Paul's Epistle to the Buddhists

This week I happened on Andrew Springer's Why I Hate Paul (And The Religion He Made Up), an essay on the vital question of what the hell St. Paul is doing in the Bible. This has bothered me since childhood: the promotion of a random convert, not even a disciple, to Christ's equal. Christ's superior, really, given that the Church typically defaults to Paul over Jesus.

I heartily recommend Springer's article to anyone who has been or is now a Christian; it's lively and well-argued, and no doubt good companionship for Christians who find themselves blessed with a surabundance of hell-raisin', God praisin' fellows, but little in the way of actual fellowship. (Ah, memories…)

As for me, I'm grateful for my deep and broad Christian journey, which taught me a great deal about spiritual discipline and ethics, and comes in handy every day of my Buddhist life.

It also taught me to appreciate the paucity of Bible-babble in Zen. In my 24 years on the path, I don't think I've once seen a Zenner smack another about the head with a sutra, trying to win a point of practice. In this we beat the Christians cold, but all coins have two sides; our lack of scriptural literacy leaves the door wide open to innovation, with the usual questionable results. I grazed this issue some years ago in Are Teachers Necessary?, wherein I explored an abuse of the Buddha's teaching that's entirely as egregious as the cult of St. Paul.

What really brought this to mind for me in the Springer piece was his citing of a contention, roundly accepted by competent Bible scholars, that six of the 13 documents attributed to St. Paul in the Christian Bible aren't even his. In other words, almost half of St. Paul's contribution to Christian teaching is in fact fraudulent.

And guess which of those two lists is most problematic, from a Christic perspective?

Because where Paul appears to contradict himself, rescinding acceptance he'd extended before, the reversal occurs most often in the apocryphal material.

Hence the training I received on my Christian path: that written wisdom is frequently wangled to please worldly authorities. And that since we're called by and to the Holy Spirit, we must be careful not replace it in our religious practice with idols of paper and ink.

So when pursuing the Zen matter in my own piece, I was neither surprised, nor particularly dismayed, to find that one of the most poignant moments in Buddhist scripture has been trafficked for political ends. Specifically, that whereas the Buddha preached and demonstrated throughout his life that no human outranks another, the cited sutra makes him "repent" of this on his deathbed, commanding Buddhist monks to accept social hierarchies.

Yeah, that's not blasphemous or anything.

As a Christian, I learned that angels neither wrote nor protect the Bible, so we must study our scripture minutely, always aware of where it comes from, where it's been, and who would stand to lose under its authentic counsel. Where that counsel appears to waver, you seek a higher power.

My comments on that bit of sutric softness met with some scorn at the time. I think I've quoted my favourite example before: "Sounds like Mara." (In case anyone thought devil-baiting wasn't a Buddhist thing.) Which is ironic for a religion – and here I refer specifically to Western Buddhism – chiefly founded by more or less indignant refugees from the Church.

So let the record show that the courage to exercise clear-seeing in scriptural study, and to signal potential tampering when suspected, came straight out of my Christian schooling, and I recommend it to anyone who's determined to get off this merry-go-round.

Because the counterfeit passages are fully as valuable as the authentic ones.


(Photo of the Great Heart of Wisdom Sutra courtesy of The Metropolitan Museam of Art and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Explosive find

(This is a concretion I found on the beach after a storm. It's a sort of sedimentary rock that solidifies around a piece of metal on the ocean floor; I mostly find them encasing old hardware, tin cans, fishing equipment, and other refuse.

But here the core is a 3 to 4 inch military cartridge, evidently surplused into the sea by the local US Navy base.

Concretions are fairly soft stones, easily broken by roasting in the woodstove or rapping with a hammer.

Which is why I left this one in place.)

Poem: Spring of Life

the snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children

Issa


(Photo courtesy of Ben Wicks and Unsplash.com.)

WW: Trillium challenge

(Trillium ovatum. Jungle flower; iconic herald of North Coast spring.)

What Men Want

A Substack meditation on the emotional lives of men has been making the rounds. Fruit of Drunk Wisconsin, whose timeline is one of those digital live traps that will keep you scrolling and surfing all day if you're not careful, Men Only Want One Thing (And It's Disgusting) is that rarest of things: a brief, well-written rumination on the never-asked question of what men want.

Given cultural assumptions on this matter, if you're not a man, you likely haven't the slightest accurate idea.

If, on the other hand, you're one of "those" men, you'll probably be disgusted by the whole thing. Look, brother, the writer warned you.

And if you're here among us left–overs, you may feel that welter of repressed, conflicting emotions that signals a direct hit.

For further proof, check out the comments below the Substack post. Important: read the text first, and only afterward the comments. If you reverse that order, you'll lose the ability to read the post at all.

Because bombarding a challenge with self-mocking parody is the jiu jitsu of the reflective male. (If you thought it was middle school insults embedded in dripping sarcasm… see "those" men, above.)

Let the author of this pithy, penetrating, precise manifesto be Exhibit A.

I'd say "I feel seen", but the truth is I feel x-rayed.


(Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com and a generous photographer.)

WW: Desert snapshot

(Photo taken during my outbacking trek through the Columbia Basin last summer. Mt. Rainier in the distance.

Open link in a new tab to see it to better effect.)

WW: Classic Puget Sound house

(Another in my unintended series on endangered Old Settler houses in the district where I grew up. I've loved this one since I first rowed the lake at the age of 8. Its classic Puget Sound lines – detached garage, gable roof, dormers, shed-roofed second story, barn paint and gleaming white trim – I associated with grandparents, partly because my own raised their kids and still lived in one like it.

Lacking a boat these days – embarrassing as that is – I took this shot through the back fence; bit of a shame, really, because the view from the water, while less bucolic than it was those many years ago, is much more evocative of the prewar era in this part of the world. [See photo below, taken by a school chum from his front yard in 1965.]

A popular city park was built beside it in the 70s, and I'm told the city bought this property too when the last elderly resident moved out a few years ago. That explains the nominal effort to make the boarding-up less unsightly, but sadly, almost certainly also signals the end of this fine old example of Green Side architecture.)