Jesus Loves Me This I Know, For the Buddha Tells Me So:
Ajarn Sulak and the Hidden Treasures of Loving-Kindness

Jeanne Matthews Sommer, Ph.D., M.Div.

One night, as pious and faithful Rabbi Eisik slept, he had a dream; the dream enjoined him to proceed, afar to the Bohemian capital Prague, where he should discover a hidden treasure, buried beneath the principal bridge leading to the castle of the Bohemian kings. The Rabbi was surprised, and put off his going. But the dream recurred twice again. After the third call, he bravely girded his loins and set forth on the quest.

Arriving at the city of his destiny, Rabbi Eisik discovered sentries at the bridge, and these guarded it day and night; so that he did not venture to dig. He only returned every morning and loitered around until dusk, looking at the bridge, watching the sentries, studying unostentatiously the masonry and the soil. At length, the captain of the guards, struck by the old man's persistence, approached, and gently inquired whether he had lost something or perhaps was waiting for someone to arrive. Rabbi Eisik recounted, simply and confidently, the dream that he had had, and the officer stood back and laughed.

"Really, you poor fellow!" the captain said; "Have you worn your shoes out wandering all this way only because of a dream? What sensible person would trust a dream? Why look, if I had been one to go trusting dreams, I should this very minute be doing just the opposite. I should have made such a pilgrimage as this silly one of yours, only in the opposite direction, but no doubt with the same result. Let me tell you my dream."

He was a sympathetic officer, for all of his fierce mustache, and the Rabbi felt his heart warm to him. "I dreamt of a voice," said the Bohemian, Christian officer of the guard, "and it spoke to me of Cracow, commanding me to go thither and to search there for a great treasure in the house of a Jewish Rabbi whose name would be Eisik son of Jekel. The treasure was to have been discovered buried in the dirty corner behind the stove. Eisik son of Jekel!" the captain laughed again, with brilliant eyes. "Fancy going to Cracow and pulling down the walls of every house in the ghetto, where half of the men are called Eisik and the other half Jekel! Eisik son of Jekel, indeed!" And he laughed, and he laughed again at the wonderful joke.

The unostentatious Rabbi listened eagerly, and then, having bowed deeply and thanked his stranger-friend, he hurried straightway back to his distant home, dug in the neglected corner of his house and discovered the treasure which put an end to all his misery. With a portion of the money, he erected a prayer house that bears his name to this day.(1)

It was 1997 when Ajarn Sulak Sivaraksa first wandered into my life and the life of our community at Warren Wilson College. A phone call from a new friend of mine-- an old friend of Ajarn Sulak's by the name of Elmer Hall--brought an invitation to host a "Buddhist social activist, Nobel Peace Prize nominee" from Thailand who would soon be visiting the area. Since Thailand and Buddhist social activism were not topics with which I was very familiar and a part of me hoped that Buddhism might be free of some of the hypocrisy I was seeing within my own Christian tradition, I welcomed the opportunity to host this stranger. What began during that visit was a friendship that has simultaneously opened me and many others within our college community to the beauty, complexity and suffering within Siamese culture and to a deeper exploration of our own Christian roots and influences, both personally and as an institution.

I teach in a small liberal arts school, Warren Wilson College, begun by Presbyterian women missionaries in 1894 as a high school for impoverished farm boys in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina. For over 100 years, the school--in its various incarnations as a high school, junior college, and now a liberal arts college-has endeavored to embody an alternative educational philosophy that combines liberal arts academics with work and service-learning. As part of a consortium of six "work colleges" in the nation, we offer what we call the "Triad" approach to education. This means our nearly 800 students study, work 15 hours per week on one of over 100 different work crews that sustain the life of our community, and complete a minimum of 100 hours of community service and reflection.

We continue to farm and nurture over 1100 acres of land, including cattle and pig farms, a sustainable garden, and over 700 acres of forest. Students have created and implemented the idea of a vegetarian restaurant on campus, ironically called "The Cow Pie." The college has undertaken one of the most extensive environmental reviews and campus "greening" policies of any college in the nation, as stewardship of the natural environment in which we live continues to be one of the mainstays of our philosophy and practice as a community. We also continue to wrestle, as a college community, with whether or not these values of care for the earth, for the dignity and value of labor, and the sharpening of the life of the mind should be attributed, at least in part, to our Christian roots or if we should content ourselves with more generic language of spirituality; for the schools who most often identify themselves as "Christian colleges" in the United States tend to be institutions that are theologically fundamentalist or evangelical.

Ajarn Sulak is intensely familiar with the complexities that colleges like my own encounter. Many of the ideas and practices that Ajarn Sulak has been urging his country to consider with regard to alternative education, through his SEM (Spirituality in Education Movement), are ideas and practices that Warren Wilson College has been experimenting with for over 100 years. He is certainly one of our school's "good friends." Because of his own Buddhist commitments and his work in Siam on behalf of education movements that include spirituality as a core principle of personal and social transformation, Ajarn Sulak understands the impulses that encouraged those 19th century Christian missionaries to found our school, impulses that we may be in danger of forgetting.

The Christian missionaries who founded our college were men and women whose beliefs compelled them to live out a life of service and care for the land, for they knew that the heart of America's strength, both economically and spiritually, was connected to the health of those who suffered most in the rural areas. The missionaries came to our valley from the northern portion of the USA, in the days when the Presbyterian Church was separated into northern and southern denominations after the Civil War. These missionaries were "longtermers" who tended to stay for more than five years and were, as a result, as affected by the culture in which they immersed themselves as were those whom they came to serve. This is perhaps one reason why the college has maintained a long history of appreciation for diversity and a commitment to its continued cultivation, particularly in relation to international students, many who hail from Asia.

There is a bit of irony, however, that--despite our founding by Presbyterian missionaries and our continued affiliation with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)--our students, according to a 1995 survey I conducted on campus, are most interested in the Buddha Dhamma and indigenous cultures and religions. Many, if not a majority, of our students also express a mild to sharp disdain for Christian traditions. Interest in Christianity ranked, in that survey, below Orthodox Judaism and Islam. What began as a school for poor Appalachian farm boys, has metamorphosed into a college for students --a majority women--who come from relative wealth, who hail from all over the United States and a good portion of the world community, and who are--more often than not--either ready to resign themselves from Christian faith and practices with which they were raised or who come from families who have consciously raised them according to other traditions or ethical views.

In the face of such conditions, what, if any, relevance can or should we find in our earliest Christian roots? This is one of the main questions that our community is currently exploring as it takes itself into the new millennium. Into a period of time in our college's history when we are debating to what degree, if any, Christian language should be present--either implicitly or explicitly-- Ajarn Sulak stepped again in the winter of 2002.

To our students, he reminded them, as he did on his first visit with us in 1997, to explore the roots of their own cultures, including the Christian traditions--warts and all--which shape our consciousnesses even when we are raised within another religious tradition, are in the process of rejecting Christianity, or are trying to find some way to claim the Christian path with integrity and with real concern for social justice, not just individual salvation. To the college, he urged us to find language that can direct the school's mission into the 21st century in ways that will enable our community to take relevant and compelling stands within a nation that appears, increasingly, to use Christian theological language to justify imperialist policies in support of the new religion of Consumerism. This new religion has a mantra that sounds more and more like "Buy, buy, buy, throw away, throw away, throw away, buy more, buy more, buy more." Its litany is deafening and deadly.

Upon Ajarn Sulak's last visit, I was reminded again of how many liberal Christians and the institutions associated with them have failed keenly to articulate a compelling word that speaks to the de facto religion of Consumerism that is exported with American foreign policy on a daily basis and is coming to dominate developing peoples' consciousness as well as our own. I came to understand, in a much more painfully poignant fashion, that there is a direct correlation between my/our inability to articulate a compelling voice that includes Christian language and the dehumanization of the people of Siam, of others and of the earth. Because of Ajarn Sulak's visit to our campus and my recent travels to Thailand where I was able to witness first hand the new city temple, The Mall, I saw the "truth" of America's new religion, the "Middle Way" of Consumerism.

American culture finds itself poised between two extremes: the way of fundamentalism and the way of secularism. As one of my students wrote in her journal after Ajarn Sulak's visit this fall:

It also kind of feels like the world is at a turning point. So are we going to stay where we are on the boat as it starts to capsize? Or are we going to drop everything and run to the other side to try and counterweight the overturn? What would be the Buddhist response? In my opinion, it is going to take a lot of what Sulak would call 'good friends' to come with us to stop the boat from overturning.(2)

The religion of Consumerism is America's "Middle Way" response between the extremes of Christian fundamentalism and secularism. It is keeping the boat afloat, for now, but its efforts are not sustainable. Both extremes, either intentionally or unintentionally, enable the religion of Consumerism. Christian fundamentalism does so by promising a kind of "gospel of wealth"--in this life for the wealthy and in the next life for the poor--as reward for obedience. Secularism does so by dethroning all sacred religious values. According to Ajarn Sulak,

One of the characteristics of the new secular intellectuals is their eagerness to scrutinize religion and its protagonists. These intellectuals examine how far the great systems of faith have aided or harmed humanity and to what extent religious leaders have lived up to their precepts of purity, truthfulness, charity, and benevolence. Then they issue harsh denouncements against both churches and clergy. Over the last two centuries, as the influence of religion has declined, secular intellectuals have played an ever-increasing role in shaping our attitudes and institutions.(3)

Posed between secularism and fundamentalism, I began to recognize a Buddhist response, a true "Middle Way" which seems to be recalling us to our roots in hope that the spiritual biodiversity of our nation and its exported values can be rescued from the mono-crop consumerist spirituality that is colonizing our culture and providing a deluded and temporary solution. Ajarn Sulak came to us and called us to explore, even claim, our Christian roots, as individuals and as a college. Currently, many institutions of higher education in the United States continue to remove explicit Christian language from their mission statements.(4) They oftentimes retain some language that recalls their historical relationship to the denomination that founded them and opt either to emphasize their commitments to a more vague exploration of "spirituality" or to no religious education at all, perhaps in obeisance to secularism or out of fear of being associated with the fundamentalists. The debates, in my opinion, are not just about the words. They are about deep questions of institutional identity and what role, if any, academic institutions should take in the religious education of students. The removal of explicit Christian language seems related in my mind to the degree which institutions can offer compelling alternatives to secularism, fundamentalism, and the "Middle Way" of Consumerism.

If our college and others like it follow this trend, we will continue to bolster the "Middle Way" of Consumerism. In our case we will do so because we will be educating students who do not really understand how to have compassion for and interact with the majority of Americans who have not questioned the ways in which their faith or secular views support this new religion. We will continue to concede the word "Christian" and the tradition itself to those fundamentalists who would do dishonor to the tradition in its very name and who see American soil as suitable to only one kind of planting. As the world becomes more dominated in the coming years by absolutists and religious extremists of all sorts, successive generations of our students will have less access to the knowledge that there is another viable, religiously committed and open path within the Christian tradition because progressive and compassionate Christian individuals and the institutions to which they are related remain silent.

Because of the silence, the de facto religion of Consumerism--along with the Christian fundamentalism that parodies this de facto religion and the arrogant secularism that enables it--will continue to be exported around the world. As Ajarn Sulak writes:

You cannot walk down the streets of Bangkok, for example, without being bombarded by billboards touting the benefits of various soft drinks. Streets here are jammed with expensive, foreign cars that provide the owners with prestige and the city with pollution. Young people define their identities through perfumes, jeans, and jewelry. The primary measure of someone's life is the amount of money in his or her checkbook. These are all liturgies in the religion of consumerism.(5)

If higher education in America fails, in word and deed, to demonstrate how Christian language and praxis can serve as a door to genuine and deep pluralism, not just toleration, and how the tradition can help us to ascertain and address the real sources of conflict and healing in the world, the palette of theological acumen from which we can draw will become increasingly pale in America. It is necessary that we find a way to demonstrate this because our complex future will include, whether we like it or not, many theological discussions about how Christianity contributes to the good society. My main concern is with regard to who will be equipped to guide these discussions and how thoughtful and compassionate these discussions will be. Institutions like ours have a great responsibility to shape this dialogue effectively. We owe it to ourselves and to the future not to take ourselves out of this conversation prematurely.

What, if any, is the correlation between our students' eagerness to explore the Buddha Dhamma as it is practiced in America, Thailand and around the world, and our need to explore--perhaps even to reclaim--our own Christian spiritual roots? I have found that--just as some have suggested that the Buddhist awakening that is occurring in the west may be one key to the recollection of Buddhism in the east toward its own compassionate roots-the opportunity to explore Buddhist philosophy and practice may be one of the keys to recovering the teachings of compassion and social justice that are at the heart of the Christian tradition.

When Ajarn Sulak first visited our college in 1997, he made the distinction, as he does in Seeds of Peace, between big "B" Buddhism and small "b" buddhism. The former is a Buddhism that allies itself with state power and multinational corporations while the latter focuses on the original, reformist teachings of the Buddha. He writes:

If we Buddhists want to redirect our energies towards enlightenment and universal love, we should begin by spelling Buddhism with a small "b." Buddhism with a small "b" means concentrating on the message of the Buddha and paying less attention to myth, culture, and ceremony. We must refrain from focusing on the limiting, egocentric elements of our tradition. Instead we should follow the original teachings of the Buddha in ways that promote tolerance and real wisdom.(6)

When Ajarn Sulak spoke of this distinction, he challenged us at the college and within America in general to do the same thing with regard to the Christian (little "c") tradition: not to abandon the language or praxis of the tradition itself, but to reclaim it on behalf of the radical, non-violent intent that informs its core teachings. Perhaps we would, in the process, begin to find our own "Middle Way." This Christian middle way would not be a watered down version between two extremes, as is Consumerism, but the real way of the cross that calls us to live in the center between the intersecting, often contrary claims upon our lives which call us to practice both justice and compassion.

When Ajarn Sulak gave us this challenge, I began to understand that this stranger was not coming to our campus to call us to be Buddhist--for it is not the Buddhist way to say that "if everyone practiced Buddhism the world would be a better place"(7)--but to point us to our own resources, hidden as they are within an increasingly secularized or fundamentalist culture. I found myself going to sleep that night singing, "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Buddha tells me so." Just as Rabbi Eisik entered into the foreign territory of Bohemia and found there some insight that enabled him to return to this home and find what was buried there all along, so my own sojourn and that of many of our students into the Buddha Dhamma may lead us back to our own hidden, spiritual treasures at home. Ajarn Sulak's insights and the Buddhist teachings of wisdom and compassion can be key resources on our campus for discovering wisdom and compassion within and for Christianity and for the elimination of hatred and disdain. Hatred and disdain, even a relatively benign "dismissal"--whether such attitudes originate on the "right" or the "left"--are never postures with which we should content ourselves.

I wish to thank Ajarn Sulak--who has had the courage to explore alien territory with grace and compassion--for pointing me, and others, toward the dirty corners of our own spiritual territory that we may find long forgotten treasures of loving-kindness. Over 100 years after our founding, another missionary, this time a Buddhist one, came to our lovely Swannanoa valley and helped us to nurture the seeds of peace--including the Christian seeds--planted in this fertile Appalachian soil.

Jeanne Matthews Sommer is an ordained Presbyterian minister (Presbyterian Church USA) and a professor of religious studies at Warren Wilson College in the Swannanoa Valley near Asheville, North Carolina. For more information about the college, see www.warren-wilson.edu

1 O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. Other Peoples' Myths. (Macmillan Publishing, 1988), 137-138, citing Zimmer, Myths and Symbols, 219-221, citing Martin Buber. Die Hassidischen Bucher (Hellerau, 1928) 532-533.

2 Reese, Kate. Socially Engaged Buddhism Journal. December 17, 2002.

3 Sivaraksa, Sulak. Seeds of Peace: A Buddhist Vision for Renewing Society. (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1997), 59-60.

4 There are many church-related colleges in the United States but the colleges who emphasize that they are "Christian" colleges tend to be those schools that are fundamentalist or evangelical.

5 Ibid, 3.

6 Ibid, 68.

7 Ibid.