The Search for Meaning: What Buddhism Can't Provide
- Clare Kneusel-Nowak
- 15 hours ago
- 9 min read
They thought they were seeking peace. In truth, God was already seeking them.
“Man is by nature and vocation a religious being. Coming from God, going toward God, man lives a fully human life only if he freely lives by his bond with God.” Catechism of the Catholic Church, §44
When I teach my high school students the difference between man-made religion and the Judeo-Christian faith, I like to show them two pictures: the hiker arriving at the Tibetan peak to conference with the wise man, and the burning bush. In the first, man, with every ounce of strength in his body, summits the heights in order to find god. In the second, an exiled shepherd finds himself suddenly in the presence of the God of his fathers. That is: the first is man’s search for god, and the second is God’s search for man.
Man cannot help but be spiritual: it’s in his nature. Even when man gives up his childhood faith and the God of his fathers, he cannot help but seek something. As society becomes more secular by pushing religion to the side, it leaves behind a palpable emptiness. For many people who have grown up in a Western and post-Christian culture, there is a desire to be spiritual, not religious. To this end, Buddhism seems to supply a path in which one can be nurtured spiritually and live secularly.
To the secular West, Buddhism is romantic: it seems at once familiar, even commonplace, but is simultaneously mysterious and inexpressible. Meditation centers are not hard to find in most metropolitan areas. Buddha statues for your garden can be purchased at Home Depot. And one easily recognizes terms like karma, reincarnation and Nirvana.
Buddhism, unlike Christianity, does not have a strong tradition of missionary evangelists, certainly not in this country. The prevalence of Buddhism in modern secular society is due, almost entirely, to those spiritual seekers who are seeking after the Truth and have not yet found him. They have summited the mountain peak and found it empty.
What do these spiritual seekers find in Buddhism? Can the longing of the human heart be filled by it? And what do those who have sought the Truth in Buddhism found?
The Truths in Buddhism
As a young man, Henry Schliff grew up in a spiritual but not religious household, but he, like his mother, was a natural spiritual seeker, interested in Eastern mysticism. He became a Buddhist from a young age and devoted 20 years to a serious practice of Buddhism. He not only studied the literature and history of Buddhism in an academic setting, but he also fully immersed himself in the tenets of Buddhism, in meditation and instruction Rinpoches (highly respected teachers of Buddhism)
He found great beauty and truth in many Buddhist teachings and practices. Buddha, after all, was a bit of a revolutionary who was willing to take anyone from any caste, the highest to the lowest.
In the caste system, especially in Buddha’s day, if someone was born in the untouchables, they were condemned to a truly hellish life, with no means of getting themselves out of it.
“Your means is death, at which point maybe you’ll have a better karmic rebirth. But you’re stuck. And I think, as Westerners, we can’t really fathom that,” Henry said. “Just how degrading and oppressive that is. It’s below feudalism. I mean, it’s soul-crushing.”
But Buddha made everyone equal.
“He would say it doesn’t matter if you’re a Brahmin or an Untouchable,” Henry said. “Everyone has karmic baggage. And the only thing that is worth doing is to recognize the nature of inherent suffering in life and to recognize that there’s a way out of it.”
To this end, Buddha proposed a path with clear moral principles that, if followed, would serve to liberate men and women from the pain and suffering that kept them bound to worldly things.
One such moral principle in Buddhism lies in the recognition of the sanctity and preciousness of each human life. Within the Buddhist framework, Henry explained, something like abortion is utterly unjustifiable.
“The precious human birth is the one opportunity, potentially, in eons of lifetimes for this person to attain salvation. The idea of snuffing out that opportunity for a sentient being is repugnant beyond compare. The karmic damage that would be done to the individual who would do that — and there's no grace that can draw you out of that. You're destined for hell, and you're destined for hell for eons,” he said, adding, “And the Buddhist hells are insane — they make Dante look like a picnic.”
Kathy Conde, who attended a Buddhist university and made a serious practice of Buddhism for a decade, added that Buddhism’s truths possess a goodness that attracts many people. The practice of meditation, for instance, can provide an escape from pain and suffering, particularly if one is at a loss of where to find healing.
But, she added, Buddhism fails to reach the human heart, which was made for the love of God alone. Kathy entered the Catholic Church this Easter.
Kira Roark had a similar experience. She first began her practice of Buddhism after working with and developing a friendship with Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.
Kira explained that she gained a great deal from Tibetan Buddhism, both by studying with the Rinpoche and attending retreats. Through Buddhism, she learned how to cultivate a what she called “a state of loving-kindness compassion, using meditation techniques to quiet ‘the monkey mind,’ and experiencing the dissolution of Self in order to connect to Being (the ‘isness of all phenomena’).
“All of that was intellectually interesting and psychologically useful,” Kira explained. “The equanimity of mind I learned from my Buddhist meditation practice serves me now in prayer. But through it all — through decades spent exploring New Age spirituality, Buddhism, the Yoga Sutras, animism, esoterica, astrology, tarot, etc., etc. — I remained spiritually alone.”
In short, Kira said, “Buddhism was an impersonal practice while Catholicism is a personal relationship.”
Buddhism and Nihilism
The majority of Buddhist traditions are nontheistic; the Buddha himself didn’t believe in a creator. Though no strain of Buddhism self-identifies as atheistic, the lack of a Creator who wills the universe into being for love is undeniable.
Many Western thinkers have romanticized Buddhism because they have reinterpreted various ideas and principles in a post-Christian way. For instance, it’s not uncommon to hear people consider Nirvana to be another name for Heaven, to talk about karma as synonymous with divine justice and to think of rebirth as a beautiful thing, perhaps similar to the Christian teaching of the resurrection.
Henry explained that the original teachings of Buddha, as far back as we can trace them, are much more nihilistic: that is, they describe a universe ultimately devoid of purpose since no individual was willed to be.
“If you look at them objectively, they do believe in those early traditions of snuffing out of consciousness in the Nirvana state,” he said, later clarifying that “nobody really knows what happens to [consciousness], but it’s annihilated.”
Nirvana is certainly the goal of Buddhism, but not so much because Nirvana is wonderful but instead because the cycle of rebirth is so horrifying.
“We think of rebirth in the West [and] we’re romantic about it,” Henry said. “We think it’s a chance to try again, but for Buddhists and Hindus in the East, it’s so negative. When you’re stuck in the karmic cycle, it reverts to the negative. You’re going to be sucked down in it. You’re not going up.”
Undergirding that cycle of rebirth is karma. In Buddhism and Hinduism, it is believed that following death, the karma accumulated by that person over the course of their life determines the state in which they will return. This cycle, called samsāra, is a continual wandering characterized by suffering according to one’s karma. Henry explained that the traditional understanding of karma is much harsher than the vast majority of Westerners seem to realize.
“There’s very little upward motion [in the cycle,]” he said. “There are hells. There are animal states. If you get into those, you’re going to keep getting pulled downward, and it’s nigh impossible to get out.
“The closest thing to grace in Buddhism is when you actually manage to get a human birth,” he continued, “especially an advantageous human birth, where you actually have the karmic setup with you, the karmic tools that you could embark on this path of Buddhism.”
The advantageous human birth, Henry clarifies, is the closest thing to grace in a universe made apart from mercy.
“Karma is a causal system,” he explained. “It's spiritual physics. It's just what is the makeup of reality. There's no justice in it per se because justice would imply that there is some kind of form of judgment that's being made by a higher arbiter. It's completely impersonal and detached.”
With no higher being or creator, the universe in the Buddhist framework is a closed cause-and-effect system.
“If you do such a thing, then such a thing will happen in return to you, your consciousness, as it moves through the cycles of birth and death,” Henry explained.
While Henry sees many beautiful parallels between Christianity and Buddhism, in Buddhism, when the deceased are reborn, “mercy is absent,” he said.
The goal of Buddhism, then, as Henry explains it, is to be free from the cycle of rebirth by passing into oblivion.
“It’s incredibly nihilistic,” Henry said. In Nirvana, “you are gone. Your consciousness, for all intents and purposes, is eradicated. So the question is, ‘What then?’ and the Buddha just doesn’t answer that … But it’s good that you’re out of this system.”
Buddhism’s Heart Problem
Many spiritual seekers like Henry, Kathy and Kira find beauty within Buddhism and other Eastern practices.
But many like Henry, Kathy and Kira found Buddhism unable to reach their hearts.
“Meditation was just me, my mind and the vastness of the universe,” Kira explained. “Yoga asana was just me, my body and a quest for alignment. I did not sense God there. I did not feel love there. But I never stopped seeking God. And through his grace, I was — at last! — called by Jesus Christ to his Church. I found God and his love in Catholicism.”
Kira entered the Catholic Church last Easter.
“There's a lot of good to Buddhism. There's a lot of good goodness there. But there's just not the heart element that I feel in the Catholic Church that I really need,” Kathy explained.
Prior to her conversion, Kathy would daily cry out to God, asking, “Do you love me?”
Decades later, she realizes it was the love of God that she was seeking, and only that love could satisfy.
“There was a longing for God in my heart, which I couldn't really articulate except that I kept looking for him,” Henry said. “Buddhism didn't really satisfy that. I was looking, I'd say, now for a relationship.”
Like Kira and Kathy, it was the love of God, especially in the Passion of Christ, which brought Henry home to the Catholic Church and inspired in him a vocation to evangelize and teach the faith to others.
Standing on the edge of the vast universe, Henry, Kathy and Kira felt the emptiness that their spiritual practices left them with, especially in times of suffering. But they kept seeking.
It is finally and always the love of God that we search for — but only God can satisfy the heart. As the Psalmist wrote, “Only in God is my soul at rest” (Psalm 62).
There are many beautiful truths within Buddhism and much to be appreciated in Buddhist practice. But what Buddhism lacks is the very most precious thing of all: the God who asks, “What are you seeking?” (John 1:38).
Chesterton, in his great work Orthodoxy, suggested that the starkest difference between Buddhism and Christianity could be found in the depictions of their saints. He wrote, “The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. … The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.”
In short, in Buddhism, the Truth is sought; in Christianity, the Truth seeks after us. Buddhism can be likened to a spiritual and philosophic path, but Christianity is always a revelation of the person who desires to love you.
For all the beauty within Buddhism, it finally lacks the “beauty ever ancient and ever new,” as Augustine wrote. For all its truths and the profundity of “the way” Buddha proposed, Buddhism lacks “the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6).
As much as man thinks he seeks after God, the beautiful truth is that God is always and ever the one in pursuit.
