Why A Chinese
Buddhist Became an Orthodox Athonite Monk
by Fr. Libyos
On my last
trip to Mount Athos I visited the Monastery of Simonopetra. It is a majestic
monastery and the sky was fully blue. There I met a graceful novice monk from
China. In truth, he surprised me by his presence.
An Orthodox rason on
a Chinese man?
I was moved
somewhat. I had never seen this before up close, only in pictures of missions.
An inheritor of a great cultural tradition and for him to embrace Christianity?
My friends and I got curious to ask him about this.
“Brother, how
did you, a Chinese man, embrace Orthodox Christian monasticism coming from such
a great cultural tradition? Were you a Buddhist?”
“Yes, of
course, I was a Buddhist.”
“What won you
over to Christianity?”
“Divine
companionship!”
“Excuse me?”
“Yes, yes,
Father, hahahahaha!”,
he laughed,
since with every three words the Chinese seem to laugh at two.
“In Buddhism,
my Father, you are very very much alone. There is no God. Your entire struggle
is with yourself. You are alone with yourself, with your ego. You are totally
alone in this path. Great loneliness Father. But here you have an assistant, a
companion and a fellow-traveler in God. You are not alone. You have someone who
loves you, who cares about you. He cares even if you don’t understand Him. You
speak with Him. You tell Him how you feel, what you would have hoped for –
there is a relationship. You are not alone in the difficult struggles of life
and spiritual perfection.
I realized
things in those days. A severe cold bound me to bed. No doctor could find
anything wrong with me. The clinical picture was clear, at least the doctors
couldn’t see anything. The pain was unbearable and there was absolutely no pain
killer that could stop it. I changed three different pain killers and still the
pain was not alleviated.
At this time
I got the news that the brother of my father, whose name I bear, had an advanced
form of cancer in the vocal cords and larynx. He had a largyngectomy. It was
the result of chronic alcohol consumption and smoking. Generally he lived a bad
life, without any quality.
Then I felt
something a former Buddhist and now a Christian monk on Mount Athos told me,
that you need to have a God you can talk to; to perceive and to feel someone
besides yourself Who hears you.
I don’t know
if it’s wrong or right. I only know it is a deep need of man. This is evidenced
by life itself. Even these Buddhists, who are from a non-theistic religion,
created various deities. Even in dream language and worlds. But they have a
need to refer to someone, to something, someone beyond and outside themselves,
even if it’s dreamy. Besides, reality and truth is something very relevant and
will always remain so. It is an enigma, a mystery.
At this I
remembered the words of Saint Gregory the Theologian, who had a sensitive and
melancholic nature, when he said:
“When you are
not well, or not feeling so, speak. Speak even if it is to the wind.”
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