In my quest for indigenous Asian theology, I discovered Kosuke Koyama’s book, Waterbuffalo Theology. Koyama was a Japanese Christian theologian, who served as a missionary in Thailand for eight years. His chapter entitled, “Aristotelian Pepper and Buddhist Salt” talks about how Christian theology in the hands of Thai believers can get salted with Theravada Buddhism. Very insightful about how real Buddhists practice a Buddhism that is full but not “pure.”

I saw this growing up with my grandmother. She was the spiritual leader of our family, who followed the Chinese calendar and led us in rituals on designated days. When I was young, I was taught to offer cups of rice wine, to burn paper that resembled money, and to bow. I remember the smell of the incense and the table setting with three sets of chopsticks and food, which always included a whole chicken. These were the “old ways.” My older brother, the eldest in our family, when he took over the ancestor rituals, said to me, “we are Buddhists.” Yes, and with some local Toisan culture mixed in. 

Koyama taught that we must know actual Buddhists and not fixate on the pure Buddhism of philosophies and books. He also said that we needed to go beyond the polite theological conversations in the living room and listen in on the unfiltered conversations that were happening in the kitchen. How were the Thai Christians adding Buddhist salt to the Aristotelian peppered theology that the Western missionaries brought?

The form of his chapter is a letter to a towering missionary of a previous generation, Dr. Daniel McGilvary, who wrote A Half Century Among the Siamese and the Lao. “You spoke simply, forcefully and straightforwardly to the listening Thai,” Koyama wrote. But perhaps McGilvary missed how the “cultural modesty” of the Thai did not lead them to directly say how strange McGilvary’s message must of sounded. “I have become very curious to know whether your audience understood your preaching or not, if you will pardon me for asking,” Koyama wrote.

Koyama went on to ask how the great missionary explained the language he used in his preaching: “Buddha groaned under his load of guilt”; “Our Jehovah Jesus is the only self-existent being in the universe”; and “He did this out of infinite love and pity for our race after it had sinned.” McGilvary spoke in the Northern Thai dialect to Thai peasants, using “thoroughly strange and unrealistic” Western Christian vocabulary.

I was in no position to evaluate the validity of Koyama’s critique, but he went on to suggest an inculturated translation: “Buddha groaned under his own load of dukkha”; “Our Jehovah Jesus is the only arahant in the universe”; and “He did this out of infinite mercy for our race after it is caught by ‘craving’.” This Koyama proposed after long conversations and years lived with real Thai Buddhists while studying Theravada Buddhism.

In reading Koyama, I was not looking to become a missionary to Buddhists. I was looking to know Buddhists who might have knowledge of Christ that can only come from their own indigenous contexts. To borrow Koyama’s image, I was looking for a doubly-seasoned–Buddhist salt and Aristotelian pepper–Christian theology. As an Asian American Christian, a doubly-seasoned Christian theology was intriguing.

It goes without saying that there is no theologically “pure” Christians, either. The Western branch of Christianity was peppered with all kinds of indigenous philosophies and practices from that part of the globe–the North Atlantic. Western theology was never pure nor meant to be an orthodoxy by which other theologies were measured. I am grateful for pioneers like Koyama that nudges us toward a fuller knowledge of the Divine, who embraces all of our human experiences.