Christianity and Buddhism

I went up to visit a Japanese Buddhist monastery in the mountains near here. Although they are Japanese, they are not Zen, and I don't actually remember the name of their order. It is quite different than Tibetan Buddhism, but in essence, it is the same. They did a ceremony where they banged on drums and chanted with the goal of world peace. This same group leads an annual walk from Atlanta to Oak Ridge to protest the existence and manufacture of nuclear bombs. The monastery has only two regular residents, a monk and a nun, and I immediately liked them both. After the ceremony, we ate a delicious home-cooked meal that they had prepared. The monk, Brother Izumi, talked a bit about American Buddhism. (By the way, he welcomed us as if we were old friends, even though we practice Tibetan Buddhism.) In any event, he emphasized that Buddhism often reconnects people with their Christian roots, with the true spirit of Christianity. He pointed out that this true spirit is thriving in places like South America. In fact, what Brother Izumi was saying has been echoed by all the Buddhist teachers I've ever heard voice an opinion about the subject. Christianity and Buddhism are not contradictory. My problem is that Christianity is promulgated in a way that gives rise to a lot of misunderstanding and confusion, especially because people cling so much to doctrine. Thus, when I was growing up, I got the clear idea that there is an all-powerful anthropomorphic creator God sitting up their in the sky. Now this concept leads to all sorts of confusion. First, there is the well-known problem that omnipotence is logically contradictory: "Can God create a rock so heavy that he can't lift it?" Second, there is the question of why God causes us to suffer, if, he is after all, the ultimate cause of everything. However, many people have come up with a much more sublte idea of God. Spinoza recognized that "there can be no other thing than God." That is, all of us, the world, the universe, are part of God. We are ineseparable from God. The person A.C., who posts comments on this site, has mentioned a similar idea that "we are all thoughts in God's mind." This, I feel, is quite close to ideas in Vajrayana Buddhism, where everything is said to be a projection of mind. All that we see and experience is a projection of mind. But whose mind? A fundamental Buddhist teaching is that at the ultimate level, there is no such thing as separately existing selves. There is only one mind, and we are all inseparable from it. One could call this God, and be very much in tune with some strands of Christian thought. This unity is not usually called God in Buddhist circles because the term God evokes so much preconceived baggage, I think. For example, it seems funny to say "We are participants in God."