As a Christian I have to disagree. The sense he [Thict Nhat Hahn] gives Christian ideas is not one compatible with historic, orthodox Christianity.
Well, as a Christian I say that THN’s treatment of the religion is indeed compatible with historic, orthodox belief.
The essential, non-negotiable points of Buddhism are:
(1) dependent origination, or emptiness, or non-self (three ways of getting at the same idea)
(2) the Four Noble Truths
(3) the Five Precepts
Everything else is commentary and personal tradition. All of it can be found inside Christianity. Therefore, Buddhism can fit with Christianity. Most Buddhists unfortunately are as close-minded as, well, Christians, so they object to joining with anybody else as strongly as we object to joining with, well, everybody else including even non-Catholic Christians.
The Five Precepts are commonly expanded to ten, but those ten are also within Christianity. Whether you count five or ten it’s actually the same as Christian morality.
Although the Buddha constructed Buddhism without recourse to any god, the concept of a deity does not conflict with essential Buddhist doctrine. For one thing the Pali canon is full of references to Brahma and spirits and demigods. More to the point perhaps, Pure Land Buddhism most definitely treats Amida Buddha as it’s “God.”
The reason given in the Long Discourses for Buddha not following any particular god was that he did not know of any school with a lineage going back to any person who had actually gone to heaven. In other words, all the priests in all the schools of India back in the days of the Buddha, had made it up. But that objection does not apply to Catholicism or Orthodoxy, nor does it universally apply to Protestant bodies as some of them have clean connections back to the Roman Church. Furthermore, the Buddha specifically based his teachings of dependent origination and the Four Noble Truths and the Precepts on experience. Christianity has that in spades in the lives of all the saints. The gospel and epistles of Saint John, for example, are exclusively written from experience. The numerous Desert Fathers and Mothers, Mother Teresa, Saint Francis, “The Dark Night of the Soul” book, etc etc, all point to God being experienced. There it is. We also own the Buddha’s personal test for truth.
Even Buddhist rebirth can fit with Christianity. First, not all Buddhist believe it. Rebirth is completely irrelevant to Zen, for example, proving that it is not an essential part of Buddhism. But if we want to keep it, rebirth is not too different from the concept of purgatory and the final resurrection. We could meet in the middle with the Buddhists by expanding our ideas of purgatory in the right way. Catholics already go beyond the catechism as it is, so we’re not asking too much. The purpose of rebirth is purification: those who come back come back because they are not yet perfected in their character. And they don’t necessarily come back to Earth. There are other realms to be born into, that vary on the pleasantness scale. The purpose of purgatory is purification too, and where exactly is it? And what exactly does it entail? And will your purgatory feel the same as mine? Will it even be the same as mine? The catechism doesn’t say. At the final resurrection a soul will be matched up with an old body that is now a new body because the old body was gone. In rebirth, a soul is matched up with a new body that is a new body. Kinda the same, really.
