Earthing the Cosmic Christ of Ephesians—The Universe, Trinity, and Zhiyi’s Threefold Truth, Volume 3: Commentary on Ephesians 2:1–12

By John P. Keenan

As both a scholar of Buddhism and a Christian priest, John P. Keenan engages with the New Testament letter to the Ephesians, written by a member of the Pauline school likely near the end of the first century--a time when both the cultural world and the cosmos were much narrower than for us today. In pondering this scripture's significance for residents of the twenty-first century, Keenan looks to the work of scholars and thinkers both ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, scientists and philosophers. Particular attention is given to Chinese Buddhist master Zhiyi's explanation of a threefold truth, which resonates with an early trinitarian theme in Ephesians and suggests the riches to be discovered upon the global theological commons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: May 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666708585

John P. Keenan

John P. Keenan is professor emeritus of religion at Middlebury College and a priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont. His previous works include The Emptied Christ of Philippians: Mahāyāna Meditations; The Meaning of Christ: A Mahāyāna Theology; The Gospel of Mark: A Mahāyāna Reading; A Study of the Buddhabhūmyupadésa: The Doctrinal Development of the Notion of Wisdom in Yogācāra Thought; and Grounding Our Faith in a Pluralist World—With a Little Help from Nāgārjuna.

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Trinitarian Themes

The traditional Christian doctrine of the Trinity affirms the indivisibility between God the Father, the incarnate Christ, and the Spirit. As this trinitarian theology developed in first- and second-century Asia Minor, it drew heavily upon the vocabulary of ancient Greek philosophy, adopting metaphysical terms that by now have long since fallen out of use and become almost unintelligible to modern Christians. Theologians’ usage of terms like essence, substance, nature, and consubstantial—persuasive though this language was in its context—was specific to western philosophy and never shared by most of the peoples of this world. Thus it is that we need new models in which to express our faith, models that are drawn from within our varied cultures, and that can speak to modern people.

Just a few centuries after the time of Christ and the spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire, on the opposite side of the globe in China, a master of Tiantai¹ Buddhism named Zhiyi (538–597 ce) taught a different threefold truth. He explained the indivisibility between, first, awakening to true reality, described apophatically as emptiness; second, the embodiment of that awakening in the everyday, conventional world as the truth of that which is empty; and third, the realization of serenity and insight attained through the practice of a middle path that enables transformations of conscious reality to emerge.

When we look across traditional borders in this way, we are able to discover analogous human experiences in very different cultural contexts. Some thinkers conclude from this that all cultural forms and languages are therefore weakly symbolic, and that basically we are all on analogous paths to the same unified experience. This view would hold that the very same experience of awakening, or resurrection, is universally present throughout the world even if expressed in different symbolic languages. That is indeed an attractive idea in today’s world with our awareness of multiple different religious traditions. It would not only break down barriers that too often have violently divided Jews from Christians and early Jewish Christians from gentile² Christians, but it would also bridge cultural barriers between the many different faith traditions around the globe. Indeed, it very much reflects a feeling present in the modern cultures of this world—that somehow even in meeting people who are committed to a different path, we are meeting our brothers and sisters. Present-day Jewish and Christian experiences of living in frequent interaction with Buddhists and Muslims, Hindus and Taoists, do reveal to us a common, shared humanity.

However, recommending—as I do throughout this series on Ephesians—that we enrich our Christian understanding of Trinity by delving into the threefold truth of Zhiyi’s Tiantai Buddhism is distinctly different from adopting a pluralistic theology. When one engages with any particular Christian or Buddhist teaching, or any specific portion of scripture, pluralistic theologies do not suffice, for each tradition is grounded in its own particular, conventional context. Czech biblical scholar Petr Porkorný (1933–2020) saw both Colossians and Ephesians in their own time as countering such pluralistic tendencies among Gnostic thinkers who developed speculative systems in which Jesus was only one of the many expressions of the highest spiritual divinity. Porkorný concluded that the one-sided stress [in Colossians and Ephesians] on [Jesus’] exaltation and the efficacy of his work . . . was a reaction against these tendencies (Col 2:13; Eph 2:5f).³ The difficulty with a pluralistic viewpoint is that it claims the high ground for itself, as a superior theological perspective over both texts and the people who cherish those texts, thus reducing particular traditions and their participants to mere examples of an all-inclusive viewpoint—often without directly engaging any of them.⁴

In contrast, by delving into Buddhist master Zhiyi’s teaching on the threefold truth, we Christians may indeed discover there a resonance with our traditional Christian trinitarian faith. We may also find that our experience of the ineffable—that which is beyond language, image, and measure—is indivisible with our cultural and conventional communities, the quite ordinary places where we confess the incarnate Christ, and thus become focused on living in Christ as skillfully moved by his Spirit to truly express our silence in committed words and social actions. The actual practice of any tradition means that one cannot simply empty conventional reality and step aside from cultural traditions with their felt practice and practiced content.

Zhiyi’s threefold truth does not fit well into any universalist affirmation of a mystic core presumed to be present in all religions. The indivisibility between emptiness and our conventional, ordinary life in the world entails more than a weak recognition of the symbolic nature of language and practice. Indeed, the empty content of meditative exercises that still our words and trigger contemplation is indivisible with conventional insights into our everyday lives, issuing in the rich beauty of a personal and social practice grounded in the enunciable traditions that guide us in the Spirit path.⁵ Adopted for our theological usage, Zhiyi’s perichoretic insight into the threefold truth would mean that Christ followers are incarnationally to live in Christ, in the often muted glory of the Jesus of the Gospels, inspired by ongoing experiences of the Spirit in the day-to-day possibilities of risen life among us all. Living in sixth-century China, Zhiyi himself undoubtedly never heard of Jesus and thought only of the Buddha, but the pattern of his threefold truth is not limited to his Chinese Buddhist tradition. Christians, too, can employ that threefold truth to affirm the emptiness of the apophatic Father (who remained silent at the crucifixion and yet still is called Jesus’ Abba) and combine that silencing awareness with the embodied Christ, who speaks Spirit-inspired words about our Father in heaven so we may work to make his kingdom come on earth. The speaking of Christ from silence is the voice of the Father, as Ignatius of Antioch said, heard not only through inspired scriptures but also and always through prayer and liturgy in the Spirit.

The New Testament teaching of the Father’s sending of the Son and the Spirit—of incarnation and Pentecost outpouring—grounds the trinitarian thinking of our Christian tradition.⁶ As our first witnesses to Christ realized, the divine mystery has been conventionally embodied in Jesus, permeating our minds through the inundation of the Spirit, and flowing over to uproot not only injustice and its root causes, both social and political, but also the intransigent delusion that we must define our identities by saying who we are not. To be in Christ is not to discover an identity apart from a Jesus who favored the poor and the outcast. From before the foundation of the cosmos we have been elected to be the nobodies who foolishly follow a murdered savior. Even though no tradition is free of blemish and our histories include many distoritions and much violence, these are nevertheless our traditions and our histories. But Christ followers can look beyond the sins and scandals to many model practitioners over time—as varied as Mother Teresa and Søren Kierkegaard.

Master Zhiyi was of course a Mahāyāna Buddhist in the Tiantai tradition, not a pluralist theologian. But he was trinitarian. In his Tiantai theology, he refuted those who would rest on one single truth, whether that be the sense of Buddha nature as our core reality or a single-minded stress on emptiness, for these options neglect the reality of our conventional, earthbound lives.⁷ For Christians, our conventional languages and common practices—culture-bound though they are—are indivisible with the ultimate truth of God—experienced in Ephesians as the silent Father of a household church constituted by his cosmic glory. Today we experience the same truth in a pervasive silence at death, when we see others die and when we ourselves approach death. Even at Jesus’ resurrection, the Father said nothing at all. The Father did not announce Jesus’ resurrection; young men or angels did that. We do need to stress the mystery of God in our scriptures and church traditions, which frequently reveal far beyond their words and images who this Father is—and avoid the all-too-common depiction of an ontic God as a super-person who superintends this world.

A Tiantai theology would regard all descriptions as themselves but conventional endeavors that are only more or less skillful within their time and place. Absent some manner of conventional embodiment, God disappears into permanent silence; but overt, kataphatic descriptions of God are so closely tied to contexts of archaic theistic ideas that, when taken literally, they lose their persuasiveness. Best to reclaim and center the apophatic traditions of our western tradition. I can stand in awe of the God who appeared in hiddenness to Moses on Mt. Sinai, but none of us can expect ever to visit that mountain and repeat that encounter with the same Sinai God. In any case, we do not actually know the exact location of Mt. Sinai, that we might seek God there—nor can we hope to encounter the risen Christ in modern Israel or Palestine. We do construct our God, just as our predecessors constructed metaphysics to support their idea of God. The central issue is, can we do that in a way that is persuasive in our modern cultures, or do we just remain committed to the archaic images found in our scriptures?

A threefold understanding of God in Christ entails critiquing our accustomed theisms, seeking an approach to the silent Father that does not trivialize God by making him into yet another actor in our own dramatic cosmic narrative. Being the why behind the cosmos does not make God the efficient cause of the universe; efficient causes are reckoned in conventional languages. But, in the context of Tiantai theology, to insist upon the now weakly symbolic—and dispensable—character of all of our traditional languages and practices is to sunder the indivisible oneness between the mystery that surrounds us all and the cultural embodiment of that mystery. We do not want to be left with just open-minded but inefficacious ideas. Like a sieve, the totally open mind leaks teachings into puddles of meaninglessness. In Zhiyi’s terms, we are not only to move from our conventional practices to an awareness of the empty but also—and equally—from emptiness to commit fully and entirely to the very practices and teachings we have emptied of their ontic status. Our blessed teachers in the faith have always enunciated the threefold truth in the cultures and languages available to them, leaving us the task of continuing their endeavors.

The discourse in Ephesians presents Christians speaking of and to God as a person, in notable contrast to the Mahāyāna Buddhist refusal to entertain such notions.⁸ Some theistic images and ideas in our scriptures are easily abandoned, for they presuppose a dualistic, two-tiered world with God in his heaven and us on this earth. These images, however, have long been purified by theologians and philosophers who conclude that God is not the sage king above the clouds, but the very being of beings, the very act of being (ipsum esse subsistens) in all its verbal force.⁹ The scriptural personality of God that we see in Ephesians 3—wherein the author described Paul praying to God—and in 5:1—about imitating God (γίνεσθε οὖν μιμηταὶ τοῦ θεοῦ)—reflects first-century notions of God, but this image is inadequate to assist everyday people in following the path. In the first century, one might have attempted to imitate a God described with imitable attributes, but it would be impossible to imitate the God described by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century as an act of being (ipsum esse subsistens). One may perhaps attempt to imitate the God modeled by Jesus as the font of kindness and justice, but how does one imitate an apophatic God who has no describable qualities? Much less the God of ontological being—when ontology itself is the highly elite, intellectual endeavor of ages now past.

Ancient Stoics had a similar problem with their philosophy of God as the immanent Logos of the cosmos:

It is . . . important to consider the way in which the Stoics understood God as the νοῦς [nous], or mind of the world. Νοῦς, like πνεῦμα [pneuma], pervaded the universe. Its role was seen in light of the function of the soul in the body . . . To discuss the immanent rationality of the world was for the Stoics to discuss God. Their theological language was rich and somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, physics and metaphysics provided categories for identifying the real references of traditional religious language. On the other hand, traditional religious connotations provided an emotional depth to Stoic language about the natural world. As the mind (also referred to as λόγος [Logos], mens, or ratio), God was responsible for the order and continued harmony in the universe. One well-known aspect of God was the concept of fate, or εϊμαρμένη. It has been described as the concatenated causality of things, or the scheme (λόγος) according to which the kosmos is directed.¹⁰

This is probably why the Stoics sometimes adopted personal language for the immanent God. They used a two-layered speech: philosophical to describe the reality of the immanent God and personal to make their meaning accessible. But Stoics avoided the common transference of everyday notions of human personhood to God and did not imagine God to be much like the persons they knew.¹¹ God is not the first in a series of persons that began with creation, which perhaps is why they held that creation is a constantly repeated process.

The personhood of God has, across the traditions, been tied to the basic issue of the personhood of human beings. Since in our modern culture we take ourselves to be stand-alone persons, constituted by our spiritual souls as basically good—and under most circumstances even kind—then God too is a person so constituted by his inner creative life in an ongoing energetic love, ever acting to benefit humans. But if, as Anglican theologian and biochemist Arthur Peacocke (1924–2006) wrote, human personhood signifies psychosomatic unities who both feel and think, it becomes difficult to transfer personhood to God, who has neither body nor soul:

Persons are better regarded, it transpires, as psychosomatic unities with physical, mental, and spiritual capacities—rather than as physical entities to which a mind and/or a soul/spirit have been added. This is in fact the biblical understanding, as H. Wheeler Robinson expressed in the famous epigram: The Hebrew idea of personality is an animated body and not an incarnated soul. Talk about the soul or spirit of human beings as entities, and especially as naturally immortal ones, no longer represents the best explanation of the emergence of spiritual capacities in the light of what we now know about the kind of complexity that constitutes a human being.¹²

There are no analogies for God, and so any attempt to describe a relationship between human and divine realms based solely upon experience within human horizons and attributing human personhood to the divine simply does not suffice. This is why mystics over the ages have thought of God in apophatic terms and why today kenotic theologies empty the stand-alone deity to affirm a panentheistic God whose transcendence is itself immanent in everything, without parallel to the categories of relationship between beings. Philip Clayton (b. 1956) of the Claremont School of Theology writes that panentheism conceives of an ontologically closer relationship between God and humanity than has traditionally been asserted.¹³ Yet the idea of God beyond human horizons means that any description that draws upon the language of relationships becomes incomprehensible. Nonetheless, our theistic traditions do consistently describe humans as standing before and related to God.

When we speak of God and delve into the significance of saying that God is our Father in heaven, we need to question more deeply the very notion of relationship. Since fathers have an antecedent relationship to their children, Jesus’ Our Father prayer (Matt 6:9–13; Luke 11:2–4) encourages us to see an analogous fatherly care in our lives. In the language of devotion, that rings immensely true, because most do experience the sense of being cared for just by being alive and nested in a family. But fatherhood is a conventional idea, describing the immediate ground of life in the familiar words of patriarchal cultures—that is, most cultures. Granting that, I still think it far more effective to pray to our Father in heaven, in full awareness that we are modeling God after our own human image, rather than prayerfully addressing some panentheistic energy that flows through the cosmos—or approaching God as the ground of being. If, on the other hand, God comes to us from the future as Teilhard de Chardin taught, we can approach only in a patient abiding as that future unfolds.

In the Hebrew Bible, covenantal relationships were central, and so our ancestors, in awareness of that covenantal gift of election by God, sought his readily offered presence through deeds that comported with his commandments. The Letter to the Ephesians in its opening blessing reconceived that covenant, moving election by God to a primal time before all covenants while keeping the theistic relationship in place. Both believing Jews, who had been graced by the Mosaic covenant, and gentiles, who had not, could now participate equally in the primal election given in Christ before the birth of Jesus, while God retained his personal agency.¹⁴

But any notion of a personal divine agency suspending the cosmic regularities fits uneasily the into today’s ever-expanding universe. A cognitive dissonance emerges as we become more and more aware of and engaged with physics and cosmology. Our accustomed ways of speaking about God now appear to be relics of an archaic—supernatural—world, easily dismissed as irrelevant given the astonishing view we now have of our cosmos. In the first-century Hellenistic world, all fixed stars were constellated within the higher spheres of the heavenlies. Stars and galaxies were living beings that impacted one another and the earth. And other, lower entities—visible and non-visible rational beings—filled the sky, including the sun and moon and wandering planets, while deities, demons, angels, and spirits of various sorts dwelled in the atmospheric aether. The inhabited earth, recognized to be spherical, only ran from the Atlantic in the west to the Indus River in the east and was entirely surrounded by impassable water.¹⁵

And so the universe of New Testament times was very small, which by itself prevents the Ephesian vision from being a real option for us. We now know that the stars are really other suns, entire other galaxies. As a result, modern cosmic Christologies seem to wind up with a vague and distant notion of God lurking behind the big bang and sweeping the cosmos into the gravitational force of multiple black holes that may someday converge to wink the cosmos back into nothingness. Arthur Peacocke struggled with this question:

The meanings of God unveiled to and for man will be the more partial, broken, and incomplete the more the level of creation being examined departs from the human and personal, in which the transcendence of the I is experienced as immanent in our bodies . . . For the more personal and self-conscious is the entity in which God is immanent, the more capable it is of expressing God’s supra-personal characteristics, and the more God can be immanent personally in that entity.¹⁶

This is a statement that calls for extended contemplation, for when an enlightened person—perhaps a common bodhisattva or an ordinary saint—leaves the old self behind, she reflects a God more personal and more immanent than unenlightened persons can imagine from scientific data. It means that we can call God our father, and also our mother, friend, lover—employing whatever words bring us into the silence behind all divine discourse. Peacocke’s theology of continuous creation—that all biological and cosmic insights are themselves evidences of continuous creation by God—is as tenable as the agnostic counterpart, which would remove God to a cosmic distance measured in light years. Cosmic theology ought to stop at wonder, at what Zhiyi recognized as the clear serenity to be realized when we are able to stop the flitting images and ideas of common living and stand in awe at the entirety of reality itself.

We cannot abandon cosmic wonder altogether, lest we ignore our now-commonly shared story of origins. And yet, only within a theological commons can we explore and explicate a conventional incarnation that is indivisible with the ultimate truth of God. Much to our theological advantage, we are now able to piggyback our Christian incarnational understanding upon a globally common, religiously non-specific, cosmic story. Meanwhile, we can acknowledge that our personal language about God has been and remains a descriptively conventional embodiment of an indescribable mystery. We do not know the basic why of it all. We do not know what God is. And yet, relying upon our common story, neither theology nor cosmology need be concerned about invasions of one another’s space. Indeed, the personhood of God has never constituted a self-enclosed entity (Skt. ātman).

Our limited self-consciousness does not provide adequate language for speaking about God. And so Peacocke could speak of transcending the I that masquerades as me and mine. Authentic transcendence is about going beyond me and mine; it is not about a stable me who can jump by prayer to an entirely different realm or alternate sphere of the Great Me. However, if we empty our stand-alone identity, our commonly used personalized language about God can retain its provisional validity: We are conscious; so is our source. We are able to love, and so God loves. We are persons; likewise God is a person. All this is in the register of our accustomed language and culture. Which is why I say the Rosary with its mantric repetitions, and why many find it best to focus upon concrete images whose full meaning percolates in mental spaces not limited by language. And which is why we set aside church buildings as spaces that are conducive to the interstices of silence. The earliest church building was discovered by archaeologists in Dura-Europos (in present-day Syria), its rich scriptural icons still visible—Adam and Eve, the Good Shepherd, the Cure of the Paralytic, angels, and Jesus himself. The subtlety of these icons and images speaks to a place where there is no speaking.¹⁷

In negating the core identity of personal selfhood, Buddhists affirm the dependently arisen reality of five identifiable factors (Skt. pañca-skandhas) that comprise personhood: body, experience, thinking, orientation, and consciousness. A moment’s attention can easily identify these factors, for they name what we experience ourselves to be: psychosomatic beings. When Buddhists recognized that we humans create our gods by transferring personal images onto our deities (in their case, the pantheon of Indian deities), they saw those gods also as sentient beings comprised of those same five factors. So in that view, images of God, or gods—whether in the Mahābhārata, the Bible, the Torah, or the Qur’an—were conceived by people as exalted in status and superior in rank to other sentient beings and yet still confined within the same worldly boundaries of saṃsāra. So described, the gods also needed to be awakened, for they were entangled in the same delusions as other sentient beings, and they were in fact described as such in ancient Indian sources.

When the Jewish God was described as behaving badly, waging divine wars in 1 Chronicles and fomenting revolutions in 1 Kings, second-century apologists—both Jewish and Christian—acknowledged that these scriptures were accommodating their imagery to the limited understanding of an ancient people. When God behaved rightly, Jews and Christians still confessed that scriptural accounts accommodated their language to naïve people. Which is why both the early church fathers Justin, Clement, and Origen and their Jewish interlocutors came to affirm that the true God is the God of the philosophers, who in his Stoic self-sufficiency is beyond emotional outbursts and tendencies to favoritism. Theologian and Roman Catholic pastor Jack Bonsor describes the Hellenistic notion of God as quite different from the Jewish notion: While the Jews found stability amid historical flux in the fidelity of God, the Greeks found stability in an unchanging reality which underlies the world of appearance and change.¹⁸ God became the prototypical Stoic sage and among the Greek fathers of the church developed into the ontic God of Platonic and later supernatural tradition, which today is regarded by modern astrophysicists as an unpersuasive hypothesis. It is not that the ontological notion of God as ipsum esse, the very act of existing, cannot be widened to include the entire universe of one hundred billion galaxies. It could be, but our fundamental notion of being remains tied to Greek discourse and is difficult to employ apart from that context.

Christians are accustomed to asserting metaphysical claims that in fact no longer skillfully engage our world. If we are to be meek and mild, as Jesus is sometimes described, we would relinquish our doctrinal sureties, and our churches would concern themselves less with expressing theological certitudes than with practicing the faith. In a Tiantai model, the first truths of the emptied ultimate and the embodied wisdom in Christ remain meaningless unless they are indivisible with a middle path practice that acknowledges the historical character of our societies and strives to champion the poor and the marginalized. By contrast, metaphysical demonstrations of the existence of God fall upon deaf ears today.¹⁹

We do not long for a metaphysical God, which is why it is better to twin apophatic emptiness with the conventional embodiment of the Logos in Jesus, the Memra/word that had long been speaking to Jews,²⁰ all enfolded within Spirit-driven practice to bring about the rule (kingdom) of justice and peace—but always justice before peace. A faith not practiced is not trinitarian.

In a Tiantai theology, the divine emptiness is indivisible with our conventional images and ideas, concretized as skillfully as possible in our path practice. But in a Tiantai understanding—unlike Ephesians—the threefold truth is not located within any cosmology, whether ancient or modern. Christ is not then the center of the cosmos but the center of the consciousness of Christ followers. The questing character of consciousness itself is adequate ground for our desire to find ultimate reality in a God embodied in Jesus. Even though Jesus as eschatalogical prophet and worker of miracles often swallows the very being of God, we err when we tame Jesus and reduce him to a sage. John Meier points out that this view of Jesus in his own time stands

in stark contrast to one popular portrait of the historical Jesus often found in literature today: Jesus was a kindhearted rabbi who preached gentleness and love in the spirit of Rabbi Hillel. This domestication of a strange

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st-century marginal Jew bears a curious resemblance to the domestication of Jesus undertaken by Thomas Jefferson some two centuries ago.²¹

Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment God is a deist God, so distant that he never does anything, a God of primal intelligence and design who made tick the clock-like world. But once that God started things rolling, he left the rest to us so we are on our own, without any sense of a continuing presence in mind or body. Jefferson’s God and his Jesus apparently had nothing to say about the four hundred slaves Jefferson owned at Monticello, his private chattel. Jefferson believed in God but not in a trinitarian God.

Perhaps at some point God questions cease to urge themselves upon us: sometimes we grow weary of the back-and-forth arguments. Yet, we can come full circle and slip away from the many controversies simply to reaffirm the silent ground for a knowing that is deeper than answers to questions, because the questioning itself comes first, not the answering. Yet without conventional embodiment of that silence in word and act, a silent God—however mystical and universal—departs from Christian tradition. We do not enter the path because we have figured it all out beforehand but because, unable to figure out much of anything, we hear a message that changes hearts and gives their eyes the ability to see the path forward. It does not take a genius to notice how our lives are hemmed in by suffering and death, and how unsatisfactory the common anodynes so shortly become. It does take the courage of faith to empty self-identity and become one with a Christ whose love of the poor led to his murder. The secular Enlightenment of Dame Reason has proven itself yet another source for fear and anxiety. Rudolf Bultmann offered his demythologization of the New Testament because the Enlightenment dismissal of the gospel had produced the most destructive war ever yet seen.²² The primacy of reason led to a common fascist madness, which grows exponentially each time it is not challenged. We are always uneasy about who we are, despite writing brave histories that celebrate our identities.

Oddly, however, this product of evolution [the human being], unlike any other, is strangely ill at ease in its environment. Man alone amongst living creatures individually commits suicide. Somehow, biology has produced a being of infinite restlessness, and this certainly raises the question of whether human beings have properly conceived what their true environment is. In the natural world, new life can arise only from the death of the old, for the death of the individual is essential to the possibility of new forms evolving in the future. To man this is an affront and he grieves over his suffering and his own personal demise.²³

Theologian Serene Jones (b. 1959), president of Union Theological Seminary, has asserted that to do theology is to deal with death, and with suffering.²⁴ Yet, although fearful of dying, many feel that they have all the answers. Brief glimmers of our own raw need are silenced by new answers that nevertheless do not answer the question: Why do we die? Why are we ill at ease in our own bodies? Second Corinthians 5:3–4 speaks of our groaning not to be found naked (οὐ γυμνοὶ εὑρεθησόμεθα), and recommends that we assuage our anxiety by having our mortal bodies swallowed up by life (ἵνα καταποθῇ τὸ θνητὸν ὑπὸ τῆς ζωῆς). But it is not the life of selfhood that Paul had in mind here: You have formed us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you.²⁵

In his sermons, Zhiyi conventionalized the ultimate truth of emptiness within the practice of clear serenity and quiet insight, stilling emotions and ideas to gain that insight. His concern was focused on his monastic practitioners, but we are to go beyond to see the practice of the middle path as embracing the equality of all within our modern societies. Emptiness and conventional life are indivisible with middle path practice because without prayerful practice, reality seldom emerges and we shuffle off our mortal coil without ever having dreamed of better worlds. Sometimes we don’t even realize that we make the worlds we inhabit but never think to change them—a constant state of denial of being human in human cultures and societies. Yet we do create the social realities in which we live, and this is why Martin Luther King Jr. could dream of a society beyond racism—not based upon his own experience but on a biblically inspired vision.

We carry from our ancestors both compassionate love and biased self-assertion. Never are we born into a valueless family or culture. For Buddhists, there is the continuity of inherited consciousness from one lifetime to the next, while for Christians there is a continuity of consciousness from one generation to the next. Untoward ideas and self-centered emotions carry over from one time to the next, impelling us toward the original sin of evolutionary violence. Which is why we need to quiet and still our minds and hearts, the source of those ideas and emotions. I believe that practices of stillness and serenity (Skt. śamātha) are present in the prayers and meditations of all faith traditions, engendered by emptying the borders of a stable and independent self and resulting in a quiet insight (vipaśyanā) into our constructed worlds that enables us to judge how we are to practice the middle path of justice and peace. In Mahāyāna, serenity is a clarifying meditative experience of emptying everything, not as a piecemeal negation of this or that, but as a negation of any supposed stability in all its permutations. As the Mādhyamika philosophers in India insisted, emptiness is a non-affirming negation, for it does not negate one perspective in favor of a better perspective, but rather negates the assured status of any viewpoint, even that of Mahāyāna itself: One God, Two God, No God, Who God—no final answer emerges. Which is why one cannot abide in a sheer absence that empties everything. Emptiness is the negation of any imagined ontological account, and yet the single truth of any such emptied world can become an other-worldly trap, enclosing people within constant negation, encouraging people to live in denial of their need for community practice and of their actual interdependent worlds.²⁶ By contrast, Zhiyi emphasized contemplative insight into the dependently arisen character of everything that has been emptied, that is, of the conventional life we all lead. Emptiness and dependent arising are coterminous, realized in the practice of the middle path. And then begins the struggle entailed in a practice that is now attuned to the worlds we construct in primal ignorance.

Sharing risen life in Ephesians is a community endeavor, not a private affair between an individual human and an individual God. Who cares if an individual is awakened if she cannot share that with her neighbor? Who would care if Christ rose from the dead if we could not also share risen life? Whenever Paul talked about living in Christ, enlightened by the Spirit and sharing his overcoming of the boundaries between life and death, he was speaking of the common efficacy of our practice. When Paul wrote in Philippians 3:12–16 that he has forgotten the past that had defined him and has pressed forward toward risen life, he had broken down the barriers that hemmed in his own selfhood so that he was liberated to open his life to the fullness of everyday life in Christ. The deeper one enters into practice, the less crucial questions of identity—of God or of ourselves—become. In the Zen maxim, the path of awakening is the everyday mind.

So the title of Zhiyi‘s compendium of sermons includes both Clear Serenity (摩訶) and Quiet Insight (止觀).²⁷ Zhiyi inculcated the Mādhyamika teaching that emptiness is indivisible with everyday dependent arising, but he equated both with the middle path, as did Nāgārjuna. It is not enough either to rise above conventional events by focusing on emptiness or to engage in convention while forgetting the emptiness of those everyday events. One is also to take refuge in the emptied and conventional world by engaging in a practice of the middle, for middle path practice is indivisible with both ultimacy and convention.

The threefold truth is an ecology of spiritual practice, so Tiantai trinitarian theology becomes grounded in practices of emptying world constructs and accustomed practices to embody wisdom and compassion. All streams of awakened consciousness lead to the great ocean of awakening into which they empty, only then to be reabsorbed into the rain clouds that replenish streams of conventional engagement. One has to return from emptiness back into the very sweaty world of our embodied living, nested in our conventional lives, all the while acknowledging that emptiness itself is to be emptied, so that we can live here and now. This also is a way to understand Christian teaching: that the one God is threefold, which reconfigures all attempts to speak of God as a stand-alone person. The criticisms from Jews and Muslims are not wide of the mark: Christians are marginal monotheists, for we do not look to a single truth but to a triadic truth that sweeps our lives into the emptied Father by embodying his emptiness in the conventional life and death of the Son and through the Spirit continuing his practice of caring for the poor and marginalized. Our ancestors followed Jewish themes about the second God installed by the Ancient of Days at his right hand when they sought to find a place for Christ—even