Just as would happen with Christianity, Buddhism would decline in the region that gave it birth. And like Christianity, as it spread into other regions, it took on distinct forms. The form that spread in Southeast Asia came to be called Theravada, the School of the Elders, though its opponents would call it Hinayana, or the Lesser Vehicle. The northeastern movement of Buddhism split into two major forms. Syncretism gave rise to a distinctly Himalayan form called Vajrayana. The Buddhism that spread into China, and eventually into Korea and Japan, was labeled, in chauvinist form, Mahayana, or the Great Vehicle. And it was from this third northern branch that the most well known form of Buddhism developed… that is, the School of Zen Buddhism, as it is known in Japan and the West, or Chan, as it is known in China.
The key figure in the development of Zen Buddhism was Bodhidharma. A monk who arrived in China in the early 5th century, he is best known for a fierce intensity, and is often depicted with a scowl. Legend has it that during the sixth year of a seven year meditation called “wall gazing,†he fell asleep. Infuriated, he cut off his own eyelids.
Since, to the Buddhist, bodily existence is yet another turn on the endless wheel of suffering, samsara, this really wasn’t a bad thing. Bodies were bad, life was bad, and the Buddhist’s single goal was to escape the cycle of rebirth, to leave the body and the word.
As Bodhidharma was beginning his teaching in China, Augustine was in the last decade of his life in Northern Africa. The great “Church Father,†he had been intensely involved in doctrinal debates that established what would become correct or orthodox belief in several areas of Christian life. Most important, he established that the effectiveness of a Christian rite, such as baptism, is not dependent on the holiness of the person administering it. This was an important issue in an era when even bishops were known to abandon Christ when faced with execution.
Unfortunately, Augustine brought with him eastern ideas about creation and the body, ideas he had picked up in his first religion, Manicheaism, a Persian gnostic cult. These were ideas that would not be alien to Bodhidharma. Like the Buddhist, the Manichean found the body to be a source of corruption.
Augustine brought a healthy dose of self-loathing and hatred of the body, and especially of sexuality, into Christianity. And he didn’t have to work that hard to fit it in. Paul doesn’t seem particularly enamored of the body, and even Jesus states that the body can be a source of sin, urging us to pluck out the lustful eye, to amputate the sinful hand.
But none of this actually comes out of the original Hebrew trajectory. Certainly the ancient Hebrew cult had its own body issues, especially when it came to blood and disease. But while they may have been a bit fastidious, they did not hate the flesh. The Hebrews didn’t have a problem with the body for one very good reason. They didn’t believe in any other existence.
This is important. The ancient Hebrews did not believe in an existence after bodily existence, just as many Rabbinic Jews today do not believe in life after death.
The belief in post-mortem existence develops fairly late in the Hebrew trajectory, when the constructive theologians we call prophets realized that a good Creator, and they believed in a good Creator, would have to render every life ultimately good, and that if that didn’t happen during the existence they could see, then surely it would happen in an existence they could not see.
Which is all to say, body hatred is a weird and inconsistent thing in our religious trajectory, more compatible with Gnostics and dualists than with a faith that believes in a good creation, and a good Creator. If we believe in a good God, then we must believe that our bodily existence is good, or at least potentially good.
That is not an easy message to preach. We humans have more words for complaint than we do for praise, and we notice our bodies more in their failures than we do in their successes. We note every lump and break and tear, every cancerous cell and pounding head. Athletes are conscious of the body, can find pleasure in the body, but they are a rare exception. We let Madison Avenue, anorexic models and twinkies in Chelsea define the acceptable body, insanity that leads to insanity. When we wrestle with addiction we blame our bodies. Some even blame their bodies for bad conduct, for bad decisions, for murder.
We watch our bodies fail and sometimes implode. Several families in our community know first hand that even the young are not spared from the seemingly random embodied catastrophe.
Yet, for all of our body hatred, these are amazing things. Fearfully and wonderfully made the scripture tells us. And our God deserves credit for their creation…
Why, you may ask? Because, whatever you may believe about your existence after the body dies, the embodied existence is the only one you have ever known. That little magic thing of self that sort of floats behind your eyes has never known any other existence.
What’s more, it is the only context in which you have experienced the world. For example, you have never enjoyed a glass of wine in your life. What you have enjoyed is the reaction of your body to the glass of wine. You have never enjoyed a symphony. You have enjoyed your body’s processing of sound waves and seat-shaking vibrations. To hell with the Platonists and their abstract forms, their pure thought. There is no such thing. Every thought is mediated through the existence of these bodies. Christ’s body, sensual, broken, resurrected. Ezekiel’s epileptic body.
We should be affirming the blessings of the body and naming, singing… we are the Little Leaguer who doesn’t know how long his arm is anymore and misses the ball… we are the dancer who makes that first perfect pirouette… We are nothing if not the tender touch of love, romantic or maternal or just a bear hug of camaraderie.
The psalms draw our attention to the valley of the shadow of death, to an encounter with our mortality, but they also remind us of the overflowing cup. They dwell on the blessedness of creation. The Song of Songs is not the extended metaphor some would claim. It is an erotic poem that describes the body in the most evocative language of its age.
Your body is you, at least the current you. It may break and fail. But it is also the context of your life, the way you can experience and know the goodness of God, for God is good, and a caress is good, and that delightful dark chocolate is good and that percussive final swell in Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony is good. The mud of springtime, the grass stains of the Little League field. These are good. Enough with the body hating. Our bodies, messy and beautiful… our bodies…
Which ironically brings us back to those body-hating Zen Buddhists, and maybe they aren’t so bad anyways, as we recall the words of American Zen poet Gary Snyder in his Pulitzer prize-winning 1975 collection Turtle Island. In “The Bath,†Snyder writes of bathing with his wife and two young sons in the family sauna. The poem ends:
This is our body. Drawn up crosslegged by the flames
drinking icy water
hugging babies, kissing bellies,
Laughing on the Great Earth
Come out from the bath.