The Buddha and the Lion

When I warn my children of consequences for their bad behavior, I have to be both discerning and sparing; for whatever I threaten, I must then be willing to follow through. One arrow in my quiver that worked particularly well when they were younger was my promise to play one of my black-and-white subtitled samurai films, which I adore and which bore my children to tears. They took this threat seriously, because they knew that I would be happy to carry it out.

American and Japanese pop culture have been entwined in a love affair ever since the end of World War II. Few directors on either side of the Pacific have been so influential as Akira Kurosawa. His movies have been remade, often shot for shot, into such familiar titles as The Magnificent Seven, A Fistful of Dollars, A Bug’s Life, and, yes, even Star Wars. For his part, Kurosawa loved Shakespeare, filming his own medieval Japanese interpretations of Macbeth and King Lear.

Most fascinating to me was how he adapted the religious aspects of those stories. His approach was simple and straightforward: Kurosawa outright replaced references to the Blessed Virgin Mary with Kannon (Guanyin), the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy, and those to Christ with Amita (Amitābha), the savior-figure of Pure Land Buddhism. Could it really be that easy? Could cutting and pasting a couple of divine names leave the spiritual substance intact?

Apparently so. A colleague and seminary classmate of mine from California once mentioned cousins of his who converted from Christianity to Pure Land Buddhism—only then to be shocked at just how Christian their new faith felt. In Pure Land understanding, anyone who calls on Amida Buddha is saved purely by mercy, purely by grace: reborn into his paradise, where all reach enlightenment, all achieve salvation. Salvation by grace through faith! Sound familiar?

Long had I wondered why Christianity never took widespread root in Japan. The Church flourished both in China and Korea, despite such horrors as the Taiping Rebellion, when a nineteenth-century Chinese visionary, who claimed to be the brother of Christ, started a war that ended up costing 20 million lives. One can see why modern Chinese might be wary of the Cross. Yet soon China will be able to boast the largest Christian population on the planet. Were the Japanese really so different?

For Japan, Christianity remains the road not taken, a historical and cultural “What if?” Before the Tokugawa Shogunate consolidated Japan under their rule in the early seventeenth century, many daimyo (feudal lords) had embraced the Christian faith, and even carried it to Korea, where it remains powerfully present today. Alas, those Christian rulers largely lined up on the wrong side of the Battle of Sekigahara in AD 1600, and the remaining southern Japanese Christians were crushed during the Shimabara Peasants’ Rebellion in 1637.

With their leaders and missionaries crucified, the surviving “Kirishitans” went underground for some 250 years, maintaining their faith in secret until its legalization in 1873. That’s a heck of a long time to keep the faith. Today Christians make up some 1.5% of the Japanese population, compared to a third of South Koreans. That’s twice as many Korean Christians as Buddhists.

Kurosawa’s approach to translating Western stories into his Far Eastern context, and the fluidity with which American and Italian filmmakers were able to accomplish the same feat in the opposite direction, offered a solution to my query that I hadn’t expected. What if the Japanese had little interest in Christ because—so to speak—they’ve already got one?

This isn’t quite as wild as it sounds. Christians and Buddhists interacted for centuries along the Silk Road, and the exchange went both ways. It’s entirely possible that the Buddhist concept of the bodhisattva—a person who reaches enlightenment only then to return to this burning world in order to save others—developed from the Christian understanding of saints. Meanwhile, the Buddha became Christianized in legend and lore as the paired St.'s Barlaam and Josaphat.

In The Last Battle, the final volume of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, a character of another faith, who worships Tash, is shocked to find himself welcomed into Aslan’s paradise. Aslan, of course, is a literally lionized Christ figure, whilst Tash stands in for all false gods and demons. Aslan tells the man that all evil done in Aslan’s name, Tash claims; and all good done in Tash’s name, Aslan claims; not because Tash and Aslan are one, but because they are opposites.

I wonder about those of other faiths in our own world, who call upon the Lord of Love under such names as Krishna or Amida. Is it Christ they know, the self-revealing Logos of God, in some other form, however veiled? Or when the dying call to Amida, is it Christ who answers their prayers? A name is so much more than just a password, after all. Jesus’ mother never called Him Jesus. That’s our Latinization of a Hellenization of the Hebrew Yeshua, which in turn is short for Yehoshua, meaning “Yahweh Saves.” A name is a relationship, a connection.

I’m not saying all faiths are the same. I’m simply musing that the grace of God in Jesus Christ almost certainly transcends all the limits we impose. He surely loves all of His children. He finds a way to bring us home, even if He has to go all the way to the Cross, all the way to hell and back. The Church’s job, after all, is to tell people where God is, not to tell them where He’s not. The former we know. The latter we don’t.

I would that all of Japan, indeed all of the world, would know God in Jesus Christ, that all would be Christians in the truest sense of the term. Were we doing our job, the whole world might well be converted by now. I simply wonder in the meantime if the same Jesus who has lavished us with His grace, undeserving sinners that we are, hasn’t also found a slantwise way to nourish others as well. For His understanding is unsearchable, and all peoples worship Him.

In Jesus. Amen.

By: Reverend Sir Knight Ryan Stout