Orthodox Reflections

— Augustine Martin

Without naming names and jurisdictions, recently an Orthodox Christian priest of 15 years who was vaguely Soto Zen Buddhist left the Orthodox Church to become a Soto Zen Buddhist teacher who is vaguely Christian. He said that Zen meditation gives him clarity to understand what God is telling him. He still believes that redemption is only possible through Jesus, although I don’t know if he means those words in the same way that I would.

Since the writing of that and its publishing, he has become less theistic to the point of almost outright atheism. I am the only one of this former Orthodox Church circle who has shown any concern whatsoever for his spiritual well-being, and I knew him as a priest for much less time than most people. Those in cassocks who do Orthodoxy professionally have the attitude of, “Well, that was embarrassing, but at least he’s gone.”

I’ll say here that he is a more thoughtful, kind and humble person than almost any of the monastics, igumens, hieromonks, bishops and married archpriests I’ve come across. I don’t talk about my personal history on the internet, but I’ve been around the block. I have more optimism for his salvation than for any of the Orthodox Brahmins I’ve met.

Normally I make a point to not read about Oriental and occult religions even academically, but I also try to not hold empty opinions. So I told him that I would research Zen and form an educated opinion. This article is my conclusions about whether Zen Buddhism can fit within Orthodox Christianity.

The most simple answer, of course, is to not seek truth outside the Orthodox Church. That’s the safest way. God has given us everything for our salvation already. Everything is simple and laid out before us if we would only seize it. But then again, Zen would likely agree with that last sentence.

On some level even researching this is impossible. The Oriental mind is so different from the Occidental that any study of Oriental religions immediately becomes disorienting. Things get lost in translation, and I’ve always found the White converts like George Harrison to be ridiculous and decadent. Western definitions of religion become difficult when applied to the East. Hinduism especially is more of a culture than a religion, so how can someone convert to Hinduism? My friend tells me that Soto Zen isn’t really a religion at all and doesn’t conflict with Orthodox Christianity. I have another Orthodox friend whose father converted to Reform Judaism and then to Soto Zen Buddhism, and there’s no contradiction in that.

Ultimately religions are understood through practice, not doctrine. That’s something that’s very hard for us to understand in the West with our protestant cultural background. We Orthodox Christians tell protestants and Catholics that they can’t understand Orthodoxy without being inside of the Church and living Orthodoxy, but that’s true for any religion.

So I write this as an outsider who has not practiced Buddhism at all whatsoever and has only read some books promoting it. I had trouble organizing my thoughts into a linear procession, perhaps because we are talking about things that exist outside of Western categories, perhaps because this is more of a reflection than a polemic.

Tangentially related, it’s worth reading what St Nicholas of Japan wrote about Japanese Buddhism here and here.

St. Nicholas of Japan

Zen could be understood as a more refined version of Buddhism in the sense that if you burn away all the excess, Zen is what remains. Zen has no religious doctrines, but it does not deny that these exist either. It doesn’t seem to have the iconic Buddhist teachings of karma, reincarnation and nirvana, at least not with the clarity that these appear in other Oriental systems. Zen goes beyond logic and outside of logic. The only thing that Zen teaches is how to teach yourself. It transcends doctrines so that the category of doctrine is irrelevant.

That being said, as I continued reading about Zen, I started to see the moralistic and metaphysical baggage hiding in the background that really makes it look like a formal religion. They have priests and temples. They light incense, bow to statues of the Buddha, and chant sacred poems. There is an anecdote of the Japanese-American Zen master Suzuki Roshi praying to Buddha to live a little longer. They take four sacred vows about shattering delusions and follow five moral laws about not hurting others. Advanced students go through a sort of mystery rite called Dharma Transmission, which seems to be their equivalent of apostolic succession and has real metaphysical significance. Only authorized people with a lineage of some level of ordination can teach and organize Zen meditation groups. Japanese immigrants were often members of a Zen temple but without any interest in sitting in meditation, which means that Zen is a lot more than the mindfulness practices.

Regardless of how religious or not old country Zen may be, the lack of doctrine and metaphysical commitments, as presented to beatniks and hippies, seems to be the biggest draw of Zen Buddhism in the post-Christian West, and why it has become so well-known. It gives you a mysticism without demanding anything from you. It’s a Jello that fits into the mold of your life. There is no demand that you reverence any spirits or change your social philosophy. It easily layers over whatever religious tradition you are already a part of. Zen helps you accomplish the goals you already have instead demanding that you rewrite them altogether.

I often say that God doesn’t care about your career dreams. We spend our entire childhood learning to plan for adulthood, and even those of us raised Christian, do not consider that our plans are not God’s plans and may be very opposed to his plans. But for the Zen Buddhist, this is no problem at all because there are no fixed moral categories. Be a Wall Street investor or design military weapons – Zen accepts everyone without judgment.

Zen Buddhism acknowledges the possibility of God’s existence, but it is hostile to the idea that he would be relevant. You yourself are your own god, because it is only from yourself that truth and enlightenment come. If there’s some kind of salvation, God has nothing to do with it.

But is that an appeal? To me it’s not. It’s just something else to fit into the buffet of modern relativism. It’s a sort of Oriental ecumenism. Really, the truest ecumenism, because it quickly supersedes whatever religious tradition you bring to it. Anyone can be a Zen Buddhist. As John Lennon said, “Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.” It turns you into a god. You become the center of the world if there is no God, and anything you want is true. That’s the opposite of the Christian image of Charlemagne submitting to the cross and leading his army against the Saracens.

I have spent my life yearning for a Charlemagne to follow into battle. After Jesus finished the sermon on the mount, “the people were amazed, because he spoke as one having authority and not as the scribes.” But Zen rejects all such authority. You the practitioner are the authority, if there could even be said to be an authority.

Zen focuses so much on seeing through everything, but what it misses is the simplicity of sacrifice. Giving your life for the benefit of others because you believe in greater promises of eternity — Zen has no category for this. At the most, the Zennist can sacrifice his life for his own benefit, but there’s nothing connecting him to others beyond a philosophical belief that all things are really one and nothing. The Western intellectual like Carl Jung ridicules Christianity for its myopia, but decadent, globetrotting academics lack the humanity to understand that for the Franks to align themselves against the Saracens was more than a quest for land and treasure.

What kind of world is it without a providential God? That God has an ultimate plan and will even the scales in the end is such a comforting doctrine. We live in an age permeated with evil. Even if the atheists are ultimately right, I would be a heroin junkie in a tent without a belief in a providential and interventionist God. That God loves us and will reward our own loyalty with his loyalty, even if we don’t see it now, is the only thing that keeps me from falling into complete despair. I don’t want the Zen worldview, where there are only things deeper, but nothing higher.

And yet I appreciated the emphasis that words and categories are for our convenience. Often the truth about things lies beyond our ability to express it. Often we lose the truth of something as soon as we try to define it. It’s a very different way of looking at things than the Western philosophical tradition. Words are a tool, but they are not the thing themselves.

Zen rejects affirmations and negations as being a binary that limits you and obscures the truth of things. The Zen master may hold up a stick and say, “Describe this without affirming or denying that it is a stick.” The point is that in any kind of, well, logical logic, this would be impossible. But he wants you to go beyond logic into the true affirmation. Often this is expressed by something absurd, such as breaking the stick.

But what is completely wrong is to imitate someone else’s means of transcending the binary. So the Zen master teaches by holding up a finger. His disciple also holds up a finger. When people ask the disciple what does the master teach, he holds up a finger. So one day the master cuts off the disciple’s finger. Then the master holds up his finger, and the disciple realizes that he had misunderstood all along. The point of holding up the finger is not to hold up the finger. What the actual point is, frankly, was something that I couldn’t quite figure out, but I appreciated the insight that external imitation reduces authentic spirituality into performance art.

Would we accept this in Orthodox Christianity? Our theology is based on Aristotelian categories and universals (read St John Damascene’s Philosophical Chapters). So there is definitely an affirmation of common natures that things have. But it’s also true that our attempts to perfectly fit everything into logic defeats that very logic. Who can explain how God is both sovereign and allows for free will? How is Jesus the Son of God outside of time or reproduction? These things go beyond logic. They are not irrational so much as extra-rational – something outside of rationality.

That seems to be the great paradox of Zen Buddhism. Does it fit within Orthodox Christianity? The answer is both yes and no, and it is the very same things that are both yes and no. You can’t tease out the good from the bad because it is the things that are very yes which are also very no.

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Although Zen contains meditation, Zen is not meditation. Meditation involves fixing your mind on an idea, and Zen exists outside of all these concepts. Zen meditation rejects any kind of images, doctrines or narratives. Zen is more of a mental framework or a training regimen. Zen meditation is more about learning to have a quiet mind than to repeat a phrase like in Maharishi Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation.

Maybe “parallel” is too strong of a word, but you can see … similarities? … with Orthodox hesychasm and apophatic theology. We would say that you can’t define God because that would put him within boundaries. Those who reach very advanced prayer experience God outside of theological concepts and images, and it seems that the liturgical services and icons are really a crutch for the common masses of Orthodox Christians. True prayer goes beyond words.

The Orthodox tradition strongly condemns images in prayer, such as the medieval Catholic tradition developed. The classic An Introduction to Zen Buddhism by D. T. Suzuki criticizes Ignatius of Loyola for similar reasons that we would. Instead Zen is about finding the unintelligible reality deep within yourself. Or as Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” But without a clear belief in God, what Kingdom or Heaven is there to find? And so Zen uncovers an unfathomable abyss, or rather, is an unfathomable abyss. The closer you get to it, the farther away it becomes. But isn’t that how we would describe God? The closer you get to God, the more you realize how far away you are?

Suzuki writes:

“The basic idea of Zen is to come in touch with the inner workings of our being, and to do this in the most direct way possible, without resorting to anything external or superadded. Therefore, anything that has the semblance of an external authority is rejected by Zen. Absolute faith is placed in a man’s own inner being. For whatever authority there is in Zen, all comes from within.” [page 44]

That seems as opposite of Christianity as possible. I think? It rejects that God can be defined and limited, and it teaches that God has left his stamp inside all of us, except that it rejects the very category of God-ness. There is nothing higher than what is already inside of you, but there is no explanation to how that was placed there or what it means.

Elsewhere Suzuki writes:

“In Christianity we seem to be too conscious of God, though we say that in him we live and move and have our being. Zen wants to have the last trace of God-consciousness, if possible, obliterated.” [page 132]

Granted, he probably does not understand the Christian concept of God being beyond the category of existence. Taking the Hindu or animist concept of gods, then his statement is more digestible. But the space for any kind of supernatural or supra-natural being has no place in the Zen literature. Even if God were to reveal himself to the Zen masters directly, they wouldn’t know what to do with him. If they were really seeking God, then they would have found him. But by their own admission, they are not seeking God and do not want him.

Buddhism, including Zen, tries to eliminate suffering by detachment so that deprivation becomes meaningless. There’s genuine wisdom in that, and you see it in Greek philosophy and Christian asceticism. You don’t own your things – your things own you.

But St Paul said, “It has been given to you on behalf of Christ, not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer for His sake,” and, “We must through many tribulations enter the kingdom of God.” And there are many such verses. Suffering is integral to Christianity, without which there is no salvation. The Buddhist avoids suffering, but the Christian runs to it.

Zen focuses on the real-ness of the everyday and mundane instead of grand, theatric temples. You see beyond the four elements to what things actually are, and the four elements themselves become illusory and un-real. I don’t know how I feel about that.

A Zen monk goes to the master and asks where the entrance to the path of truth is. The master asks him if he can hear the sound of a nearby creek. The monk says yes, and the master tells him that it is the entrance to the path of truth.

But what does that mean? A Zennist would likely interpret it as that everything is mundane and has no real existence, and so you can learn truth from the creek as much as from a grandiose temple. An American spiritualist would say that God is in the woods and not in the Church, or that everything has a piece of God or even is God, and so you encounter God through nature. An Orthodox hermit might say that you find God by leaving the city and going away from people.

The only classic Oriental religious text I’ve read (or listened to) is the Dao De Jing. It only makes sense as a pre-revelation of Christ. Otherwise it’s nonsense about water. But I sort of get that sense with Zen. They’re searching for Christ, and they almost grasp him, but they try to build a Christless Christianity, and so they entirely miss what they’re searching for. It’s like if you took Zen and added submission before Christ, you would get Christianity. But then it wouldn’t be Zen Buddhism anymore. I found something similar when I read about Reform Judaism.

The purpose of any kind of Christian asceticism is to connect with God. Orthodox spirituality in particular focuses on preparing for Judgment Day through self-examination and constant repentance. But Zen rejects all of this. Zen has no concept of salvation. Metaphysical categories are not rejected so much as smothered into irrelevance. It seeks truth but has no purpose for it and no framework in which to understand it. So how could Zen fit within Orthodoxy if it rejects the very core of Orthodoxy?

But can you isolate the good from Zen and add it to Orthodoxy? Can you give Zen an Orthodox context? And the parts that don’t quite fit, can you leave them out or reinterpret them? I’ve met a “Zen Episcopalian” before – can you be a Zen Orthodox Christian?

Of course not. You can’t separate out what you like from an idea and leave the rest behind. Belief systems have to be taken as a whole, because they developed within the context of the other parts. If you’re going to accept Zen Buddhism, then accept it in its entirely. You can’t adopt a quasi-religious system that rejects all external authority and then still believe in the Bible and the Church tradition.

Likewise, if you’re going to become an Orthodox Christian, then you have to leave everything else behind. Zen Buddhism might be better in some ways than most of American Christianity, but that is our fault for our “cold and barren piety,” to quote the Akathist to the Holy Spirit. At best Zen Buddhism could a good stepping-stone to Orthodox Christianity. What attracts people to Zen is completed in the Orthodox tradition, and is largely absent in evangelical protestantism.

And yet Zen is ultimately worldly. It’s for Jewish lesbians who want to be spiritual but don’t actually believe in spiritual beings. Or for your ex-wife to “find herself” once she is liberated by the divorce. They want a calm mind without the Christ who gives you the peace “not as the world gives”. They try to “take every thought captive” but not “to the obedience of Christ” and not with “the weapons mighty in God”. Zen can fit into whatever worldview you already have. There are no moral requirements put on you. You have no responsibilities or obligations to anyone else. There is no particular vocation or focus of life that you are supposed to orient your decisions and goals around. Zen is about you for the sake of you. It gives you everything and expects nothing in return. At best, the most it can promise is an impersonal Christ.

For example, the godfather of American Zen is Robert Aitken, who was also a radical pacifist and activist. He first dabbled in Eastern mysticism in a Japanese prison camp during World War II, some twenty years before the Beatles made it cool. In 1950 he left his wife and newborn son to travel to Japan to learn to meditate at Zen monasteries, where he made various friends of the monks, learned to bow before the Buddha, went on a mendicant begging expedition, and was prophesied to start a Buddhist temple in America. That is to say, as stereotypical of post-war Americans, he abandoned his responsibilities for his own sense of personal fulfillment. He predates the baby boomers by about thirty years, but what could be more boomer than abandoning your newborn son to go searching for the Buddha? All the while he is finding enlightenment and uncovering the reality of what things really are by allowing the thoughts to fall where they are, he has a newborn son across the ocean.

Despite its claim to not have metaphysics, Zen is insistent that everything is an illusion. Your concept of self is constructed and therefore doesn’t exist. The point of meditation is to slowly dissolve your sense of self. But in realizing that you are nothing, you realize that you are also everything, because everything is one, and there are no boundaries between things.

But why do you want to lose yourself? You were made in the image of God. Why dissolve yourself? Jesus came to restore the image, not annihilate it. Zen Buddhism is the truest iconoclasm. They do not smash images of wood and paint, but instead they smash humanity itself. Humanity is meaningless in Zen because they don’t believe that it even exists.

And it’s just false that nothing is real. I am real. My emotions and experiences are real. The narratives I form about my life may be constructed, but the components it’s constructed of — what actually happened — are real. And the same is true for you, dear reader. Your life is real, and you matter. You aren’t broken and needing to be discarded.

The love you have for your children – is that an illusion? If the soul is an illusion, then wouldn’t the love that comes from that soul also be an illusion?

And the suffering you have been through – it’s all meaningless. The life in Christ, if you understand it right, redeems the disappointment and heartbreak and “makes all things new”. But for Zen, suffering is an illusion to be avoided. If you had a bad life, then it’s just bad luck, or maybe bad karma, but what it’s definitely not is significant.

I find this teaching that everything is an illusion the most anti-human, anti-life thing about Zen Buddhism. I’m actually offended at it. I lived a full life with all kinds of diverse experiences, emotional extremes and mystical moments, and Zen says that it’s all an illusion. I might as well have just stayed home watching TV and built some stupid career handling insurance claims.

God revealed himself as the I AM. The Gospels are full of arguments and questions about who Jesus is, and everything about life, death and beyond hinges on the answer to that question. And so the closer you are to God, the greater an awareness you have of your identity. In our times we have become distant from God, and so we have all this confusion of identity. Most obviously there is the Skittles pandemic, but in the last century we saw various fashion movements like goths, punks, greasers, pachucos – all seeking an identity. We see today especially how people follow their pop culture or sports team like a religion, and it’s just seeking an identity because we have lost who we are, because we have lost our way from God, in whose image we are made. Nearly everyone has a tattoo or piercing in an effort to make their own unique identity on their own terms. The superhero genre is undyingly popular because people wish for a different kind of humanity where we are gods.

Zen is the fullness of the rejection of identity. You are nothing and don’t really exist, just as God doesn’t really exist. Or to whatever extent you or God exist, it’s just an extension of everything else. True awareness is found through diminishing the borders in your mind between yourself and everything else so that nothing is seen as a subject-object relationship. This, as far as I can tell, is the only purpose of Zen meditation. It would probably be incorrect to say that Zen does not teach dispassion, but it’s a very different kind of dispassion than Orthodox Christianity teaches.

We can see how this kind of relentless nihilism has burnt out society. We need a sense of self. We need a God to submit to. We need cosmic order and cosmic truth to tell us how to live our lives and organize society. Otherwise, you get an air-conditioned Babylon.

A common riddle in Zen Buddhism is, What was your face before you were born? When you meditate on the irrationality of this, you suddenly come to some kind of deeper truth that can’t be explained. The face you had before you were born is your true self.

But what is this face? Answer: Jesus Christ, in whose image you were made, and who is the icon of the Father. This is why he took the name “Son of Man” – he was the fullness and summation of all humanity. When Jesus conquered hunger in the desert, it was humanity that conquered hunger. When he rejected temporal power, it was humanity that rejected temporal power. When he chose virginity and poverty, it was humanity that overcame the need for sex and wealth. When he meekly submitted to an illegitimate show trial, refusing to answer when the governor wanted to set him free, it was humanity that broke the world’s justice system. And finally in his resurrection, it was humanity that conquered death.

Do you, the Zen practitioner reading this, wish to know your face before you were born? Look at the icon of Christ, “slain from the foundation of the world.” Will Zen teach you virginity and poverty? Will it teach you non-reactivity to the point of intentional starvation? You see all these social activists enraged when someone is denied basic justice – will Zen teach you to quietly submit to a Bolshevik show trial in order to break the system’s legitimacy? What can the most profound of Zen satori give you that Christ has not already accomplished for all humanity? Zen can only offer you fool’s gold when compared to the treasure that Christ already won for us if we would only seize it.

If you wish to shatter delusions, to know your true self, to achieve dispassion, to find the inner light, to not be dominated by your thoughts, to embrace all of creation, and to become the super-man, then, as the hymn says, “Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full in his wonderful face. And the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.”

American converts to Zen are often shocked to find that traditional Zen masters do not have the kind of moral obligations we expect of religious clergy in the West. An exalted Zen abbot may be a womanizer or a drunkard, and the Japanese student does not consider this relevant so long as he can teach meditation well. American convert masters such as Richard Baker likewise took on this moral flexibility and then were confused when they were being judged for doing what is commonly done and tolerated in the old country.

But again, if there is no cosmic order to anything, if there is no God, and if you have no identity, why not, like Baker did, have an affair with the wife of your close friend? Baker’s wife didn’t mind. Why not, like Aitken, abandon your newborn son to study meditation? American Zen master Maurine Stuart personally rejected sexual relationships with students, but only because it didn’t work for her. She saw nothing wrong with it if it helps a student. Zen only pushes you to retrain your mind, not to become a good person, because there are no categories of good or bad. If nothing is real, then there would be no moral categories to govern a phantom humanity made in the image of an irrelevant God.

Zen is very cerebral, and so it does not have much regard for the body. If the mind and soul can barely be said to exist, then the body especially is an illusion. But we know at heart that this is not true. We are both body and soul. You don’t “have a soul” or “have a body” – you are both. At death these are divided, but this is only temporary.

Christ came to sanctify the flesh. He took on the blameless passions. He hungered, thirsted, felt tired, wept and felt the full range of human emotions. One of the first things he did after the resurrection was to cook breakfast on the beach, and only then did he tend to Peter’s spiritual needs. He told Thomas to touch his wounds. The seven sacraments, especially the Eucharist, are defined by their union of both the carnal and mystical [1672 Confession of Dositheos of Jerusalem, Decree 15; St Peter Mogila, 99-101]. And finally, even with our death, we know that all bodies will be resurrected, either to glory or to condemnation [John 5:29]. The body isn’t just a tent to house the consciousness.

How does the Zen Christian reconcile that? It’s a complete denial of the gospel. Zen Buddhism seeks the very opposite of what Christ came to give to us. That so many Catholic monks have adopted Zen shows that Catholicism has emptied itself of any authentic spirituality, and so they must suck the mud from the well of the heathens [Jeremiah 2:13].

I go hiking in the mountains a lot. After about a mile, the trail gets very isolated. It’s often amazing how it’s like an entirely different world to itself. Here is a rushing mountain stream that no one in the valley knows about. Most obviously I think about how God created all this but also how evolution makes no sense at all in such a world that is so carefully crafted together from such very diverse things. Of course urban liberals never go into the mountains, so they all believe in evolution. I think about how this is what the Indians saw and experienced. I think about how we forcibly removed them so that we could mow down the forest, dam up the river and throw asphalt everywhere. Then I think about how the descendants of those who removed the Indians were treated much the same way by Northern industrialists and FDR, and how the ghosts of Indian chiefs are laughing at the demise of the White race today.

But the Zen Buddhist would think none of these thoughts. He would think about how the forest doesn’t really exist because forest-ness is an artificial concept. Whether God made the forest and how the forest has something of his image in it is a lowly, pedestrian concept for the unenlightened. The forest is only valuable insofar as it is not the city, but there is no spiritual value to the forest for being a forest. There are no universal natures that the forest reflects. You could just as well mow down the forest so long as it stays quiet. Maybe if you killed all the birds, that would help you sit in meditation.

Of course, the Zennist would object that this is a crude caricature, but I really don’t think it is. That’s where this kind of spiritualized nominalism leads. It’s the Eastern side of crass Western capitalism, where everything has a cost but nothing has a value. There is no God who made the forest, and nothing is really real. Suzuki insisted that Zen does not teach nihilism, and maybe he’s technically right, but it’s a subtlety that is effectively irrelevant.

Despite its claims to reject dogma, Zen has definite beliefs that must be accepted. There is a sort of perennialism lain within it. These insights about mind, thinking, attention, passions, quietness – these are found throughout world cultures. Little in Zen Buddhism is uniquely Buddhist, and there are many parallels to some of the Greek philosophers. You could see Zen Buddhism as a stripped-down meditation culture in a specifically Far Eastern context.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It has overlap with Orthodox Christian practical spirituality because these insights into the soul are universal. In that sense it’s good. Or at least better than what most people are doing. But like all perennialist religions, it sees itself as the center that all others are imitating. So for the Zennist, it is actually Orthodox Christianity that is imitating Zen Buddhism, and Orthodox hesychasts just don’t realize that they’re Buddhists. The Zennist would think that hesychasm is the same thing as enlightenment. (Admittedly, I’m imputing what I think their claims would be.) So the theoretical Jewish lesbian Zen practitioner can say that Orthodox Christianity is fine if it works for you but that it doesn’t speak to her or that there are many paths to enlightenment, as long as you are at least doing something. In that sense the universality of Zen’s genuine insights are very bad.

I think that this is where the real confusion hits. The Zen master monk looks a lot like an Athonite hesychast. Aren’t they the same? No, not at all, because the Athonite hesychast saw the Unseen Light that created the world. Fr Seraphim Rose left Zen and found the Aristotelian essences of Love and Truth in the Person of Jesus.

Zen makes no such claim, nor has the philosophical framing to even understand such a claim. Its description of what enlightenment is can be very mundane. But how could someone spend a lifetime in these kinds of practices that are clearly beneficial, but not achieve something of ultimate spiritual value? And my answer is that I don’t know. What I know is that Jesus is the way, truth and life, and anything outside of him is chaos, lies and death. But what the humble, earnest Zen monk has achieved, I don’t know. I thought the same thing when reading “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat” by Rudyard Kipling.

Part of the value in Zen is that it teaches you how to clear out your mind, and that seems to be legitimate. But what are you filling it back in with? Cast out one demon, and seven more return. Zen is supposed to bring some kind of healing from the chaos of the modern world, but without Christ, what kind of healing program is it? If the problems of the world are rooted in the rejection of Christ, how can an atheistic spirituality be a solution? The Catholic monk and the Jewish lesbian share a camaraderie in Japanese Zen. But then what are you trying to accomplish in a spiritual discipline if it does not bring you to the Holy Spirit? What other spirit are you connecting to?

And the Zennist will say, “There is no spirit that I’m connecting to,” but I don’t think that’s really true. There is no such thing as a spirit-neutral field. You may not be interested in the revolution, but the revolution is interested in you. The Christian Zennist could say, “I use Zen meditation to connect with Jesus,” but then how can you encourage Zen meditation for someone who doesn’t believe in Jesus? And how can you connect with Jesus through a means that developed in alienation from the Christian tradition? That would mean that Jesus did not give us everything we need. The command in Deuteronomy 30:13 to not go across the sea to find the secret hidden path to God is rejected by the Zen Christian, as is the promise in 2 Peter 1:3 that we have been given all things that concern life and how to live properly. I am unwilling to accept that Zen meditation is the most precious treasure worth pursuing but that Jesus and the apostles glossed over it entirely.

In the 60s people took LSD to see deep inside themselves and find what’s really there. But their mistake was assuming that something good and pure was at the bottom of the well, when really it was just mud. They opened these doors that became difficult to close, and things came out. If you don’t have the framework to understand and organize what you’re pulling out of your deeper self, then it would be better to have never opened those doors to begin with.

Maybe Zen Buddhism has a parallel to the kind of suburban hesychasm that diaspora Orthodox monasteries teach, especially the Essex community. Anyone can say the Jesus Prayer in silent meditation, open the nous, and connect deeper with God. Except no they can’t, because to uncover these deeper things in your unconscious requires you to lay them in order and examine them very carefully. Most people aren’t going to do that because it requires relinquishing everything that you care about. You have to re-examine all of your assumptions about what is true and what matters in life, and that’s a cost higher than most people will pay. Otherwise, it will either break your psyche, or you will come under spiritual delusion. So, it would be better for most people to just say the Lord’s Prayer and Psalms and not touch the Jesus Prayer. That’s just as true for monastics as for parishioners.

Likewise, Zen Buddhism became something for drug-users to substitute their parents’ Catholicism with. It teaches you to dump out your thoughts, but it gives you nothing to replace them with because Zen doesn’t believe in anything. Zen by its definition offers nothing to replace your thoughts with, and it’s hostile to such a notion. Literally, Zen is spiritually vacuous. There is no framework for how to reassemble your thoughts and assumptions once you take them out.

Zen tries to see through everything to what it really is, but then it rejects whatever you would define such a thing as. And so you see through everything so much that you never see anything at all. Because all meaning is inherently arbitrary and subjective, no meaning actually exists.

Again, the Catholic monk and the Jewish lesbian sit in meditation together and empty themselves, and they both think that they are advancing spiritually. But that means that Zen states nothing positive, in the sense that it puts nothing forward. It can only negate. The Catholic and secular Jew can agree that the medieval Catholic spiritual tradition is insufficient, but they cannot agree on what to replace it with except for more emptying out. This isn’t progress though because it’s not moving towards anything. Maybe Zen isn’t nihilism, strictly, but it’s endless negation. I am reminded of St Paul’s warning in Colossians 2:18 about those who intrude into things they have not seen and take on false humility and the worship of angels.

St Paul did not risk his life travelling the world to preach emptying-out and rejecting categories. If anything, he taught a filling-up. If Zen were so beneficial, then there would be something resembling it in the Bible. You can find a few verses here and there that sort of rhyme with Zen, such as 2 Corinthians 10:4-5 or St Dionysius’s Mystical Theology, but really this is something almost entirely absent from the Christian tradition, which Carl Jung correctly points out even within his own conceit and blindness. The Zennist might insist that it doesn’t contradict Christianity, and there may be some truth to that, but implied within the Christian syncretist is that Jesus did not really give us everything we need, and perhaps what he gave us is actually deficient. Jesus gave us a good starting place, but it is completed by Zen Buddhism, which historically has been explored by Westerners from the starting place of rejecting Christianity altogether. And so if you try to incorporate Zen or yoga or any Oriental spirituality into your Christianity, you will slowly slip away from Christ altogether until he’s just one of many well-intentioned but misunderstood sages over the millennia.

What about the Zen master himself? For centuries the tradition has passed on in a documented lineage in China and Japan. There has to be something about Zen that made countless people eager to devote their lives to it, and maybe they found something authentic and real that is absent in post-war America. But what they didn’t find is Christ. Why dedicate your life to virginity and prayer if there is no Christ to base it on and no eternity to look towards? What is even the purpose? It is as St Paul wrote, that if the resurrection is just a misunderstanding or a historical exaggeration, then we are the greatest fools.

But if we find that there is a purpose to being a Zen monk other than Christ, then that means that Zen doesn’t lead to Christ. If you can spend your life in a Zen monastery and become holy in some regard, then what does holiness even mean? What have you gained if you missed Christ? The Zen monk gains something, and maybe that makes him better than the catty, backstabbing people in Orthodox monasteries, but what it doesn’t give him is truth. And really, the Zen monk doesn’t want truth, because he doesn’t believe in the category of truth – he just wants to strip away all delusion until there’s nothing left.

I always say that you can only know how to live if you know how to die. If you’ve come to terms with death, then you won’t fear it, and you will make better life choices. People spend their lives trying to shove as much pleasure into it as possible, and then they get that cancer diagnosis, and they panic and try to bargain with mad science for more time.

But in Zen Buddhism, there is little or no belief in anything that happens after life. You spend your life in a Zen monastery learning to sit in silence, but for what reason? What are you going to do with what you’ve gained except just sit in silence even more? The Orthodox monk sits in silence and reorients his thoughts, and that gives him the ability to repent more deeply and connect with God more closely and love other people more authentically. But Zen doesn’t have a concept of sin, God or obligation to other people because there are no fixed categories of morality or metaphysics. So what is the Zen ascetic going to do with his enlightenment and satori? What is the purpose of satori beyond the satori itself?

Zen Buddhism is all about learning how to live in this world, and maybe it has genuine wisdom for that. I thought that a lot of Everyday Zen was good advice that we could all benefit from, although it was intimately tied up with some very bad advice. But that is all that Zen can do. We are called to follow Christ into death and resurrection. St Ignatius Brianchaninov wrote, “Let us use our earthly life, this great gift of God, as it should be used, as God intends it to be used, to come to know God and our own selves, and to arrange our eternal fate properly.” [The Threshold, page 151] The most from that that Zen might be able to help us with is to know our own selves, but for all it focuses stripping away delusions and seeing the naked truth, it is completely blind to help with any of the rest. St Ignatius continues, “Let us not lose any time; let us use our time wisely. … We are here [on earth] to kill the death that killed us, using faith, repentance, and the cross. If we do this, we will find our lost Eden.”

Books Read

When I decided to research Zen, I went to the local used bookstore and bought whatever in the Buddhism section looked useful, knowing that I wouldn’t read them all. These are the books that I ended up reading, which I read in their entirety. I am not necessarily endorsing these books.

An Introduction to Zen Buddhism by D. T. Suzuki, 1964 edition. The classic text in English that first introduced Zen to the West. Carl Jung wrote the foreword.

Zen in America: Five Teachers and the Search for an American Buddhism by Helen Tworkov, 1994 edition. Biographies on five American Zen masters and a brief history of Zen’s prior development. This book was actually very interesting.

Everyday Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck, Plus edition. A collection of talks given by an American Zen teacher. The back of the book calls it “an enduring classic” and is endorsed by a Benedictine monk and Robert Aitken.

Teachings of Zen: Revised and Expanded Edition, translated by Thomas Clearly. A small coffee table book of sayings from historic Zen teachers that I presume is the primary sources of the tradition. Like the Zen Church Fathers. Published by Barnes and Noble, so it’s that kind of thing.