we are fulfilling one of his wishes.”

The Dalai Lama’s talks have been a high point of the conference. Deliberately avoiding debates on arcane doctrine, he asserted in sketchy but plain-spoken English that members of different religions should not try to convert one another, but rather exchange ideas, study each other’s traditions and conduct pilgrimages to each other’s shrines.

“I feel the variety of religion is much better,” he said. “Look at the requirement of the body. More variety of food, much healthier.”

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Punctuating his comments with his trademark hearty laugh, he said if a restaurant served the same dish for every meal, “I think then no longer any customers.”

A discussion of Buddhist and Catholic ideas about anger, the Dalai Lama said, left him particularly impressed.

The Rev. Basil Pennington, a Trappist who has written extensively on centering prayer, said that when he feels overwhelmed by anger, he stops what he is doing, goes into a room and “starts centering.” He noted that anger often results from “attachment” to something, drawing a parallel to the core Buddhist teaching that suffering results from attachment to desires.

“The world is hurting, the world is crying because of anger,” said the Venerable Chuen Phangcham of Chicago, co-president of the American Buddhist Congress. He compared indulging in anger to inviting a cobra into one’s home. Without “mind culture,” a term he said better translates the Buddhist notion of meditation, “we cannot know the danger of anger. That is why we meditate.”

Zoketsu Norman Fischer, an American convert to Buddhism and co-abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, spoke of “the uselessness” of Zen meditation. He said meditation done for any utilitarian reason--including the love of it--misses the point. One can only meditate for meditation’s sake.

Fischer found an echo to his thoughts when Catholics explained their reverence for the crucifix. Fischer, who has a Jewish background, said he greatly admires Jesus and feels “sad” to see him nailed to a cross.

Several Catholics replied that meditating on the crucifix and the sufferings of Jesus is central to their prayer life. One noted the apparent helplessness of Jesus on the cross resembled the “uselessness of meditation.”

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Then Buddhists took up the topic. Joseph Goldstein, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Mass., said the crucifix seems to represent the first of the Buddha’s “Four Noble Truths”--that all humans suffer. “It seems like that is the common ground,” he said.

(Buddhism’s other Noble Truths are that the cause of suffering is ignorance and desire; that to overcome suffering one must vanquish these traits, and that the path to overcome them is through compassion, ethical behavior and meditation.)

The Venerable Eshin Nishimura, director of the International Research Institute for Zen Studies in Kyoto, Japan, observed that the crucifix reminded him of a koan upon which a Zen master once told him to meditate: “When you meet a situation from which you cannot [escape] in any way, how do you get out of it?”

He compared the dilemma posed in the koan to a frog falling down a deep well. Maybe the frog would “now do meditation at the bottom of the well,” Nishimura suggested. “That would be called the uselessness of meditation.”

The audience chuckled, but the laughter quickly dissipated into a silence of recognition when he said, “I would recommend you do this kind of useless meditation before you fall down the deep well of death. I think Jesus Christ on the cross [is] showing us the fact of the whole situation, which we call death.”

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Sister Mary Margaret Funk, a Benedictine nun from Beech Grove, Ind., noted that while Christianity has its own tradition of meditation, it has been obscured by centuries of emphasis on social action and now many Christians are looking to the East to relearn meditation. She asked the Dalai Lama, who is encouraging Tibetan monastics to become more socially involved, how he reconciles the apparent conflict between prayer and social action.

The Dalai Lama had no simple solutions, but said he recommends a “50-50” split between prayer and action. Buddhists are far too inclined to withdraw from the world, he said. “We have to learn from our Christian brothers and sisters. We should have more socially engaged activities.”

The Dalai Lama acknowledged that Buddhist monastics’ lack of social action partly prompted Pope John Paul II’s widely publicized criticism of Buddhism in his book, “Crossing the Threshold of Hope.” Buddhists in Sri Lanka bitterly protested the pope’s visit there last year after he wrote of Buddhism’s “negative” emphasis on freeing “oneself from evil by becoming indifferent to the world, which is a source of evil.”

But the Dalai Lama said the pope had an inaccurate impression of Buddhism. “Naturally the pope lacks sufficient time to study all the Buddhist texts,” he said, downplaying the dispute and adding that he had a warm meeting with the pope this year.

Robert Thurman, director of the Center for Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and longtime advisor to the Dalai Lama, commented on the pope’s book more directly, saying that Buddhism teaches that one overcomes suffering not by shunning the world, but by destroying “the causes of suffering, which are ignorance, greed and hatred. Then you are in Nirvana.”