One thing I have never been able to shake about Buddhism is that its moral vision seems to rest on a foundation that I regard as fundamentally mistaken. I am not talking about all the virtues it encourages. Non-violence is good, Self-control is good, patience is good. A refusal to be consumed by greed or anger is obviously good. Christians should be able to acknowledge virtues wherever they find them. My concern is with the principle underneath those virtues.
When Christians are told to love their neighbor, the command is not rooted in detachment. It is rooted in attachment of a very specific kind. We are supposed to care what happens to other people and to bind ourselves to their well-being. The Good Samaritan does not achieve moral excellence by remaining emotionally uninvolved. He achieves it by interrupting his journey, spending his money, taking responsibility, and making another man's problem his own. Many forms of Buddhism, by contrast, teach that suffering arises from attachment and that spiritual growth requires liberation from it. Even when Buddhist thinkers speak of compassion, it is usually compassion that exists alongside non-attachment. I understand the logic. I simply do not think it can bear the full weight of moral obligation.
The test of a moral system is not how it behaves when someone is mildly irritated or tempted by material excess. The test comes when evil appears and demands a response. Imagine a German citizen in 1942 who knows Jewish families are being taken away. The Christian answer is relatively straightforward. Those families are his neighbors. Their suffering places a claim upon him whether he wants it or not. He is called to become involved, to risk something, perhaps everything. What I struggle to understand is how a spirituality of detachment reaches the same conclusion. The person who hides a family in his attic has become deeply entangled in the fate of strangers. He desperately cares what happens to them. His virtue seems inseparable from that attachment.
The same problem appears at smaller scales.
A mother sitting beside the hospital bed of a dying child is not detached from the outcome. Nor should she be. Her willingness to suffer alongside her child is not a moral failure. It is one of the highest forms of human fidelity.
The abolitionists who spent decades fighting slavery were not detached from the outcome either. They sacrificed careers, reputations, fortunes, and sometimes their lives because they could not look away. Their moral greatness seems bound up with the very attachment that many spiritual traditions urge us to loosen.
This is one reason Christianity has always seemed more morally compelling to me. It does not tell me to escape the world of loves and losses. It tells me to order them rightly. The Christian martyrs were not detached from the Church. Missionaries who crossed oceans and died in foreign lands were not detached from the people they served. Christ himself is the clearest example. The Incarnation is not a story about detachment from human suffering. It is the story of God ENTERING into the world. The cross is not detachment but love making itself vulnerable.
I understand why people are drawn to detachment. It promises peace in a world full of grief and disappointment. What I have never been persuaded of is that it can produce the kind of fierce, costly loyalty that stands between victims and their persecutors. Responsibility seems to require attachment. Love certainly does. And I have come to believe that responsibility is a firmer foundation for moral life than detachment could ever be.