Last week, I found myself sitting with a friend who was speaking enthusiastically about their Christian faith. They were particularly invested in their identity as a Reformed Christian, and I listened as they shared the convictions that gave that identity meaning. There was a time when such a conversation would have awakened something combative in me. I would have listened for theological inconsistencies, assembled counterarguments, and waited for an opportunity to explain why I found the claims of Christianity unpersuasive. I would have wanted to win something, although I am no longer certain what such a victory would have accomplished.
Instead, I simply sat and listened.
I was not suppressing an argument or surrendering my convictions. I felt no particular need to challenge my friend's beliefs, nor any obligation to defend my own. We could understand the world differently and remain entirely at peace with one another. As my brother sometimes says, I had no reason to "yuck their yum." What brought my friend meaning did not need to become an object of criticism simply because I did not share it.
As I sat there, an image came to mind that I had encountered several years earlier: Abanindranath Tagore's The Victory of Buddha (1914). I remembered it from Myths of the Hindus & Buddhists, a collection of religious narratives by Sister Nivedita and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. I had read the book during my own journey away from Christianity, when exploring other religious traditions was becoming an important part of my intellectual life. The painting had remained somewhere in my memory, waiting, perhaps, for an experience that would give it renewed meaning.
Tagore's Buddha is an unusual victor. There are no armies at his feet, no fallen enemies, no banners announcing his triumph. The figure sits quietly against a background of muted gold and blue-gray, his robes dissolving into the atmosphere around him. His face is turned away from the viewer, and his posture suggests neither celebration nor exhaustion. The painting possesses the atmospheric delicacy associated with the Bengal School, of which Tagore was a leading figure. Its restrained palette and softened contours create an impression of stillness that seems to extend beyond the figure into the surrounding space.
The title announces a victory, but the painting withholds almost every conventional symbol of conquest. Whatever struggle preceded this moment has already ended. We are left not with the spectacle of triumph, but with its aftermath.
The book in which I encountered the painting was published in 1914, bringing together stories from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the religious traditions surrounding Krishna, Shiva, and the Buddha. Its authors participated in an intellectual movement concerned with interpreting Indian civilization and recovering the cultural significance of its religious and artistic inheritance. The collection presents mythology as a way of preserving philosophical questions within narrative. Gods intervene in human affairs, heroes confront impossible obligations, and extraordinary beings embody the fears, desires, and aspirations of ordinary humanity.
I have come to approach the Bible in much the same way. It is a collection of writings containing mythology, legend, poetry, law, moral instruction, and theological argument. Its authors and communities used these literary forms to interpret their experiences and communicate what they understood about human existence. I do not regard biblical mythology as inherently more authoritative than the religious narratives of India, nor do I dismiss either tradition because I reject its supernatural claims. Mythology need not be historically literal to remain meaningful. A story can illuminate something important about suffering, love, mortality, or moral responsibility without describing an event that occurred as its believers imagine it.
This understanding has allowed me to continue engaging with religious traditions without accepting their metaphysical foundations. I can appreciate the intellectual and imaginative achievements of Christianity while rejecting its theology. I can find wisdom in Buddhist narratives without accepting rebirth, supernatural beings, or the cosmological world in which those narratives developed. Religious stories remain part of the human conversation about existence, regardless of whether I believe their extraordinary events actually occurred.
Among the stories in Myths of the Hindus & Buddhists is the familiar account of Siddhartha Gautama, the prince who would become the Buddha. Confronted with aging, sickness, and death, Siddhartha recognizes that the comforts of his privileged existence cannot protect him from the conditions shared by all humanity. He abandons his inherited life in search of an answer to suffering, eventually adopting practices of severe asceticism. Yet deprivation brings him close to death without delivering the wisdom he seeks. He finally accepts nourishment and abandons the extremes of indulgence and self-mortification, discovering that liberation requires another path.
I find something compelling in this movement from intensity toward moderation. Siddhartha's renunciation is followed by another kind of relinquishment: the willingness to abandon a struggle that has ceased to be productive. His experience challenges the assumption that perseverance always means continuing along the same path. Sometimes wisdom requires recognizing that the effort itself has become an obstacle.
The central victory represented in Tagore's painting belongs to Siddhartha's confrontation with Māra beneath the Bodhi tree. As Siddhartha approaches enlightenment, Māra attempts to prevent his awakening through temptation, intimidation, and doubt. His armies and challenges embody the forces that perpetuate human suffering: ignorance, fear, craving, and attachment. Yet Siddhartha does not overcome these forces through superior violence. He remains seated, unmoved by the threats before him. When Māra challenges his right to enlightenment, Siddhartha calls upon the earth to bear witness. The confrontation ends not through the destruction of an adversary, but through the failure of that adversary to disturb his awakening.
The supernatural imagery is extraordinary, but its psychological significance interests me more. Māra can be understood as an embodiment of the impulses that govern human behavior when we become attached to our fears, desires, and identities. The story suggests that freedom does not always require defeating the forces that confront us. Sometimes it requires depriving them of their authority over our responses.
I recognize something of my own journey in that lesson.
For many years, questioning Christianity was an important part of establishing my intellectual independence. I had spent so much of my life within the religion that its doctrines continued to occupy a substantial place in my understanding of the world even after I no longer accepted them. Questions about salvation, divine authority, predestination, and the nature of God were never merely academic. They were bound to my history, relationships, and developing sense of identity. Challenging those claims was part of learning to trust my own judgment.
I do not regret that process. There were questions worth asking and arguments worth having. The younger version of myself needed the freedom to challenge inherited authority, particularly when that authority claimed to speak on behalf of ultimate truth. But intellectual independence can become its own form of attachment when we begin defining ourselves primarily through opposition. Eventually, I realized that continuing to argue against beliefs I had already rejected was no longer giving me anything I needed.
One of the most consequential changes in my thinking came when I recognized that my objections were directed toward religious traditions, doctrines, and dogmas rather than the people who believed them.
I have often been told that I cannot judge a perfect God by the behavior of imperfect people. I understand why Christians offer this response, particularly when confronted with religious hypocrisy or institutional failure. But it does not address the substance of my objections. My difficulty with Christianity is not principally that Christians fail to live according to their professed values. My difficulty is with the theological system itself. When subjected to scrutiny, the Christian conception of God does not persuade me. Its claims concerning divine sovereignty, revelation, salvation, suffering, and justice raise questions that I cannot reconcile with my understanding of existence.
The sincerity or moral character of a believer does not resolve those questions. Neither does my rejection of those doctrines diminish the humanity of those who accept them.
Many Christians are thoughtful, compassionate, generous people whose faith provides a meaningful framework for their lives. Their beliefs may contribute profoundly to their identity without becoming the measure by which I judge their worth. I can recognize the value religion brings to their lives without accepting the claims upon which that religion rests.
Perhaps this is difficult to understand from within a religious tradition. Christianity offers an interpretive framework in which belief and unbelief carry consequences extending beyond the present life. Someone who has left the faith may be understood as wandering, wounded, rebellious, or searching, even when that person experiences their departure as the conclusion of sustained inquiry. Having inhabited both perspectives, I understand something of the difficulty. I remember what it meant to believe, but I also know what it means to examine those beliefs and find them unconvincing. My present understanding of existence is not an incomplete version of my former Christianity. It is a worldview I have arrived at through years of reflection.
I would welcome being understood on those terms, but I no longer require that understanding to be at peace.
The philosopher Paul Ricoeur's concept of a second naïveté offers a useful way of considering my continuing relationship with religious mythology. Ricoeur recognized that critical examination changes how we encounter sacred narratives. Once an earlier, unquestioning faith has been subjected to historical and philosophical scrutiny, we cannot simply return to that innocence. Nevertheless, religious symbols may become meaningful again through interpretation. We can recover their significance without abandoning the questions that transformed our understanding of them.
I find this possibility liberating. I cannot return to the Christianity of my youth, nor do I wish to. But I can continue reading its scriptures, appreciating its liturgies, and considering its philosophical traditions. In the same way, I can encounter the Buddhist account of Māra without believing that supernatural armies confronted a historical figure beneath a tree. What matters to me is the human experience illuminated by the story.
This freedom to revisit religious mythology has also changed how I understand the victory that dominated my childhood imagination: the Christian victory of the cross.
Growing up within Christianity, I understood the crucifixion and resurrection as the decisive events in humanity's relationship with God. Christ's death addressed the problem of sin, while his resurrection represented the defeat of death itself. In the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, Paul celebrates this victory with an almost defiant confidence. Death, the apparently inevitable conclusion of human existence, has been deprived of its final authority.
There is a remarkable paradox within this mythology. The cross, an instrument of Roman execution, becomes the central symbol of salvation. Apparent humiliation becomes triumph, and surrender becomes the means through which divine power is revealed. The Christian concept of kenosis, or self-emptying, expressed in the second chapter of Philippians, deepens this paradox. Christ's humility and willingness to relinquish status challenge ordinary assumptions about power, greatness, and victory.
The Christian and Buddhist narratives are not interchangeable. Christianity presents salvation through divine action and reconciliation with God, while Buddhism concerns liberation from ignorance, craving, and the conditions of suffering. Their accounts of human existence and ultimate reality are profoundly different. Yet both reconsider what victory means. At the cross, triumph emerges through apparent defeat and self-giving love. Beneath the Bodhi tree, liberation emerges through the relinquishment of attachment and the cessation of struggle.
I grew up celebrating one of these victories and encountered the other much later in life. Yet I now find that both challenge the human tendency to understand triumph through domination. I can appreciate that wisdom without accepting the supernatural claims through which either tradition expresses it.
Another story from Myths of the Hindus & Buddhists describes the Buddha intervening in a dispute between the Shakyas and the Kolis over the waters of a river. What begins as a conflict over irrigation threatens to become a war. The Buddha asks the opposing parties to consider the value of the water against the value of the lives they are prepared to sacrifice. The narrative exposes the absurdity of allowing the desire to prevail to obscure what matters more.
There is a lesson here about the price of being right. Human beings are remarkably capable of sacrificing relationships, affection, and peace in pursuit of victory. Certainly, some disagreements demand confrontation. Religious doctrines can have real consequences for individuals and communities, and there are circumstances in which criticism becomes a moral responsibility. But not every conversation about religion requires such a confrontation. Sometimes a friend simply wants to share something that brings them comfort, and the value of that relationship exceeds anything I might gain by contesting the claim.
Buddhist teachings about upekkhā, commonly translated as equanimity, help me understand the freedom I have gradually discovered. Equanimity is not indifference, nor does it require abandoning intellectual or moral judgment. It is a cultivated steadiness of mind that allows us to encounter experience without becoming captive to attachment or aversion. We may recognize an impulse without being compelled to act upon it.
This is increasingly how I approach religious conversations. I can hear a theological claim I reject without experiencing it as a challenge to my identity. I can recognize the possibility of an argument without feeling obligated to pursue it. My convictions remain intact, but they no longer require constant defense.
More importantly, I can encounter the person without reducing them to the doctrines they profess.
I do not imagine that I have achieved anything comparable to the enlightenment described in Buddhist tradition. I remain susceptible to frustration, attachment, and the ordinary human desire to be understood. There are still circumstances in which I want to argue, correct, or defend. But I have become better at recognizing those impulses without allowing them to determine my behavior.
Several years ago, I encountered Tagore's painting while reading stories that broadened my understanding of the religious imagination. I appreciated the Buddha's victory as a philosophical idea, an account of liberation from the forces that perpetuate suffering. Sitting with my friend this past week, however, I recognized something of that victory in the ordinary experience of listening.
There had been no decisive argument, no surrender of convictions, no moment when one of us persuaded the other. My friend remained a Christian, and I remained an unbeliever. Nothing needed to be resolved for the encounter to be meaningful.
I return to Tagore's painting and find the Buddha seated in quiet contemplation. The struggle that gives the painting its title is absent from the image itself. There is no adversary left to confront, no audience awaiting an explanation, and no need to announce what has been accomplished. The victory resides in the stillness.
For years, I thought freedom would come from learning how to defeat the beliefs I had left behind. Perhaps the arguments were necessary for a time. But the peace I value most today has little to do with winning. It comes from recognizing that I no longer have to participate in every struggle that presents itself.
Once, I would have wanted the final word.
Now, I am content to sit.