Questioning Thich Nhat Hanh

What you read on a trans-Pacific flight is as important as when you read it, and while the perfectly-coiffed and spiffily-uniformed flight attendants of Korean Air Lines served two meals and an untold number of coffees in close quarters from San Francisco to Seoul with no appreciable change to their fashion-model hairdos, I had no such luck retaining equilibrium while reading the book in my carryon. What's surprising is that it was a gentle treatise on why it's helpful to think of Jesus and Buddha as brothers.

I have learned much from a student of Vietnamese Buddhist monk, author, and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. Thanks to that student and a few others, including my darling wife, I understand more about the concept of "mindfulness," and more about Zen Buddhism, than I did in my wastrel youth. I also appreciate Hanh's well-deserved reputation as an apologist for Buddhism and a bridge-builder between Buddhism and Christianity.

All that needs to be said up front, because some of the things Hanh writes in his 1995 book, Living Buddha, Living Christ convinced me that he misunderstands at least part of the Christian critique of Buddhism.

I can't claim to be authoritative on that critique myself. “Comparative religion” sounds antiseptic to my ears. Moreover, my own faith is refracted solely through the prism of personal experience rather than through, say, the certification implied by a degree in theology. But as Paul Simon sang in the halcyon days when he was introducing African vocal harmonies to audiences in the United States, "I know what I know."

In a fascinating discussion that links the Buddhist concept of interbeing with the Christian concept of the Trinity, Hanh writes: "A Zen monk said, 'Before I began to practice [mindfulness], mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers. During many years of practice, mountains stopped being mountains and rivers stopped being rivers. Now as I understand things properly, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers.' ”

"Thanks to the practice," Hanh observes, "this monk was able to see the nature of interbeing. He was no longer caught by the notions of self and non-self. Some people say that Buddhist practice is to dissolve the self. They do not understand that there is no self to be dissolved. There is only the notion of self to be transcended. As soon as you know mountains are made of rivers and everything else and rivers are made of mountains and everything else, it is safe to use the words "mountains" and "rivers." In Buddhist practice, what is essential is for you to recognize the nature of interbeing and transcend the notion of self and all its constraints. When you touch the reality of non-self, you touch at the same time nirvana, the ultimate dimension of being, and become free from fear, attachment, illusion, and craving."

The italics in the passage above are Hanh’s. There are echoes of Walt Whitman’s “I am large. I contain multitudes” here, but Hanh ups the ante by suggesting that “I” am not the operative subject, or the object, either.

Philosophy professor and writer Peter Kreeft may be among the people whom Hanh says misunderstand Buddhist practice. I think this passage from Kreeft's co-written Handbook of Christian Apologetics (1994, InterVarsity Press) has special relevance for further conversation about these matters. Judge for yourself:

"We shall use 'Eastern' and 'Western' here in an oversimplified way in order to make our main point as simple as possible...the West claims that the East is wrong on some points, and the East claims that there is no such thing as being wrong. A Hindu can believe everything, including Christianity, as a partial truth, or a stage along the way to total truth. Even contradictory ideas can be accepted as true: the stumbling block of East-West dialogue is the law of noncontradiction. The East's argument is that its notion of truth includes the West's, but not vice-versa; that the East is inclusive, the West exclusive. This is probably the main reason for the great popularity of Eastern religions in the West today, especially on an informal, unofficial level. Not many Americans are Hindus, but most prefer the Hindu notion of truth to the Western one, at least in religion."

Hanh confirms the accuracy of that summation by Kreeft and his co-author, one Ron Tacelli: "For a Buddhist to be attached to any doctrine, even a Buddhist one, is to betray the Buddha," Hanh writes.

Kreeft and his co-author explain the problem with received wisdom: "The real situation is just the opposite. The traditional West includes the East, not vice-versa. The West already understands the Eastern insight that there is such a thing as degrees of truth (i.e., degrees of understanding, depth, adequacy, wisdom). But the West adds that there is also such a thing as the law of noncontradiction. Contradictory propositions cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time. The East does not admit this."

Back, then, to Thich Nhat Hanh. If, as he says, Buddhism teaches that there is no self to be dissolved, then it follows that there is no self to be redeemed, either. "Jesus loves me" as a statement of faith anchored in the Christian scriptures then makes no sense, because really there is no "me," and Jesus, God bless him, loves everybody or everything without differentiation.

Jews, too, will quibble with any Buddhist assertion of non-being. It’s all very well to chide Tevye the dairyman, whose Fiddler-on-the-Roof musing through “If I Were a Rich Man” writes an indictment against craving and attachment faster than a man exiting the hot bath at the Gyeongju Spring Dome. A rabbi can second that sentiment. But if there is no self, then what exactly did God create, walk in the cool of the evening with in the garden before the Fall, and eventually give commandments to? And why was the first man given the privilege of naming things? Did God give an illusion the busywork of cataloging other illusions?

Somewhere over the Pacific, and well before I realized that Hanh subscribed to a worldview that gave him a pass on the law of noncontradiction, I wondered how Hanh would square the notion of non-self with the well-known injunction of one Zen master to his student, "when you meet the Buddha, kill him!" On its face, that doesn’t seem to be the most enlightened advice. But as Hanh points out, a Buddha is anyone who is awake. Siddhartha, the original Buddha, showed the way, but in Buddhist thought, we're all potential Buddhas. In that light, Jesus was a Buddha, too, although of course he never identified himself as such. And what the Zen master of the harsh advice meant, Hanh says, is that "the student should kill the Buddha concept in order for him to experience the real Buddha directly."

Westerner that I am, Hanh’s explanation strikes me as something of a dodge. Given the non-self constraints in which Buddhism is working, wouldn’t the “real Buddha” be as ephemeral as any other self? Killing the Buddha is a waste of time if the Buddha is not really there, in a way that dying to self or emulating a grain of wheat (“if it die, it will yield a rich harvest”) are not wastes of time for Christians.

That Peter Kreeft was right to say that Thich Nhat Hanh and his tradition do not acknowledge the law of noncontradiction is apparent from Hanh’s critique of a statement by the late Pope John Paul II. In a book of his own, John Paul had asserted that Jesus Christ is “absolutely original and absolutely unique, the one mediator between God and humanity.” Hanh’s puzzled rejoinder is, “Of course Christ is unique. But who is not unique? Socrates, Muhammed, the Buddha, you, and I are all unique.” From there Hanh shifts to indignation: “The idea behind the statement, however, is the notion that Christianity provides the only way of salvation and all other religious traditions are of no use. This attitude excludes dialogue and fosters religious intolerance and discrimination,” Hanh chides. “It does not help.”

Hanh would have done better to read the late pope more closely. Neither John Paul nor the Catechism of the Catholic Church that he updated claims that non-Christian religions are “of no use.” More puzzling, though, is the ground of Hanh’s rejoinder. How can we all be unique if uniqueness is anchored in notions of self that must be transcended because there’s no there, there? Buddhism seems hard-pressed to explain the means by which its message is delivered.

Hanh contends that if one is a truly happy Christian, then one is also a Buddhist, and vice-versa. It’s an interesting thesis that draws whatever force it has from the practice of mindful living. For more enlightened or less judgmental readers, Hanh’s ecumenical instinct has perhaps the power and poetry of a translucent wave curling to foam in front of a setting sun while salt spray mists boogie boarders waiting for the next ride.

But my puzzlement may be summarized with an image from the singing rooms that new friends assure me are important to Korean culture (it’s karaoke, except one learns quickly not to use Japanese terms around Koreans): Hanh seems comfortable with the nonchalance of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” I wonder what he would make of the bracing reason in Aretha Franklin’s “Think”?

It would take a longer essay, and perhaps a round of soju, to figure that out.