I'm going to hold off on writing about the sesshin in Bloomington for a little bit longer, because I read a very interesting article in last week's New Yorker (I'm a little behind in my reading) about Gnostic Christianity, and I was taken by some of the similarities between this historical movement and Buddhism. The article, "The Saintly Sinner" by Joan Acocella, was primarily about Mary Magdalene. But it also included the following fascinating account of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library:

Biblical scholars had understood for a long time that the orthodox Church was just the segment of the Church that won out over competing Christian sects, notably the so-called Gnostics. But, apart from what could be gathered from the Church fathers’ denunciations of these supposed heretics, students of early Christianity knew little about them. Then, one day in December of 1945, an Arab peasant named Muhammad Ali al-Samman drove his camel to the foothills near the town of Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt, to collect fertilizer for his fields, and as he dug he unearthed a clay jar about three feet high. Hoping that it might contain treasure, he broke it open and, to his disappointment, found only a bunch of papyrus books, bound in leather. He took the books home and tossed them in a courtyard where he kept his animals. In the weeks that followed, his mother used some pages from the books to light her stove; other pages were bartered for cigarettes and fruit. But eventually, after a long journey through the hands of antiquities dealers, black marketers, smugglers, and scholars, Samman’s find was recognized as a priceless library of Gnostic writings—thirteen codices, containing fifty-two texts—recorded in Coptic (an early form of Egyptian) in the fourth century but translated from Greek originals dating from between the second and fourth centuries. In time, the books were confiscated by the Egyptian government and moved to the Coptic Museum in Cairo, where they remain today. (They were published in 1972-77.)

The Gnostic Gospels are full of surprising content, Acocella writes, with a Demiurge (not God) creating the universe, and the story of the Fall told from the point of view of the serpent, a friend to mankind. So far, Gnostic Christianity is still very different from Buddhism, which has no creation myth, but Acocella describes the key Gospel of Mary thusly:

As the treatise opens, the Risen Christ is preaching to his disciples. There is no such thing as sin, he says. Also, the disciples, in their quest for the divine, should follow no authorities, heed no rules, but simply look within themselves. Having delivered these lessons, Jesus departs, leaving his disciples quaking with fear. No sin? No rules?. . .

In Greek, gnosis means “knowledge.” To the Gnostic communities, it meant a kind of spiritual understanding — the goal of all believers — that was achieved only through intense self-examination, typically accompanied by visions. The Gospel of Mary shows the Magdalene as an expert in this practice. It also presents her as a leader, full of confidence and zeal.

Looking for answers within the self, no rules and no sin all sound very Buddhist. The early orthodox Church regarded the Gnostic communities as heretics, and in the fourth century when the orthodox Church was finally, after centuries of persecution, achieving stability, the leaders of a Gnostic community near Nag Hammadi, apparently feeling that they were now in serious danger, put their most precious books in a jar and buried it in the hillside.

The classic reference on this subject is Elaine Pagels’s 1979 “The Gnostic Gospels.” As Pagels explains, the Orthodox Church’s whole effort at this time was to create an institution, and certain Gnostic principles—above all, the rejection of rules and hierarchies —were utterly incompatible with institutionalization.

Pagels also points out that Gnosticism, for all its egalitarianism, was élitist. To qualify, you had to set yourself, over a long course of study, to discovering the divine within yourself. This wasn't for everyone, and the orthodox Church wanted everyone. Accordingly, the Church did not ask people to search for the divine—their priest would tell them what the divine was—and it assured them that as long as they confessed certain prescribed articles of faith and observed certain simple rituals, they, too, could enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Setting oneself on a long course of study to discover the divine within is very similar to the Buddhist meditative experience. Combined with the lack of prescriptive rules for behavior and the negation of the concept of sin, one can wonder if the early Mahayana Buddhists present in the world at the time of the Gnostics would really have found much to disagree with.

With the publication of the Gnostic Gospels, abetted by postmodern theory, a number of young scholars have come to regard early Christianity as a process, a vast, centuries-long argument among competing sects. Between the first and fourth centuries, Christianity had coalesced into a few broad traditions. One of these was Magdalene Christianity, whose goal was to put an end to the oppression of the world’s powerless. Magdalene Christianity was egalitarian in its organization, and Jesus was “not hero or leader or God” but just a brother to his fellow-reformers. It was only after his death and Resurrection that the focus shifted from the group to him alone, and that he was deified. The Resurrection, to Jesus, meant the ethical renewal of the world.

The Mahayana Buddhists pledge to save all sentient beings, and to seek enlightenment not for themselves, but for the benefit of all others. Magdalene's goal of ending oppression and bringing about the ethical renewal of the world, achieved through a long course of introspective study to discover the divine within, is amazingly similar to goals of the Mahayana movement.