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The Circle of the Way: Reading the Gospel of Thomas as a ChristZen Text
Cross Currents, Wntr, 2002 by Kenneth Arnold
The Christian Gospel of Thomas is a wisdom text, a collection of sayings in which a fictive Jesus instructs his followers (and readers like us) in a new way of living. The sayings are a means for the transformation of life. Thomas is part of a long tradition of such collections that includes Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Pirke Aboth ("Sayings of the Fathers" included in the Mishnah), and the later (fourth century) collections of sayings of the Christian desert fathers. These collections are generally read as straightforward guides for proper living.
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The goal of the student of Zen is to open the mind to satori (enlightenment or realization) in which one realizes oneself. This transformation is the result of mind-to-mind transmission from the teacher to the student. The ego and the intellect get in the way of realization, and the teacher's role is to help orient the student toward a state of consciousness in which fundamental change is possible. One of the vehicles for such reorientation is the koan.
The Sayings Gospel of Thomas can be encountered in the same way one encounters a koan. The teachings of Master Jesus cannot be apprehended intellectually. Like koans, they need to be realized by what Zen would call the unthinking mind. This essay is an experiment in reading Thomas with Zen mind. It concludes with some traditional Zen-style readings of three of the Thomas sayings.
The Gospel of Thomas
The text of the Gospel of Thomas exists in its entirety only in the Coptic version discovered as part of the Nag Hammadi library, which was buried in the fourth century and unearthed in Egypt in 1945. Greek fragments were first found among the Oxyrhynchus papyri and published in 1897 and 1904. While the Coptic version dates to the early fourth century, some scholars estimate that the original text may have been composed late in the first century C.E., probably in Syria. In most versions, it consists of 114 sayings.
Although part of what is generally referred to as a Gnostic Library, Thomas (as the Gospel will be referred to hereafter) is not simply a Gnostic text. Some ascribe the Gnostic aspects of it to a redactor. Harold Bloom, in his "Afterword" to Marvin Meyer's translation, is a cheerleader for Thomas as a thoroughgoing Gnostic. In his introduction, Meyer demurs. He notes that Thomas clearly has other, equally important identifying marks. For example, it is part of the ancient genre of collections of sayings and is of a piece with Jewish Wisdom literature, as I mentioned earlier (Meyer, 7-8).
In terms of its relationship to the canonical New Testament Gospels, Thomas is probably best described as being part of a process of creative borrowing and reworking over time, in which original contributions were combined with traditional materials to create novel literary forms addressed to specific Christian communities. Meyer suggests that the forms of some of the sayings in Thomas appear to be more original than New Testament parallels (Meyer, 13). Bloom finds in Thomas (and the Q Gospel, a sayings collection woven through the synoptics) a Jesus who is a great verbal artist in the oral tradition. He has identified a Jesus who is more like a teacher than a savior:
Nothing mediates the self for the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas. Everything we seek is already in our presence, and not outside our self. What is most remarkable in these sayings is the repeated insistence that everything is already open to you. You need but knock and enter.... The emphasis of this Jesus is upon a pervasive opacity that prevents us from seeing anything that really matters. Ignorance is the blocking agent.... (Bloom, 112, 115)
This perspective sounds more Buddhist than Christian.
The possibility of there having been a Buddhist influence on Thomas is not remote. Elaine Pagels in The Gnostic Gospels notes that the living Jesus of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts speaks of illusion and enlightenment, not sin and repentance. "Instead of coming to save us from sin, he comes as a guide who opens access to spiritual understanding. But when the disciple attains enlightenment, Jesus no longer serves as his spiritual master: the two have become equal -- even identical" (Pagels, xx). (Hence, the voice of Thomas is Didymus Judas Thomas, revered in the early Syriac church as an apostle and twin brother of Jesus.)
Jesus said, "I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become drunk from the bubbling stream which I have measured out.... He who will drink from my mouth will become as I am: I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him." (Thomas, 35 and 50)
As Pagels points out, this identity of the divine and human, concern for illusion and enlightenment, and a founder who is a spiritual guide not a savior sound more Eastern than Western. The living Jesus could as easily be the living Buddha. The British scholar of Buddhism, Edward Conze, has suggested in fact that Hindu or Buddhist tradition may well have influenced Gnosticism. He points out that "Buddhists were in contact with the Thomas Christians (that is, Christians who knew and used such writings as the Gospel of Thomas) in South India" (Conze, in Pagels, xxi). Trade between the Greco-Roman world and the Far East was opening up between 80 and 200 C.E., and for generations Buddhist missionaries had been proselytizing in Alexandria. The possibility of influence and exchange is provocative.
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