Misunderstanding Buddhism
This is an excellent piece insofar as it compiles various quotes critical of Buddhism from older Catholic sources. It's a fine basket of old chestnuts and provides ample material for a looooong blog post.
Ecumenical dialogue has been an object of obsession on the part of Western churchmen for some decades now and I'm sure there are other well-meaning parties in non-Christian traditions who would like to see them proceed as well. I don't sense that anyone but an older generation of liberal Christians get worked up about it though in the West. It's just not something that comes up when I read modern Buddhist literature (which is sparingly at best).
I found an excellent quote in the Pali Canon one evening that summed up what the Buddha's path was all about and in a nutshell, it is a process of purifying the heart. So it is with some pleasure that I've read John Paul II and the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate (cited by Derksen in the link above) latch on to the same heart purification theme when they discuss Buddhism. Someday, I will locate the passage and post about it here because to me, it is the best explanation of what the Path is from the Buddha himself.
The tripod of sila, samadhi and panna which support and guide the practice is something recognized within the post-Conciliar Church and it is admired although not explicitly named. So again, there is something very positive here for modern Catholics to tune their ear to when thinking about what is a very strange and different way of living.
If you want to defeat an opponent, it's usually best to show that you understand something about what makes him tick. Some of the men at Vatican II wanted a big rethink to see if they really understood other cultures and traditions instead of sliding into standard formulas about the "heathens."
Monotheism has historically manifested as a highly exclusivist cult centered around, in the case of the Abrahamic faiths, Yahweh. Catholics and Anglicans in particular have taken up the cause of ecumenical dialogue, at least in the years following Vatican II, but the gap to close there is pretty small in theory even if in practice, the two bodies are pretty far apart. There is an absolute chasm between Christianity and Buddhism. As someone who crossed over to the East, I cannot stress enough how different the two are in their psychology, their beginning points and in the way they are lived out.
This intro is to say that Mario Derksen represents the older pre-Vatican II Church which, in its more orthodox form, was heavily guided by moral and dogmatic textbooks that, if they addressed other religions, were not always interested in primary sources. Derksen relies exclusively in his blog post on the characterizations of Buddhism written by Catholic thinkers reading poorly translated and heavily filtered concepts from the East. Derksen in his post can never present what Buddhism says about itself from authentic Buddhist sources. Yahweh is a jealous god and, as the blogger indicates, there can be no congress between his followers and the "sons of Belial."
This is not the basis of modern dialogue obviously, but it is crucial to remember that these passages are the spiritual backbone and attitude of all Abrahamic religions though they be expressed in different ways. While parlay and interchange of ideas is fine, the authentic follower of Yahweh is going to view the non-believer or the pagan Buddhist as someone working in cahoots with the Prince of Darkness.
At most, the ardent trad Catholic will look upon the cradle Buddhist as a benighted soul, under a dark doctrine of nihilism. If you are a "liberal" Christian, you will go onto say something about the unbeliever who, if he practices a natural virtue as best as he can, might through invincible ignorance, be let into heaven instead of being consigned to hell for all eternity.
The orthodox Catholic position on the other hand will always be visible membership and submission to the Roman Pontiff as the absolute precondition for salvation. The doctrine is so cringe that it is never mentioned in public and the Church itself would be happy if its existence were completely forgotten.
I'm not aware of any papal documents explicitly calling out Buddhism for its heathenish doctrines and practices, but Derksen, whom I read sometimes as an oddity, would have provided those in his post if they existed. So far as I know, the Catholic Church historically has generally just lumped non-theistic traditions like Buddhism into the pile of "you're all going to hell," but not in those words. Recall that Christ enjoined his apostles to go and make all men his followers. Monotheism is monopolistic and we see the same sentiment in Islam. For Judaism, the messiah will ring in an age in which all men will perforce worship Yahweh. There is not the live and let live attitude of Buddhists and other Eastern traditions.
Post Vatican II has seen an about face with regard to non-Christian communities; the Koran was kissed by St. John Paul II, Buddhists and others were invited to interfaith gatherings at Assisi, excommunications floating around for 1,000 years between the Eastern and Western Churches were lifted in the 1960s, etc. Francis represents the latest iteration of the kinder, friendlier version of the Christian school of the Yahweh cult, one that underwent a major revamp of its PR department beginning after 1965.
To be clear, the vast majority of Christian clergy and laity do not hold to the exclusivist claims formulated in earlier years by councils and so on. I limit myself to more formal claims based on doctrine and not practice. I suspect an anonymous poll of clergy would show that less than 3% believe that membership in the Catholic Church is essential for salvation, or that hell really exists as a place where people suffer horrifically forever and ever, amen.
Derksen is very well read in papal encyclicals and would of course have cited them had they had specific criticisms of Buddhism in its particulars. It's fine for a papal utterance to say generically that all men who are not joined to the Catholic Church are destined for Gehenna, but it's another to dig into the details. Popes say lots of things in their documents, but it's not clear just how much of it really matters except to scholars, historians, etc. The popes leave it to their underlings to work out the best of transmitting the big game plan.
Popes do not get into the weeds as they say in their public statements, but the theologians do and it's these whom Derksen appeals to in painting a picture of Buddhism that is negative and by extension, places his anti-pope Francis in a bad light. Derksen does not accept Francis as pope along with all of the others going back to John XXIII. Basically, any claimant to the title in the last 65 years is an imposter according to the sede vacantist school (of which Derksen is one of the most visible exponents), with the last valid pope being Pius XII (d. 1958).
Since him, it's just been false conclaves electing false, anti-popes. This of course solves the problem of cognitive dissonance caused by documents like Nostra Aetate because it was not written by "real" Catholics but by sell outs, Freemasons, satanists, the feckless, etc.
Vatican II shifted from a supremacist theological position to the one that said, "Hey, maybe the other traditions have some truth in them since God is truth and by virtue of his truthiness, his creation reflects a set of natural laws which guide things along their courses. Maybe this can serve as the basis for dialogue..."
This is seen most acutely in Nostra Aetate, which starts from a different place when it looks from Rome to the far flung reaches of the world where Abrahamic faiths are still in the minority. Catholicism in the Council did not repudiate its claims to being the ark of salvation, but it opened the door to dialogue and respect towards other traditions.
In the East, there is Reality, the Dao, the Dhamma (pick your flavor) and in the West, it's the Logos. All religious traditions place a heavy value on sexual mores, laws against theft, murder, etc. This to say that there is a common ground rooted in human ethics upon which to build an interfaith dialogue. Vatican II tried to shake the "you're all damnable heathens destined for eternal hellfire" since it didn't always produce happy results in encounters between Christianity and non-Christian traditions in the past. Europe was still in the aftermath of rebuilding from the most destructive war ever waged and Christian triumphalism had given way to a more sober self-assessment. It's hard to wag your finger at the East when your continent has been leveled twice by World Wars.
Islam has an even more dreadful track record, having by some accounts murdered many millions of Indians during its conquest of the northern regions and countless others before that during its African and European campaigns. Recall that Vatican II took place at the height of the Cold War, the period of the Cuban missile crisis, so the council fathers were well aware that new times required new tactics if the human race was to be spared nuclear holocaust.
When reading Christian criticisms of Buddhism, there will usually be some appeal to Christianity being the stronger religion on account of the great emphasis it places on human dignity, yet the scale and barbarity of the various Yahweh schools over millennia can in no way be found in the history of Buddhism, which is much older than Christianity and Islam and probably not much younger than Judaism. (If one correctly sees rabbinical Judaism as a relatively late rendering, then Buddhism is the eldest brother in the faith so to speak.)
It's unfair to ignore the tremendous humanitarian benefits brought by Christianity to the world and one can very easily stress its barbaric episodes unfairly. Eastern Orthodoxy has not to my knowledge ever handed over anyone to the state for execution for the crime of heresy, but neither has it a claim to creating hospitals, universities and worldwide charitable networks with the same energy and genius as Western Christianity.
An example I saw from a YouTube Christian academic, explains that Buddhism is bad because it does not recognize Yahweh and on account of this, does not recognize that all humans are his children, made in his image. Therefore, there are no rights to free speech, assembly, worship or the maintenance of lethal weapons under the Buddhist dispensation. (I only slightly exaggerate the last point.) This is by the way a natural kind of reasoning among older Americans from Red States, who just understand that the system of rights and open, legal processes are the fruition of the Western notion of human dignity. This dignity is rooted in man as a creature close to Yahweh. "We place a great emphasis on the individual!"
It's a chestnut of Christianity that without Yahweh, humans cannot produce real civilizations in which peace abides and the arts and sciences flourish. Europe and America have been altars soaked in human blood for the past 250 years at least; compare their track record with southeast Asia during the same time period and draw your own conclusions about the worth of the human person in the West. This is not the sum of Christian civilization of course, but it should throw some cold ice water on the triumphalist overtones found in some of the traditionalist camps.
This zeal for converting other people to Yahweh has expressed itself militarily, judicially and in other ways in the past but today, given modern conditions, the only thing left is to tell people to their faces that they are going to be punished for all eternity in the great roaring fires of hell if they don't give up on the Buddha or whatever tradition they follow. (Buddhism's reflections on hell incidentally are far older than anything in Christianity and are as horrible as anything in Dante.) This seems to be Derksen's idea of what to do with Buddhists when they drop by the Vatican for a visit as they did recently to direct metta towards Francis.
Today's Christianity and Islam simply lack any sword-bearing arm like they did in centuries past. They are completely toothless and, absent state backing, tend to go into decline and become hidden. Religious Judaism has undergone an intense revival under the auspices of the state of Israel, which today, looks more like a theocracy than a democracy. Yahweh needs the state like a bee needs a flower.
Buddhism has a similar story and it's not clear what the futures holds for it in southeast Asia as the forces of democracy take deeper root in there. Thailand is associated in the Western mind with binge drinking, whores and male prostitutes and the Thai themselves don't seem especially concerned about changing that image. The founder of Red Bull reportedly was inspired to create an energy drink while slumming in whore houses in Thailand – cocaine was too heavy, so he settled on B vitamins mixed with high doses of caffeine.
Thailand no doubt has many good Buddhists, but it is also in the orbit of the West and will continue to follow the logic of Western values to their natural end. I recall Ajahn Chah wanted to spread the Thai Forest lineage to the West because he didn't see much future for it in his own country. Little did he know about Western civilization...
Islam has a reputation for violence in the modern mind. Yet look more closely and see: The Palestinians have been under steady massacre and dispossession of their lands for the past nine months (well, more like 80 years) and Islam has been completely impotent to stop it. Dozens of Muslim-majority nations, billions of followers, access to vital energy supplies and the only resistance the Ummah has mustered comes from rag tag militias in Yemen (armed with Iranian weapons). The rest of the time, the militant members are carrying out CIA-backed missions to overthrow secular governments and massacre their neighbors if they happen to belong to a minority faith – or just don't fit the idea of a good Muslim.
Today, there are just face-to-face get togethers where the Pope of Rome harangues Buddhist monks for their rejection of the One True God. Or this is the expectation that Derksen seems to have although it's not something that has happened at any point in the last few decades of Buddhist-Christian dialogue. If anything, popes have tried to look for common ground as the basis of dialogue since the world has gotten so much smaller.
Derksen quotes at length the Catholic philosopher Jacque Maritain of the U.N.'s Universal Declaration on Human Rights fame. This is a little curious since Maritain is not usually claimed by the orthodox Catholics in Derksen's sphere. One suspects that he was one of a few readily available sources to use in criticizing Buddhism. Garrigou-Lagrange is the second source he cites on things Buddhist.
Maritain sums up the Buddhist message for 1940s-era Christians unfamiliar with its strange doctrines:
Evil is no longer merely the possession of individual or personal existence; it is existence itself: it is evil to be, and the desire of existence is the root of all suffering. The wise man must therefore destroy in himself man’s natural longing for existence and for beatitude, the fullness of being; he must abandon all hope and extinguish every desire
Dukkha is not translated as evil normally; it is suffering, it is getting what you want and then fearing its loss; it is not having what you want; it is experiencing disappointment; it is experiencing anxiety caused by the inconstancy of existence; it is experiencing poverty, job loss, abandonment, aging, sickness and death; it is everywhere, a mark of existence, and is related to the impermanence of all things. The very act of existence is a form of suffering where even the longing for it spoken of by Maritain is itself a burden. We long for existence when we are miserable and we have it. Even suicide victims desire existence but are unable to bear the current one they have; it is probably rarely a choice for total annihilation, but rather the ending of a condition that is seen as permanent by a distressed mind.
Have you ever longed for something? Was it not a form of suffering, of enduring; or bearing a less than ideal state because of an absence? If and when your longing was ended by the obtainment of the desired good, did life become serene and pleasant? If you are like most people, it probably did not. Maybe for a few minutes or maybe a few years, but all things are impermanent and in appealing to concepts like desire, longing and nature, one appeals to the continuation of dukkha as a noble end. Maritain wants to say frilly things so that their underlying deficiency is ignored or is rectified and perfected in the great hereafter.
In reading how Westerners describe Buddhism from a monotheistic perspective, they tend to resort to high sounding concepts which are absent in the lowly teaching of Siddhartha. So we get phrases like, the "fullness of being" and "the natural God-given rights of Man!"
For those who've read the Pali Canon, it reminds of the instances in which the Buddha is approached by some practitioner whose spiritual teacher claims some great doctrine, some highly intricate and hidden wisdom which outshines the Buddha's preaching on suffering and the end of suffering. Our theologian here, Maritain, has a noble message about the fullness of being and it too outshines the Four Noble Truths. "I preach suffering and the end of suffering!" just doesn't sound as good as "the fullness of being."
What is meant by this curious phrase? Does it suggest that there is a state in which one has everything – being itself – so completely and utterly that he is without desire because he no longer lacks for something? Does the existence and beatitude – that is, supremely blessed state – of which Maritain speaks involve perfect security from inconstancy, anxiety, pain, fear and loss? Does it include a deathless state?
We don't know from the passage given, which is taken from Maritain's 1948 Introduction to Philosophy. Maybe he has a whole chapter in the book on the fullness of being, but if it means anything at all to a sentient creature, it should probably have something to say about the cessation of longing, desire and inevitable loss, including the loss of life. If his fullness of being addresses the inadequacies of samsaric existence such that desire is itself not found in the Christian heaven, then perhaps he has something in common with Siddhartha, at least in terms of desirable outcomes. If there is something like commonality, then why the bitching?
The answer is found in the next sentence, which is the canonical misinterpretation deeply held by all devout Christians who apply themselves to Buddhadhamma:
He will thus attain the state of emptiness or total indetermination called nirvana …, which will deliver him from the evil of existence and the yoke of transmigration, and which, in the logical consequence of Buddhist principles, must be regarded as the annihilation of the soul itself.
It is logical to conclude at this point that Jacques Maritain never ever cracked the Pali Canon or read a good solid introduction to Buddhism from a Buddhist. Annihilationism – or nihilism simply – is like, its polar opposite eternalism, explicitly ranked as wrong view by the Buddha. There is simply no way to read the Digha Nikaya – the Long Discourses of the Buddha which serve as the seminal text of the Buddha's message – and come away with the idea that he taught the annihilation of the soul. There is no soul and there is no annihilation of it that serves as the goal of the spiritual life. To crave annihilation is as deluded as desiring eternal existence and is, like it, the perpetuation of suffering. India had its own schools of atheistic materialism during the Buddha's life and he rejected their nihilism.
The English translation we have today of the Digha is prosaic and readable, especially when compared to the other Nikayas, which can be very subtle and repetitive. In the 1940s Maritain would have had access to Maurice Walshe's edition of the Digha Nikaya, which was published a decade earlier and is still distributed today as the standard text in the Anglosphere. People have quibbled about Walshe's translation, yet here we are in the current year with it on our bookshelves and e-readers. I suspect the library at Fordham, where Maritain taught, had this in their collection.
Maritain never read it and he certainly didn't have Google or ChatGPT to give him a highly condensed summary of it. He lazily transmitted what he picked up from high level 19th-century glosses on heathen religions in all likelihood (more on this later).
Maybe this is supposition, but what isn't wrong is that there is an ignorance of basic points of fact and for a philosophy professor at a university who wraps himself in the love of wisdom and truth to be so indolent shows that he is unreliable in other matters. Or any matter for that matter. For an intellectual in his time to write in a book about something which he had so little knowledge – to condemn authoritatively a version of Buddhism that has never existed – is disappointing. In philosophy, this is the categorical error known as the Straw Man Fallacy.
(ChatGPT confirms that there were no French translations of the Digha Nikaya in the 1940s since the Pali Text Society was focused on getting the English translations out the door; French translations came in later decades.)
It is this intellectual flabbiness on the part of people like Maritain that may have underpinned the Catholic Church's reassessment of its stance towards non-Abrahamic religions just a few years later, in the early 1960s.
Our philosopher continues:
For since the soul is only the chain or current of thoughts and feelings which derive their existence from the desire to be, to extinguish that desire is to extinguish the soul.
He continues on by intermingling the concept of soul with desire, thoughts and feelings. Maritain is claiming here that the "soul" is the locus of various epiphenomena which are unique to humans. He is writing an introductory text for Westerners and I speculate that he uses established concepts to frame the discussion. This is a little backwards if the point is to teach, but then, teaching accurately the contents of a foreign religion, even in summary, can be a challenging exercise for someone who relies exclusively on his own cultural referents.
First, the Buddha never talked in this way about souls except to reject them on empirical grounds. Let me stress this: on empirical grounds. The Buddha was not a teacher who transmitted doctrine or revealed messages so much as a thesis or formal proposition about existence. Why? Because he himself had to struggle in earnest to understand the basis of suffering which, until his arrival, had neither been discovered nor cured. Buddhism is about discovery and unlike the schools of Yahweh, doesn't require that one submit to the teachings contained in message delivered by a sacred messenger like Moses, Jesus or Mohammad.
The nature of Buddhist practice is that it involves testing oneself and one's direct experiences of existence to see its truth. A man who studies the Four Noble Truths not as an intellectual exercise but as propositions to compare against one's own experience is on the path to becoming a Noble One. Few who sincerely embark on it can turn away and go back to living with the routine of old presuppositions. To ponder impermanence with steady resolve tends toward a disenchantment with material goods, wealth and personal associations. This kind of disenchantment does not mean indifference so much as seeing things for what they are – phenomena, maybe processes, that have a beginning and end.
While Maritain as a pre-eminent Thomist would say much in favor of beauty and truth, he does not in the passage we have from Derksen anything to say about the veracity of the Four Noble Truths. Buddhism is about truth, about right and wrong view and the consequences of those as they relate to wholesome and unwholesome action. They lie as the very foundations of happiness and joy, which are the supports for the spiritual life.
More Maritain:
Moreover, the source and ultimate measure of Buddhist ethics is man, not God. If it rejected the system of castes which exaggerated the demands of social order and divided man almost into distinct species, it was only to dissolve social order of any kind in an absolute equality and individualism.
Western morality seeks its anchor in a Supreme Being who is ultimate good, wise, just, etc. and delivers laws that are perfect and to be obeyed. This being reveals a moral code that he himself does not uphold in his own personal conduct if we look to the Judeo-Christian scriptures. The Christian philosopher and advanced theologian holds a more abstract notion of deity in mind, one which is untethered from the gritty and morally repugnant incidences related in the sacred passages of the Hebrew Testament.
Christian thinkers happen to leave Yahweh in the closet propped up next to the vacuum cleaner when they begin Platonizing about the lofty attributes of their philosophical deity, The Logos. This version of the godhead is all about brotherly love, compassion, natural law, charity, property rights and respect for one's fellow man. It's a trunk in which you can fit a lot of stuff in other words. It has nothing to do with genocide, brutal executions, the slaughter of children or the enslavement of other humans.
Put another way: The Hebrew Testament is not inspirational material that Maritain drew from when thinking about the Declaration on Human Rights. Genocide, stoning people to death and the like conflict deeply with the modern Western models for law and social order. No doubt, at this point a reader might want to argue that the Torah is very noble and is the basis of Western law, but let's be clear: it's a very cherry picked version of it that is being cited.
The last statement in the quote, about the "dissolution of social order", etc. is simply stupid. It goes beyond intellectual laziness and into the realm of bad character. It amounts to a kind of slander and it's probably the case that Maritain was too ignorant to even know he was ignorant.
There are no instances in history in which Buddhism caused a society to dissolve after its introduction. Buddhism has existed in Asian countries for 2,500 years and was even selected by monarchs as a way of life for subjects precisely because it was conducive to social harmony and order. Buddhism was forcibly expelled from India after existing there for over a thousand years through the violence of Hindus and then later, Muslims. Both of these religions worship a Supreme Being. Make of that what you will and draw your own conclusions about the kind of social order they produce. One will search in vain for a similar tendency in traditional Buddhist countries.
What's ironic about Maritain's claim of "absolute equality" in Buddhism of course is that the same exact charge has been levied against the Christian religion, including by a contemporary of Maritain, Julius Evola, over the centuries.
According to ChatGPT:
Evola criticized Christianity for promoting egalitarianism and what he saw as a decline in traditional hierarchical structures and spiritual values. He advocated for a return to pre-Christian, warrior-based societal models.
Evola and Maritain have identical opinions but each directs them toward different religions. Imagine that. Evola follows in a long line of writers going back two thousand years who viewed Christianity as battery acid in its effects on social bonds. Nietzsche called it a "slave morality."
Buddhism does support and advance equality as it relates to the sangha; in it, there is neither rich nor poor, Greek nor gentile. Unlike the Yahweh cults, it does not have a highly developed "social doctrine" that describes in detail how a society should be ordered for it to be authentically Christian, Islamic or Jewish. Buddhism may suffer from a kind of optimism about the ability of humans to work these things out and when it speaks of the golden age or the wheel turning monarch, it does not set up a body of writings that explain what these look like. Men know goodness when they see it.
Buddhists assume the Five Precepts as a minimum base for human ethics. A society in which people work at remembering and keeping them in daily life will produce a good society. Not perfect, but pretty good. The First Precept (against killing) by itself, if kept, would eliminate vast bloody swaths of Christian, Islamic and Jewish histories. To my knowledge, 20th century imperial Japan attempted to come up with a Buddhist justification for a militant arm of the religion and tasked David Suzuki with formulating the theory. It didn't succeed. Buddhism is still a pacifist religion at its core.
Buddhism does not have legal outs that justify killing other human beings if it means protecting the Triple Gem. The Almighty on the other hand is always in need of human violence to protect his cult and identity. Buddhism also doesn't rationalize the killing of other beings over property disputes or in self-defense. If someone attacks your wife and kids late at night and you choose to kill them in self-defense, you take the karmic hit so to speak. You do that when you agree as a man to a marriage contract.
The last plaint in the quote about the individualism of Buddhism sounds odd in 2024 since the word has taken on a very negative, context-dependent meaning in light of the sexual revolution, the dissolution of trust in public institutions and the overall nihilistic drift of Western society. Religious Westerners love to boast of the value of the individual (each of us is a snowflake handcrafted by Yahweh) and it is this individualism that has created a nihilistic civilization with no real future other than as a rubbish pile.
Much of the blame for Western decline is laid at the feet of individualism by both the left and right for good reason. It has a corrosive effect on the positive cultivation of good will, charity, metta which are essential to felicitous social living. The non-woke, classical forms of left and right do agree on basic but crucial ideas like fair wages for fair labor, orderliness, impartiality in the administration of justice, the wise use of tax dollars for the common good, etc. This kind of individualism, like the right to choose to kill a baby, slander other people publicly, produce porn, is just not part of Buddhism. In fact, these are not part of any traditional society of whatever religion. It is part and parcel of the West. But the old left and right are almost invisible at this point.
If however by individualism, Maritain means that Buddhism teaches a "salvation" rooted in personal effort and striving, then he is correct. One achieves liberation through his own exertions; there is no blood atonement that is paid by another for a "debt" assumed to be held by all who share, by no choice of their own, a common ancestor – the satisfaction of which grants one an admission ticket to paradise.
Even here though, if the notion that Buddhism is about embracing the loneliness and social isolation of modern Western life, then this is wrong. The Buddha taught spiritual friendship and daily life in a spiritual community as the whole of the religious effort. To put it another way, if one surrounds himself with other strivers who seek the wholesome, avoid the unwholesome and attend the dhamma, then their path to enlightenment is lighter and easier. Some bhikkhus might even describe the path as a pleasure to follow if done under the auspices of good spiritual friends. Clinging to material goods, social position and other fleeting goods – including close friends or family – is the hard path.
One key difference between Buddhism and Christianity relates to the individual's role in his "salvation." I use the quotes here because the end goal of the spiritual life is not the same for the two practices, so keep this in mind. Christians want to meet Yahweh in heaven and remain with him for all eternity. Buddhists seek the end of all suffering.
In Christianity, salvation is a gift from Yahweh, who chooses to save whom he wishes while others, he lets fall like leaves into the fires of hell. Strictly speaking, there is nothing that any one man can do to merit the gift of salvation. Grace is given and some men reject it out of their own free will while others embrace it. In no case does one achieve it as a result of his own efforts. This is boilerplate, exoteric doctrine of the Christian faith.
To complicate things, even the choice to accept Yahweh's extended gift of salvation requires the application of grace. For man's alleged free will just mentioned is sufficiently impaired by sin that he cannot see the good adequately or choose it freely; God gives the grace to accept his offer, enabling the will to choose what it never could if left to its own devices. To put it another way, the "free will" much praised by Christians since it signals moral agency and accountability, is not really as free as they believe.
The question of the place of the human will in salvation was a source of contention early on among Christian theologians and produced two schools of heterodox thought. ChatGPT has a nice summary of the Pelagian and semi-Pelagian positions which were condemned by local councils. The first form appeared in the 400s while the second appeared around a century later.
Pelagianism is a 5th-century theological doctrine named after Pelagius, which asserts that human beings are capable of choosing good or evil without the need for divine grace. Pelagianism denies the doctrine of original sin, arguing that individuals are born innocent and possess the inherent ability to achieve moral perfection through their own efforts and free will. This perspective emphasizes personal responsibility and the potential for human righteousness independent of God's intervention.
Semi-Pelagianism emerged in the early Middle Ages as a moderated form of Pelagianism. It acknowledges the impact of original sin and the necessity of divine grace for salvation but maintains that the initial steps toward faith and moral improvement can be initiated by human free will without prior divine assistance. Unlike strict Pelagianism, Semi-Pelagianism proposes a cooperative process between human effort and God's grace in the journey toward salvation. Both Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism were condemned as heretical by the Catholic Church, particularly during the Council of Carthage (418 AD) for Pelagianism and the Council of Orange (529 AD) for Semi-Pelagianism, reinforcing the necessity of divine grace in the Christian understanding of salvation.
Thus, the idea that Christian salvation is rooted in "free will" is misleading since from its earliest days, the notion that a sinful creature could even properly begin to accept the gift ("divine assistance") of salvation is impossible. The human will is so impaired, so degenerate that it can never choose the good apart from divine aid. There is in Catholicism and Calvinism only predestination of souls and neither confession denies Paul's basic message on the place of predestination in soteriology (Rom 8:29).
(As an aside, I find this concept of "who" or "what" accepting salvation to be a mystery. If the sinner is too sinful to choose Yahweh, but is given the grace to aid his will, then really, who is doing the choosing? This might be fruitful meditation for a Christian who wants to take a Buddhist-like analytical mindset as a spiritual practice. It also raises the question about the extent, if any, of moral agency among humans, who all have equal claim to being made in the image of Yahweh regardless of where they end up after death.)
Buddhism does establish that "personal responsibility" is the sine qua non for liberation. This is the individualism that Maritain speaks of, albeit it is anything but inimical to the social order as is claimed. Hearing the dhamma from a wise teacher or spiritual friend is of course required as well, but the choice to follow the path is one that only the practitioner can make by his own lights.
Unlike Christianity and its concept of predestination, Buddhism has an optimistic view on the capacity for humans to change through their own volition and more importantly, by their own efforts to make great progress in spiritual life. One of the great lights of my own spiritual life was discovering that my own reform was something I could give myself as a gift through meditation, reflection and the practice of awareness during normal activities. For a true Catholic, this is pure heresy, hatched in the lowest bowels of hell. Most people who begin these activities just outlined soon see changes in themselves for the better.
Continuing on with more Maritain:
And though it prescribed a universal benevolence (which extended even to prohibiting the slaughter of animals and to a compulsory vegetarianism), almsgiving, pardon of injuries, and non-resistance to the wicked, its motive was not love of one’s neighbour as such, whose positive good and (by implication) existence we are bound to will, but to escape suffering to oneself by extinguishing all action and energy in a kind of humanitarian ecstasy.
Compulsory vegetarianism is just another one of those basic errors of fact that shows he never read what many consider a foundational text of Buddhism, the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta. Here, it relates that the Buddha consumed a soft succulent pork dish served by a lay follower and died shortly thereafter. Some speculate that the pork was undercooked and led to him contracting a case of dysentery, based on the symptoms given. Walshe translate's the dish name as something like "pig's delight" if memory serves. At any rate, 80 years later and most Westerners, if they know of Buddhism, believe it has something to do with vegetarianism as a formal doctrine.
The Buddha's cousin Devadatta played something of the role of Judas in the early Buddhist writings, where he tried to create a schism by forcing a stricter monastic discipline than what the Buddha had devised. Among his criticisms of the sangha was that it allowed meat eating; he, in contravention to the Buddha's code, wanted a strict vegetarianism imposed because, unlike the Buddha, he knew a thing or two about spiritual development. The spirit of Devadatta is alive and well in Buddhism, since I still hear Theravada monks talk about it as a badge of honor.
His agitations led to his excommunication and eventual death, the nature of which ranges from dying in an avalanche, falling off a mountain, or being pummeled to death in a massive hail storm, depending on who is telling the story. Like Judas Iscariot, there are multiple accounts of his final end, all tragic and like Judas, Devadatta played the role of follower, but was really an enemy of his spiritual teacher.
(Christians who have made it this far should be advised that there are interesting parallels in some places with the much earlier Pali Canon. Satan tempts Christ in the wilderness; Buddha is tempted by Mara in the wilderness... Devadatta is Judas, etc.)
Maritain claims that there is no fraternal feeling in Buddhism, that it is all predicated on a selfish kind of individualistic striving for total annihilation of the self. This of course leaves out that the whole basis of Siddhartha's mission as a Buddha was to end the suffering of beings who are trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of suffering. Samsara is in fact translated sometimes as the "wandering." Could Siddhartha have achieved liberation for himself and gone into the forest to live selfishly, blissed out as the kids say, at the foot of a tree?
In fact, he admits that this option was very tempting until he recalled the number of beings who suffered, including gods. Instead of dwelling quietly as a paccekabuddha, he engaged in a multi-decade ministry that saw him moving far and wide to speak to people, from the highest to the lowest. Along the way, his teachings brought thousands to the end of all striving, to final refuge on the Blessed Island.
One can dismiss enlightenment as bunk, but one cannot conclude that the Buddha established a model that exalts selfishness and annihilationism, of indifference to the plight of delusional creatures. In reading Maritain's charge of Buddhism lacking fraternity, on what basis did he make the judgment? We know he read half-assed glosses and preconfigured Western opinions, but did he know Buddhists? Did he go to Thailand or Vietnam? By all accounts, the Buddhists of southeast Asia, despite their reputation for conservatism, have been reckoned among some of the happiest, most pleasant and generous people around. Allan Watts has a quote somewhere that says it in a way that only he could, but alas I cannot find it.
Again, Maritain never cracked a Buddhist text and studied its teachings for himself. It's fine to have an uneducated opinion, it's another to pose as a philosophy professor in love with the truth and then write a book that completely distorts a world religion. Maritain's students who read his work and attended his lectures left misled, even deceived. Hopefully, they had a chance to unlearn his errors in later life.
So much for Derksen's first witness against Buddhism.
His second one is the great theological luminary Garrigou-Lagrange, a Dominican of "impeccable orthodoxy" as Derksen avers. While he may have the Catholic version of right view, he shares Maritain's predilection for playing fast and loose with simple facts.
Religious orthodoxy and fidelity to points of fact are not the same thing. In the pre-Vatican II period especially, the anti-intellectual posture of men like Maritain and Lagrange was seen increasingly as a barrier to communicating with "men of good will" from other faiths, and this in a period where great powers held world-ending weapons.
If traditional Catholics want to know how they got Nostra Aetate, they can start by looking at the configuration of the pre-Conciliar intellectuals like Maritain and Lagrange. These show an ignorance of their subject matter as it regards non-Christian religions and more worrisome, a lack of curiosity. Curiosity tends to overcome the former. Derksen rails against Nostra Aetate by appealing to the very types of ignorant opinion which caused its creation.
Like Maritain, Lagrange uses the same old 19th century chestnut of nihilism created by men like Nietzsche:
By contrast, Buddhism tends toward self-annihilation and likewise does not speak of grace, prayer properly so-called, and the supernatural moral life.
If you've read any Nietzsche, you may have come across his views on Buddhism. In re-reading Derksen's post, I kept going back to Nietzsche's characterization of it as "life negating." I looked it up on ChatGPT and found a concise listing of Nietzsche's views and they echo in later Westerners like Maritain, Lagrange and Taylor Marshall:
1. **Life-Denying Philosophy:** Nietzsche perceived both Buddhism and Christianity as "life-denying" religions. He criticized them for promoting values that suppress natural human instincts and desires. In his view, such philosophies encourage individuals to deny their own will to power—the fundamental drive he saw as essential to human flourishing.
2. **Suppression of the Self:** Nietzsche interpreted Buddhism as advocating the suppression or negation of the self. He believed that Buddhism's focus on overcoming desire and attachment led to a form of self-abolition, which contrasted sharply with his emphasis on self-affirmation and the creation of one's own values.
3. **Resignation vs. Affirmation:** While Nietzsche valued the affirmation of life, embracing its challenges and uncertainties, he saw Buddhism as promoting resignation and acceptance of suffering without striving to overcome it. This perceived passivity was antithetical to his philosophy, which champions active engagement with life.
4. **Final Nihilism:** In some of his unpublished notes, Nietzsche referred to Buddhism as a manifestation of nihilism—the belief that life lacks inherent meaning or value. He suggested that Buddhism represents a form of final nihilism that completely renounces worldly desires and ambitions.
If in reading these you hear echoes of the Maritain and Lagrange quotes, it's probably because they imbibed Nietzsche's views either from primary or secondary sources. ChatGPT lists Conze and Mueller as other possible sources for Maritain's thought along with the Pali Canon itself; of course, this blog post has offered ample evidence that Maritain never read any of it. If he did, he either did not understand it or maliciously misrepresented it to his readers. If Johnny says he read the history assignment and misses all the easy questions on the pop quiz, then he probably didn't.
Like Maritain, Nietzsche charges Buddhism with repudiating man's natural desires, longings, ambitions and so on for a supreme act of resignation that leads to nothingness. Both Maritain and Lagrange denounced the Buddha for allegedly calling existence per se "evil." Nietzsche criticizes the Buddha on similar grounds, for denying life, i.e. existence as having no intrinsic value when compared to nothingness.
This is a position you will never find expressed in the Pali Canon or any of the Buddhist schools. What is said is that birth is suffering, aging is suffering, not getting wha you want is suffering, sickness is suffering and so on... in other places, the Buddha makes very clear that life also has its charms but that these are by their very nature, impermanent. If a Christian theologian wants to dispute this, he strikes a Quixotic pose in relation to reality. Everyone you love, everything that you care about, you will be separated from in the future.
Even the longing for immortality much praised by Christian thinkers is itself another form of suffering, maybe even the highest given that it posits an eternal Self who is given only a binary choice between eternal paradise or never ending agony in a lake of fire. As shown here already, this apparent "choice" is not really any choice at all – it is the decree of Yahweh, whose ways are inscrutable.
Nietzsche and Maritain both complain of the Buddhadhamma's encouragement of passivity. Was Jesus' injunction to turn the other cheek a call to passivity? For Nietzsche, yes.
Back to Lagrange, who observes:
Meditation consists in thinking about nothing, lest something evil may be thought. Practices of this kind produce nervous overexcitement with quasi-pathological effects. By means of self-suggestion many monks arrive at a kind of ecstasy.
Throughout, I've kept the underlines in the quotes since Derksen thinks they are important. The underscores literally just, uh, underscore the ignorance. It's unlikely Derksen has ever studied what Buddhists say about their practice, its purpose and ends. As someone who has found the One True Faith inside the One True Church, there is no need to delve into heathenish writings.
Lagrange though is a different story since his quotations are taken from a published work, On Divine Revelation, which was recently republished in 2022 but had its first run in 1950, two years after Maritain's work. A Fr. Cajetan Cuddy, O.P. sums up the book thusly:
On Divine Revelation …is a stunning work of inestimable value. No other subsequent work on this topic has come close to meeting it (much less surpassing it).
I am going to go out on a limb here and say I don't think Fr. Cuddy knows much about Buddhism or its meditation practices. This is not to say that Lagrange's work is not a good scholarly source for Christian theology; it probably is and if that is your thing, you will not have much concern for its passing (albeit deeply flawed) comments on non-Christian religions.
There is a normal human bias towards wanting your side, your opinion to be painted in the best possible light while seeing competing points of view portrayed in the worst way possible. We all as fallible humans want to see ourselves at different times as warriors of truth and while we may say finding truth is a hard struggle, we very easily slide into lazy, flabby mental stances that prop up our ego.
Our views and opinions are vital to many of us. If there's anything that practitioners know, is that our self-conception is deeply entwined with our most cherished beliefs. These beliefs give us meaning, purpose and are also the cause of suffering. Have you ever had an argument about something minor with someone and just felt the full weight of your being invested in maintaining your side?
This to say that maybe Lagrange, who was I'm sure an intelligent man, said something so stupid because of a clinging to an orthodoxy, the denial or doubt of any part could lead to his burning for all eternity in a lake of fire in the company of demons. Lagrange thought a way of life that has been around for 2,500 years has, as its basis, people sitting around trying to think of nothing for the sake of reaching some kind of self-induced ecstasy. Most men of an intellectual bent would suspect that there was more to it if told this in a brochure or booklet. He would, to be thorough, at least investigate the original sources for clarification. Lagrange was not such a man. Again, there is a lack of curiosity because a strong view has been forged in faith and faith is, like a mountain, not something which can be easily moved.
I will not belabor the point with Lagrange, but suffice to say that the Digha describes meditation, its objects and purposes. Thinking of nothing is like "compulsory vegetarianism," not part of Buddhism. Americans will probably always think French toast is from France, or that General Tso's chicken is an authentic dish eaten by Chinese people. Likewise, people thinking of nothing and practicing vegetarianism will probably be associated in the Western mind with Buddhism for some time.
This has been a long post and I will close by observing that Derksen's post recycled some old lazy canards against Buddhism, the kind that, on account of their ignorance and anti-intellectual posture, probably caused a big rethink in some quarters of the Catholic Church on the modern Christian stance towards other religions. Derksen probably doesn't understand that his own post reflects the kind of dull sentiment that led to the publishing of Nostra Aetate, meant as a prescriptive guidance about how Christians should see the Other with fresh eyes.
Allan Watts published The Way of Zen in 1957, a book I should probably read. He would go on to become an important figure in communicating Eastern ideas to a Western audience, being uniquely versed in both traditions. He was cheerful, eloquent, erudite, a little foolish, mischievous and a wonderful teacher whose audio recordings still draw traffic today on YouTube, some 50 years after his death from alcoholism. I think of Watts as in many ways very English in the best possible way.
The Buddhism Watts described to audiences was alive, deep, wonderful and the cause for joyful living. It was not the dry glosses of 19th century European schoolmen and eccentrics like Nietzsche. Perhaps some churchmen on the eve of Vatican II who heard or read Watts (on the sly) decided that his presentation was maybe more authentic than that of Nietzsche, Maritain and Lagrange.
