Rooted in both.

i. The title, explained.

Baptized Buddhist. Not Buddhist-Christian, not interfaith, not a third and easier religion made from the soft parts of two. It is a description of a man standing in both traditions with three sons asleep upstairs, in a village where the wat is the center of everything and the nearest church is hours away. That position is rare, and it is the only credential this site has. I am not a Pali scholar and I am not a theologian. I am a man who has to answer his sons' questions from inside both rooms at once.

And one concession, up front, because a Thai reader will be looking for it. Christianity has a doctrine of sin as a stain — inherited, indelible, needing to be washed. A lot of my early life was spent under that doctrine and a lot of my adult life was spent getting out from under it. The New Testament word for it, hamartia, comes from archery: it means to miss the mark. That is a much better teaching — where were you aiming? is that where you meant to aim? — and I use it with my sons. But Buddhism never needed the correction. Its word is akusala: unskillful. A bad shot. Not a stain, not inherited, not a verdict on the archer. The tradition down my road said bad shot from its first century and never stopped. Where Buddhism is sharper, I will say so first.

ii. Where they agree, and neither borrowed from the other.

Four places. Each one matters more than the disagreements below, because when two traditions with no contact arrive at the same thing, that is evidence.

• Conscience. Elijah, in the cave, hears the voice not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire but after them — a still, small voice. The Pali texts name two qualities, hiri and ottappa — the inner sense of shame and the dread of doing wrong — and call them the guardians of the world. A voice inside that informs and does not compel. Both traditions say civilization rests on it.
• Aim before conduct. The archery reading of sin puts the direction of the will ahead of the act. So does the Eightfold Path: sammā-saṅkappa, right intention, is the second fold — placed deliberately before right speech and right action.
• Nobody needs a king. In Exodus, Jethro tells Moses to stop judging every case himself and build a hierarchy of tens, each rung settling what it can before anything goes up. The Buddha, dying, refused to name a successor: the teaching and the discipline would be the teacher. Twenty-five centuries later the monastic community still governs itself by local acts with quorum rules and seven procedures for settling disputes, and there has never been a pope. The two oldest working systems of distributed responsibility on earth, and neither has a throne in it.
• Forcing yourself does not work. The founding story of Buddhism is six years of the most extreme willpower against a body on record — and it failed. The first sermon names two wrong roads, not one: the pursuit of pleasure and the pursuit of self-torment. A Vienna psychiatrist named the same thing clinically in 1939 — hyper-intention, trying too hard at what can only come as a by-product — and built a treatment on it. A Kadampa monk's sister found it at a family gathering. The lever is not the stick.

iii. Where they disagree, and I am not going to resolve it for you.

Three places. Presented as not resolving, because they don't.

• The self, and the story. The Christian narrative tradition — and the modern teachers who work from it — says life is a story, and the task is to become the protagonist of a better one. The Theravāda texts say the protagonist is the fabrication, and that the fabrication is precisely what suffering is built on: anattā, not-self. One says become the hero. The other says the hero is the disease. And yet the Buddha was the greatest storyteller in the history of religion — 547 birth-stories, the raft, the arrow, the blind men and the elephant. The difference is not story against no story. It is what the story is for: one tradition uses it to build a self worth being, the other to take a self apart. Same instrument, opposite direction.
• Relief, or cessation. Both agree that suffering is real and that love and meaning relieve it. Buddhism made that the First Noble Truth. The disagreement is the Third: nirodha — cessation, not relief. Buddhism is not offering a painkiller. It is proposing that the condition which produces the need for one can end.
• What a called man owes the people in his house. Moses is called and takes his wife and sons with him; the exodus is a household operation. Siddhattha is called and leaves his wife and his newborn son at night — and the tradition names the boy Rāhula, fetter, and tells the leaving as the necessary cost of the greatest act in human history. Two traditions, each founded on a man who received a call, and they cannot both be right about what he owed the people asleep in the next room. I have an answer to this one, and it is a structure rather than an argument.

iv. The third position.

Viktor Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist, a Jew who survived four camps, and a clinician who left the ultimate deliberately open so that anyone could fill it from their own tradition. His answer to the three disagreements above is not a bridge between them. It is a third thing.

On the self: logotherapy is not about finding yourself. Frankl's whole position is that a person aimed at himself is sick — "human existence is essentially self-transcendence rather than self-actualization" — which is closer to anattā than anything in the narrative frame. On suffering: it is sometimes unavoidable and never necessary, and meaning is available in full without any of it; the stance toward unavoidable suffering is the last of his three paths, not the first. On the house: he treats "to experience one human being as unique" as one of the three ways a life gets its meaning, and calls that love.

That is why the method site in this family is his. Logotherapist.com sets out what logotherapy is, what a logotherapist does, and what the evidence actually shows — in his own words, with the weak parts named first.

v. Right livelihood, and me.

The fifth fold of the Eightfold Path, sammā-ājīva, comes with a list: five trades a lay follower should not undertake. Weapons. Human beings. Meat. Intoxicants. Poison. I owned or ran adult entertainment venues with alcohol licenses, sold pork at a farmers' market for five years, and was president of the company behind a cannabis café. Three of the five, and a fourth only by luck. Somebody will do that arithmetic on a website called Baptized Buddhist. I would rather it were me, and I would rather not argue with the text. Here is what I actually think →