The Temptation of Belief

When a Buddhist enters a Christian realm, faith without work is difficult to understand, but easy to envy.
by Bethany Saltman | from Killing the Buddha website


Last month I went to southern California to visit my cousin K., a born again Christian who promised to show me around the church scene there and take good care of me in the seventh month of my first pregnancy. Pretty much everyone I talked to about this trip found it odd that I would leave behind my cozy world of husband, house, mountains, and fellow Zen practitioners in the monastery down the street, to fly 3,000 miles across the country to interview Christians.


Why, they asked me, would a Buddhist spend all this time researching and writing about Christianity? And why that type of Christianity, specifically? It's a good question, one that I am trying to answer as I do the work, which I have become nearly obsessed with. I keep putting off things like turning our guest room into a nursery to read C.S. Lewis or transcribe an interview with a fundamentalist. People are beginning to wonder. I wonder. But there's one thing I know: Jealousy is a powerful force, and I am terribly jealous of the born again.


I have been practicing Buddhism for nearly ten years now. In the first couple years, I truly felt as if I had been delivered from madness. I discovered the dharma through a total fluke, realized I had found the answer to my torment, and threw myself in with abandon. Instantly, I was rewarded for my efforts -- my mind settled down and the prison I had been in started to disintegrate. Someone once told me that, when she first met me, I seemed like someone who had been saved, yes, even born again. And it's true. But even then, in the beginning, when the payoff was greatest and most obvious, the goods didn't come easy. I was devoted -- fanatically -- to practicing, as Master Dogen says, as though extinguishing a fire upon my head. It was natural, in that sense, but not effortless. In fact, it was pretty frantic.


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Filed Tue - March 14, 2006, 07:52 PM in

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