Is the Buddhist concept of Zen compatible with the Christian faith?

Meditation has got itself a bit of a bad name with Christians as it is so often linked to Buddhism and eastern religions- meditation linked with emptying of the mind. The psalmist meditated and his meditation had nothing to do with this - instead it was a focused meditation- reflecting on God's word.

The blessed man meditates in the law of God day and night. Some eastern religions advocate "meditation," but their practice is not meditation at all, but the effort to rid one's mind of everything, good or bad, and leave him in a state, of nothingness. How much better to meditate on God's word!

Holiness. — The true way of holiness has now been unfolded. It is death with Christ to sin. Not the effort to die, but the truth that we have thus died carried out in practice. Not, let us remember, that we died in Christ; for none were, nor could have been in Him then (John 12:24). We have died with Him, because now in Him. How different is this from the teaching of Buddhism, and of that of corrupted Christianity. All will agree in the confession of evil in man, which has to be overcome; but only in true Christian teaching is found the solution of the question. How can the evil be effectually dealt with? Therein we learn how the life and death of Christ are needful for this, but in the inverse order. We must begin with His death, ere we can practically profit by His life. We have died with Him to sin, that we might live to God. Owning His death we can profit by His life. "He that eats My flesh and drinks My blood, dwells in Me, and I in him. As the living Father has sent Me, and I live by the Father; so he that eats Me, even he shall live by Me" (John 6:56-57). Such was the Lord's teaching when on earth, as to profiting by His death. It receives elucidation by the ministry of the apostle, taught of the Holy Ghost.

229 Luke 9:23 ff. (cf. Luke 14:29 f., etc.). — Around these words, found substantially in each of the Gospels (cf. Matt. 16:25; Mark 8:35; John 12:25), gather all the thoughts of Thomas à Kempis' "Imitation of Christ." Self-sacrifice, suffering, is seen, by men otherwise so widely differing in their views as Dr. Martineau and Bishop Gore, to be of the essence of Christianity, which so far has no meeting-point with Buddhistic "illusion of self," at present so much in vogue; that idea and Christ's "denial of self," the suppression of sorrow and its transfiguring into joy, badly sort together.

A popular form of Mahayana Buddhism in the West is Zen, a discipline with the primary goal of experiencing enlightenment through meditation (reaching satori). Zen teachers emphasize the saying of the Buddha: "Look within, you are the Buddha."

After World War II, Zen made significant inroads in the West through the influence of the Japanese scholar D. T. Suzuki (1870-1966), as well as through influential artists, philosophers and psychologists. Hundreds of thousands of Americans converted to Buddhism, including notable entertainers and film stars such as Joan Baez, Tina Turner, Richard Gere, Larry Hagman and Harrison Ford .

All this sounds very good on paper. For a Christian to have communion with God, the Father, is surely right.

But on enquiring further we find elements which arouse suspicion. The young converts are taught to have their “Quiet Time,” to relax their bodies, and with pencils and note-books to await communications from God. Harold Begbie says of A Rugger Blue: “He told them that in these times of silence he had learned to relax his whole body, and that with so simple an invitation as, ‘God, come into my soul, and help me,’ evil thoughts drained clean out of him, and he really did become vitally conscious of invisible power” (Life Changers, p. 88).

Why should the whole body be relaxed? Where in Scripture do we get such instruction? We know that Spiritists are exhorted to let themselves go, relax their bodies, empty their minds of all thought and will, and listen in. We do not say that the Christian should not have a Quiet Time, we believe he should, but we do say emphatically that, with so little study of the Scriptures, so little knowledge of the true way of salvation, and in many cases, we fear, lives changed by auto-suggestion without any real conversion to God, and Christ known only as an Example and not as a Saviour, to inculcate the experiment of the Quiet Time in the particular way the Movement advocates, is really fraught with terrible danger. There is more than danger of evil spirits taking possession of the relaxed bodies, simulating what is divine, but being in reality Satanic.

Christians are exhorted to “let themselves go,” “not to resist the Spirit,” “to let their minds become a blank.” This is dangerous advice indeed, laying open the bodies of those who follow it to demoniac influence. Similar advice is given in Spiritist circles.

Before leaving this chapter notice how in the latter part of it the exclusive claim of Jehovah is emphasised again and again. Beside Him there is "none else." The faith of Christ, and the Gospel which proclaims it, have today just this exclusive claim, as witnessed in such scriptures as John 6:68; John 14:6; Acts 4:12; Galatians 1:8-9. There are today men who would go to the Buddhist or Confucian acknowledging their religions as ways to God and only claiming that "Christianity" offers them a rather superior way. In so doing they bring themselves near to, if not actually under, the apostolic curse of Galatians 1:8, while they avoid the reproach that the Gospel brings. It is this exclusive claim, inherent in the Gospel, which provokes the opposition.

Satan is very busy in India as elsewhere. He is doing His best to get it believed that all religions are practically one and the same, as long as their followers are sincere seekers after God. We are assured that sincere seekers after God will find Him, but it can only be through Christ. He is the Way. There are not several ways—the Hindu way, the Sikh way, the Mohammedan way, the Buddhist way, the Christian way—there is only ONE way. Christ says, “I am THE Way” there is no other.

It is curious how false philosophy always is. How, taking man as he is, God is left out, and man is supposed to begin, i.e., to have been created with no connection with, or knowledge of, or relation to God at all. A most absurd and low idea, as if God would have left man, in making him, capable of progress towards, but wholly, absolutely, incognisant of anything but himself, to make out a God as he could! 'Men were in this state' - but how? I may go back to enquire what they would do when they had not God at all, but have no ground or right to assume it was an original state, and there is no experience of men, as such, coming to it. Some glimmerings only of a few, and these wretched, but no people. There are testimonies of dreadful descent. The Vedas have much more of one supreme God than the Mahabharata or the Puranas. Men have gone down, not up, when there was a revelation, and Buddhism is an extreme case, when the misery of men's state was thought only to be met by losing self as an existence with no God - only gods as bad as men.