Wake Up Read Free

nonviolence, to turn the other cheek to your enemy’s blows, to give your cloak when your shirt is demanded of you, to go beyond loving your friends and relatives and learn to love your enemy, and the central injunction to love your neighbor as yourself. These teachings are totally consonant with the Buddhist ethic of nonviolence, and resonate powerfully with the Mahayana’s messianic emphasis on selflessness, heroic tolerance, love, and compassion. On the wisdom level, Jesus’ statements that the kingdom of God lies within you are fully compatible with the Buddhist vision of the Buddha-nature in all beings, or Nagarjuna’s famous statement of nonduality, that the deepest reality is ultimate voidness as the womb of relational compassion ( shunyatakarunagarbham ). And Jesus’ powerful statement to the legalist priestly hierarchy he faced that “I am the way, the light, and the truth!” can be understood not as dictating religious exclusivism for a particular church or faith and furious intolerance of others, but rather as insisting by living example that divinity and salvation for each person lies within herself or himself as an individual, and not through membership in some denomination or institution.
    The deeds of St. Thomas in the Kerala area of India are very much like those of any Buddhist itinerant monk and preacher. The Nicene Council’s editing of the Gospels, especially the excision of St. Thomas’s Gospel, among others; the banning of the Buddhist or Indian doctrine of transmigration of souls, such as was championed even by the semi-martyred Origen; and Constantine’s transformation of Buddhism into a tool of the Roman state—these obscure the Christ-Buddha connection; but, nevertheless, it was perceived by Mani and others closer to the time. Professor Thomas McEvilley mentions “early 3rd-4th century Christian writers such as Hippolytus and Epiphanius” who wrote about a man named Scythianus, who brought to Alexandria “the doctrine of the Two Principles” from India around 50 A.D. According to them, Scythianus’ pupil Terebinthus presented himself as a “Buddha” and went to Palestine and Judaea, where he met the Apostles, who apparently condemned him. He then settled in Babylon, where he transmitted his teachings to Mani, who himself founded what could be called Persian syncretic Buddho-Christianity, known as Manicheism, which was the youthful religion of Augustine of Hippo, who later condemned it.
    So in spite of the insistence by Christians that their teachings are sui generis and come down only from God and have no connection with any other movement on the planet, Mahayana Buddhism and Christianity have very strong “family resemblances.” It is likely that Kerouac understood the deeper, broader dimensions of Mahayana Buddhism better than his peers, either those like myself, who were strongly motivated to break away from their Christian background, or those who were receiving their knowledge through the prism of East Asian Chinese and Japanese cultures, and especially through the Ch’an/Zen connection, where meditation and samurai-like hardball “no-thought” are emphasized.
    Most important to examine is Kerouac’s personal understanding of enlightenment, which he seems to assume is the experience of the oneness of all things, and yet he allows also for the persistence of engagement with a transformed relativity. Though he oftens mentions no-thing-ness and even nothing, he refuses to reify any sort of disappearance, and most often talks of “the holy emptiness,” not nothingness, and emphasizes that “emptiness is form” just as much as “form is emptiness.” He blew me away by referring to the “Womb of the Tathagata,” and seems comfortable in the profound realm that Nagarjuna calls shunyatakarunagarbham, “emptiness the womb of compassion.” He offers many accounts of his personal experiences in meditation (he knows all the original terms, dhyana, samadhi, samapatti ) toward