On honeymoon

Commonweal, Jan 17, 2003 by Paul J. Griffiths

The Unexpected Way On Converting from Buddhism to Catholicism Paul Williams Continuum/T & T Clark, $22.95, 264 pp.

The blood of the martyrs, the old saying has it, is the seed of the church. The same should be said about the stories told by Catholic converts: the church has often been nourished and sometimes transformed by such narratives, and some of them are among its literary and theological monuments. Justin's and Augustine's conversion narratives are perhaps the most familiar examples from the ancient church; in more recent times John Henry Newman's Apologia and Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain are probably the most widely read among English-speaking Catholics. There are many others as well, ranging from the coolly intellectual (Avery Dulles's Testimonial to Grace) to the deliberately down-home (Scott and Kimberly Hahn's Rome Sweet Home).

Paul Williams's book is one more in this genre. It doesn't match Augustine or Newman for literary elegance or theological acumen (few books in any genre do), and it is not Merton's equal in the psychological insights produced by that author's obsessive (hyperscrupulous, some would say) concern for the state of his mind and soul. Yet in its own way it is as interesting as any of these, and it has a feature which makes it unique among conversion narratives: it depicts a conversion from Buddhism to Catholicism, not from Anglicanism, as did Newman's, nor from Christian-influenced paganism, as did both Augustine's and Merton's.

Paul Williams is an English babyboomer, born in midcentury and raised with the attenuated Anglicanism common to most of his generation and social class. He was baptized and confirmed in the Anglican church as an adolescent, but soon ceased to practice. He became interested in Buddhist thought and practice as a young man, and because of his intellectual gifts proceeded to study the languages and literatures of the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist tradition, achieving a high degree of mastery and sophistication. He has a doctoral degree in Indian Buddhist philosophy (with a focus on Madhyamaka, for those who care about Buddhist scholastic affiliations) from Oxford, and has published many books and articles on Buddhist thought. These range from the abstrusely technical to his Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations, which may be the most widely used introduction to Mahayana Buddhist thought in the English-speaking world. He continues to hold a professorial position in Indian and Tibetan philosophy at the University of Bristol in England, and was for many years known in Europe not only as a scholar of Buddhism, but also as a practitioner and an instructor of others in practice. He is certainly among the half-dozen most widely read living interpreters of Buddhist thought to the West. But in the late 1990s, he experienced an intellectual conversion, went through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, and was received into the church as the second millennium turned into the third. His book is a record of the intellectual conversion, and (to a lesser extent) of the practicalities involved in becoming Catholic in England at that time.

What matters most to Williams is that he takes what the Catholic Church teaches to be true. It was at least necessary (and probably sufficient) for his conversion that he should become convinced of that. He hopes, he says, to have become a "reasonably orthodox" Catholic, and the book's discussions of the central doctrinal claims of Catholic Christianity show that he has indeed done so. He expounds the doctrines of the Incarnation and the atonement, for example, with a refreshing directness and a clear awareness that although there are theological subtleties and disputes his training has not equipped him to address, there is nonetheless a core of orthodoxy that he can and does affirm with clarity, verve, and assurance. The same unapologetic directness is evident in his discussions of such disputed (among Catholics as much as between Catholics and non-Catholics) topics as the reality of hell and purgatory, the impropriety of artificial contraception, the incompatibility of the Christian view that the cosmos is created by a good God with the (usual) Buddhist view that it is a beginningless product of human action (karma), and the relative impoverishment of Protestant churches as compared with the Roman Catholic Church.

Williams's straightforwardness about all this is certainly appealing. He would agree with (though he does not quote) Newman's view that dogma is the fundamental principle of the Catholic religion, and that "religion as a mere sentiment, is--a dream and a mockery." In part because of its unabashed affirmation of the importance of doctrinal orthodoxy, the book is likely to infuriate many. Naturally, some Buddhists will find annoying his argumentative dismissal of some central tenets of their tradition (though I suspect that Western Buddhists are more likely to be annoyed than, say, traditional representatives of the Tibetan Buddhist schools who will probably be amused). It is more likely that other Catholics will find what Williams says both unacceptable and distressing. He is certainly not ecumenical, and what he writes shows a deep joy in what for many cradle Catholics is cause for shame and embarrassment.