Steven Sutcliffe My first encounter with a Zen master...shattered my understanding of religion. I came in order to study Buddhism, and zazen seemed to be the best way to enter below the surface. The master was rather blunt. "Why do you have to study Zen when you have your own prayer and contemplation?" I explained my reasons, adding politely that I thought Christians might have something to learn. "Why are you so preoccupied with Buddhism - or with Christianity for that matter?" he asked. I did not know what to say. "It is raining tonight", he continued in a more gentle way. In the quiet room we heard the soft sound of rain falling on the moss in the garden. "Is it Christianity or Buddhism which is raining?" he suddenly asked. The rain gave me no answer. "It simply rains", he concluded. "The real question is that of being. All your speculations about Buddhism and Christianity separate you from the very basic and simple fact of being". (Article in Japanese Religions Vol 13 No 3, December 1984, by Notto R Thelle).
I came upon this by lucky accident, for it brings together a number of issues in a religious and cultural event of great personal - and growing public - interest: the Buddhist-Christian encounter. If it's true that "many streams flow into the sea of faith", then I hope that the following thoughts may strike a chord with some of the network.
Buddhism :: Christianity. The issue I want to focus on is what the Zen Buddhist master advises the Christian: "the real question is...the very basic and simple fact of being". "Real" maybe, "basic" certainly, but "simple"? Raymond Carver's eponymous poem comes to mind here: "I go on casually eating from the bowl / of raspberries. If I were dead, / I remind myself, I wouldn't / be eating them. It's not so simple. / It is that simple." (From Simple in In a marine light: selected poems, 1988). "Being", whatever it is or isn't, rings particularly clear bells in our Western liberal culture which has become associated with the rights, needs and creative expression of the "individual" (now raised to near-mythic status), and this has naturally become a preoccupation with personal health, well-being and general quality of life.
This process seems common both to religious institutions and secular culture at large, and can be seen at work as much (though with different emphases) in the Church of Scotland as in the New Age and the growing Buddhist presence. In general terms it represents the flowering of the western enlightenment.
Now what Christians, Buddhists and New Agers, as well as secular humanists, all have in common is that each one unarguably is: we all have lives that we live. We have being; we're human beings. If this is the Zen master's real question, the "basic and simple fact", I'm in full agreement. But I also feel the need, for whatever reason, to probe further: is this it? is this enough? Is it enough just to be? Is "being" religious expression in itself? What kind of being do we have to do?
I don't think the Zen master would be impressed by these speculations, for in his view they are precisely the barriers between the idea I have of myself, and how I actually am. In this connection, John Lennon's witty words come to mind: "life is what happens when you're doing something else" - in this case not so much writing about it, as here, as agonising over it, as elsewhere. The point is not that intellectual activity - "speculation" - is to be shunned in some way; rather, that we should be careful with the way we integrate its complex and wonderful hypotheses (purely provisional models of reality) with the wider world of sense and matter.
Thus, for this Zen master at least, the way the world is at the moment in question is raining. Whether the rain is Christian or Buddhist rain is irrelevant. In this understanding, being is an elusive universal category which all of us have. Subsequent investigations actually become questions of interpretation rather than description. The important implication is that "what is" is a nondual state, when correctly or ultimately comprehended. That is to say that any sense of separateness, and thus all sense of subject and object duality, is only a subsequent, provisional and relative "interpretation" of the way "being" is.
Christianity :: Buddhism. Now despite important exceptions, this position is hardly compatible with the ontological claims of traditional Christian dogma, among which is a central witness to (i) a triune God, (ii) who created the world, and (iii) exists as a "holy other" to humankind. That is to say, however much God may move among and within us, God is always more; God is not reduceable to any or all human categories. In addition, God's great "otherness" requires a special mediator, Jesus Christ, to bridge the gap.
In this understanding, saying that it "simply rains" sounds merely banal. So what? At most, evocative poetry; at least, New Age solipsism of the most Californian kind. The claim that "our condition of `what is' is sufficient just as it is" sounds even worse, for if we're OK as we are, then where does Jesus fit in?
And what about the idea of God's unfolding purpose in history?
Common ground? These questions are just the tip of the iceberg in the Buddhist-Christian dialogue. If we are looking for common ground, I doubt that we shall find it - much less confirm it - at this level of doctrine and ideology. What we need is a much more tentative, provisional and intuitive approach. For what they're worth, here are my "hunches" after ten years or so of reading, reflection and attempted practice: 1. There are universal experiences, whose great value many of us recognize in describing them as "religious", according to particular cultural circumstances and temperament. 2. We may experience and practice some of these universals together: either consciously, or whether we realize/acknowledge it or not. 3. Living out these universals takes us beyond ratiocination [ie the reasoning process - Ed. (who had to look it up in the dictionary)]. 4. The only possible place to begin to experience this is with ourselves, here and now, over and over again. 5. Everything else grows out of this being, this "what is".
In more practical and personal terms, this means that I - that's me, personally - am somewhere that feels like a place of movement and transition, a place of betweens; somewhere between a radical Protestant secularism and several strands of Mahayana Buddhism, chiefly the Ch'an/Zen traditions. I practice simple sitting meditation (zazen) infrequently, very occasionally attend Glasgow Friends' meeting and even less often attend a church.
This often feels precarious, but also very real!
Steven Sutcliffe is a Glasgow musician and Stirling University graduate in Religious Studies.
This is an edited version of a longer article.