Conversation with a Buddhist

I went to Dallas for some training for my new job and on the way back I saw this lady walking around in the airport with only a quarter inch of gray hair and what looked like a hospital gown. I immediately thought she was a cancer patient. But then later when I boarded the plane and found myself sitting next to her, I learned that she was a Buddhist monastic, living with about 10 others in a monastery in Newport, Washington, just north of Spokane. It was actually she who struck up the conversation. I was a shy at first, thinking she might possibly have Aids and it would be embarrassing for me to ask her about her haircut and garb, but as soon as she introduced herself we talked for the entire one-and-one-half hour flight.

I asked her how she came to be a Buddhist and she said that she was a history major in college like me. She was drawn to Buddhism because its teaching made sense and helped her. Then, after she was already a Buddhist, she became deeply concerned about her own integrity. For example, she would complain about the lies of government and big business, while thinking her own little white lies wouldn’t hurt anyone. So finally she decided to seek self control through the discipline of the monastery, which in fact helped her, she said. And I could tell that she now had peaceful soul. She had walked and smiled, when I had seen her earlier, like someone at rest, resigned to her condition, not fighting the world. And given her shaved head and simple frock, her lack of care for material things couldn’t be more obvious. Yet, she wasn’t afraid to ask me about my new job and whether I thought it was honest. I liked her immediately.

I told her about the Trinity and how worshiping the Triune God allows people to live in both unity and diversity. We talked about Islam and gender roles and the role of politics in believer’s life and the history of evangelicalism in America. And we talked about Buddhism’s cyclical view of history and I asked her how such a world with no creator had any meaning. In fact it was I that most often set the course of the conversation, while she would question me at times and object gracefully at others. It occurred to me that she was probably doing what Buddhists do, which is to avoid confrontation and rather probe for weakness. She asked me how I could think of men and women in such “stereotypical” roles, but when I didn’t balk at the term, but continued to explain marriage as I had heard Doug Wilson do so many times and also continued to tell her my own experiences (not with marriage of course!), so as to remain vulnerable, we eventually began to get along quite well—me and Thubten Chodron, as she was called. The tension with which we started the conversation vanished. Yet I didn’t ask her any personal questions, because I wanted to respect her age, but toward the end of the conversation she told me that her last name had been Wilson. And she also said something very strange and telling. She said that she used to wonder why she had a body, why she should be white and born in America, why these hands and this color hair, etc. She had wanted rather to identify with the entire human race. I responded by saying that I believed God placed us in families and ethnic groups and nations for a reason and that these were something to glory in, but that our identity has countless levels. One may in one context be proud of his identity as a Wilson or a Becktell and an American and also be proud of his identity as a Westerner or a son of Adam or a creature for that matter. Everyone in fact is much more diverse, biologically speaking than we realize. Each one of us has eight great grandparents and sixteen great, great grandparents and so on.

The plane began to land and so I told her what a pleasure it was to meet her and asked if she had a Facebook. She did not, because she was worried that such means of communication would inhibit true face to face relationships. It occurred to me that living in a monastery, humming in tune with the universe might limit true face to face relationships as well, but I thought better of it. She probably has developed a number of close relationships with her peers and students.

As she left I wondered to myself and to God, whether I had been a good witness. It almost bothered me that we had gotten along so well. We shared so many of the same values, peace, simplicity and taking responsibility, and yet she believed not in God, but in “humankind,” as she would say, and humankind’s own humanity to man, our ability to recognize and alleviate the pain of others. It occurred to me that the only way I might influence her, so far along in her pursuit of “enlightenment,” was for my God to vindicate me. I had told her what I could. It was not for me to press home some uncomfortable point to a kind woman, much older than myself. There are sometimes when a Christian meets his equal in terms of someone who loves peace and wants to do what’s right and who seems self-satisfied. And perhaps only the passage of time and the manifest blessing of God on our lives can influence these.