He learned the language before he formed the opinion
Eugene Rose graduated from Pomona College in 1956 with a degree in Oriental Languages. He had learned to read Chinese, ancient and modern, because he wanted the sages without a translator standing between him and the page. His parents had expected a scientist, and his teachers a brilliant career in mathematics. He gave that up for a question he could not put down: whether there is anything real underneath the life everyone around him was living.
At the Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco he studied under its dean, Alan Watts, then the best-known populariser of Zen in the English-speaking world. The teacher who marked him more deeply was a Chinese philosopher on the same faculty, Gi-ming Shien, described in the biographical note printed in Fr. Seraphim's own books as a true representative of the Chinese tradition rather than a Western interpreter of it. Together the two of them worked on rendering the Tao Teh Ching out of the old characters.
Berkeley came next. He took his master's degree in Oriental Languages there in 1961, and during those years he visited Eastern temples — not as a tourist collecting impressions, but as a man looking for somewhere to stand. From Gi-ming, and from the French metaphysician René Guénon, he had absorbed a principle he kept for a long time: that if a religion is to be entered at all, it must be entered in its traditional and orthodox form, whichever religion that turns out to be.
What he admired, and why it is worth saying first
It is easy to assume that a Christian writer who ends up disagreeing with Buddhism never understood it. That is not what happened here, and the honest thing is to say so before anything else. He knew these traditions from inside their texts, in their own languages, under teachers who belonged to them. Whatever he wrote later, he wrote as a man who had been held by them once, and who never pretended otherwise.
Their seriousness impressed him permanently. The Chinese sages taught him that strength can look like suppleness and that the yielding thing outlasts the rigid thing, and he believed that for the rest of his life. Hindu metaphysics offered him an account of reality far more ambitious than the flattened materialism of 1950s California. Zen offered discipline without sentimentality. None of that was a mistake, and he did not afterwards describe it as one.
Speaking in May 1981 to a comparative religion class at the University of California, Santa Cruz — a room full of students who had tried gurus, Tibetan and Zen Buddhism, shamanism and hallucinogens — he began not by correcting them but by granting the premise of their search. There is only one serious reason to study religion, he told them: to come into contact with a reality deeper than the ordinary one, which changes, rots away and leaves nothing behind.
Every religion that is sincere tries to open up contact with this reality.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, God's Revelation to the Human Heart, §1 “The Search” (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Second Edition, 2014)
The search ended in a way he had not planned
One day in the early 1960s he walked into a Russian Orthodox church in San Francisco. By his own later account he went in the way he had gone into the Buddhist temples: to look at another tradition, one that Guénon's circle had named as the most authentic surviving form of Christianity. What met him there was not a conclusion he reached by argument. It was a recognition — the search, he wrote afterwards, was simply over, although the service was strange to him and in a language he did not know.
Naming the change took him longer than having it. Truth, he came to think, was not an abstraction to be mastered by a capable mind but someone personal, sought and loved by the heart. He was received into the Orthodox Church on the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, 25 February 1962. Nineteen years later, standing in front of the Santa Cruz students, he put the same thing not as a memory but as a rule about how God is known at all.
God's revelation is given to something called a loving heart.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, God's Revelation to the Human Heart, §2 “Revelation” (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Second Edition, 2014)
What he concluded, stated plainly
Here is the part that cannot be softened without dishonesty. Fr. Seraphim did not conclude that the traditions climb one mountain by different paths. He concluded that Jesus Christ is God become man; that the Church He founded still exists and is the Orthodox Church; and that the fullness of communion with God is given there and is not on offer elsewhere. That is the traditional Orthodox position, he held it to the end, and this parish holds it too.
Such a claim is hard, and we will not dress it up as something milder. What it is not, though, is a claim about anyone's intelligence, sincerity, family or worth. Many Orthodox Christians reached Orthodoxy precisely because they found other traditions more serious than the Christianity they had been shown as children; Fr. Seraphim was one of them. The claim is about who Christ is. It is not a ranking of the people who have not yet met Him.
Second, and less often quoted, he set a firm limit on how far the claim may be pressed. Asked where particular souls stand before God, he declined to answer — not out of vagueness, but on principle. In a letter of 27 November 1980, written to a catechumen who was distressed by the harsh language she kept meeting in Orthodox books and who wanted to know whether she could still call her family Christians, he laid down the rule he kept himself.
it is not for us to define the state of those who are outside the Orthodox Church
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 27 November 1980, in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St. Herman Press, 2003)
The book people quote, and who wrote which part of it
Nearly every argument about Fr. Seraphim and the Eastern religions comes back to one book: Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, first published in April 1975 and now in its Fifth Edition (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2004). Anyone quoting it should know how it is assembled, because it is a compilation he edited as well as wrote, and the name on the cover does not describe every page inside.
The distinction is not pedantry. Some of the sharpest sentences about Hinduism that circulate online under his name belong to Chapter II, which he selected and printed but did not compose. It is also worth knowing that the text has changed between editions and that this has been publicly questioned by at least one Orthodox critic, so the responsible habit is to name the edition you are citing, every time. This article cites the Fifth Edition of 2004.
- Chapter I, on whether Christians and non-Christians have the same God, is by Fr. Basile Sakkas, reprinted from La Foi Transmise (1970).
- Chapter II, on Hinduism, is signed “By a Convert to Orthodoxy” — a woman who had practised Hinduism before becoming Orthodox.
- Chapter III, on a fakir's miracle and the Prayer of Jesus, is by Archimandrite Nicholas Drobyazgin.
- The Preface, the Introduction, Chapters IV to VIII and the epilogue “Jonestown and the 1980s” are Fr. Seraphim's own work.
- The Preface and Epilogue to the Fifth Edition are by Hieromonk Damascene, written long after Fr. Seraphim's death in 1982.
How he wrote about a Zen monastery
His own chapters are the fairest test of how he handled a tradition he had left behind. Chapter V reports at first hand on Zen training at a monastery in northern California, and the report is not a hatchet job. He notes that the community forbids fortune-telling and psychic practice, that it warns students against drifting from teacher to teacher, that it has little patience with merely academic religion, and that it demands hard work and the banishing of flattering illusions about oneself.
More striking still, he writes that the young monks there discuss the spiritual life in a tone so sober and knowledgeable that it sounds like the conversation of serious young Orthodox converts, and that an Orthodox Christian reading them might well recognise himself and say that only grace had placed him elsewhere. He judged Zen the most intellectually sophisticated and the most spiritually sober of the Eastern movements then arriving in America, and he took its teaching of compassion seriously rather than caricaturing it.
Where he finally disagrees is not about the quality of the people or the rigour of the discipline. His objection is that an ideal reached by human effort, however high it goes, is not the same thing as the God who came down and looked for us; and that a path which relies on experience alone has no way of telling one kind of experience from another. You may think that wrong. It is at least an argument about the thing itself, made by someone who had been in the room.
He went on quoting Lao Tzu to his monks
A man who had repudiated his old studies would simply have dropped them. He did not. In 1979, seventeen years after his baptism and two years after his ordination to the priesthood, he gave an informal talk on simplicity to the brothers and sisters gathered at his monastery, and he taught them out of Lao Tzu, introducing him plainly as a philosopher who was not a Christian.
The oak trees on the ridge above the monastery, he said, are hard and unbending, and their limbs come down in every storm; the pines bend, and stay standing. Then he turned the image on his own people: a man so certain of himself that he will take your head off over a disagreement is not showing strength but weakness, because he needs to convert you in order to be sure of his own belief.
Whatever else that is, it is not the behaviour of someone who thought the Chinese sages were beneath his notice. He had read them at twenty; he was still teaching from them at forty-five, to monks, in a forest, as a priest.
If your family is Buddhist, Hindu or Taoist
In Singapore none of this is abstract. It is the question of what happens at home — whose altar, whose joss sticks, who is expected at the temple for the anniversary of a death, what a son does at his father's funeral. Orthodox Christians in this city live inside families where most of the people they love are Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist or of no particular religion, and this parish has no wish to make that harder than it already is.
Fr. Seraphim's own family were Protestants, and his conversion was not easy for them. What he told converts was to live at peace, especially with their own families; that calling people names accomplished nothing; and that when the non-Orthodox have not seen the truth of the Church, part of the reason may well be that we have not lived it in any way they could recognise. He kept that last accusation pointed at himself and never removed it.
So the claim stands, unsoftened, and it is not a claim that anyone owes us agreement. If you have read this far out of curiosity about what the Orthodox actually hold, you are welcome to keep reading, and you are welcome to come and stand quietly at the back of a service in Kovan and watch. Nobody will ask you to sign anything. It is the same door Eugene Rose walked through in San Francisco, as a man who had come only to look.