TIO Public Square

Woke Like Jesus and the Buddha

by Robert P. Sellers

In 2019, “Woke” -- the term was often heard on the Republican presidential campaign trail. It was customary to hear rebukes of “wokeness” and “wokeism” at GOP rallies, according to NPR journalist Domenico Montenaro. Florida governor Ron Desantis, for example, claimed: “This woke mind virus represents a war on merit. … We will fight the woke in the legislature. We will fight the woke in education. We will fight the woke in the businesses. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Our state is where woke goes to die.”

Photo: Robert and Talbot Trudeau, CC 2.0 BY NC

The word has a long history in Black culture. It was found in Black protest songs of the early 20th century, like the one by Huddie Ledbetter, or “Lead Belly,” who sang the 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys.” The lyrics recounted the fate of nine Black teenagers in Alabama who were accused of raping two white girls and were condemned in a terrible case of racist miscarriage of justice. Explains Montenaro, the song “helped spur the civil rights movement and loosely inspired the book and movie To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Merriam-Webster Dictionary identifies the term as “chiefly US slang,” and defines it as “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).” While conservatives “view today's liberals as woke cultural warriors who pose an existential threat to the nation and its traditions,” liberals argue that “we have a moral obligation to ‘stay woke,’ take a stand and be active – challenging injustices and racism in our communities and fighting hatred and discrimination wherever it rises.”

But the concept of “wokeness” – being alert to racial and social discrimination and injustice – did not begin with African Americans or their powerful music. I contend that two remarkable men, now adored by hundreds of millions of people across the globe, were both enlightened, personally and socially. They were woke.

The Woke Man from Northern India

One of the most familiar stories about Siddhartha Gautama, who in adulthood became known as the Buddha, is repeated by Huston Smith – perhaps the greatest world religionist of the 20th century, and one of my life heroes. In his book The Illustrated World’s Religions: A Guide to our Wisdom Traditions, Smith wrote:

Buddhism begins with a man. In his later years, when India was afire with his message, people came to him asking what he was. Not “Who are you?” but “What are you?” “Are you a god?” they asked. “No.” “An angel?” “No.” “A saint?” “No.” “Then what are you?” Buddha answered, “I am awake.” His answer became his title, for this is what Buddha means. The Sanskrit root budh means to awake and to know. While the rest of humanity was dreaming the dream we call the waking human state, one of their number roused himself. Buddhism begins with a man who woke up.

Buddhism is an ancient religion with more than 506 million adherents globally. Buddhists do not worship the Buddha as divine, but follow his teachings and life example as a fellow human who awakened to discover the path which can lead to the inbreaking of enlightenment.

In 563 BCE, Siddhartha was born the prince of the Shakya tribe in an Indian kingdom now located in modern-day Nepal. According to legend, a sage predicted that the infant would either grow up to become a mighty king and political leader or a revered spiritual figure, or wisdom teacher. His father, the aging monarch – believing this prediction – attempted to isolate his son from the outside world, so that he might be that successful ruler the sage had envisioned. But one day, after having been given in marriage at a young age and welcoming a baby into his family, Siddhartha disobeyed his father’s orders and went out from the royal compound. Outside, he encountered what his followers called “the Four Passing Sights.” He saw “an old man, crooked and toothless; a sick man, wasted by disease; and a corpse being taken for cremation. Then he saw a sannyasin (a wandering holy man, a renunciate) who had no possessions but seemed to be at peace.”

These four chance meetings changed Siddhartha’s life. As professor of religions Michael Molloy writes in his book Experiencing the World’s Religions: Tradition, Challenge, and Change:

At 29, he realized that his life up until then had been a pleasant prison, and he saw the same programmed life stretching forward into his old age. The suffering he had just encountered, however, prompted him to question the meaning of human existence, and it threw him into a depression that kept him from enjoying his luxurious and carefree life any longer.

Determined to hold on no longer to the follies of riches, power and pleasure, one night the young prince gazed upon his sleeping wife and child for the last time, rode to the edge of the palace grounds, gave his horse and jewels to his servant, cut his long hair, put on the clothes of a common person, and walked away from his former life, carrying nothing except the many questions in his mind.

Hans Küng, the late professor of ecumenical theology at the University of Tübingen, Germany, wrote in his book Tracing the Way: Spiritual Dimension of the World Religions that Siddhartha, named the Buddha, “is…an epoch-making guide. … Venerated by countless people throughout the world, alongside Christ he is the figure on this earth who is most frequently represented in art. He emanates calm, sovereignty, superiority and peace.”

Having enjoyed a life of plenty and excess, Siddhartha determined to deny himself, to embrace renunciation like what he had observed in the countenance of the sannyasin. In fact, had not some friends of the young man force-fed him rice gruel and nursed him back to strength, he surely would have died from emaciation and hunger. Rejecting what he considered two false paths to life’s meaning – the way of self-gratification, or indulgence, and the way of self-denial, or asceticism – Gautama came at last to advocate the Middle Way.

Siddhartha continued his quest, “combining rigorous thought and mystic concentration…[until] he sat down one evening under what has come to be known as the Bo Tree (short for Bodhi or enlightenment), vowing not to arise until he had gained his goal.” Smith explains that the first event of the night was a three-part temptation from Mara, the evil one, which is reminiscent of Jesus’ temptation by Satan in the desert. Defeating Mara by the power of his will, “Gautama’s meditation deepened until, as the morning star glittered in the transparent eastern sky, his mind pierced the world’s bubble, collapsing it to nothing. … The Great Awakening had arrived. Gautama was gone. He had been replaced by the Buddha.”

But the Buddha did not physically leave the world of suffering to enter nirvana [‘the extinguishment of the flames of private desire and everything that restricts the boundless life’]. Instead, for almost another half century, he wandered about the north-central plains of the Indian subcontinent accomplishing his mission to help others seek enlightenment. According to Smith, “he founded an order of monks, challenged the deadness of Brahmin society [structured and controlled by the highest caste of Hindu priests], and accepted in return the resentment, queries, and bewilderment his stance provoked. His daily routine was staggering,” not only training monks and overseeing his Order, but carrying out an exhausting schedule of “public preaching and private counseling.” What he taught was an ethical Way, the Eightfold Path of right (or correct) understanding, right intention, right speech, right action, right work, right effort, right meditation, and right contemplation – all proceeding from a preliminary step of right association, or training for the life of the spirit in the company of those who had already taken the journey.

Following the Eightfold Path was to let go of one’s pleasures and comforts, in order to extinguish the flame of one’s own desire through right living and the service of others. It was to awaken from the lethargic slumber of selfish routine. It meant, like the Buddha, to become woke.

The Woke Man from Galilee

Christians worldwide have just celebrated one of the two holiest seasons of the sacred calendar. Around the world, millions of Jesus-followers have gathered in homes, churches, cathedrals and holy sites to sing the songs of faith concerning his birth. In the English-speaking world, one of the most frequently-sung carols is the late nineteenth-century ballad, “Away in a Manger.”

Away in a manger, no crib for a bed,
The little Lord Jesus laid down His sweet head.
The stars in the bright sky looked down where He lay,
The little Lord Jesus, asleep on the hay.

The cattle are lowing, the Baby awakes,
But little Lord Jesus no crying He makes.
I love You, Lord Jesus, look down from the sky
And stay by my cradle till morning is nigh.

In this beloved verse cherished on both sides of the Atlantic, Jesus is a newborn sleeping peacefully, who then quietly awakes – already a powerful figure, attracting the attention of lights in the cosmos, rightfully surveying the world from his exalted position high above and, despite his own fragility, able to protect all the world’s most vulnerable little ones.

Another treasured Christmas song, “O Holy Night,” is based upon an 1847 French poem written by Placide Cappeau and translated into English in 1855 by John Sullivan Dwight:

O holy night, the stars are brightly shining; it is the night of the dear Savior’s birth.
Long lay the world in sin and error pining, till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!
Fall on your knees! O hear the angel voices!
O night divine, O night when Christ was born! O night divine! O night, O night divine!

Truly He taught us to love one another; His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother; and in His name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we; let all within us praise His holy name.
Christ is the Lord! Then ever, ever praise we!
His power and glory evermore proclaim! His power and glory evermore proclaim!

Cappeau wrote “Minuit, chrétiens” to celebrate the stained-glass renovations at a local church in a nearby French town. But his theology, shaped by Jesuit educators in the university, was often perceived by the theologically unsophisticated as socialist and abolitionist. Those sentiments are evident in the lyrics which affirm the gospel of Jesus is peace, that he breaks the chains of slavery, creates brotherhood out of racial division and inspires all oppression to cease.

The references to a gospel of peace, where slaves and masters become brothers and believers are commanded to end all forms of oppression are not just the socialist, abolitionist musings of a French poet. They are, in fact, the heart of the story of Jesus in the gospels, especially in Matthew and Luke. Followers of the Jesus Way are to treat others as they themselves wish to be treated. They are to love their neighbors – even their enemies – as they love themselves. They must forgive others who mistreat and abuse them, which mirrors and earns God’s own forgiveness of them. They are to act virtuously, honestly and compassionately, recognizing that what comes from their hearts either makes them clean or unclean. They are to follow Jesus’ Way by sharing from their wealth with the poor and less fortunate. They should serve the needs of others, humbling themselves by imitating the example of their teacher.

Jesus was a human being, a man of his moment in history. As Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer writes in Jesus against Christianity: Reclaiming the Missing Jesus: “Jesus was a . . . man who was socialized within his tradition. He had to make sense out of competing claims and explanations of God and history, exile and empire, holiness and sin, old story lines and new apocalyptic promises.”

The humanity of Jesus means that he did not emerge as an adult with full-blown understanding of how best to help others, due to his divine pedigree. The journey from infant in the manger to master teacher, healer and inspiration for the masses was a difficult one. He needed to grow, to mature, to face and defeat temptation, to struggle with what it meant to embody God’s love as he encountered people who were captive not only to a foreign empire but to their own misguided impulses. Thus, Nelson-Pallmeyer suggests:

We must respect Jesus’ humanity or we will miss important Gospel clues about his faith life, including his emerging understanding of God. We must respect Jesus’ humanity or we will miss evidence of his rejection of many of the foundational assumptions of the old theology of deserved blessings and curses, his embrace and later break with John the Baptist’s apocalyptic movement, or his differences with other Jewish social movements over expectations of God and history. Without respecting his humanity, we cannot accept that Jesus was sometimes wrong about God or that he sometimes changed his mind about important matters of great significance to life and faith.

Interpreting Jesus in a non-traditional way – paying close attention to his humanity – John Shelby Spong, in his book Jesus for the Non-Religious: Recovering the Divine at the Heart of the Human, describes Jesus as a “breaker.” He was “the breaker of tribal boundaries, the breaker of prejudices and stereotypes and the breaker of religious boundaries.” As the breaker of tribal boundaries, the human Jesus began the difficult process of shifting “us-them” thinking about Jews and Gentiles. As the breaker of prejudices and stereotypes, the human Jesus elevated the status of Samaritans, the poor, women, children and the ill and demon-possessed. As the breaker of religious boundaries, the human Jesus communicated and demonstrated that anything which puts limits on humanity, that teaches people to hate, reject or violate another, cannot come from God.

Marcus Borg, in Jesus – A New Vision: Spirit, Culture, and the Life of Discipleship, contrasts the Pharisees’ “politics of holiness” with Jesus’ “politics of compassion.” Whereas the “politics of holiness” was based upon the effort to become holy as God is holy by separating oneself from those persons or experiences that are impure, the “politics of compassion” leads one to embrace others, including those who are different from oneself, and to treat them with kindness and generosity of spirit. As Borg explains:

The substitution of compassion for holiness is most strikingly clear in a passage which is formally an imitatio dei [‘imitation of God’] and whose structure echoes the climatic words of the holiness code: “Be compassionate, even as your Father is compassionate” (Lk 6:36). Just as God is compassionate or “wombish,” so people who are faithful to God, who are “children of God,” are to be compassionate. Just as God is moved by and “feels with” the “least of these,” so the Jesus movement was to participate in the pathos of God.

Becoming a disciple of Jesus, similar to becoming a disciple of the Buddha, leads one to walk an ethical Way of living. It is to become alert to racial and social discrimination and injustice. It is to become woke.

Conclusion

President-elect Donald Trump, in an interview with Fox News, said the Biden administration has been “destroying” the country “with woke.” Senator Marco Rubio, Trump’s official nominee for Secretary of State, in a New York Post op-ed, criticized “woke talking points,” “woke progressive craziness,” “woke cultural issues that tear at our national fabric” and “woke, toxic nonsense” from the radical, progressive left.

I don’t want to be known as woke, however, because I am a Democrat and wish to stand against the perspectives of Republican politicians. I don’t desire to be woke because Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Michelle Obama and Gavin Newsom are, or because Martin Luther King, Jr., Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Dianne Feinstein and John Lewis were.

I want to distinguish wokeness from politics, because it is related to character and moral choices. I want to be awake and to know, rather than to yawn and doze at the circumstances that bind and oppress my neighbors and myself. I hope to be woke to the terrible unfairness in our society so I can join others to help create a better world. Most especially, because I am a person of both faith and interfaith, I want to be woke like Jesus and the Buddha.

Header Photo: EpicTop10, CC 2.0 BY