There's that Gateless Gate Again

A Report from a Buddhist/Muslim Dialog by Jim Graham

I admit that I have some reservations about the kind of inter-faith networking that has become so fashionable of late. These are not reservations of principle. Arguably the need for understanding across religious borders has never been more important or urgent. And yes, of course the Great Way sees right through the illusion of labels. People who can shelve their doctrines and work whole-heartedly together for the benefit of others are bodhisattvas regardless of their religious pedigree. Much good work is being done by the inter-faith community. This is all true.

My uneasiness arises from the pan-spiritual flavor that suffuses many such undertakings. In the well-intentioned effort to foster understanding and cooperation, the commonalities of the religious traditions are celebrated, while the inevitable prickly points of variance are politely sidestepped, or even dismissed as inconsequential. What has emerged from innumerable repetitions of this exercise is a tepid form of “spirituality” which, while inoffensive in pretty much any company, also lacks the abrasive grit that forces transformation.

When I was invited to attend a Buddhist/Muslim dialog to be held at a mosque in the basement of an Episcopal church in Batavia, my flags went up. When I learned that the theme was to be “The Rains Retreats and Ramadan”, the flags started waving. Here, to all appearances, an attempt had been made to find a topic that everyone could nicely agree on: the benefit of retreat and renunciation in spiritual practice. What, I wondered, could possibly come of this?

These misgivings began to dissipate when our little Buddhist contingent stepped, shoeless, into the makeshift mosque. At just a few minutes before the scheduled start time, the sparsely decorated hall was occupied only by a middle-aged gentleman with a warm smile who introduced himself as Hamid Ahmed, the president of the mosque. Mazher, his wife, then appeared in the door laden with food and an equal measure of warmth. “Ah well,” she said, looking around the nearly empty room, “if nobody shows up we can just sit around and eat and talk”. My heart leapt at the prospect.

As it turned out, more people did drift in sporadically over the next hour or so, but by then an atmosphere of intimacy had taken root which, while undermining the formality of our gathering, opened the door to a deeper level of communication that had nothing to do with Ramadan or the Rains Retreats. The Muslims took such pleasure in talking about their faith, and seemed so genuinely pleased that we non-Muslims were interested enough to come to the mosque and ask questions, that the subject of Buddhism rarely came up. Had we come with the intention of expounding on the Dharma, we would have been sorely disappointed.

It became clear that many of our hosts were speaking under the assumption that we Buddhists have our own notion of God, but that we perhaps just imagine Him differently. As some described how, in the rapture of prayer, “there is only me and God”, I felt how sharply different the Buddhist experience is. And here is where I encountered the inter-faith conundrum: for me to have said “in my experience there is no such Other with whom to have the kind of dialog you’re describing, nor, for that matter, a ‘me’ to hold up my end of the conversation”, would have threatened the bonhomie that we were all enjoying. But in feeling that I couldn’t say it, wasn’t I basically denying that this discussion was, in any real sense, inter-faith? Wouldn’t a true inter-faith moment require such complete trust on all sides that statements like that could just tumble out, without disastrous consequences? And, of course, it would require that the Buddhists of the group not smugly discount this “unenlightened” talk of God.

As I put my shoes back on, mindful not to park my copy of the Qur’an (a gift from Hamid) anywhere inappropriate, I would have been hard-pressed to point to any new insights I had acquired into Islam. I’m certain that our interlocutors felt no more informed about Buddhism. But I found that somehow, in the midst of the simple acts of humanity that had transpired that afternoon- eating, smiling, giving, receiving- I had come to actually love several people whom I hadn’t even met a few hours before, like the retiree from the paint factory who, in a spontaneous gesture of generosity and intimacy, dog-eared a page of my Qur’an at a passage he especially loves. We had indeed found commonality, but not of ideas or practices.

In bed that night, before turning out the light, I opened the Qur’an to the dog-eared page, curious to see what had so enchanted this beautiful man. From the florid prose of the page, of a tone familiar to anyone who has read the Old Testament, what jumped out at me was the unrelenting imagery of duality- two gardens, each with two fountains, each with two pairs of every fruit, two other gardens, each with two springs- and this verse, which made me pause: “He has made the two seas to flow freely (so that) they meet together: Between them is a barrier which they cannot pass.”