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Arriving out of the Western desert in a.d. 635, a group of Nestorian Christians, led by the monk Aluoben, entered the Chinese capital of Chang An (modern Xian) and were welcomed by the Tai Zong emperor, founder of the great Tang dynasty. Over the following centuries, their faith spread to cities around China. The earliest Chinese Christians took the first steps in meeting the epic challenge of translating a universal message from a distant Semitic sect into words that could be understood in Europe's cultural antipodes, the "utter east," the glory and wonder that was Cathay.
In The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity, researcher Martin Palmer introduces us to the Nestorian Christians, as well as the improbable story of how the ancient Chinese church was rediscovered in modern times. Palmer himself played a key role in that rediscovery, which also involved Jesuits, a Taoist priest exploring a cave, a 115-year-old gatekeeping Buddhist nun, and possible Axis spies. (It is hard to read the first part of this book without thinking of Indiana Jones.) In the rest of The Jesus Sutras, Palmer brings the extant texts of the Chinese Nestorians—the famous Nestorian stele uncovered in the early 17th century near Xian, and texts from Dunhuang in Northwest China—together in a poetic English translation. The fascinating blend of theistic and karmic thought that appears in some of these texts, Palmer argues, points toward a synthesis between West and East that can bring needed renewal to the Christian faith.
In 1998, Palmer discovered a pagoda outside of Xian that turned out to be what was left of an ancient church. (The temple where legend says Lao Zi wrote the Tao Te Ching, the hymn to the paradoxical power of gentleness that crowns the Taoist canon, stands just a mile away.) When Palmer and his fellow researchers arrived, the pagoda was being used as a Buddhist temple, and an elderly nun greeted Palmer at the door:
I stood where fourteen hundred years ago Christians had faced east and prayed, and I too prayed. I felt I had finally come home after twenty five years of searching for that home, of never knowing if it did, in fact, exist. Yet here was evidence of a living Tao of Jesus, a once vital practice of Jesus' teachings in a Taoist context. I wept for joy, for love of my faith, for the gentleness of the Buddhist nun, and because my heart was full to bursting.
As the Jesus sutras show, the Nestorian community began the work not only of translating the gospel into Chinese words but also of relating it to the Chinese philosophical tradition. "[Jesus] found people who were living evil lives and brought them back to the Way of goodness, the True Way" (or tao). "You bring us back to our original nature" (a concept central to the thought of Confucian philosopher Mencius and later Taoists). "The Messiah gave up his body to the wicked ones for the sake of all living beings" (as a bodhisattva in the Buddhist tradition aims to save all sentient beings).
As the Nestorian community interacted with other faith communities, later thinkers blended Christianity and Chinese thought in often striking imagery: "Divine Son … Send your raft of salvation to save us from the burning streams!" "Jade-faced one, exalted as the sun and moon!" "World-honored one!" The orthodoxy of the texts waxes and wanes, however:
The Messiah was orbited by the Buddhas and arhats. Looking down he saw the suffering of all that is born, and so he began to teach. … "Peace comes only when you can rest secure in your own place, when your heart and mind rest in God."
All such evil stems from the first beings, and the disobedience in the fruitful garden. All that lives is affected by the karma of previous lives. God suffered terrible woes so that all should be freed from karma.
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