Lucien MILLER. Jesus in the Hands of Buddha: The Life and Legacy of Shigeto Vincent Oshida, O.P. Foreword by Timothy Radcliffe, O.P. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2023. pp. xx+195. $24.95 pb., $22.90 eBook. ISBN 9780814668672-6867 eISBN: 9780814668689-E6868. Reviewed by James BRETZKE, S.J., John Carroll University, University Heights, OH 44118.

This is an intriguing, but difficult book to review. It is part memoir, part biography, part theological reflection, and part narrative of some of Oshida’s Zen-inspired Christian retreats. The author has a doctorate in comparative literature from Cal-Berkeley who taught at the U. Massachusetts-Amherst. He spent several sabbaticals in East Asia and India, and has also served as a deacon and spiritual director at the Newman Catholic Student Center. All of that background clearly is intertwined with his presentation of Fr. Oshida (1922-2003), a Japanese Dominican who in turn has frequently been described as person with “a double religious identity”– a Zen Buddhist cultural background by birth and a Dominican priest by choice.

Miller recounts that Oshida described his decision to become a Catholic, echoing Jeremiah 20:7, ‘by a trick of God’. Oshida became a Catholic based because he assumed that all Catholics must be Fr. Herman Heuvers, SJ, (1890-1977) former president of the Jesuit Sophia University in Tokyo, who had led Oshida into the Church in 1943 shortly before being drafted into the Japanese army.  Of course, he quickly discovered this was not the case, yet neither he nor God let go of each other.

Though he lived a relatively long life, Oshida was often troubled by long-standing tuberculosis and other related illnesses. He had been able to travel widely and conversed easily in French and English along with his native Japanese. One of his most important accomplishments was the the acquisition of the land and opening of the Takamori Soan (Hermitage and International Community) in the “Japanese Alps” of the Nagano Prefecture. One might think there were many contradictions between Zen and Christianity and in a sense Oshida held these all together in his own life and approach to spirituality. Key for him was the concept of madoi [円居] or “living friendship circle” that animated his life and apostolate as a Zen-infused Catholic hermit which he experienced as an ongoing tension. Reading Miller’s account of Oshida brought to my mind the character Otsu in Shusaku Endo’s Deep River—a man not really at “home” in either Asian Japan or Western Christianity, but nevertheless imbued with all of these inherent apparent contradictions.

A good deal of Miller’s account is given over to providing a summary of the Sesshin or week-long retreats that Oshida gave in various places around the world. Miller attended a few of these held near the Trappist Spencer Abbey in Massachusetts and gives us a good recollection of the various talks that Oshida presented. The notes from the sessions are a bit like a collection of koans, worth reflecting upon, but quite impossible to schematize, or even summarize. The “points” of the conferences were a bit like the facets of a diamond when held up to the light will refract different parts of the light bandwidth spectrum.

In the Epilogue Miller recounts the last time Miller was with Fr. Oshida in 1981 at the latter’s invitation to a special conference in Japan on the threat of the nuclear holocaust. Miller speaks of Oshida as a sort of leader and pioneer in interfaith dialogue, though I wonder if Oshida himself would accept that categorization. Rather,  I think Oshida would self-identify as simply a person who earnestly and honestly searched for “God” however He might appear and be hidden in plain sight.