Zen Buddhism is one of the more philosophic and orientally flavored of cultism, peculiarly adapted to the Western mind in that it decidedly shuns outright supernaturalism, but encourages a “Satori” (enlightenment) experience, “an awakening of our original inseparability with the universe.” The ultimate goal of Zen Buddhism is “the freeing of the will,” so that “all things bubble along in one interrelated continual.”

Those who would be disciples of Zen must allow their ego to be detached until “one’s real self calmly floats over the world’s confusion” like a ping-pong ball skimming over the turbulent rapids of life. In a world faced faced with deprivation, hunger, disease, death, and the ever-present shadow of nuclear warfare, the denial of such reality borders on the criminal. Zen Buddhism, in our opinion, is the most self-centered, selfish system of philosophy that the depraved soul of man can embrace, for it negates the two basic principles upon which all spiritual reality exists: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind…[and] thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 22:37, 39).

For Zenists, it is the love of self first, last, and always. This is the core of Zen, which releases one from spiritual responsibility and substitutes intellectual enlightenment for conversion, and the absence of concern for one’s fellow man for peace with God. Historically, Buddhism has produced nothing but indescribable conditions under which its subjects live. For in almost every area of the world where Buddhism of any form holds sway, there stalks the specter of disease, hunger, and moral and spiritual decay.

The people of the Orient are the slaves of their religions, and Buddhism, with its egocentricity and inherently selfish concept of life and of responsibility to society, is by all odds one of the greatest offenders. Let those who consider Zen as a superior form of religious philosophy look well at its history and its fruit, for “by their fruits ye shall know them” Matthew 7:20). [1]

Dr. Walter Martin

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Endnotes:

[1] Walter Martin, Ravi Zacharias, Gen. Ed., The Kingdom Of The Cults [Bloomington: Bethany House, 2003], 311.