Buddha treads the Via Dolorosa
By: Ronan Mclaverty-Head
Tags: Interfaith, Spirituality, Buddhism, Religion, Christianity

I take refuge in the Buddha

But which Buddha?

Down the road from where I live, an old Victorian hotel has been converted into a temple of the Amida Buddhist order. Here, the chant Namo Amida Bu (“I call out to Amida Buddha”) calls upon the mercy of Amitābha/Amida, the celestial Buddha of compassion.

Amida Buddha in the Pure Land. Source: Amida Mandala.

For those not familiar with Mahayanan iconography, Amida is often shown with the colour red (he is the Buddha of the setting sun). His dying vow — on this earth, or some other earth, or somewhere — was that those who call upon his name would be reborn in the Pure Land, a kind of Buddhist paradise where enlightenment is more easily obtained.

The friendly folk at the temple seem agnostic as to the metaphysics of all of this. No doubt many Amida Buddhists believe in the literal, biographical ontology of Amida. Others are content to see in Amida a kind of celestial love that accepts them just as they are. “Amida” offers grace from without and that is enough. I take refuge in that.

Or I could take refuge in Shakyamuni Buddha — you know, the Buddha. Myth and history co-exist in the story of Siddartha but I certainly take refuge in its splendid archetypes: innocence lost, crisis, the search for enlightenment in all the wrong places, the battle with the ego, and finally, one hopes, equilibrium.

Most of all I believe this second kind of “buddha” is earthly embodiment. Incarnation. It is the human form of a truth — the Kingdom is within. I take refuge here.

The Gospel of Thomas says it best:

Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, ‘Look, the Kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will get there first. If they say, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will get there first. Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you…”

I take refuge in the Dharma

Standing orders in Jerusalem — given by Pilate and understood and supported by Caiaphas — required the immediate arrest of religious troublemakers at Passover. If we want to understand Jesus’ execution, then, we must pay attention to what Jesus did at the temple. His was a total and visceral rejection of a theocratic order, whose chief cleric had been appointed by Rome.

You see it with the cursing of the fig tree. In leaf and inviting from afar but barren and curse-worthy in fact. You are full of the bones of the dead and all manner of filth. This is the dharma, the way things are. Can we bear it? Can we take refuge in it? Read Matthew 23 and see that a man who would say even half of this, with a crowd at his back willing to proclaim him king and a reputation for sorcery on his accusers’ tongues, will, of course, find himself on a Roman cross.

The events of CE 70 and the destruction of the temple are no doubt seeping into Matthew’s report here, but no matter, we can still learn: “See, your house is left to you, desolate.” Jesus came to tell us the hard truth, not to become a fetish for our pietism.

I take refuge in the Sangha

Photo by James Coleman on Unsplash.

I take refuge in an open communion, both in the narrow sense as it refers to the eucharist but also in the wider sense. I believe this because I believe the story of the Passion demands it.

The Last Supper makes this particularly clear. For many Christians, the Last Supper seems to have made Jesus into a kind of Dionysus in which by eating his flesh we become joined to God in a mysterious union, a union only available to the worthy. This may be true on one level, and like all good myths and their ritual enactments, there are levels of meaning here. It is true in that in the eucharist we are bound to Jesus, but not in some strange act of spiritual ecstasy but rather in a very practical way. Jesus did not intend to replace one set of pietist rituals with another. The grand failure of Christianity is that it has become just another whitewashed tomb.

The Last Supper was the last supper of many similar meals, and it is Jesus’ social eating prior to the Passion that offers insight into how Jesus used food and feasting to drive a message of love and inclusion. His fellowship at meals was frequently criticized (Matt 11:19) because it broke Jewish purity laws when he sat down with “tax agents and sinners.”

Jesus’ view of purity ran perpendicular to that of the religious authorities. His cleansing of the temple was an act of aggression against the corruption of the priestly elite (and from that moment on, he was doomed). But then he went further, saying over the bread and the wine in the upper room that “this is my body” and “this is my blood.”

Read both in companion with the temple incident and Jesus’ history with food, he did not mean, “here is my body, here is my blood” referring to symbols of his own flesh, but rather something like, “these are my substitute sacrifices, replacing the blood and flesh of animals being sacrificed at the Temple.” You no longer need the priests.

As he dies on the Cross this prophetic enactment reaches its crescendo. No longer the blood of a lamb in the temple but the Blood of the Lamb who will rip away the barriers that separate humans from God, not as some cosmic, literal act of atonement but as a symbol, a lesson.

Siddartha found the same and the earth goddess bore witness to its truth: we do not need the sects or the clerics or even the gods — enlightenment is here, within. Whether under the bodhi tree or at Golgotha, this is nirvana, that the sangha, this refuge, is for all.