"You will know them by their fruits." — Matthew 7:16
A lot of thoughtful people today believe that all the religions are really climbing the same mountain. Different trails, different names for the top, but one summit, and everyone who's serious ends up in the same place.
It sounds humble and generous. For a long time I quietly held the view myself.
But, you might think, isn't this 'school' both Christian and Zen? Didn't I say Christian and Zen are doing similar early work — clearing the ground, dying to self, learning to actually pay attention? It is and I did.
But sharing early ground-clearing is not the same as sharing the destination.
Two people can pull the same weeds from different fields and still plant very different harvests. That both have to stoop, sweat, and pull the same weeds tells you something true about being human. It tells you nothing about what will grow.
The same trouble at the start does not mean the same glory at the end.
Consider the plain fact that they don't actually say the same thing. Sit down with a serious Catholic and a serious Zen student and ask them, "What are you? And what are you for?" The Catholic will tell you that you are a soul — made, known, and loved by a God who is a Person — meant to last beyond this life, and made in the end to be drawn up into God's own life — what the old theologians call divinization or deification. They may tell you about the beatific vision.
Zen, on the other hand, won't hand you a self to save at all. The whole work is to wake up and see through the very "I" that the other tradition wants healed and brought home. There is no fixed self down there (anatta).
Those are not one truth wearing two outfits. They are different answers to the deepest question there is. And it isn't only these two. The Muslim mystic longs to be undone and remade in God (fana); the Hindu sage seeks release from the whole round of birth and selfhood (moksha). Different questions. Different answers. All the way down.
So, what are we doing if we wave that all away?
When you tell a Catholic and a Zen student that their differences are just the packaging — that underneath their partial views is one reality that they can't name — you are telling each of them that the thing they're giving their life for is a costume. A costume over something you can see and they cannot. That is not the stance of someone sitting down beside them as a fellow traveler. It stands above them, as the one who finally knows.
I think that view quietly erases the person in front of you. The harder thing is to let each person stay as strange and specific as they actually are — that's respect. And this is not relativism, where nothing is really true and it's all the same in the dark. It's the opposite. It's taking each tradition seriously enough to let it be itself.
Of all the traditions, Zen is the one built to cut exactly the "one mountain" view. The teachings ask us to drop the big idea, come back to this breath, this bell, this floor you're standing on. To float up into a grand theory that swallows every religion and pronounces them One is maybe the least Zen thing a person could do.
Still, Zen's popular teachers fall for it all the time — and so do plenty of us who love it. Why? There are many reasons, but perhaps the most interesting and consequential is a very modern habit: treating all religion as one inner experience dressed in different clothes. (The idea that religion or spirituality is primarily about our own private, internal, special experience is, I think, a deep mistake, one that leads most people into narcissism. A topic for another post.)
But ask yourself: where would you have to stand for "it's all really one" to be true? You'd have to stand somewhere above all the houses, seeing the whole mountain. But there is no such place to stand. Every view is a view from somewhere.
The person who's certain he's looking from nowhere is usually standing in a very modern room, mistaking it for the sky. And that room has a history. It's built out of three older pieces.
The first is ancient: the notion that behind everything we see lies one single Reality, and all the rest is just its outward appearance (Neoplatonism, the world of Plotinus). Stack the religions up as so many appearances, and of course one hidden Reality seems to shimmer behind them all — you built the stack that way.
The second came out of the Enlightenment: the confidence that plain human reason can step outside every particular tradition and judge them all from a neutral place above (the view from nowhere). You can only survey the religions and pull out their "common essence" if you're sure there's a balcony to survey them from. (Admittedly, this one gets very complicated.)
The third is the quiet one — the one I think is often most harmful — and it does the real work: the very modern idea that true religion is an inner experience, and that everything else is just the wrapping around it — not only the creeds, rites, and rules, but the specific ends each tradition names for the work, and even its account of what a human being is (the psychology of religious "experience," which William James gave its classic form a little over a century ago). If you grant that, the differences melt on contact, because you've decided in advance that they're disposable.
One Reality underneath, a balcony to view it from, and a rule that only the inner experience really counts. Each aspect of the "one mountain" idea has a history. The one outlook that claims to unify every tradition turns out to be a tradition itself — a young, particular, Western one — that has simply forgotten it.
This does not diminish the traditions. It doesn't say they're small, or partial, or limited. It does the opposite. We can clear the ground side by side — Christian, Zen, or neither — and learn an enormous amount from one another, without pretending we're planting the same orchard and harvesting the same fruit. The differences aren't a problem to explain away. They're the gift. They're the whole reason the conversation is worth having.
Does one tradition ultimately have to be right? What do you think?
I do know this: you don't need the traditions to be One in order to walk one honestly.
But don't take my word for any of it. Come and look for yourself — come and see, not come and take.
Come and see.