The Transitioning of Rev. Ike

“Close your eyes and see green,” Reverend Ike would tell his 5,000 parishioners from a red-carpeted stage at the former Loew’s film palace on 175th Street in Washington Heights, the headquarters of his United Church Science of Living Institute. “Money up to your armpits, a roomful of money and there you are, just tossing around in it like a swimming pool.”

His exhortation, as quoted by The New York Times in 1972, was a vivid sampling of Reverend Ike’s philosophy, which he variously called “Prosperity Now,” “positive self-image psychology” or just plain “Thinkonomics.”

The philosophy held that St. Paul was wrong; that the root of all evil is not the love of money, but rather the lack of it. It was a message that challenged traditional Christian messages about finding salvation through love and the intercession of the divine. The way to prosper and be well, Reverend Ike preached, was to forget about pie in the sky by and by and to look instead within oneself for divine power.

“This is the do-it-yourself church,” he proclaimed. “The only savior in this philosophy is God in you.”

One person who benefited from this philosophy of self-empowerment was Reverend Ike himself. Along with Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and Pat Robertson, he was one of the first evangelists to grasp the power of television. At the height of his success, in the 1970s, he reached an audience estimated at 2.5 million.

In return for spiritual inspiration, he requested cash donations from his parishioners, from his television and radio audiences, and from the recipients of his extensive mailings — preferably in paper currency, not coins. (“Change makes your minister nervous in the service,” he would tell his congregation.)

He would also, in return, mail his contributors a prayer cloth.

His critics saw the donations as the entire point of his ministry, calling him a con man misleading his flock. His defenders, while acknowledging his love of luxury, argued that his church had roots both in the traditions of African-American evangelism and in the philosophies of mind over matter.

Whether legitimately or not, the money flooded in, making him a multimillionaire and enabling him to flaunt the power of his creed with a show of sumptuous clothes, ostentatious jewelry, luxurious residences and exotic automobiles. “My garages runneth over,” he said.

The Buddha and the Siddha

There are two Paths. The Lokuttara Path is the path that takes you out of the conditional cosmos altogether. Jainism, Buddhism, and various other traditions were founded upon the Lokuttara Path, even if most of the members of those traditions do not actually aim for transcending the conditional cosmos altogether. Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism and various other traditions were founded upon the Lokiya Path, the path that aims for the fulfillment of the conditional cosmos, even if some of the members of those traditions may actually aim for the transcendence of the conditional cosmos altogether.

The Lokuttara Path may be called the Path of the Buddha, the Buddha being one who has 'awakened' to the transcendent realm.

The Lokiya Path may be called the Path of the Siddha, the Siddha being one who has 'accomplished' the fulfillment of the conditional realm.

In that sense, Jesus of Nazareth was a Siddha, and Christianity is a Siddhic tradition.

Another name for Siddha is Tantrik.

God and Buddhism

The most essential meaning of "God" is quite simple: "God" is a person or event of greatest significance. As such, Buddhism does teach about God.

The Buddha is God. This would also imply that the Bodhisattas (those who are on the path to Buddhahood) are also God. (The Buddha corresponds to God the Son of Christianity.)

The Dhamma is God. "Dhamma" doesn't simply mean the Teaching of the Dhamma. "Dhamma" also means the Reality that the Buddha realized: Nibbana, as well as the abandonment of greed, hatred, and delusion, and the perfection of giving, love, and wisdom. (The Dhamma corresponds to God the Father in Christianity.)

The Sangha is God. Sangha is the community (infinite in number) of those who have realized, to one degree or another, what the Buddha taught. The Sangha includes both monastics and laypersons. (The Sangha corresponds to God the Holy Spirit in Christianity.)

The Buddha is ever-present, never absent, because the Dhamma is always True, and the Sangha is always practicing.

Last Man Standing

For most of its history, Christianity was a tricontinental religion, with powerful representation in Europe, Africa and Asia, and this was true into the 14th century. Christianity became predominantly European not because this continent had any obvious affinity for that faith, but by default: Europe was the continent where it was not destroyed.

As late as the 11th century Asia was home to about a third of the world's Christians, Africa another 10 percent, and the faith in these continents had deeper roots in the culture than it did in Europe, where in many places it was newly arrived or still arriving.

About the time of Charlemagne's investiture in 800, the patriarch, or catholicos, of the Church of the East, often called Nestorian, was Timothy, based in Seleucia, in Mesopotamia. In prestige and authority, Timothy was "arguably the most significant Christian spiritual leader of his day," much more influential than the Western pope and on par with the Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople. Perhaps a quarter of the world's Christians looked to him as their spiritual and political head. His duties included appointing bishops in Yemen, Arabia, Iran, Turkestan, Afghanistan, Tibet, India, Sri Lanka, and China. A Christian cemetery in Kyrgyzstan contains inscriptions in Syrian and Turkish commemorating "Terim the Chinese, Sazik the Indian, Banus the Uygur, Kiamata of Kashgar, and Tatt the Mongol." The Church of the East may even have reached to Burma, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, and Korea.

The Asian church was also more intellectually accomplished: Its operating languages were Syriac, Persian, Turkish, Soghdian, and Chinese. Timothy himself translated Aristotle's Topics from Syriac into Arabic. Much of the "Arab" scholarship of the time, such as translations of Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, and others into Arabic, or the adoption of the Indian numbering system, was in fact done by Syriac, Persian, and Coptic (Egyptian and Nubian) Christians, often in the high employ of the Caliph.

It was also a church immersed in cultures very different from the Roman and Hellenic environments of the West. Timothy engaged in a famous dialogue with the caliph al-Mahdi, which still survives. The church's milieu was not only Jewish and Muslim but also, perhaps more so, Buddhist, Manichaean, Zoroastrian, and Confucian. This made for relations that defy many of our usual assumptions about history. Jenkins recounts how "in 782, the Indian Buddhist missionary Prajna arrived in the Chinese imperial capital of Chang'an, but was unable to translate the Sanskrit sutras he had brought" into Chinese or other useful local languages.

Hence, Prajna did the obvious thing and consulted with Bishop Adam, head of the Chinese church, who was deeply interested in understanding Buddhism. As a result, "Buddhist and Nestorian scholars worked amiably together for some years to translate seven copious volumes of Buddhist wisdom." These same volumes were taken back home by Japanese monks who had been in Chang'an, and became the founding volumes of Shingon and Tendai, the two great schools of Japanese Buddhism.

The Chinese also influenced the West. Around 1275, two Chinese monks began a pilgrimage to the Holy land. One, Markos, was probably a Uygur and the other, Bar Sauma, may have been an Onggud. In 1281, Markos was elected patriarch. He protested that he was not up to it, not least because his knowledge of Syriac was rudimentary. But the church fathers argued that the "kings who held the steering poles of the government of the whole world were the [Mongols], and there was no man except [him] who was acquainted with their manners and customs." Markos established his seat near Tabriz, then the capital of the Mongol Ilkhan dynasty.

Bar Sauma had an equally interesting life. In 1287 the Ilkhan overlord sent him on a diplomatic mission to Europe to enlist aid for a proposed joint assault on Mamluk Egypt: Kublai Khan in Beijing would also be a supporter. The Europeans were amazed to discover both that the church stretched to the shores of the Pacific and that the emissary from the fearsome Mongols was a Christian bishop, one from whom the king of England subsequently took communion.

Jenkins places the ending of this world, "the decisive collapse of Christianity in the Middle East, across Asia, and in much of Africa," not with the initial rise of Islam but in the 14th century. One trigger was the Mongol invasions, which threatened Arab Islam as never before. (The Crusades were a minor sideshow.) The Mongols sought alliances with Christians, and there were Christians among them [i.e., the Muslims], hence local believers were treated as a potential fifth column and often massacred [by Muslims].

Later, the Mongols themselves embraced Islam and turned on the Christians. Timur's subsequent invasions, among the most brutal in history, furthered the process, as did Seljuk and Ottoman advances and, further east, rising anti-Mongol Chinese nationalism. Between 1200 and 1500 the proportion of Christians outside Europe fell from over a third to about 6 percent. By 1500 the European church had become dominant "by dint of being, so to speak, the last men standing" of the Christian world.