"Jesus eats and drinks with whores and highwaymen, turns water into wine, and finally, in one way or another, establishes a mystical union at a feast through its humble instruments of bread and wine." Adam Gopnik, from "What Did Jesus Do?," The New Yorker, May 24, 2010, page 74.

Jesus shared wine with publicans and sinners as a way of awakening them to that fact that these identities so clung to by habit were not, in fact, all they were, not even mainly, that secretly, or not, they were something entirely, or at least largely, different. It is the same message as the Buddha's, brought to a young West, that the notion of Self is an illusion. To all seemingly concrete conclusions about a identity, Jesus brings questioning and contradiction, revealing the riddle to any claim of Self. The wealthy are too cooked by all their assumptions of self-preservation and what-not, and will have a very hard time giving up who they see themselves to be. They'll never get to the humble Four Noble Truths and the Eight-fold Path. The poor, the sad, the mournful, are closer to the understandings which will release them, though they still have a ways to go. Caesar, well, his things are based on illusions, and if you really want to subscribe to all that, you're welcome to, but will remain mistaken. Oh, you think the harlot is solidly guilty and that you are solidly righteous enough to judge her, well, let's see if you are truly free of sin...

It's a voice that questions a lot of what a society places upon people to give them recognizable identities, radical indeed. It's reasonable to gather that an establishment might not be completely content with that.

Now what if you start asking yourself the Buddhist's questions? Hmm. Well, you have to start somewhere, and at first you may well not like some, maybe many, of your own habits. You might begin to see through things. You might begin to see yourself as something akin to a Prodigal Son, a faulted sorry self. There may come some troubling questions about your professional life, your personal life.

It could be that it isn't entirely your fault. In certain ways we live in a society that enables the tempting devils of Maya. And Buddha wouldn't be Buddha--and Jesus wouldn't be Jesus--if there weren't a susceptibility on the part of the human creature to, as lower animals, respond to stimuli, even stimuli made up in one's own head of a tempting sort. The two are monumental thinkers for good reason; their insights are brilliant, maybe even testable, of a high sort, with great powers known and unknown, a whole new way of looking at things, in deep agreement with the nature of reality. And maybe they provide stuff we, in our busy lives, don't get to sort out so forcefully.

Jesus' confrontation with the ego's fascination with wiles is rendered as a personal encounter with a personified Satan he will say no to. The Judeo-Christian tradition is full of 'personal encounters,' voices, clear signs from the God of Abraham. (Later on, we'll get the Mormons' personal messages from archangels.) Buddha, in some contrast, is more about drawing such epiphanies out through careful thought, logic, meditation, stuff one does on his own, free to all for the taking.

You might find yourself feeling a bit naked, like you're nothing but a sad person after a life of asking yourself questions, but a life of falling into the same old habits, if still having been capable of treating other folks with friendliness, kindness, hopefully some decency. And you are at least free now from being little more than just entirely a publican, a sinner, a lowly fisherman living humbly at the edge of a great busy empire.

It comes as a sense of footing, the right kind, to allude to a parable of Jesus, at times an uneasy place for the worldly to inhabit, maybe a rather lonely one, but a healthy, psychologically sound and independent one. For what it's worth, essential now as then for negotiating life.