Boddhisatva-Nature and Theosis: Or, a Proposal for the Integration of Buddhist Thought into Christian Spiritual Practice
Author's Note:
I am a Western Christian with a more-than-popular but less-than-scholarly understanding of the religious and philosophical milieu of Asia. While I attempt to represent the ideas and intentions of other traditions with respect, drawing out from them what I think are valuable insights, I nevertheless recognize my own blind spots. If there are any among my readers who would seek to correct my writing, either in regard to my representation of Buddhism or Christianity, I humbly welcome such fraternal correction.
In later Mahayana Buddhism, the ideal of the bodhisattva is held up to adherents as a supreme religious aspiration and all are encouraged to attain to it. A bodhisattva, an "awakened" or "enlightened being," is a person who has promised to withhold their own enlightenment and attainment of nirvana until all other sentient beings have likewise escaped the cycle of reincarnation, the experience of suffering, and attained buddhahood. Buddhists from this branch of the tradition venerate bodhisattvas as benevolent divine figures willing to come to the aid of lesser beings with their immense magical power.
It is perhaps because of a sense of subtle egoism that Buddhists of the Mahayana schools began to regard the path of the bodhisattva as higher than that of the so-called "solitary Buddha," still seen as the religious ideal among the Therevada schools. I cannot say as much. What I can say is that, to a Christian, the idea of the bodhisattva, a person on a cosmic mission to end all suffering by the force of their own compassion and wisdom, almost immediately recalled, for me, the sublimity of St. Paul's cosmological Christ. Take, for example, this passage from the first chapter of his Letter to the Colossians:
"For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation— if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel. This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant."
Take note specifically of the universal scope of Christ's authority, his power, and the efficacy of his salvific work. This recalls the cosmic significance of the mission of the bodhisattva, but, of course, they are rooted in different philosophies. Christ can bring this universal shalom by virtue of who He is, as coeternal with the Father and possessed of Godhood, proper. The bodhisattva, by contrast, has no special spiritual or ontological status beyond what they have labored to achieve by following the path set forth by Buddhist spiritual practice. In this straightforward sense, this type of cosmic saviorism is off limits to the ordinary Christian.
If we speak this way, I feel, we speak too soon. For just as Christ labors to reconcile all things unto himself, the body of believers which we call the Church labors with Him and, by the process of theosis, or what we in the West may call divinization or sanctification, we are made partakers of the same divine nature through mystical union with Christ.
Likewise, just as the later Mahayana tradition came to assign a "buddha-nature," to everything, seeing in all things the potential to transcend the eternal cycle of suffering, so Christ as Incarnation, that is as having become in a certain sense a Creature, has united his divinity to creaturehood such that it is considered obvious to the Christian consciousness that all men partake in a kind of "Christo-nature" via Christ's identification with the suffering: "What you have done for the least of these, you have done for me." This is the fullest expression of what Christian theology calls the imago Dei.
Thus, as Christians advance in the spiritual life and attain more fully unto theosis, they take on more of the aspects of this Christo-nature, not as something achieved through effort but as something infused by grace.
Necessarily, this has a similar dimension to the bodhisattva, for if Christ is a kind of supreme bodhisattva, kind of supreme bringer of shalom, then it stands to reason that those who attain unto theosis become such as well. What this looks like practically in the life of the believer would prompt a much longer speculation, but it must mean, at least, a sharing in Christ's universal compassion and salvific will, as well as a cultivation of such virtues as would allow this orientation to be effective upon the souls of others. It would require, like Christ, an other-oriented spirituality.
Here, Christianity stands ready to receive a corrective. For especially in late modern times, Christian soteriology has more and more retreated inwardly. There is a greater emphasis on one's personal holiness. Christians disappear into preoccupation with their own salvation, a theosis of a "private Christ," if you will. I have heard many Christians routinely boil the faith down to the bare goal of "getting to heaven." It would be much better to receive the outwardly-directed and affective spirituality of the bodhisattva, and work for one's own salvation through and for the sake of the salvation of all.
Here, obviously, other issues arise. How could such a schema apply to a Christianity that is not at least hopefully universalist in its outlook? Indeed, I do not relish, and do not intend to take up, the project of squaring such a profound, cosmologically Christic spirituality with traditional Christian beliefs about eternal damnation, its exact nature and condition. I would leave that project to someone more interested.
Yet I find nothing so pressing in my own spiritual life as to cultivate this spirit and disposition, and live it to the best of my ability.