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JOURNEY OUT OF NOTHING

My Buddhist Path to Christianity

Martin Roth

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One – First Steps

Chapter Two – Learning about Buddhism

Chapter Three – A Series of Newspaper Columns

Chapter Four – Writing a Book

Chapter Five – Zen Adventures

Chapter Six – Was I a Buddhist?

Chapter Seven – Kyoto

Chapter Eight – Heading North

Chapter Nine – Christian Zen

Chapter Ten – Buddhist Art

Chapter Eleven – Doubts

Chapter Twelve – Becoming a Christian

Chapter Thirteen – Buddhism and the Book of Ecclesiastes

Chapter Fourteen – Talking with Buddhists

About the Author

Introduction

For seventeen years (1976 to 1992), during my twenties and thirties, I lived in Japan, working first as a journalist, then later in banking. It was during this period that I became enamored with Zen Buddhism. So much so that I co-authored a book on the topic, “Zen Guide,” aimed at helping Westerners who were coming to Japan to study and practice Zen Buddhism.

I was a regular participant in meditation at several Tokyo Zen centers. At the same time, the writing of my book sent me to some of Japan’s most famous temples and monasteries. Often I stayed one or more nights, participating in morning services and other activities. Along the way I met many other Western Zen practitioners.

Yet gradually my interest waned. Then I left Japan and moved with my family to Australia. Within a short time I was attending church, and soon I was baptized and a devout Christian.

This book is about my experiences in Buddhism and seeks to explain its appeal to me and to other Westerners.

I start off with some background on my life, and how, after traveling to Japan I joined an English-language Zen group. This led to a series of newspaper columns, followed by a book.

I introduce some of the fascinating people, Japanese and Westerners, whom I met, and the temples I visited. Because I was writing a book I was sometimes able to gain access to famous temples that were normally off-limits to tourists.

But doubts set in, and I detail my fading interest in Buddhism, and how, eventually, I became a Christian. Finally, I try to provide some guidance on how to talk with Buddhists about Christianity.

Chapter One

First Steps

Can you be searching for God without knowing it? In my case the answer was yes. A spiritual hunger lay deep inside me. I was on a spiritual journey. The problem was, I did not realize it.

I was born and raised in New Zealand. My father was a Jewish refugee from Vienna, Austria, and my mother was a New Zealander from a traditional Anglican family. But both had abandoned their respective religions for extreme left-wing politics – for some years my father was a Communist - which was a kind of religion in our house.

There wasn’t an anti-nuclear rally we didn’t attend – and, frequently, organize as well. As an elementary-school boy, while other kids made model toys with their carpentry sets, I was hammering together protest banners for the next demonstration outside the American ambassador’s residence.

My parents were deeply cynical about so many things in life. They were especially scornful of religion and of people who practiced religion. Growing up in such an environment I readily absorbed those attitudes, and from a young age I too was cynical about life. It all seemed pretty meaningless.

Later, the Vietnam War was raging, and at university I was actively involved in the protest movement. Politics for me, too, became a kind of religion.

After graduation I worked for a year as a journalist then headed overseas for work and adventure. I went to Israel, where my father’s brother had been sent as a boy during the war. I met my cousins there and spent six months on some kibbutzim. I even learned a little Hebrew.

But I took no interest in the religious side of my Israeli experience. My relatives were secular Jews. I didn’t try learning about the Bible. I never attended a synagogue.

In any case, several Israelis made it clear to me that I was not Jewish. Judaism passes through the mother, they said. My mother was not Jewish, and so, therefore, neither was I.

This would apparently not have deterred Hitler from sending me to the gas chambers. And more recently a Messianic Jew told me that in biblical times Jewish heritage was passed through the father, not the mother. So, according to the Bible at least, I might be Jewish.

I arrived in Japan in 1976, expecting to stay a year or so and also explore Asia. I planned to write about the region for overseas newspapers and magazines.

I quickly found that Tokyo was an exciting city, offering all manner of exotic experiences, and I threw myself in.

I discovered karaoke, and learned that in the 1970s a Westerner who got up and sang in Japanese at a Japanese bar could expect to be inundated with free drinks from amazed patrons. So, I memorized a few enka love ballads - Yume Oizake (saké dreaming), Tsugaru Kaikyo Fuyu Geshiki (Tsugaru Straits winter scenery), Kita no Sakaba (northern pub) and several others - and belted them out in my off-key voice at every chance.

In 1978, I wrote a long article telling foreign residents in Japan about karaoke and how even the worst singers could emulate my success. Not so long ago I happened to look in the Oxford English Dictionary, and found that the editors had included the word “karaoke” - which is now an English word, adopted from the Japanese – but with the earliest English citation they had found dating back to September 1979.

I sent the dictionary editors a copy of my 1978 article, and received from them a reply stating that they will cite it in due course, when they revise the karaoke entry to the dictionary. So, unless a challenger steps forward with an earlier reference, I can lay claim to being the person who introduced karaoke to the English-speaking world.

I decided to learn judo, and a Japanese friend arranged an introduction to the Meiji University judo club, home of several world champions and Olympic gold medalists.

I nervously arrived for my first training session at a dojo (training hall) that was located up several flights of stairs in an office building near the university. A pungent smell of sweat greeted me. I quickly realized that I was the only foreigner. Not only that, it appeared all the others – about three dozen of them – had black belts, while I was a complete beginner. Worse, many were bigger than me.

In Tokyo, very skinny and more than six feet tall, I was used to towering over the majority of people. But the judo club was populated by men – there were no women there – who were often not only tall but also bulky, with enormous chests and powerful legs and arms.

My Japanese then was limited, and I struggled to make myself understood. I had expected some kind of instruction, but there was none. Mostly it was free training – men bowing to each other and then grappling.

The intensity was frightening. Screaming and grunting, the men worked to throw each other to the ground. Often the entire building seemed to shake as one of these bulky giants went flying through the air to the mat. On a couple of occasions I saw men apparently knocked unconscious. They were just dragged to one side and left lying on the ground to recover.

I would try my best to throw my various opponents, but it was impossible. They generally stood rooted, absorbing my feeble parries, before dumping me powerfully to the ground, on my back, often knocking the breath from me.

At the end of the hour’s training I staggered home and went to bed. When I awoke the next morning my entire back, and the backs of my legs and arms, were blue, and I could walk only with difficulty.

I told my friend that there had been some kind of mistake. I needed a beginners’ class.

“They’re testing you,” he told me. “That’s how it works in Japan. You have to keep going, and when they see you’re sincere they’ll start teaching you. You have to go back.”

I waited for my bruising to heal then went back, only to experience another hour of the same. I decided that judo training in Japan was an experience I could skip, and I never returned.

It was in the announcements section of the Japan Times, a daily newspaper, that I read of a group aimed at foreigners wishing to learn about Zen Buddhism.

I saw this as another exotic experience. But I also felt a modest attraction to Zen. Since arriving in Tokyo I had been buying books on Japanese life and culture, and though I did not know so much about Buddhism, of which Zen was one branch, I had learned a little.

According to my pretty limited understanding, Buddhism taught that life sucked, which seemed to me a religion that accorded with my own cynical views. But Zen was especially interesting. It seemed to reject doctrine and dogma, in favor of experience, particularly intense meditation.

Having been raised in a devoutly political atmosphere I was now tired of doctrine. As I understood it, I could break through the struggles of existence with stringent Zen meditation and achieve some sort of enlightenment, whatever that might be.

I felt I had nothing to lose. Certainly it would be another experience.

The group met in a tatami-covered room in an office building not far from Tokyo University. I do not have strong memories of the occasion. I know that about a dozen people, Japanese and Westerners, men and women, were there. A middle-aged Japanese man, Gudo Nishijima, was in charge. Both a Buddhist priest and a businessman, he was small with a shaved head and a broad smile. He welcomed me as a newcomer.

The others were already taking positions on the tatami, seated cross-legged on small black cushions, each foot resting on the opposing thigh in the lotus position, and facing the wall. This was how we were to do zazen – Zen meditation – which apparently was at the heart of Zen Buddhist practice.

I sat, and Nishijima-sensei [“sensei” means teacher and is a word of respect used for academics, doctors, priests and many others] showed me how to arrange my long, skinny legs. I could manage to get only one foot above the opposite thigh, in a kind of semi-lotus position.

He stressed that posture was very important. I needed to sit with my back ramrod straight, my spine pointing straight at the ceiling. I was to lower my chin so that my focus was directed downward at roughly a forty-five-degree angle.

I was to maintain this position for the duration of the zazen period, which would be about thirty minutes. I was not to think thoughts during this period. Instead I should try to empty my mind, creating a kind of nothingness in my brain. I should not let distractions, such as traffic noise from outside, bother me.

He rang a small bell, and we began. My limited recollection is that certainly my legs hurt, and I think that I kept slouching, and had to remember to sit up. I definitely struggled continually to eliminate any thoughts.

At the end of the period Nishijima-sensei rang a bell and we were able to stretch our legs. We walked around a little, then sat once more on the tatami, this time in a more casual manner, for a lecture on Buddhist doctrine.

As I said, I remember little of the experience, which was more than thirty-five years ago. But I do recall that I felt something of a buzz. From what, I’m not sure. I think it was a sense that, somehow or other, I was connecting with something a lot bigger than myself, a feeling of the transcendent, a feeling that this might be something beneficial.

I had a hunch that I would probably return.

Chapter Two

Learning about Buddhism

Gudo Nishijima spoke excellent English, but I found his lectures to be heavy. So I did what I invariably do whenever I develop an enthusiasm for a new pursuit. I began buying books, lots of them - on Buddhism generally and more specifically on Zen Buddhism.

Not that these were always of so much help. More than one writer advised that it was impossible to describe Zen in words. Here is writer and Eastern religion specialist Alan Watts in “The Way of Zen” –

Zen is above all an experience, non-verbal in character, which is simply inaccessible to the purely literary and scholarly approach. To know what Zen is, and especially what it is not, there is no alternative but to practice it, to experiment with it in the concrete so as to discover the meaning which underlies the words.

He also wrote –

Zen Buddhism is a way and a view of life which does not belong to any of the formal categories of modern Western thought. It is not religion or philosophy; it is not a psychology or a type of science. It is an example of what is known in India and China as a “way of liberation.”

…A way of liberation can have no positive definition. It has to be suggested by what it is not, somewhat as a sculptor reveals an image by the act of removing pieces of stone from a block.

Or an author would write something that to my highly rational mind was confusing rather than helpful. One of the leaders in introducing Zen Buddhism to the West was the Japanese writer D.T. Suzuki. Here he is, right at the beginning of his book “What Is Zen?” –

You ask, “What is Zen?”

I answer, “Zen is that which makes you ask the question, because the answer is where the question arises. The answerer is no other than the questioner himself.”

At a weekend Zen retreat I was once criticized by one of the other participants for arriving with my books. “Zen is about experience,” he told me. “Not study, or reflection.”

But my reading was certainly useful in helping me understand the history and development of Buddhism.

I learned that Buddhism had its start in India some 500 years before Christ, when a young priest named Siddhartha, living in the kingdom of Shakya, near the border with what is now Nepal, became dissatisfied with his life.

He had been enjoying an existence of incomparable luxury. But one day he stepped out from his palace compound, and for the first time he witnessed the misery that was the lot of so many people. He saw poverty, old age, disease and death.

So one night, abandoning his sleeping wife and child, he left his palace and embarked on a lengthy search for the meaning of existence.

According to the Hindu religion, humans were helplessly caught in a circle of birth and rebirth – reincarnation - by which bad behavior in a past life was punished by the person being reborn into a new life of destitution or disease.

Prince Siddhartha sought a means of escaping this cycle. For six years he devoted himself to ascetic practices such as fasting and yoga, coming near to death, but finally achieving the enlightenment he sought while meditating under a large tree.

He concluded that everything that comes into existence – material possessions and physical pleasures alike - must also eventually wither and die. Nothing is permanent. So there is no point to human desire. He became known as the Buddha – the enlightened one.

He summarized his diagnosis in what are known as the Four Noble Truths, and these are at the heart of Buddhism –

(i) suffering is the fate of all humans;

(ii) this is caused by human desire – for wealth, sex, food, ideologies and so on;

(iii) to ease suffering it is necessary to eliminate desire by casting off all attachments, all limiting thoughts and opinions and all notions of self;

(iv) the way to do this is by following the Eightfold Path – right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration.

When the practitioner is able fully to let go, and, at the deepest possible level, to see things as they truly are, he or she has achieved enlightenment.

For more than forty years the Buddha traveled around India, teaching his ideas to a growing body of followers. Over ensuing centuries, Buddhism steadily spread throughout Asia (while, ironically, almost disappearing from the land of its birth – today there are far more Christians than Buddhists in India).

As it spread, Buddhism, while retaining its core principles, also often merged with local religions, even to the extent of sometimes absorbing the other religion’s gods. Consequently there are now within Buddhism innumerable methods for seeking enlightenment and for following the teachings of the Buddha.

In addition, it developed several major streams of belief. In its relatively unvarnished original form it became known as Theravada Buddhism, which is prevalent in Southern Asian countries such as Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand.

The other main stream is the Mahayana Buddhism of China, Japan and Korea. Complementing the original teachings is the addition of numerous spiritual beings. Some of these are Buddhas who have achieved enlightenment and may be living in distant heavens. Many others are deities who have postponed enlightenment in order to remain on earth to help humans in their suffering. These are the hugely popular Bodhisattvas, who are worshipped devoutly by many.

A third stream is sometimes called Vajrayana Buddhism or Tantric Buddhism, and is especially prevalent in Tibet. From a Christian perspective this might be called signs and wonders Buddhism, as it teaches numerous spiritual practices that involve connections with the supernatural and with spiritual beings.

Within these three streams are many sub-streams that might even be called denominations, with varying teachings – sometimes startlingly different from each other – on how to follow the Buddha. Some believe in a heaven, some in a hell, some in Satan-like deities. Some emphasize intense study, some insist on time spent in a monastery. Some say it is not possible in one lifetime to achieve enlightenment. Others say it is eminently possible.

An interesting stream of Mahayana Buddhism is generally known in English as Pure Land Buddhism. It arose in China around 1,500 years ago, as a reaction to the fact that in those days Buddhism was mainly a preserve of the aristocracy.

It taught that a particular Buddha, named Amitabha (or Amida in Japanese), was living in a “pure land” – some kind of distant, heaven-like universe – and was waiting to save anyone who called on his name with faith. These faithful would then be reborn, after death, in this heavenly paradise, free from the constant cycle of life and death.

Until that time, most schools of Buddhism put an emphasis on monastic discipline and deep learning, or on spiritual disciplines that required much time and a teacher. But Pure Land Buddhism insisted on no more than faith. It held immense appeal to the common people, and is today one of the main streams of Japanese Buddhism.

The first Christian missionaries to Japan came in 1549, and were Catholic. Sadly it was several hundred years later before Protestant missionaries arrived with Martin Luther’s teachings on justification by faith, so similar in many ways to Pure Land doctrine.

Zen is one of Buddhism’s sub-streams – or denominations - and actually a relatively small one. It emphasizes intense meditation and an emptying of the mind as a direct means towards casting off all desires and achieving a oneness with the universe, and enlightenment.

In Japan there are two major branches of Zen Buddhism – Soto (with which I was mainly associated) and Rinzai. Some Rinzai Zen masters use “koans.” These are unanswerable questions – What is the sound of one hand clapping? What was your face before you were born? and numerous others – designed to break down rational thinking.

Zen is often little interested in the various deities, or the rituals and ceremonies, of some other streams of Buddhism. I was to find that Zen temples will sometimes seem relatively austere in comparison to other Buddhist temples, which can be adorned quite gaudily.

Chapter Three

A Series of Newspaper Columns

In Tokyo I had established myself as one of a handful of successful freelance journalists, able and willing to take on any assignment. I had reported from around Asia for the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune, the Financial Times and other well-known newspapers.

I enjoyed searching out the oddities of Japanese popular culture. I loved the little Japanese akachochin (red lantern) bars where patrons drank saké and ate grilled mackerel and deep-fried tofu and dried squid. No one spoke English at these bars, so I could practice my Japanese.

For several years I ate and drank at these places regularly. I had my own column, called “Tokyo Off-Beat,” in a local English-language newspaper, and I wrote stories about the lives of some of the customers, as well as about phenomena like restaurants that served grilled snake and raw horse meat, or the wholesale market that dealt in fighting insects, a popular present for young boys.

I had many foreign friends in Tokyo, and it was clear that there was interest in Zen Buddhism. I thought an article on the subject – introducing foreigners to temples that would accept them – might be welcomed by a local publication. Better still, I saw the possibility of several articles on the theme.

So I put the idea to the Asahi Evening News, one of four English-language daily newspapers published at that time in Tokyo. I got a cordial response. A meeting with the editors led to an assignment to write a weekly series of columns.

My initial column was about Gudo Nishijima. It was published in August 1980. Here it is –

The foreigner who wants to start studying Zen in Tokyo is remarkably lucky. The atmosphere may not be as “religious” as elsewhere, but there exists an experienced teacher who gives regular lectures in English, accompanied by meditation, and who is available at any time to give advice to beginners.

He is the Reverend Gudo Nishijima, who is both a businessman and a Zen priest. He has been teaching Zen to Westerners and Japanese for many years, and has two foreign disciples.

“I am very happy to see so many Westerners become interested in Zen,” he said. “I think it is a very useful discipline for them to study.

“I feel that foreigners often make better students, because they approach the subject without any prejudices. They have an open mind and are more sincere about it.”

The Reverend Nishijima said that a person who wants to study Zen should concentrate on two things, zazen (Zen meditation) and a study of Buddhist theory.

“The essence of Zen is practicing zazen,” he said. “It can be done anywhere, including in one’s own house. Many people visit temples to practice, but this is often just a kind of sightseeing. It is not necessary to go to these places.

“As for Buddhist theory, it is possible to read books, though I think many of the books published about Zen are rather confusing. The authors themselves do not seem to understand the subject.

“But Buddhist theory is really a very clear and exact system of thoughts, so it is possible to give definite answers to all questions. I am happy to help anyone with problems.”

The Reverend Nishijima has written a short book in English, “How to Practice Zazen.” This gives practical advice on such points as the correct posture for meditating.

As well as regular lectures in Tokyo, he sometimes leads groups of students to a tranquil mountain temple in Shizuoka [about 100 miles south-west of Tokyo] for a few days of meditation. Most of the participants are Japanese, but a few foreigners regularly join in, and others are welcome, even beginners.

The Reverend Nishijima is a kind teacher. He realizes that one of the biggest problems facing beginners is the practical one of aching legs.

“When we go to Shizuoka we meditate four times each day. I allow new students to change their sitting position during meditation. If their legs are really sore they can walk around a little, or even go to their rooms and rest for a while.

What about the results of practicing and studying Zen? “Buddhism is a theory which relies upon oneness of spirit and matter, or mind and body. It is a philosophy of action, quite different from Western religions, which are philosophies of idealism.

“I believe that today’s civilization is suffering from a conflict between idealism and materialism. But Buddhism synthesizes these into one ultimate philosophy. I think studying Buddhism can help us save the world.”

After studying Zen for some time a student is advised to find his or her own teacher.

“Selecting a teacher is very important for studying Buddhism,” he said. “Dogen, the founder of the Soto sect of Zen, said that if we cannot find a true master it is better not to study Buddhism at all. A beginner should visit many teachers, but eventually should select one teacher to continue more serious study.”

Chapter Four

Writing a Book

Like many journalists – most journalists, probably - I wanted to write books. I was especially keen to write novels. But non-fiction was a good start.

The ongoing articles for the Asahi Evening News were a success. They were eventually to extend into a series of twenty columns, and I had been receiving correspondence about them from various countries. My editors were happy, and even offered me a position on the paper.

“Don’t tell anyone we’ve offered you this job,” said one of them. “We get foreigners in Tokyo looking for work all the time, and we tell them we’re not hiring.” But I had enough writing work at the time, and turned them down.

I was confident that I had the material for a useful book and I approached John Weatherhill, then a Tokyo publisher of high-quality English-language books on Japanese culture. They accepted the idea. The book was to be titled “Zen Guide.”

But I felt that for a book I needed a co-author with a far deeper knowledge of Buddhism than mine, someone who could write with authority on the topic. I was fortunate in having already met such a person.

John Stevens, a stockbroker’s son from Chicago, was a Buddhist priest living with his wife and children in Sendai, nearly 200 miles north of Tokyo (one of the cities later devastated by the March 2011 Fukushima earthquake and tsunami). He was teaching at a Buddhist university there. Though just in his mid-thirties, he was gaining a name around the world as a fine Buddhist scholar, and had written several books. Among other achievements, he was also an aikido teacher and an expert on Asian calligraphy.

He had already himself written an article for a foreign publication on Zen temples in Japan that welcomed foreigners. I had contacted him when I was writing my columns for the Asahi Evening News and he had generously shared all he knew.

I traveled to Sendai to meet him. He was a barrel-chested man, very softly spoken and very gracious. I asked him how he became interested in Zen.

“I was always keen on things like philosophy, theology, religion and literature,” he told me. “Then at university I became interested in the East.

“That was what led me to come to Japan, but there is no real explanation for why I became so keen on Zen, although I feel it has been a very natural development, and an expression of my own personality.

“It suits me to do it, though it is difficult to say why. I think everyone has some desire to practice something religious, in order to regenerate themselves. And meditation becomes a very natural thing to do.

“Basically it is just something inside you that leads you toward Zen practice. In fact, some people practice Zen for many years, then stop. They go beyond it.”

He introduced me to his teacher, Kosen Nishiyama, a former Fulbright scholar to the US and an excellent speaker of English. In Japan, temples are often passed from father to son, and Nishiyama-sensei was priest at a small mountain temple in the suburbs of Sendai that he had taken over from his father, and which he expected to pass down to his own son. In addition, he taught at the same Buddhist university as John.

My memory of our evening together is that Nishiyama-sensei spent much of the time berating Japan’s political leaders. He also expressed his dissatisfaction that all the work involved in running his temple gave him insufficient time for the more scholarly pursuits he enjoyed.

John had arranged for me to stay overnight in one of the temple buildings. I was taken on a five-minute trudge uphill through snow to a creaky old tatami-floored lodge on the mountain peak with no heating, and there, all alone, endured one of the coldest nights of my life. I recall dragging futon after futon on top of me, to little avail.

The next day I rose at 5:00am to attend a service that Nishiyama-sensei conducted each morning in a small temple building on the mountain peak, near the lodge. Inside this building were hundreds of tiny carved Buddhas. A few local residents had also arrived, and we took turns ringing a giant bell, the sound reverberating across the city in the still air.

Then we walked back downhill to the main temple building for an hour of Zen meditation and chanting. I knew that two young trainee priests were also living at the temple, but they had yet to appear.

“They don’t like getting up early,” Nishiyama-sensei informed me. I felt mildly disillusioned.

Chapter Five

Zen Adventures

I now embarked on a series of adventures, in order to write the book, visiting scores of temples and Zen centers all around Japan.

I spent a weekend at one of the great Asian Buddhist monasteries, Sojiji, near Yokohama. This was home to around 250 young novitiate priests. I was told that many were reluctant trainees. Running a temple was the family business, and their fathers had sent them here.

So discipline was strict, and they were treated a little like new army conscripts. For the first week after their arrival they did little but meditation, and for the first one hundred days they were allowed no contact with the outside world. They slept together in the giant monks’ hall, each man allotted a single tatami mat (roughly three feet by six feet). Meals were sparse.

In our book “Zen Guide” my co-author John touched on this style of training, common at many of the monasteries that educated young priests. He wrote –

Unfortunately, the majority of the monks at the head temple – mostly the sons of temple priests who will inherit the family business – are being detained unwillingly and cannot wait to escape, so the atmosphere is hardly conducive to real practice. Further, monastery officials, mindful that this is their one chance to mold recalcitrant trainees, unmercifully haze their charges, occasionally with tragic results.

I also travelled to Eiheiji, another famous monastery, founded in the thirteenth century by the great teacher Eihei Dogen. It was a magnificent complex of more than seventy buildings near the Japan Sea, surrounded by hills, streams and 600-year-old cedars.

I interviewed the head priest, who told me the daily schedule:

3:30am – rise
3:45-5:30 – meditation
5:30-7:00 – morning worship service
7:00-7:30 – breakfast
7:30-10:00 – work duties
10:00-11:00 – meditation
11:00-11:30 – lunch
11:30-2:00 – free time
2:00-4:30 – meditation
4:30-5:30 – evening worship service
5:30-6:00 – dinner
6:00-7:10 – free time
7:10-8:30 – meditation
9:00pm – lights out

I encountered many interesting people. Ann Sargent, a former Lockheed employee in the US, from a Presbyterian Church background, discovered Zen when she was sent to work on a new computer system at Haneda Airport in Tokyo. Later, going through a divorce while raising two children, she found meditation to be very calming.

I met her when she was running regular meditation sessions at Taisoji temple, not far from my home then, in Tokyo’s Sugamo district. She was later to become a Zen priest.

I interviewed a young priest from the Eiheiji monastery, Daito Noda, who had left to found the Kappa Zen Dojo on the island of Shikoku.

“At first I lived in a giant soy sauce barrel, about two meters in diameter and two meters high,” he told me. “I also did zazen [Zen meditation] in there every morning and every evening, and during the day I worked outside planting fruit and vegetables.”

Friends and acquaintances soon arrived to help, and they often wanted to do meditation as well. One old soy sauce barrel was clearly insufficient.

“I acquired another barrel,” he said. “I converted it into a miniature tea ceremony room, with a low entrance, flowers and so on. We all used to squeeze in and do zazen, facing the round inside wall of the barrel.”

After five years he had raised sufficient funds to expand. So he bought an old bus, tore out the seats and laid down tatami mats. This became his home and also his meditation room, though by the time I spoke with him he had progressed to living in a real house.

I also took an interest in other streams of Buddhism, separate from the Zen tradition. I met a Tendai Buddhist priest, Masao Ichishima, who had spent three years in Hawaii and two years in California, and was now teaching at a local Buddhist university.

He told me that in California he had helped some local Buddhists inaugurate a mountain pilgrimage on Mount Tamalpais, near San Francisco. “I told them which places on the route to use for worship. For instance, if I found a very auspicious rock I would say they should stop there to pray and chant some mantras.

“Zen tends to believe that sitting meditation is the only way to achieve enlightenment. But in Tendai Buddhism this is just one method. Other ways include chanting, walking, ninety days without sleep and moon watching.”

He also told me that he had devised what he called “commuting Zen,” to manage the one-and-a-half-hour rail journey between his home and work, most of this time spent standing and clinging to a strap on the crowded Tokyo train.

“I worked out the best posture – a straight back and square but relaxed shoulders – and now I take some deep breaths and start meditating when the train sets off. The next thing I know, I have arrived at my destination, fresh and relaxed.”

I discovered that the Zen monastery Eiheiji had a branch temple in Tokyo named Chokokuji – a handsome antique structure with a giant wooden entrance gate and a tranquil garden - with Zen meditation sessions for two hours each Monday evening, attracting many office workers. I began attending quite regularly.

I used to feel a real vibe – a sense of the transcendent - on arrival, removing my shoes, taking a hard black cushion, filing into the meditation hall, stepping up onto a ledge and then sitting cross-legged on my cushion, facing the wall. A bell signaled the start of meditation, which lasted for more than an hour.

For a while I attended often, until an incident that soured me on the temple, and also possibly helped spark my disillusionment with Zen. I describe this in the next chapter.

Chapter Six

Was I a Buddhist?

All my activity raises a question – was I a Buddhist?

I was not attached to any particular temple or Buddhist center. Nor did I have a teacher, and I wasn’t seeking one. I was not studying doctrine in any meaningful manner. Rather, I was just racing from temple to temple, lapping up all the experiences.

If you had asked me the question at the time I probably would have replied that I was simply a hard-nosed journalist doing research for my book. But, undeniably, I was going more and more deeply into Zen practice. So, though I did not see myself as a Buddhist, I suspect that others who knew me might have thought otherwise.

I used to love visiting new temples. I loved the ritual, the sense of tradition, the feeling of the transcendent.

I especially loved the Buddhist morning worship services - monks wearing colorful robes chanted sutras; there were bells, gongs, drums and chimes, and the fragrances of incense; and there were many different kinds of dazzling Oriental ceremonies. It was all very exotic, and for me, coming from a non-religious background, the whole atmosphere always seemed to be one of great holiness and the presence of the supernatural.

I sometimes experienced a real spiritual buzz from these flowing, dream-like ceremonies, seated with dozens of monks on the tatami floor, listening to the soft-percussion melodies, and chanting long, layered sutras that seemed to soar upwards and then float to earth in deep, guttural growls.

I can recall a magical morning service at the Chishakuin temple in Kyoto, near the Kyoto National Museum, when an entire face of the temple building was opened to display a famous old garden. As I watched, dozens of priests in colorful robes slowly walked towards us through the mist.

After a forty-minute spectacular of chanting, singing, incense, gongs, chimes and bells we all filed into a smaller, much older temple building.  There the service continued in near darkness with a red-robed senior priest at the front tending a roaring fire and all the other priests chanting ferociously in a rising crescendo to the pounding beat of an enormous taiko drum. I could hardly imagine anything more thrillingly spiritual.

Yet at the same time I continually found myself dissatisfied with whatever I was currently doing, and would seek something new.

In particular, I could never really come to grips with all the zazen – Zen meditation - which of course was at the heart of Zen practice. I tried my hardest. But I would struggle with it all.

My teachers told me it was a time to empty my mind and to detach myself from this world and all my desires. Repeated meditation was intended to lead to a sense of satori, or enlightenment, a feeling of freedom, and of oneness with the universe.

Certainly, there were times during meditation when I felt a warm, sleepy sense of inner peace, but these were not often. More often I was thinking of my aching legs, stretched into an unnatural (for me) lotus position. Or my back would be hurting from continual efforts to keep it straight.

Here are instructions on how to sit properly during zazen meditation, from the book  “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” by Shunryu Suzuki, one of the most popular introductory books on Zen –

The most important thing in taking the zazen posture is to keep your spine straight. Your ears and your shoulders should be on one line. Relax your shoulders, and push up towards the ceiling with the back of your head. And you should pull your chin in. When your chin is tilted up, you have no strength in your posture; you are probably dreaming. Also to gain strength in your posture, press your diaphragm down towards your “hara,” or lower abdomen. This will help you maintain your physical and mental balance. When you try to keep this posture, at first you may find some difficulty breathing naturally, but when you get accustomed to it you will be able to breathe naturally and deeply.

Your hands should form the “cosmic mudra” [a mudra is a Buddhist hand gesture]. If you put your left hand on top of your right, middle joint of your middle fingers together, and touch your thumbs lightly together (as if you held a piece of paper between them), your hands will make a beautiful oval. You should keep this universal mudra with great care, as if you were holding something very precious in your hand. Your hands should be held against your body, with your thumbs at about the height of your navel. Hold your arms freely and easily, and slightly away from your body, as if you held an egg under each arm without breaking it.

You should not be tilted sideways, backwards or forwards. You should be sitting straight up as if you were supporting the sky with your head. This is not just form or breathing. It expresses the key point of Buddhism. It is a perfect expression of your Buddhist nature. If you want true understanding of Buddhism, you should practice this way. These forms are not a means of obtaining the right state of mind. To take this posture itself is the purpose of our practice. When you have this posture, you have the right state of mind, so there is no need to try to attain some special state. When you try to attain some special state, your mind starts to wander about somewhere else. When you do not try to attain anything, you have your own body and mind right here.

Then it was necessary to switch off your mind. I could, but probably for no more than a minute, and usually less, and then my active brain would cut in with all kinds of thoughts. Will I be home in time to finish the article I’ve been writing for the last couple of days? Why haven’t I received my payment yet for the last article I submitted? Do I have any food in the refrigerator in my tiny apartment, or should I make a detour, on my way home, to the supermarket?

I was supposed to just let all such concerns pass, as if they were something external, but invariably I found myself dwelling on them. And then I would start to feel bored and agitated.

I had heard many stories of Zen practitioners who, on sitting cross-legged on their cushion, would almost immediately be able to somehow switch off their brain. I could never do it, and believe me I tried. Maybe that was the problem – I was trying too hard. So I would stop trying. But I still couldn’t do it.

It was during Zen meditation at Chokokuji, the Eiheiji monastery branch temple in Tokyo, that I received a painful experience that really disrupted my attempts to enter into a state of emptiness. 

One of the risks of intense meditation is that you might start to drift asleep. Or your rigid posture starts to slacken until, perhaps unknowingly, your body is slouched in a most un-Zenlike pose.

Thus, at many Zen meditation sessions, a supervisor patrolled the proceedings, carrying a long stick. Spotting someone nodding off he or she would give that person a very sharp thwack on the shoulder. Some people, feeling drowsy, might even request that they be hit.

I had already had several experiences of being struck with it. Administered firmly, it had delivered a bracing sting that energized me and startled me out of my lethargy.

The stick is called kyosaku or keisaku in Japanese, and has a long and revered tradition in Zen Buddhism. It is sometimes referred to as the “stick of compassion,” though some young priests have complained that they received shoulder injuries from being struck so often during their training.

I guess I was busy day-dreaming at that particular meditation session, with my body gradually slumping forward. I was seated on a ledge, facing the wall, and was not aware that the supervisor had walked behind me.

Suddenly I felt him lightly tap my right shoulder with his stick. I knew the drill. I placed the palms of my hands together in front of my chest, in an attitude of prayer, and tilted my head to the left and slightly forward. He then administered a tremendous blow to my right shoulder that felt like some kind of violent assault. It was so tremendously painful I almost cried out. I wanted to jump from my ledge and strike him back.

For the rest of the session I sat cross-legged in pain, brooding about what seemed like some kind of deliberate act of aggression aimed against me. I wondered if it was because I was one of the only Westerners there. And I worried that he might do it again. I kept listening for his footsteps. If I thought he was walking behind me I made sure I was sitting rigidly upright.

I think I may have gone back once or twice to Chokokuji. But each time I found myself utterly unable to participate in any meaningful way, so fearful was I of being struck like that again. I eventually decided it was futile to return.

Chapter Seven

Kyoto

Like numerous Westerners in Japan, I fell in love with Kyoto, the former imperial capital and home to some 2,000 temples and shrines. Many of them were major tourist sights, full of art treasures. I especially loved the fact that writing a book on Buddhism got me access to some stunning temples that tourists would seldom see. I used to love staying overnight in these places and taking part in the early-morning worship services

But it was after a visit to Kinkakuji, the Golden Temple, one of Kyoto’s most famous tourist sites, that I had an experience that sparked some disillusionment with Buddhism. I write about this in Chapter Eleven.

I especially remember Saihoji, the stunning Moss Temple, with its fairyland gardens of moss – more than forty varieties, in many hues of green and yellow - spreading through more than four acres of forest like some rolling, magical carpet.

Tracks wound through the trees, past an antique teahouse that was a Japanese National Treasure, and around a lake that contained several moss-covered islands. At this temple I participated in a simple but magical Zen service, in a large room overlooking the gardens.

In Kyoto and surrounding areas I came into contact with several Americans who were studying Zen. One was Tom Wright, who, like virtually all the foreign Buddhists whom I met, was mild-mannered, humble and always happy to answer my questions.

“I notice that foreigners in Kyoto nowadays [around 1980] are more serious than when I first arrived. In the late 1960’s and early 1970s all kinds of people started coming to Kyoto, saying they wanted to study Zen,” he told me.

“Some were serious, but others had some really weird ideas. Drugs were sometimes common. But more recently the young people seem straighter. They are sophisticated and more serious about Zen.”

A fascinating American was John Toler, who had become one of the few Westerners to head a Zen temple in Japan.

His temple, Shogen-In, was located in a 270-year-old manor house in the hills outside Nara, one of the ancient capitals of Japan and a city not far from Kyoto. After a long train and taxi journey I sat with John next to a traditional sand and rock garden, drinking green tea and looking over a magnificent vista of rice paddies and groves of trees.

He had arrived in Japan in 1954 as a member of the US army, and when his tour of duty was over he decided to stay. For a while he worked in advertising. But approaching middle age, and searching for peace of mind, he felt the call of religion. He sold his valuable collection of antique Chinese snuff bottles to finance four years of intensive training as a monk at Daitokuji monastery in Kyoto.

He told me of the hardship this involved. Just to be accepted he spent three days prostrating himself at the temple entrance, begging to be allowed in. Once accepted, he rose at 3:30am in the summer, an hour later in winter, for long hours of meditation, interspersed with sutra chanting, study and backbreaking physical labor.

The trainee priests were often required to tramp the snow-covered streets of Kyoto wearing only straw sandals on their feet, begging for food and money. A fellow American who entered training with him found it all too much and one night climbed over the monastery wall and fled.

Thanks to a wide circle of friends, in both Japan and the US, he had gained a modest degree of fame. Life magazine included a shot of John conducting a tea ceremony for a glamorous model as part of a feature on Japanese fashion. Famous people would fly in for a few days, for a taste of Zen. One of these was Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the assassinated US president, and more recently the US Ambassador to Japan, who spent two nights there during her honeymoon.

A newspaper wrote of this event –

''We all danced in the garden until quite late at night. We kicked up a lot of sand,'' Toler recalled, a broad smile creasing his large, square face. ''But bright and early the next morning they joined me for our traditional temple breakfast - boiled rice and pickles - and then we all recited sutras for twenty minutes or so.''

As I said, I loved visiting all these exotic and sometimes exciting places. I kept rushing from one to another, thinking that it was all research for my book.

In fact, though I did not realize it at the time, I had a giant spiritual void in me. There was an emptiness there. I didn’t need to meditate to try to create some kind of emptiness. It was already there.

I was searching for God. I just didn’t know it.

Chapter Eight

Heading North

I once worshipped at a Japanese Buddhist temple before the mummified body of a priest who had starved himself to death in a hole in the ground hundreds of years earlier.

He had been placed on a platform inside a glass case. His wizened body was wrapped in black priestly robes and his skeletal face leered. Teeth jutted out in several directions. One eye was missing. His long, bony fingers had turned a blotchy purple color and were varnished, so they resembled sticks of salami.

I clapped my hands once in the Japanese manner of worship, bowed my head quickly, then threw some coins into the offering bowl and fled the gruesome scene.

I was at Dewa Sanzan - the three Dewa mountains - in Yamagata prefecture in northern Japan. I had been working on my Zen book for several years now. But I had also been able to fulfill a dream and had written a couple of novels, hard-boiled spy thrillers full of gorgeous, karate-kicking Oriental women and villainous Oriental gangsters.

I had even found a San Francisco literary agent for one of them. Unfortunately, publishers in the US and Britain were unanimous in their rejections.

And so it transpired that, with my brief, childless marriage to a Japanese girl and my writing aspirations both on the rocks, I felt in crisis. In a display of cowardice and unwillingness to confront problems, I decided that escape was the best option. I headed north, to the snowy peaks of Dewa Sanzan, Japan’s holiest mountains - ostensibly to gather as many experiences as possible and then to write a travel book and perhaps another novel - and embarked on a series of weird spiritual adventures.

Dewa Sanzan was known as a place of the spirits. Shamans still practiced there. For 1,200 years the region had been home to the yamabushi, an order of mountain priests whose worship practices mixed Buddhism, Shintoism, Taoism, mysticism, traditional folk religions, shamanism and primitive mountain worship.

The weather was so harsh that the ski season on the mountains started only in spring, and continued until mid-summer. During winter much of the region was virtually inaccessible, though that did not stop the yamabushi, who scheduled some of their holiest rituals for this period.

Basho, Japan’s great haiku poet, visited the area during his epic seventeenth-century journey to the deep north of Japan. Seldom at a loss for a haiku, he simply recorded that the rules he had to obey as a pilgrim precluded him from detailing the wonders he witnessed on the mountains.

At some point in their history, certain yamabushi followers devised the practice of self-mummification, believing that this would hasten their spiritual journey to Buddha-hood.

It involved a grisly ten-year ritual designed to get rid of virtually all body fat, to wither the body and to rot the internal organs. The first forty months saw the devotee cut out all consumption of cereal crops. For the second forty months he ate nothing but fruit, berries and plant roots. At the end of this period he was little more than a skin-covered skeleton.

He then entered a small underground room which was covered with earth. Breathing through a bamboo tube, he chanted sutras and awaited death. At the end of the final forty months, the earth was supposed to be removed and the mummified body enshrined in a temple. But some bodies were found only recently, and it is presumed that others remain buried, awaiting discovery.

I took part in other adventures. I joined a Shinto pilgrimage group on the mountains. Shinto is an animistic religion that co-exists quite comfortably in Japan with Buddhism. In fact, most Japanese tell researchers and census takers that they follow both Buddhism and Shintoism.

For three days our motley group - a stressed-out policeman, a young woman who could not find a husband, an irrigation supplies salesman on the verge of a breakdown, a couple of students and a dozen others - hiked through the mountains with our yamabushi leader, all dressed in baggy white garb and with straw sandals on our feet.

He took us on twisting trails that no casual tourist could ever have discovered, and every fifty yards or so we stopped as he pointed to something - a Buddha statue, a cave where some holy man had lived hundreds of years earlier, a haiku poem carved into the rock. We chanted and prayed to the spirits of trees and rocks and mountains. Our leader carried a giant conch shell, and sometimes he stopped and blew a haunting reverie through it, the sound echoing through the mountains.

We climbed to the summit of one of the mountains, past a giant 600-year-old pagoda, to worship at an ancient wooden Shinto shrine, and though it was mid-summer the building was shrouded in a chill fog. Several times a day we stood under a frigid waterfall for a purification ritual - the men dressed only in loincloths - and chanted and prayed to the mountain deities as torrents of water thundered down on us.

At the end of the pilgrimage the local radio station interviewed me, incredulous (as am I, now) that I, a Westerner, should choose to join such a pilgrimage. I told them I felt spiritually refreshed, though I was unsure whether I really did.

But I had certainly felt a soothing sense of inner peace from repeated chanting of the melodic Shinto prayers, probably more so than from any of my Zen experiences. And standing for long minutes under the icy waterfall, my hands gripped in prayer, shaking back and forth vigorously in the water, had induced a modest feeling of transcendence; it was like floating in space, with the wintry current transformed into a warm glow. Anyway, the exertion of three days of mountain walking had certainly done me good. A national magazine included photos of me under the waterfall, in a feature on the pilgrimage.

While up north, I also studied aikido, a martial art. After some painful attempts to learn judo, which I write about in Chapter One, I had decided to try aikido, which enjoyed a gentler image. After several years of training I had achieved the rank of shodan, first-level black belt.

In the city of Yamagata, near the town where I was residing in northern Japan, lived a famous teacher, Rinjiro Shirata, who had trained before the war with Morihei Ueshiba, aikido’s founder. Aged seventy-two, Shirata-sensei was one of the last surviving teachers from that era, and I was eager to take the chance to train under him.

Aikido teaches a rhythmic form of self-defense, based on the body’s natural movements. Participants practice the same wave-like moves repeatedly until they become second nature - so engrained that it becomes all but impossible not to do those moves in the required circumstances. But it also stresses character - notably self-discipline, perseverance, duty and humility - though I found that Japanese notions of character formation are sometimes different from our own.

I had started my aikido training in the beginners’ class at Tokyo’s honbu dojo (head training center). But I wanted to practice more intensively, so sought out a dojo nearer my home. I found one in Otsuka, just a five-minute ride from my apartment, on the Toden, Tokyo’s last remaining tramline. I turned up one snowy winter’s morning, wearing a thick red windcheater.

“Don’t ever come here dressed in red,” snarled the elderly dojo head. “Men don’t wear bright colors. Go home and change.”

He told me to report the next day for early-morning training. But for a couple of weeks I was not allowed to train; instead I was expected to kneel at the edge of the training mat and watch the others. Only then, having apparently decided that I possessed sufficient character, did he actually let me join.

When I arrived in Yamagata I was quickly welcomed into the aikido class. But as a newcomer I was placed in the beginners’ group, even though I already had my black belt. It was another character-testing exercise.

As a teacher of “original” aikido, Shirata-sensei – who despite his age displayed extraordinary power and agility - attracted students from around Japan. Often they had been learning for many years, and possessed high-level black belts. But they all got placed straight into the beginners’ class (and during the few months I was there several never returned after the initial lesson).

I did another pilgrimage, this time to worship at thirty-three Buddhist temples scattered around the Mogami River. This gracious waterway flows through the heart of Yamagata prefecture and makes it one of Japan’s lushest and most fertile rice- and fruit-growing regions.

They were tiny country temples, often several hours’ walking distance from the nearest railway station or bus stop. All were many hundreds of years old, and each housed a Kannon statue. The Kannon is a Japanese Buddhist goddess of mercy, a Bodhisattva (which I explain briefly in Chapter Two) and a traditional object of veneration for people in distress. There are many similar pilgrimages around Japan. (The founder of Canon, the camera and office-equipment giant, worshipped the Kannon, and named the company for this deity.)

I carried a small, cloth-bound notebook, and at each temple for a small fee the priest or his wife inscribed a proverb in graceful ink-brush calligraphy and also impressed with red ink the temple’s traditional seal. This notebook is now a treasured souvenir of my seventeen years in Japan.

Many of the priests I met told me I was the first Westerner they had known to do the pilgrimage, and I was frequently invited inside for green tea and sembei rice crackers.

Komatsuzawa temple, Number Twenty on the course, was a rickety wooden structure, high up a mountain, leaning and creaking like some ancient ark tossed there centuries earlier. After the steep hour-long climb I was eager to rest. I pulled the rope that clanged the temple bell, in order to summon the priest to inscribe my notebook (unaware at that point that he lived off the premises). As I tugged, the temple began to shake and groan.

My first reaction was to laugh, amazed that one yank of the bell-pull could set the entire antique building vibrating. But the shuddering continued, and became more pronounced. I realized that I was experiencing an earthquake.

All around me enormous pine trees began to shiver and twist, the tops of the thinner ones flicking back and forth like catapults. I fled to a clearing where I waited, the ground moving beneath me. Fearfully I watched the vibrating trees and the swaying temple. It was more than a full minute before the quivering abated, and even longer before my own trembling eased.

Later I listened to the radio news and learned that the quake that day - May 26th, 1983 - had been the strongest to hit Japan in fifteen years, and that about one hundred people, mainly schoolchildren, were dead or missing. Most had been swept out to sea in a giant tsunami that ripped across the northern Japanese coastline in the hours after the tremor. High in the hills, I could not have been safer.

Tragically, nearly twenty-eight years later, in March 2011, an immense earthquake, also in northern Japan, was to unleash a massive tsunami that killed more than 15,000 people.

Chapter Nine

Christian Zen

Can you be both a Christian and a Buddhist?

I had no particular interest in Christianity while I was researching my Zen book, and the question did not concern me.

But my publisher phoned to tell me of a television program she had seen, featuring a group of Christians in Japan – Westerners and Japanese - who headed into the mountains periodically for Zen meditation at what might have been some kind of temple. They were apparently fusing Christianity and Buddhism.

I spoke about this with my co-author, John Stevens, and he was dubious. “It is impossible for a true Christian to go deeply into Zen,” he told me. “Sooner or later the differences become irreconcilable.”

But I was keen that the book should be as complete as possible. I did not feel that it was for me to judge the efficacy or the sincerity of any particular group. These were, apparently, Westerners practicing Zen – in their own way – in Japan, and I felt they should probably be in the book.

I made further enquiries and learned that a group of Catholic priests associated with Sophia University – a prominent Catholic institution in Tokyo – met each week for a short worship service that featured zazen (Zen meditation) and a Catholic mass.

One of the leaders of the group was William Johnson, a priest and prominent author who has written many books on Christian spirituality, including one titled “Christian Zen.”

In that book he wrote –

In the twenty years that I have spent in Japan…I have had some contact with Zen, whether by sitting in Zen meditation or through dialog with my Buddhist friends. All this has been tremendously enriching; it has deepened and broadened my Christian faith more than I can say.

…It seems to me that Christians can profit greatly from Zen methodology to deepen their Christian faith, and here in Japan an increasing number of Christians, both Japanese and Western, are discovering this. A growing number of Catholic nuns, for example, are quietly practicing Zen, and I believe it has a future within the church.

I attended one of the services, and was underwhelmed. A dozen-or-so participants sat on tatami mats in a small room, spent a short time in meditation, and then a priest recited a short liturgy, said a prayer and gave a brief homily. I could not see the point of it all.

After the service a group of several young Spanish and Latin American priests prepared a delicious meal – including squid cooked in its own ink, which I was able to taste for the first time – and we ate together, and drank Spanish red wine.

I interviewed one of the priests, Juan Rivera from Spain, and wrote about him for my column in the Asahi Evening News. “We have four to six people who come regularly, a few whom we see occasionally, then others who come just once or twice,” he told me. “Most of them are Japanese, but a few are foreigners.

“I would imagine they are divided equally between Christians – including Protestants – and non-Christians.

“We don’t like to call ourselves a Zen group, in case some Zen masters get upset. So it is best to describe us as a Zen-like prayer group. But we do use Zen methodology and way of meditation. However, we don’t give any Zen instruction, although during the homily I will discuss Zen ideas.

“There is really no structure to our group. We have no aim. We are not trying to reach any point. I think most of the people who come want a place to meditate. Some come because it is just a small group. Sometimes people don’t stay for the mass.”

I also learned of the Catholic Zendo, a Zen center in the outskirts of Tokyo that had been founded by a German Jesuit priest, Hugo Lassalle. People came here once a month for a five-day sesshin (intensive Zen training session), and this was the group that my publisher had seen on television.

Father Lassalle had been quoted as stating that he saw Zen becoming an important stream within Catholicism, and that he believed Zen meditation could help Christians attain the same connection with God as achieved by some of the famous Christian mystics.

I spoke to a worker at the Catholic Zendo who told me: “Most of the people who come to these sesshin are Japanese, and the majority are Christians, including some nuns. But we have Buddhists, atheists and others. Among the Christians are both Catholics and Protestants. During the sesshin we do about ten forty-minute meditation periods. There is also a Catholic mass.”

Though I wrote about Christian Zen for my Asahi Evening News column, at my co-author John’s insistence we did not include it in our book, and he added the following words to our introduction –

There are several Christian Zen groups here [in Japan] and quite a few Christian ministers and Catholic religious – Jesuits, especially, go for Zen in a big way – who regularly participate in zazenkai [Zen meditation meetings] and sesshin.  All of this is fine as far as it goes, and anyone may use the mechanism of meditation to enhance one’s spiritual life. However, we suggest that the reader accept Buddhism on its own terms and forget, at least temporarily, about combining the two approaches.

Chapter Ten

Buddhist Art

I developed a fascination with Buddhist art, and it is still an interest of mine. One of the finest art exhibitions I ever saw was in Tokyo in 1984. It was a collection of Gandhara Buddhist art from six museums in Pakistan.

It was in the Seibu Museum of Art, on an upper floor of the Seibu Department Store, and I remember the lines of hundreds of people stretching back down the stairwells, waiting to get in.

Gandhara was a region of ancient Pakistan, and for about 400 years, from the First Century AD, was one of the heartlands of Buddhism. A flourishing art movement began here, depicting in sculpture the life of the Buddha and of various Buddhist deities. This is some of the earliest Buddhist art in existence.

At one point in its history Gandhara had been conquered by Alexander the Great, and the sculptors of the day often used Greek art as their model. So here were Buddhas with moustaches and beards and long noses.

The highlight was the spectacular Fasting Buddha from around 350 AD depicting a Buddha with a long face and nose, a little like a Roman centurion, and with his ribs poking through his chest as he came near to death from his stringent fasting regime. The Pakistani government had never before allowed this precious work to leave the country.

(You can see it here: http://i717.photobucket.com/albums/ww179/tortolitas/fasting_buddha2.jpg.)

Japan was a marvelous place to explore Buddhist art, as so much has survived. Visiting temples and museums, full of graceful, sensuous sculptures, helped me learn about all the many varied figures in Buddhism, and the varieties of Buddhist belief.

I saw many statues of Amida, a Buddha who presided over a paradise-like “pure land” known as the Western Heaven. This is where the souls of believers would be reborn after they died. As I note in Chapter Two, to achieve this rebirth a believer, no matter how bad his or her behavior, simply had to express faith in Amida, through a simple mantra – Namu Amida Butsu (“praise to Amida Buddha”).

Indeed, evangelists traveled through Japan in the eleventh and twelfth centuries teaching this mantra, often with music, to the common people.

This popular stream of Buddhism, known in English as Pure Land, taught that Amida personally would descend to Earth to carry the dying believer with him back to the Western Heaven. A painting of Amida descending to Earth might be taken to the home of a dying believer, who clutched cords attached to the painting, to ensure a smooth passage to the Western Heaven.

Another important Buddha is Dainichi (Great Sun), and there are many statues in Japanese temples. Dainichi is viewed by many Japanese Buddhists as the most important of all Buddhas. He is especially worshipped in the tantric branches of Japanese Buddhism, which teach that believers should seek to identify with certain deities and thereby gain their spiritual powers.

When the first Christian missionaries arrived in Japan in the sixteenth century they mistakenly used the word “Dainichi” to translate “God,” unaware of its all-encompassing Buddhist connotations.

I have already mentioned in Chapter Two and Chapter Eight the Kannon – the goddess of mercy - probably the most loved deity in Japanese Buddhism.

The Kannon is a Bodhisattva – a deity who has postponed enlightenment in order to remain on Earth to help troubled humanity. A proverb I heard said something to the effect that when the people are happy the Kannon smiles; when the people are sad the Kannon weeps.

It is probably little exaggeration to say that for many Japanese Buddhists the Kannon fulfills something of a Jesus role – someone to pray to in times of trouble, confident that your prayers are heard and understood. Or for Catholics an analogy with the Virgin Mary might be appropriate.

Indeed, when Christianity was outlawed in Japan in the early seventeenth century, driving the church underground, some Christians made statues of the Virgin Mary disguised as the Kannon. These Maria Kannon, as they are called, sometimes had a small cross hidden inside.

Another hugely revered Bodhisattva is Jizo, seen as a protector of children, and clusters of concrete statuettes of Jizo can be seen beside the road in some rural regions. In certain streams of Buddhism it is believed that Jizo will save believers from the torments of hell.

Several years ago I took a course in Japanese art at Melbourne University. I was required to write one lengthy essay, and chose as my topic the stunning Byodoin temple, located near Kyoto in the town of Uji, famous for its green tea.

This is a supremely beautiful eleventh-century temple building shaped to represent a phoenix, together with a lush garden and a pond forming the Sanskrit letter A, for Amida, the Buddha worshipped at this temple.

I mention Amida in Chapter Two and also above. This is the Buddha loved over the centuries by so many of the common people. Faith in Amida was said to be sufficient to ensure that a believer, after death, would go to the magnificent Western Heaven, avoiding the torments of hell.

So Byodoin was designed to bolster the faith of the believer by a wondrous display, here on earth, of the glorious delights of the Western Heaven. Indeed, it was intended to allow the faithful actually to experience the spiritual joy of the Western Heaven, and provide reassurance to believers of the presence and compassion of Amida.

One feature was the temple hall containing Byodoin’s famous Amida statue. This hall is surprisingly small, certainly in proportion to the large and gorgeous statue inside. It is intended to allow the pilgrim visitor to feel a closeness to the statue and thus to emphasize the importance of the believer’s personal relationship to the Amida Buddha.

You can easily find images of Byodoin online. One is here: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/ealac/V3613/kyoto/images/byodoin.jpg.

Anyone looking to learn about Buddhist history and beliefs would find a study of Buddhist art a fascinating place to start. One short online course is at the Khan Academy - https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-history/art-history-400-c-e--ancient-cultures-1/buddhist-art/a/the-historical-buddha.

You can find other courses at Apple’s iTunes University.

Chapter Eleven

Doubts

Gradually I moved away from Buddhism. Nothing dramatic happened. I had, more or less, drifted in and now I drifted away. My “Zen Guide” book was published and was selling well. And I had quit journalism and taken a new job, as a securities analyst with the Tokyo branch of a British investment bank. I began working long hours.

But something more was happening in my life. I married again, to a young Korean Christian woman. I was happy for her to go to church, though sadly – back then - never considered joining her. Our first two children were born in Tokyo. I had little free time.

In any case, I had been having doubts about Buddhism.

I had never been much interested in doctrine. It was not especially relevant to me. Certainly not at the start. I was looking for spiritual experiences.

But spiritual buzzes had become increasingly rare. At the same time, the greater was my exposure to Buddhism the more was I forced to confront various unpalatable concepts.

I certainly had difficulty in swallowing the notion of reincarnation, an integral part of Buddhist belief. It was not just the idea itself, although it did always seem a strange concept. At that time I had no particular interest in what happened to people after we died. That was not important for me.

But it was the implications of the belief that concerned me.

Buddhists believe that our status in our present lives is determined by our conduct in past lives. In other words, if we are suffering it is our own fault - it meant that we conducted ourselves badly in a past life and so we are fated to suffer in the present life. It is almost as if we are being punished.

Certainly Buddhism contained myriad teachings on the need for compassion towards those who are suffering. But this compassion does not arise from an ethic of love, as is the case with Christianity. Rather, Buddhism teaches that ethical conduct is necessary in order to be elevated to a higher status in the next life.

In any case, it is difficult to feel too much compassion for the suffering when you believe the person is directly responsible for his or her own misfortune.

I was raised in a non-Christian household. In fact, it was an anti-Christian household. As I mention in Chapter One, my parents were politically very left wing, devoted to changing the world. I may not have been Christian, but I had been raised with the notion of trying to make the world a better place (or, at least, a Socialist place).

So I could not help but notice that in Japan back then there was little notion of charity to those outside one’s own groups – family, school friends, work colleagues and so on. Even my non-Christian eyes noticed that in an overwhelmingly non-Christian country it was the Salvation Army that provided a disproportionately large amount of charitable aid to the needy.

Once I was talking to an American Buddhist friend who had spent a considerable amount of time training at a Zen monastery high in the mountains, a place that attracted many Westerners. It was so remote that in winter the priests had to ski for several hours to the nearest shops for supplies. My friend told me how, on one of these shopping expeditions, an avalanche had swept away two of the priests and killed them.

There was something that startled me about the matter-of-fact way in which he told me of this tragedy, and I questioned him more. He explained the deaths as if he were recounting the fact that the sun rises every morning, as if they were on the level of importance of, say, dead leaves falling from a tree.

I had come to believe that Buddhism regarded life and human existence in general as meaningless. But I still regarded individual human beings as precious, and was startled at what seemed to me a lack of love in the religion.

Another incident came one morning in Kyoto when I was researching my book. I visited the 600-year-old Golden Temple – Kinkakuji - one of Japan’s most beautiful religious buildings and a famous tourist sight.

I was privileged to be able to enter parts of the gold-leafed temple that are normally off-limits to visitors. I sat with one of the priests beside a delicately manicured garden and a small lake, and we drank green tea together, ate traditional Kyoto cake delicacies and discussed Buddhism. It seemed to me at that time to be a small taste of paradise.

But that evening, in nearby Osaka, walking to catch a train, I passed through a park littered with rubbish. The park was apparently home to at least a dozen alcoholic, derelict tramps. They were lying around in tattered clothing, some sleeping, others singing and drinking from “one-cup” containers of cheap liquor. This was then a very rare sight in Japan, a prosperous country (though, sadly, not as uncommon nowadays). In fact, in my seventeen years in Japan it was the only time I ever witnessed such a scene.

But I could not help making a connection with my visit, just a few hours earlier, to the utopia of the Golden Temple, and I wondered what the priests there could offer the men in the park. It seemed to me they could only tell them that the world was a miserable place and that their lives were meaningless. But the men knew this already; perhaps that helped explain why they were alcoholics.

Incidentally, some years later, living in Australia, and having become a Christian, I recounted the above incident in a particular internet forum. I received a short email from a Buddhist in Scotland. He wrote: “Regarding those drunks you came across in the park. You must realize that those people made that hell for themselves; it is their karma.”

Other little things happened. The more I learned about the practice of Buddhism in Japan, as opposed to the theory, the less keen on it I became. At the beginning Buddhism had seemed to me a gentle religion of peace, love and harmony. But some of the priests I interviewed for my “Zen Guide” book were arrogant in the extreme, and had no hesitation in telling me their low opinions of all other priests.

One prominent priest in particular quite unabashedly told me that he was the only person in the world who truly understood Buddhism. I mentioned this to my co-author John, who laughed, and responded, “Oh, they’re all like that.”

It was perhaps because of this that he included the following paragraph in our introduction to our book –

The quality of enlightened guidance varies. Outright charlatans are fairly rare, but even the best teachers have trouble distinguishing between essential Buddhism and the customs of Japanese Buddhism. Tradition weighs heavily on most, and many things are done simply because “they have always been done like that.” Many masters have weaknesses for costly robes and fancy titles; some are heavy smokers and drinkers; a few espouse the most extreme right-wing politics; and the majority have high estimations of their own worth: “I am the only one who understands Buddhism” is sure to be heard more than once.

I learned, too, of religious wars that had occurred in Japan. I started asking questions. What did Japanese Buddhists do during World War II? I was saddened to learn that in many cases they actively supported their country’s aggression.

There is evidence to suggest that D.T. Suzuki, a prolific author and one of those at the forefront in introducing Zen Buddhism to the West, was particularly outspoken in his support for Nazism – he is said to have described Jews as “a parasitic people” and their lack then of their own country as “karmic retribution” – and for Japanese military aggression.

I had learned that Buddhism in Japan was in some respects a family business, with many priests owning their temples and bequeathing them to their sons. They also made big profits by charging exorbitant fees for arranging funerals.

John wrote in our introduction to the book –

Sad to say, the current state of Japanese Buddhism is not what it should be. Buddhist priests here have a well-deserved reputation for greed, and not a few are little more than confidence men, demanding outrageous fees for funerals and other dubious services. At the other extreme, there are the caretaker priests who maintain their temples as museums. Make no mistake, much of what you will encounter is sham Buddhism. However, if you exercise caution and keep searching for the real thing, sooner or later you will find it.

In some places women are treated basically the same as men, but in the older, more conservative centers women have second-class status, being made to act as seamstresses and maids. At other places they are not welcome at all.

So I drifted away. I don’t think any single item of the above, in itself, was enough to turn me away. But gradually I ceased my involvement. It was a slow but a fairly natural development. I wasn’t sure why, but Buddhism was no longer especially stimulating to me. I didn’t find it interesting. Soon I had no involvement at all.

I was searching for something much greater. Unfortunately, I still did not know what that was.

Chapter Twelve

Becoming a Christian

An Australian friend of mine, Michael Graham, spent many years practicing Indian religions. He was one of the first Western disciples of Swami Muktananda Paramanansa, who was to become a leading figure in America and elsewhere with his teachings of Siddha (perfect being) yoga.

Michael helped manage his ashram (spiritual center) in India, with up to 2,600 Westerners there at one time. He also became deeply involved in Muktananda’s American activities and energetically promoted his teachings in other countries.

Then one day he had an amazing encounter. This is how he recalled it to me, when I interviewed him for an Australian Christian magazine –

At the time it happened I was in isolation. But I wasn’t meditating; I was in a completely plain state of mind. All at once an image of Christ formed up in my chest cavity. Along with this image came a recognition of who He was. What followed was beyond conception. But to indicate using mere words…there was an openness to me from Christ of cosmic proportions, and an invitation and welcome, as if to say, “Give me your life and breath and I will take care of you.” It was a personal invitation. It was equal to the deepest spiritual experience I’d ever had.”

This is what happened next, as I described it in my article –

But despite the marvel and intensity of the encounter, there was a problem. So entrenched was he in his existing spiritual ways, that Michael simply did not know how to respond. He carried that memory of meeting Jesus with him for one year, when he happened to be in Berkeley, California. And there, in 1997, he had what for him was another profound experience.

“I was overcome by the conviction that my lifelong spiritual quest added up to a big fat zero. It was a powerful sense. I was reduced to nothing.”

At the time he was driving forty-five minutes each day, and as he drove he listened to evangelical Christian radio, which was building in him an understanding of the first principles of the Christian faith. “I started to get very excited by the promise of Christianity,” he remembers.

A prominent young Indian swami was visiting California at the time, and he was looking for twenty to thirty experienced people to be trained as gurus and healers in their own right. Michael was not in the least interested, but when three friends, separately, urged him to attend, he took that as some sort of sign that he should be there.

He went, and was not impressed by what he saw and heard. But one thing he noted deeply. The instructor reminded him that to achieve anything it was necessary to have faith. Thus reminded, Michael clearly recognized that it was only in Jesus Christ and His promise that he could ever have faith.

But there was for him one more step in becoming a Christian. “I knew about the importance, power and place of decision….I knew that becoming a Christian would be the biggest decision of my life. I wanted to make a marker of it - an event. It so happened that Billy Graham was coming to San Francisco. So I went to that meeting for the express purpose alone of making this decision clearly, cleanly, surely, with no turning back, in front of 22,000 witnesses.

“And since that day I’ve never been the same. I knew absolutely what it was to be renewed, to be reborn. I was a new creation. It was a silent indwelling of the Holy Spirit. I started to be led in my Christian walk.”

Today Michael is back in India, working to introduce Jesus and His message to all the many Western spiritual seekers who go to that country looking for enlightenment. You can read more about Michael’s story in his book “From Guru to God: An Experience of the Ultimate Truth.”

I wish I could claim a similar experience, of feeling Jesus with me, inviting me to Him. It happened to another friend, the late Rabbi Harold Vallins, at a prayer and worship convention.

In his own words –

As the prayer was being recited I felt as though I was being transformed onto another plane of life. I suddenly knew that Jesus was in the room with us. I could actually feel Jesus come and stand behind me and put His hand upon my shoulder. And I could hear myself saying, inside my head, “Jesus, you are my Messiah, my Lord, my Savior.” I felt tears in my eyes and felt my whole body was trembling.

You can read the remarkable story of Rabbi Harold Vallins in my short devotional “Love, Justice and Power: The Message of Passover for Christians”

My own experience was far more mundane. As I noted in the previous chapter, I had gradually drifted away from any involvement with Buddhism. Then, with our two older children reaching school age, my wife and I decided to leave Japan and move to Australia.

After that, things happened very fast. My wife, a Korean, joined a local Korean congregation, but suggested we try to find a church near our home where we could worship as a family.

I thought it would not be bad for our kids to go to Sunday School – something I had missed out on – and was amenable. I had no idea what it meant to be a Christian. I thought that if you believed in God you were a Christian, and I decided that I could probably believe in some kind of almighty God. And so one Sunday morning we all turned up unannounced at our local Baptist church.

Very quickly the pastor visited us and he invited us to dinner at his house, together with various church people who had Japanese or Korean connections. Then a couple of church ladies came to our home and said they would like to do a series of Bible studies with me.

I was prepared to accompany my family to church, but had no interest in reading or studying the Bible. However, I felt blackmailed. One of the ladies had taken it upon herself to pick up our older son and drive him with her daughter to kindergarten on the days when I was working – I had taken employment as a journalist on Melbourne’s Sunday Herald Sun - as my wife still did not have her Australian driving license. I was annoyed, feeling that these ladies were taking advantage of my kind nature.

So two ladies began visiting every week to talk about the Bible, and I started reading and reading and asking more and more questions. There were no thunderbolts, no flashes of lightning, but one day one of the ladies – the wife of our family doctor and a former missionary worker at Galmi Hospital in Niger - made the offhand comment that the life of Jesus and much of the New Testament had been forecast in the Old Testament. And at that moment I felt this warm glow passing through my body and in my heart I just knew that everything I was being told was the truth.

Over the coming weeks I had a growing conviction that I had found something I had been searching for. The next time at church, when the bread and grape juice were passed round, instead of letting them pass I took some, and said a silent prayer to God, asking Him to confirm that I was doing the right thing. And I did feel a great peace.

So at the age of forty-four I gave my life to Christ and was baptized. I went on to study at Bible College of Victoria, anxious to catch up with what others in my church knew about the Bible, and I completed a Graduate Diploma in Christian Studies.

Now I look back and am astonished to see, quite clearly, God’s hand at work in my life over many years, long before I became a Christian, guiding me, prodding me, sometimes protecting me, and softening my hardened and cynical heart.

While sitting cross-legged in temples, or standing under a waterfall, I had never considered Christianity as the answer to my spiritual thirst. Probably in Japan I would never have started going to church, just as in Australia it is unlikely I would have embraced Buddhism or other Eastern religions.

Perhaps my situation was in some modest way similar to that of the late American psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, author of the best-seller “The Road Less Traveled,” who became a Christian at the age of forty-three.

He later said that it was probably his background in Zen Buddhism that prepared the way for him. “Zen is the ideal training ground for paradox,” he wrote. “Without my twenty years of meandering around with Zen Buddhism, I don’t think there is any way I could have been prepared to swallow the literally God-awful paradoxes that lie at the core of Christian doctrine.”

Though for me I suspect it was more a case of God using my Zen experiences, and my desire for the spiritual, to break down and to break into my hardened and deeply cynical heart.

So now I am a Christian. As I told my church recently, when asked to repeat my testimony: That He was loving me when I despised Him is something I sometimes struggle to understand, and accept. And occasionally I think “Why me?” and that I find very difficult to answer. But I do know that in that mighty love of God I have at last found the sense of peace and hope that for so much of my life seemed impossible to attain.

Chapter Thirteen

Buddhism and the Book of Ecclesiastes

At some point after I became a Christian I read the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. It resonated immensely. It was talking about me and my cynical view of the world. I too had believed that life was pretty meaningless.

I recall saying to one of the ladies who had worked so hard to evangelize me after our family had turned up at our local Baptist church: “You know, all you had to do was get me to read the Book of Ecclesiastes. I would have realized immediately that I needed God.”

I am far from the first person to notice similarities between Ecclesiastes and Buddhism. Perform an internet search and you will find many references.

It is noteworthy that both the Buddha and the author of Ecclesiastes – assumed by many to be King Solomon – were immensely wealthy. They lived in luxury, in palaces with servants, and were utterly without want. And they both concluded that – ultimately – life was meaningless.

Though parallels between the Book of Ecclesiastes and the writings of the Buddha are far from precise, there are interesting similarities.

For example, in the first of his four Noble Truths, the Buddha declared that suffering is the fate of humans. And here is the writer of Ecclesiastes:

Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun:
I saw the tears of the oppressed –
and they have no comforter;
power was on the side of their oppressors -
and they have no comforter.
And I declared that the dead
who had already died,
are happier than the living,
who are still alive.
- Ecclesiastes 4:1-2

And:

All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing.
- Ecclesiastes 1:8

The Buddha’s second Noble Truth states that our suffering is caused by human desire – for wealth, sex, food, ideologies and so on.

And I saw that all labor and all achievement spring from man’s envy of his neighbor. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
- Ecclesiastes 4:4

As I said, the parallels are far from exact. But they are there. The big difference of course is that Ecclesiastes ends with an affirmation of God as the answer to our angst.

So it is the Book of Ecclesiastes – a text of the Bible which some Christians dislike, but which I love – that highlights what I had been searching for all along.

I had a spiritual thirst inside me. I now recognize that this was a God-given desire for Him.

That is why I kept rushing from temple experience to temple experience, indulging myself in all the spirituality, but then, somehow, feeling vaguely dissatisfied and thirsting for more, and not knowing why.

The prescription of Buddhism to this kind of spiritual thirst was that I should work to eliminate all desire – and eliminate my God-given spiritual thirst - by consciously advancing towards some kind of sterile state of nothingness.

Far better, I now know, to recognize that these desires arise from the lack of God in our lives. Bring in God – bring Him truly into our lives - and we can want for nothing more.

And what futility – I now believe – to try to know true reality through the process of eliminating rational thought. God gave us our minds so that we may know Him and His creation.

Once I became a Christian, and started learning about my new faith, many more distinctions became apparent. Some are summarized neatly in the book “Buddhism: A Christian Exploration and Appraisal” by Keith Yandell and Harold Netland –

The difference between the Christian gospel and the Buddhist dharma [teaching] is most evident when we consider the question of God’s existence. The gospel presupposes the reality of God, and makes no sense if God does not exist, whereas the notion of God plays no role in the Buddhist dharma.

...The Buddhist rejection of theism has many religiously significant consequences:

* the world was not created
* there will be no final judgment
* there is no divine providential care of anything
* and there is no sin, since there is no God to sin against
* thus there are no sins of which to repent
* there is no forgiveness of sin
* Jesus Christ is not God incarnate
* Jesus did not die on the cross that we might be reconciled to God
* there is no hope of resurrection of the body and everlasting life in God’s presence
* persons are not created in the image of God
* prayer to God is religiously pointless, for there is no one to hear and respond

But, at heart, it is the absence of love in Buddhism that for me marks a clear difference with Christianity. Yes, there is compassion in Buddhism - a considerable amount of teaching on the need for it. But it is aimed at helping the believer earn more merit and an elevated existence in his or her next life.

By contrast, Christianity teaches that God, who IS love, so loved the world that He sacrificed His Son, and consequently we humans are to live lives of holiness, infused with His Spirit, bound together in self-giving love. What joy.

Chapter Fourteen

Talking with Buddhists

My wife is Korean and most of her family are Buddhists. Some years ago her nephew got into a fight with a soldier in a bar in Seoul and was smashed to the ground. He spent a few months in hospital in a coma, before coming round. But to this day he remains mentally and physically disabled.

His parents were for many years inconsolable. He is their only son, and traditionally in Korea the son will take care of the parents in old age. Now they could see that they would be taking care of him. They are not well-off people.

His father – my wife’s brother-in-law - speaks good English, and on a visit to Seoul I tried to encourage him to go to church. But he was having none of it.

“At the hospital when we visited our son we were always being approached by Christians,” he told me. “Some of them were just after money. Anyway, I tried praying to your God and never felt anything. Why is your God better than my god?”

He said Korean Christians were too pushy. “Go to church just once and next Sunday there will be a car or minibus outside your home waiting to take you again. If you tell them you’re not going they get angry.”

He and his wife eventually found comfort in the teachings of a Buddhist priest, who told them their suffering was due to their bad conduct in a past life, and that there was nothing they could do to change this. Rather, they should act well now, to ensure for themselves a better life in a future existence.

Christianity in Korea has enjoyed phenomenal growth, and now accounts for something like thirty per cent of the population. I suspect that pushiness is one factor, though more important are relationships.

Indeed, I believe that relationships and an understanding of local cultures are probably the keys to bringing Asian Buddhists to the Lord.

In Seoul I have attended services at the Yoido Full Gospel Church, founded by David Yonggi Cho, and with a phenomenal membership of around one million people. After one service I attended an information meeting for Western visitors and learned that one of the reasons for the church’s growth was the multitude of apartment buildings in Seoul, housing most of the city’s residents.

Small prayer groups at many of the buildings apparently make it their business to learn about the activities of all the tenants within their building. When they hear that someone has a problem they immediately offer to pray for that person, who often will end up joining the church.

But there may be something else as well. Here is an excerpt from a piece that I wrote on my blog in 2003 after a visit to Korea –

I often think that one of the reasons for the explosion in Christianity in post-war South Korea has been due to the Korean church’s appropriation of local culture.

When I visited David Yonggi Cho’s Full Gospel Church in Seoul…an elder pointed to a large Korean magpie that had built its nest on top of the high church gateway. “That’s very good luck,” he told me.

In South Korea, it is common to seek out shamans for guidance about sickness, money, jobs and many other concerns. And in particular, for help in finding a husband or wife.

I attended three Full Gospel Church services, and after lengthy prayers at each, Dr Cho announced that particular people in the congregation had just been healed of various ailments. He has explained in one of his books how he teaches women to visualize exactly the sort of husband they want, in order to be successful.

Buddhism teaches the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. Dr Cho’s church teaches the Fivefold Gospel and the Threefold Blessing.

(Sadly, as I am writing this, news arrives that David Yonggi Cho has been convicted of tax evasion.)

Yet while Christianity has enjoyed phenomenal growth in South Korea, nothing similar has happened in neighboring Japan, where I lived. Many explanations are given. I suspect that intense spiritual warfare waged against Japanese Christians over many centuries is a factor.

For example, it is not generally known that in the late sixteenth century many Japanese had become Christians. In fact, Christianity was becoming such a force that in the early seventeenth century the ruling shoguns (military rulers) banned it outright.

From that point Christians were persecuted, and subject to the most horrendous punishments. To ensure the eradication of the religion, the authorities introduced a practice known as fumie.

A fumie – “stepping-on picture” – was a picture of Jesus or of the Virgin Mary. For more than 200 years government officials regularly traveled through the country, to even the smallest village, forcing residents to trample on these pictures. Those who refused were assumed to be Christians and were tortured until they renounced their faith. Those who would not do this were cruelly executed. Crucifixion, sometimes upside down in the sea, was one method.

Another example: according to Japanese tradition, the country’s emperor was a god. Emperor Hirohito formally renounced his divinity in 1945, after Japan’s defeat in World War II. However, his son Akihito, who became emperor in 1989, subsequently participated in a highly secretive religious ceremony, one purpose of which, according to some experts, was to join symbolically in sexual union with the sun goddess and attain divine status.

The level of spiritual warfare in Asia is high.

Talking about Christianity with Asian Buddhists is one thing. Talking with Western Buddhists is another.

Over the past few decades Buddhism has been expanding in the West. In part, this has come about through immigration from Asian countries. But it is also a result of some Westerners choosing to become Buddhists.

Though, for what it is worth, I do not believe this phenomenon to be as great as is sometimes portrayed. Some years ago the Dalai Lama visited Australia and our newspapers began running articles on the growth of Buddhism among Australians. I contacted an editor at The Age daily newspaper and said I would like to contribute an article on the significantly larger number of Asian migrants to Australia who were turning to Christianity. But she was not interested in my story. That was not the kind of message her newspaper wanted to convey.

Because of my experiences in Buddhism I am sometimes asked by Christian friends for advice on how to talk to someone who is expressing an interest in Eastern religions.

It is not easy. In my case I was searching for God. And I also believe it was my years in Buddhism that helped open up my hardened heart, allowing God’s Spirit to reach me easily.

But, for many of the Westerners who are turning to Buddhism – sometimes from a Christian heritage, though it often seems that a lot of them have a Jewish background – they are in many cases very consciously turning away from God, as well as from all the church trappings of “Western” religion.

Buddhism in its original form was not especially interested in the notion of deities. Some people say that Buddhism, as propounded by the Buddha some 2,500 years ago, is more of a philosophy, or a guide to living, than a religion.

This is what many Western Buddhists have turned to. In many cases they are not – unlike so many Asian Buddhists - particularly concerned with gods or with heaven or hell. Rather they see the Buddha’s message – that we live in a world of suffering – as credible, and they like his prescription, that we need to cast off all attachments and desires, especially through meditation.

Many no doubt also like the spiritual aspects – chanting, incense and so on – as did I, and they often find the meditation calming. They may even have turned to Buddhism exactly because they see it as something exotic. Though certainly some get very caught up in particular streams of Buddhism such as Tibetan Buddhism, which put a high emphasis on the supernatural.

In the words of “Buddhism: A Christian Exploration and Appraisal” –

The Buddha offers many a vision of inner peace and tranquility in an age marked by high stress, rampant materialism and consumerism. For many in the West, Buddhism seems to promise a spirituality and serenity that enables one to transcend the pressures of modern life, but without the ecclesiastical structures, dogma and authoritarianism of traditional Western Christianity. In particular, since Buddhism does not teach the existence of an almighty creator God, it offers the prospect of deep spirituality without having to bother with God.

Nevertheless, it is certainly worth prodding Western Buddhists on their attitude to the doctrine of reincarnation and its affirmation that the suffering are themselves to blame for their problems.

And surely not every Western Buddhist is comfortable with the notion that Buddhism’s emphasis on compassion is in order that the believer can accumulate merit for himself or herself, to ensure a better existence in the next life, in contrast to the Christian doctrine of love, based on God’s love for His creation.

Nevertheless, it is no easy task to try talking with such people about Christianity.

I was such a person. I remember that when I was residing in Tokyo in the 1980s I heard about a church not so far from where I lived – the Tokyo Baptist Church – that operated then a small lending library of English-language books, a big attraction to me. I went along to investigate.

“Would you be interested in coming to one of our services?” asked the very friendly lady I met there. I could not get out of the place fast enough, and never went back.

At least, not until last year, when my wife and I returned to Tokyo for the first time in twenty years. It was my first time in the city as a Christian, and I made a point of spending Sunday morning in joyful worship at the Tokyo Baptist Church.

Now I sometimes get goose bumps when I look back and – as I write in Chapter Twelve - see, quite clearly, God’s hand at work in my life over many years, long before I became a Christian, guiding me, prodding me, sometimes protecting me, and softening my hardened and cynical heart.

God is in control. In His time He will bring His people to Him.

THE END

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About the Author

Martin Roth (http://www.authormartinroth.com) is a veteran journalist and foreign correspondent, and the author of many books.

He has worked on daily and Sunday newspapers in England, Australia, New Zealand and Greece. For seventeen years he lived in Tokyo, and his reports from Asia have appeared in leading publications around the world, including the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun.

He has also spent six months working on kibbutzim in Israel.

His first two devotional studies are –

* Love, Justice and Power: The Message of Passover for Christians
* A Psalm for the Battle: Reflections on Psalm 18, Christians and Warfare

The first three books in his Johnny Ravine private detective series are -

* Prophets and Loss

* Hot Rock Dreaming (Australian Christian Book of the Year finalist)

* Burning at the Boss 

He is also the author of the Brother Half Angel series of international thrillers, the first five of which are -

* Brother Half Angel

* The Maria Kannon

* Military Orders

* Festival in the Desert

* The Coptic Martyr of Cairo

The first two novels in his Feisty Ferreira series of financial thrillers are -

* Tokyo Bossa Nova

* The Kalgoorlie Skimpy

He lives in Melbourne, Australia with his Korean wife and three sons.

Devotional Studies

* Love, Justice and Power: The Message of Passover for Christians 

Passover is a Jewish celebration of the mighty acts of God in liberating the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt.

But it is also much more. For the events that culminated in Passover tell us a momentous story about God's power, His love for His people and His justice.

Yet there is even more. Because Passover is a story with a particularly deep and resounding message - that God's mighty act in redeeming the Israelites foreshadowed another, even mightier, act, when He would come to Earth in the form of a baby. And this time He would redeem the entire world.

Read this short ebook and be inspired and encouraged that our God is a God of love, justice and power.

* A Psalm for the Battle: Reflections on Psalm 18, Christians and Warfare

What does God really think about war? This short devotional uses the resounding words of Psalm 18 - in which David praises God for victory in battle - to examine some of the ethical issues of Christianity and warfare.

Questions are asked, such as when can a Christian soldier kill? How are we to understand some of the bloodthirsty passages of the Old Testament? Does God still provide guidance to military commanders, as He did in Old Testament times? What does a Christian do when ordered on a suicide mission?

Some of the answers are surprising, including testimonies from modern-day military leaders who have clearly heard God speaking to them at critical times of battle.

And did you know that some of the Japanese kamikaze pilots - who deliberately crashed their aircraft into American warships during World War II - were devout Christians? How did they reconcile their actions with their faith?

But ultimately this devotional is about the spiritual battle faced by every Christian.

Martin Roth’s Acclaimed Brother Half Angel Series of International Thrillers

With a focus on the persecuted church, these thrillers feature Brother Half Angel, an abrasive former military man who heads a clandestine new military order that is dedicated to fighting for the rights of persecuted Christians around the world.

* Brother Half Angel - an underground Christian seminary in China is under siege from sword-wielding members of a local cult who still pay homage to the bloodthirsty extremists who tried to expel all foreigners from China in the nineteenth century.

* The Maria Kannon - a killer is on the loose in Japan, targeting members of a small church community. It becomes apparent that the key is a mysterious card left at each murder scene – a card depicting the Maria Kannon, a statue of a Buddhist deity that was once revered by persecuted Japanese Christians.

* Military Orders – a missionary is murdered in India and the local police are falsely claiming that he was the leader of a gang engaged in the theft and sale of precious temple artworks. It quickly becomes clear that he was involved in something much bigger than simple mission work. But what?

* Festival in the Desert – a US military officer is kidnapped by terrorists in West Africa and a Christian mission hospital in the region is under attack. It is time to call on the New Mercedarians, the clandestine military order dedicated to fighting for Christians under attack around the world.

* The Coptic Martyr of Cairo – American Christians at an archaeological dig in Cairo discover the body of a murdered priest in a church basement. It heralds an angry wave of attacks on an ancient church community.

Johnny Ravine Private Detective Series

Set in Australia, these books feature private detective Johnny Ravine. They were originally published by Ark House Press.

* Prophets and Loss - when Melissa Stonelea’s born-again Christian husband is found strangled in the bondage room of the city’s classiest brothel, a page of the Bible stuffed in his mouth, she doesn’t need to hear more of her pastor’s sermons on the healing powers of forgiveness. She needs revenge.

* Hot Rock Dreaming - Australian Christian Book of the Year finalist. The judges wrote: “Hired to investigate the death of an Aboriginal painter, private detective Johnny Ravine is drawn into a complex mystery as dangerous as it is intriguing. Environmental politics, land rights and Aboriginal spirituality are explored with subtlety. For the hero and reader alike there is a valuable lesson to be learned about the importance of discerning which voice is proclaiming life and love when all is not as it seems. A compelling novel.”

* Burning at the Boss – a hellfire preacher is murdered and investigator Johnny Ravine learns that huge sums are missing from the charities that he administered. Was the preacher really using the money to pay off gunrunners? And, if so, why?

Feisty Ferreira Thriller Series

These financial thrillers feature Brazilian geologist Feisty Ferreira, now working as a highly paid financial analyst in order to pay for the orphanage she impulsively bought on a mission trip to the Philippines.

* Tokyo Bossa Nova – a body is discovered on the dealing room floor of upper-crust investment bankers Baund Major. Meanwhile, a shady Japanese takeover specialist is trying to acquire an obscure Australian oil company. Feisty Ferreira is sent to Tokyo to investigate.

* The Kalgoorlie Skimpy – a huge new gold discovery is followed by the murder of a top financial analyst. Feisty Ferreira is sent to the Australian outback. But why are so many people trying to stop her learning the truth?

JOURNEY OUT OF NOTHING: My Buddhist Path to Christianity
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Copyright © 2014 by Martin Roth
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