My Buddha-nature and my Christ-nature

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6 My Buddha-nature and my
Christ-nature
Paul Knitter
Although any statement that is supposed to apply to all religions is risky,
I do believe that a case can be made that all wisdom traditions recognize, in
one form or another, that religions really don’t know what they are talking
about! All of them insist that what they are seeking or what they believe
they have come to experience, what many of them call ultimate reality, is
beyond all human comprehension. No human being, and no human com-
munity of spiritual seekers, can grasp the fullness of God, or Tao, or Brah-
man, or Wakan Tanka. As a tee-shirt that someone gave me – and which
would make an ideal gift for all theologians – puts it: “God is too big to fit
into any one religion.”
In my theology classes, I have used the image of ultimate reality or Truth
as a universe surrounding us that, in its vastness and richness, is beyond all
human sight. To see it, we need telescopes. But all such telescopes – in their
varying power and specializations – do two things: they enable us to see
more of the Truth that otherwise would be beyond our visual capacity; but
they also limit what we can see, for focusing on one part of the universe of
truth leaves out others. So in order to see more of the universe than what my
telescope allows me to see, I need to look through other telescopes that are
different in their abilities and specificities than mine.
The analogy is clear. If followers of the different wisdom traditions are
convinced that they have encountered and come to know a Truth that has
given meaning to their lives, they also know that there is more to the Truth
than what they know. They know, but they also know that they don’t know.
What more and more followers of the religions are coming to realize in our
interconnected, intercommunicating contemporary world is that they can
discover and come to know more of the Sacred by using, as it were, the
telescopes of other religions. In order to learn more of the Sacred, in order
to overcome the limitations of one’s own religion, one must engage the
teachings and practices of other religious paths. As Raimon Panikkar put
it with his typical edgy insightfulness: “To answer the question ‘Who/what
is my God,’ I have to ask the question ‘Who/what is your God’” (Panikkar
1979, 203).
DOI: 10.4324/9780429000973-9

66 Paul Knitter
That is a question posed in interreligious dialogue. To be authentic, dia-
logue requires much more than “tolerant conversation” in which partici-
pants are “nice” to each other. It is also more than a sincere conversation
in which all parties seek to learn more about each other. Anyone who truly
commits herself to real dialogue commits herself to the possibility and to the
expectation of learning from the other. And insofar as one learns something
new or different from another, one is also learning something new about
oneself. The goal is not just information but also transformation. One might
have to change not only one’s ideas but also one’s religious identity, one’s
way of being religious.
I’m going to write out of my own personal search for a spirituality that
can be experientially meaningful, intellectually coherent, and ethically
responsible. My reflections as a theologian will, in other words, be based on
my spiritual practices and experience. I hope that these reflections will be
an example of theology as “fides quaerens intellectum” – spiritual experi-
ence trying to make sense of itself. I will be following the age-old Christian
directive that the “lex credendi” (how we believe) should flow from the
“lex orandi” (how we pray). Doctrine should be grounded in and tested by
spirituality.
I will begin with some of the difficulties or stumbling blocks that I and –
from my experience as a teacher and a preacher – many Christians have
with what they have been told to believe about Jesus the Christ. If Christians
no longer believe that “outside the church there is no salvation,” many now
struggle with the related claim “outside of Jesus there is no salvation.”
Many Christians sense a discomforting ambiguity when they ask them-
selves: “Just how does Jesus save me? How is he my savior?” There is
increasing dissatisfaction with the atonement theory – that Jesus’s death
somehow paid the price that satisfied God’s wrath or demand for justice
after the “original sin.”
But what is to take the place of atonement? I want to suggest that our
conversation with Buddhism can provide some very welcome help.
I will be using the notion of “functional analogy” as it is developed by my
co-author, Roger Haight, in our recent book Jesus and Buddha: Friends in
Conversation (Haight and Knitter 2015). Functional analogies between two
differing traditions would be those teachings or symbols that, despite their
profound differences, serve similar purposes or respond to similar concerns
and thus can offer possibilities of comparison that illumine and enrich each
other.
The Tibetan Buddhist practice from which I would like to suggest some
functional analogies with the saving role of Jesus is that of Guru Yoga,
particularly as taught by my teacher, Lama John Makransky, as “benefactor
practice.”1 Tibetan teachers recognize the need for embodiments or visual
representations of the ultimate reality that is beyond conceptual comprehen-
sion. These are our “spiritual benefactors,” who have embodied and so can
reveal the nature of mind. For Buddhists, of course, the primary spiritual

My Buddha-nature and my Christ-nature 67
benefactor will be Buddha, or Tara, or one of the vast team of bodhisattvas.
Makransky encourages Christians to welcome Jesus, as well as Mary, as
their spiritual benefactors.
Crucial for this practice is to visualize and truly feel the presence of the
spiritual benefactor. Visualizations of the benefactor are intense, particular,
contextual, and set in the vivid colors of what St. Ignatius in the Jesuit Spir-
itual Exercises might call the “compositio loci.” The practitioner is encour-
aged to feel the energy of the benefactor’s love that embraces and holds her
fully and penetrates, as Makransky puts it, into every cell of one’s body.
After having received the love of the benefactor into one’s total being, the
practitioner, in the second step of this practice, extends the love to all sen-
tient beings.
The final phase is to let the images of the benefactor dissolve and allow
oneself to merge nonconceptually into the Essence Love that was manifest
and communicated through the benefactor. This is the “nonconceptual”
goal of the practice. We grow in awareness that there is a nondual oneness
between the spiritual benefactor and ourselves and also between the teacher
and student, between benefactor and recipient, between savior and saved,
within the vast cognizant, compassionate space that contains and animates
us all.
When Christians visualize Jesus as their spiritual benefactor, they can dis-
cover deeper ways of understanding and experiencing Jesus. Seventy times
St. Paul uses the phrase “en Christo einei” – to be in Christ Jesus. The Bud-
dhist benefactor practice functions analogously for the Christian as a way
of waking up to what it means or how it feels “to be in Christ Jesus,” or to
“put on the mind of Christ” (Phil 2:5), or to be the body of Christ (I Cor
12:27). Having gone through the visualization of Christ, having received of
the love of Christ, having extended that love to all the others that make up
his body, and finally having let the image go in order to fuse into the mystery
of the risen Christ-Spirit, the Christian can pronounce, with clarity, “It is
now no longer I who lives; it is Christ living in/as me” (Gal 2:20).
This is salvation – not as an atoning process that takes place outside of
oneself but as a transformative unitive experience. Jesus saves in essentially
the same way that the transcendent Buddha saves: not by constituting the
nature of mind or God’s saving love, but by revealing and so making it effec-
tively present. With Christ, one is a recipient and a conduit of the Essence
Love that Jesus called Abba. To be saved, therefore, is the nondual experi-
ence of being in Christ Jesus. In this experience, Jesus certainly plays a very
unique role. But it is a uniqueness that is, by its very nature, larger than
Jesus and so shareable with other unique embodiments of Essence Love or
Spirit.
In another functional analogy, both Buddha and Jesus can be considered
“liberators” – as bearers of a message that can enable humans to achieve
the well-being of what Buddha called enlightenment and of what Jesus
called the Reign of God. They shared a common starting point for their

68 Paul Knitter
preaching: the sufferings that all humans (though some more than oth-
ers) have to face: the inadequacies, the perplexities, the insufficiencies, the
diminishments, the pains and disappointments that darken human exist-
ence. Both teachers began their missions out of a concern for the sufferings
of their fellow human beings.
As indicated in the Second of the Four Noble Truths, for Buddhists, the
fundamental cause of suffering is found in the tanha, or self-centered greed,
that all humans have to deal with. This selfishness is caused by the ignorance
that human beings are born into. Hence, the importance of enlightening,
or transforming our sense of who and what we are. What we really are,
according to the teachings of the Dharma, is anatta – not-selves – beings
who exist as interbeings with others. Our own well-being consists in foster-
ing the well-being of others. Enlightenment is to wake up to that truth, that
reality.
At this point, liberationist Christians will remind Buddhists that the
results of ignorance go beyond the individual. The actions that follow
upon my lack of awareness of my nature as anatta/not-self are not only
my actions; they become, slowly but inevitably, society’s actions. My own
ego-centered attitudes and acts become embodied in social forms; they
incarnate themselves, as it were, in the way society works. If Buddhists
understand karma to be the unavoidable results that follow every action or
choice we make, Christians will point out that individual karma becomes
social karma.
Sinful or greedy structures remain even after individuals have been
enlightened. Liberationist Christians insist on the reality of social sin, which
can remain even after individual sin has been removed. To transform the
structures of one’s awareness and thinking does not necessarily change the
structures of society. One can be enlightened and full of compassion for all
sentient beings without realizing that one remains a part of an economic
system that continues to cause suffering to others.
So Christians remind Buddhists that transforming oneself is different
from – and should not become a substitute for – transforming society. This
implies that compassion, though necessary, is insufficient. Justice is also nec-
essary. If compassion calls us to feed the hungry, justice urges us to ask why
they are hungry. Mindfulness is necessary for living a life of inner peace, but
we also need social mindfulness of how our reified, ego-centric thoughts and
fears become reified social or political systems.
If Buddhists are to effectively extend their practice of personal mindfulness
to include social mindfulness, they will also have to take seriously the Chris-
tian liberationists’ call for a “preferential option for the oppressed.” This
preference calls upon all spiritual seekers to be sure that their quest includes,
as an integral element, the effort to become aware of the experience of those
who have been pushed aside, those who don’t have a meaningful voice in the
decisions of state or school or neighborhood. Our “mindfulness” must also
include them, their experience, their reality.

My Buddha-nature and my Christ-nature 69
This is what the liberation theologians mean by the “hermeneutical privi-
lege of the poor.” From their position of suffering and exploitation, the
oppressed can see the world in ways that the powerful or the comfortable
cannot. The mindfulness we practice on our cushions or in our pews must
be balanced and expanded by the mindfulness gained on the streets.
If Christians remind Buddhists that personal transformation is incomplete
without social transformation, Buddhists in turn will remind Christians that
social transformation is impossible without personal transformation. For
Buddhists, I believe, inner transformation of consciousness has a certain
priority over social transformation.
One can carry out the task of being a bodhisattva only if one has expe-
rienced the wisdom that produces compassion. Prajna, or wisdom, is what
one knows when one begins to wake up to the interconnectedness or the
interbeing of all reality. Realizing that one’s very being or self is not one’s
own but the being of all other selves, one will necessarily feel compassion
for all sentient beings.
Buddhists are calling Christians to recognize (or reaffirm) the subtle, but
real, primacy of contemplation over action and of compassion over justice.
The primacy of contemplation over action
There is a Buddhist conviction that we must undergo a profound personal
transformation before we can “wisely” interact with the world around us.
We are born into a fundamental ignorance that we must deal with before
we can begin to truly know who and what we and the world really are.
If we don’t overcome this ignorance before fixing the world’s problems,
we’re probably only going to cause more problems. Although Buddhists
have much to learn from Christians about what kind of action must arise
out of contemplation (that is, socially transformative action), Christians
need to learn from Buddhists why action without contemplation is unsus-
tainable and dangerous.
Buddhist contemplation aims at a nondual experience of our interbeing
or reciprocal interdependence with what is ultimate (the nature of mind/
spirit). This is what establishes in us an inner peace; it is also what sustains
us in working for the Reign of God. No matter what happens, no matter
how much failure or opposition, if we are peace, we will continue to try to
make peace (Hanh 1992). Such inner peace and groundedness is a protector
or an antidote to the danger of burnout that threatens all social and peace
activists. Working for peace and justice is hard, often frustrating, work.
The primacy of compassion over justice
But contemplation manifests its priority not only by sustaining action but
also by guiding it. Thich Nhat Hanh challenges the Christian insistence on
the “preferential option for the oppressed.” God, he declares, doesn’t have

70 Paul Knitter
preferences. God – or Essence Love – embraces all beings – poor and rich,
oppressed and oppressor – equally (Hanh 1995).
Christians remind Buddhists that compassion without justice – that is,
without reform of structural injustice – is not enough to relieve suffering;
Buddhists remind Christians that, just as there can be no peace without jus-
tice, there can also be no justice without compassion.
This Buddhist challenge reminds us of what Jesus himself taught. People
will know who Jesus’s disciples are not by their work for justice, but by
their love for each other. Jesus’s “first commandment” is love, not justice (Jn
13: 35). And Jesus called on us to love our enemies as much as we love our
friends, which means loving the oppressor as much as we love the oppressed.
This doesn’t mean we will not confront our enemies and oppressors. But our
primary motivation for doing so will not be the demand of justice, but the
demand of love. We will confront oppressors with what Makransky calls “a
fierce compassion” (Makransky 2014).
Thich Nhat Hanh, in his little book on Living Buddha, Living Christ,
informs Christians that, for a Buddhist, God doesn’t have favorites. He is
thus reminding Christians that just as there is a relationship of nonduality
between emptiness and form, or between Abba-Mystery and us, so there
is a nonduality between oppressed and oppressor. Both are expressions of
interbeing and Abba-Mystery. The actions of oppressor or oppressed are
clearly different. But their identities are the same. And that means that my
own identity is linked to both oppressed and oppressors.
Therefore, we do not respond to the oppressed out of compassion and
to the oppressor out of justice. No, we respond to both out of compassion!
Compassion for both the oppressed and the oppressor. So, yes, we want to
liberate the oppressed. But just as much, we want to liberate the oppressors.
Compassion for the oppressor will be expressed differently than compassion
for the oppressed. But just as much, we want to free the oppressors from the
illusions that drive them to greed and to the exploitation of others. Such a
nonpreferential option for compassion that extends equally and clearly to
both oppressed and oppressors will be the foundation on which justice can
be built, on which structures can be changed.
Some kind of a spiritual practice that will foster and sustain our inner
transformation and resources is imperative. To have begun the process of
awakening to oneness with Christ and to what Jesus experienced as the
unconditional love of the Abba-Mystery can assure us that our efforts are
not just our own efforts. Once we begin to wake up to the wisdom that
reveals to us that all our efforts are grounded in and expressions of the
Abba-Mystery that is active in and as us, once we begin to realize that in
working for peace and justice we are doing what our Christ-nature neces-
sarily calls us to do – then we will also realize that, as the Bhagavad Gita
tells us, the value of our actions are not determined by their fruits. The value
of our actions is in our actions themselves, for they are also the actions of
Abba.

My Buddha-nature and my Christ-nature 71
This deeper experience of the nonduality between the Abba-Mystery and
the world, or between the future and the present Reign of God, assures
Christians that even though their efforts to bring the world closer to the
Reign of God fail, Abba and the Reign are still present and available. In
both success and failure, the Reign of God is both already/not yet.
The Buddhist experience of “enlightenment,” of waking up to what
Mahayana Buddhists term our “Buddha-nature,” is, I believe, a prompt for
Christians to enter more profoundly into the unitive experience signaled in
John’s description of Jesus as “one with the Father” and “one with us” (Jn 14),
or in Paul’s description (I would dare say “definition”) of a Christian as
someone who exists “in Christ.” I am suggesting that the nondual unity
that Mahayana Buddhists affirm between emptiness and form, or between
Nirvana and Samsara, or (in Thich Nhat Hanh’s terminology) between
interbeing and all finite beings, is analogous to, if not the same as, the unity
between Jesus and Abba or between Christ and us. The divine and the finite,
the creator and the created are, like emptiness and form, distinct but insepa-
rable. They co-inhere. They “inter-are.”
When we begin to “awaken” to our oneness with Christ in the Father,
when we begin to feel that “it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives
in me” (Gal 3: 21), we are awakening to what Buddhists call prajna, or
wisdom – the awareness of the fundamental, all pervasive interconnected-
ness of all reality. We are all truly “one in the Spirit.” And this realization
that we are interlinked in the Divine Mystery will naturally bring forth in us
what Buddhists call karuna, compassion, for all our fellow human beings –
indeed, for all sentient beings. To love our neighbor is not a commandment;
it is a natural necessity.
Here Buddhists are offering us Christians an opportunity to clarify, per-
haps reform, our soteriology – our doctrine on how Jesus brings about “sal-
vation.” The cross can save a world wracked by the sufferings caused by
greed and hatred and violence by embodying and making clear the power of
nonviolent love. Jesus died on the cross not because the Father willed it, but
because he refused, as the Dhammapada counsels, to answer hatred with
hatred. Rather than answering the violence of the colonizing Romans and
their local collaborators with his own violence, rather than abandoning his
mission of proclaiming the Reign of God, he responded with love and trust,
and, as the Latin American martyrs express it, he was “disappeared.”
And the power of this embodiment of nonviolent love was such that,
after he died, his followers, gathered around the table to break bread and
remember him, realized that he was still with them. His example of love
confronting hatred, of nonviolence responding to violence, transformed
their lives with the power to go and do likewise. To be so transformed is to
be redeemed and saved. His followers share in his “Christ-nature,” just as
the followers of Buddha continue to realize their “Buddha-nature.” And by
realizing my Buddha-nature, I have been able to understand and to live my
Christ-nature.

72 Paul Knitter
Note
1 This benefactor practice is laid out clearly and practically in Makransky’s Awak-
ening through Love (2007).
References
Haight, Roger, and Paul Knitter. 2015. Jesus and Buddha: Friends in Conversation.
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Hanh, Thich N. 1992. Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday
Life. New York: Bantam.
Hanh, Thich N. 1995. Living Buddha, Living Christ. New York: Riverhead Books.
Makransky, John. 2007. Awakening Through Love. Somerville, MA: Wisdom
Publications.
Makransky, John. 2014. “A Buddhist Critique of, and Learning from, Chris-
tian Liberation Theology.” Theological Studies 75 (3): 635–657. doi:10.1177
/0040563914541028
Panikkar, Raimundo. 1979. “The Myth of Pluralism: The Tower of Babel – A Medi-
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