The Buddha said that the world is like a house being consumed by flames, and that we are inside it. I remember when I first read that, almost forty years ago. I thought, someone has stared into the depths of suffering and has told what he has seen.

To me, his statement seemed ironically to contrast with and to confirm a truth most evident about Catholicism, in which I had been raised. It appeared to be burning up in front of me, but, at the same time, it could no longer recognize the flames. I wouldn't have put it this way then, because I vaguely welcomed the changes that were occurring in the Church, but as I look back on it now, I believe we were losing our nerve. We refused to appreciate how deeply into the very particles of matter and spirit our suffering and sin were implicated, and how vain were our attempts to engineer a new Church, a new society, a new human being, and a new age. We saw evil, but it was outside us, we thought, in "structures of oppression."

We made felt banners and no longer talked about Hell or sin or guilt or penance. We no longer knelt much, or fasted, but feasted instead. We gathered around a table and held hands or played guitars. We sang about happiness and love. We did street theater to speak Truth to Powers and Principalities. We pretended we were already in Heaven. We supposed we were as gods, and as The Whole Earth Catalog put it, that we might as well get good at it.

We were no longer serious. The only real sin seemed to be to believe that one was a sinner. So why be Catholic—or Christian—at all? Why bother going to church or to confession? Judging by the decline in church attendance over the past decades, I was far from being the only one who asked those questions.

Kierkegaard has a parable in which a clown, not having time to take off his makeup, suddenly appears onstage and shouts "Fire," but the audience thinks it is part of a comedy. They laugh—but soon they perish in the flames. while I sat on my living room couch and read the Buddha's sermon, however, I saw that the flames onstage were real.

As I continued my study, Buddhist Tibet became part of that stage. China had set it afire and it was burning during the 1960s and 1970s. People were fleeing and telling about the conflagration in such vivid terms that it seemed to have sent its smoke all over the world. As Tibetan Buddhist elementary logic texts put it, the existence of smoke, seen on a mountain pass, entails that fire is present there. I could see that smoke from where I was and so I could understand the existence of the fire. Anyone can still catch a glimpse of it, even from a living room couch, just by paging through some books on Tibet.

An excellent place to begin is Matthew Kapstein's The Tibetans, a balanced, clear, and comprehensive introduction to the geography, ethnography, religion, and history of the region. Its maps are helpful, although its photographs are not quite up to the quality of those in some of the older survey books on Tibet that it has superseded. And readers who are unfamiliar with the basics of Buddhism will need to supplement Kapstein's explanation of it, as well as his discussion of the recent politics of the region.

That politics is complex. China and Tibet, ethnically and culturally distinct, have sometimes advanced armies against each other and claimed sovereignty over each other. For much of the last few centuries, China has exercised some power over Tibet, although by the beginning of the 20th century, that power was purely nominal. Then the Chinese People's Liberation Army swept into the region in 1950. Determined to eradicate religion, the Communists killed, tortured, and imprisoned teachers and other "counter-revolutionaries," destroyed monasteries and temples, and smashed religious images or sold them on the international market. Tibetans died in forced labor gangs and through famine induced by agricultural collectivization.

Tsering Shakya's The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947 is a clear-eyed description of recent Tibetan political history. Shakya weaves a red thread of suffering through his pages, but he also picks out golden flecks of human nobility. The young Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959. He has lived there ever since, not far from the Indian-Tibetan border. He also travels around the world to publicize Tibetans' plight (or, as Chinese officials say, to cause trouble) and to teach Buddhism.

From the turmoil in Tibet, many Buddhist teachers have dispersed around the world. They represent a religious tradition brought to Tibet from India beginning in the 8th century. Twenty-five years ago the Dalai Lama made his first visit to the United States. He gave a series of public lectures on the basics of Buddhism. His translator, Jeffrey Hopkins, collected, edited, and published them as Kindness, Clarity, and Insight. This volume offers a clear but simple introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, recently reissued in an anniversary edition with Hopkins' remembrances of the tour, which was a watershed in Western interest in Tibetan Buddhism and in the Dalai Lama as a religious teacher.

One can also approach Tibetan Buddhism through biographies. Lobsang Gyatso's Memoirs of a Tibetan Lama is a gem. Gyatso became a monk as a boy in rural Tibet and traveled to Lhasa with a caravan of traders to enter Drepung Monastery, which then housed ten thousand monks. He paints a beautiful picture of the human complexities of the monastery, his adventures in negotiating his studies, and his duties as a house proctor for the monastery and a lender of seed grain to the lay community.

After the Chinese invaded Tibet, Gyatso fled with thousands of others to be with the Dalai Lama in India. He established the Buddhist School of Dialectics in Dharamsala, the mountain town where the Dalai Lama resides, as a place where both Tibetan refugees and Westerners could study. His memoir ends with an afterword by his friend and translator, Gareth Sparham, who recounts with sorrow how Gyatso was murdered. The most likely suspects were Tibetans angry at his support for the Dalai Lama's effort to suppress the worship of their "protector deity" Dorje Shugden, who they believed was angry because their religious practices and beliefs were being mixed with those of other sects and religions.

That Tibetan Buddhism suffers from sectarian violence came as a revelation to many in the West, where in the post-1960s era the religion has often been portrayed as the very exemplar of gentle tolerance. This perception reverses a common 19th-century Western view of Tibetan Buddhism, with its rosaries, monasteries, strict clerical hierarchies, robes, chants, elaborate liturgies and set prayers, as a pagan counterpart to Papistry.

But if many in the West at that time saw Tibetan Buddhism as having supposedly corrupted the simple, pure message of the Buddha, freethinkers and liberals often saw it as a living fossil, surviving in the mountains while Buddhism elsewhere was either diluted or, as in India, annihilated by Islamic invasions and Hindu opposition. They saw Tibetan Buddhism not only as a rarity in itself but also as a base from which they could launch a critique of Christian orthodoxy.

Two books are of particular value in understanding the West's misperceptions of Tibet over the last few centuries. The best is Donald Lopez's trenchant Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, which describes Westerners' use of Tibet as a kind of screen onto which they projected their own fantasies of hidden truths and secret spiritual treasures. Another is Patrick French's Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land. French was head of the Free Tibet Campaign for years, but became disillusioned with the Pro-Tibet Lobby. Part of his book recounts a trip he made to Tibet, where he saw the complex difficulties of Tibetans' political past as well as their clouded future.

A brilliant parody of older Western treatments of Tibet is Jamyang Norbu's The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes: The Adventures of the Great Detective in Tibet. It tells the tale of Holmes, after his struggle with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, when he traveled to Tibet. Conan Doyle had probably been inspired to mention Tibet by the Russian adventurer and journalist Nicholas Notovitch's "translation" of an imaginary manuscript he said he discovered in 1887 in a Tibetan monastery. Notovitch's popular Unknown Life of Jesus Christ purported to describe the "missing years" of Jesus' life, during which, it was revealed, he joined a secret brotherhood and made his way to Asia. Over the last century, writers of occult fiction, a genre pioneered by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Theosophical Society founder Helena Blavatsky, have concocted many psychic adventures in Tibet, including such nonsense as Frederick Spencer's 1899 fantasy Phylos the Thibetan, Levi Dowling's 1908 "alternative gospel," The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, Baird Spalding's 1924 fable about an expedition to Tibet, The Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East, "Lobsang Rampa's" 1956 novel The Third Eye, and cult leader Frederick Lenz's 1995 pseudo-autobiography Surfing the Himalayas.

Quite apart from such flim-flam, Tibetan Buddhism has attracted devotees in the West. Its teachers offer insights into suffering and methods for cultivating mental equanimity and compassion. It appeals to Westerners' utilitarian pursuit of self-betterment because it seems, at first anyway, to set aside the necessity of faith and to ask the inquirer only to try its methods and see the results. It says that one can become a Buddha, an "awakened" one, by one's own efforts. Its goal is enlightenment about a truth beyond the limits of contingent reality. It is as dubious about objective reality as certain currents of Western philosophy have become. It proclaims impermanence and emptiness, and so fits our experience of upheaval. It questions the reality of the "self." Nowadays the West does too, and often conceives even the Gospel as a manual, not for the personal development of holiness, but for the impersonal engineering of social justice.

Ecumenists have organized exchanges between Buddhists—especially Tibetan Buddhists, because of the Dalai Lama's interest—and Christians—especially Roman Catholics, influenced by the late writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Toward the end of his life, Merton became intensely interested in Buddhism, and traveled to India where he met the Dalai Lama. Just before he died in 1968, Merton seemed to be running toward Buddhism as fast as he could go. "O Lord I do not have any idea where I am going," begins one of his prayers, on sale as a postcard at the Abbey of Gethsemani in rural Kentucky where he lived. In 1996, the Dalai Lama and other Buddhist monks and nuns visited there, inspired by Merton's writings and example. They met with Christian monks and nuns for discussion and fellowship. But from that week-long event, which I attended as a reporter, what I most vividly remember is standing outside Merton's hermitage, recording the sound of cicadas and the wind shushing through the high summer grass.

The Dalai Lama is an advocate of interfaith dialogue. One fruit of such conversations is The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus, the edited transcript of the Dalai Lama's impressions of Gospel selections read to him at the 1994 seminar at the London Center of the World Community for Christian Meditation. In the introduction, the Center's director, a Catholic priest, writes:

When a Buddhist, perhaps especially a Western Buddhist, says that all religions are compatible because they represent the different personal or psychological needs of individuals, many may add or think "at different stages of their development." Behind this may be the feeling—which I never sensed at all in the Dalai Lama in either private or public discussion—that the notion of a personal God is acceptable, but that it represents a more immature, perhaps an earlier, stage of spiritual development, a kind of balancing third wheel on a child's bicycle.

The Dalai Lama, a good man, would not beat his hosts over the head with it, but that is indeed how Buddhists understand theism and even the various other schools or sects of Buddhism that they do not agree with. Such teachings, they believe, are potentially helpful to those who are not yet highly gifted but who will eventually, perhaps in a future lifetime, be able to comprehend and profit from the highest Buddhist teachings.

The history of Buddhism has been punctuated by waves of "discoveries" of scriptures filled with novel doctrines. Against those Buddhists who tried to keep what seemed to be obvious forgeries out of the sacred canon, the followers of new ways said that the Buddha did teach these things, but not to everyone. He hid them until someone could make good use of them. This was the explanation for the appearance of the "Great Vehicle," the Mahayana, and its scriptures, which first came to light, as it were, around the 1st century of the Christian era, and then, centuries later, for the appearance of the Tantric scriptures. Such "discoveries" still occur in Tibet. Scriptures, supposedly hidden away by the ancient yogin and saint Padmasambhava, are retrieved from niches in rocks or from hidden recesses in individuals' minds.

In Christianity, after the Church rejected the Gnostic scriptures that turned up in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, this sort of thing did not occur much, until nostalgia for Gnosticism began to grow in the 19th century and new scriptures and teachings began to appear out of spirit mediums' minds, or out of the earth, guarded by angels and inscribed on disappearing golden tablets, or out of novel movements of the spirit at religious gatherings. Buddhism's inability or disinclination to enforce scriptural discipline has meant that its "bible" is vast. A block-printed multivolume copy of it in Tibetan requires forty yaks to carry, although nowadays one can also get a huge chunk of it and many more volumes of commentary free, on a single cd, from the Asian Classics Input Project.

Tibetan Buddhism lays out higher and lower paths for those of varying capacities. Perhaps the London Center's Catholic director believes that Buddhists ignore their own distinctions, but he believes that a Christian's holding to the notion of a personal God is immature. "Christian theology," he writes, "also recognizes the danger of this kind of infantalism—it calls it anthropomorphism. It recognizes that there are indeed stages of faith in which the symbol of God is understood more maturely. Every believer in God wrestles with idolatry and superstition before coming to the mystery of the divine Other." All is One? One is the all? God is beyond words? Is that all there is to say? When I was younger this kind of apophatic argument would have impressed me, I think, but nowadays it does not. I have seen that, shortly after "All is One," usually comes "Cast everything that is not our One into the flames." And who, except God, has the authority to say that? Most Christians believe that the object of Christian faith is God, not "the symbol of God." And that God has a name and became flesh and dwelt amongst us. And that he is not totally unknowable and alien. And that the Nicene Creed is not merely a "thought construction."

The Christian enthusiasts who gathered in London asked the Dalai Lama for an extemporaneous exegesis of the Gospel. We read that having heard the Gospel account of the Resurrection, he wondered if Jesus had achieved a Buddha's "emanation body." The editor notes that people cried at this point, although, he says, it is hard to say why. Perhaps they were grateful for having shared an insight into the Gospel that was beyond words, because I cannot see a cause for it in the transcript of what the Dalai Lama said. But perhaps it was instead a symptom of what I think of as illuminatio praecox—"premature enlightenment," which assumes a unity in desire or feeling where it does not otherwise yet exist. It is commonplace. Those afflicted by it often call themselves "prophets." They stand in a world on fire and try to put out the flames by denying their reality. It is not fire, they say. It is merely "fire."

Some iconoclasts in the West seek a path "beyond" specific religious expressions, which they regard as idols of the mind. They are embarrassed by particularity, most of all by the Incarnation. Although Christian, they frown on Christian missionaries, who might encourage Tibetans to convert. The Catholics among them were dismayed by John Paul II's less than completely enthusiastic assessment of Buddhism in Crossing the Threshold of Faith and mourned the obstacles to ecumenism that they believed it created. And they saw the Second Vatican Council's declaration that there is truth in other religions, not as a nod in humility to the inscrutable Providence that might even save those who are not members of the Church, but as the first step toward a welcome universalism that will not "privilege" any particular religious truth. Nevertheless, it is not just the Pope but the Dalai Lama, too, who says that the goals of different religions are not the same. All these paths do not meet at the center. They must connect onto a single path before that. In the end, only one breaks into the clearing where the first and last fire burns.

The translation of Buddhist scriptures into English and their publication continues apace. But how do Buddhism's Western enthusiasts regard the translation of the Bible into Tibetan and its distribution to Tibetans? One must search carefully within the ocean of books currently in print to find an account of it. One is Alan Maberly's God Spoke Tibetan: The Epic Story of the Men Who Gave the Bible to Tibet, the Forbidden Land. It was first published in 1971, but it will most likely never be available from any of the publishers specializing in Tibet for Western seekers.

I am neither a Buddhist nor a prophet. I have reverted to the Catholicism that gave joy to my youth. How did this happen? Buddhism focuses on the life of the monk and nun, who have renounced the world in an effort to achieve enlightenment and thereby climb out of the cycle of suffering transmigration through rebirth. Compared to Christianity, it has only a rudimentary teaching on the governance of society or on the value of the family. Throughout Asia, Buddhist clerics usually have a lot to say and do at funerals but little or nothing at weddings and births. This sensibility has found fertile ground in the West, where we have spent the last few centuries attacking the principles that encourage the regeneration of the given structures of society—especially of marriage and the family.

Several years ago, after spending more than a decade researching the early history of Western interest in Buddhism and seeing how it was tied into the growth in the West of radicalism and atheism, I realized how thoroughly these views are themselves historically conditioned and are therefore neither necessary nor ultimately given. Whatever "Progress" is, it is neither linear nor inevitable nor irreversible. That applies, I concluded, to the modernist revolution itself, the uncritical acceptance of which, I further came to see, had drawn us toward chaos, into what John Paul II called "the Culture of Death." This led me to admit the existence of natural law, which asserted itself despite the massive efforts in our culture to deny it. This law pointed to the existence of a Legislator. And the institution that held most unwaveringly to what I had concluded was the truth of human nature was the Catholic Church. How had it done that in the face of so much in the culture that denied it? It could not be through the individual merits of its members or its clergy—their sins and failings were manifold and were often on display in the newspapers. As with smoke and fire, I concluded that if it was not the individuals in the Church, then the institution itself, in a way that was mostly hidden to me, benefited from intelligent guidance beyond its mortal capacity.

As a result, I achieved an odd kind of enlightenment. Or a number of small ones that added up to this: I realized that what I most urgently needed was repentance. Not for the sin of holding on to an infantile form of faith, but rather for turning away from the Faith and looking to myself for salvation. After almost forty years, I saw the smoke on a mountain pass. God, I felt very strongly, had lit the fire. And the trail of smoke led back home. All these inferential steps I am describing make it sound like a series of trap doors shutting, but really it felt more as if, in the dark, a person I knew was drawing closer and closer to me in silence—"anthropomorphic" though that may be. I made the sound of one (closed) hand clapping (the breast). Mea maxima culpa. And I began the "yoga" of genuflecting before Him at whose name every knee shall bend.

Bewildered at my turning back to the Church, someone asked me why I had chosen Catholicism, of all religions (Could there be a worse one? was implicit in the question). I could only answer that I did not have that kind of choice. When the door opens onto the truth, you can walk through it or you can walk away from it, but in honesty you cannot just look for another door.

In religion it is not enough for people to do the best that they can. That can never be enough. Our life is more perilous than that. Everything is on fire. We cannot put out the flames, for we too are engulfed. I pray to Jesus Christ not because he was the teacher who showed us how to do the best we can, but because he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Miserere mei, Domine.

At least two of us have found our way into this pew. Paul Williams, author of The Unexpected Way: On Converting from Buddhism to Catholicism, is a former practitioner and continuing scholar of Tibetan Buddhism. He is also a relatively new Catholic. He writes about why the two religions are irreconcilable. Buddhists are not theists. And, despite talk about the unknowable "Other," Christians most certainly are theists—at least those who have not decided that God is a projection of a limited mind. Williams also argues that reincarnation cannot ultimately provide a basis for religious practice because it reduces the significance of individual lives to a vanishing point.

Buddhism has always needed to shore up "conventional" truth—including moral truth—because it is undermined by the doctrines of selflessness, impermanence, and emptiness. This is why Chesterton wrote that Buddhism was not a creed but a doubt. It is plain to me that Buddhist sages are similar to Christians in their capacity to sin. Buddhism, however, by locating our suffering in ignorance, rather than in the will, and its cure in knowledge, makes it difficult to think that one who had really experienced enlightenment could sin. Buddhists are often inclined, I believe, not to recognize enlightened beings' sins as sins, but to explain them away as "skillful means," actions that, to the unenlightened, look like sins but that spring from someplace beyond good and evil. Christians have sometimes broached this sort of rationalization—"To the pure all things are pure"—but have generally hesitated to insist on it. Christian doctrine weighs strongly against it.

Does it need to be said that Buddhism does not know Jesus Christ in any sense except an indirect, hidden, and metaphorical one? How then can a Christian fail to say that it is lacking something, and awaits the Gospel? The actions of Jesus were essential to the salvation of all. He was fully human and fully divine. He rose from the dead. He will come again.

If this is "anthropomorphism," Christians are the world's biggest fools, as St. Paul made clear, and no one is saved, no matter how many emanation bodies he might envision. But if it is true, then the work of Christian missionaries in Asia is one of profound charity. If Westerners will not undertake it, Asian Christians will, and, with hearts aflame, will send missionaries to the West.

John B. Buescher retired in June 2007 from many years as director of the Voice of America's Tibetan Broadcast Service. Among his publications are Echoes from an Empty Sky: The Origins of the Buddhist Doctrine of Two Truths and The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear: Agitator for the Spirit Land. He has just published a monograph on the career of Levi Dowling, the author of The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ. He is a parishioner of Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Annandale, Virginia.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.