Lotus and Lily Field Notes

Last night Lotus & Lily brought to a conclusion our exploration of Keenan’s commentary on Mark.  I for one am in a celebratory mood: we’ve taken on a difficult text and done some excellent work with it.  Hooray for us!
But the work goes on: from the emptiness of the wilderness to the teachings empty of content (as Keenan loves to point out, much of Jesus’ best teaching in the gospel is indicated simply by “he taught them”–without explaining what the teaching was) to an empty transfiguration (focusing in the end on “just Jesus”–not the brilliance or glamor but of the simple presence that was left in the aftermath) to the self-emptying of the cross to the final shocking image of an empty tomb.

Emptiness is a core Mahayana teaching. In my Buddhism classes we’ve been learning that emptiness has three characteristics: impermanence, dependence, and multiplicity. In other words, all phenomena are empty of a permanent nature, empty of an independent nature, and empty of a singular, indivisible nature. I realize that in this formulate the notion of emptiness may seem overly philosophical and abstract, but it’s intended to cut like a diamond knife right through our delusive attachment to permanence independence indivisibility–*particularly* when it comes to our own rotten selves.

The teaching on emptiness is the Buddhist equivalent of the empty tomb, or the emptiness of the cross: a teaching to shock us out of our attachments and wake up to something larger. What’s become crystal clear to me in my re-reading of Mark through Keenan’s eyes is that the story of Jesus is as good a whack on the side of the head as any Zen master could provide–assuming, that is, that we are able to get past the blinding aura of dazzle and glitz that centuries of imputed messiahood, triumphalism and imperial values have bestowed on the Man of Galilee.

But viewed in his raw and naked form, the Tempted One, the Suffering One, the Risen One is nothing but an icon of emptiness. Perhaps articulated through a Buddhist lens that helps to define just what that “emptiness” is (impermanent, dependent, multiple), we can see more clearly what a vision of enlightened, awake possibility Jesus presents us with.

To me, anyway, this gospel of emptiness begins to open up the opportunity for embrace, not mere toleration or laborious translation, of the gospel narrative. Perhaps it’s simply a perfectly constructed story of Buddhist liberation. No, even better: it’s a perfect parable of what liberation might look like for us: shocked again and again out of our expectations, on the road with Jesus or maybe without him, confused, healed, misunderstanding and then grasping. I love the slow, steady pace with which Buddhist teaching and practice unfolds. But maybe the lurching road to Jerusalem, full of crazy highs and exhausting lows, and winding up in the end back where it starts, in Galilee, is a suitable and appropriate pilgrim path for us Buddhist-Christians to explore.

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Tomorrow is our last “Mahayana Mark” session, in which we’ll be discussing the resurrection narrative.  Here is one thing Keenan has to say that I particularly like:

The empty tomb itself proves nothing.  An empty tomb merely means that there is no corpse in it.  Mark is not trying to demonstrate the truth of the resurrection within the context of imagined thinking, for no such demonstration is possible.  Rather, the point is that Jesus is not there within conventional frames of reference, and thus not within the realm of words and judgments that might be called upon to demonstrate his renewed existence. (393)

When I was in high school I heard a speaker, Josh McDowell, who had written a book called Evidence that Demands a Verdict that told a very different story.  (Interestingly, I encountered Mr. McDowell’s work again a few weeks ago at my parents’ church: the bulletin included a slick anti-Da Vinci Code brochure authored by him).  Nowadays he has a website, www.josh.org, that lays out his rationalist point of view with great clarity.  For him, the empty tomb proves it all, and “the “realm of words and judgment” is indeed called upon, most insistently, to “demonstrate his renewed existence.”

At that time, as a 17-or-so-year-old, I was confronting with growing alarm and dis-ease the reality that I was not going to be convinced by rational arguments.  The way I was beginning to formulate it at the time was, “Even if Jesus has risen from the dead…what of that?”  And now I find, like the most wondrous soothing balm, these words of Keenan:

The story of Jesus has no final conclusion, for the resurrected life of Jesus is not a given data, once learned and perhaps imitated.  Rather, it is the life story of each Christian, embodied in particular circumstances and taking specific courses, as needed and possible in different lives.  The Gospel is open-ended, for the action of the story depends on decisions which the Church, including the readers, must still make.  Stories end, but the gospel goes on. (397)

“Not a given data” [perhaps 'datum' would be better, but...] says that what’s important, what one can focus on, is not this brassy iconic firm and fixed “risen Savior” that sits there in heaven waiting for me to come up to him and poke my finger in his side and say “oh wow!”  But rather that gorgeous emptiness, that opening of possibilities: the empty tomb, the empty possibilities, like the emptiness of the cross and the emptiness of the parables and the emptiness of the wilderness and even the empty heads of the uncomprehending disciples.

What I see after reading Keenan is a gospel full of emptiness, which means a gospel full of possibilities and full of freedom and full of of liberation from all our clinging and desire and the suffering that generates.  In short, a pretty darned Buddhist gospel.

I’m looking forward to the discussion tomorrow, and looking forward even more to continuing the journey of study and exploration that reading Keenan has opened up for me (and, as it seems to me, for many others in our group).  I feel deeply grateful to John Keenan for his important and eye-opening work.  It’s not always easy, but it has continually opened up new insights into the gospel, and Jesus, and the net of domestication that has been woven around the profundity and clarity of his message.

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As part of my lengthy time hanging out with Nalandabodhi people for 4th of July fireworks, I got into a discussion with several of them about Christianity and Buddhism.  I find this is rather tricky territory: a number of the Buddhists I know were raised Christians and don’t necessarily feel all that amicable about the tradition.  Anyone who reads this blog knows that I have ample sympathy for that situation.  Nevertheless it’s hard not to feel defensive.

The main critique of Christianity I was hearing from this group is that it is lacking precision and method.  Couldn’t agree more: that troubles me as well.  What I said in response was, “right–the focus of the religion is devotion to Jesus.”  And one of the people in the conversation pointed out that guru devotion is a core element of Tibetan Buddhism too.  Rigor and devotion: not such a bad combination.

This all puts me in mind of this week’s upcoming Lotus & Lily session on John’ Keenan’s Mahayana interpretation of the Gospel of Mark.  It’s our last session, on the resurrection.  And as Keenan points out, what Mark does at this juncture is point to the resurrection as the final emptying out, the virtual disappearance of the savior just at the point when one would expect a triumphant affirmation of his glory.  “He is going before you into Galilee” is the only information the disciples get.  Back to Galilee–back to your life, back to the present moment: that’s where the savior is located.  Only in the here and now will you find the transcendence you seek.

So how does that satisfy the devotional impulse?  I think Keenan’s Mark (or Mark’s Jesus?) thwarts that, just as he thwarts attachment in so many other ways.

Handling this human impulse toward devotion takes wisdom and skill.  What is starting to come into focus for me is that that impulse benefits greatly from the rigorous discipline of the Buddhist philosophical framework.  But the question also arises: how does one make use of a Christian devotional impulse?  If love of Jesus is what calls, how does one answer?

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Things are a bit crunched this week: I’m headed to Sacramento on Thursday evening to help celebrate my parents’ 50th anniversary.  Little blogging likely while I’m gone.  Lotus & Lily meets on Sunday–if my flight’s on time I’ll be there to join in what should be a juicy discussion about Keenan’s “Mahayana Mark” commentary on the “little apocalypse” in Mark 13.  Very rich, interesting material, including Jesus’ pointing to “Love God/love neighbor” as the core practice of the kingdom of God, and the beginning of Keenan’s brilliant exposition of the quite pointed treatment of last-days prophecy as presented by Mark.  Mark’s Jesus tells us “sure, go ahead and fantasize about the end of the world.  But the only point in doing that is to get right back to the fundamental work of WAKING UP in the present moment.”  Very clever indeed.  Too bad it has been overrun by the (to my mind) far less skillful treatment of the same material in Matthew and Revelation.  But taken alone Mark presents a wise and useful outlook, one that is in fact quite helpful in our own apocalyptic times (today’s version: North Korea may launch a missile that could land right here in comfy old Seattle).

Just wake up, Mark says:  just wake up.

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Geez, that is one sticky movie. I find myself having many wistful thoughts about what might have been with this film, what toxic mythologies might have been exploded, what liberating possiblities might have been opened up. The profound question skirted by both film and book is, “Well, if Jesus wasn’t the Only Son of God, what was he?” I don’t think “a family man” (even if true) is a very helpful answer. I guess we’ll have to wait for “Mahayana Mark: the Movie”–because Keenan’s interpretation of Mark is loaded with powerful ideas about just who Jesus was, or wasn’t, and what that might mean.
“For the Markan Jesus, the son of man is simply a man, come not to win a prime position for self, but to serve all and even to abandon all the structures of the self, to die so that others might live. And that is why Jesus is the eschatological bearer of the kingdom.” (p. 254)
This puts “dying that others might live” into a totally different context, one very resonant with Buddhist notions of bodhisattvahood. I’ve learned a bit about the Tibetan practice of “feeding the spirits”, which is basically the meditative act of one’s own body to demons for the sake of their liberation. Well, not exactly “for their sake”–the Buddhist notion is resolutely one of individual responsibility for liberation: even a Buddha can’t liberate another being. It is, rather a surrender of self because the self must be surrendered, in order to move closer to what is truly real, and to empty out one’s own negative karma.

Creepy as that might sound, it’s actually a potent representation of the bodhisattva vow–and very similar in kind to Keenan’s understanding of Jesus sacrifice. Not a cosmic saving event, but a necessary self emptying that points the way to liberation.

Yet in Mark there is still tough language to be dealt with, such as this: “For the Son of man himself did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Though the “not to be served but to serve” puts a stake through the heart of all the “Jesus is Lord” language–still it is easy to get wrapped up (not in a good way) in the “give his life as a ransom for many.” As Keenan says, “This indeed is a frequent pattern of ancient and modern thinking: ascribing the evil we experience not to our own delusion or attachment to idols, but to God who punishes that delusion and idolatry. Thus one dies to assuage God’s wrath.”

Exactly, and thereby one becomes the Lord of All, before whom every knee shall bow–and that’s a blind alley. OK, so Keenan dances around the question for a page or two, then says, “[Jesus' dying] is a price paid to selfhood, so that, shocked by the deconstruction of all imagined hope, one might break through and be freed from bondage.”  And concludes with “In the Zen phrase, it is the attainment of one’s original face, one’s true humanness.  Ransomed means recovery of our pristine human condition.”

I love the emphasis on emptying out, the clarity of a Jesus whose act of becoming not-Jesus on the cross is the bodhisattva act that opens up realms of possibility for his followers.  Turning the dharma wheel, upon the wheel of time, just like the Buddha.  And just like the Buddha, not to do it *for* us, but to do it *as* as.  Way-shower, not do-for-er.

And certainly not Dad in pipe and slippers, bouncing little Sarah on his knee while Mary whips up a frittata in the kitchen.  I mean really…

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A co-worker of mine turned me on to what looks like a very cool book by Leslie Savan called Slam Dunks and No-Brainers : Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever. The subject is “catchphrases and buzz words spread by the media that are, she says, replacing thought with preprogrammed verbal responses.” Savan deconstructs the trivial expressions that pepper our expression with shortcuts and code and well, “no-brainer”ness. But as my colleague and I talked about the book, the culprit behind the “no-brain” mentality slowly shifted, at least in my mind, from “the media” to “capitalism” to “the human condition.”

I’m certainly intimately familiar with this more general human phenomenon from my own religious upbringing. It was in my high school days that I began to identify the easy, “no-brainer” shortcuts in the religious language of my church community. “Jesus is Lord,” “I’m redeemed,” and so forth–there are thousands of permutations–distance us from genuine experience with conventional formulations.

Buddhism does an excellent job of cultivating a skeptical attitude toward language (or perhaps, it’s better to say “Buddhism contains within it the potential for a skeptical attitude toward language”). I don’t doubt that Buddhist communities (being composed, for the most part, of admittedly unenlightened beings) have their own formulaic propensities as well.  But when a core assertion is the inherent emptiness and interdependence of all phenomena, it’s maybe just a little bit harder to get wrapped up in the thing-ness of language.
This all seems germane to Lotus & Lily’s upcoming discussion of John P. Keenan’s commentary on the 8th chapter of Mark.  In that chapter, Peter professes that Jesus is the Christ. To which Jesus responds by giving “strict orders not to tell anyone about him.” However this might be conventionally understood (and it seems to me that even within conventional contexts this passage is a little puzzling) Keenan uses the passage to draw out some interesting implications:
“The point does not lie in identifying who Jesus is, and so he neither accepts no rejects Peter’s statement because it does not mean very much. Who Jesus is comes clear only in the unfolding events of his dependently co-arisen course, in the events of his passion, death, and resurrection, and even then it has no fixable definition.”

And further, “Peter’s confession is indeed the central turning point in the narrative, because it calls into question the very need for definitions….There is no ready-made essence of christ, no imagined understanding of who Jesus is. Only then, in the emptiness of all essence, can one confess that Jesus is Christ.”

Verbal confessions are not, as Keenan would say “the point”.  Fixed formulations are not the point.  The point, Keenan emphasizes again and again, is “conversion”: the shift of consciousness from fixations and obsessions and delusion into a  present-moment awareness of that which exists beyond names and forms.

In my Buddhism classes every week, we grapple with the question of path, of journeying toward a more awake state, using (of course) our own verbal apparatus and the conventional linguistic apparatus of Buddhist teaching as we do so.  It’s absurd, comical, impossible.  And yet there is somehow a mysterious progress being made anyhow, perhaps by force of intention, perhaps because of the inherent-beyond-words wisdom of the tradition, perhaps because, underneath the language, there is a “directly pointed out” form knowing: not referred to but experienced with immediacy and directness.

I’m reminded of the experience I had at Easter in 2001 when I was confirmed in the Episcopal church.  As part of that ceremony the Bishop, Vince Warner, anointed me with oil.  A not inconsiderable part of the power of that for me was the fact that, at least according to the tradition, that physical touch of consecration has been handed down, bishop to bishop, from Peter Himself, and of course, before him, from Christ.  Amidst the muddle of my Christian identity and practice, resistances and obsessions, the sense of being directly contacted in this way has been quite helpful.

In a sense, this mode of understanding is a “no-brainer”.  But, unlike conventional language, rather than turning the mind all the way off, perhaps direct contact, in whatever form, Buddhist Christian or otherwise, turns the whole person all the way on.

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Just so no-one can accuse me of being obsessed with the Book of Revelation, here are few thoughts on the Lotus & Lily group’s upcoming session on The Gospel of Mark: A Mahayana Interpretation.

And Jesus said to them,”…Do you not yet understand, still not realize?  Are your hearts hardened?  Have you eyes and do not see, ears and do not hear?” (Mark 8:17-18)

Hardness of heart.  Another one of those phrases that sticks in my brain from Sunday School days.  Like Pharoah refusing to let the Israelites go, the disciples are here represented as getting stuck in a stiff and unpliable way of being that prevents them from understanding.  Keenan says, “the point is not that one excludes new images or insights, but that one clings to and reifies images, whether old or new.  Hardening of the heart is the externalization of meaning into images and ideas, as if they were cages of reality.”

Ah.  So it’s not being rebellious against the will of the Almighty?  Hmm…this will require a shift in my own thinking about the term “hardness of heart”.  I must say, I like it: it gets us off the chessboard (God:good:white squares; rebellion:bad:black squares) and into directly relating with suchness, beyond images and concepts.

The above passage takes place within a fascinating narrative sequence which moves from the feeding of the 5,000, to Jesus’ refusal to give the Pharisees a sign of his power, to the present passage where he castigates the disciples for missing the significance of the miracle of the feeding.  It’s been easy enough for me to read this passage and get annoyed at Jesus (yes, I know, it’s shocking!) for being inconsistent and unreasonable.  But Keenan helps me impute a bit of Zen-style wisdom teaching here.  The point is not miracles or no miracles; the point is to help train the mind beyond its habitual grasping–to shock it, in a sense, into a new state of awareness.  Again, I like it.

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One more set of thoughts about Keenan’s “The Gospel of Mark: A Mahayana Interpretation” before the Lotus & Lily discussion tomorrow.

Consider the story of the calming of the sea, Mark 4:35-41.  The story ends with the disciples saying, “Who can this be?  Even the wind and the sea obey him?”

I vividly recall considering this story in my high school days, when my involvement in bible quizzing led me to memorize most of the gospel of Matthew.  I identified with the disciples in their awe: “Who is this man?” translated to “Wow, what an amazing supernatural guy!  I’d better commit my life and heart to Him!”

But Keenan, who never gives the disciples a break, flips this around: “[The disciples'] response is fear for their own well-being and, consequently, a view of Jesus as a messiah who might deliver them from such fear.  And so the sea he is really trying to calm remains troubled by fear and self-clinging.”  And again, “The calming of the sea is yet another parable, suggesting that faith affords one security over the sea of demonic chaos by abandoning security.” (136)  Abandoning security: not focusing attention on Jesus as a wonder-working savior who makes everything right, but on his radical call to individuals to calm the stormy seas inside ourselves.  In this context, Jesus’ comment “Why are you such cowards?  Have you still no faith?” is not to be understood in the conventional sense, which would be “Don’t you get that I’m here and You’ll Never Walk Alone?” (note to seekers of high-quality kitsch: you must click that link).  Rather Jesus is saying “Don’t you know that this storm is simply a mirror of your own confused thinking, and that you have within yourselves the ability to cut through this illusion and calm the sea within yourself?”

Zowie–that is a powerful transformation of the conventional understanding!   It cuts through the pious niceties like a buzzsaw.  I like to think that’s just the way Jesus would want it.

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Considering there’s a whole magazine dedicated to the question “what in enlightenment?”, I’m not sure this post is going to live up to its title.  However, the question comes up over and over again in Keenan’s “Mahayana Mark” (and in Lotus & Lily, for that matter).  The notion of Jesus as teacher of enlightenment is, I think, central to Keenan’s work: every healing story and teaching episode, and even the passion itself, is seen as a finger pointing to the possibility of awakening to the true nature of reality.

Talking (once again) about the contrast between Jesus’ awareness and the disciples’ blindness, Keenan remarks, “Other-dependent conciousness is characterized by a twofold process: its initial proclivity to grasp images and ideas as it seeks security in a radically impermanent world and, upon awakened conversion, its recovery of the original purity of joy and zest in celebrating that very impermanence.” (134)

The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche provides a helpful explication of the three-fold nature of enlightenment in the Nalandabodhi study curriculum:

• Realizing the true nature of emptiness – (the dharmakaya or “truth body”)
• Manifestation of enlightenment in the form of joy, bliss, and luminosity – (the sambhogakaya or “enjoyment body”)
• Manifestion of enlightenment in this-world solidity – (the nirmanakaya or “created body”)

All three of these terms are present in Keenan’s formulation.  But I must say that, despite this passage, at times I think Keenan’s philosophical approach to Mahayana Buddhism fails to emphasize that middle term, the luminous and joyful aspect of enlightenment.  This could be because of his primary source for Buddhist understanding, the Japanese Buddhist writer Gadjin Nagao’s Foundational Standpoint of Madhyamika Philosophy.  This is a book Keenan translated himself and I’m not familiar with the author’s background or specific orientation.  It may be that the joyful/luminous aspect is particularly found in the vajrayana, tantric stream of Buddhism which is so prominent in Tibet (where my current teacher comes from).  Not sure about that (I’m in over my head, Buddhist philosophy-wise) but sometimes Keenan’s version of enlightenment seems a bit dry and careful.  I find myself missing the (literal and figurative) passion, the sense of abandon and risk I find in the story of Jesus, the wildness of John the Baptist, the wonderment and strangeness of the miracle stories.

One of the things that has become clear to me from my Nalandabodhi studies is that the path to enlightenment has many different overlapping, and at times contradictory, layers.  There is room in such a world for the primarily philosophical.  But as I work through Keenan’s book again, I long for a multiplicity of Buddhist commentaries on Christian scripture, teasing apart layers of depth, celebrating the diversity of the 10,000 gates to the dharma in the kaleidoscopic panoply of metaphor, story, wisdom and blindness that infuses the Judeo-Christian scriptures.

OK, I’m digressing.  But if Christian scriptures contain coded in their pages somehow the story of enlightenment, how will we liberate its meaning?

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A few days ago I rewatched the film Walk the Line, about the lives, music, and (mostly) love of Johnny Cash and June Carter.  There’s a lot to like in that film, but all in all I found it sadder than I had the first time, though it’s got good Buddhist cred in the samsara-life-is-suffering sense.

But an early scene in the film has me thinking.  The young John Cash is talking with his brother Jack as they lie in bed in their Alabama sharecropper’s shack.  John says to Jack, “You must know every story in the Bible.”  And Jack says, “well, if I’m going to be a preacher I need to know all those stories.  How are you going to help people if you don’t know what story to tell them?”  I get this picture of Naaman or Jacob or Nehemiah or Zachaeus being prescribed like traditional medicinal herbs.  It resonates with my Protestant Bible-believing soul.  Who knows?  Maybe it would work…

Though both Buddhism and Christianity certainly have their stories (and as I have posted elsewhere, the Buddhist stories might be better), I think there’s a case to be made that stories are more fundamental to Christianity.  After all, the Main Event is just that, an event: a story that saves.  The Buddha’s story of enlightenment is a good story, an important story, an inspiring and instructive story: but then Buddhism heads off into the land of philosophy and practice.  In Christianity stories have a sacramental power to heal and to save (or, by contract, to consign to eternal flames).  Philosophy and practice might suffer, but the stories are always there.  Something about hearing Jack Cash say that was moving and hopeful, maybe, or foolish, maybe. 

I’m reflecting on stories also because of John Keenan’s explication (in the Gospel of Mark: a Mahayana Interpretation) of the parables of Jesus: stories presented in the context of a profound mistrust of language, language pointing beyond language, language subverting language.  In his introduction he says, “By his use of metaphor and irony, paradox and ambiguity, all surrounded by an abiding opacity which veils both the beginning and the end, Mark accomplishes in narrative what Nagarjuna was effecting through dialectics: the emptying of expectancies and a tensing of consciousness which may work to trigger awakening.” (17)

Stories as sacraments.  Commenting on Mark 4:34, “He would not speak to them except in parables”, Keenan notes that Jesus’ teaching “was not without content.  That content of his word, however, is not presented as a viewpoint about reality or a perspecdtive on life…Jesus’ speaking brings the experience of the kingdom to manifesting speech, without presenting a verbal account of things.”  Speaking in parables, bringing about experience.  Like the touch of the guru, a direct transmission of direct truth, through stories.  A little later on, in the episode where Jesus walks on the sea, the story becomes embodied in Jesus himself: “it is a miracle story aimed at inner wisdom transformation.”

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Some reflections on Keenan’s Gospel of Mark, as Lotus and Lily gets ready to meet next Sunday to continue our conversation about the book.

The section we’re focusing on has mostly to do with parables, in particular parables of seeds, planting and growth. 

I have to admit that parables have always made me somewhat uneasy, specifically because of their multivalent and metaphorical meanings.  Don’t get me wrong: I adore multivalent and metaphorical, when it’s Shakespeare or Melville or Dylan.  But it doesn’t square particularly well with the positivist, rationalistic, sundrenched evangelical faith of my childhood.  In my hermeneutic tradition, parables were to be handled with care, strictly allegorized when mentioned at all.  I think theologians must prefer John’s Jesus with his philosophical pronouncements. 

Keenan has been helpful in encouraging me to take a second look at the parables, as for example when he comments on Mark 4:27-28, which reads: “Night and day, while he sleeps, when he is awake, the seed is sprouting and growing; how, he does not know.  Of its own accord the land produces first the shoot, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.”

Here’s Keenan: “The mind in which the kingdom grows is not engaged in minute observation and judgment about the meaning of the parables.  Rather, while one is engaged in other things, awareness grows spontaneously, from stage to stage, without the person’s being aware of it at all.”  (Keenan, p. 129)  Hmm, that doesn’t sound like what my pastors used to say.  But I must say, my own practice today, chanting a Psalm and reading a scripture text, then letting it go to move into silent meditation, and then getting on with my day, feels a lot more like planting a seed and letting it alone.  This particular advice is in fact rather helpful as well, when it comes to the sometimes intense and sometimes, well, even a little burdensome Tibetan Buddhist notions (think: tonglen) I’ve been working with.

Imagine: the unfolding of the kingdom has an inherent naturalness, spontaneity, and grace about it. Keenan says, “Grace comes spontaneously in the abatement of all attempts to manipulate things.” (130)  This could apply to Lotus & Lily itself, and the whole Buddhist-Christian project – even wrestling with this rather gnarly text.

A few pages later, however, the other shoe (you just knew there was going to be another shoe, didn’t you?) drops:

“Although the seed grows spontaneously, it must be both planted and tended.” (p. 131) Oh.  OK.  But tended with an empty mind, without expectations.  Fertile consciousness, but which releases its need to try to manipulate or control outcomes, but which also stays awake to what’s happening there under the ground, in the garden.

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Tonight at Lotus & Lily we continued our investigation of Keenan’s “Mahayana Mark”.  Our conversation about Jesus and John the Baptist was diverted, most fruitfully, into a reflection on our own experiences of baptism.  Everyone there tonight (I think pretty much everyone in the group) grew up in one flavor or another of Christianity (Lutheran, Presbyterian, Nazarene, Catholic, Baptist), and it was fun to hear the many different stories of our “encounters with water”.

But most memorable to me about tonight’s session was to hear one of our members talk about his experience being baptized as a teenager, and his understanding of that act as a committment to serve God, and how when years later he came across the Bodhisattva vow he recognized it as simply a continuation, or maybe a clarification, of that vow he had already made at baptism.

That is very beautiful, and very inspiring.  My own experience of baptism (also as a teenager) was a last-ditch and somewhat desperate attempt to find peace and reconciliation with a community I was to leave behind not so many years later.  My encounter with Buddhism often (not always, but often) feels like a warm sandy beach I have been thrown up on after a long stretch in the tempestuous ocean. It is hard for me to look back, especially back that far into my teenage years, with anything other than a sincere hope that it will stay behind me in my past where it belongs.  

But something about the warm-hearted and magnanimous embrace of both traditions I felt in Baptist-bodhisattva story tonight gave me a tingle.  I’m not sure I will get there, exactly.  But I like the idea of examining the sincere intention behind a teenager’s aspiration, and looking there for some genuine seeds of bodhicitta.

It could be that we all took our first steps on the Buddhist-Christian path in that initial encounter with the waters of compassion there in the baptismal font.  Maybe we’re just looking for a way to truly fulfill the aspiration established at that time (by ourselves, or by our sincerely aspiring parents). 

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I Just got back from Lotus & Lily’s first discussion session on The Gospel of Mark: A Mahayana Reading.  It was a rich conversation, and I am feeling particularly grateful for the good thinking and above all the good intentions and committment to the process displayed by all.  A few days ago I told a friend of mine about our upcoming discussion, and he said “How fortunate you are to have a group of friends that can get together and talk about things you really care about.”  Yes indeed–what a great group, and an excellent discussion.

A few observations:

1. Re Keenan’s line: “In Luke, if one knocks on the door, it will be opened.  In Mark, one knocks at a closed door that, remaining closed, rivets attention to the mystery it hides.”  We had a good conversation about that one, with one person asserting that eventually the door will be opened to a personally meaningful connection with the divine, while another said they found the closed door “invigorating”.  Though there was much talk about patterns of consciousness and dependent co-origination and the meaning of emptiness, I was really glad that we were able to tie the concepts to life experiences and life questions.  Hoping for much more of that in the sessions to come…
2. One of our members raised an excellent set of questions about Keenan’s apparent disregard for the historical background of Mark.  This came in the context of a conversation about the disciples in Mark, who “just don’t get it”, unlike the many others Jesus encounters in healing and exorcism episodes, who apparently do get it and abruptly leave the narrative.  The point was made that from a historical perspective the reason the disciples don’t get it is that the Pauline church was seeking to demonstrate that one didn’t need to be Jewish to be on the inside.  I have my questions about that theory (am looking forward to getting more information from the person who raised the point). But his comment that “Keenan tries to have it both ways–saying that he will read Mark any way he wants to while claiming to represent Mark’s actual intentions in his writing” is worth consideration.  I would agree that Keenan isn’t as careful as he should be about emphasizing the “a Mahayana Reading” part of his title, and confuses assertions about original intent based on historical context with how Mark *can be* read using a Buddhist filter.  On the other hand, Keenan quotes Frank Kermode (page 21–for those who were there, this is the infamous “crossed-out section”):  ”whatever we may find to say about the community for which it was originally written (and the evidence will come largely from the gospel itself, in defeating circularity), it is far beyond us to reproduce the tacit understandings that existed between this dead writer and his dead audience.  Those accords are lost.”  Keenan concludes, “To paraphrase Pogo, we have found the Sitz im Leben (historical context) for Mark, and it is us.”  Fair enough, but at many points during the analysis this is less clear than it could be.  Furthermore, for many in the group this position seems to feel a bit too much like the “I’m going to read the text any way I want to” approach.  It is in fact a pretty radically literary (rather than historical) approach.  We’ll see if that gets any more comfortable as we move into the commentary itself.
3. One final point: we spent a fair bit of time discussing the “three patterns of consciousness” (other-dependent, imaginary, perfected) and the two truths (relative and absolute).  In addition to being part of the standard Buddhist obsessions with the two-thises and three-thats, we discovered that it’s fairly important to recognize that these disparate classifications don’t exactly line up easily.  I’ve discovered from my Buddhist studies that this kind of stuff happens *all the time* in teachings.  It takes some getting used to–but it’s certainly true that Keenan’s lack of precision in this area doesn’t help.  Again we will see how much of a problem this poses as we move into the commentary.  However, it was great to see that the fundamental challenge posed by Keenan, to look at the figure and teaching of Jesus in Mark as an invitation to enter into the middle path, the pathless path between absolute reality and worldly conventions, came across clearly and was the subject of some good conversation.

To me point 1 above is a very hopeful sign that this can be a meaningful experience for folks in the group.  2 and 3 are items for us to watch.  One group member commented afterward, “To me, this kind of discussion, people sharing ideas and experiences–this is real worship!”

That is very nice to hear–and I for one will be glad if we can continue to make this tunneling through material (even if it’s difficult) a part of our community life.

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Here’s a plan for the Lotus and Lily group to read through Keenan’s Gospel of Mark: a Mahayana Reading. By exploring the book in seven sessions, those who wish to read Keenan’s entire book (more than what I’m proposing) will probably have enough time to do so (see option #3 below), while the group as a whole will focus on specific selected passages that give a flavor of the whole.

Session 1 – April 9
Introduction (Keenan pp. 21-43)

Session 2 – April 23
*Passage for discussion from Mark 1:1-3:6
*Passage for discussion: Keenan pp 52-61
(Entire passage Mark 1:4-13)
(Entire passage from Keenan pp 47-100)

Session 3 – May 14
*Passage for discussion: Mark 4:26-41
*Passage for discussion: Keenan pp 128-137
(Entire passage Mark 3:7-5:43)
(Entire passage Keenan pp. 101-148)

Session 4 – May 28
*Passage for discussion: Mark 8:11-30
*Passage for discussion: Keenan pp. 190-200
(Entire passage Mark 6:1-8:30)
(Entire passage Keenan pp. 149-200)

Session 5 – June 11
*Passage for discussion: Mark 10:32-52
*Passage for discussion: Keenan pp 250-260
(Entire passage Mark 8:31-10:52)
(Entire passage Keenan pp. 201-260)

Session 6 – June 25
*Passage for discussion: Mark 12:28-13:2
*Passage for discussion: Keenan pp 292-303
(Entire passage Mark 11:1-13:37)
(Entire passage Keenan pp. 261-332)

Session 7 – July 9
*Passage for discussion: Mark 16:1-8
*Passage for discussion: Keenan pp 389-397
(Entire passage Mark 14:1-16:8)
(Entire passage Keenan pp. 333-397)

For each session after the first one there are several options:

1. Read the “passage for discussion” in Mark. This passage will be the focus of our discussion and reading it will orient you to what we’ll be talking about.
2. Read the “passage for discussion” and associated commentary in Keenan. I’ve tried to keep the commentary to 10 pages, which I hope won’t be too burdensome to anyone.
3. Read the entire passage for the session in Mark. This approach would mean you’d read through the entire gospel by the end.
4. Read the entire passage for the session in Mark, and associated commentary in Keenan . That’s 50 pages of commentary per session, which is doable for the ambitious but will take some exertion…
5. Take a break, read Thich Nhat Hanh, and breathe. And enjoy the conversation at the meeting.

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In addition to whatever pontificating (or its Buddhist equivalent: Lama-nating?  Roshi-nalizing?) might take place here, this blog will also be a staging point for the Lotus & Lily work around the “Mahayana Mark.”  I will continue to post, and encourage comments (especially from novice commenters, ahem!) on specific content about the book, and I’m in the process of putting together a proposed reading plan for us.  For any readers that aren’t in the physical Lotus and Lily group in Seattle, a litle forebearance.  I think there will be rich discussion along the way.

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Lotus & Lily met tonight for a first session to discuss Keenan’s Gospel of Mark: a Mahayana Interpretation.  Actually we met to discuss whether to discuss the book, because there has been some concern about its challenging nature, given its presumption of an understanding of Mahayana Buddhism, literary-critical theory, Biblical studies, and theology (as one person said about the excerpt we read to start out with, “I felt like I was back in graduate school.”)  Rigorous indeed, but it was great to hear how enthusiastic so many people in the group were about the idea of plunging into this difficult territory, and we agreed to proceed for a few sessions–even those who are more oriented to the devotional and inspirational agreed that it would good for us to journey together with the material for a while.

Over the past couple of days I’ve been very concerned about the appropriateness of the book for our group ; but during that time I have also continued to be aware of its tremendous potential to serve as a foundation for our Buddhist-Christian endeavor, along the lines of one of those great commentaries (like Chandrakirti or Tsongkhapa’s) that articulate root texts (like those of Nagarjuna).

So could it be that Mark can become our Buddhist-Christian “root text” as expounded by our Chandrakirti, John Keenan?  That’s a delicious thought to contemplate, full of amazing implications for study and practice and community life too.  But before I get too wound up about that, first we need to dig into the work together.  We’ve agreed to explore representative sections over several sessions, not reading the entire commentary but choosing selections from the major sections of Mark.  Some in the group may want to read the whole thing; some may choose to use the opportunity to read through the gospel; others might just want to read the sections we’re going to focus on.

One member of our group has offered to help write study questions; others will bring their expertise in theology and languages and Buddhism;  others will be present to listen and reflect and keep us grounded in the practical (a very important activity too!).  There certainly needs to be a popular version of this material, something for Buddhist-Christians everywhere (and we know you’re out there!) to sink their teeth into, but in a more accessible way.  Perhaps this group’s work can be the beginnings of such an effort.

Oh boy–what an exciting journey!

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A tidbit from John P. Keenan’s commentary on the Gospel of Mark, regarding chapter 9, verse 40 (“Anyone who is not against us is for us.”)

“Mark himself gives no clear definitions [of Jesus].  His Jesus shies away from self-definition, reinterpreting traditional themes in terms of the concrete actuality of his lived life.  The messiah is not the glory figure of his disciples’ imaginations, but the one who undergoes the sufferings of a lived life.  Jesus is not the messiah.  Rather, the messiah is Jesus.  In typically Mahayana terms, ‘Jesus is not the messiah, not the messiah, and that is why Jesus is the messiah.’”

Not the messiah?  And therefore the messiah?  That sticks deep.

We long for a messiah with a name, a definitive revelation that will lift us out of the conditioned partiality of our existence.  It must be Jesus.  It must be the church, it must be our sangha or a boddhisattva, or something else–anything, as long as it carries with it a glorious definition we can cling to.

Mark doesn’t give us glory, but rather a self-emptying cipher, a figure that shuns definition and rejects our propensity to glorification, and points us again and again to the emptiness of the question: “who do you say I am?”

Growing up evangelical, I learned to run like Hell to the answer: “You are the Christ (the answer to all my problems), You are the Messiah  (who’s going to come and fix everything), You are the Glorious One (who will satisfy my every need for glamour).”  How refreshing to just pause, instead, and linger over the deliciousness of the question.  What a revelation, to let it resound in its glorious emptiness.  The messiah deserves nothing less than all of that.

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This l-o-n-g post (apologies for that!) is a continuation of this post and this one.  The series is a preliminary consideration of John P. Keenan’s The Gospel of Mark: A Mahayana Reading (unfortunately the book is not in print and not easy to get–I’m trying to track down my own copy but for now am grateful to the University of Washington library for the use of their copy).  Lotus and Lily will be discussing the book in our group sessions in coming weeks. 

I do want to interject here that my writing about the topic to this point feels uncomfortably dry.  I spent a few more hours with the commentary at the Priory Spirituality Center (while my wife was leading a wonderful visual meditation workshop) and I’m getting more and more excited.  It does require taking some time with some foundational concepts to make sense of it all–but I’m convinced it’s well worth the effort.  My reading so far (I’m through the commentary up to Mark chapter 5) has been exhilarating and transformative.  The Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche (Nalandabodhi’s spiritual director) talks about meditation without a right view being like trying to go rockclimbing without any arms: there’s just no way to progress.   So all this preliminary stuff is in the category of “right view”…  I hope in future posts to focus on Keenan’s treatment of individual gospel stories, which should be quite a bit juicier (and, I hope, quite a bit briefer!).

Here we’re considering the last three of the six “Thematic Design” elements in Keenan’s introduction.

The Truth of Ultimate Meaning

Mahayana Buddhism emphasizes an ultimate truth that is beyond all conceptual elaboration.  Language is inherently incapable of describing it.  There’s much debate about exactly how one approaches this ultimate truth (at my Nalanda West class we’ve been exploring these various schools in some depth).  Keenan sees the figure of Jesus as represented in Mark pointing to this ultimate meaning in several ways.  One key metaphor is the wilderness.  Jesus is baptized in the wilderness, is tempted in the wilderness, retreats to the wilderness throughout his ministry.  For Keenan, Mark’s use of the wilderness as a narrative device calls to mind the non-verbal, fundamentally empty nature of ultimate truth, and Keenan’s commentary will explore this metaphor in some depth.

But pointers to the ultimate truth beyond words also appears elsewhere in the gospel narrative.  Throughout the gospel, in Jesus’ encounters with those he heals “[Mark's] point is not that one assents to the content of some verbal teaching, but that one is converted and attains faith.”  The existential experience of faith-beyond-words does remind me a great deal of the Tibetan Buddhist teaching I’ve been receiving.  “None of the faithful who pop in and out of Mark’s narrative seeks for signs of certitude, but are content to experience the saving force of Jesus’ word to them.”

Finally, Keenan mentions Mark’s eschatology: “the mythic expression in Mark’s narrative for the reversal of all expectancies and all constructs.  …the cosmic and dramatic descriptions are to be seen as mythic narrative elements signifying the complete otherness of ultimate meaning from all conventions and all plans.”

So if we keep Jesus attitude to conventions, plans, names, forms–all conceptual elaboration–in mind as we read Mark, it’s possible to see a consistent position of opposition and resistance to the conventional.  In fact, it’s just this resistance to the conventional that becomes the narrative driver of the gospel story, as we shall see later on.

This is a fascinating take on the transcendence of Jesus–not pointing to some concretized theological principle of god-man or salvation or a prescriptive ultimate truth, but rather an ultimate truth that evades our definitions, conceptions, and expectations.

The Truth of Worldly Convention

In Mahayana teaching, the relative truth of our everyday experience is a subject of much attention.  In some schools, it’s a vehicle for gradually liberating oneself from its very limitations in order to directly experience the ultimate truth.  In others, the worldly truth is shunned by those who dedicate themselves to cutting through illusions.  But the whole notion of the “Middle Way” is to avoid attachment to extremes of all kinds, even “emptiness ineptly grasped” (Keenan gets this phrase from his own translation of Gadjin Nago’s Foundational Standpoint of Madhyamaka Philosophy).

And, for Keenan, this is the path that Jesus follows.   Though he spends time in the desert, he doesn’t remain there: he comes back into human society, into the contingent and confused doings of everyday people.  This is where he delivers his message: a message aimed at ultimate truth but couched in the terminology of worldly convention.

Jesus is thus a teacher of “the middle path”, using everyday language to point to that which is beyond words.  “[Jesus' teachings'] are skillful rhetorical strategies directed toward insights that go beyond words and images, that finally fall silent in the wilderness of no-speaking.” ”Ultimate meaning triggers conventional discourse but is not captured therein.  No rhetorical discourse brings about faith.”  Keenan contrasts Mark’s rigorous avoidance of explanation and conceptual hooks with Luke’s strategy: “In Luke, if one knocks on the door, it will be opened.  In Mark, one knocks at a closed door that, remaining closed, rivets attention to the mystery it hides.”

Mark is the gospel of “the truth of paradox lived, not merely described verbally.”  So the function of language is tricky, imprecise, slippery.  We start out the book identifying with disciples, then distance ourselves from them due to their obstinacy, but in the end we identify with them again in their confusion and questioning.

The Three Patterns

A final theme Keenan explores is the way Mark presents conversion as a movement from a deluded view to a perfected view.  Keenan connects this to the structure of consciousness taught in the Yogacara philosophical school.  To speak once again in greatly simplified terms: the spontaneously emerging constellation of causes and conditions, the soup of phenomena, experiences, feelings, memories, and so forth, is called the “other-dependent nature”.  We normally construct a coherent but completely imaginary universe: the frozen judgments, static concepts and deluded notions that we impose upon our encounter with this raw stuff of experience.  This artificially created, delusive consciousness is the “imaginary nature”.  But by letting go of our pre-conceived expectations, we are able to see dependently arisen experience just as it is: empty of independent existence.  The resulting clear seeing is the “perfected nature”.

Keenan identifies a major thrust of Jesus’ work in the Gospel of Mark as a call to conversion from the imaginary to the perfected: letting go of conventional understandings and seeing the truth of emptiness.  The scribes, the Pharisees, and most notably the disciples repeated exhibit a clinging to imaginary, frozen consciousness.

Mark’s rhetorical strategy is a “doubling back”, revisiting important ideas time and again, reframing them, refusing to let them remain static, so as to help loosen the hold of our fixed ideas and open us up to deeper, less conceptually bound ways of understanding.  One of the most important examples is the assertion of Jesus as “the Christ and the son of God.”  This occurs once at the beginning of the gospel, then again in Peters assertion, and finally in the mouth of the centurion at the Crucifixion.  Examined carefully in their narrative contexts, each of these assertions brings a different dimension of meaning.  There is no clear and precise way to correlate these contexts together, so in the end we are left with a question about Jesus’ identity, an openness rather than a definitive statement.  So in the end Mark is offering not dogmatic forumlas or conceptual assertions but rather a call to conversion, inviting us to abandon all fixed notions about Jesus and the kingdom and to open instead to a penetrating awareness of the present moment in all its suchness.

Similarly, the geographical “way” that Jesus travels (a horizontal, physical dimension) is interwoven with the vertical path between wilderness (emptiness) and civilization (dependently-arisen phenomena).  “The result of that interweaving is a doubled doubling back, for all aspects of the way, both horizontal and vertical, interpenetrate.  Together they constitute the middle path, the way followed by Jesus and offered to his disciples.  And that middle way is the path to awakening to who Jesus is and what he is all about, for he has no discernible identity apart from his embodiment of the middle way.”

The idea that one of the gospels would present a Jesus with “no discernable identity” is utterly delightful and refreshing.  But reading the text with Keenan, I think he has hold of–or should I say, doesn’t have hold of?–something essential and profound.  I eagerly look forward to continuing this exploration!

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In the first post in this series, we considered some basic Buddhist concepts that John P. Keenan makes use of in his The Gospel of Mark: A Mahayana Reading.  Now let’s dig into his “Thematic Design” section, in which he lays out six key concepts that figure in his interpretation.  In this post I’ll talk about the first three of these concepts; in the next post in the series I’ll cover the last three.

On the Way

The Gospel of Mark is striking for its sense of constant motion: Jesus is continually on the go.  Traditional Christian comment might understand this as emblematic of a journey toward a preordained and cosmically significant conclusion.  But the Mahayana notion of “path”–essentially a process of practice that unfolds in each moment just as it is–puts the journeying in a different context.  The “fruit” that arises from the “path” is not a linear, logical outcome: it arises from staying focused on the path and not its result.  So from this point of view, the trajectory of the gospel is not toward a fixed and final conclusion–neither the fulfillment of a cosmic plan nor a journey toward some abstract spiritual realization.  Mark’s style in depicting Jesus on the way–impatient, hurried, almost obsessively eager to move on to the next event–supports this notion of path as a spontaneously arising journey.  This style beautifully evokes and illuminates the Buddhist “middle path.”

Emptiness

In Keenan’s reading of Mark, Jesus is a teacher of emptiness, continually pulling the rug out from under certainties and insisting on a spontaneous awakening into the present.  Mark uses the disciples in their “obdurate clinging to their own ideas about precisely who they are and who Jesus is” as a way to highlight the emptiness teaching.  Over and over, in Keenan’s reading, Jesus and the narrator subvert the disciples’ expectations and sense of certainty.  This parallels the Madhyamaka school’s philosophical method of refusing to make positive assertions.  At this writing I’ve only read a couple of chapters of the commentary, but am impressed by Keenan’s point that (at least in those early chapters) Mark steadfastly refuses to provide any but the barest details of Jesus’ actual teaching.  The narrative is so much more about the concepts that those around him (disciples, enemies, those he heals) rush to apply to his presence and activity.  This is a very rich vein indeed for reflection.

Dependent Co-Arising

Rather than acting out a pre-ordained divine plan, Mark’s Jesus responds to the causes and conditions that confront him–in particular conditions that emerge from the conflict between his own practice of “the path” of empty awareness and the forces of opposition that build up against him.  From this view, Jesus’ predictions of his suffering and death indicate his insight into the nature of dependent co-arising.  Similarly, his individual encounters with those “on the way” result from each particular set of unique circumstances.  Interestingly, virtually all of the people Jesus heals during the gospel disappear immediately from the story.  Only the most fixed players in the story–the disciples and those in opposition to Jesus–stick around to drive events forward.

Furthermore, the relationship between the relative world of dependent co-arising and the deeper reality of emptiness provide the two terms of the “middle path” that Jesus walks.  We’ll explore this notion more in the next post.

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The Lotus and Lily group has read several books on the nexus of Buddhism and Christianity (see the bibliography for details), but I’m reading one now that is the most potent exploration I’ve come across yet. I have been working my way through a fascinating commentary on the Gospel of Mark, “The Gospel of Mark: A Mahayana Reading” by John P. Keenan. It’s a rare treasure, published by Orbis in 1995 but unfortunately now out of print. It is giving me insights into Jesus, and a way to understand his teaching and presence, that is based entirely on a Mahayana Buddhist point of view.

[Update: I just discovered that the publisher Wipf & Stock has reprinted the book and it's available online.  I ordered it and will update again if anything goes awry.  But this looks promising!]

The group has agreed to spend some time working with the book, though it is rather dense. I’m excited to have the opportunity to facilitate these sessions–in no small part because it will motivate me to dig into the material more deeply than I might do otherwise!

So what I’m doing here is the first of a few posts that will give me a chance to think through the material in the book in preparation for these sessions–a combination of thinking out loud and note-taking that I hope will be useful.

But I think a necessary first step to is to provide some background on the Mahayana Buddhist lens he uses as the basis for his commentary. His own introduction covers this material, but I find that somewhat inaccessible and complicated by his use of a lot of literary-critical ideas that may be more confusing than helpful.

For starters, I found this chart, which helpfully lays out the historical development of the term. The details are less important than the fact that Buddhism split into two major “camps” at around the turn of the first millennium (hmm, right around the time of Christ…). The more conservative Theravada/”hinayana” school focuses on a core set of teachings of the Buddha, while the Mahayana school accepted additional texts (sort of like the Christian apocrypha, though far more significant historically–a better, but still rather loose, analogy would be if a branch of Christianity based on Gnostic texts like the Gospel of Thomas continued to grow and flourish for centuries).

The more conservative school is still followed in Southeast Asian countries like Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Cambodia. Its most visible American presence is in the teaching of “Insight Meditation” or “vipassana”. Mahayana Buddhism was the main vehicle for the spread of Buddhism through Tibet, China, Japan, and Korea. All the major schools of Buddhism in these countries, including Zen, Pure Land, Esoteric and many others, are based on Mahayana thought.

It’s important to note that both Mahayana and its more conservative counterpart agree on many fundamental points, in particular the Four Noble Truths and its direct implications. Many of the practices of both meditation and devotion, as well as assertions about the nature of human experience, are shared in common.

Though there are certainly many points of divergence, the key characteristic of Mahayana for our purposes is the teachings on emptiness. This set of insights was articulated most clearly by Nagarjuna, a 2nd-century Indian figure revered by all schools of Mahayana Buddhism (though not all would completely agree with him…). The sacred texts that supported this teaching are called the “Prajnaparamita” (perfection of wisdom) sutras, and the most famous one is the Heart Sutra (naturally, it has its own web page). This sutra is chanted regularly in many sanghas all over the world.

A key phrase of the Heart Sutra is “form is emptiness, emptiness is form”. Now I heard this phrase for a long time and read analyses of it for a long time, before I started to see how crucially important this idea is. And since it’s crucially important to Keenan’s reading of Mark as well, it will be helpful to spend some time thinking about it.

The two terms “emptiness” and “form” refer to what is known as the “two truths”–an absolute, perfect reality, and a relative reality that accords with our everyday experience.

For the mahayana school, “emptiness” is a crucial term that points toward perfected reality, which can be provisionally formulated as: “all phenomena are empty.” That doesn’t quite mean “nothing exists”, but rather that everything we experience is impermanent, is dependent, is divisible into constituent parts. But the kind of analysis that Nagarjuna introduced and taught, avoids making specific assertions like that–instead, it applies what we might call a methodology of emptiness to all phenomena. The methodology insists that all assertions of any kind must be rejected. So for any proposition, it can neither be asserted to be true, asserted to be false, asserted to be neither true nor false, or asserted to be both true and false.

Thus ultimate reality is beyond concepts, beyond name and form, beyond language.

But what of the everyday reality that we experience? To describe this, Mahayana Buddhists make use of the term “dependent co-arising”. This is in fact a relative, partial-and-inadequate conceptual way to describe that indescribable emptiness we were just talking about. In a relative way, we can say that the contents of our experience are brought about by causes and conditions–we can articulate those causes and conditions and can in fact make quite thorough statements about what precisely they are. So I can dissect my experience, analyzing, for example, my mornning toast into its consituent parts of bread and jam and toaster and my own intention in toasting it, and on from there to the grain and the farmer and the baker and the farmer’s and baker’s parents, and on and on.

On one level (“emptiness”) this analysis points toward something beyond concept; but on another level (“form”) its a perfectly acceptable way to describe “what goes on”–just in a relative way.

So now that we have at least a provisional understanding of the concepts of “form” and “emptiness”, we can address the statement “form is emptiness; emptiness is form”. This takes the profundity one step deeper: the two truths in fact interpetrate, are both true at the same time, and in fact cannot be understood apart from each other. Clinging entirely to the relative has its obvious limitations, but by the same token clinging continually to the “really real” wraps one into an fruitless grasping after the ungraspable.

The fancy Sanskrit name for all this philosophy is “Madhyamaka”, which translates as “the middle way”–and that is a very key point. The Mahayana path is a middle path, between the extremes of absolute nonconceptual reality and the relative reality of the phenomenal world.

OK, I’ve tried to make this as brief and accessible as I could. It’s complicated stuff with a lot of variations and debates among various schools, but I think understanding these terms will give us enough to venture into Keenan’s interpretation of Mark: the two truths are emptiness and form, and there is a middle way that enables us to engage with both.

In short, Keenan’s proposition, which I find incredibly provocative, is that Jesus as presented in the gospel of Mark can be seen as a teacher of exactly this middle way. His actions, teachings, interactions with the disciples and others, and even his passion can all be understood as manifestations of a committment to a reality that can’t be described and yet is contained within the suchness of everyday life.

Next: the “thematic design” of the commentary, which summarizes the key ways Keenan links up the Gospel of Mark with Mahayana Buddhist teaching.

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