Christian Mindfulness & Emptiness

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Siddhartha

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When Americans in the early 21st century think of meditation and other spiritual disciplines for training one’s awareness, we think of Buddhism. American Buddhist teachers have called attention to the fact that most Americans’ minds are like a tree full of jumping monkeys. In any given moment we are not really present, but rather worrying and obsessing about yesterday and tomorrow. We are distracted, multi-tasking creatures of habit who suffer by being inwardly divided. This is why there are popular Buddhist meditation centers in every American city. We are looking for relief from the chaos and violence in our own minds. Most Americans don’t know that we Christians have inherited many spiritual tools to help us break through the cloud of gnats and mosquitoes in our minds that we call obsessive thinking, worry, anxiety and habitual fear.
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For example, one of the Christian Desert Fathers, the monk Evagrius Ponticus (345-399 A.D.), taught a form of hesychasm (Greek: quiet) in which one comes to see the conditioned links between thoughts and emotions, and then, through meditation and prayer, finds a deep calm called apatheia. In apatheia the mind is integrated and purified of its naturally tumultuous activity, allowing one to simply “be” in God’s presence or to pray without distraction. Monks such as Evagrius believed that virtue in one’s speech and behavior would follow freely from a mind that is emptied of distracting thoughts. Some other Christian contemplatives would describe this emptying as a kind of on-going detachment from chaotic thoughts. It’s not that thinking goes away–sometimes our thoughts may bring blessings or healings!–but that we experience an inward spaciousness so that we are not so caught up in our own thoughts and worries. When we have this kind of detachment, we are less likely to mistake our thoughts and opinions for our present reality.
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The difference is that, for the Buddhist, our passions block our spiritual development because they keep us shackled to reality, which to Buddhists (nihilists) is illusory. For us as Christians however, reality is real, the place where God calls us, yet our perception of it is warped by our passions. Therefore, the ascetic practices aimed at the passions, as described by Evagrius and John Cassian, should lead us back to reality, which is grounded in the Logos. This is the work of Christ in us, according to the Christian mystics, and in the process the seven passions are transformed, not just transcended.
 
When one says “the Buddhist,” especially when speaking as a person not affiliated with any part of it, it would only be fair to state which of the eight principle Buddhist ways, paths, or viewpoints one is referring to. In the case of your statement it might be more correctly stated that in one or some of the Buddhist ways the passions are seen to interfere with “spiritual” development in that they keep the focus of the mind on the illusory nature of worldly experience, though that world is yet correctly understood as a direct manifestation of God, only misunderstood and personalized. So in fact, the injunction to “be in the world but not of it” in this sense is a very Buddhist saying of, eg, the Vedanta school. And though one sect of Buddhism, Ahimsa, tends toward nihilism, it is not strictly so.

It could be said as well about christianism that that perspective is itself illusion in that it deals strictly in mental contents, not with the nature of the human spirit itself in any direct way, it being primarily in the realm of fear based, and rarely loved based, behavior modification.

That being said, the Word, the Logos, and the Christ are intimately tied together, but not as a matter of faith or intellect. The knowledge of how that IS is the root of understanding and the beginning of practice as well as the transmutation of the passions. Until that is known, faith will serve, but as if a dark glass blocking the Light.

BTW, Siddhartha, whom are you quoting?
 
Detales said:
BTW, Siddhartha, whom are you quoting?
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Robert Jonas:
Jonas, the founder and director of The Empty Bell, a contemplative sanctuary in Northampton, MA, with a special emphasis on the Buddhist-Christian dialogue, and on the arts, is an author, musician and retreat leader. A Christian in the Carmelite tradition, he has also received spiritual formation with Buddhist teachers. Currently a student of Sui-Zen, the Japanese bamboo flute (shakuhachi), he has played in many secular and spiritual contexts, both Buddhist and Christian.
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So, since you quoted Jonas, what are your consideration about the posted matter?
 
Detales said:
So, since you quoted Jonas, what are your consideration about the posted matter?
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I’m old school on these matters:

Ekam sad viprā bahudāh vadanti: Truth is One; the wise call Truth by many Names.

But in addition to this statement, another statement fact must also be kept in mind: In order to realize Truth, one must commit oneself to one particular Name (or Path).

A caveat must be added as well: Just because Truth is One, does not mean that all Names (or Paths, or Religions) are “the same”. All genes are composed of DNA, but that does not mean that all genes are “the same”.
 
Siddhartha said:
But in addition to this statement, another statement fact must also be kept in mind: In order to realize Truth, one must commit oneself to one particular Name (or Path).
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A parable told by Ramakrishna:325. A man began to sink a well, but having dug down to the depth of twenty cubits he could not find the least trace of the water-spring which was to feed his well. So he desisted from the work and selected another place for the purpose. There he dug deeper than before, but even then he could not find any water. So again he selected another spot and dug still deeper than before, but it was also of no avail. At last in utter disgust he gave up the task altogether. The sum total of the depths of these three wells was little short of a hundred cubits. Had he had the patience to devote even a half of the whole of this labour to his first well, without shifting the site of the well from place to place, he would surely have been successful in getting water. Such is the case with men who continually shift their positions in regard to faith. In order to meet with success we should devote ourselves entirely to a single object of faith, without being doubtful as to its efficacy.

Source: sacred-texts.com/hin/rls/rls28.htm
A caveat must be added as well: Just because Truth is One, does not mean that all Names (or Paths, or Religions) are “the same”. All genes are composed of DNA, but that does not mean that all genes are “the same”.
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Now you’ve gone and done it! You mentioned DNA so this will turn into yet another evolution thread. 🙂

rossum
 
Well, I’m no expert on Buddhism, but I stand with one foot on the shoulder of a particularly fat giant and the other on the shoulder of another Wise Man who said ‘by their fruits you shall know them’:
NO two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint always has a very sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The medieval saint’s body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.
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G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy’
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Agreed. 😉 There is also a time to say ‘we [Judaeo-Christians] are right and you [Buddhists and proponents of other Far Eastern religions] are wrong’: youtube.com/watch?v=Jyc0wwQz6Os

Merton never realized this and the same lack of boundaries led him into other grave errors, of which the least said the better.

Merry Christmas! :christmastree1:
 
The difference is that Buddhism seeks to escape the world while Catholicism seeks to see the world as it really is. The Catholic ascetic looks frantically outwards because he wants to see the hidden goodness in things. The Buddhist looks inwards because he wants to escape the illusory world of “things.”

The Catholic sacramental imagination looks at the world as being fundamentally good and as a gift from God. While passions can cloud our vision of the world, it still remains good and worthy of our respect. A common misperception is that Catholicism is all about hating the flesh and the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the reason we have rules about the world is that we take the world so seriously that we don’t want to damage it. Buddhism, on the other hand, views the world of things as something illusory and therefore something to be escaped. The Catholic imagination looks outward in a desire to love the world for what it is, while the Buddhist imagination looks inwards to escape the world
 
Is it possible to escape the world?
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If you no longer desire anything, whether it be honor, beauty, romance, travel, art, fine meals with friends over a roaring fire, long walks through the woods after a fresh snowfall, or having a picnic by a rural stream in the mountains, then whether or not you can escape the world becomes irrelevant.

The Catholic is free to enjoy all of those things because we love the good things in this life as a gift from God. The Buddhist is not free to do the same, because he must ultimately eliminate all the desire within him.

I know that Buddhists say that such things can be temporarily desired as stepping stones to full nirvana. This distinction doesn’t affect the teleology. In a final and ultimate sense, the Buddhist views desire as something to be extinguished, while the Catholic views desire as something to be perfected.
 
It seems to me that GK Chesterton vastly mistook Buddhism of any kind, and that you, “son of Zeus,” are in his thus impoverished company. As I said, even the Catholic encyclopedia stumbles in describing the kernel of Buddhism, at least that found i Vedanta. And where did you get your ideas, Sarpedon?
 
rossum said:
The Buddha tried, and rejected, extreme asceticism before he found enlightenment.
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So did St Benedict and St Bernard but this does not negate the fact that the end of their quest was quite different from that of the Buddha. This teleological difference remains even if the means were similar (solitude and meditation). The former were ultimately seeking to lose themselves in order to re-find and refine themselves in the Logos who **is **the Babe of Bethlehem, the latter sought merely to lose himself in order…to lose himself. The end vision for St Benedict is to see all things in the light of the Godhead, for the Buddha it’s to see all things as nothing…In that he is wrong, sublime but wrong.

Detales- I don’t want to get into a flame war with you just before Christmas. I’m puzzled, though, as to the sense in which I’d be a ‘son of Zeus’. About Buddhism, as about most things, it seems to me that Chesterton was wrong about the ‘detales’ but right about the heart of the matter. He had himself tasted the dust and ashes of Schopenhauerian nihilism in the early twentieth century, itself influenced by Buddhism. He had his own cave experience and came out seeing that all things were either in God or they were nothing.
 
I just told you that you were in the impoverished company of GK Chesterton, who was clearly ignorant of things Buddhist. So I am just curious where you got your incomplete and misinformed slant on Buddhism?
 
Detales said:
I just told you that you were in the impoverished company of GK Chesterton, who was clearly ignorant of things Buddhist. So I am just curious where you got your incomplete and misinformed slant on Buddhism?
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What? I have never read anything by Chesterton about Buddhism. You state that I have an “incomplete and misinformed” slant on Buddhism. Could you please explain why?

Slinging the burden of proof can go both ways and evade the central issue. Everything I have read about Buddhism says that the central goal of Buddhism is the cessation of desire and the supposed release from suffering and rebirth that goes along with it. I have heard Buddhists argue that we can desire good things in life as a temporary stepping stone to full Nirvana. I believe it was Rossum who brought up an analogy of a boat, where Buddha said that desire for Nirvana can be used as a temporary means to achieve the loss of all desire, like using a boat to cross an ocean and then discarding it. The problem with this argument is that it ignores the teleology. If the end goal of Buddhism is the cessation of desire, then ultimately desiring even good things is subservient to desiring nothing.

So, my argument in #13 and #15 still stands. The Catholic can cultivate a desire for good and holy things in this life because the teleology of Catholicism is (partly) a perfection of desire, and the ordering of desire to its proper object. In contrast, the Buddhist cannot cultivate a desire or even appreciation (of the things themselves) of good things, because in the teleology of Buddhism such things are illusory and something to be overcome in the path to eventual release from all desire.

If I am mistaken in my view of Buddhism, then please correct me.
 
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