THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation


JESUS AS ZEN MASTER
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached October 8, 1995 at
The First Unitarian Church of Honolulu

It may seem like a truism, but Jesus of Nazareth was not a Western religious teacher. What we call "Western religion" is really Westernized. We took the teachings of an Eastern religious teacher and transmogrified them into something that fits more closely our habitual ways of thinking about these things.

In Western Christianity, we have literally turned religion into ideology. We have made it a set of competing truth claims. A religious person is seen as one who believes what they are instructed to believe by their chosen or inherited religious tradition. We see this among Unitarian Universalists, as well, although as many times as we have won this battle in our heritage you would think we would have stopped doing it. For the last 450 years we have eight times walked right up to the edge of saying, "Look, you folk over there, you just don't talk right about religion. You're out. We're not going to have you with us any longer." Just before we pushed them over the edge, somebody said, "I don't think that's what we're about." We have backed off, saying, "Oh, all right, you can be in, but for heaven sakes, mind your manners."

Most recently, of course, we have had this all around the country with respect to paganism. The neo-pagans drive a lot of us nuts -- it wouldn't be so bad if they weren't having so darn much fun. It is difficult to go out there and talk to your Baptist minister friend about doing something together in our common interest and have him say, "Well, we'd like to, but what about those witches?"

It is difficult to explain. We have backed off from that one after much shilly-shallying. At our General Assembly this year we finally put the piece in our Unitarian Universalist Purposes and Principals that those folk wanted in there. And, you know, they were right -- darn it.

So even we have difficulty with this. You will often hear Unitarian Universalists say with a straight face, "It's nice to be a Unitarian Universalist; you can believe anything you want." While that's true, the giveaway is that as long as you're thinking of Unitarian Universalism in terms of "you can believe anything you want" you are still stuck inside that Western misinterpretation of Jeshua bar Joseph, of mistaking his teaching for another set of beliefs to be set there alongside everybody else's, to argue whose is right.

We have turned the teachings of Jesus into statements to be believed and a set of moral rules. No, worse than this, we have turned all of this into something to be merely approved of. After all, we aren't really expected to BEHAVE AS IF what Jesus said was really true, or to actually live the ethics he taught. I mean, how many of you have said or heard people say, "Well, I'm a (fill in the blank) but I don't practice it" and think they have said something intelligent? We are, however, expected to behave as if we approved of his teachings. It is the appearance of approval that has become crucial. In fact, one of the scary things about moral issues in our world today is that it is no longer a question of whether or not you did something which damaged yourself or someone else. You are immoral if you failed to scream bloody murder when somebody behaved as if they didn't disapprove of naughtiness.

It is not merely hypocrisy, although hypocrisy is interesting. I used to be filled with righteous indignation at the First Baptist Church of Garden Grove, where I was raised. Some people appeared to approve of things on Sunday morning that I knew perfectly well they didn't follow the rest of the week. And my father said to me, "Mike, you must understand. Hypocrites are honest people. They really do feel both ways about the same thing at the same time."

I want to suggest this morning that Jesus came from an entirely different teaching tradition and had a totally different religious agenda. From those portions of the New Testament that are pretty clearly deeply rooted in the tradition of the teachings of Jesus (Note I'm being very cautious here.) what he was up to and the ways in which he did it were quite different from what we have taken religion to be in the Western world.

My title this morning, "Jesus As Zen Master," might lead you to believe that I was going to allege that somehow the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Buddhism are the same thing. They're not. The cultural roots of those two traditions are so different that they are literally speaking a different spiritual language. They have taken the human experience and cut it up very differently.

Now, it's also true that there is some historical evidence that Buddhist missionaries did indeed visit the eastern Mediterranean about the time that Jesus was around. There are a number of clues. King Akosha, king of one of the larger kingdoms in India, sent out Buddhist missionaries. This is not too terribly surprising. Trade was going back and forth across those hinterlands. We like to think that somehow, because the maps in our map book tend to stop just to the east of the Mediterranean -- which is, after all, the only part that we're interested in,we Westerners -- that nobody ever walked off the edge of the map to all those other parts. There was a good deal of travelling back and forth; in fact, much of the history of Palestine is the history of people from off there in the East marching back and forth and doing a lot of property damage in the process.

What I want to talk about is that Jesus' teachings, as I read them, are thoroughly Semitic, but the style of teaching is very, very Eastern. Perhaps the nearest analog to that style of teaching is the style that you and I have come to know as the style of teaching of the Zen Master.

You will find in Jesus' teaching and in the style of teaching of the Zen Master almost literally no set of rules you're supposed to follow. In fact, the Buddhist commentaries on the Eight-Fold Path section called Right Behavior, are quite fascinating. Right Behavior includes, "You know, it's really not too smart to do stupid things." However, the commentaries consistently indicate that nobody is capable of Right Behavior until you understand who you are and how, in fact, you are connected to the rest of the world out there. And once you do understand that, Right Behavior happens without any intentionality whatsoever.

One of the interesting aspects of Jesus' teaching is the suggestion that those who would save their life--by being all properly moral and everything--will lose it. God's not stupid. If you are nice in order to get into heaven you don't get to get into heaven. God knows when you're putting Him &/or Her on.

Let me give you a flavor, first, of some of the Eastern style of teaching and then move over to some of the flavor of Jesus' style of teaching and see if you can see some of the parallels that I'm pointing to here and some of the changed insights into the teachings of Jesus that might come out of this.

The standard Buddhist Zen koan is, "You know the sound of two hands clapping. What is the sound of one hand clapping?" The student is supposed to take the koan and sit in meditation until the student "gets" the koan. Not understands it intellectually. There are wonderful stories of students going in to the Zen Master and saying, "Oh, I've got it figured, Master. The sound of one hand clapping is mu, is infinity, is everything, is the all, is the whole that we are all a part of, is Buddha Nature." The Zen Master typically picks up his ink stick and thwacks the student, POW! right between the eyes. Not because he's wrong, but because the koan has not been made a part of who he is. The student has not wrestled with it until the answer can be lived.

Sometimes the koans come in the form of stories. And of course, this was very characteristic of Jesus' way of teaching, also. One of my very favorites is of the two monks who are on a trip. They are members of an order that vows not to touch women. As they are walking along they come to a river. There is a very attractive young woman standing by the edge of the river trying to figure out how she's going to get across the river. As they approach her, one of the monks says, "May I assist you across the river?"

She says, "Oh, yes, I'd be terribly appreciative if you would. You can usually walk across here but the water's too high right now." So the monk gathers his robe around his waist, picks the woman up in his arms, carries her across, and sets her down on the other side. The other monk tucks his robe in, walks across and they go on. She then goes on her way and they go theirs.

Hours later, the second monk finally says, "I just can't stand it, I've got to say something. You touched her! How could you do that? We have vowed not to touch women."

And the first monk said, "You know, you must be very, very tired. I set her down on the other side of the river. You have been carrying her all this way."

The story is also told of one of the great patriarchs of the Zen tradition. The tradition was that the begging bowl and robe are passed as the symbol of the passing of the heritage from one abbot to another. This particular abbot did not have anybody in his lineage that he thought was worthy of inheriting his bowl and his mantle. So he decided upon a test. He announced that whoever could come up with the most appropriate couplet would be the inheritor of the bowl. On the wall next to the dining hall poems began to appear. One of the poems went like this:

The Dharma wipes the dust from the mirror. The mind reflects Buddha nature.

Another one said:
Meditation cleanses the mirror
That the mind may see the teaching.

Another wrote up there -- and this was a little closer:
If the mind is dusty, it matters not
How clear the mirror.

Finally, the cook, who had never sat in meditation, who had never visited the Master, wrote his own couplet on the wall, in response to those earlier poems. He got the mantle and the bowl.

The couplet went like this:

No Mind. No Mirror.
Where does all this talk of dirt come from?

The purpose of the koan is to take your mind and shake it so that the habitual ways you have of dealing with the experiences of human life get cocked differently so that the opportunity is there to see life fresh again, as if for the first time. The Zen Master's job is to thwart your attempts at understanding, not facilitate them. The Zen Master's job is to thwart your habitual ways of making judgments, your habitual ways of perceiving until he has thwarted you enough that you finally drop all the old stuff and actually look for yourself.

Perhaps the most Zen-like teaching in the whole of the teachings of Jesus is that one wonderful teaching that comes down to us as the one thing that all Christians seem to be able to agree on, the Golden Rule: Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, with all thy heart, soul, mind and strength, and thy neighbor as thyself. Perfectly straightforward instruction as to what you are supposed to do to be a moral person. Right? Except that there is that one little problem of the word "shalt" in there and a slightly different problem with the word "love." The commandment orders you to do what can only be done spontaneously. There is a landmine sitting there, waiting to thwart the moralist in all of us.

In Jesus' day, one of the big issues in religion was the rules. Judaism had evolved to the point, at that time, where they were all wrapped up in the questions of "the rules," some 13,000 of them by some people's count. (Modern synogogue Judaism has evolved in parallel with Christianity, largely in response to this same problem.) The problem had become how to make that complex set of rules fit into the real world of real people. While the Pharisees are blamed for a lot of that rule bickering and get a bad rap in the New Testament, it is also true that of all the groups of teachers and rabbis in the New Testament the one that Jesus is closest to is the Pharisees. This may not be surprising. It's the people that we are closest to that we often have the most vicious disagreements with.

For example, you shouldn't work on the Sabbath. Now, obviously God would not intend you shouldn't be able to have a drink of water on the Sabbath, therefore you could go to the well. So, any trip that did not require you to go any farther than from your house to the well was not work. Therefore, if you could break your trip up into segments only as long as the distance from your house to the well, you could walk to hell-and-gone and never do any work! It had gotten that convoluted.

Jesus says, "Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them." What do you suppose he was talking about ? He goes on to say, "You have heard it said of old . . ." -- and then there follows this wonderful list of ". . .but I say unto you," teachings. Look at them. It is as if somebody had said to
Jesus, "Uh, look, this teaching about forgiveness and the kingdom of God and all that's real nice, but could you give us some rules, please?" Jesus' response was something like, "Rules? You want rules? I'll give you rules.

"You have heard it said, 'Thou shalt not kill,' but I say unto you Whoever is angry with his brother is in danger of the same punishment."

Whoa !

And yet, every act of murder begins in the small acts of not being able to handle one's emotions in usefully appropriate ways. It's the little, tiny pieces of behavior like being angry at your brother that build into the possibility of being able to take another's life.

"You have heard it said of old, 'Thou shalt not commit adultery.'" Here's where old Jimmy Carter got into trouble. "But I say unto you that anyone who looks lustfully at a woman has committed adultery with her in his heart already." To the pick pocket, the whole world is pockets. If all you see is sexuality, that's who you are.

"You have heard it said of old 'Thou shalt not swear falsely,"' and Jesus says, "I say unto you, you shall not swear at all. Let your 'yes' be 'yes' and your 'no' be 'no,' for everything else is of evil."

Here's one that I find absolutely fascinating. "You have heard it said of old, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.'" It is wonderfully ironic that the eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth--the Lex Talonis-- was an ancient rule to get people to stop killing one another. We turn it around and use it for a justification for killing one another. The ancient rule was: You may take only one eye for an eye, only one tooth for a tooth, instead of the kind of retribution that wipes out whole families and tribes in return for a single act.

What does Jesus say, for example to those who would quote the good book in defense of Capital Punishment ? "You have heard it said of old, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' but I say to you, resist not evil." Oh, boy. That's a toughie. Resist not evil. Try preaching that one to the masses as a straightforward moral rule. There's got to be something hidden in there that needs to be heard at a different level entirely.

"You have heard it said of old, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy,' but I say unto you, love your enemies." Even St. Paul got that one wrong. He says, "Love your enemies because it's like pouring hot coals on their heads." Somehow, I think, had Jesus been a Zen Master, St. Paul would have gotten the ink stick right between the eyes.

He concludes the sequence, "You must be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect, for He makes the sun to shine on the evil and the good, and sends the rain on the just and the unjust alike."

The last piece of Jesus' teaching that I want to mention here is one of the major clues, it seems to me, as to what those other pieces were all about.

For all the emphasis that Christianity has placed on the Last Judgement and the Book of Revelation and what's going to happen after you die and all of that "life after death" stuff -- there is only one place that Jesus tells us about the Last Judgment. It's in a little story about the separation of the sheep from the goats. Now the story has a great deal of difficulty communicating in its full power today because most of you here would not feel really complimented by being called a bunch of sheep. In the story--Jesus is telling the story, remember--the people come before the judge at the Last Judgment like separating the sheep from the goats. The sheep go to be with God for everlasting life. The goats, what is their punishment? Simply to be separated.

It's the sheep who say, "Why us?" The judge says, "I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me to drink. I was naked and in prison and you visited me." The sheep say, "When did we do that ?" The judge says, "As you have done it unto one of the least of these, you have done it unto me."

There are three really big bangs in that story. The first is: In doing what got them into heaven, the sheep didn't know what they were doing. They didn't run out there and feed and clothe and all of that in order to get into heaven, had no idea that that's what got them in.

The second big bang is that the Last Judgment has nothing to do with what you believe. It is not a heresy trial. One might even get the impression that God doesn't give a damn what you believe, which is what I suspect. What made any difference was the kind of life you spontaneously lived, what came out of you naturally, not because you are supposed to, but because that's who you were. There is no way, not a thing that you can do, to make yourself spontaneously perform correctly.

Third big bang: If you want to meet God, where does Jesus point you? "As you have done it unto one of the least of these, you have done it unto me." Whatever it is that we point to with that huge cosmic exclamation mark called "God," the place that God is met is not under the stars, with a nice aesthetic nature experience; it is not in meditation, trying to purify and straighten out your own internal kinks. The place that God is met is in the other, the least of these others. It's not about rules. It's not about beliefs. It's certainly not about appearing to be nice little boys and girls. It is about transforming lives. To take those teachings seriously is a very different thing from taking them literally.

The business of a religious community, of a religious teacher, is to keep the corners of your boxes kicked out -- not to make you feel good, not to make you feel certain; but to keep you alive, open, paying attention to the life that is yours.

A final Zen story. There once were two monks who lived in a woods. One was committed to sitting under a particular tree forever until he achieved enlightenment. He sat there under the tree eating only the bugs and spiders and lizards that happened to wander close enough. He drank only the water that fell when it rained. There were cob-webs hanging off of him and he was dirty and smelly and not a pleasant, aesthetic experience.

There was a second monk who lived in that same woods, who travelled around the woods and had a lot of fun, who occasionally went into town and got himself in a little bit of difficulty now and then -- he did have a weakness for the rice wine.

As chance would have it, a messenger of Brahma happened to be passing through. Now the tradition was that, if you recognized the messenger of Brahma, you got to ask the messenger a question. The old man under the tree recognized the messenger, and he said, "Hah there. I see you, messenger of Brahma. I claim the answer to my question."

The messenger said, "Oh, all right. What's your question?"

"How many more life-times must I sit under this tree, meditating, before I experience enlightenment?"

"Well," said the messenger, "I'll go ask Brahma and come back when I'm next this way and give you the answer."

Overhearing this, the second monk said, "Hey, I'd kind of like the answer to that, too. That'd be interesting to know."

Years passed. As chance would have it, the messenger again came back through and the old man recognized him. The old man said, "Hah, I recognize you, messenger. Have you brought my answer from Brahma."

The messenger says, "Yes, Brahma says you've got four more lifetimes before you finally achieve enlightenment." The old man under the tree said, "Ah, dung. Four more lifetimes of sitting under this damn tree, amongst the spiders and the lizards and the muck and the rain. Yuck! Phew!"

The second monk said, "How 'bout me?"

The messenger said, "Brahma said you have ten thousand more lifetimes before you finally 'get it'."

The monk said, "Ten thousand more lifetimes? Incredible. Ten thousand more lifetimes enjoying this incredible world we live in? Enjoying this woods, enjoying being alive!"

The messenger said, "No, no, you're there already."

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