But suppose we didn't have any source except the words of Christ in the gospels. What would we be able to flesh out, and how would it compare to what we've learned from Buddhist practice?
I think that one thing to keep firmly in mind when we’re looking for Jesus’ angle on the love of God and practice of that love is that Jesus as a Jew was always working from scripture himself, from the Hebrew Bible. His first public appearance in the gospel of Luke is at a synagogue in Nazareth (immediately following his 40-day meditation retreat and fast in the wilderness), where he stood up to read from the book of Isaiah, chapter 61, verse 1 and part of verse 2:
The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD. . . Isaiah 61:1-2
In mapping terms, this seems to me to be suggestive of the last stage of the Zen Oxherding cycle, “coming back to the city with bliss-bestowing hands.” He is speaking from some kind of fruition here, and he is talking about fruits, the good news of liberation and healing, not about the process and practice of moving toward fruition.
So what we’re really asking about here on this thread about practice is what was he doing for those forty days in the wilderness? And in his frequent resorts to prayer in solitude and isolated places during his ministry? And in all honesty, I just don’t think there’s enough in the gospels to put much together here. Even in the larger Hebrew scriptures, the material on prayer is very sketchy and thin on the ground, as far as actual practice goes, and you can’t really do much with it without an awful lot of exegesis and reading stuff in, which is how the rabbis and Merkabah mystics and kabbalists and Christian contemplatives have been doing it for thousands of years, making a scriptural molehill into a contemplative mountain. (No offense, lol, I’m climbing that molehill myself).
I guess part of what I’m getting at is that I just don’t think you’re going to get that far in unearthing or discerning a comparable “practice” from the words of Jesus alone, or even from the Bible as a whole by itself. Most of the Desert Fathers seem to have made do with "a word," a scrap of scripture, often given by an elder, that they took back to their cave or hut and found a way to meditate on for very long periods of time: 40 days in the wilderness all over again, and just as opaque about "technique." Most of the written Judeo-Christian contemplative tradition, while rooted in scripture, finds its elaboration in extra-canonical writings. John of the Cross, who really does seem to me to be the state of the art in the articulation of a Christian contemplative path, makes his main points with frequent, and sometimes spectacularly strained and even mistranslated, quotations from scripture, both Old and New Testament. The new cloth of his exegesis is woven around threads of scripture. The word “sutra” also means “thread,” and Hindu-Buddhist tradition also weaves its later layers of exegeses around scripture, but the eastern tradition is much more discursive and explicit, eventually, in its presentation of the path and the way along it. The Buddha’s sermons are standing on top of thousands of years of Upanishadic and Vedantic material, even as he renews and subverts it with his own fresh exegesis. And so on, with every fresh reading of the previous material, and every new contemporary exegesis, like MCTB or Bernadette Roberts, and right up to the present day. And all these shared sources ARE the traditions. We follow the threads that speak to us, working and studying and practicing to see what all the fuss has been about all these thousands of years. We make the tradition our own, we come to embody it in our degree. The Judeo-Christian didn’t begin or end with Jesus; the deep historical spirituality of the East did not begin or end with the Buddha. And when we compare the traditions, we compare them from precisely where we are now, in our own practice, as students and followers of the paths the traditions discuss and suggest; we try to make the footprints come alive beneath our own feet. I know that Buddhism has immeasurably enriched my own practice, and can try to articulate that to some extent; in context here, we are talking about whether that enrichment of practice can be two-way or not, whether Judeo-Christian tradition has anything whatsoever to offer in return.
It really may not, lol. I usually suspect that it doesn’t, actually. I think it may come down to whether we can see dependent origination as the will of God, the three characteristics as the movement of the holy spirit, and the cloud of unknowing as sunyata. And to what the hell happens when that rock rolls away from the mouth of the tomb, and whether samsara is nirvana then or what. But if you can grok all that, in both vocabularies, and keep paying your rent and being kind to your neighbors. . . . well, waiter, I’ll have what he’s having.
love, tim