Marco Carvalho
Vice-director of the Macau Ricci Institute and teacher of political science at the University of Saint Joseph, Jarosław Duraj is well versed in Buddhist thought. A specialist in interreligious dialogue, the Jesuit spent some time in monasteries in Japan and in Taiwan, where he discovered a spiritual tradition rooted in a deep perception of human nature. To know and understand the other, he says, is a crucial step in the intercultural dialogue and China will have a lot to win if it decided to apply the principle to the “Belt and Road” initiative. The approach provides the rallying cry for an international symposium organized by the Macau Ricci Institute in the end of November.
How did someone born in Poland took on his hands the mission of connecting and balancing two very different worlds, Christianity and Buddhism?
For many years I have been interested in interreligious dialogue and it started in Poland. During my studies I started to explore Buddhist thought. It was very difficult at that time because the number of publications was very limited, so I had to read what was available. One of the most impressive books, the one that impressed me the most was Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha Gautama, which is quite a famous classic already. I was, in a certain sense, very much influenced by this book, but also by many others. I followed with my missiological studies in Rome, after theology. During my time in Rome I had a very good professor in Buddhism, so my expectations were actually met during these studies. Thanks to the Society of Jesus, after missiology i had the opportunity to come to China and to study Chinese in Taipei, Taiwan. That was an opportunity for me. I got the possibility to meet Buddhist communities, Buddhist monks and enter into real dialogue with them. I went to Buddhist monasteries and spent some time with them: meditating, having dialogue. All this helped me to deepen my conviction that this tradition is not only fascinating, but constitutes a real challenge to Christianity.
In which sense? The two traditions share some common ground, like the idea of compassion …
In several senses. For example, one of the difficulties that we have in our tradition is to combine the institutional authority, the tradition of the faith with individual practice. We have been noticing that there has been a reawakening and a desire for spirituality in the Christian tradition, especially from the 90s until now. What I encountered in Buddhism – and in this sense I think Buddhism can be a challenge to us in a positive way – was that it helped me to understand that my individual responsibility for my spiritual life is at hand. I cannot count or I cannot simply expect others to take responsibility for my life. Buddha said very clearly: “Workout your salvation yourself.” This is one of the most famous statements of Buddha. It means that you have your responsibility for your salvation. It is something similar to what Saint Paul says: “Make every effort, with trembling and fear, working out your salvation” (Phil 2:12). This is one of the challenges that Buddhism constitutes. The other thing is the whole practice, spiritual practice that is lacking a little bit in Christianity.
You were focusing on spirituality. One of the aspects that Buddhism embraces is a certain detachment from material things and the material world. What can a Christian, someone who follows the Catholic tradition, learn from Buddhism in this particular sense?
Buddhism is, in the sense of psychological insight and spiritual insight into the nature of the human being, extremely profound. Honestly speaking, apart from Christianity, I think there is no other tradition that has such a deep insight into the nature of the human psyche, but also into the nature of our way of being, human attachment and detachment and the process of liberating ourselves from that attachment.What gave me a lot was the ability to try to understand my inner motions or, as Saint Ignatius of Loyola likes to say in his spiritual exercises, “to analyze inner movements of the spirits.” Definitely, Buddhism helped me through meditation, through a practice of meditation that I partially borrowed from Zen Buddhism. I started to aply little by little the Zen method of meditation, as several Jesuits before me did, in Japan and in other places. I gradually started to interiorize this mindfulness of the motions and movements in me. Then, to understand them in my Christian context, I tried to grasp deeper those movements of the spirit, in a process that will lead me to enter to the dimension of discernment proper. In this aspect, Buddhism and Buddhists helped me to deepen my Ignatian spirituality.
This idea of meditation, of walking the inner roads of ourselves, seems to have lost some space and relevance in the Church’s tradition. What could the Church win by reinstating meditation as a spiritual exercise?
How can meditation, the method of Zen meditation, help Christians? Well, maybe the question should be: “Do we really need that?” We have our own tradition. Of course, one point is – and Buddhism also stresses that – “you have your treasures, so recover those treasures.” The Dalai Lama has repeated this several times. When he goes to the West and he meets Christians he says: “You don’t convert to Buddhism. There’s no need for that. You have to recover and to rediscover your own treasures and your own traditions.” This is true, but the difficulty is that Catholics, ordinary Catholics, do not have good spiritual guides nowadays. We do not have good masters of meditation and that is why a lot of young people, those who abandon the Church, find themselves in some kind of vacuum, in emptiness. The vacuum, you cannot live in it continuously. You have to replace that with something else. I would say that Zen meditation, Buddhist meditation does not – or cannot replace – our tradition and cannot replace our meditation, but it can be a supplementary tool, a method that will help me to reach a deeper stage and a deeper state of my awareness. This is particularly true about mindfulness meditation: it will help me to practice more mindfully my individual beliefs, my personal traditions.
The Macau Ricci Institute will organize in November a symposium that focuses on the “One Belt, One Road” initiative and the importance of the ancient Silk Roads in bringing together different peoples and different religions. Could this “Belt and Road” project have a similar impact?
We do really hope that it will change China. It is difficult to foresee the future, but one thing is sure: this “One Belt, One Road” initiative, that later was rebranded as “Belt and Road Initiative,” will set an opportunity for China to change its approach to religion in a more respectful way. The “Belt and Road” has a more infrastructural, economical dimension and basically many countries which are especially involved in it, they perceive it this way, also expecting that China, somehow, will help them to fix their economical problems.
However, there is another dimension that cannot be forgotten. A dimension that was always present in the past: that was cultural and religious exchange along the Silk Road. It lasted for centuries and we know the impact of those exchanges between Europe and the Far East. This small contribution, offered by the Macau Ricci Institute, in collaboration with the University of Saint Joseph, is aimed at showing that this cultural dimension can supplement this economic and political aspect. Without this, the Belt and Road might be successful but only to some extent. If China wants to go deeper and help those countries along the Silk Road not only to develop economically, but also to create more peaceful collaboration among those cultures and countries, the religious factor, the spiritual factor and cultural factor cannot be ignored. There are a lot of Chinese elements being promoted, but actually not too much, of course, of spirituality and religion and I think that this is something that China also can improve through those Institutes or along the Silk Road, to promote this kind of more respectful and tolerant exchange of cultures and religions in a dialogical way. Tolerance is not enough. I can tolerate others but it doesn’t mean that I respect or that I want to learn from them. I need to have a willingness and desire to learn from the others in order to improve myself. This is the goal of dialogue.
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