Contextualizing the Gospel for Thai Buddhists

Some rough thoughts on contextualization:

What follows is, with a few edits, my thoughts on contextualization of the gospel for Thai Buddhists that I wrote up for one of our Servant Partners trainers who was preparing a teaching on contextualization for the Servant Parnters’ interns in Los Angeles. (April 2007). More polished articles will be forthcoming and posted under my “Writing” page.

The key to my contextualization is that Logos=Tamma. Tamma is widely translated “Dharma” in English, though it is important to note that Theravada (Thailand, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Laos, Burma), Mahayana (China, Korea, Vietnam), Zen (Japan), and Tibetan Buddhisms are more different from each other than Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox or (I think) Sunni and Shiite Islam, and so popular books in the west that emphasize Zen and Tibetan forms might describe things quite different from what I am referring to. The idea of Tamma is the force behind the universe, the right order of things, the path of righteousness, Truth, Wisdom, etc. When I look up Logos in the Greek lexicon on my computer Bible program, the definition is eerily similar. Tamma is the root word behind nature (tammachat), righteousness (kuamchobtaam), normal (tammada), religious truth (kristtaam or puttaam for Christian and Buddhist respectively), scripture (prakristtaamkampi or praputtaamkampi), the community of saints (tammikachon), etc. John makes the leap in John 1 to say that, “In the beginning was the Tamma, and the Tamma was with God, and the Tamma was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made…..The Tamma became flesh and made his dwelling among us…” This isn’t how the official Thai Bible translates it. From what I’ve heard the Thai Bible society and Thai churches are quite afraid of/opposed to contextualization. The official Thai Bible uses a royal language word to translate Logos that essentially means the “word from the throne”. But the concept of Logos in Greek is certainly much bigger than the literal word of a king.

My light bulb went on to how I could communicate the concept of God with Buddhists through a regular dialogue I had with our community president, Komsorn, a guy who had previously been a monk for 10 years and is very learned into Buddhism. Whenever I would say that God is a person, he would laugh off/rebuke the idea, saying that God couldn’t possibly be a person. We would just go back and forth on this sticking point for a couple years. But then one day, he explained in such a way: “God can’t possibly be a person because God is infinite, eternal, there is no beginning and no end to God, he doesn’t have a day he was born and a day he will die and be no more, he is all powerful and all knowing…” I was like, “Woah! This is exactly what I believe about God. He is Yahweh, the Alpha and the Omega….” I asked him, “So do you believe that you can pray to God as you conceive him?” He answered yes. We were on to something. He wasn’t opposed to the idea of God being relational, he was opposed to the idea of God being finite. Again, the concept of Logos/Tamma came in handy. From my background in physics, I already had the concept that God was the force that holds the universe together. That in the electromagnetic and gravitational and nuclear forces, between the quarks and protons and neutrons and photons, in the infinite complexity, we are seeing none other than the hand of God. So if God is a Force, bigger and broader and beyond our imagination than we could conceive of as a person, this is a beautiful thing. If God is indeed the Alpha and Omega, the Great I AM, then of course he is more than a person. And, amazingly, I can read in Colossians 1 Paul saying something very similar, “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 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….For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him…Now I rejoice…by the commission God gave me to present to you the Tamma of God in its fullness - the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord’s people…” So we reclaim the miracle that though God is more than a person, he wanted us to know him and knew that the only way we could know him in his fullness is to relate to him as a person. And so it is an absolute mind-boggling miracle that God, Tamma, in all his fullness, squeezed into Jesus so that we might know him. And then that we are told God’s Spirit comes to live in us, in our hearts…if we indeed believe that all of God’s fullness is in the Spirit, then we ought to burst into flames.

So from all this, we can emphasize how Jesus was a teacher of Tamma, the same Tamma that Buddha taught. And then we can talk about Jesus’ life and how he was the only one who ever lived who fully lived out this Tamma. And we can emphasize Jesus’ teaching to repent and believe the good news, that the Kingdom of Tamma is at hand. We can emphasize how Jesus taught that he was the Way, the Truth, the Life ( i.e. the full manifestation of Tamma, just as Colossians teaches). Komsorn would affirm that Jesus is the Son of God (which we defined as the only one who fully walked out Tamma, the full manifestation of Tamma). He would still call himself a Buddhist but I don’t know what difference there is between us anymore after he says something like that.

Where all this is going and what I will write further when I have time, is how contextualizing with Buddhists necessarily leads us to a more holistic gospel. Unless we understand that the Gospel is “Jesus is Lord” and that the Kingdom of God is at hand and that this news is good news for this earth here and now, that God’s purpose is to send us out as healing agents in this world, that he endeavors to bring about a new creation, a new heavens and a new earth (as opposed to believing that the Gospel is simply believing the bridge diagram and four spiritual laws and getting a ticket into floating up in the clouds as a disembodied spirit singing worship songs all day after we die), we can’t make the gospel of Jesus and the gospel of Buddha equivalent. Buddhism is from square one all about ending suffering. If we believe that God is about ending suffering and bringing about a new creation, even presently, the Tamma of Buddha is the same as the Tamma of Jesus and we can see Jesus as the special one, the Annointed One, or as a Buddhist prophecy would put it, The Most Beautiful Love, the fulfillment of Buddhism and the one who’s reappearing will set the world to rights and coincide with our coming to live in harmony together in what can be summarized with a Judeo-Christian term as shalom. But if we believe that God would just have us proclaim a message of four spiritual laws and an individual salvation, it is very hard to show how this is good news because sin and guilt is not the primary concern of Buddhists. In the former, we don’t even need to have people change their affiliation from “Buddhist” to “Christian” and will succeed in evangelism all the more by avoiding such dividing distinctions and rather taking opportunity to point to the story of Tamma and Jesus’ life. In the latter, it is necessary to have people convert from the religion of their fathers and their country to the foreigners religion and be seen as essentially becoming a foreigner.

We can also show how Buddha was one of the strongest preachers against the idolatry and spirit worship that is so common in popular Buddhism. That practice is actually more from Hinduism and Bhramanism, which is what Buddha was reacting against from the very beginning. Buddha’s main concern was Tamma as the path to put out the flame of suffering. But yet, the folk Buddhist elements (which are actually stronger than the pure Buddhist elements in popular religion here), rightly maintain an understanding that there is a real spirit world. In this, our contextualization is quite easy. We pray for people’s healing, we pray for people to receive dreams and visions from God, we pray for God to miraculously reveal himself to people, to touch people’s hearts. People come to see that God is real and he is powerful. Our daily example as people who don’t walk in fear of ghosts and spirits is more powerful than I think any of us realize. From this people can come to see the victory of Christ over and against all demons and spirits.

I’m also presently considering how we might talk about the Holy Spirit as Tamma. It would seem that to fresh ears, the directly translated term “holy spirit” (as of a dead person) would not evoke the idea of the all powerful fully manifested presence of God. And in as much as the New and Old Testaments speak of the Spirit as a wind or a breath, I am inclined to think that when we walk in “the Spirit”, it is the same as when we walk in the spirit of a movement or in the spirit of some role model or famous figure. We are influenced by the ways and lifestyle, values and ethos. So when we walk in the path of Tamma, when we live out our walk out Tamma, we are walking in the Spirit. When we receive the Spirit of the Word of God, we receive the Spirit of Tamma. Perhaps we can help people more easily understand the Spirit this way if we translate it as Tamma. For afterall, if Tamma is already revered highly as something mystical/mysterious, quite a bit more than just a set of rules or laws or principles, Tamma seems to be the same thing as the Spirit. If it is Truth, but also that which reveals Truth to us….then it is the Counselor, the Helper.

Another issue is the phenomena of merit-making in Thailand, but this is also something that Buddha wasn’t emphasizing. You get from the animistic influences a religion of fear and looking out for one’s own self-interest, how one will come to a better place in life in the next life. But if you take straight from Buddha, you have an interest in how do you bring about the elimination of suffering from the world, even in how your own laying down of greed and lust and so on can be the beginning of that. So a popularly practiced Buddhism would appear quite selfish, that all the good deeds are done only out of self-interest. But a pure Buddhism would be agnostic as to whether there is reincarnation and all that, with the only sure thing being that one can, if one so pursues it, achieve enlightenment in this life. In popular Buddhism, Nirvana is accessible only to the holiest, most advanced of monks, who might be within shooting distance of Nirvana. For 99.9% of the people, there is no hope of reaching nirvana from this lifetime. There is only hope of advancing to a better place that is maybe a little step closer to nirvana. But teachers of pure Buddhism would assert that nirvana is always within shot of everyone. So just as popular Christianity has erred in emphasizing a selfish individual salvation of escape from this world, so popular Buddhism has erred in emphasizing selfish individual merit-making to advance oneself in the grand scheme of reincarnation. In what I believe are their purer forms, both Christianity and Buddhism would emphasize dying to oneself and the present at-hand-ness of the “life of the ages” (as Dallas Willard would translate eternal life) in which through the path of Tamma, or repenting and submitting to the Kingdom of God, one can be free oneself and be a blessing and healing agent in this world.

A further word on the concept of eliminating suffering through extinguishing desire: As westerners would tend to view it, this is an evil concept. After reading several John Eldredge books in the months leading up to moving to Thailand 4 years ago, I could see ample evidence that Christianity and Buddhism were polar opposites and found it easy to call Buddhism an evil religion from the pit of hell. After all, shouldn’t we be enjoying God and his creation and fellowship with the Body and eagerly desiring and pursuing justice and the elimination of suffering? As I understand things now, this is a superficial misunderstanding of what Buddha actually taught. Its one thing to say I should let go of my own dreams and desires, I should understand that greed and lust only lead to slavery, all the while being filled up and soaked in the study of and meditation on and practice of Tamma. It is an equal thing to say that I should take up my cross daily, dying to self, losing my life for the sake of the gospel in order to find it, etc. It is one thing to say that I should not waste my time trying to teach a stubborn, hardened man and rather wait for it to be revealed to me who will be the eager disciple who will accept the teaching. It is an equal thing to say that there are those who have ears but don’t hear, eyes but don’t see, etc. and that I should sow the seeds broadly, knowing that some will fall on hard, rocky, thorny soil and some on fruitful soil. But it is another thing entirely, and I think the popular distortion (of religious discourse, not popular common sense), to say that I should not desire even that which is good, should not be eagerly desiring even righteousness, and that I shouldn’t bother correcting anyone who is walking in error because we should just be tolerant, knowing that it is to each to decide whether to accept the right path or not. The eschatological picture in Buddhist prophecy is actually not one of all desire being wiped out, where even good joyous fellowship is to be eliminated and extinguished and we all be come nothing. The Buddhist prophecy of the Phra Sri Ariya Mettrai (a suffering servant figure eerily similar to Isaiah 53 and Jewish messianic prophecies) coming back is a picture of shalom. Mettrai says that people will see him reappeared when husband and wife lie together, cherishing their marriage, are faithful to one another, no longer pursuing adultery, when they build a happy home, warm environment for their children, when they fellowship in harmony with their neighbors, eating together, living at peace with one other, building society together, etc. It is a picture of shalom reminiscient of Isaiah 65. So I think that the Buddhist idea of extinguishing desire and the Christian concept of taking up ones cross, losing one’s life for the sake of the gospel, etc. are quite similar and not at odds with one another.

I mentioned it several times in the above discourse about Buddhism being about eliminating suffering. Just to make clear, we find an evangelical leg up, so to speak, when we don’t bother talking about sin, but rather just start from the common point of agreement that the world is messed up (wars, corruption, inequality, disease, poverty, etc.) or in other words, that there is suffering. Then we describe Jesus’ way as the path to eliminate suffering. The word sin is gradually leaving our vocabulary as we emphasize this method.

It should also be noted that Thai Buddhism is a faith of orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy. That is, the emphasis is on right practice rather than right belief. This is why they can say that all religions are the same, that all religions teach people to do good and not necessarily divide over doctrinal matters with others. If we can show that Jesus’ Way works, that’s far more important than proving apologetically that God is true or even that certain doctrines are true. This again drives us toward a more holistic gospel, because as the gospel is a message that we must believe a set of doctrines to “be saved”, its irrelevant. But once you start emphasizing how the gospel is “Jesus is Lord” and that he uniquely lived out Tamma, not only setting an example for us, but achieving victory over suffering and Satan, you can paint Jesus’ Way in more pragmatic (and thus more convincing) terms. God’s plans to bring healing and restoration to this world, in order to bring about his new creation and his desire to partner with us in that mission and gift and annoint us for that mission - that’s relevant.