Excerpted from For Buddhism, Science is Not a Killer of Religion by Paul Wallace
I have known about the Four Seals for years, but my first true personal encounter with them occurred in June. I was visiting India for the first time and while I was there I learned a lot of interesting things. One of these is, the roads of India are perilous and unbelievably chaotic. No one really knows how to drive, it seems, and the water buffalo and cows are outnumbered in the streets only by the small and fast-moving motorized rickshaws. So when I was taking a four-hour taxi ride from Delhi to Agra I had to have something to distract my attention from the harrowing video game-like scene out the front window.
A friend who was riding with me handed me a book called What Makes You Not a Buddhist. Written by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, a Bhutanese lama (and Director of the first Buddhist soccer film, The Cup), it peels away all the claptrap—the heavens, the hells, the pure lands, the deities, the hungry ghosts, the hell beings, and says simply: These are four things you must “believe” in order to call yourself a true Buddhist. They are (1) all compounded things are impermanent; (2) all emotions are pain; (3) all things—including “yourself”—have no inherent existence, and (4) nirvana is beyond concepts. That’s it. Here there are no personal gods or demons or cosmic metaphysics or even divinities to judge you, smite you, love you, die for you, or get between you and your reason.
Notice that the Four Seals are very far from self-evident. This is important. Taken together, the Seals amount to much more than an intellectual solution to the problem of suffering; instead they represent a radically new way of seeing the world. To see the world falsely is to suffer, says the Buddha, and to see the world through the lens of the Four Seals is to see the world as it really is. And when this clear vision is acquired, suffering simply dissipates. The end of suffering comes only with right vision.
So Buddhadharma suggests that you not try to relieve suffering by clinging to what you think will save you, whether it is science, religion, art, your spouse, your children, your money, your public image. Doing so will only increase your suffering and that of your fellow creatures. Instead, let go of everything you think is true, hit the big reset button, and learn to see the world correctly. This is what the Four Seals insist on, and this is what the Buddha insisted on. He did not argue his point of view with those who came to him seeking help; instead, he painted for them a new and clear picture of the world.
I had read about the Four Seals before, but for some reason (maybe because I was in India, maybe because I had just finished working with and learning from Buddhist monks, maybe because the taxi ride was making me ill) I found the seals to be palpably and scarily true. And, per the Buddhadharma, I didn’t believe them just because I was taught them (which I had been), or because I read them in a book written by a lama (which I was doing). I believed them because I had found them to be true in my own experience.
Which is strange, because I’m not a Buddhist.
Not only that, but I’m not into blending things. I’m kind of a purist. I like my wine red, my coffee black, my M&M’s plain, and my religious traditions separate. I hold to the principle that if one wants to find water one should dig a single deep well instead of a number of shallow ones. So it embarrasses me somewhat to admit that although my language is Christian, my stories are Christian, my Scriptures are Christian and my baptism is Christian, in truth I live in the hinterlands of Christianity, just a short distance away from Buddhism’s border. I’m a Christian all right, but I can see Buddhaland from my house.
It is my proximity to Buddhism that allows me to reconcile science and Christianity in a way that may seem contradictory to reason. Living near that border allows a Christian to be wide open to science and shows that Christianity too can absorb and incorporate modern science into itself with plenty of room to spare for metaphysics.
