Killing the Buddha

There is a famous parable in Buddhism that goes something like this:

A monk approached the Buddhist master Lin Chi. The monk was excited, in ecstasy. He tells the master that he has seen Buddha. He was walking down the road when suddenly, he was enlightened! He has seen the whole of enlightenment, known Nirvana, understands the Buddhamind. Finally the monk quiets and waits to see what the master will say of his revelations.

Lin Chi reaches out and smacks him. "You meet the Buddha on the road," he says, "Kill him".

It's happened to all of us, or to people that we know. We're marching along, going to work, doing the laundry, living our lives, when suddenly, it all seems to make sense. You were just doing your thing, not really seeking for religion, not really thinking about social justice, but then something impresses you so clearly and forcefully that there's nothing for it but to admit that God is great. Or evolution is wrong. Or Allah is wonderful.

Lin Chi says, fabulous. You've found it, and now you can kill it. The Buddha you stumble over like a rock in your path isn't the true Buddha, but an expression of your longing. If this Buddha is not killed, he will stand in your way.

When Lin Chi contributed the idea of deicide to his godless religion over a thousand years ago, he wasn't talking about killing a long-dead teacher who had come to be known as the Buddha, but instead about the ideologies of his day: the One True Path, One True Story, One True Anything. He was talking about the preachers and the gurus, the Family Research Counsel, and the mass media. Faced with an obscenity-screaming abortion protester or a convert who thumps Kabballah aphorisms as hard as any Bible, Lin Chi would say the same thing: Don't be a chump. A single story never explained anything.

What does a Buddhist master have to do with modern society? Well, in the case of Christian theology, all too often Christians today sell their faith in small chunks. A recent Christian publication informed me that all I needed to do to be saved was to 'accept that Jesus Christ died for my sins'. "It's that easy!", the magazine trumpeted. No mention of God, no mention of theology, no doctrine and no morality involved. It's Powerpoint Christianity, God for the fast-food generation.

The same phenomenon happens in political debates. Complex questions of science are reduced to three word memes so that reporters don't have to think too hard when producing headlines. It took me three years of biology education and an entire semester of a focused seminar at a university, conversing with the best minds in the world, to understand enough about cellular function to make judgements about whether stem cells might be helpful in medicine, but pundits pass judgement in thirty-second clips for the news. And it's pundits that define the debate.

The problem with the loss of doctrinal richness is that the more God or an issue of public debate gets boiled into soundbytes, the more people lose sight of what they're actually talking about. When people make judgements based on pundit clips, fields of science get closed down that might have saved lives, but there is no moral responsibility felt by those who pass the laws. And when people lose sight of what God really is, in all His complexity, people start to make and defend wrong choices using statements that sound religious, but aren't. Soundbyte theology is how Bush and company led many to think that Bush represented a Christian outlook on government, when his policies were anything but. Soundbyte science is what allows the debates about abortion or evolution to continue in public, when the people who've devoted their lives to studying the issue aren't debating any longer, because they've reached a conclusion. It's hard to parse the inaccuracies of someone's claims about religion or social issues when you don't know the details of what you yourself think.

In the church, it's not just a problem of pastors preaching repetitive and doctrinally-shallow sermons. It's a problem of conversion methods as well. The large evangelistic religions often rely on a major religious experience for a great deal of their converts. Youth groups on retreat weekends, adults attending special revival services: these emotionally-drenched conversion conventions produce a huge number of new Christians every year. The problem is that all of these people are meeting Buddha on the road. They will be energized by their new faith, but if you asked them what exactly they had faith in, they couldn't give a detailed answer. But instead of urging these followers to kill that Buddha and instead grow slowly towards deeper knowledge, the church rewards these people. If they continue to attend church at all (many don't), they'll hear soundbyte sermons designed to make God understandable in less than an hour a week. You couldn't understand the behavior of the stock market in that length of time, much less a deity.

The truth is that God should be complex, and that faith shouldn't be easily digestible. Science can't be reduced to easy conclusions, and graphs are also the easiest way to misrepresent data. Refusal to confront the difficult theological questions doesn't make for less conflict in a church, it makes for shallower Christians. Debate by soundbyte doesn't make for a better-informed public, it makes for a bunch of ill-informed ideologues. Modern society doesn't care about the details of what we believe in, though. You can't fit ideas that big onto a Powerpoint slide.