I saw this article linked over at Ignatius Scoop, and thought it was too good to pass up. Be sure to read the whole thing.
A few highlights:
The Buddha said that the world is like a house being consumed by flames, and that we are inside it. I remember when I first read that, almost forty years ago. I thought, someone has stared into the depths of suffering and has told what he has seen.To me, his statement seemed ironically to contrast with and to confirm a truth most evident about Catholicism, in which I had been raised. It appeared to be burning up in front of me, but, at the same time, it could no longer recognize the flames. I wouldn't have put it this way then, because I vaguely welcomed the changes that were occurring in the Church, but as I look back on it now, I believe we were losing our nerve. We refused to appreciate how deeply into the very particles of matter and spirit our suffering and sin were implicated, and how vain were our attempts to engineer a new Church, a new society, a new human being, and a new age. We saw evil, but it was outside us, we thought, in "structures of oppression."
We made felt banners and no longer talked about Hell or sin or guilt or penance. We no longer knelt much, or fasted, but feasted instead. We gathered around a table and held hands or played guitars. We sang about happiness and love. We did street theater to speak Truth to Powers and Principalities. We pretended we were already in Heaven. We supposed we were as gods, and as The Whole Earth Catalog put it, that we might as well get good at it.
We were no longer serious. The only real sin seemed to be to believe that one was a sinner. So why be Catholic—or Christian—at all? Why bother going to church or to confession? Judging by the decline in church attendance over the past decades, I was far from being the only one who asked those questions.
Kierkegaard has a parable in which a clown, not having time to take off his makeup, suddenly appears onstage and shouts "Fire," but the audience thinks it is part of a comedy. They laugh—but soon they perish in the flames. While I sat on my living room couch and read the Buddha's sermon, however, I saw that the flames onstage were real.
As I continued my study, Buddhist Tibet became part of that stage. China had set it afire and it was burning during the 1960s and 1970s. People were fleeing and telling about the conflagration in such vivid terms that it seemed to have sent its smoke all over the world. As Tibetan Buddhist elementary logic texts put it, the existence of smoke, seen on a mountain pass, entails that fire is present there. I could see that smoke from where I was and so I could understand the existence of the fire. Anyone can still catch a glimpse of it, even from a living room couch, just by paging through some books on Tibet.
The omnipresent felt banners make their appearance. I vow that if I ever become a bishop, I will ban the use of felt in my diocese.
Long story short, the author, John B. Buescher, becomes disillusioned, and becomes a Buddhist. After some years, though, he becomes disillusioned with it, too:
That Tibetan Buddhism suffers from sectarian violence came as a revelation to many in the West, where in the post-1960s era the religion has often been portrayed as the very exemplar of gentle tolerance. This perception reverses a common 19th-century Western view of Tibetan Buddhism, with its rosaries, monasteries, strict clerical hierarchies, robes, chants, elaborate liturgies and set prayers, as a pagan counterpart to Papistry.But if many in the West at that time saw Tibetan Buddhism as having supposedly corrupted the simple, pure message of the Buddha, freethinkers and liberals often saw it as a living fossil, surviving in the mountains while Buddhism elsewhere was either diluted or, as in India, annihilated by Islamic invasions and Hindu opposition. They saw Tibetan Buddhism not only as a rarity in itself but also as a base from which they could launch a critique of Christian orthodoxy.
In other words, many Westerners admire Buddhism not for the thing itself, but because it is not Christianity. If you are a radical who wishes to attack Christianity, any cudgel will do.
I am neither a Buddhist nor a prophet. I have reverted to the Catholicism that gave joy to my youth. How did this happen? Buddhism focuses on the life of the monk and nun, who have renounced the world in an effort to achieve enlightenment and thereby climb out of the cycle of suffering transmigration through rebirth. Compared to Christianity, it has only a rudimentary teaching on the governance of society or on the value of the family. Throughout Asia, Buddhist clerics usually have a lot to say and do at funerals but little or nothing at weddings and births. This sensibility has found fertile ground in the West, where we have spent the last few centuries attacking the principles that encourage the regeneration of the given structures of society—especially of marriage and the family.Several years ago, after spending more than a decade researching the early history of Western interest in Buddhism and seeing how it was tied into the growth in the West of radicalism and atheism, I realized how thoroughly these views are themselves historically conditioned and are therefore neither necessary nor ultimately given. Whatever "Progress" is, it is neither linear nor inevitable nor irreversible. That applies, I concluded, to the modernist revolution itself, the uncritical acceptance of which, I further came to see, had drawn us toward chaos, into what John Paul II called "the Culture of Death." This led me to admit the existence of natural law, which asserted itself despite the massive efforts in our culture to deny it. This law pointed to the existence of a Legislator. And the institution that held most unwaveringly to what I had concluded was the truth of human nature was the Catholic Church. How had it done that in the face of so much in the culture that denied it? It could not be through the individual merits of its members or its clergy—their sins and failings were manifold and were often on display in the newspapers. As with smoke and fire, I concluded that if it was not the individuals in the Church, then the institution itself, in a way that was mostly hidden to me, benefited from intelligent guidance beyond its mortal capacity.
As a result, I achieved an odd kind of enlightenment. Or a number of small ones that added up to this: I realized that what I most urgently needed was repentance. Not for the sin of holding on to an infantile form of faith, but rather for turning away from the Faith and looking to myself for salvation. After almost forty years, I saw the smoke on a mountain pass. God, I felt very strongly, had lit the fire. And the trail of smoke led back home. All these inferential steps I am describing make it sound like a series of trap doors shutting, but really it felt more as if, in the dark, a person I knew was drawing closer and closer to me in silence—"anthropomorphic" though that may be. I made the sound of one (closed) hand clapping (the breast). Mea maxima culpa. And I began the "yoga" of genuflecting before Him at whose name every knee shall bend.
Bewildered at my turning back to the Church, someone asked me why I had chosen Catholicism, of all religions (Could there be a worse one? was implicit in the question). I could only answer that I did not have that kind of choice. When the door opens onto the truth, you can walk through it or you can walk away from it, but in honesty you cannot just look for another door.
In religion it is not enough for people to do the best that they can. That can never be enough. Our life is more perilous than that. Everything is on fire. We cannot put out the flames, for we too are engulfed. I pray to Jesus Christ not because he was the teacher who showed us how to do the best we can, but because he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Miserere mei, Domine.
At least two of us have found our way into this pew. Paul Williams, author of The Unexpected Way: On Converting from Buddhism to Catholicism, is a former practitioner and continuing scholar of Tibetan Buddhism. He is also a relatively new Catholic. He writes about why the two religions are irreconcilable. Buddhists are not theists. And, despite talk about the unknowable "Other," Christians most certainly are theists—at least those who have not decided that God is a projection of a limited mind. Williams also argues that reincarnation cannot ultimately provide a basis for religious practice because it reduces the significance of individual lives to a vanishing point.
Buddhism has always needed to shore up "conventional" truth—including moral truth—because it is undermined by the doctrines of selflessness, impermanence, and emptiness. This is why Chesterton wrote that Buddhism was not a creed but a doubt. It is plain to me that Buddhist sages are similar to Christians in their capacity to sin. Buddhism, however, by locating our suffering in ignorance, rather than in the will, and its cure in knowledge, makes it difficult to think that one who had really experienced enlightenment could sin. Buddhists are often inclined, I believe, not to recognize enlightened beings' sins as sins, but to explain them away as "skillful means," actions that, to the unenlightened, look like sins but that spring from someplace beyond good and evil. Christians have sometimes broached this sort of rationalization—"To the pure all things are pure"—but have generally hesitated to insist on it. Christian doctrine weighs strongly against it.
Welcome back, Mr. Buescher.