Elijah the Bodhisattva: An Interspiritual Exploration

By Malcolm David Brown. O-Books, 2024. 192 pages. $17.95/paperback; $8.99/eBook.

The provocative incongruity of Malcolm David Brown’s title that joins the story of the ancient Hebrew prophet Elijah with the Buddhist ideal of the bodhisattva—the enlightened person who works to liberate others—is only one of many global religious images held in creative tension throughout this learned treatise.

In his introduction, Brown, a British Quaker, locates his own theological attitude in the work of American philosopher John Caputo, particularly Caputo’s theory on the weakness of God. In this view, God is an event, an experience, that makes the “impossible possible.” God is not a strong force that exists outside of the world but rather a foolish insistence, a spirit as light and essential to our being as the air we breathe, that calls us to do justice and love mercy.

The principal spiritual lens through which Brown examines the story of Elijah as told in the Bible (First and Second Kings) is Buddhist. Although he also draws heavily on the mystical and unitive aspects of Judaism, Christianity, and Sufism, Brown is careful not to glibly appropriate cultural traditions not his own. Admitting that it is probably impossible to reconcile different religions, he moves through these various traditions from an experiential and soul-centered perspective, recognizing that the ground of being is beyond culture. In this way, Brown forges his own inner path, finding more than notions, to reveal the universal “light hidden in the text” that speaks to him and hopefully the condition of all spiritual seekers regardless of background.

The experience of enlightenment—so central to Buddhist practice—is approached by Brown from a soul perspective. Soul is not something in a person: “It is more like a gravitational pull of things to each other”: a process rather than a project. For Brown, even individual enlightenment is a communal endeavor bestowed by grace (spiritual practice) and providing insight into the spiritual condition as well as the political circumstances of one’s life.

Once an embodied understanding of the unitive nature of reality as the ground of being is realized, the sense of a separate, individual self drops away to reveal anatta or non-self. Nothing is separate from anything else and what is discovered is the “pearl of great price”: the present awareness of being, the presence of the living Spirit, the Christ in whom we live and move and have our being. With this insight come responsibilities.

In a close reading of the story of Elijah, Brown finds outlines of these responsibilities and inspiration for confronting political and social injustices, yet his reading doesn’t shy away from, or spiritually bypass, the writing’s violent passages. Resorting to violent action reveals our “treatment of the weak,” and evil represents myopic self-preservation, a failure to live with compassion for all beings. When Elijah mocks the prophets of Baal as ineffective, they, in their despair, start cutting themselves: their self-inflicted suffering only creates more suffering.

In his introduction and then again in the afterword, Brown references an apocryphal quote from Augustine about biblical interpretation: “the more meanings the better.” While Brown describes himself in the brief bio as a “recovering academic,” his interpretation of the story of Elijah is ultimately more intimate than scholarly. Certain Sufis believe they will eventually have to make a personal recitation (their own qur’an) of their journey to God to the world; in Elijah the Bodhisattva, Malcolm David Brown has done just that.

---

George Schaefer, a member of Abington (Pa.) Meeting, is a licensed clinical social worker. He served as the care and aging coordinator for Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (PYM) from 2009 to 2022. He is a member of PYM’s Friends Counseling Service and lives in Glenside, Pa., with his wife, Georgette.