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Introduction

One of the most famous Zen Buddhist koans, or riddles that move one beyond merely rational thought structures is “What did your face look like before your parents were born?” The koan goes to the very heart of Buddhism, since Buddhism is a religion that finds the idea of a personal self to be something of an illusion, something that gets in the way of understanding, something to be transcended through enlightenment. We shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that early Buddhist iconography never presented a picture of the face or the body of the Buddha. Instead, he was represented as an eight spoked wheel — representing the eightfold path to enlightenment — or as an empty mat or a set of footprints. The notion of a distinctive personality was so alien to the spirit of Buddhism that the idea of representng him as a person was foreign to the early Buddhists.

And yet statues of the Buddha are now commonplace both within and without Buddhist. All of us have a mental image of the Buddha as a person that we’ve gotten from seeing statues or carvings like the one that I brought with me today. He looks serene, wise and either mildly amused or gratifyingly content. His image might vary at little bit, but like Jesus, he’s now become ubiquitous. And even non-Buddhists might have a concrete version in their gardens. He seems to fit in really well with trickling miniature waterfals and goldfish ponds.

The question that I want to answer today is “How did the Buddha get his face?”. It is a fascinating story and one that shows how early the West encountered Buddhism and the kind of cross pollination that has occurred between the east and the west. For it was us Westerners who first gave the Buddha a face around the time of the birth of Christ. It was our legacy to Buddhism that he became portrayed in human form.

The Greeks Go To India

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself here. If we are to understand how the Buddha got his face, we have to explore a little history. And that means talking about the Greeks, the founders of Western civilization.

The Greeks developed a very potent culture, based primarily on the commercial empire of the city of Athens and the military training of the city of Sparta. But the Greeks were never really very big, and certainly not as powerful as they loooked. Their empire lasted only approximately 40 years whereas, in comparision, the Roman Empire lasted for about 500. And, as you probably know, Greek culture survived primarly because the Romans stole it and slavishly copied it, not having very much culture of their own.

But even in serious decline, the Greeks were a force to be reckoned with, particularly because even those who dismembered the Athenian empire wanted to be thought of as Greeks. The kings of Macedonia, in particular, considered themselves Greeks and there rose among them a conqueror and a hero who created one of the most powerful and extensive empires that the world has ever seen. His name was Alexander the Great, a man who surrounded himself with Greek philosophers and sought to bring Greek civilization to the world.

At that time, most Westerners thought that the world ended somewhere in India. Alexander was eager to finish of the job by getting there as quickly as possible and began his great Eastwards Expedition in 334 B.C. But in order to do that he had to go through and conquer the peoples of Afganistan, northern Pakistan and northwestern India. Imagine yourself a soldier in Alexander’s army. At first it might be a good idea to conquer the world, but imagine spending seven years fighting just to reach the Indus river. Imagine taking ramshackle towns and having to garrison them along the way. Now imaginge that you are getting just a bit fed up with with this conquering hero things and you begin to want to go home.

Well, that’s exactly what happened to Alexander’s army. They mad it to the Punjab, where morale got so bad that Alexander had to retreat. Eighteen months later, at the young age of 32, Alexander died. One is reminded of Kiplings phrase “Here lies a man who tried to hustle the east.” But before he died, he had established some Greek colonies or communities in some small Indian towns. The Indians now knew about the Greeks and they also understood the importance of creating a unified empire that could withstand invasion. Indian society, the homeland of Buddha and Buddhism, was already responding to the West.

So far the East was not having a similar influence on the West. And it would be a gross exaggeration to say that Buddhist ideas were very potent or even recongnized among Westerners. Alexander never made it anywhere close to where Buddhist societies were exensive. But he did meet up with some of the kind wandering aesthetics that Shakimuni Buddha had arisen from. These were monks who had renounced possessions. Alexander the Great was really impressed by these guys and even tried to recruit one to his entorage of philosohers. But the monk Dandamos simply asked Alexander why he had travelled so far and expended so much effort when he was only able to possess as much of the earth and drink as much of its water as this philosopher. Thus was Alexander introduced to a principle of Indian aesteticism that you can ony possess everything by possessing nothing. It didn’t seem to improess him, at least not in that lifetime.

While Alexander was camped in Taxila, which was to become a Greek town, he was visited by a fellow why the name of Chandragupta who was a nobleman from a clan that ruled a small part of Nepal. At that time, he was an exile, but later he led a revolt that created the Mauryan empire, an empire that lasted three times longer than that of the Greeks and can be called the first powerful unified state of India. Chandragupta was a supporter of the Bhrammin religion, and like most Bhrahhmin he didn’t much take notice of Buddhism. In fact he didn’t even mention this small sect in his official history. But his grandson Ashoka would not only control a much larger empire that he built on his grandfather’s legacy, but would mary a Buddhist woman, convert to Buddhism and transform Buddhism into a budding world religion.

Meanwhile Back at the Buddhist Ranch

Meanwhile back at the Buddhist ranch, Ashoka was’nt even a trinkle in his grandfather’s eye and Buddhism was still little more than a religious sect that was creating is own legacy. So far, that legacy was entirely Indian, but there was one very intriguing reference in one of the many discourses of the Buddha that they were writing down. In the discourse, the Buddha tells a young nobleman that social castes are not something created by heaven but something that changes according to society. Gutayama Buddha uses the example of the Greeks, where people can be masters or slaves depending on historical circumstances.

How much did the very different social structure of the Greeks influence the Buddha’s thinking? We know that his teaching was a radical departure from the status quo and the belief in irrevocable castes. And we know from the discourse that he was capable of comparing Indian and Greek society. But that tantalizing piece of information is all that we have to suggest that perhaps the West was influencing the East more than we once thought and that their histories have been historically intertwined despite generations of mutual ingnorance.

The ignorance has always been more the fault of the West than the East. By 250 B.C., Ashoka was ruling a large empire and Buddhism was rapidly becoming the flavour of the day. Ashoka was close to the Greek communities in India and even commisioned the first Greek Buddhist monk as a missionary/envoy to a Greek district in the empire.

When religion is related to the doings and teachings of a charismatic leader like the Buddha, it has lots of spiritual vitality but very little structure. When religion becomes instututionalized and supported by polical leaders the power of a religion grows but not without problems. Because there is a lot more power involved, there often arise competing visions of religion. Gutayama Buddha was very imprecise about the kinds of structures that would follow after his final enlightenment and towards the end of his reign, a dispute occured between those elite monks who wanted to follow Lord Buddha’s rules rigorously and a sizable majority of monks and lay people who wanted the religion to be more open and accessible to ordinary people. This was the beginning of a dispute between the Hinayana and the Mahayana traditions of Buddhism and its a dispute that continues right into the present.

It is one of the great ironies that the development of eternal religious principles is tied to temporal politics and this is something the Buddhism has understood better than other world religions. Buddhists believe that Buddhism itself can die out for entire periods of time only to be reborn in future generations when the time and social maturity is right.. Under Ashoka things were good for a time, but by his death things were in disarray. The Indian state began, like so many others of its time, to disintegrate shortly after achieving its third generational peak. And now one of the kings of Alexander’s dividied empire — Demetrius of Afganistan — decided that the time was ripe to realize Alexander’s dream of conquering India. The Greeks were about to return, and this time in force.

He never realized his goal of conquering India, he was killed on expedition. But his top general Menander continued the stuggle and finally managed to rule a large portion of North West India.. He was a sufficiently important personage to be talked about in both Indian literature and western legend. And he was for at least two thousand years the most famous Western convert to Buddhism. And we know all about his conversion because its written up in a beautiful little book entitled the Milindapanha or Menander’s Questons.

Menander’s Questions

Menander was a lucky guy. He had a good Buddhist master in the form of the Venerable Nagasena who answered his questions and put him on the path to Enlightenment. The exchange between the two is a classic of Buddhism and still very instructional for those of us who are not kings and don’t ever want to be. Menander begins by asking Nagasena who he is.

Nagasena says that his parents gave him the name Nagesena but there is no person named Nagasena here. Menander asks him then who it is that wears robes, accepts alms and keeps vows. Nagesena replies that it’s not Nagesena. The king asks him whether any of his body parts are Nagasena. No. The king asks him whether his feelings or perceptions, impulses or consciousness are Nagasena. No. Finally the king calls him a liar for say that his name was Nagasena.

Then Nagasena shows him the difference between a conventional usage and a deeper reality by showing the king that his favorite chariot is only a useful symbol and a name, since no part or accumulation of parts can be said to constitute a ‘chariot’. Ultimate reality is beyond both things and the symbols that describe them.

The most impressive lines of the dialogue come when Menander asks where wisdom dwells. Nagasena says that it dwells nowhere. The king says that there then must be no such thing as wisdom. Nagasena asks him where the wind dwells. The king says that it dwells nowhere. “Then there is no wind either,” replies Nagasena.

And so a Greek king was tutored in a religion that was very different from the religion of his own cultural heritage and so the first series of instructions to a westerner was put to paper. There would be many more series of instructions, but the overwhelming majority of them would not be produced until the late 19th Century when many in the West became fascinated with the East once again and sought wisdom from sources that had seemed to evaporate from the face of the earth for centuries.

What is interesting about Menander’s Questions once one gets past the really difficult bits is the ways that Nagasena tries to give Menander instruction in a language that he can understand. He attempts to convince Menander through the use of that quintessentially Greek technique — dialogue and Socratic reasoning. He emphasizes the importance of concentration and the ethical foundation of Buddhism, touching lightly on the need for a leap of faith and the ‘cutting off’ of connections with the world of things, feelings and perceptions.

During the reign of Menander, Buddhism was evolving to fit the cultural patterns of its Western ruler. Now, perhaps, we can understand the lasting legacy of the West towards Buddhism. For it is precisely at this time that Buddha gets his human form. For 500 years, all putures of the Buddha were symbols like the empty throne or the tree. These symbols emphasized the complete transcendence of the Buddha from early things. The Buddha resembled Israel’s Jahovah. He could not be restricted by any form. But the Greeks were used to sculpting statues of their gods and their heroes. They naturally wanted to do the same with Buddha. And guess what, the form that they chose for Buddha was Appolo — the Greek God of illumination. It was a natural choice. Appolo was the God who warmed men’s hearts with the sun’s light; he was also the symbol of reason and mental illumination; and he was the God of purity. If you had to pick a Greek God to mirror the Buddha , you could do a lot worse than Appolo.

The Great Seclusion

Important events made this kind of cross fertilization far less likely for the next two millinea. The Romans slavishly copied the Greeks without their genius for philosophical and spiritual investigation. Roman Catholicism busied itself with the religious and secular unification of a dismantled empire and the scattered tribes who inherited its bits and pieces. The obsession with unity meant insularity , suspicion of outsiders and an obsession with anything that smacked of religious heterodoxy. The most horrible words that medievalists could utter were religious schism and heresy and it would be a long time fore the West would open up to the East in any welcoming sense. This took nearly two thousand years and even then has been very gradual. But two thousand years and even two thousand lifetimes are next to nothing in Buddhist cosmology. It’s us Westerners who are in a hurry.

Just because the Buddhist influence was limited, however, doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist during this period. One of the most interesting things about Christianity was its tendency to ‘cut a deal’ with the old pagan gods. If it didn’t make them devils, then it was inclined to make them saints. And there’s an interesting story in the way the Buddha became a saint.

The story of the life of the Buddha is fairly well documented by scholars. We know that Prince Siddhartha, later Gautama Buddha, was of royal birth and was secluded from the evils of the world. When he snuck out of the Palace during the ‘Great Renunciation’, he was immediately confronted by old age, sickness and death. The story was well known in the popular Sanskrit biography of Buddha in China by the 2nd and 3rd Centuries and was later translated into Persian and Greek. From the Greek, it was translated into Latin and, as was the way during the Holy Roman Empire, the legend eventually made its way into the venacular. The really fun part is that, by the seventeenth century Jesuit missionaries were telling the Chinese about Saint Josaphat who was really the Buddha in disguise. He was referred to before his awakening as the Bodhisattva in Sanskrit. This became Budhasaf in Arabic, then Iodasaph in Georgian, Ioasaph in Greek and finally Josaphat in Latin. Fortunately for the reputation of the Catholic Church, Josaphat was never formally canonized, but he did have a feast day on 27th November; one Italian Church is dedicated to him; and his relics are supposed to reside in another French Church. Parts of the legend of Josaphat found there way into Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice.

Gnosticism and Buddhism

As I said before, Medieval society had a horror of schism that made it very insular looking. One of the victims of this insularity was Gnosticism. The Gnostics were those Christians who believed that union with God could only be achieved through spiritual transcendence or mysticism. They flourished for many centuries as an active part of Christianity but were alternately punished as heretics. Eventually, however, Christian paranoia meant that the Gnostic tradition was rooted out, depite its having been an important influence on thinkers like Augustine and authors like Hildegard of Bingen. You can really see the transendental aspects of Hildegard’s mustic if you listen to c.d.s like “Canticles of Ecstacy’ or ‘A Feather on the Breath of God’. Both of these are very good for Buddhist meditation.

Gnositicism put its emphasis on a direct spirtual experience that was not available to those who were uninitiated. They contrasted material existence as unremittently evil and contrasted it with the spiritual world of light. They looked for a state of release, of beatitude and, like Hildegard put it, being a feather on the breath of God.

Now, while these ideas are not Buddhist, they certainly have some affinity with Buddhism and other Eastern religions that clearly influenced them. While the Gnostics were around, there was at least the possiblity of exchange. Such an exchange does seem to have been evident in the writings of Basilides of Alexandria in the second century. Scholars tell us that Baasilides learned these principles from the Indian community in Analexandria and them built them into his own Christian system. Among the theories that we can still discover of Basilides (his 24 book system is now lost), is a belief in multiple lives and karma and a definition of God as ‘non-being’ that is very similar to the Buddhist concept of Nirvana..

Another Christian system that borrowed ideas from India and Persia was Manichaeism, named after Mani its founder. Mani had travelled in north-west India, encorporated some Buddhist ideas into his religion and modelled his organization on Buddhist communities. St. Augustine was a Manichaean for nine years before his mother’s prayers brought him to Christianity. The Manichaean influence helps to explain why Augustine made such a distinction between the City of God, that was ultimately unknowable, and the City of Man that was sinful and depraved. Of course his emphasis on sin, salvation and the critical role of Jesus was Christian and helped to mould a Christian othodoxy that was intolerant of other religious views.

Things got even worse after Augustine’s death, as Christianity became the only unifying principle upon which nations could hang their banner and control the rivalriess of fuedal warrior lords. There was less and less patience with the kind of religious toleration and non-violence that was characteristic of Buddhism. During the early middle ages, Buddhism showed itself to be an equally powerful and unifying spiritual force in Asia. But the two great world religions now, more and more, began to operate within different spheres.

Isolated borrowings, like the story of St. Josaphat, became the exception rather than the rule. And the story of St. Josaphat provided no Buddhist insights — he had been transformed into a completely Christian character. Like Santa Claus, he provided no indication of the original impulse of the the legend of the Buddha..

The West and the East lived in mutual ignorance and suspicion. Serious contact with Europe did not resume until very recently. But contact did occur and paved the way, however intermittently, for more substantial interractions hereafter. And we’ll be talking a bit about that next week. But, before ending up, I want to mention something that is often overlooking in histories of East-West contact — the parallels between our societies.

There is always a tendency to think of the West as the the mover and shaker and the innovator. But in many respects, and certainly over the long haul, the history of Christianity in the West and Buddhism in the East have much in common. Both religions moved from early charismatic leadership to social vitality to huge bureaucratic regimes. Both religions lost touch with their earlier inspiration and divided into numerous sects and variations in order to regain their vital energies. Both religions moved uneasily between an emphasis on spiritual liberation and support of the status quo in their various countries. Both religions showed themselves resistant to economic change, and yet proved themselves very capable of dealing with change once they became less wedded to traditional hierarchical kinds of support. Both developed socially activist philosophies — the social gospel and the concept of the bhodisattva — as a means of linking religion to issues in real life.

Western chauvinism and short-sightedness has made us focus on a 200 year period between the mid eighteenth and the mid twentieth century as a period of European and North American supremacy. But that supremacy is obviously transitory as we now move to a global economy where the Asian nations are moving into parity, if not supremacy, with us. Our social and spiritual convergence would be obvious to us were it not for a tradition of relative insularity.

If one looks very recently, this social and spiritual convergence is particularly stricking. Whereas religion may once have appeared to concentrate on things that were not of this world and, at worst, a cultural support for an unjust status quo, religion is now becoming the primary locus of what is left our social conscience. One of the few bodies that still raises its voice against the injustices of modern capitalism in our country is the Canadian Council of Bishops. Similarly, Zen Buddhist monks have been in the forefront of demands for social justice and advocates of non-violence. And they are talking seriously to one another again, about both social and spiritual matters. In the weeks to come, I’ll be describing some of the reasons for that convergence as well as the very slow and painful process by which it came about.

These lectures are based on Stephen Batchelor’s book ‘The Awakening of the West: The Encounter of Buddhism and Western Culture’.