The Commandments as Koan
The Teaching
You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery. But I say unto you, that whosoever looks on a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart. Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. — Matthew 5:27–28, 5:48
Commentary
Read as instructions, the demands of the Sermon on the Mount are not difficult but impossible. Love your enemies. Take no thought for tomorrow. Want nothing that is not yours. Be perfect. No one has met them, and the consistency of their impossibility looks deliberate.
The clue is that the teacher breaks his own rule. He warns that whoever calls his brother a fool is in danger of hellfire, then later, addressing the crowd, calls them fools to their faces. A rule its own author violates is not a rule. It is a device.
Paul names the mechanism directly: the law was given not in the expectation that it would be kept, but to convict, to reveal the gap between what is asked and what the separate self can do. This is the same structure as a Zen koan, a question with no answer, pressed against the grasping mind until that mind exhausts itself. The commandments are a koan disguised as a law. You try, you fail, and in the failing the question opens: who, exactly, was supposed to be doing all this? When you look for that doer, you cannot find it. That absence is what the impossible demands were built to reveal.
Themes
Connections 8
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. No known exchange while either’s teachings took shape. The Buddha’s life later reached Christian Europe as the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat (10th–11th c.), and a Christian church in Tang China used Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781).
Arose apart
No known transmission between Christianity and Taoism while these teachings took shape. The Church of the East reached Chang’an in 635 and described itself in Taoist and Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781), long after both took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Christianity and Hinduism while these teachings took shape. Christians lived in Kerala from early centuries, but exchange of ideas begins only with the Jesuits: Akbar’s court debates (from 1580), Roberto de Nobili writing on Hindu doctrine in Tamil (from 1606), then Wilkins’s English Gita (1785), the Upanishads in Latin (1801–02) and Vivekananda (1893). All long after either’s formative teachings.
Travelled
Alan Watts read and drew on Christianity.
Travelled
Ram Dass read and drew on Christianity.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Christianity and Taoism while these teachings took shape. The Church of the East reached Chang’an in 635 and described itself in Taoist and Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781), long after both took shape.