There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places

INTRODUCTION

THE SUPREME TRUTH

The word God means different things to different people. I wrote this book to explain what God means to me. A lot of people expect that as a Zen Buddhist monk and teacher, I must not believe in God. They’ve read that Buddhism is a godless religion. And some folks are frightened by this idea. But many, especially the people I meet in my capacity as a Buddhist teacher, are elated by it. They love the idea that they can have a religion without a God.

But in my opinion it’s entirely wrong to say that Buddhism is a religion without a God. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. To me Buddhism is a way to approach and understand God without dealing with religion.

Right here, at the very beginning of this book, I want to be clear about my position. Alan Watts, author of a number of books about Zen, once said in a lecture,

I am not a Zen Buddhist; I’m not advocating Zen Buddhism; I’m not trying to convert anyone to it. I have nothing to sell: I’m an entertainer. That is to say in the same sense that when you go to a concert, and you listen to someone play Mozart, he has nothing to sell except the sound of the music. He doesn’t want to convert you to anything, he doesn’t want you to join an organization in favor of Mozart’s music as opposed to, say, Beethoven’s. And I approach you in the same spirit: as a musician with his piano or violinist with his violin, I just want you to enjoy a point of view which I enjoy.

This is pretty much how I feel. Only I did something that Alan Watts was clever enough not to do. I got ordained a Zen Buddhist monk. What can I say? It seemed like a good idea at the time. And the system needs someone on the inside to irritate it a little bit.

I couldn’t care less if you decide to become a Zen Buddhist as a result of reading this book. In fact, I hope you don’t. That being said, though, the philosophy and practice associated with Zen Buddhism have been tremendously useful to me; otherwise I’d never have become a monk. I think it might be useful to you too.

But categorizing oneself as a Zen Buddhist is absolutely contrary to the spirit of Zen Buddhism. And the organizations claiming to uphold the spirit of Zen Buddhism can be just as silly, hypocritical, and corrupt as any religious institution. Still, unlike Alan, I feel I have little choice but to call myself a Zen Buddhist. I’ll address this topic in detail later. But for now I want to concentrate on why I, as a Zen Buddhist, believe in God.

By the way, in this book I will occasionally use the words Zen and Buddhism somewhat interchangeably. This drives some people bananas. Zen Buddhists often quite arrogantly insist that theirs is the only real kind of Buddhism, while Buddhists of other types just as often insist that it’s not. But Zen is just the Japanese pronunciation of the Sanskrit word dhyana, which means meditation. So to me Zen Buddhism means Buddhism that involves meditation. Since meditation is the main thing that the historical Buddha taught, I think it’s fair to say that anything that calls itself Buddhism and doesn’t involve some kind of meditation may not really be Buddhism. So in using the phrase Zen Buddhism I’m referring not necessarily to that particular sect and lineage labeled by historians as Zen Buddhism but to all forms of Buddhism that focus on meditation practice, or zazen.

There are many possible answers to the question of whether it’s possible to be a Buddhist — Zen or otherwise — and also believe in God. One answer could be that it depends on what you mean by God. Another could be that it depends on what you mean by Buddhist. A third could be that it depends on what you mean by believe. When framing such questions we often take for granted that all parties use the same definitions of the words we choose. But that’s not always the case.

I was not raised in a religious family. Oh, I suppose we were nominally Protestant. My dad has a photo that shows me with a group of kids at a local Sunday school. But I couldn’t have attended very often since I have no memory of ever having gone at all. I first started getting interested in God when I was about ten years old and the movie Jesus Christ Superstar was all the rage.

We were living in Nairobi, Kenya, where my dad worked for the local branch of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. He’d been sent there from the home office in Akron, Ohio. I grew up in an Akron suburb until I was about eight and then spent almost four years in Africa. In Africa I made friends with Tommy Kashangaki, whose mother was an American Jewish woman and whose father was Tanzanian. The Kashangakis were raised Catholic. They knew about God. So I used to ask Tommy and his older brother, James, a lot of questions.

What I couldn’t get from Tommy, James, or the copy of the Jesus Christ Superstar sound track I got for Christmas one year, I learned by reading the children’s Bible my mom got us. The whole idea of God was just so weird and fascinating. Some people were sure he* existed. Others were certain he did not. Many, like my parents, didn’t know either way.

When I thought about God back then I used to imagine him not as a giant white man on a throne in the clouds. I knew even at that age that this was just a metaphorical representation, although I’m sure I couldn’t have explained it in those words. Instead I envisioned God as sort of a big, round, shiny entity of some sort. Sort of like the sun but with a personality.

As I grew older, my fascination with God continued. But I became increasingly disgusted with those who claimed to speak for him. We moved back to Ohio when I was eleven, and I soon discovered the amazing world of television evangelism. The idea that there were TV stations entirely devoted to God was pretty intriguing. But it didn’t take long for me to figure out that the people who ran these TV stations were as clueless about the real nature of God as anyone else. They were just clever at manipulating people’s fears and desires and using God as a way of getting scared and greedy people to send them money.

In high school I discovered books published by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness at a used bookstore called the Book Nook in downtown Wadsworth, Ohio, where I lived. Those Hare Krishna guys also said they knew what God was like. But their version of God was different, at least superficially. God, they said, had a name, which was Krishna, and he had a specific form. He was a handsome purple-skinned Indian youth who could have sex with a thousand girls at a time. The God they talked about at the local Baptist church couldn’t do that!

But it soon became apparent that the differences between their God and the one the televangelists spoke about were mostly cosmetic. The God of the Hare Krishnas was just as narrow-minded and vengeful as the one the televangelists believed in. He had a slightly different idea about who to send to hell and why, that’s all. Sure, the notion of reincarnation put a different spin on things. But when it came to God, I couldn’t find much to like in their version, except that their stories about him were more entertaining.

In college I came across a teacher of Zen Buddhism who had ideas about God that actually made some sense. He showed me a way to see God for myself. But even though I’ve met God, I still search for him.

My favorite answer to the question of whether it’s possible to be a Buddhist and believe in God is There is no God but he is always with you. I heard this quotation from my first Zen teacher, Tim McCarthy, who learned it from one of his teachers, Sasaki Roshi, a Japanese Zen monk who lives in California. Apparently he was addressing a student of his who believed deeply in God. He wanted her to start seeing God in a different way. So he said this very shocking thing to her, and it worked. I think it expresses the Zen Buddhist approach to the matter of God very succinctly. And not just because it sounds like nonsense.

What you think of as God does not exist. It couldn’t possibly exist. No matter what you think of as God, it’s an image you’ve created in your mind. In his book Buddha Is the Center of Gravity, Sasaki said, The God who is standing in front of you as an object says, ‘I am your God.’ But he is not. Even if that God has great power he is not the real God. And yet there is something powerful and ineffable that is the ultimate ground of all being and nonbeing, and it created you. And some people use the word God to talk about that ineffable something. Sometimes I do too.

I’ve traveled around the world twice in the past two years, and as I write this I’m on my third tour of Europe. I’ve been speaking to a lot of people about Zen practice while simultaneously deepening my own quest for the true nature of God.

These are some of the questions I’ve been asking. Can the Zen approach provide an answer to this seemingly irresolvable debate? Can one be an atheist and still believe in God? Is there a way to be a true believer and still doubt? And why frame things in terms of God, anyway? Isn’t it just an outmoded concept that only fanatics still talk about?

As a Zen monk* who was born and raised in the United States but who has spent a considerable portion of his life in Japan, I have an unusual take on the matter. Not being raised in any religion, I had no notions about God apart from those I absorbed from the society around me. I was never indoctrinated into any belief system regarding God. So I could look at the various ideas of God that people presented me objectively. But none of them made a lot of sense.

According to D. T. Suzuki, one of the earliest and most influential authors to write about Zen Buddhism in English, Zen has no God to worship, no ceremonial rites to observe, no future abode to which the dead are destined.† So is Zen some form of spiritual atheism? Writers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have made a compelling case for the new atheist movement. And Karen Armstrong produced a wellreasoned comeback with her book The Case for God.

But most of the current debate concerns a very specific definition of God: the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God as framed by contemporary fundamentalists, particularly those in the United States. I’m not sure this debate even makes sense to a lot of people outside North America. Many of the folks I’ve talked to about it in Europe find the whole argument a little weird.

Yet the cornerstone of the debate is at the core of Western philosophy, which holds sway throughout much of the world, even outside Europe and America. Western philosophy is divided into two competing ideologies. We are told that we must side either with the materialists, who insist that we are just this body, or with spiritual people, whom some would file under the category of idealists, who say that we are just a mind, or a soul, that resides within the body. Even most Eastern religions insist on this division. The current debate about atheism is based on this age-old insistence that we must have it either one way or the other.

This is a big problem with real consequences. In some American schools arguments rage about whether or not children should study evolution, while in other parts of the world all forms of scientific inquiry are shunned because of the perceived threat they pose to faith in God. And yet the same people who fear science spread their message through the sophisticated communication tools that scientific research has given them. It must be a cause of a great deal of subconscious cognitive dissonance to denounce science on the Internet.

I believe this dissonance lies at the heart of much of the conflict around us. There is no going back at this point. The genie is out of the bottle and cannot be returned. Science obviously works. This means that the materialistic view of the world is, at least in some sense, correct. It can’t be totally wrong or you wouldn’t be able to log on to your Facebook page to say that it’s wrong. Does this mean that there is no God? Does science tell us that all spirituality is just unrealistic wishful thinking? What about the deep longing in the human heart for something spiritual in our lives? Must we deny this in order to be rational people?

This was a profound and serious question to me all my life. I knew science was true, and like many I feared this meant there could be no God. And yet I felt there was a spiritual dimension to my life that I could no more deny than I could deny the obvious truth of the scientific method.

I was deeply involved in the punk scene in my teens and twenties. So I was already questioning society’s basic values, especially those espoused by religious hypocrites. And as the son of a mother who was dying of a disease I knew I could inherit, from an early age I felt a sense of desperation in my search for a meaning to life. Zen Buddhism has provided me with a way to come to terms with God and to finally settle for myself the question of whether or not God exists.

There is no God and he is always with you may sound like a simple non sequitur or a typical pointless Zen riddle. But it expresses the Zen point of view about God very succinctly. Even though what you think of as God can’t possibly exist, there is a real spiritual dimension to this world. There is something that can be called God.

The thirteenth-century Zen master Dogen Zenji said, We know that we ourselves are tools that it possesses within this universe in ten directions because the body and the mind both appear in the universe, yet neither is our self. The word translated here as it is the Chinese word inmo, which refers to the ineffable substratum of reality, the ground of all being and nonbeing. To me, this is just another way of saying God.

I feel it’s useful to speak in terms of God because we need to draw attention to the fact that Zen concerns something that is at once very ordinary and very personal and yet very big and very important.

Zen says that both the materialistic and the spiritual view are incomplete and mistaken, that we are neither body nor mind, that our actual reality cannot be defined in such narrow terms. Even the word God is too limiting. Or as Dogen says, Even the whole universe in ten directions is just a small part of the supreme truth. The supreme truth is, to me, another name for God.

In my early search, the various spiritual ideas I examined about God made no sense. But the idea that human beings were simply walking clumps of dead matter didn’t fit my real experience any better. It was my experiences in Zen meditation that made God clear to me in ways that no intellectual expression of God’s existence or nonexistence ever could.

In this book I will attempt to make the Zen approach to the question of God comprehensible to a contemporary Western audience steeped in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions. This book is not a religious tract by a true believer trying to convert others to his way of thinking. And it is not meant to quell the fears of those already converted to my religion to assure them they’re correct. Rather, it is a straight talk about why this godless religion has a lot to say about God.

*Of course, God is neither male nor female. But the English language requires us to use a gendered pronoun, and he is the common pronoun used when speaking of God. I’m not happy with that. But it’s the way things are.

*I’m using the word monk as a convenient shorthand to describe myself. But it’s a lousy word. It derives from the Catholic tradition and tends to make people assume that Zen monks are like Catholic monks, except that they believe in Buddha instead of Jesus. That’s entirely incorrect. As a Zen monk in the Soto tradition I have not taken a vow of celibacy, nor have I committed myself to life in a monastery, just to name two very important differences. Furthermore, Zen is not a religion. So I cannot be considered a member of the clergy. Yet I have taken vows and I have committed myself publicly to uphold the tradition. So in that sense I am a monk. If there were a better single word than monk to describe my role in the Zen tradition, I’d use it. Unfortunately, monk is the word I’m stuck with.

†He said this in a book called An Introduction to Zen Buddhism.

CHAPTER 1

DEATH IN THE HOLY CITY

Lance Wolf died on the streets of Jerusalem, beaten to death under the very eyes, some would say, of God himself in God’s Holy City. Although he was not killed for explicitly religious reasons, Lance was murdered by people who probably thought their version of God was better than his.

I didn’t know Lance well. He was a strange guy. I first met him on the third floor of Ibrahim’s House of Peace on the Mount of Olives in one of the Palestinian neighborhoods of Jerusalem. He was smoking a cigarette while lying on a pile of blankets on the tiled floor of a bare, dark concrete room.

Ibrahim had taken me upstairs to introduce me and another new lodger at his house to Lance, probably in the hopes that as fellow Americans we could draw Lance out of his shell and maybe get him to come downstairs and eat. Lance was not unfriendly. He sat up on his bedding and chatted enthusiastically. But he wasn’t interested in coming downstairs or eating. I couldn’t really see his face except when he puffed on his cigarette and the red glow illuminated his gaunt features.

Lance came out of his room a few times later that week, always talking about politics or religion. Nobody I spoke with knew when he’d arrived in Israel or why. A Jew, maybe he was one of those guys who come to Israel hoping for an audience with God. Maybe he was running away from something back home.

Ibrahim’s House of Peace is a hostel in a Palestinian village called At-Tur. At-Tur is the kind of place tourists don’t usually visit unless they end up there by accident while visiting the nearby scenic overlook from which you can see all of Jerusalem. Or else they wind up there while stopping by the world’s oldest Jewish cemetery, where pious folks get buried in the hopes that when the Messiah descends on the Mount of Olives they’ll be the first to greet him. You can see the Garden of Gethsemane from there. Some of the olive trees in the garden are more than two thousand years old and were there when the Romans took Jesus away to be crucified. But if they saw what really happened that night they’re not telling.

Ibrahim is a short Palestinian man, around seventy years old, with close-cropped white hair and a stubbly white beard. He’s a friendly, generous character who for the past thirty years has opened up his home to travelers from all over the world. Anyone can stay at his house for however long she likes — no questions asked. Payment is however much you can afford. There’s a collection