He concluded that attachments to this life are what produce suffering, and the Buddha sought a way beyond the suffering of the implicit processes of human life. Five-hundred years before the advent of Jesus Christ, the Buddha was profoundly affected by observing sickness, old age, and death. The prescribed remedy is detachment, contemplation, ascesis and spiritual discipline leading to a “religious experience,” or an enlightened state. Pain and pleasure are two sides of the same coin. Things are not as stable and permanent as they appear to be to the five senses. (Of course the remedies are quite different and unique to each tradition.) The Hindu Upanishads (sacred texts), for example, teach that life is changeable by nature, transitory and ephemeral, lacking fundamental substance. All three religious traditions-Eastern Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism-find this condition unnatural and untenable and seek a spiritual remedy for it. One of the first areas where Eastern Christian spirituality converges with Eastern religions is the with diagnosis of the human condition. Theme One: The Diagnosis of the Human Condition I believe this appropriately expresses the spiritual yearnings of both Hindus and Buddhists as well as our Eastern Christian spiritual tradition. We seem to have an inbuilt desire to transcend our humanity, to reach out to something absolute and enduring that leaves the limitations of our bodily selves behind. It is widely accepted that there is more to reality than just our own conscious selves and the tangible world around us. Let me begin here with an introductory quote to set the stage, from a book titled Fellow Workers with God: Orthodox Thinking on Theosis: This is where the Lord’s closest disciples-Peter, James and John-saw the Transfigured Lord in His numinous glory! Would they have believed Jesus Christ was the promised Messiah and the Son of God, had they not experienced His Transfiguration, or witnessed the miracles, the empty tomb and the burial cloth, and His physical (re)appearance after His death before His ascension? Would St Paul have become an apostle and martyr for Christ-after mercilessly persecuting his followers-had it not been for a life-changing post-ascension spiritual encounter that literally knocked him off his horse on the road to Damascus? Christian doctrine developed in response to spiritual experience. Let’s not forget that the first followers of Christ-the Apostles-were persuaded that Christ was God not merely by doctrine (i.e., the Hebrew prophecies of the Messiah), but also by spiritual experience! Recall the Transfiguration which we still celebrate annually in our Orthodox Church calendar. However this emphasis on spiritual experience has an important precedent.
#Transfigure thyself how to#
One of the reformers of Hinduism who introduced Hinduism to America in the late 19th century, Swami Vivekananda, put it succinctly: “Don’t believe anything-experience!”įor Christians the conversation with the Eastern seeker will necessarily lead to doctrine-because we cannot explain how to overcome death and make sense of human suffering without reference to the suffering, death, burial and resurrection of our Archetype, Jesus Christ! Their interest is (generally speaking) in spiritual experience: liberation from death and suffering, from the cycle of death and rebirth, liberation from human mortality and how that is achieved. What we miss is that for the Eastern spiritual seeker the interest is not doctrine or theology. Generally this approach we take with Eastern religion spiritual devotees misses the mark. As Christians we have generally been taught to lead with information: doctrine, theology, tradition, church history and ecclesiology. I want to say at the outset that by taking this approach of comparative spirituality versus doctrine, I am not trying to blur or minimize the very real and critical differences between these religious traditions. What I hope to share are ways we can better communicate our spiritual tradition to Eastern religion seekers, and hopefully at the same time better understand our rich spiritual tradition too. I will not be doing a doctrine-by-doctrine comparison. Tonight I will be speaking about some “points of contact” and common spiritual themes in Eastern Christian spirituality and Eastern religion, especially Hinduism and Buddhism.
It’s a bit longer than most of our pieces, but it didn’t make sense to us to break it up. He has kindly given us permission to publish it in full. The following is the manuscript of a talk recently given by Ancient Faith Today host Kevin Allen at an Advent Forum in Merced, California.
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