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Mutual good will means the two religions can practice mutual appreciation toward one another, recognizing their potentially complementary nature even as each fulfills its distinctive "missionary" calling through advocacy. The goal is freedom on both sides—freedom to champion the gospel of Jesus and the dhamma of Gautama without disparaging the other's path.
How can this be done in a world where cutthroat competition is the rule? The Dalai Lama begins by personifying this cooperative competition. He is very humble about his attempts to understand Jesus and his words—"this is my understanding of Christian theology," he says with a twinkle at one point. He is not apologetic about what he offers in the way of commentary; still, he never loses sight of the fact that he is dealing with the scriptures of another religious tradition. In the end, he defers to Christians' self-understandings where they might conflict with his own.
He obviously believes that others can learn this goodheartedness. He urges Buddhist and Christian scholars to meet and talk regularly. He is enthusiastic about the rich conversations already taking place among Buddhist monastic meditators and Christian monastics.
He promotes pilgrimages to one another's holy sites. All of these things, he believes, will deepen friendships among adherents of the two traditions.
The Jesus who emerges from this exegesis is a person remarkably similar to the Dalai Lama himself: someone able to hold passionate commitments about the religious life, to advocate those teachings to others, but to do so in a way that unifies people around their common humanness rather than destructively promoting division. The key to combining passionate commitment and unswerving openness is the good heart.
THE ENGAGED JESUSThich Nhat Hanh presents a different vision of Jesus in Living Buddha, Living Christ. He too likes Jesus. He likes him very much indeed, and does not hesitate to tell readers, especially Christian readers, why. Yet his is a very different approach to Jesus from the one taken by the Dalai Lama.
If the Dalai Lama's approach could be likened to that of a biblical exegete (or more precisely, a Bible-study leader), Thich Nhat Hanh's resembles that of a philosopher of religion. He attempts to distill from what Christians say and believe about Jesus Christ a picture that comports well with a similar picture of Gautama Buddha—someone interested in the health and welfare of all sentient beings. This picture does not emerge from Jesus' meditative practice but from what Jesus taught and did in his public life.
There is a certain congruence between this picture of Jesus and the trajectory of Nhat Hanh's own life. He practices Zen Buddhism, but a Zen heavily influenced by a life of social activism. As chairman of the Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation during the Vietnam War, he was nominated by Martin Luther King, Jr., for the Nobel Peace Prize. Today, like the Dalai Lama, he lives in exile from his home country. From his base in France he carries on his teachings of peaceful coexistence by writing, lecturing, and leading retreats.
Nhat Hanh is interested in emphasizing the activist side of Jesus' ministry, and that interest emerges in the descriptions he gives of how Buddhism, true Buddhism, and Christianity, true Christianity, relate to one another. He uses his philosophy-of-religion approach to demonstrate how congruent Buddhism and Christianity are on this point, and how congruent the life and teachings of Jesus and the life and teachings of Gautama are when it comes to their core messages: "I do not think there is that much difference between Christians and Buddhists."
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