A Buddhist Looks at the Arguments for the Existence of God

© Kenneth Ireland, March 28, 2024

Back to Lenten Practice

Wednesday Feb 14, – Thursday Mar 28, 2024

It has been years since I even noticed Lent, but this year, I prepared myself for the central mystery of the Christian faith. I had been writing about my relationship with Cardinal Avery Dulles, a remarkable man from whom I learned an enormous amount, whom I loved and, as a quirk of fate, happened to be a famous and well-regarded, even revered figure in both the Jesuit order and the official Catholic hierarchy. For several years, while I was a Jesuit, he was my spiritual advisor, and informally held that role for the rest of his life. He was disappointed when I stepped away from the more orthodox expressions of the Christian faith, but he was never harsh or judgmental. He always treated me as a friend and was extremely generous. I am very grateful for our friendship.

Several Jesuits and former Jesuits have been authorized to teach Zen, but I am not in that elite group. I was in the Jesuits for a decade, and when I left, I turned my back. In total honesty, I indulged hostility towards the institutional church like so many gay men of my generation. When I gave myself wholeheartedly to Zen, I discovered traces of Ignatian prejudice in my practice. Uncovering what was not apparent to me has taken years of careful work. My feet were so planted in either camp that I couldn’t distinguish any separation. I became known in my sangha as a Jesuit Buddhist. 

I hit on another sentence to describe my project, “A Buddhist looks at arguments for the existence of God, and a former Jesuit weighs these arguments in the Zendo.” It became important for me to specify that part of my argument had been colored by meditation practice. 

In the few weeks till Easter, I certainly can’t settle any argument about the existence of God, but following the age-old Lenten practice of penance and purification, I hope to clear away some of the underbrush obscuring these old questions, at least for me. 

When I write, I consciously try not to allow academic rules and conventions to hamper me. I know that this can be what we used to call the occasion for sin, but I also don't owe allegiance to any religious authority, and the days of the burning at the stake are over. Although I will try to be as balanced as any aspiring bodhisattva can be, I know that I have a definite point of view, which I will state as clearly as I can and then, like a good Jesuit scholastic and Zen student, try to refute my own argument. I take this work seriously, but I will also have as much fun as possible.

Capitalizing God as an honorific carries many linguistic nuances and preferences. I would prefer to separate us from our preconceptions and not treat God in the preferential way that the capitalization “God” might imply, but I’ve decided to follow the linguistic convention of capitalizing God. I intend it to be neither theist nor atheist, and not derogatory, just neutral. When referring specifically to YHWH, Jehovah, or the Father in the translations of the Jesus gospels as they come to us, I use the honorific “God.’ I may not always be consistent.

And finally, my conclusions surprised me, though I cannot claim to have satisfactorily resolved any of the issues I tackled.

A Jesuit theologian with the papal imprimatur asks me about God's existence.

During our last meeting, Avery Dulles said to me, "I hear that Buddhists haven’t settled the God question.” Of course, he knew the answer: most Buddhist schools are non-theistic; they do not usually entertain the question of divinity, neither affirming nor denying a supreme deity, certainly not in the same way that Christians do. But in Catholic dogmatic theology, statements about the nature of divinity are the coin of the realm. For Avery, the existence of a Godhead, a personal deity, was central, along with expressing or “confessing” assent to its existence.

That afternoon, despite our friendship, or perhaps because of it, I felt Avery was trying to pry an answer out of me that would undermine my Buddhist beliefs. His tone was friendly, loving, even playful, not in any way disapproving or forceful, but he was serious. He was trying to push me towards a more traditional faith because, for him—and for most serious Christians—assent to the existence of God, saying “I believe,” is key to salvation. I couldn’t respond that I still believed in God because, honestly, I was leaning more towards the agnostic end of the spectrum, an answer that would surely have disappointed him. My love for the man overrode any other considerations. 

Avery was a Jesuit through and through, and I might have countered with an invitation to inquiry, but I didn’t have the skill to turn a rhetorical or speculative question into an opening. I didn’t know how my friend would take it, perhaps almost as blasphemy, although my real fear was that he would have just made fun of the question—and me.

We might have waded into the tricky currents of sweeping, generalized truth statements that leave one floundering on rocky shores, or, to return to my speculative ruminations about placing my bet on the right pony, the kind of restrictive notions that Jesuits liked to argue about with Pascal and the Jansenists. Avery would have enjoyed that: this essay honors our friendship.

“Something rather than Nothing” 

First, let’s look at the question itself. “Why is there something as opposed to nothing?” is a religious question, or at least religions worldwide have appropriated it. Any preacher worth their salt will warn you to think about what happens after death. They call up an ontological fear and create an answer to the question: what persists after our experience ends?  

That question seems based on raw emotion, so it’s not scientific or philosophical. It might be psychological, even then, you have to lay down some parameters. I’m going to leave it for another time. My characterization won’t win me many converts among my religious friends who have been trained in the traditional seminary rendition of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s theology. Some of them even call it  “the Big Question,’ encompassing belief and unbelief, who we are, where we are in the universe, and how we got here. Our answers are expected to have the clarity of a clarion bell, dispelling our doubts and clearing the path to salvation. Proponents and believers claim it demands an answer.

The question itself is a canard, or in French slang, a hoax. To clarify the possible answers, let’s give it the hair-splitting it warrants before we begin. The question is designed to introduce the question of God into ordinary discourse and ultimately leads us down a rabbit hole. It is formulated to skew the answer. Any answer is, at best, an assessment of probability rather than a true statement. My former Jesuit philosopher teacher, Ed MacKinnon, argues that the proposition is a statement that can be held by reasonable people rather than a proof as in science or mathematics. (Why is There Something? Edward MacKinnon, Philosophia 51 (2):835-855 (2023). I disagree.

If, for example, we follow Piaget and examine how a child learns about the world, among his or her first questions might be, “What is that?” pointing to Fido. Then he or she might ask, “Can I pet Fido?” “Why did Fido bite me?” or “Is Fido hungry?” but certainly not “Why is Fido there?” You usually don’t get to that before post-grad philosophy and debating Kant’s idea of denotation or Gilbert Ryle’s “Fido-Fido fallacy,” which he and Wittgenstein label “primitive word magic." (Meaning, Use and Rules of Use, Raziel Abelson. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.) In our case, Fido becomes “something with identified meanings vaguely about God,” much like the neo-Platonists who identified the deities of Mount Olympus with ideas and virtues to pass the muster of logic. I am not saying that such questions are out of order, but that they need much more explanation and definition before we are allowed to label “Something” as ontologically real and demand justification for its existence.

Is the question “Why is there something?” even a good question? 

Because I am going first, I will lay out my objections.

Begin with the concept of negation. The question posits “not-Nothing.” However, in this sense, nothing may just be “not everything that presents itself to our minds,” as an extrapolation or inference, not a definition. 

The double negative serves no purpose in the argument other than to get God in the door. “Something rather than nothing” is not even ordinary language. The way we speak in ordinary language does not include the inherent claim that we cannot know “something is something” unless we posit its negation. We are not obliged to imagine a world in which “what is so” is not. That is absurd. 

Joanie Mitchell teaches us, "You don’t know what you got till it's gone.” What do we get when we take away something? Her answer is “a parking lot.” To be clear, her answer to the question is “What’s left, or what did we replace it with?” and not what is this thing (state or condition) that you are naming “Not-a-parking-lot?” 

Ms. Mitchell uses a rhetorical strategy to affirm our knowledge (and appreciation), not an ontological definition of nothingness. Following Aristotle, Aquinas posits an orderly universe governed by natural law in which man has his place to know and serve God. In return, he is promised cash and prizes (which he may or may not receive, which is another problem to which he will return later). At this point, it is enough to say that It is also possible and legitimate in this universe to take away any promised benefits. That is variously called estrangement, hell, or sin. Aquinas knows all this through faith, not reason or empirical observation, though Aquinas does claim that there is no contradiction between faith and reason. When Darwin, Einstein, and Heisenberg et al. blew the supporting physics all to hell, modern schoolmen filled in the blanks with whatever cosmological ideas they fancied, but again, I would point to the neo-Platonists filling their empty blanks with virtue and form when they kicked out Zeus and his buddies. Sleight of hand. Bunk. That’s a technical term.

When Bill Clinton was asked in his famous deposition before Congress if there was a sexual relationship between him and Monica Lewinsky, he initially said there "is" no sexual relationship (US News & World Report, Ronald Brownstein and Kenneth T. Walsh). He went on, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the — if he — if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not — that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.” Some commentators said this was his pitch to the Talmudic scholars among his judges. I contend that he just needed to get himself out of a hot pickle. Theists using the word “something” as an ontological bridge between science and faith are not much better than Clinton parsing the verb "to be” concerning sex. I don’t need a Rabbi to point to the duplicity because that is why we are parsing the verb “to be.” There has to be nothing out there, or we’d find ourselves in a hot pickle.

Let’s return to little Freddy or Frederica, who learned that Fido is called a dog. Hopefully, they also learned practical ways to avoid being bitten by Fido. They include feeding, training, learning to gauge Fido’s moods, and how to get him into his dog house if needed. But the question remains: how do we get from there to “Why do we have Fido rather than not-Fido?” 

How did this become a religious question, and why is it essential to get the correct answer? I will ask the Buddhist before I ask Aquinas, though I might use him as my reference point when I describe the hot mess that his religionists get us into. I am going to characterize four arguments for the existence of God. I intend to hold them as an object of meditation in a Buddhist way, but as I write them, I find myself trying to demystify them. They each have become almost a caricature of our culture’s way of thinking through these questions.

Instead of proving or disproving that God exists, I propose a more modest goal: to examine the claim that God exists. This avoids what seems impossible — to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a supernatural being has control and power in the universe, and whose existence or essential being makes the workings of the universe possible. It also sets philosophy on a more solid footing (in my view) — to use the tools that are available to human beings and evaluate various claims solely to determine whether or not they are possible or reasonable, and secondarily, that these beliefs provide us with some guidance about living our lives in a fully human way that is ethical and loving. Based on our understanding of human history on Earth, these questions and their proposed solutions have been debated. That is all we can say with certainty.

On a personal note. I have spent several hours a day for the past six weeks thoroughly reviewing and examining as many of these arguments or claims as possible. My emphasis has been mainly on the scholastic proofs following the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas that Catholic seminarians have studied since the Council of Trent. In addition to reviewing my intellectual history, I also searched for new work that has been done since I was at Boston College almost 60 years ago. But I was also trying to honor the question proposed by my friend and mentor Avery Dulles before he died: how might Buddhists settle the question about God? I will be 80 in a few months. I have spent far more time in meditation halls than in seminary, which has influenced my views.

Clockwork Orange, or shooting marbles on the Lyceum’s almost perfectly level floor 

Let’s tackle “The Unmoved Mover.” It purports to be the most universal of the arguments, or at least the TV Bishop Robert Barron would have us believe so; it is allegedly the most palatable that believers put forth to their enlightened naturalistic colleagues because it is based on a particular analysis by Aristotle, which also gave rise to the scientific method through his understanding of causality. Its religious formulation might be broadly called “Deistic.” 

Those who claim to follow Aristotelia over the 2400-year crooked path to our discussion talk about the existence of God as the “Unmoved Mover” or the “Uncaused Cause.” However, for each of the five contingency arguments that St. Thomas takes from Aristotle, there are two prongs: observation and logic, the moving parts, and the moving mental parts. One is locked down by observing the world as it is, and the other is abstracted from those observations, with hypotheses or checking questions.

Using the instruments of scientific observation, we can measure speed, distance, force, resistance, gravity, sound waves, etc., all of which seem to give the Thomists a comforting certainty that there is an “unmoved cause” at the very beginning. But is that conclusion supported by science? You can “move” from moved to unmoved using carefully constructed experiments, scientific instruments, and observation. However, tracing back to a primordial mover observation seems to uncover more moving parts, going faster and in all directions. I assert that focusing on one single mover is inconsistent with the data and requires a leap of faith.

For the moment, let’s set aside some of the more irksome consequences of conceiving of God as a personal being and merely describe him as a kind of clockmaker who has set the universe in motion according to a set of observable and predictable physical laws. Thomas Jefferson, a man of the Enlightenment, gave this advice to his nephew Peter Carr in 1787: "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." God and reason are synonymous, or God him/her/itself is reasonable. This is a distinction that I am going to have to sit with.

If God sets the universe in motion and allows reason, even divine reason, to dictate or at least guide its workings, does this guarantee that justice, love, and benevolence will prevail?  We no longer need to believe in a revealed God to be a good person, but can we point to the intricacy of the mechanism and say that God exists? But how do you find the benevolence of our universe being swallowed up in a black hole or the 700 species of Ornithoscelida, dinosaurs extinguished by an asteroid that veered off course 65 million years ago? The burden of that proof rests on the Deist. Mr. Jefferson.

Jefferson held a deep conviction in “The Laws of Nature and Nature's God.” We should also examine the proposition that such laws exist without blindfolded fear. In Deist thought there is a hierarchy to the things that God condones or encourages. We know that God exists because of the good order we see in nature. Nature, being revealed as science, allows us to understand the order of the universe. The science of the Enlightenment was based on the unfolding principles of the scientific revolution. 

Driving south on Highway 280 from San Francisco, I cross over the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a huge isolated tubular structure over two miles long that passes under the highway near Sandhill Road. Since 1966, the SLAC has been conducting experiments using isolated electrons traveling at speeds beyond my powers of imagination. Beyond that crude description, I don’t understand much, but I do know that scientists at Stanford won the Nobel Prize for developing a facility that allows us to decipher the actual activity of particle physics. This is centuries and worlds away from Aristotle’s Physics, which I envision being the careful study of the action of marbles on the (as level as possible) floor of the Lyceum from which Aristotle and his students began to measure mass, movement, distance and time which led to his geocentric model of movement in the universe. But rather than fault Aristotle for failing to grasp that our earth was not the focal point for movement in the Universe, I am astonished that his school was able to decipher so much given their primitive instruments of observation and measurement. 

Centuries later, these crude experiments would lead to both Newton’s Apple, Thomas Aquinas’s cosmological proofs for the existence of God, and after the Council of Trent, most Catholic priests were taught in seminary that the Universe was created ex nihilo by a Being who set the world in motion. The question remains: has it been shown that there was an urge or force at the beginning that initiated the inevitable, linked causal incidents we observe?

Hiking into the Source

What happens when a meditator searches for the Unmover or the Source of all of it? In the hours of silent meditation, within our inner world, we might imagine that we have traced many thoughts, feelings, and stories to their source. You’d think the search for an Unmoved Mover would be a cakewalk.

Late one Fall fifteen years ago, I sat in a week-long retreat up along the Klamath River in a small cluster of vacation cabins with Jon Joseph Roshi. For one of our afternoon meditations, Jon asked a long-time practitioner to lead us up into a cavern where he had done some photography. He was a spry old bird, perhaps having a decade on me but moving with the grace of a man many years younger.

That afternoon, we were to follow one of the several small gushing mountain streams that fed the Klamath. The walls of the ravine were steep. Though the rains were not torrential, it was very wet. We were to climb in silence, practicing walking meditation, kinhin, as best we could. It was a challenging, narrow path; the small, fast-moving stream dropped off sharply to the north. I had to concentrate more on where I was stepping than on my exhalation. I needed a stick to stay balanced. The thick green moss covering the stones, the only toehold, was slippery. They were laid out by nature's architect, who’d thrown out the handbook for a comfortable and safe ratio for step and tread. It was proving more difficult than initially advertised. Our spry photographer probably thought it was a stroll in the park. I did not.

Perhaps after a half-hour’s climb, we reached a pool. The combination of boulders tumbling down the ravine, plus beavers or storms felling the tree trunks, closed the remaining gaps and formed an expanse of perhaps 10 meters of still, mirror-like water. The stream seemed too narrow for the salmon run, but I still knew there was life under the mirror that reflected the tall pines with the bright blue that gave them an almost Technicolor background. I could also hear the soft sounds of what were probably small rivulets feeding my source, but had reached some kind of source. It was not the Big Bang beginning; it was not ex nihilo, but it was a beginning.

Buddhists are trained to look for change. We call it impermanence. Even more than karma, change is the one immutable law in the Buddhist Universe.  When I asked my first Buddhist teacher what “Impermanence” meant, he said, “You’re going to die, and along the way, the world is always changing.” When we look for change, for the moment of change, that observation changes our world. When I finally reached the still pool high above the Klamath, which might have been the beginning of something, I felt my racing heart and the quickness of my breath as I became aware of small, almost imperceptible drips between the rocks higher up. This makes pinpointing or even imagining a First Mover hard, if not impossible. It also makes positing an Unmoved Mover so vague that it is meaningless, or at least extremely limiting. I’ll go with vast and holy.

Foggy Father Ed McKinnon

Originally published Monday, February 12, 2024

When I was in the Jesuit Philosophate (1968-1969/70), fulfilling a canonical requirement for Thomistic philosophy, I lived with five other young Jesuits in a small house near Boston College. After being locked down in Shadowbrook for more than two years under strict rules covering every aspect of life, every hour of the day, we were enjoying some freedom. From time to time, we’d sneak out to a well-known art house in Kenmore Square near the Boston Red Socks ballpark. I think it was called Kenmore Square, but it might have been The Fine Arts Theater. 

The reason I mention arthouse movies is a hilarious story that popped up about one of my Jesuit Philosophy teachers, Ed MacKinnon, affectionately known as Foggy MacKinnon. 

One night we went to a forbidden movie, Pasolini’s Teorema. It inspired Nick Nolte’s “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” another fantastic film. In Pasolini’s film, a mysterious character shows up at an upper-class family villa in Milan and begins by sleeping with the maid, then the son, then the mother, then the father. He was, of course, a Jesus figure. It was Pasolini, what do you expect? The film was long enough for an intermission, and when we went for popcorn, Foggy MacKinnon was standing in the lobby looking somewhat bemused. Rather than a rebuke for sneaking out, he just said, “Thank God they don’t have any pets.”

https://cinematreasures.org/theaters/6460

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teorema

Ed MacKinnon, whom we affectionately called “Foggy,” was one of the promising young philosophy professors at Weston and Boston College. After my novitiate at Shadowbrook, I went to Philosophy, and for reasons not altogether clear to me, I was also ready to pick a fight. Imagine. Ed had a Ph.D. in physics from Saint Louis University and had done several years of postdoctoral work in philosophy at Yale. He was supposed to form a bridge between science and faith. I had no idea what he was talking about. Of course, I wouldn't admit it--I was actually too busy doing art to spend enough time in class to ask a good question. So I missed that boat entirely. My loss

Once Ed went to the minister at Weston and asked for a car to drive to a conference, I think at McGill. What would be better preparation for delivering an important paper than a relaxing drive through the Catskills to Canada? He arrived, parked the car, delivered the paper, answered questions, and then left quickly, grabbed a cab to the airport, and boarded a flight back to Logan. The minister came to his room when he heard that Ed had returned to pick up the car keys. Ed said, “What car?” I may have some of the details wrong, but I think the story is basically correct. 

When I was in California, I heard that Ed had gone to another conference about resolving the conflicting claims of science and theology, or as he says, “examines an influential argument that the intelligibility of the universe requires a creator.” Why is There Something? (Philosophia 51 (2): 835-855. 2023. He is still dealing with the problem today.) The Jesuit rumor mill spelled out the story that he laid out the positions carefully and then announced that, after studying the issue for a number of years, he found the agnostic position persuasive and was going to leave the Jesuits.

I do not know if this story is correct, but it’s a great story. I did meet up with him one more time. I think it was at an event that Fred Tollini organized for New Englanders and Jesuit friends who had lived with him at Virgil Barber House near the Yale campus. Ed had just taken a new position at Cal Hayward, where he spent his entire career after BC. And he’d married. I am pretty sure I asked about his current position regarding the Church, since I had just left and publicly said I’d tossed out the whole shebang. He demurred, but offered that he was now very happy. He’d met a woman who had been a nun at a support group for former religious. He called it a “Religious Lonely Hearts Club.” I didn’t say that I had met one or two former Jesuits in gay bars, so maybe I could borrow the designation. Perhaps he was not so hung up on the conundrum between faith and science. Maybe he’d just decided that he wanted to marry. 

End of story. Retelling them is how I pass long, lonely nights in a remote Indian village.

https://philpeople.org/profiles/edward-mackinnon

Suntne Angeli?

Our good luck is to be working in a world where there is no ultimate justice and God knows there is no justice in the world. —Orson Wells

I leave my examination of the intellectual proofs or arguments for the existence of God, not convinced that there is a God. If the Scholastic proofs alone are the only validation of my knowledge, I am tending toward an atheist position. However, because I say these arguments don’t hold water, it is not to say that God does not exist. In other words, logic is not personal—my remaining unconvinced cannot be used to support a non-theistic position.

Many religious people, not just believers in the Abrahamic tradition, look to the acknowledgment of Evil as moving them closer to believing in God. I will call this exploration “stories we tell ourselves about the origin of Evil.” Believers claim that this adds the power of deep emotion, even intuition, to our stories. Their persuasiveness and coherence also depend on the cultural setting that gives rise to them, but for the moment, we can set this aside and simply say that we have experienced evil in the world. If we are theists who believe in a benevolent God, this presents a problem, but might it also be an opportunity to prove the existence of God?

This relationship between evil and the existence of God is paradoxical. After the barbaric horrors of the Second World War, many people of my generation point to the evil of the holocaust and say that this disproves the existence of a benevolent deity. The pro-deity camp points to the Garden of Eden and traces the evil and humankind’s agency as well as to a huge falling out between YHWH and some of his angelic hosts. The existence of Evil should convince us that God exists, 

This is the story that I am going to examine. The story of the fall of Lucifer went through several rewrites before the nuns at Saint Charles taught me that the evil in the world is the fault of Satan and his rebellion against the all-powerful Jehovah. In the myth, I learned that before he fell, Satan was called Lucifer, or light bearer, a name that indicates great beauty. (Baltimore Catechism #3, Lesson 4 - On Creation).2

Neither Satan nor Lucifer appears much in the Hebrew Bible, with the significant exception of the Book of Job. It was not until the early Christians began to search for some depravity of humankind’s fall horrific enough to require the sacrifice of God’s son that the character of Satan/Lucifer was fleshed out. Although mentioned in many places in the synoptic gospels and Revelations, Augustine of Hippo (Civitas Dei) put Satan at the scene of the crime in the Garden of Eden. In the story we read in the Hebrew Bible, it was just a talking snake who beguiled Eve. 

The shadow lingering from the God-in-the-sky myth is that God creates an existential problem by allowing evil—à la Job—why do the bad prosper while good people suffer? For the pious, this is a test. There is an unwritten rule or assumption: God only wants to make us better, which requires a leap of faith into the unknown. But this also, on some very real level, entails a denial of the reality of suffering. To say that suffering as a test dulls the sting. Get stoic and get through it—a survival mechanism. But is this even close to reality as it presents itself?

Reworking this story or myth even takes us out of the Biblical era and into the third century. It also has traces of the Manichean gnostic cult that Augustine belonged to for almost a decade. It was not a minor flirtation with some New Age religion; however, it is key to the Christian understanding of evil in the world. It introduces the notion of “free will” and thus responsibility and accountability. Probably, I need to look no further for why Avery was insistent that the part of belief in God is the acknowledgment that God exists. 

Elaine Pagels, in The Origin of Satan, talks about the role Satan plays in the zeitgeist of the early believers. There were people of God, the followers of Jesus, on the one hand, and those who were opposed on the other. This was problematic for Jews who were not followers of Jesus. Pagles says this myth contains the roots of the long, horrendous history of antisemitism. She says that in Mark’s gospel, Satan is identified with “the Jews.” It is no longer a myth. Real people were responsible for the execution of Jesus. The Church of James had names and addresses. It was about real issues right down here on earth. 

This also muddies the waters if I use the myth to trace some deep intuitive human intuition, some deeply felt belief in the unseen world. However, the creation of evil personified also has consequences and falls short as evidence of God’s existence. You can’t negotiate with evil. You have to kill.

My conclusion: Listen to your better angels, but that alone is not going to clear a certain path to the deity,

2 The LDS extends this odd belief to Lucifer, extending his rebellion to the Son of God himself ( Doctrine and Covenants 76:25–29).

Judge Judy and The Sanctification of Common Sense

You might have guessed that our heavenly version of the creation of evil has a more ordinary version, which I call “The Sanctification of Common Sense.” This also has its limits.

 

Do you remember that lovely Chanel cocktail dress that your friend Angelina borrowed without asking you and then ruined when she got wasted at a party that went from sedate to wild in a New York second? Then she compounded the injury by giving it to a dry cleaner who promised the world and returned an unwearable rag. That one? The one Angelina could not afford to replace? The one that carried so many precious memories of love and romance that you were going to treasure for as long as you lived? Yes, that one.

According to the Psalmist (8.5), Angelina is fashioned after the image of God, “a little less than the angels,” yet she managed to destroy Coco Chanel’s little black dress and probably a lot more. There is no justice in this world: one careless act destroyed both memories and friendship. You wanted to talk about it, but somehow, the messiness of the situation carried memory and friendship far beyond a simple conversation. 

You’ve watched Judge Judy on TV and imagined you, Angelina, and the dry cleaner standing before Her Honor, and you asked for redress. Indeed, the norms of friendship had been strained if not destroyed. Even though she's not Solomon, Judge Judy is Jewish and has a no-nonsense tone. She might set your world aright by crafting an equitable judgment. You felt personally violated by your friend Angelina. She knew how much it meant to you. You had a lot of investment in that little black dress. I will examine the story for evidence of an innate sense that Justice exists in the universe. It is perfect in so many ways.

The argument for the existence of the All-Knowing being able to right deeply-felt offenses.is designed precisely to satisfy this kind of personal vengeance. We know from experience that the verbal tongue-lashing delivered by Judge Judy, even if she assigns the maximum $5,000 fine and you can collect it, is not sufficient to satisfy the kind of deep grief and indignation that you feel, but it is something. You know that, given similar circumstances, almost everyone except the super-rich or deranged would feel the same and deserve equal justice.

What is also true is that you know that the feelings of vindication you might experience while watching TV are just that, an unraveling of feelings, and that’s just an illusion. There’s no guarantee that justice for all crimes will be satisfied, even at the tribunal of the All-Knowing at the Last Judgment. What is also true is that just by turning on the TV and watching Judge Judy, you are helping increase the sales of whoever has paid for the commercials and, let’s follow the money, help improve the wealth of conspicuous luxury brands so that the likelihood of universal justice is diminished.  

And here is what I think: There are bad people. Humans have devised the only justice in the human realm to order ourselves and create space for peaceful cooperation. It is not Divine. That we entertain divine justice is a result of assigning the governance of human affairs outside the world humans inhabit, or it could be whittling down our preconceived notions and beliefs to something very rudimentary and authentic, a fundamental and foundational understanding of the Golden Rule.

“Be Here Now” all over again.

Here is a story from my first year in India, along with a few facts about life in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains.

On our first trip to India, my former partner and I planned a weekend trip to meet his sister and her husband in Shimla. She wanted to visit because it was used as a setting in so many Bollywood movies. She was a devotee.

Early one morning, we began our journey on a treacherous mountain road, racing 225 km across northern India in a rinky-dink cab with a madcap driver — even by Indian standards. He careened and jammed, reducing the almost seven-hour trip from McLeod Ganj to under five. It was only my second long trip by car in India. This is not a myth: the roads and the driving are unlike anything in the West. Over 350 people a day die on Indian roads, which in a population of more than a billion plus seems minuscule until you figure into the calculation that fewer than 10% of the population use cars. It takes some getting used to.

The power brokers of the British Raj selected this idyllic spot for its summer headquarters when the heat of the plains became too much for their thin blood. A mile and a half above sea level, Shimla is now the capital of Himachal Pradesh. It’s a more picture-perfect hill station than our humble McLeod Ganj. There’s a pedestrian mall that you get up to via a crowded elevator, a substantial Anglican Church, a handsome stock of colonial buildings still in use as offices for the renowned Indian bureaucracy, lots of restaurants, and coffee shops. A few of the fine bungalows that the highly placed British civil officers demanded for their families and staff have been carefully preserved. 

One of the oldest small-gauge railroads in India shuttled the overlords, their families, and their extensive retinue up the steep mountain. Though still connected to the Indian Railway, it’s kept in service as a tourist attraction. You pay your fare, ride a couple of stops, get off, cross the track, and wait for an uphill train. We’re not talking about Six Flags. We’re stepping back at least 150 years into the remnants of the British Raj.

For Hindus, Shimla is also revered as one of the traditional holy sites of Lord Hanuman. Though this goes back to ancient times, a very recent addition to the landscape has been a colossal statue of the monkey god, 108 feet high up on Jakhu Hill (an anomaly in a land of the metric system, but probably something to do with the cost of concrete and getting to a mystic number. It’s very tall). 

Early in the afternoon, our little group took the toy train downhill. On the way back up, we were told about a small temple that might be worth a visit. We either walked or grabbed a quick cab from the train station to a very typical Indian temple. Inside the gate, one of the babas was chanting, breaking coconuts, and pouring their milk over the bonnet of a devotee’s car; I noticed that it was not brand new; perhaps the new owner was trying to wipe the karmic slate clean in anticipation of treacherous mountain roads. The only way I can describe it is “very Indian.” Even though I’d met several Indian teachers in California, including Swami Muktananda, who came with all the cultural guru trappings, I felt slightly uncomfortable. It was certainly not something that Father Halloran would be doing in the parking lot of Saint Catherine’s — breaking coconuts and pouring the milk over the hood of Mother's Ford station wagon, but I can hardly get that image out of my head now that it's planted.

We managed to squeeze past this elaborate ritual and came into a large hall where there was some intense chanting, surprisingly so. In most Indian temples, people line up, offer a few rupee notes, get a blessing, and leave. As a Hanuman shrine, it was overrun with hundreds of monkeys scarfing up tons of bananas set out as offerings. Monkeys are particularly nasty creatures, and living in a temple courtyard does not make them civilized, but on a Saturday outing at a temple, people were posing for selfies with the monkeys using their smartphones. The depth of the devotions was refreshing, but the whole scene still felt very foreign. There was a lot of family talk in Hindi, and after a few pictures for the folks back home, I wandered off.

The temple was built into the side of a hill. I descended to the level below the main hall, where there was another highly decorated temple in a small courtyard. I was the only person there. I wandered in and was greeted by a life-sized statue of a baba, sādhu, or monk, lots of fresh flowers, and food offerings. I’d stumbled into the samadhi shrine of the temple’s founder. I bowed, turned, and was about to leave when it hit me, really hit me! It was not that particular emotional feeling that Indians describe as bhakti. It was a deeper recognition: “I know that man.” The lifelike, life-sized, very colorful, idealized figure was definitely a person that I’d seen somewhere. I pulled out my phone and, within a few minutes, had solved the mystery. It was Neem Karoli Baba, Ram Dass’s guru. Neem Karoli was not from the plains of India. He’d spent his life wandering these hills of northern India. His main temple and ashram were further north in Uttarakhand, but perhaps we’d found a subtemple, or the temple of one of his disciples. The deity fit; his protector, not quite sure how to describe the relationship, was Lord Hanuman.

The pieces tumbled together. You’ve probably heard about Ram Das. Who hasn’t? He wrote the wildly popular New Age book called “Be Here Now” in the 70’s. It became one of the Bibles of the hippies. I met him on four or five occasions. He was always incredibly gracious and lively. Even in a large group, he seemed to be able to focus on you in a way that felt very personal. During my tenure as Director of Maitri, I asked him to come to Hartford Street to do a fundraiser. I remember that it was after Issan had died and Steve had resigned because Phil did the introduction. 

Even though the enormous death toll of HIV/AIDS had begun to decline by the mid-90s, there were still thousands of infected men facing an early death. An overflowing crowd sat zazen in our small zendo. Ram Das sat in the teacher’s seat and, as I remember clearly, his head seemed to be on a swivel, bouncing around, while all the zennies were stiff as boards, staring straight ahead.

He began his talk with a kind chuckle and said, “I am going to talk about the Self and dying. Oh, sorry, no-self, I have to remember that I am in a Buddhist crowd even if the notion entirely escapes me.” Then he began to talk about one of his visions after he first returned from India: to create a center for conscious dying. The idea was to establish a kind of ashram for people who were dying and interested in various conscious exercises, including meditation, during their dying process. He even said that he had a location picked out. Then he said that he, or the group that was working with him abandoned the idea because no one was interested. I wondered why he would throw this out into a group of gay men, the majority of whom were facing death. Was it a kind of challenge? How would they choose to spend their few precious last months, weeks, days?

Then he turned towards me and asked me about the hospice. I said that Issan had been committed to making life as normal as possible for the residents, but we had no requirement that residents had to be particularly conscious, spiritually or otherwise, during their last bit of this-life-alive time; that we were committed to allowing the individual's path to unfold. There were, however, a few residents who meditated as much as possible. He nodded and smiled. 

We collected a few hundred dollars that evening to help pay the bills, but we received a different kind of gift, not pouring coconut milk over a second hard car, but an invitation to examine what was really important about life, especially when the end is definitely in sight.

Politically correct Zen is not possible

In the early summer of 2018, there was an incident in the Zendo at Green Gulch Farm. Roshi Ed Brown, during a daylong meditation retreat, said something to offend a person who describes herself as a queer woman and a survivor of sexual violence. The incident appears to have been thoughtless, perhaps with a rough edge, but we mostly know about it through the backlash, which, frankly, seemed disproportionate. There are, or were, tapes of Ed’s talk, but I lack the patience to sift through them to hear precisely what was said. It is essential to remain impartial when assigning blame. Perhaps someone should take the blame (and apparently, Ed did try at some point), but that doesn’t interest me. 

As a person who was sexually assaulted, I was encouraged that another person had found meditation as a source of healing, but I am not surprised that Ed could not heal the wound. Zen has no silver bullet, and Ed is not a therapist. I am also saddened that the woman felt unsafe. I am sympathetic to both parties. What disappoints me is the decision of Zen worthies to ban Ed from teaching at any of the Zen Center’s Temples. He is among the oldest of Suzuki Roshi’s disciples, and his practice has demonstrated selfless dedication to the Way. 

All Zen Centers, like most religions, need to create a congregation, the crowd that will return. It is crucial. Zen is stealthy, and it may take some time to reveal itself, but most administrators of Zen Centers also have to keep an eye on the collection plate. I have been in that unenviable position. Hartford Street was set up as a neighborhood temple that shared the attitudes of its mostly gay neighbors. 

The richest, privileged liberal white clientele in California does not want to be subjected to bathroom gender brawls. The Zennist authorities felt that they had to take a stand. And thus the unenviable task of defining what is politically correct in Zen. I want to be clear. Zendos should be welcoming and safe for human beings facing any of life’s challenges. That has not always been the case, but the way that all the assembled roshis tried to smooth things over in Ed’s case destroyed the immediacy and the power of the moment. Not only did they throw the baby out with the bathwater, they murdered the helpless soul.

I can say with certainty that one of the keys to Zen practice is the student-teacher relationship. It is not an unequal relationship. In fact, the closer it is to equal, the closer to real friendship, and we touch the magic of Zen. It is a listening and response. It is not psychotherapy with the aim of getting better, better adjusted, or happier. Those things may happen, but it ain’t necessarily Zen. It has another overtone, a sacred one. It evades definition. It is not necessarily religious, even though it touches on the numinous. It also includes all of life. And that is where the danger lies.

If I were Ed, perhaps a solution might be to pass out a disclaimer to cover my ass when people entered the hall. (Of course, I have never been invited to speak at ZC, and at least one of the reasons might become clear if you make it to the end.)

“Friends, we have gathered to practice one of the most essential, perhaps the most crucial, even sacred pieces of our work together. We listen and respond, all the while realizing that the perfect dharma is imperfect in our hands. We chant occasionally and make seemingly impossible promises to dedicate our efforts to the liberation of all beings, but then comes a presentation of the dharma. Suppose the leader does his or her job; hopefully, you will be intrigued, inspired, puzzled, or even offended. If you come with a mindset that can only hear what you’d like to hear, it seems that a political rally is where you should be. I am no mind reader. I am not quite sure where my own mind will lead me, but occasionally, with any luck, it will be down a dark alley that needs light. If you’re at least willing to stay with me, sit still, and follow your own mind, you are welcome. If not, it might be appropriate to leave.

“If you are willing, your mind and mine can start to dance, like an introspective call-and-response in the Black Church, allowing us to see ourselves. I say something; you respond. There’s a mysterious formula here like treading the well-known words of "The Old Rugged Cross."

On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,

the emblem of suffering and shame;

and I love that old cross where the dearest and best

for a world of lost sinners was slain.

Following the script of most Zen Center talks I’ve heard, I might open by telling a personal story and painting a picture of the inadvertent hero of my story, stumbling along through life. Despite my sincere intention, I got distracted; I stumbled, cracked my head, stepped in shit, mindlessly crushed a frog or even a snake, heard a madperson screaming incoherent truth in the center divide on Market Street, thoughtlessly dropped the fiver that was intended for Mother Theresa in the gutter, but I use the occasion to turn my attention inward, examine myself, realize that in this fleeting instant the dharmakaya opened with unmistakable brilliance. I resolve to dive in more deeply, to apply Buddhist principles more generously, plus any number of other worthwhile ways in which I might lessen my suffering and the suffering of others in the world. I am not disparaging any of these aims or outcomes. In a word, they are lovely; it’s very genial. We smile over cookies and tea.

But now we come to the part in my talk where you ask, Why is he saying that? How dare he go there? That tone. That language. We can talk about sex and drugs and rock and roll as long as we use the prescribed politically correct language and (at least pretend) that it’s all in the past. We left those experiences as we emerged from the Summer of Love with a drug hangover that lasted a few weeks, or years if we are honest. Thank god it cleared up. 

Most talks are, at least to some degree, commentary on Buddhist Scripture, sutra, or Koan. And if it gets real, it gets real, but the chances are 50/50 that it might go astray. I recall hearing a public talk by the Dalai Lama when he attempted to bring an esoteric distinction from a Gelugpa text into a bedroom fight between a husband and wife. He was not successful, but not because of the bedroom part. He turned it into an Ozzie and Harriet squabble and avoided a serious discussion about sexuality and the inequality of power and consent. He opened the door, but then didn't walk through. He played it for the laugh. Ed Brown’s accuser would have little to complain about. 

I promise that if I am lucky enough to open a door, I will try to walk in. I certainly will not shy away due to some prudery or elevated sense of myself. That is the attitude I try to bring to the conversations I have with my teacher. 

Now, just to be clear, my mother taught me well, and I reserve profanity for private moments. I will also try to frame what I say in a way that you are at least open to listening. I certainly will not encourage you to break the precepts even if I am commenting on the “Kill the Buddha” koan, but neither will I try to explain it away or give an answer I don’t have—certainly not one that you want to believe but is just a pack of lies.

The choir invokes the image of the old rugged cross. It is imaginary. It makes no sense. In our case, the only part that does make sense is that it is an emblem of suffering. Somehow, the hymnist manages to drag love into the picture of sin and shame. I’m sorry, that is the best I can do with it without wandering into a make-believe world of elevated, sacred lies. Sometimes the dharma is like that, rudely breaking into our world with no formal introduction, not making any sense.

It seems hit or miss. Sometimes a teaching will get you to first base, and sometimes the fly ball will be caught and you’re out. But we still honor the dharma. We cannot retreat. It is in the very nature of the dharma. If you can't hear that and are going to feel affronted, please leave. Zen is not politically correct.