This talk was given at a Conference in Sarum College, Salisbury, in September 2006, at which a panel of Christians and Buddhists met in dialogue. The subject matter was the Prologue to the Rule of St Benedict and any writing of the Dalai Lama of similar length, on the subject of moral discipline. The Christian representative who gave this talk was Abbot Aldhelm Cameron-Brown of Prinknash Abbey, Gloucester.

 

THE LOTUS AND THE CROSS

In the field of interfaith dialogue, Roman Catholics and Buddhists seem to get on very well together – I speak of Roman Catholics because I do not know enough about other Churches. If we get on well together, it may be partly because we on the Christian side do not have to ask ourselves, ‘Is the God they worship the God I worship?’ Buddhists do not see the Lord Buddha as God. It is true, he seems to have acquired some aspects of divinity; but then, so has Mary, the Mother of Jesus. She shares in some way in the divine nature, as will we all in the life to come. I must add, though, that when we had lunch with the Tai Situ at Sherab Ling, in the foothills of the Himalayas, a most beautiful site, I spoke about Buddhists and God and he replied, ‘It is too simple to say that Buddhists do not believe in God. What is God? It is a word of three letters. But what is behind that word?’

That reminds me that, of course, for Christians, God as he is in himself is hidden within the Cloud of Unknowing. We know him only as he reveals himself, in the creation, in the Scriptures – the written Word of God – and above all in Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh, revealed in our human nature. We were to meet the Tai Situ later, too, at Samye Ling in Scotland.

But whatever about belief in God, Buddhists hold a spiritual treasure in their hands. That, of course, is why so many young people turned towards the religions of the East in the 60s. Christians also hold a treasure, but as we don’t go around in coloured robes and people in the 60s were not so aware of the Christian mystical tradition, the East held out the promise of something new. Some Christian writers, like Thomas Merton, were able to pierce to the heart of the East and find there something with which to enrich our own Christian tradition without being untrue to it.

As a monk, I have visited many Tibetan monasteries, so it is those I know best, although I have also been to Amaravati Buddhist Monastery, Buddhist but not Tibetan, several times. As a Christian monk, I find that Buddhists seem to have so much in common with us. There are the long chanted services, though we do not have breakfast in the middle of them! I remember there would be a break in the morning service when the novice monks ran out of the temple, their robes flying out behind them like swallows’ wings. They would be back with tea and some kind of buns, although in some temples they would bring a pot of tea and biscuits for my companion and myself who were always seated near the abbot.

Seated near the abbot, we were facing down the temple towards the open doors, and I remember one occasion when an elderly Tibetan, dressed in a European style suit, appeared in the temple porch, made several prostrations and then advanced up the aisle until he was in front of the abbot. He then prostrated again, got up and embraced the abbot, giving him some money. He then came over to my companion and me, squeezed our hands with a smile that I will never forget, and put some rupee notes into them. Any Roman Catholic will know what I mean when I say that he was giving the abbot a stipend, just as we do if we wish a priest to offer a Mass for our intentions.

One thing we did not see in Tibetan temples was rows of monks in silent meditation. I expect most of you have seen pictures of Zen monks sitting in rows, cross-legged, spending half an hour or more in meditation. The Tibetans do not do this. I asked out guide about this and he said, ‘Oh, no, we do not do it like that. If a monk wants to meditate, he goes into his room, shuts the door and then, if anyone knocks, he calls out “Go away, I’m having a nap!”’ I thought of the words of Jesus, ‘Do not be like the hypocrites, who love to be seen praying, but whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”

These chanted services incidentally, were very much longer than ours. We would be taken in to one long after it had started, and then brought out again after an hour or so, before it had ended. I was delighted to see that some of the monks, sunk in prayer, would steal a look at us as we went by, just as some of us would look up from our books to steal a look at a stranger who had come in. Buddhists are human, too, I thought, the first time I noticed this.

Buddhists may not believe in God but somehow, for me as a Christian, they made God present in their chanting.

Incidentally, to add a lighter touch, we travelled over much of India, partly by train and partly by car. The roads were usually crowded with traffic and also with animals – goats, cows and so on. I came to the conclusion that we were safer with a Buddhist driver than with a Hindu – the Buddhist would go out of his way to avoid all animals, while the Hindu would only make sure of avoiding cows!

The texts of the Dalai Lama that are being studied today are about one subject: the importance of moral discipline. That is something on which Buddhists and Christians can agree. Without moral discipline there is no spiritual path, but just an aimless wander down spiritual byways in what is really a spiritual self-seeking. We start the spiritual path because we feel it is worthwhile, we are going to get something out of it, whether great feelings of peace, union with God, or whatever. But this search is self-centred. It we were not self-centred we would never get started. But on both the Christian and the Buddhist paths, the journey has to take us away from ourselves and outwards to other people – to God, too, for Christians. What is the supreme virtue for Christians? We may call it Charity, a biblical word, but it means love, a love that goes out to others and goes out to God. For Buddhists, if I understand the matter, the supreme virtue is compassion. But compassion is love turned towards those who are wounded. And we are all wounded – that is what the Adam and Eve story is saying. I believe the Lord Buddha, having reached enlightenment, vowed to do what he could for the enlightenment of all sentient beings. Again, he recognised that we are all wounded. The smile of that elderly man in the temple was surely the smile of someone who has built his life on a foundation of moral discipline and has reached out to others with compassion.

St Benedict, on the other hand, in the Prologue of his Rule, is not concerned with the importance of moral discipline. He takes that for granted. Rather, he is laying the foundations of a Rule of life that is aimed at creating a community in which prayer is possible. Later on in the Rule he says that the newcomer is to be tested, to see if he is truly seeking God. He seeks God above all in two ways, through prayer and through fraternal, or sisterly love. Whether Benedict himself was thinking of nuns I can’t say, but of course there were Desert Mothers as well as Desert Fathers. Of one of them it is said that as she sat in prayer, a passer-by asked her, ‘Why do you waste your time like that, sitting all day doing nothing? She said, ‘I am not doing nothing, I am on a journey’.

And in Benedictine prayer, rather like Tibetan prayer, the first place is to be given to the prayer together, the choral Office, as we call it. Benedict wrote that ‘nothing is to be preferred to the Work of God’ by which he meant the prayer together in choir. Christianity is about community, amongst other things. ‘Father, may they all be one in us’, Jesus prayed before his death, and monastic life, amongst other things, about creating community, and so at the heart of monastic life is the common prayer in choir.

In his first paragraph, Benedict lays down one of the fundamental principles of the Christian monastic life: ‘To you, whoever you may be, are my words addressed, who, by the renunciation of your will, are taking up the strong and glorious weapons of obedience in order to do battle in the service of the Lord Jesus Christ, the true king.’

The reference to Christ is not, of course, relevant to Buddhists, but I wonder whether ‘the strong and glorious weapons of obedience’ meets anything in their teaching. For Christians, that means in the first place, of course, obedience to visible, human superiors. In the long run it means accepting the will of God in whatever way it is manifested. I do not know whether obedience is a virtue for Buddhists, but I suspect that they would agree that obedience is one way of ceasing to cling, to people, to things, to our own ideas. There is a clinging which is good, of course: I am not going to give up my idea that killing someone is evil! As we all know, we can, and should , love others, but there is a love which becomes clinging and destroys the freedom of the other. I wonder if the idea of obedience in the widest sense as St Benedict means it – an obedience which is not a military obedience – is related to the Dalai Lama’s idea of moral discipline?

Obedience for the Christian is not simple obedience to those set over us, whether parents, or abbots or whoever. It is also, and above all, obedience to the will of God in whatever way it is made known to us. This includes obedience to the way things are, when we cannot change them. Put in Christian terms, it is abandonment to Divine Providence, accepting what comes as God’s will for me – again, providing it is not obviously possible to change something. So I don’t grumble if I miss my train, to take one small example. Some of the Christians present probably know the little book ‘Abandonment to Divine Providence’ by the 17^th Century Jesuit, Jean Paul de Caussade. I am sure Buddhism has some similar teaching.

But time is limited and I cannot end this talk without saying something about our audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, I had already met him in London. Here we were to meet him in his own home. He came out to meet us when we arrived, and led us into his sitting room, furnished just like an English sitting room, with comfortable armchairs and so on. After we had exchanged greetings and answered questions about the journey, and other chitchat, we got down to business and the first thing his Holiness said was, ‘Now that you have seen so many of our monasteries …’ I thought he was going to ask, ‘What do you think of them?’ But he didn’t. He said, ‘Now that you have seen so many of our monasteries, what advice can you give us?’ I was stupefied – to be asked for advice by the Dalai Lama! I changed the subject at first, giving me time to think, but eventually I said, ‘Well, the Catholic Church has bee renewing herself for some years – perhaps you could learn from our mistakes.’ Fortunately he did not ask me what I meant by that, or I would have had to think further!

The Lord Jesus and the Lord Buddha: we differ about what ‘Lord’ means, in some fundamental ways, and in some other beliefs, but perhaps Buddhists and Christians can agree that both taught a way of life, a way of peace, a way of love and concern for others. How desperately the world needs to learn such a way today!