Insight Scoop | The Ignatius Press Blog: The sound of one Catholic hand clapping

John B. Buescher was for many years director of the Voice of America's Tibetan Broadcast Service. He is also a very fine author and researcher, who has written some significant books on 19th-century American spiritualism, including The Other Side of Salvation: Spiritualism and the Nineteenth-Century Religious Experience and The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear: Agitator for the Spirit Land. He has an outstanding essay in the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of Books & Culture titled, "Everything Is On Fire," about his journey away from Catholicism, his excursions into Tibetan Buddhism, and his return to the Catholic Church. Here is what he has to say about that homecoming:

I am neither a Buddhist nor a prophet. I have reverted to the Catholicism that gave joy to my youth. How did this happen? Buddhism focuses on the life of the monk and nun, who have renounced the world in an effort to achieve enlightenment and thereby climb out of the cycle of suffering transmigration through rebirth. Compared to Christianity, it has only a rudimentary teaching on the governance of society or on the value of the family. Throughout Asia, Buddhist clerics usually have a lot to say and do at funerals but little or nothing at weddings and births. This sensibility has found fertile ground in the West, where we have spent the last few centuries attacking the principles that encourage the regeneration of the given structures of society—especially of marriage and the family.

Several years ago, after spending more than a decade researching the early history of Western interest in Buddhism and seeing how it was tied into the growth in the West of radicalism and atheism, I realized how thoroughly these views are themselves historically conditioned and are therefore neither necessary nor ultimately given. Whatever "Progress" is, it is neither linear nor inevitable nor irreversible. That applies, I concluded, to the modernist revolution itself, the uncritical acceptance of which, I further came to see, had drawn us toward chaos, into what John Paul II called "the Culture of Death." This led me to admit the existence of natural law, which asserted itself despite the massive efforts in our culture to deny it. This law pointed to the existence of a Legislator. And the institution that held most unwaveringly to what I had concluded was the truth of human nature was the Catholic Church. How had it done that in the face of so much in the culture that denied it? It could not be through the individual merits of its members or its clergy—their sins and failings were manifold and were often on display in the newspapers. As with smoke and fire, I concluded that if it was not the individuals in the Church, then the institution itself, in a way that was mostly hidden to me, benefited from intelligent guidance beyond its mortal capacity.

As a result, I achieved an odd kind of enlightenment. Or a number of small ones that added up to this: I realized that what I most urgently needed was repentance. Not for the sin of holding on to an infantile form of faith, but rather for turning away from the Faith and looking to myself for salvation. After almost forty years, I saw the smoke on a mountain pass. God, I felt very strongly, had lit the fire. And the trail of smoke led back home. All these inferential steps I am describing make it sound like a series of trap doors shutting, but really it felt more as if, in the dark, a person I knew was drawing closer and closer to me in silence—"anthropomorphic" though that may be. I made the sound of one (closed) hand clapping (the breast). Mea maxima culpa. And I began the "yoga" of genuflecting before Him at whose name every knee shall bend.

Bewildered at my turning back to the Church, someone asked me why I had chosen Catholicism, of all religions (Could there be a worse one? was implicit in the question). I could only answer that I did not have that kind of choice. When the door opens onto the truth, you can walk through it or you can walk away from it, but in honesty you cannot just look for another door.

In religion it is not enough for people to do the best that they can. That can never be enough. Our life is more perilous than that. Everything is on fire. We cannot put out the flames, for we too are engulfed. I pray to Jesus Christ not because he was the teacher who showed us how to do the best we can, but because he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Miserere mei, Domine.

At least two of us have found our way into this pew. Paul Williams, author of The Unexpected Way: On Converting from Buddhism to Catholicism, is a former practitioner and continuing scholar of Tibetan Buddhism. He is also a relatively new Catholic. He writes about why the two religions are irreconcilable. Buddhists are not theists. And, despite talk about the unknowable "Other," Christians most certainly are theists—at least those who have not decided that God is a projection of a limited mind. Williams also argues that reincarnation cannot ultimately provide a basis for religious practice because it reduces the significance of individual lives to a vanishing point.

Buddhism has always needed to shore up "conventional" truth—including moral truth—because it is undermined by the doctrines of selflessness, impermanence, and emptiness. This is why Chesterton wrote that Buddhism was not a creed but a doubt. It is plain to me that Buddhist sages are similar to Christians in their capacity to sin. Buddhism, however, by locating our suffering in ignorance, rather than in the will, and its cure in knowledge, makes it difficult to think that one who had really experienced enlightenment could sin. Buddhists are often inclined, I believe, not to recognize enlightened beings' sins as sins, but to explain them away as "skillful means," actions that, to the unenlightened, look like sins but that spring from someplace beyond good and evil. Christians have sometimes broached this sort of rationalization—"To the pure all things are pure"—but have generally hesitated to insist on it. Christian doctrine weighs strongly against it.

Does it need to be said that Buddhism does not know Jesus Christ in any sense except an indirect, hidden, and metaphorical one? How then can a Christian fail to say that it is lacking something, and awaits the Gospel? The actions of Jesus were essential to the salvation of all. He was fully human and fully divine. He rose from the dead. He will come again.