An interview with the author of Christianity for Buddhists (published in 2002 by St Austin’s Press) Comments from readers are most welcome.

I wanted to share my experience with others. I had been drawn to Eastern mysticism since my youth in the late 1960s, and had become increasingly involved in Buddhism, studying under two very powerful teachers. Yet the deeper I got into it the more uneasy I felt and that I was at odds with my Christian roots. In the end I had to face the fact that in all but ideology I was thoroughly stamped in the Christian mould. It turned out that for me Buddhism was a preparation for my rediscovery of God and Christ. I felt that if it could be that for me, it could be that for others too, and at the same time I might in some small way be able to help the two religions to value each other and dispel mutual suspicion born of ignorance of each other’s depths.

The word "Buddha" means Awakened One, or something close to that. It was a term given both to describe and venerate the Indian prince Siddhartha Gautama of the Shakya tribe 500 years before Christ in what is now Nepal.

Siddartha dedicated his life to finding an answer to four types of suffering endemic to life – birth, ageing, sickness and death. He came to see that all worldly things are impermanent and in perpetual flux, and that ordinary identity or self results from previous struggle – what Buddhists call "self-clinging". There is no inherent self in things, at least not of a kind one can qualify with worldly characteristics such as colour, age, sex and so on. All of the things by which we know ourselves are the results of causes and conditions and are radically impermanent. All that really lasts is what he called "the unconditioned", whose ultimate or absolute nature he didn’t speculate upon.

The Buddha was atheistic only insofar as he refuted all positive qualifications of Absolute Being as mere speculation or opinion. But included in his refutation was atheism itself, which, as a belief system, he saw as no more than a contrary form of speculative, opinionated absolutism. What he knew from ordinary experience was that the continuity of what is always changing is, in itself, a mysterious reality that is always free of knowable characteristics. Its presence and nature can be known but only by properly understanding the ordinary things that conceal it. As soon as the immediate fact of impermanence is directly perceived, so too is the continuity of what is changing. And that paradoxical perception allows the apprehension or revelation of the hidden unconditioned centre of all experience.

Our perception of continuity is an act of understanding built into all of our perceptions. Normally we don’t notice it but take it for granted. It is the unspoken, unspeakable ground that all our perceptions assume but don’t normally highlight as significant. The Buddha recognised that it is not only significant but is the fundamental source of all that exists, and is an infinite wellspring of goodness, happiness and peace. His teaching, essentially, was a training in the art of appreciating and living in the light of that mysterious unconditioned reality.

The Buddha taught "anatman", which was a refutation of his culture’s belief in "atman". Atman signifies self in the sense of a personal essence or self-existing identity. The personal self had been thought of, by earlier Indian tradition, as a spark that had become separated from a Universal Self or Atman, known as Brahman. The deepest yearning of these sparks was to become reunited with their source once more.

The Buddha refuted that way of thinking. One’s personal identity, he believed, was wholly a product of causes and conditions. When these causes and conditions were cut through or interrupted, all that remained was the unconditioned, not some eternal soul or self that transmigrated from life to life (or ascended to heaven, for that matter).

I don’t think this need be as alarming to Christians as it at first appears. All that the Buddha discovered about the worldly self was that it does not subsist in and of itself. This actually confirms the Christian belief that God created and continues to recreate everything from nothing. When you analyse creatures thoroughly, you don’t find a fundamental self-existing substance. You find nothing at all! They exist, sure enough, but not by their own substance. Rather, they exist only by the will of God. All this means is that the eternality of the soul that Christians believe in is perpetually given by God. The soul has no eternality of its own. The Buddha’s view is absolutely accurate in this respect and can be of great value in preparing us to appreciate the true fullness of the gift of existence, whether in this mortal life or in the hereafter.

There is a great diversity of opinion amongst Buddhists as to how to interpret the Buddha’s teachings on conditioned existence. My own understanding is that for him the creative force that was the primary cause of conditioned existence was self-clinging, which arose spontaneously from the unconditioned and then, being ignorant of its own true nature, continued to perpetuate conditioned existence according to its own inner laws of self-reflexive action.

For the Buddha, lasting peace could not be attained in conditioned existence but only in the unconditioned from which it first arose. And so his path consisted of renouncing self-clinging whilst respecting the reality of what already existed.

I personally never felt satisfied that that particular bearing provided an adequate basis for relating to the world. As a creature and as a Christian, I love creatureliness, and all the tragic and comedic aspects of its nature. These emotional qualities seem particularly well-developed in Christian societies. There is a certain ambiguity in Buddhism in this question of creativity. That first spontaneous arising of self-clinging cannot itself be a result of previous self-clinging. And so there is an opening here to the creativity of the unconditioned ground of existence, especially if, as the evidence of modern cosmological science suggests, that first spontaneous event possesses enough information to determine in large measure the subsequent unfolding of the universe.

This opening is recognised and much more thoroughly examined in later schools of Buddhism such as Zen, Tibetan Vajrayana, and the Chinese Pure Land Schools. However, although the unconditioned is regarded non-theistically in these schools the ambiguity is still not resolved since most regard the unconditioned as intrinsically mnemonic or mental in some sense. What kind of creative mind could be non-personal? And what kind of Absolute creative Mind could not be God?

Yes, I think they have, but their position is confusing due to the initial emphasis in their teachings of self-clinging as the cause of all conditioned existence and the suffering that it entails. The way they eventually try to resolve this is by treating the teachings on conditioned existence as an explication of psychopathology, while developing an elemental cosmology based on spontaneity and laws of self-organisation or mandala principle, immanent in the unconditioned primordial ground. Psychosomatic wellbeing then involves attuning oneself to these intrinsically hidden characteristics of reality.

By recognising that Christ completes the deficiencies of Buddhist teaching with regard to creatureliness. Conditioned existence is the result of self-clinging - not because of ignorance of its own nature, however, but because it is inspired by the Divine will of the creator God. And creaturely propriety, though it does involve non-attachment, is better understood as perfect obedience to the nature God intended us to have. Non-attachment serves not to help us avoid becoming tangled up in suffering, but to become fully human in the image of God. If this is held on to and clearly understood, then the Buddhist perception of non-self and its practices of mindfulness and non-attachment can become very powerful preparations for prayer, in a way reminiscent of Romano Guardini’s teachings on prayerful recollectedness. I think that Mahayana Buddhism with its Bodhisattva vow to defer one’s own enlightenment until all others have been brought to enlightenment, already presents an intimation of Christ’s self-giving love. But rooted as it is in the teachings which see personal karma or action as nature’s primary creative force, there remains an important and decisive obstacle to communion with Christ.

* * *