Joseph S. O'Leary homepage

Response from John Keenan

 

I Am / No Self does not comment on the Heart Sutra vis-à-vis particular Christian notions, but rather takes the emptiness of self, as taught in that Sutra, as a broad philosophic background for reading the Gospel. My claim is that Mahayana philosophy can be, and in some cases is, a valid approach to our Christian scriptures, equally fruitful if not more so than more comparative approaches that simply contrast Christian ontology with Mahayana emptiness. Given the pervasive ontological reading of the Gospel of John over the centuries, such a Mahayana reading is more skillful for our times, when critical readers are disinclined to accept the commentarial promotion of any scriptural discourse to an objective and absolute status.

 

Mahayana proceeds by negating the normative practice of contrasting subjective and objective poles, which is often taken as the only framework for theologizing. In such a polarized framework, one is left with either affirming claims of a frozen objectivity or accepting mere subjectivity. But the focus of Mahayana is upon awakening, involving the recognition that there is at once both a non-discriminative wisdom—apophatic and silent—and at the same time, a need to enunciate doctrine as skillfully as possible in conventionally true verbal teachings. I try to avoid synoptic readings that would align a Buddhist text alongside a Christian one. I believe that this practice constricts the meaning of both texts, since because of our radically incommensurate philosophic histories, one cannot mirror-read one set of ideas into another. An organic blending of philosophic notions such as here attempted is intended less as a work of tentative negotiation between two texts than as an enrichment of one text, The Gospel of John, by the perspectives of another set of more distant texts.

 

Unfortunately, the endeavor was not, as O’Leary notes, very “economical,” for the submitted manuscript was too lengthy for the guidelines of the series and I was constrained to eliminate many notes that engaged the Christian scholarly works. Although I found that most of the commentaries I employed were ontological in approach and therefore within my context less useful and rather stodgy, the elimination of so many of the footnotes meant that the final product comes out as less scholarly.

 

The main section of the brief Heart Sutra is taken directly from the Chinese translation of a passage from the Prajñāpāramitā corpus, repeating its Chinese word for word. That is what first led Jan Nattier to think it was originally put together in China, rather than translated anew from the Sanskrit text., which would surely have offered a slightly different Chinese version. In the early days of Chinese acceptance of Buddhist texts, back and forth translations between Sanskrit and Chinese were not, I think, so very unusual. So the presence of Sanskrit commentaries is not surprising, and yet there are over a 1000 Chinese commentaries in the canon. In any event, the original form of the Heart Sutra does not figure in its interpretation, for there are no significant semantic differences between the Sanskrit and Chinese versions.

 

It is not merely that I find that the Buddhist anthropology of the skandhas resonates with the Johannine vision. I do so, but even more I find the adoption of this anthropology to be useful in undermining the confidence of a reader who assumes a standalone reader persona. John itself accomplishes a similar undermining in its use of double irony: first setting the reader on the high ground of being in-the-know with Jesus vis-à-vis Nicodemus or the Samaritan woman, and then collapsing that surety by means of its high christological affirmations, which leave everybody much in the dark of its abundance of light. When read as ontological claims, John’s affirmations become twinned with a somewhat lower but equally ontological affirmation of the standalone being of the reader. By contrast, adopting of the emptiness of self “reduces” questions of identity to their dependently arisen status—consistently bringing up the component factors of our human being, the normative perceptions, insights, and orientations that direct our life courses, none of which truly apply to the ultimate meaning of our lives, the God who groundlessly swims through Jesus’ “I am” statements. If we can own up to our own human groundlessness, then we may the better construct a reader/disciple who is able to approach John’s gospel without the ontological baggage of our tradition. To read the gospel groundlessly surely shifts the ground of any High Christology that would locate its ground in "being itself."

 

It is true that I detest crude conceptions of God, as does Joe O’Leary, but although nuanced theologians have long since discarded such obstacles, I find that those notions perdure in the culture, widely and tenaciously. Theologians may well have raised his voice against the idolatry of substantialist notions of God. Nevertheless, naïve images and notions of God seem hard-wired in our neural desires and well supported in the traditions, most pronounced in exegetical works. Commentary after commentary purveys notions of a divine being who is well-defined in being, if inscrutable in willing.

 

I did overlook the article in 1:1. It is pros ton theon, and not pros theon. But the “subtle” discussion of Origen escapes me. In the many commentaries I read, his treatment was never mentioned. It is replete with a plethora of Biblical citations that serve more to confuse than to elucidate the passage in question. There has been a dispute among a few scholars over the import of the anarthous theon; some wish to understand theos here, not as God, but as “divine.” But there is a perfectly good Greek word, theios, for divine, and that is not used here. Following the commentaries I employed, I do not think that here there is any real “distinction between the Father as the Logos embodied in the phrase ho theos or theos.” These trinitarian concerns lie beyond the horizon of this verse. So although I have read the passages from Origen’s Commentary on John, they do not shed light for me. Thus, I would like Joe to say a few more words on just how Origen provides an antidote to Nicaea and Chalcedon categories read back into John.

 

Joe makes a number of "could-have” and "should-have” suggestions, most of which I concede, merely noting either that I did not think of them or that I could not see how to proceed further. To O’Leary’s question, “Could a more precise and illuminating application of Buddhist emptiness be possible or desirable here?” I would agree: surely such is entirely possible, and desirable, but just did not occur to me.

 

Still, as in the dialogue with the Samaritan woman, I would insist that there are no privileged languages. The constant interpretation of the commentaries has largely been to note the stable irony and contrast the words of the woman who does not understand with the truth expressed by Jesus, taken to be the objective, ontological true coin of this realm. But the claim of other interpreters that there functions throughout John a double, unstable irony disallows the surety of such approaches. The reader is not to rest assured in sharing Jesus’ true perspective against Nicodemus or the Samaritan, or the supposed latent intent of the author in chapter 6, but to recognize that even the most exalted words that appear in the gospel remain conventional speech, moving at times closer to apophatic transcendence, but never themselves finding purchase in a locatable realm of divine truth and being.

 

Other questions are more easily answered: “Jesus is not an ultimate revelation event whose content is a universal insight into the empty nature of being.” Emptiness is but another conventional word, used to banish ontological pretentions. The usual phrase is the “empty nature of beings,” not the empty nature of being. For it is does not move in polarities of being and nonbeing, but serves as a non-affirming negation, i.e., it negates that things stand alone in their self-sufficient essences, but does not affirm that in contrast there is something called emptiness that might be the actual nature of things apart from their dependently arisen character—which itself can never be ultimate.

 

The denial of self-assured identity does not “leave us with a vagueness about God, Christ, and eternal life,” but with a reverential silence that refuses the anodynes of ready answers: We do not know what God is; we learn Christ over the decades of our lives; and we await eternal life as an eschatological fulfillment whose contours we can neither grasp nor map. To abide in God is not to abide in emptiness, for emptiness describes no separate realm wherein one might abide. Which is why Mahayanists constantly speak of a non-abiding abiding. It does entail a “closure on fixed identities and substances,” but hardly on “presences,” for our lives are built upon the presence of the absent Christ and the absence of the ever-present Father, as well as upon our presence to one another.

 

I am not sure which texts have “supreme religious authority.” Within the Christian canon we generally favor some texts over others, and in our liturgical lectionaries we simply omit distasteful passages from our cycle of scripture readings in church. Among Buddhist texts, I clearly accord more weight to the classical Mahayana scriptures and commentaries that express the philosophy of emptiness, aware of but not employing the few Indian scriptures and commentaries on tathāgatagarabha themes. I cherish Chan and Zen texts, but do not much prize the works of D. T. Suzuki or Masao Abe, precisely because they do outline a sphere wherein emptiness functions, “the locus of place,” wherein affirmation and negation mutually support and negate one another in dialectical interplay.[1] The Buddhist canon is so vast that it encompasses diversetraditions alongside one another, while the New Testament is so short that it demands one attend to each and every text as authoritative. So I do not see much of a parallel between “the Buddhist and the Christian texts” in terms of their authoritative role in tradition. Rather, more concretely, I employ Mahayana scriptures together with the classical commentaries of the Mādhyamika and Yogācāra in India; and lately I have been looking to the work of Chih-i, the architect of the T’ien-T’ai tradition, and his varied teachings on the threefold truth.

The autobiographical “vignettes” offered in my book do not intend to provide any groundedness for the accompanying commentary. Quite the contrary, they are meant to describe, in a few stokes, just how my religious groundedness lost its ground and its cultural surety, leaving me with a faith that is more and more bereft of comforting images and theological explanations. It has become a very raw faith, knowing less and less, yet urging me to grapple with the blood-red gospel body of the broken and risen Christ. We are saved by faith, not by knowledge, even if we cannot envisage from here the formal structure of our eschatological longing.

 

We invoke the names of God and Christ because we live in a named world and apart from naming there is no speaking. When we want to mark some names as deserving of reverence, we do well to follow the lead of Philippians 2:6, where Christ himself does not regard his equality with God as anything so special, literally, “anything grasped as victorious booty,” so as to abandon status altogether and take the humiliated status of a slave. That Philippian hymn is probably our earliest Christological confession, cited by Paul in the year 54-55. But the loss of status by the humiliated and crucified Christ is then reversed, not in an empirical victory or a conventional promotion of his name, but by being “more-than-exalted” and receiving “the name that is beyond all names,” i.e., the very name of YHWH, unpronounceable because bereft of the vowel markers that would make it voice-able. The adoration and trust for Father, Son, and Spirit are boundless because we erase the boundaries that would define them as over against us. We can do that because we set up those boundaries in the first place. To cling to the specialness of Jesus is to remove Jesus from ordinary life and make him into a sacral person; yet we live only our ordinary lives, which are to be conformed to the measure of Christ.

 

Perhaps “I and the Father are one” can be understood in Vedānta’s terms as non-dual with the Father. But I do not know very much about Vedānta and have not read widely in Śaṅkāra. I would rather see the identification made by the text as a challenge to the reader to abandon set limits to identity altogether with a Christ who is defined beyond imaginable delinition, redirecting attention to the living waters that bubble up from within as we experience prayer and liturgy. The non-affirming negation of emptiness means that anything I wrote enjoys no more status than any other thought or expression. So I wonder if in the Johannine horizon, the Father and the Son are “objects” at all, for they do not stand over against a secure subject. I do think that it is best to understand the scriptures and the later conciliar traditions as affirming the identity between Jesus and God the Father. I cannot see any other way to read and understand the creeds. Yet I think that identification makes sense only if we reconfigure what identity means.

 

I am not sure what “a realistic assessment of the genre” of the Lazarus story is. It is an awakening account. Also I would empty John’s appearance accounts of the risen Lord just as I did in my study of Mark. I suppose I simply took that for granted.

 

It is true that I find John to be difficult. Not only for a Mahayana reading, but for any reading. It never fit easily with Christian ontology. Perhaps Raymond Brown is on the mark when he interprets John’s prologue in Chalcedonian terms, but then the issue of the adoption of Greek ontology is forced back from Patristic times right into the New Testament. Some New Testament texts—such as Mark, James, and Philippians—are quite open to being read in terms of emptiness. Others are more resistant. As was John for me, and now Colossians and Ephesians. Colossians adopts almost wholesale the Middle Platonic and Stoic cosmologies then current, only substituting Christ as the pervasive force that reigns over the cosmos. Does that mean that we are wedded to ancient cosmology? We agree that the Household Codes in Colossians and Ephesians mark the morality of a bygone age. Likewise, then, we ought to mark the cosmic ontology of Colossians as similarly skillful for its times but to be abandoned today. Some of questions that bedeviled Stoic physics are no longer of interest; we are not concerned with knowing what "holds together" the elements of the cosmos. It is neither Zeus, nor Fate, nor Nature, nor Christ, but rather gravity. Nevertheless, we still ask some of the same questions: Where and why did it all come about? Where are we going? I would suggest that scriptural answers are not theoretical cosmic speculations, for such fundamental questions are approached only in an indivisible practice of a path that moves in awakened risen life to speak of a Christ wisdom that can enlighten the eyes of our hearts.

 

Reading Christian texts within Mahayana frameworks or Buddhist texts within Christian frameworks entails the conscious creation of a reader who is conversant with and appreciative of both traditions. Commentaries often prove unsatisfying when they move only within their own scripted world of meaning, dismissing blithely things poorly understood and assuming a common acceptance of biblical perspectives. But those perspectives are no longer common, and commentaries that fail to attend to the many worlds of meaning available to attentive readers familiar with the plurality of religions will fail to find purchase in their minds.

 

 

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[1] See Keenan, “Mahāyāna Emptiness or ‘Absolute Nothingness’? The Ambiguity of Abe Masao’s Role in Buddhist-Christian Understanding,” in Revue Thélogiques, forthcoming 2013.

 

John Keenan on Heart Sutra and Fourth Gospel

I AM/NO SELF:  A CHRISTIAN COMMENTARY ON THE HEART SUTRA.  By John P. Keenan and Linda K. Keenan.  Leuven: Peeters; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011. Pp. xiv + 314.

            This work appears in Catherine Cornille’s series ‘Christian Commentaries on Non-Christian Sacred Texts.’ Like other contributions in the series, it complicates its remit by comparing two texts, a Christian one and a non-Christian one. In the present case this involves giving a wide meaning to the term ‘commentary,’ for the bulk of the book is a commentary on the Fourth Gospel, re-read ‘from the heart of emptiness’ (pp. 85-298), and thus only indirectly, if at all, a commentary on the Heart Sūtra. My own promised contribution to Cornille’s series is to focus on a neighboring sūtra, The Teaching of Vimalakīrti, and should be more conventional and economical, though I hope to learn something from Keenan’s flexible and imaginative approach.

            Keenan does begin by giving a brief standard commentary on the Heart Sūtra, without Christian notes. He cites the text in Chinese, since he follows Jan Nattier in thinking that is a Chinese apocryphon, back-translated into Sanskrit. Given the many Sanskrit commentaries on the sūtra, this seems highly implausible to me. Has any other Chinese apocryphon received such attention in the Indian world?

            Keenan finds that the Johannine vision of incarnation and the Buddhist anthropology of emptiness resonate with one another (p. 65), or at least that the former can be construed in the light of the latter. He conducts a series of raids on the Gospel text, from various Buddhist angles, bringing out, to a degree unmatched in any standard commentary, the elusiveness of the Johannine Jesus, the obliqueness of his answers, the deliberately puzzling nature of the narratives. Some literary critics have commented along those lines, but Keenan’s long practice with Mahāyāna texts gives him a unique penetration and sureness of touch. A full theological commentary building on his insights could revolutionize Johannine studies. 

            His preacherly and constantly witty text – enhanced in its literary grace by the shaping hand of Linda Keenan – abounds in daring theological utterances. ‘We are to proclaim the God of no-God-at-all, the God in light inaccessible, whom no one has seen except the Son who reveals his light in the stench of his own broken body and spilled blood’ (p. 237). A firm grasp both of the theology of the Incarnation and of the Madhyamaka dialectic of emptiness lends security and weight to such utterances. Readers will often feel that this reading of John is robbing them of any foothold; but they will often be forced to admit that this effect is caused by the Evangelist himself. The deadening view of John as the bearer of a heavy and exclusivist high Christology is undercut as the ‘edgy, confrontational Jesus of the Gospels’ (p. 242) is revealed to be at work in this Gospel too. Indeed, there is a striking continuity in this respect between the Synoptic and the Johannine Jesus, though I do not know of any scholar who has focused on it.

            Keenan’s central claims is that ‘John’s teaching is a high Christology not because it elevates Jesus to a higher register than that employed in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but because it negates any identity register for anyone’ (p. 233). As he restates this theme in often very radical and unsettling ways, he may cause some readers to have a panic attack. Does this denial of identity not leave us with total vagueness about God, Christ, and eternal life? Can we follow Keenan in believing that it will draw us more deeply into a trustful following of Christ, opening up more and more to the gracious emptiness of the divine mystery? The last discourses in the Gospel highlight the theme of ‘abiding’ in Christ and in God, and are clearly designed to draw the contemplative reader ever deeper into this abiding. For Keenan, to abide in God is to abide in emptiness, forgoing any closure on fixed identities, substances or presences. Thus the Buddhist and Johannine tracks of contemplation mutually enhance one another, as indeed is to be expected if we accept both the Buddhist and the Christian texts as having supreme religious authority. But to bring this interplay into focus phenomenologically and think it through consistently is no easy task, especially as neither the Sūtra nor the Gospel offer themselves to be tamed by the controlling mind.

            The Sūtra establishes the emptiness of the skandhas, but the application of this to God and to the Johannine Christ demands a sophisticated and tenacious inquiry. The more clearly Buddhist passages in Keenan’s commentary on John often open up this question only to leave it undeveloped. The autobiographical vignettes that dot the text failed to give the commentary the concrete groundedness intended, for they do not adequately reflect Keenan’s own lifelong contemplative engagement with the Gospel, not so speak of the Church’s bimillennial engagement. All too often they introduce perspectives that fall short of or bypass the specific Johannine phenomena.  Another distraction is the rather caricatural polemic against crude conceptions of God and salvation, particularly on the theme, ‘God does not come magically to our rescue.’ I don’t think these are the foremost obstacles to understanding John.

            Keenan focuses on the background of the Prologue in Genesis and Wisdom literature, with a stress on the dynamic character of the Word and the way the very idea of God is revolutionized by being conjoined with a historical, fleshly man.  Demythologization of John’s Christology would be helped by a closer attention to the text.  John 1:1 is misquoted twice—pros theon instead of pros ton theon—with the effect that the distinction between the Father as ho theos and the Logos as theos, subtly discussed by Origen in his great commentary, disappears from view.  Many commentators have read back conventional understandings of Nicea and Chalcedon into the Prologue; Origen could provide an antidote to that. Buddhist note is struck when Keenan says that ‘John’s mystic vision serves not to elaborate upon God, but rather to expose our primal ignorance’ (p. 87).  He could have differentiated between the incomprehension that the divine Word meets with in John 1:5, 10-11, which might well be compared with Buddhist primal ignorance, and the nescience of John 1:18a (‘No one has ever seen God’), which belongs more to the register of holy mystery. On 1:18b (‘the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has made him known’) Keenan comments: ‘John’s enfleshed Christ is exposed as a vacant, transparent empty presence of… the no-self of Jesus’ (p. 106). The ultimate identity of Jesus – in his exaltation – is a disappearing into the emptiness of the invisible God. The withdrawals of Jesus throughout the Gospel are a theme to be tracked closely for a Buddhist sounding of the Johannine language.

            Commenting on John 3:8 (‘The wind blows where it wills’), Keenan writes: ‘The sky here is the locale of the Father – the unidentified and unlocated sphere that is no sphere whatsoever, from which Jesus comes to be earthed and incarnated in flesh, but a flesh that shares in that unbounded freedom of the Father source, beyond all sources and apart from all fathers’ (p. 126). Would one share the obtuseness of Nicodemus if one asked whether a more precise and illuminating application of Buddhist emptiness is possible or desirable here? In the dialogue with the Samaritan woman, and throughout the Gospel, John ‘has set up a disconnect between two levels of truth’ (p. 128). Here one could draw on the elaborate discussions of the twofold truth in Madhyamaka sources. Keenan merely comments that ‘both of these levels of truth are worded, and that there is no such thing as a privileged language’ (ib.). Even when Jesus makes ‘I Am’ statements that draw a response of confession and adoration from the interlocutor, Keenan takes them to mean that ‘in the eschatological immediacy there is no need for anyone to be anybody’ (p. 130).

            ‘I Am’ and ‘No Self’ are brought into close conjunction. Does this imply that Jesus is an ultimate revelation event that is always here and now and whose content is a universal insight into the empty nature of being? Keenan wants to uphold the inscrutable divine otherness of God and Christ, somewhat in the manner of Western apophatic theology. But he empties their identities so radically that it is not easy to see how this is to be done. John ‘does equate Jesus with God. How can that be an identity marker, though, when God has no boundaries or limits that might identify?’ (p. 132). I think that sentences such as ‘I and the Father are one’ (Jn 10:30) express a nonduality but not an equation between Jesus and God. It makes sense to say that Jesus incarnates God by his total emptiness of any identity, and in doing so revolutionizes our conceptions of God. ‘He is equal to the Father because he is not a separate self standing apart from the self that is God, because God is not a separate, self-standing individual over against or hidden within the world’ (pp. 133-4). But when Keenan says that John mounts ‘a devastating attack on any special or elevated status,’ so that ‘to follow Jesus to the Father is to abandon both Jesus and the Father’ (p. 135), I am unsure what status to give his discourse. Surely in John’s Gospel, or in any biblical text, it would be an understatement to say that God enjoys ‘special or elevated status.’ And the same is true of ‘Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent’ (Jn 17:3). In the Johannine horizon, the Father and the Son, and only they, are the objects of boundless adoration and trust. Even if we could discern that this is because they are free of the limits of fixed identity, it is still their Names, and theirs alone, that are invoked by all Christians.

            It is true that John does not portray them primarily as individuals standing over against us, but rather as presences coming to dwell in us, and in whom we dwell (abide). To think this through, Vedantic categories may be more immediately useful than Buddhist ones. ‘The Trinitarian insistence that Jesus is not a stellar, godlike person but rather the very speaking of the Father – one in being with the Father – precludes any special status, for God is in the deepest sense a nobody beyond being anybody’s somebody’ (p. 147). Might something similar be said of the Vedantic Brahman, read with the help of Buddhist emptiness? ‘If Jesus has no identity that we can ascertain, then the Father likewise has no identity, and we would do best to empty God of  being God… to see this God as no-God in the very concrete history of Jesus’ (p. 149). Here,perhaps, is the heart of Keenan’s vision: The otherness of God lies not in an apophatic beyond but in the concrete here and now of encounter with the dependently arisen Jesus. If we want to uphold the uniqueness of Jesus and his revelation of God, we can find it paradoxically in the unique way in which he forgoes divine status, making himself known in a thoroughly emptied, dependently arising way.

            This encounter with a dependently arisen Jesus takes an unsettling form in Jn 6:51-8, where Jesus ‘simply asserts in the baldest fashion that those who eat his flesh and drink his blood shall abide in him and he in them’ (p. 141). Keenan thinks it is too easy to refer this passage to the Eucharist, or to treat it as metaphor. The words of Jesus ‘require the abandonment of any solid concept of our own precious selfhood’ (ib.). After dwelling at length on the disturbing impact of these words and how easy it would be just to walk away, and seek less disturbing texts, Keenan gives this interpretation: ‘The point of eating the flesh of Jesus is to ingest and realize the enfleshment of the Word – thus sharing the incarnated presence of God in our own bodies – in every part thereof. Without the teaching on incarnation, chapter 6 of John is gibberish’ (pp. 143-4). Incarnation is here not an ontological singularity restricted to Jesus, but the divine aspect of our own fleshly existence. Buddhism helps us to grasp that Jesus does not stand over against the world but is a cipher of its authentic empty existence: ‘By feeding on his body and blood we will become one with a person who himself has no inner core… Eat the body of Christ and give up the bodily-defined and border-guarded realms of self-life’ (p. 144).

            Keenan faces the dependently arisen texture of history at its most painful when he writes of the treatment of ‘the Jews’ in John 7-8: ‘I do apologize and beg forgiveness for these injurious words in John, as well as for anti-Jewish expressions in the other gospels and in the letters of Paul’ (p. 177) . Our involvement with the history of Jesus and its textual traces means that we are stuck with these painful aspects as well. True, the Johannine Jews can be seen as representing ‘the former identity of the Christians for whom this gospel was written’ and who ‘have not yet gained insight into the no-self of all beings, even the no-self of being Christian. In this reading the Johannine Christians are thus in fact contending more with themselves than with the larger Jewish community’ (p. 176). But Keenan knows that this does not erase the unease John’s language generates and that history is never a pillow on which one can sleep easily. He makes this vulnerable critical consciousness a mark both of Incarnation and emptiness.

            I would like to have seen Keenan engage more directly with another somewhat troubling aspect of the Gospel’s historical texture, namely the difficulty of taking literally such narrations as the raising of Lazarus in Jn 11 or the Galilee resurrection appearance in Jn 21. The narratives can be made expressive of Buddhist depths, but a realistic assessment of their genre and probable non-historicity would help us to engage more closely their dependently coarisen fabric. Keenan writes as if he takes the appearances in John 21 literally, in tension with his words in The Gospel of Mark (Orbis Books, 1995): ‘The resurrected Jesus can be seen only upon the awakening of conversion that he came to preach about, not in some supernaturally perceptible coming back to show his new glorified body’ (p. 394). It is hard to know when we should be content to let John’s language shake us, and when we should venture to ‘empty’ it further in order to let its spiritual power be released for today.

            The Fourth Gospel is regarded as the Sorgenkind, the ‘difficult child’ of New Testament studies. Keenan brings the light and healing of Buddhist doctrine to bear on some of the difficulties, and offers many hints for a thorough Buddhist rereading of the gospel that might bring it into luminous perspective at last. He draws on exegetical literature much less fully than in his work on Mark, partly because he is no longer writing in an academic context, and partly because  the commentators on John are very staid and stolid in comparison with the radical literary and theological suggestions that Mark has prompted ever since Frank Kermode’s seminal The Genesis of Secrecy. Keenan offers a host of suggestions that might enable some future Bultmann to be the Trojan horse who will penetrate the strong defenses of the exegetical guild and bring some Buddhist insights into the mainstream of Johannine studies.

 

John Keenan on Heart Sutra and Fourth Gospel

I AM/NO SELF:  A CHRISTIAN COMMENTARY ON THE HEART SUTRA.  By John P. Keenan and Linda K. Keenan.  Leuven: Peeters; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011. Pp. xiv + 314.

            This work appears in Catherine Cornille’s series ‘Christian Commentaries on Non-Christian Sacred Texts.’ Like other contributions in the series, it complicates its remit by comparing two texts, a Christian one and a non-Christian one. In the present case this involves giving a wide meaning to the term ‘commentary,’ for the bulk of the book is a commentary on the Fourth Gospel, re-read ‘from the heart of emptiness’ (pp. 85-298), and thus only indirectly, if at all, a commentary on the Heart Sūtra. My own promised contribution to Cornille’s series is to focus on a neighboring sūtra, The Teaching of Vimalakīrti, and should be more conventional and economical, though I hope to learn something from Keenan’s flexible and imaginative approach.

            Keenan does begin by giving a brief standard commentary on the Heart Sūtra, without Christian notes. He cites the text in Chinese, since he follows Jan Nattier in thinking that is a Chinese apocryphon, back-translated into Sanskrit. Given the many Sanskrit commentaries on the sūtra, this seems highly implausible to me. Has any other Chinese apocryphon received such attention in the Indian world?

            Keenan finds that the Johannine vision of incarnation and the Buddhist anthropology of emptiness resonate with one another (p. 65), or at least that the former can be construed in the light of the latter. He conducts a series of raids on the Gospel text, from various Buddhist angles, bringing out, to a degree unmatched in any standard commentary, the elusiveness of the Johannine Jesus, the obliqueness of his answers, the deliberately puzzling nature of the narratives. Some literary critics have commented along those lines, but Keenan’s long practice with Mahāyāna texts gives him a unique penetration and sureness of touch. A full theological commentary building on his insights could revolutionize Johannine studies. 

            His preacherly and constantly witty text – enhanced in its literary grace by the shaping hand of Linda Keenan – abounds in daring theological utterances. ‘We are to proclaim the God of no-God-at-all, the God in light inaccessible, whom no one has seen except the Son who reveals his light in the stench of his own broken body and spilled blood’ (p. 237). A firm grasp both of the theology of the Incarnation and of the Madhyamaka dialectic of emptiness lends security and weight to such utterances. Readers will often feel that this reading of John is robbing them of any foothold; but they will often be forced to admit that this effect is caused by the Evangelist himself. The deadening view of John as the bearer of a heavy and exclusivist high Christology is undercut as the ‘edgy, confrontational Jesus of the Gospels’ (p. 242) is revealed to be at work in this Gospel too. Indeed, there is a striking continuity in this respect between the Synoptic and the Johannine Jesus, though I do not know of any scholar who has focused on it.

            Keenan’s central claims is that ‘John’s teaching is a high Christology not because it elevates Jesus to a higher register than that employed in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but because it negates any identity register for anyone’ (p. 233). As he restates this theme in often very radical and unsettling ways, he may cause some readers to have a panic attack. Does this denial of identity not leave us with total vagueness about God, Christ, and eternal life? Can we follow Keenan in believing that it will draw us more deeply into a trustful following of Christ, opening up more and more to the gracious emptiness of the divine mystery? The last discourses in the Gospel highlight the theme of ‘abiding’ in Christ and in God, and are clearly designed to draw the contemplative reader ever deeper into this abiding. For Keenan, to abide in God is to abide in emptiness, forgoing any closure on fixed identities, substances or presences. Thus the Buddhist and Johannine tracks of contemplation mutually enhance one another, as indeed is to be expected if we accept both the Buddhist and the Christian texts as having supreme religious authority. But to bring this interplay into focus phenomenologically and think it through consistently is no easy task, especially as neither the Sūtra nor the Gospel offer themselves to be tamed by the controlling mind.

            The Sūtra establishes the emptiness of the skandhas, but the application of this to God and to the Johannine Christ demands a sophisticated and tenacious inquiry. The more clearly Buddhist passages in Keenan’s commentary on John often open up this question only to leave it undeveloped. The autobiographical vignettes that dot the text failed to give the commentary the concrete groundedness intended, for they do not adequately reflect Keenan’s own lifelong contemplative engagement with the Gospel, not so speak of the Church’s bimillennial engagement. All too often they introduce perspectives that fall short of or bypass the specific Johannine phenomena.  Another distraction is the rather caricatural polemic against crude conceptions of God and salvation, particularly on the theme, ‘God does not come magically to our rescue.’ I don’t think these are the foremost obstacles to understanding John.

            Keenan focuses on the background of the Prologue in Genesis and Wisdom literature, with a stress on the dynamic character of the Word and the way the very idea of God is revolutionized by being conjoined with a historical, fleshly man.  Demythologization of John’s Christology would be helped by a closer attention to the text.  John 1:1 is misquoted twice—pros theon instead of pros ton theon—with the effect that the distinction between the Father as ho theos and the Logos as theos, subtly discussed by Origen in his great commentary, disappears from view.  Many commentators have read back conventional understandings of Nicea and Chalcedon into the Prologue; Origen could provide an antidote to that. Buddhist note is struck when Keenan says that ‘John’s mystic vision serves not to elaborate upon God, but rather to expose our primal ignorance’ (p. 87).  He could have differentiated between the incomprehension that the divine Word meets with in John 1:5, 10-11, which might well be compared with Buddhist primal ignorance, and the nescience of John 1:18a (‘No one has ever seen God’), which belongs more to the register of holy mystery. On 1:18b (‘the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has made him known’) Keenan comments: ‘John’s enfleshed Christ is exposed as a vacant, transparent empty presence of… the no-self of Jesus’ (p. 106). The ultimate identity of Jesus – in his exaltation – is a disappearing into the emptiness of the invisible God. The withdrawals of Jesus throughout the Gospel are a theme to be tracked closely for a Buddhist sounding of the Johannine language.

            Commenting on John 3:8 (‘The wind blows where it wills’), Keenan writes: ‘The sky here is the locale of the Father – the unidentified and unlocated sphere that is no sphere whatsoever, from which Jesus comes to be earthed and incarnated in flesh, but a flesh that shares in that unbounded freedom of the Father source, beyond all sources and apart from all fathers’ (p. 126). Would one share the obtuseness of Nicodemus if one asked whether a more precise and illuminating application of Buddhist emptiness is possible or desirable here? In the dialogue with the Samaritan woman, and throughout the Gospel, John ‘has set up a disconnect between two levels of truth’ (p. 128). Here one could draw on the elaborate discussions of the twofold truth in Madhyamaka sources. Keenan merely comments that ‘both of these levels of truth are worded, and that there is no such thing as a privileged language’ (ib.). Even when Jesus makes ‘I Am’ statements that draw a response of confession and adoration from the interlocutor, Keenan takes them to mean that ‘in the eschatological immediacy there is no need for anyone to be anybody’ (p. 130).

            ‘I Am’ and ‘No Self’ are brought into close conjunction. Does this imply that Jesus is an ultimate revelation event that is always here and now and whose content is a universal insight into the empty nature of being? Keenan wants to uphold the inscrutable divine otherness of God and Christ, somewhat in the manner of Western apophatic theology. But he empties their identities so radically that it is not easy to see how this is to be done. John ‘does equate Jesus with God. How can that be an identity marker, though, when God has no boundaries or limits that might identify?’ (p. 132). I think that sentences such as ‘I and the Father are one’ (Jn 10:30) express a nonduality but not an equation between Jesus and God. It makes sense to say that Jesus incarnates God by his total emptiness of any identity, and in doing so revolutionizes our conceptions of God. ‘He is equal to the Father because he is not a separate self standing apart from the self that is God, because God is not a separate, self-standing individual over against or hidden within the world’ (pp. 133-4). But when Keenan says that John mounts ‘a devastating attack on any special or elevated status,’ so that ‘to follow Jesus to the Father is to abandon both Jesus and the Father’ (p. 135), I am unsure what status to give his discourse. Surely in John’s Gospel, or in any biblical text, it would be an understatement to say that God enjoys ‘special or elevated status.’ And the same is true of ‘Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent’ (Jn 17:3). In the Johannine horizon, the Father and the Son, and only they, are the objects of boundless adoration and trust. Even if we could discern that this is because they are free of the limits of fixed identity, it is still their Names, and theirs alone, that are invoked by all Christians.

            It is true that John does not portray them primarily as individuals standing over against us, but rather as presences coming to dwell in us, and in whom we dwell (abide). To think this through, Vedantic categories may be more immediately useful than Buddhist ones. ‘The Trinitarian insistence that Jesus is not a stellar, godlike person but rather the very speaking of the Father – one in being with the Father – precludes any special status, for God is in the deepest sense a nobody beyond being anybody’s somebody’ (p. 147). Might something similar be said of the Vedantic Brahman, read with the help of Buddhist emptiness? ‘If Jesus has no identity that we can ascertain, then the Father likewise has no identity, and we would do best to empty God of  being God… to see this God as no-God in the very concrete history of Jesus’ (p. 149). Here,perhaps, is the heart of Keenan’s vision: The otherness of God lies not in an apophatic beyond but in the concrete here and now of encounter with the dependently arisen Jesus. If we want to uphold the uniqueness of Jesus and his revelation of God, we can find it paradoxically in the unique way in which he forgoes divine status, making himself known in a thoroughly emptied, dependently arising way.

            This encounter with a dependently arisen Jesus takes an unsettling form in Jn 6:51-8, where Jesus ‘simply asserts in the baldest fashion that those who eat his flesh and drink his blood shall abide in him and he in them’ (p. 141). Keenan thinks it is too easy to refer this passage to the Eucharist, or to treat it as metaphor. The words of Jesus ‘require the abandonment of any solid concept of our own precious selfhood’ (ib.). After dwelling at length on the disturbing impact of these words and how easy it would be just to walk away, and seek less disturbing texts, Keenan gives this interpretation: ‘The point of eating the flesh of Jesus is to ingest and realize the enfleshment of the Word – thus sharing the incarnated presence of God in our own bodies – in every part thereof. Without the teaching on incarnation, chapter 6 of John is gibberish’ (pp. 143-4). Incarnation is here not an ontological singularity restricted to Jesus, but the divine aspect of our own fleshly existence. Buddhism helps us to grasp that Jesus does not stand over against the world but is a cipher of its authentic empty existence: ‘By feeding on his body and blood we will become one with a person who himself has no inner core… Eat the body of Christ and give up the bodily-defined and border-guarded realms of self-life’ (p. 144).

            Keenan faces the dependently arisen texture of history at its most painful when he writes of the treatment of ‘the Jews’ in John 7-8: ‘I do apologize and beg forgiveness for these injurious words in John, as well as for anti-Jewish expressions in the other gospels and in the letters of Paul’ (p. 177) . Our involvement with the history of Jesus and its textual traces means that we are stuck with these painful aspects as well. True, the Johannine Jews can be seen as representing ‘the former identity of the Christians for whom this gospel was written’ and who ‘have not yet gained insight into the no-self of all beings, even the no-self of being Christian. In this reading the Johannine Christians are thus in fact contending more with themselves than with the larger Jewish community’ (p. 176). But Keenan knows that this does not erase the unease John’s language generates and that history is never a pillow on which one can sleep easily. He makes this vulnerable critical consciousness a mark both of Incarnation and emptiness.

            I would like to have seen Keenan engage more directly with another somewhat troubling aspect of the Gospel’s historical texture, namely the difficulty of taking literally such narrations as the raising of Lazarus in Jn 11 or the Galilee resurrection appearance in Jn 21. The narratives can be made expressive of Buddhist depths, but a realistic assessment of their genre and probable non-historicity would help us to engage more closely their dependently coarisen fabric. Keenan writes as if he takes the appearances in John 21 literally, in tension with his words in The Gospel of Mark (Orbis Books, 1995): ‘The resurrected Jesus can be seen only upon the awakening of conversion that he came to preach about, not in some supernaturally perceptible coming back to show his new glorified body’ (p. 394). It is hard to know when we should be content to let John’s language shake us, and when we should venture to ‘empty’ it further in order to let its spiritual power be released for today.

            The Fourth Gospel is regarded as the Sorgenkind, the ‘difficult child’ of New Testament studies. Keenan brings the light and healing of Buddhist doctrine to bear on some of the difficulties, and offers many hints for a thorough Buddhist rereading of the gospel that might bring it into luminous perspective at last. He draws on exegetical literature much less fully than in his work on Mark, partly because he is no longer writing in an academic context, and partly because  the commentators on John are very staid and stolid in comparison with the radical literary and theological suggestions that Mark has prompted ever since Frank Kermode’s seminal The Genesis of Secrecy. Keenan offers a host of suggestions that might enable some future Bultmann to be the Trojan horse who will penetrate the strong defenses of the exegetical guild and bring some Buddhist insights into the mainstream of Johannine studies.

 

Rahner and Religions

 

 

  Karl Rahner, SJ (1904-1984) is still frequently invoked in discussion of religious pluralism and the theology of religions, as can be seen even from some of the essays in this issue of JMJ. Rahner's name stands for the inclusivistic vision of Vatican II, which recognizes elements of truth and grace in other religions and sees them as reflecting the light of the divine Word and the power of the Spirit moving in all hearts. Despite the vast amount of ink spilled on Rahner's notion of anonymous Christianity, discussion of the topic does not seem to advance very much. The same points are made again and again, and the idea does not reveal much capacity for fertile development.

  Truth to tell, the idea of the anonymous Christian has always been rather irritating. Hans Küng declared: ‘It would be impossible to find anywhere in the world a sincere Jew, Muslim or atheist who would not regard the assertion that he is an “anonymous Christian” as presumptuous’ (On Being a Christian, 1974). A world peopled with ‘anonymous Christians’ is a surrealistic world in which no one is what they appear to be. Even the self-declared apostate will be hailed as really a Christian in disguise.

   Rahner’s theory is grounded in an elaborate philosophical anthropology and comes clad in a stupendous armor of metaphysical jargon. He strives to give phenomenological body to his theory, but he has trouble getting beyond very general evocations of the situation of the human being before the divine mystery: ‘the experience of infinite nostalgia, of radical optimism, of unquenchable dissatisfaction; the torment arising from the insufficiency of all tangible things; the deeply felt protest against death; the experience of encountering an absolute love even where it appears in utter incomprehensibility and seems to shroud itself in silence; the sense of a radical guilt paired, nevertheless, with a firm hope, and so on.’[1]. This is a very selective list of experiences, centered on the consciousness of the isolated individual, and immediately translatable into the terms of a metaphysics of finite and infinite.

   Rahner does not go on to deal with the broad range of human experience, with specific social and political situations, or with the actual contents of the Old and New Testaments in their complexity, or with the detailed texture of the arts or of particular religions. His metaphysical or dogmatic framework encumbers his effort to encounter the phenomena. Thus the work of art, even though Rahner recognizes it as a locus theologicus, is depleted when placed within a schema of divine revelation: ‘A painting or a symphony, he argues, may be so inspired by divine revelation and by God’s gracious self-communication that it conveys something about the human being in the light of the divine.’[2] The problem here is that the phenomenon is explained before the labor of interpretation has been undertaken.

   Rahner does develop a phenomenological or existential grasp of the question of God in a meditation on modern secular experience of the absence of God from the natural world, with its unbroken chains of causal reason. But here again he seems to move too quickly from this experience to a theological explanation: ‘This experience is incorrectly interpreted if one thinks that only this worldly, a-theistic experience is given to the human being. It must rather be shown how the human being always already transcends this experience, so that this experience of troubled atheism basically only indicates the growth of God in the mind of humanity.’[3] Noting the inbuilt limits of science, Rahner denies that the scientific world-picture can be what is first and fundamental in human existence: ‘Prior to it lies the truth of religion, the knowledge of God and faith in God’s historical revelation’ (p. 218). Religion in its concrete Christian form raises its head rather suddenly here. This sudden leap thwarts the possibility of teasing out more fully what the world of science might have to teach us about the presence and absence of the divine. 

  His metaphysical picture of God seems to have made Rahner incurious about the witness to the divine in other sources, and may even have blunted his sensitivity to the riches of the Bible. Scripture is depleted by theological schemas that anticipate and forestall its meaning. The conservative suspicion that Rahner lost the concrete figure of Jesus is not without some truth. I found a curious symptom of Rahner’s desire to reach out to the concrete witness of the other religions, and of his failure to follow through on it. In the essay just quoted there is a subheading, ‘Christianity and Religions’ (p. 219), yet the ensuing text makes no mention of the religions at all! Instead Rahner falls back on a resigned reflection on the limits of all possible religious language.

  In general Rahner has a rather simplistic view of the role of language. He optimistically thinks that the demythologization of Scripture has little effect on its meaning: ‘For one thing “mythological” utterances retain their meaning perfectly even when the world-picture that once provided the frame for their development has fallen away. And second, that meaning is precisely that which was intended at that time’ (p. 221). The mode of the utterance changes but its content remains. A hermeneutically sophisticated theology would have to take the historical and linguistic embeddedness of religious ideas much more seriously than this. Jean Greisch asks whether the transcendental approach needs to be enlarged or to be overcome, and answers, following Richard Schaeffler, that it needs to be transformed into a transcendental dialogical hermeneutics, attentive to the variety and mobility of phenomena and aware of the historicity of reason itself. Transcendental thinking lays bare the conditions of possibility of all experience, but ‘the question takes a radically new shape if one agrees to define experience as that which is unforeseen and astonishing.’[4] The possessor of a true metaphysical system, such as transcendental Thomism or Hegelianism, is in danger of thinking that all the deliveries of experience have been foreseen in principle so that there is no need to explore them too diligently. This produces short-circuits that undercut dialogue. It is perhaps the main reason for lethargy about dialogue and intercultural exploration in theological circles.

  Rahner’s inclusivism is at the service of building a comprehensive metaphysical vision, but its effect is to deplete the phenomena subject to its embrace. Underestimating the thick texture of religious language and the irreducible riches of religious pluralism, he locates the religions schematically in an abstract metaphysical framework. Much theology of religions since Rahner’s time has continued to theorize about the religions with little effort to become directly acquainted with them, as if the religions posed a threat to the neatness and completeness of the theologian’s metaphysical system.            

  As long ago as 1963, Anita Röper wrote a book-length development of Rahner’s suggestions, translated into English in 1966 with an epilogue by Klaus Riesenhuber, SJ., added at Rahner’s request. Riesenhuber, having read all Rahner’s utterances on the subject, poses the question in terms not only of salvation but also of human community: ‘How can the person who does not profess Christianity… stand in brotherly unity with us?’ (p. 145). The question is sharpened provocatively as follows: ‘How is it possible that human beings who have never heard of salvation in Christ and of his Church may nevertheless believe in Christ and be visibly oriented toward his Church?’ (p. 151; my italics). If people have opened up to divine grace, this must be visible in their lives. ‘The desire of a human being for the Church has, with ontological necessity, a visible expression… This does not mean, however, that it can without further ado be gathered from the outward appearance of such a person’ (p. 170). If this visible connection is entailed by the idea of an anonymous Christian, it is very difficult to imagine exactly what form it should take. Does it not sound as if we are inventing religious identities for non-Christians of which they themselves have no inking? Is not the very idea of an anonymous Christian just such an invention?

  ‘If we have good reasons for supposing that the grace of Christ is already at work everywhere, Christianity no longer looks like one religion among many others, but like their perfection, their secret entelechy, and also their judge’ (p. 171). Yet Riesenhuber goes on to hint at an incompleteness of Christianity when he says that the visible mission of the Church remains urgent, for the following reasons: ‘It is only by incorporating the pagans that she reaches her fullness. And the grace imparted to the pagans yearns for its fulfillment in the Church. Thus the apostolate is the endeavor to bring the Christianity which is already prefigured in every human being, and often actualized, to its full development and reflexive self-awareness’ (p. 171). Would it not be better to see the Christian community as striving, along with all other communities, toward the goal designated by Jesus as ‘the Kingdom of God’? One might then say: ‘The grace imparted to the pagans – and to the Christians – yearns for its fulfillment in the Kingdom.’ Or one could adopt a position of ‘Logos inclusivism,’ which is content to say that all truth and wisdom reflects the eternal wisdom of God. The specific mission and presence of Christ could be seen then as a particular incarnate inbreaking of the Logos into the world and human history. All creatures are enlightened by the divine Logos, but this does not determine their relationship to the concrete figure of Jesus Christ. Paul Knitter has sponsored a ‘theocentric’ and ‘regnocentric’ broadening of the interreligious debate; it should be possible to open up these horizons without sacrificing the essence of biblical and conciliar Christology.

   The following passage from Dominus Iesus (2000) ascribes to other religions a more crucial salvific role than Vatican II had done, and avoids the aura of pseudo-legitimacy suggested by the idea of anonymous Christianity:

 

  Nevertheless, God, who desires to call all peoples to himself in Christ and to communicate to them the fullness of his revelation and love, ‘does not fail to make himself present in many ways, not only to individuals, but also to entire peoples through their spiritual riches, of which their religions are the main and essential expression even when they contain “gaps, insufficiencies and errors”’ [quoting John Paul II, Redemptoris Missio, 55]. Therefore, the sacred books of other religions, which in actual fact direct and nourish the existence of their followers, receive from the mystery of Christ the elements of goodness and grace which they contain. (I, 8)

 

Here it is not only in the depths of their spirit that people are open to the mystery of Christ. Rather, it is above all their religious traditions that foster this openness. Perhaps this connects with Fr Riesenhuber’s desiderated ‘visible expression’ of a link of humanity to Christ and the Church. The religions themselves are that link, in that the Christian sees them as converging on Christ or at least as oriented to the Kingdom Jesus preached. There is then no need to imagine that, in addition to their deepest religious wisdom, non-Christians also have some arcane connection with Christ of which they are unaware or which must be sought in the twilight region of their unconscious.

   Despite the advances made by Paul VI and John Paul II toward a richer, more phenomenological and pluralistic awareness of the religions and their cultures, their inclusivist insistence that the religions receive their goodness and grace from the mystery of Christ is often met with a hostility similar to that which Küng showed to Rahner’s idea. A certain theological logic obliges us to see Christ at work in the backgrounds of the other religions, and yet it is felt that this solution is more a puzzle for further reflection than a fully satisfying vision. Mulling over the puzzle quickly becomes a futile speculation.

   We should know when to put such questions and theories on the back burner, when they have ceased to be a help, and in fact are becoming a hindrance, to the really fruitful pursuit of interreligious thought and engagement. Suffice it to recognize the blessings abundant in the world’s religions and cultures and to bring the values of the Gospel into dialogue with them. The need for a lofty theoretical framework for this activity is perhaps a need that should be unlearnt. By all means let us hold to the Christocentric, theocentric and regnocentric pictures of how the religions relate to our faith. But these paradigms should not become dogmatic straitjackets. Rather they are rather vague ways of thinking that should be brought into play only where they are useful and illuminating.

   Moreover, we should beware of words ending in ‘centric,’ since they suggest a narrowing of perspective. The discovery of the New World in 1492 produced a new kind of human being, the explorer, celebrating the human in all the glory of its diversity, at the very moment when new techniques of art allowed Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo to present the glory of humanity with a light, depth and presence never matched before or since. That Renaissance vision was lost in the bitter, narrow feuds of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In literature, a humanism nourished by world cultures found supreme expression in the work of Goethe (1749-1832). In 1835, the French historian Michelet, who along with Jacob Burckhardt created our modern appreciation of the civilization of the Renaissance, was stirred by the work of his friend Eugène Burnouf, translator of the Lotus Sutra, and declared that an Oriental Renaissance was at hand. At the same time, Arthur Schopenhauer was devouring everything he could find on the Upanishads, Vedantism and Buddhism, finding in them the key to a total transformation of the philosophical and religious landscape. But the grip of Eurocentrism and of narrow nationalisms was too powerful to allow such a vision to flourish. Instead the human race devoted its best energies to the internationalization of war in 1914 and 1939.

     Today’s globalized world gives new opportunities for an integral humanism based on respect and appreciation for cultures and religions beyond the Eurocentric enclave. Rahner could be seen as a forerunner of  this culture, insofar as he gave Catholic theology a new coherence and depth, rooting it in the transcendental openness of the human spirit toward the infinite and the gracious divine response to this openness, and insofar as he could see these realities as operating in all religions and cultures; Jacques Dupuis builds on this. But Rahner had no Goethean interest in religious and cultural diversity in practice, and very little of the vast scholarly production on Rahner develops his ideas in that direction. Henri de Lubac took a bold step outside the European ghetto in his three books on Buddhism, yet this did not produce any radical decentering of his theological outlook. Perhaps the most Goethean figure in the world of Catholic theology was Ernesto Buonaiuti (1881-1946), author of 3000 texts on the history of Christianity, set in the wider setting of the Mediterranean conflux of eastern and western cultures. Far from being recognized as a godsend, this great scholarly explorer was the victim of a singular persecution by the Holy Office from the age of 25 until his death.

   Now theology has a new chance to redeem its honor, by placing its efforts in the context of a wider human quest of spiritual wisdom, treating the spiritual explorers in other religions and cultures not as ‘anonymous Christians’ but as godsends, as priceless ‘resource persons’ from whom we have everything to learn. It is as the religions stand toward one another in this posture of dialogal openness that they best fulfill their mission and realize their identity. This edifying possibility, so important for world peace, has been on the cards since the World Parliament of Religions more than a century ago. To rediscover the explosive impact of Rahner’s vision of the human being as a Vorgriff  (fore-grasp) toward divine mystery we must allow it to cleanse us of morose parochial obsessions and to redirect us to the divine revelation at work in all the cultures and religions of humanity.

 

Notes

[1] Klaus Riesenhuber, summarizing various texts of Rahner, in his afterword to Anita Röper, The Anonymous Christian (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1966), pp. 163-4.

[2] Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen, ‘Karl Rahner: toward a theological aesthetics,’ in D. Marmion and M. E. Hines, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 225-34; p. 228.

[3] Schriften zur Theologie XII (Zurich: Benzinger, 1975), p. 216.

[4] ‘Karl Rahner et la décision de la philosophie moderne,’ in H.-J. Gagey and V. Hölzer, ed. Balthasar, Rahner: Deux pensées en contraste (Paris: Bayard, 2005), pp. 71-95; p. 87.

 

From The Japan Mission Journal 64 (2010):60-65.

Keenan on Dealing with Religious Pluralism

John P. Keenan, with Buster G. Smith, Lansing Davis, Sydney Coop. Grounding Our Faith in a Pluralist World – with a little help from Nagarjuna. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2009. xii + 123 pp.

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  [This reviews also appears in The Japan Mission Journal 63:1, March, 2009, which contains a number of interesting essays from various angles, by Peter Phan, Michael Desprez, Jan Swyngedouw, John Raymaker, Marcel Kauss, John Keane, on the theme of ‘Mission then, mission today.’ For information on this journal, which shows that a proper understanding of mission makes it a humanly and intellectually exciting enterprise, see http://www.oriens.or.jp/jmj/jmj.html. To subscribe, contact jimu@oriens.or.jp.]

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  This book offers a measured, elegant, and persuasive statement about how Christians should position themselves in ‘a world of many faiths.’ Such a positioning is no longer the luxury of armchair speculators, but has become as intrinsic to Catholic identity as the Ecumenical Movement has been. It is part of the ‘foreign policy’ of the Church The last major statement of policy here is Dominus Iesus (2000), a text more notable for signaling the dangers of religious pluralism than for giving any concrete affirmative path for dealing with the other religious traditions. Vatican II’s document Nostra Aetate breathes a different spirit, which one will percolating through Keenan’s pages as well.

   One of the first points Keenan makes is that religious identity is never pure, but always pluralistic in its texture. It ‘has influenced others and itself been influenced by a myriad of external factors’ (p. 2). This is a very liberating realization for many people, whose religious conditioning has been an identitarian strait-jacket, and who now discover that being religious frees one for dialogue with people of many religious backgrounds.

   Today many Christians have become more appreciative of the Jewish roots of their faith, and more critical of how the structures of the Church were shaped by Constantine and the long centuries of Christendom. This critical historical awareness dislodges frozen notions of Christian identity, but it actually gives Christians a more vital and mobile identity as a people making their way in history, amid the threats and promises of differing cultural contexts.

  Another point Keenan stresses is that our reception and interpretation of revealed truth is very dependent on the cultural conditions of its enunciation. Facing up to this makes us less eager to proclaim our dogmas as absolutes, in an intransigent and potentially violent way. Then we grasp that the religious project is a creative one, like music of literature, in which we are called to use our imagination and sensitivity as we reshape it: ‘Often we fail to acknowledge that our revealed worldviews are in fact also the cultural products of human endeavor... In consequence, we lose any sense that our religion can change its structure if so desired’ (p. 4).

  Such a change of structure is taking place in our Christian faith because of our new appreciation of religious pluralism. ‘Any acknowledgement of the plurality of authentically practiced traditions will bend the question back onto what used to be narrowly Christian issues’; for instance, ‘if one understands the Pure Land Buddhist teaching of Shinran – according to which we are saved not by our own power but only through the grace-laden other power of the Buddha Amida – how can one recommend the exclusivist claim that God, who is totally other, saves only through faith in Christ?’ (p. 7). Well, the old exclusivist answer would be that the Pure Land believer is deluded, and an inclusivist answer would say that the Pure Land faith is a shadow game that at best can serve as a preparatio Evangelii. More generously, the inclusivist might say the Pure Land Buddhist is an anonymous Christian, perhaps glimpsing Christ under the traits of Amida.

  Keenan is critical if the inclusivist strategy, though it is found in most religions as a way of accommodating their ‘rivals’. He claims that it ‘brushes aside the original context of others’ religious traditions or their sacred writings’ (p. 8). Modern Buddhists use the Lotus Sutra to warrant ‘a universal embracing of other traditions in religious gentleness, accepting them as variously skillful teachings toward that “supreme teaching, that is, the enlightenment of the one Buddha-vehicle”’ (p. 13, quoting Nikkyō Niwano). All  such inclusivist approaches, whether Catholic or Buddhist, are in Keenan’s view ‘dreadfully unskillful and untactful strategies to employ in the encounter between religions,’ which ‘disable their own proponents from engaging in genuine dialogue with others’ (p. 13).

  But what account are we then to give of the relation of our faith to the other faiths? Pluralists ‘acknowledge many religious traditions as valid and effective, and they appreciate them as offering authentic pictures of the real... At the same time, they recognize that all religions are imperfect, language-bound embodiments of the full truth’ (p. 23). The problem with this is that it seems to undermine any ‘absolute affirmation, as well as any commitment to practice that might follow in its train’ (p. 28). The pluralist smorgasbord reduces faiths to interesting cultural artifacts, and religious practice becomes something as desultory as a visit to a cluttered museum.

  The dilemma of how to reconcile committed faith with pluralistic openness ‘cannot be solved, or even addressed, from within a single culture or theological tradition’  (p. 32), which is probably why Keenan speaks of the quest for ‘a workable philosophy of religions’ rather than ‘theology of religions.’ ‘Our approach to the religious traditions ought to be primarily philosophical, not theological... In interfaith dialogue, no single tradition or its theology can claim the privilege of providing a grid whereby others are to be viewed or judged’ (pp. 33-4).  I am not so sure we should hand over this area to the philosophers of religion! The insight they seek, and find, will either by at odds with any established faith – as seems to be case with most of the great philosophers of religion – or else it will open up a realm of understanding that is preparatory to the richer mutual engagement that religions can undertake when they meet on the theological plane (and that can also assist and correct that theological encounter).

   There is a danger here, perhaps, of making interreligious encounter and dialogue the preserve of an intellectual minority. To write a convincing apologetic for Christian faith in a pluralist world, ‘diligent and sophisticated historical and intellectual work’ whereby we acquire familiarity with the ‘vernacular’ of our religious neighbors is a prerequisite; ‘most theologians and clergy in the various faith traditions are either disinclined or ill equipped to take up this challenge’ (p. 43). But how are ordinary Christians to ‘give an account of the hope that is in them’ in this new context? A culture of informal exchange of ideas and experiences between people of different faiths should be developed, even if the theological riddles such exchange may create cannot be resolved (1 Peter 3:15). The prerequisite for this may not be scholarly sophistication but a capacity for sympathetic listening and serene appreciation of differences.

  At this point in his meditation, Keenan turns to Mādhyamika thought as a particularly useful resource for handling religious differences, since it undercuts ‘not just our assumption that there exists a substantive everyday self,’ but ‘any and all philosophic views, for even if we affirm no-self we can still project our selfhood upon tribe, religion, nation, or even just upon being right’ (p. 51). Realizing that any absolute truth claim is a dead-end, we can use views and language without clinging to them, as does a bodhisattva, ‘a ‘wisdom-being’ moved by compassion to aid and teach other beings, to heal the suffering and the pain without proffering yet another ‘true’ viewpoint or some new program of action’ (p. 55). Keenan does not mean that the effort to enunciate and argue for truths and to plan courses of action is no longer necessary; rather we should be conscious of the provisional, contextual, contingent nature of whatever we achieve in this effort. ‘We are to be engaged in this world without becoming caught in reifying views’ (p. 57).

  Keenan’s discussion of the dyad of ‘ultimate truth’ and ‘conventional truth’ may leave some readers uneasy. Conventional truth may be solid enough, in that it allows us to ‘fly airplanes and send space robots to Mars,’ but Keenan seems to suggest that it lacks even this solidity in the religious sphere: ‘When it comes to the quest for absolute truth, however, Nāgārjuna points out the futility of these common avenues of human knowing’ (p. 61). Ultimate truth is silent, ungraspable, and it is ‘completely and utterly separate and different’ from conventional truth. (p. 65); all they have in common is that they are ‘empty’ in different ways. I would like to see a recognition that conventional truth can embrace the objective bearing of religious doctrine as much as it embraces scientific objectivity, and that its efficacity can include the powerful and illuminating impact of the biblical word heard in faith – something so intimately aligned with ‘ultimate truth’ that a surgical differentiation of the two in the name of mystical apophasis seems untenable.

‘Mystical and silent awareness does find expression in the religious traditions’ and ‘in the everyday world of mediated meaning and verbal expression, we do seek and point to the ends of the cosmos of all our meanings’ (p. 68). But does the Bible place the central accent on mystical ultimacy and wise use of the conventional? ‘We now understand that all that happens arises from the will of God… Even the crucifixion of the Lord was the outflow of the many actions then performed. His obedience to the Father’s will signifies his total immersion in the way things were then, and the way they are now’ (p. 69). This does not give any very concrete indication of how ‘Thy will be done’ is an imperative for changing the world rather than only for understanding it.

Next Keenan turns to the other great philosophy of Mahāyāna Buddhism, Yogācāra. Its interreligious usefulness lies in that ‘it focuses not simply on things out there in the world that are objects of human attempts to understand, but also – and most importantly – it attends to and analyzes the consciousness that seeks to understand’ (p. 75). The thought of Bernard Lonergan is a discreet presence behind such remarks; Keenan strongly believes in rehabilitating Yogācāra ‘idealism’ by reading it in light of Lonergan’s study of the knowing consciousness. Yogācāra aims at ‘the wisdom of silence, where all the seeds of the unconscious have been abandoned, and even sense perception and thinking have ceased. Here, one abides far from the imagined pattern of delusion and self-craving’ (p. 86); meanwhile it analyzes the deluded patterns of consciousness of those who have not yet reached this ideal state. It gives conventional truth more stability than Mādhyamika does: ‘Once consciousness is converted from the imagined pattern, it can go on to engage in true and proper reasoning in the teaching of the scriptures and skillfully embody that teaching in ever new forms of doctrinal discourse’ (p. 90).

  Both these Buddhist philosophies will come alive ‘in the practice of interfaith study and textual hermeneutic across cultures and traditions’ (p. 91). How? By their focus ‘not on any particular apologetic or negation, but rather on understanding our human understanding of doctrinal affirmations and negations, and on validating our human traditions of faith just as long as they demonstrate their truth in their actions’ (p. 101). They offer ‘a rather content-neutral approach to people of the various faith-traditions,’ invite them to ‘patient and respectful dialogue with other traditions in all the rich ‘thickness’ of their many experiences, insights, and doctrines’ even when those doctrines radically clash, and ‘encourage further meditation on the meaning of personal doctrines long held and not about to be abandoned’ (p. 102). In short, only if believers reach beneath doctrine to the mystical core that sustains faith, will they be ready for peaceful and mutually enriching dialogue, ‘open-mindedly accepting other traditions from within the ground of one’s own tradition’ (p. 106). ‘A Mahāyāna approach to religious traditions is a practice of emptying our identities, with the deep hope that thereby we may regain those traditions and those identities, no longer as self-enclosed bastions of surety, but as historically conditioned and passionate embodiments of the traditions that guide us to truth and salvation’ (p. 109).

  This book gnaws at a problem faced by all believers who are aware of religious pluralism. Despite Keenan’s lucidity about all aspects of the subject, he advances his claims modestly, with a sense of inconclusiveness. His argument circles around a cluster of recurring topics, bringing new angles and suggestions at each recurrence. This very quality of exploratory groping faithfully reflects the interreligious situation today and the impossibility of dominating it by some magisterial map or some definitive breakthrough to an ultimate plateau of insight. What is most edifying about this book is that it does not makes the aporias a reason for skepticism, resignation, or whining about relativism, but rather conveys infectious enthusiasm for the great adventure of broadening our religious interests, in order that our faith, and even the Gospel itself, may breathe more freely.

The Scope of Skillful Means

The Lotus Sûtra is commonly divided into three chronologically successive sections, – chapters 2-9 and 18 (ch. 1 was later added to endorse the bodhisattva way); chapters 10-11, 13-17, 19-21 (ch. 12 ‘Devadatta’ is a later addition); and chapters 22-28. Chapter 2, on skillful means, is the basic section of the oldest part. It is undoubtedly the most important authority for an understanding of the notion. Perhaps it can be seen as opening a perspective that commands the entire sûtra, so that the entire work is composed in the key of skillful means, and the sublime revelations of the middle chapters and the practical injunctions of the final ones are to be interpreted as various enactments of skillful means. If so, the early chapters are not just a methodological lead-in but already proclaim the revelational breakthrough that is the basic theme of this scripture.

What is the content of the Buddhas’ teaching? What does the revelation reveal? Somewhat as in the case of St. John’s Gospel or the Bhagavad-gîtâ these questions come to seem quite inapposite as one becomes more familiar with the texture of the scripture. It is the revelation itself, a process of total illumination, and not any content that it bears, that is the central focus in these three texts. The skill in means of the Buddhas is not then a step to some ulterior content the means serve to convey, any more than the word that the Johannine Christ speaks is a step toward grasping the truths it conveys; it is in itself truth, life, a way that is one with the goal. ‘The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life’ (Jn 6:63). Along with this non-duality between revelation and revealed there is a non-duality of revelation and revealer. Christ, the Buddhas, Krishna are revealers who are themselves the revelation, or whose very being is that of a revelation-event. The mode of the revelation, skillful means in the Buddhist case, is thus the mode of being of the revealer, his very identity.

One may detect different meanings and functions of skillful means even in the Lotus Sûtra, and a great variety of further meanings will accrue to the term over time. This need not be a situation of chaotic ambiguity; each meaning of the term may be worked out consistently, in critical dialogue with previous understandings. In current usage, especially in interreligious thinking, there is a danger of exploiting the term in a cavalier way, so that all religious beliefs are reduced to ‘merely’ skillful means, and anything at all can be a skillful means, so that ‘anything goes.’ The Japanese saying, ‘a lie too is a skillful means,’ uso mo hôben, perhaps reflects such a banalization of the idea. Religionists are likely to use the notion of skillful means to suggest that religions are just a collection of useful lies. Lost from view here is the positive thrust of the term upâya-kausalya, which has few if any limitative connotations but rather stresses the efficacy and success of the devices, and their wholesome (kusala), or salvific, character.

Interreligious reflection is tempted to correlate or conflate skillful means with the Madhyamaka notion of conventional truth (samvrti-satya), again interpreted in a manner that voids it of positive significance. In a postmodern, relativizing mood, it is blessedly convenient to be able to say of all religious myths and doctrines that they are ‘merely’ skillful means, conventional truth, and therefore not to be taken too seriously. Though the Lotus Sûtra was almost the Rosetta Stone of the belated Western discovery of Buddhism, thanks to its first translator Eugène Burnouf, the Western student today is likely to think that the Emptiness tradition of the Perfection of Wisdom Sûtras and Nâgârjuna represents a more genuine Buddhism, because of its radically deconstructive cast, its fearless trust in the power of the negative. The unbroken sunniness of the Lotus, its sustained enthusiastic tone, might seem a relapse into uncritical devotionalism.

Nearer acquaintance with the text, however, brings a deeper appreciation not only of the efficacity of its affirmative rhetoric, which has an uplifting and galvanizing impact on its hearers, but also of the depth of seasoned wisdom underlying this rhetoric. The sûtra remains a work of Buddhist thought. The way it pitches its message, lightly and deftly, reflects a schooling in emptiness, as if this lotus were blossoming in the clear sky. The very fact that the highest illumination or Buddha-wisdom to which it invites us is not given the detailed profile of a set of dogmas, or even of the lists of hierarchically arranged stages of progress that still weigh down other Mahâyâna sûtras such as the Vimalakîrti, indicates a riper grasp of empty wisdom, a more secure abiding in it. From thence the passage to compassion and good deeds is smoother and stronger than in the other sûtras. The hearers or meditators devote less energy to conundrums of emptiness, to the methodology of the way to buddhahood, for the text establishes them in the realm of enlightenment from the start, assuring them that they are offspring of Buddhas and future Buddhas, and encourages them to embrace their blessed condition joyfully. Enthusiastic practice of the bodhisattva path follows naturally on this.

Rather than deal with Kumarajîva’s Chinese version, which has often been translated into European languages because it is a living Scripture of East Asian Buddhism, especially in Tendai and the schools coming from Nichiren, I prefer to go back to the Sanskrit, using the version edited by Wogihara and Tsuchida along with the H. Kern translation, in the expectation that this makes it easier to grasp the original bearing of such concepts as skillful means. (There is now a Spanish translation by Carmen Dragonetti and Fernando Tola, second edition forthcoming.)

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THE PLURALITY OF PATHS AS A SKILLFUL MEANS

The primary locus for the notion of skillful means in the Lotus Sûtra is the topic of the three vehicles, seen as provisional expressions of the one vehicle. Chapter 2, verse 21: ‘It is by my superior skillfulness that I explain the law at great length to the world at large. I deliver whosoever are attached to one point or another, and show the three vehicles’ (Kern, p. 34);

 

upâya-kausalya man’etad agram

bhâsâmi dharmam baju yena loke

tahim-tahim lagna pramocayâmi

trînî ca yâmâny upadarsayâmi. (Wogihara and Tsuchida, p. 32)

 

Denominational identity is one way of remaining ‘attached to one point or another’ and the awareness of religious pluralism can bring release from this, especially when one posits that the plurality of religions testifies to a universal revelatory activity at work in all of them. For the Lotus, this is the Buddhas preaching the Dharma; for Christianity, it is the enlightening operation of the eternal divine Logos.

The srâvaka, pratyekabuddha and bodhisattva vehicles are skillful means, but the one vehicle is the basic truth these three convey. Does this mean that the one vehicle has no historical linguistic embodiment but is reflected in the pluralism of Buddhist schools and lifestyles? Sâriputra rejoices that ‘the many future Buddhas and those who are now existing, as knowers of the real truth, shall expound or are expounding this law by hundreds of able devices’ (ch. 3, v. 18, Kern, p. 64);

 

           anâgatâs co bahu-buddha loke

            tisthanti te co paramârtha-darsinah

           upâya-kausalya-satasi ca dharmam

            nidarsayisyanty atha desayanti ca (pp. 62-3)

 

The Buddhas know the real (paramârtha) truth but perhaps preach it only by skillful means, which are always dependent on the context and capacities of the hearers. Or is the Lotus Sûtra itself the full and final revelation of the one vehicle, putting the three vehicles in their place as provisional pedagogies now surpassed? If the Lotus Sûtra is itself a skillful means, is it one that is consubstantial with the truth it conveys, in a way that gives it a definitive status transcending the three vehicles?

Theravâda Buddhists such as David Kalupahana resent the imperialism of Mahâyâna, which they see as putting earlier Buddhism in its place much as Origen, with his Christological exegesis of the Hebrew Scriptures, put Judaism in its place (or as, before that, the Gospel of John sublates the witness of the Old Testament into the supreme revelation in Christ). But does the sûtra claim that the bodhisattva-yâna is the supreme vehicle, invisibly at work in the lower two, as Christ is mystically present in Judaism according to Origen? Does it claim that the other two vehicles are only for the ignorant or the spiritually undeveloped?

Other Mahâyâna sources, such as the Vimalakîrti nirdesa sûtra, indeed look down on the two lower vehicles. But the Lotus seems to distinguish the teaching of these sûtras as bodhisattva-yâna from its own Buddha-yâna, which is above and beyond all three vehicles, yet present and operative in each of them, so that all three are elevated to equal dignity as paths to future buddhahood. This does not necessarily imply imperialism but could be a live-and-let-live formula, as if Christians were to recognize Judaism, Islam and Christianity as valid vehicles of a truth surpassing them all and active in them all. (Indeed, such a possibility might be profitably explored by the Abrahamic religions today.) ekam hi karyam dvitiyam na vidyate (ch. 2, v. 54, p. 43), ‘he has but one aim, indeed, no second’ (Kern, p. 46). When the text adds na hîna-yânena nayanti buddhâh (v. 55),‘the Buddhas do not bring over (creatures) by an inferior vehicle,’ this is not declaring the ‘inferior’ vehicles to be false, but means perhaps that the one vehicle is at work in the allegedly inferior vehicles as much as in the bodhisattva vehicle. The chapter begins by stating that srâvakas and pratyekabuddhas cannot grasp the depth of the Buddha’s teaching, but this does not imply that bodhisattvas can – rather, bodhisattvas are conscious that they cannot grasp it either, but must have recourse to skillful means –that skillful means is the very element of Buddhist comprehension and communication.

However, it is not clear that this is the unambiguous teaching of the sûtra. Sometimes it does seem to imply that the bodhisattva surpasses the two lower ones, clearly marked as inferior: ch. 5, v. 52 says that srâvakas ‘lack the insight of voidness’ (Kern, p. 137); sûnya-jnâna-vihînatvâ (p. 128). They think they have reached nirvâna, but in fact they have not received the supreme teaching: ‘As an able teacher he shows the true law; he reveals supreme Buddha-enlightenment to him who is most advanced. To those of middling wisdom the Leader preaches a middling enlightenment; again another enlightenment he recommends to him who is afraid of the mundane whirl. The disciple who by his discrimination has escaped from the triple worlds thinks he has reached pure, blest Nirvâna, but is only by knowing all laws (and the universal laws) that the immortal Nirvâna is reached’ (ch. 5, vv. 61-3; 64b; Kern, pp. 138-9);

 

       upâya-kusalah sâstâ saddharmam desayaty asau

       anuttarâm buddha-bodhim desayaty agra-yânike

       prakâsayati madhyâm tu madhya-prajnâya nâyakah

       samsâra-bhîrave bodhim anyâm samvarnayaty api

traidhâtukân nihsrtasya srâvakasya vijânatah

bhavaty evam mayâ prâptam nirvânam amalam sîvam…

sarva-dharmâvabodhât tu nirvânam prâpyate ’mrtam (p. 129)

 

The Buddhas have compassion for the deluded srâvakas, who are compared to fools locked inside their rooms, ignorant of what is going on outside; they take a baseless pride in their awareness and pretend to be all-knowing when in fact they know nothing (vv. 65-71). Here we have perhaps a different textual layer which falls short of the vision expressed elsewhere.

Another ambiguity discussed from of old is the question as to whether the bodhisattva vehicle and the Buddha vehicle are one and the same. Sometimes it sounds as if the bodhisattva-yâna is the highest teaching: ‘All his preachings of the law have no other end but supreme and perfect enlightenment, for which he is rousing beings to the Bodhisattva-course’ (ch. 3; Kern, p. 72); imam evânuttarâm samyak-sambodhim ârabhya sarva-dharma-desanâbhir bodhisattva-yânam eva samâdâpayati (p. 69, ll. 8-10). Are there three or four vehicles in the burning house parable of Chapter 3? The father, to lure his children to escape, promises them bullock-carts, goat-carts, and deer-carts, but when they escape they are all given bullock-carts – symbolizing the bodhisattva-vehicle, not a new, superior Buddha-vehicle. In the explanation of the parable the Tathâgata ‘shows, by his knowledge of able devices, three vehicles, viz. the vehicle of the disciples, the vehicle of the Pratyekabuddhas, and the vehicle of the Bodhisattvas’ (Kern, p. 78). But then there is a slippage: the Tathâgata ‘leads them by no other vehicle but the Buddha-vehicle to full development’ (p. 81); this ‘one vehicle, the great vehicle’ (p. 82) seems to transcend the bodhisattva vehicle.

Again Origen offers a suggestive parallel. Sometimes he speaks as if the invisible coming of the divine Logos into the minds of saints and prophets in the Old Testament make them equal to the Apostles who witnessed the incarnate coming of the Logos. This equality could be paralleled with the equality of the three vehicles in the Lotus. Moreover, Origen speaks of an Eternal Gospel that lies beyond the present dispensation; this might be paralleled with the Buddha vehicle as transcending the three vehicles. The bodhisattva vehicle becomes almost indiscernible from the Buddha vehicle, and even the lower vehicles are seen as one with it. There is a non-duality between Old and New Testaments, and between both and the Eternal Gospel, when all are seen, in a spiritual reading, as the one revelation of the Logos. Likewise, the precise distinction of vehicles becomes a matter of no great moment when we see the one Buddha-dharma being revealed in all of them.

A striking instance of non-duality between the ultimate Dharma and its vehicle is found in the Pure Land notion of hôshin hôben (方身方便) or ‘dharmakâya as skillful means.’ On the basis of the old Buddhist distinction of the form-body (rūpa-kāya) and the dharma-body (dharma-kāya), Tanluan introduced a variant of the two-body theory: dharma-body as suchness and dharma-body as compassionate means. Amida is a skillful means yet he is the very embodiment of the dharmakâya; Amida emerges from tathatâ, the ultimate suchness of the real; thus he surpasses lower forms of Buddha-body (nirmânakâya or sambhogakâya). According to Shinran, ‘there are two kinds of dharma-body in regard to the Buddha. The first is called dharma-body as suchness and the second, dharma-body as compassionate means…’ (quoted, Tanaka, forthcoming). ‘Shinran knew conceptually of the provisional nature of Dharmākara and Amida… This form or dharma-body as compassionate means was provisional in relation to the formless oneness or dharma-body as suchness, but not provisional in relation to Shinran himself on the human side’ (ib.). ‘Shinran saw no other way but to humbly accept the teachings. This, I argue, led him not to be so presumptuous as to regard Amida or Pure Land only figuratively. He does not claim to comprehend “oneness” or the “mechanism” by which oneness manifested as form provisionally.’ (ib.). Later, demythologizing, Pure Land thinkers go beyond Shinran to treat Amida as an imaginative personification of the impersonal dharmakâya.

Ultimately all Buddhas are expressions of the universal dharmakâya, an idea developed in the hon-jaku theory, so influential in Japan. Can one say that Christ, too, is a skillful means of divine revelation? The eternal Logos is universally manifest. The specific mode of its advent in the life, death and ongoing life of Jesus Christ need not mean that the universal process of revelation is entirely confiscated by this event, as the Vatican’s document Dominus Iesus (2000) tends to claim. Rather the Logos communicating itself skillfully in the singular revelation in Israel and Christ is skillfully operative elsewhere in other forms, not necessarily to be judged lower or baser, and it is in the dialogal interaction between the biblical events and this wider revelation that the meaning of the former is best elucidated today.

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THE PEDAGOGIC NATURE OF RELIGIOUS TRUTHS

Skillful means can refer more widely to the entire panoply of Buddhist teaching. Here again we see the tendency to understand revelation and its vehicle as non-dual. The means becomes the very embodiment and presence of the end at least at privileged moments or in a deep perspective. The deep mystery of the Buddha is coordinated with the multiplicity of his skillful means: ‘It is difficult to understand the exposition of the mystery of the Tathâgata, Sâriputra; for in elucidating the law, Sâriputra, I use hundred thousands of various skilful means, such as different interpretations, indications, explanations, illustrations. It is not by reasoning, Sâriputra, that the law is to be found: it is beyond the pale of reasoning and must be learnt from the Tathâgata’ (Kern, pp. 39-40); durbodhyam Sâriputra tathâgatasya samdhâbhâsyam. tat kasya hetoh. nânâ-nirukti-nirdesâbhilâpa-nirdesanair mayâ Sâriputra vividhair upâya-kausalya-sata-sahasrair dharmah samprakasitah. atarko ’’tarkâvacaras tathâgata-vijneyah Sâriputra saddharmah (pp. 36-7). The Dharma is too vast to be embraced and seized by human reasoning; instead one opens to is by accepting the testimony of the numerous skillful means that speak of it. The abundance of the means is as a flood making the Dharma richly present, and overriding the abstractions of reasoning. Thus, far from being a set of images or metaphors inferior to the deliveries of pure reason, skillful means represent the highest and richest form of communication of Buddhist truth.

Religious teachings, it is implied, are never cut and dried propositions handed to one on a plate with a ‘take-it-or-leave-it.’ Rather they acquire their function and validity within a communicative and pedagogic relationship. The entire corpus of a religious tradition can be interpreted in this contextual way: ‘The Mahayanists saw the whole Buddhist religion as a vehicle for “crossing over” and for “bringing over”, which are inseparable. In short, Buddhism is a skilful means’ (Pye, p. 159).

The Buddha is compared to rain nourishing plants of all kinds, in chapter 5:

‘Whether walking, standing, or sitting, I am exclusively occupied with this task of proclaiming the law… I recreate the whole world like a cloud shedding its water without distinction; I have the same feeling for respectable people as for the low; for moral persons as for the immoral’ (vv. 23-4);

 

ananya-karmâ pravadâmi dharmam

gacchanti tisthantu nisîdamânah…

           samtarpayâmi imu sarva-lokam

             megho va vârim sana muncamânah

âryesu nîcesu ca tulya-buddhir

duhsîla-bhûtesc athat sîla-vatsu (p. 119)

 

Is there a non-duality between upâya and truth, between conventional and ultimate? Does trust in the upâya bring one into conjunction with the unfathomable dharma? Pye says that the ‘initial ambiguity’ of the means is ‘resolved into the original or final Buddhist meaning, leaving the empty shell of the device, whatever it was, behind’ (Pye, p. 160). Let us see how this might apply to the remarkable upâya whereby the Buddha shows nirvâna, whereas in reality nirvâna always is: ‘To these son of Sâri, I show a device and say: Put an end to your trouble. When I perceive creatures vexed with mishap I make them see Nirvâna. And so do I reveal all those laws that are holy and correct from the first’ (ch. 2, vv. 67-8; Kern, p. 48; Kern’s numbering of the verses is 66-7);

 

nesâm aham Sârisutâ upâyam

  vadâmi duhkhasya karotha antam

duhkhena sampîdita drstva sattvân

  nirvâna tatrâpy upadarsayâmi

evam ca bhâsâmy ahu nitya-nirvrtâ

  âdi-prasântâ imi sarva-dharmâh (p. 45)

 

Chapter 15 will spell out this endless (ananta) existence of the Buddha, which entails that his attainment of enlightenment at Bodhigâya was also an upâya, revealing what always already was. In this case, is ‘the empty shell of the device’ left behind? It is true that the parinirvâna of the Buddha is unmasked as a fiction; but on the other hand the truth of nirvâna is now manifested in a fuller, more universal way. So the skillful means is not so much discarded as revealed more fully. The ‘initial ambiguity’ consists only in a limitation.

The connotation of ‘skillful means’ also takes on a reflexive aspect, since the Sûtra itself is a collection of such skillful means. We should not say, I think, that all previous teachings were upâya and that the Lotus now announces the truth, beyond upâya. The chapter on skillful means is the key teaching of the sûtra and it is a teaching about teaching, giving a ‘meta’- character to the entire sûtra. If the sûtra itself is a mass of skillful means, the practices of composing it, reciting it and copying it can be seen as enacting the bodhisattva virtue of mastery of skillful means. Perhaps what most distinguishes a bodhisattva from a srâvaka or pratyekabuddha is the ability to course freely in the use of skillful means both for learning and for teaching, an ability that corresponds to a grasp of how deep the Buddha dharma is, how far beyond one’s grasp.

When a teacher says, ‘I am now using a skillful means,’ he brings out the pragmatic, relational nature of his pedagogic performance. Jesus’s use of parables to elicit awareness suggests that religious truth can be conveyed in no other way. The nature of religious communication is such that the unformulable ultimate truth is never put forward plainly; a creative play of metaphorical indications is what sustains the inspiriting awareness of the gracious ultimate reality.

The upshot would be that all religious messages should be listened to as deliveries of ultimate truth, as it seeks to make itself known within the limitations of a given historical culture. The straining of language and imagination, often suggesting extravagant fantasy, testifies to the supreme quality of what is being manifested, even though to the unsympathetic analyst it may seem tawdry. The truth and seriousness of the religious words, gestures and imaginings comes into focus when we see them as teaching devices, as intended to communicate with us, just as squiggly lines on a radar screen suddenly become highly significant when we realize they are signals from extra-terrestrials. Naturally, discernment and judgment are required in handling the mass of religious messages, but the initial hermeneutic act of recognizing them as inspired pedagogy gives the proper basis for this discernment. Instead of asking, ‘are these messages true, well-grounded, meaningful’ the question becomes: ‘What are these messages trying to say? What kind of communication is going on here?’ Skill in responding to skillful means, like appreciation of literature or music, is not in the first place a matter of judgment – that comes second – but of sympathetic interpretation, and for that one must place oneself in the posture of openness that the sûtra calls adhimukti.

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FAITH

Skillful means are a teaching device of higher beings. But they need a correlative on the part of the beings who are being taught. This cannot be cleverness in interpreting the ultimate sense of the conventional devices, for such cleverness would tend to make the devices unnecessary and inoperative. Rather what is required is trust in the guidance the devices offer, in view of the surpassing profundity of the unfathomable Buddha teaching. Perhaps every religion is a construction of this kind, to which one trustingly subscribes. The means in which one trusts are not fragile tokens, but present themselves with a full presence that requisitions the entire life of the believer, somewhat as the Christian sacraments do.

The second chapter of the Sûtra urges trust in the Buddha’s use of skillful means. This trust is correlated with the claim that the Buddha’s teaching is deep and hard to grasp, so that one must consent to be led by the upâya he offers, in each case suited to one’s spiritual capacities. But the text does not spell out a contrast between deep teaching and shallow means, or stress that the means are a mere prop since the teaching is so elusive. On the contrary, the deep teaching and the means are spoken of as intimately conjoined; faith in the means is already an attunement to the deep teaching that they convey or even embody; the deep teaching connaturally expresses itself in the infinite variety of means the Buddha uses in communicating it.

The Buddhas’ mastery of skillful means is rooted in their attainments: mahôpaya-kausalya-jnâna-darsana-parama-pâramitâ-prâptâh Sâriputra tathâgatâ arhanthah samyak-sambuddhâh. asangâpratihata-jnâna-darsana-bala-vaisârady’âvenikêndriya-bala-bodhyanga-dhyâna-vimoksa-samâdhi-samâpatty (p. 28, ll. 14-17); ‘The Tathâgatas, &c., Sâriputra, have acquired the highest perfection in skilfulness and the display of knowledge; they are endowed with wonderful properties, such as the display of free and unchecked knowledge; the powers; the absence of hesitation; the independent conditions; the strength of the organs; the constituents of Bodhi; the contemplations; emancipations; meditations; the degrees of concentration of mind’ (Kern, p. 31). Skillful means are not so much a flimsy set of mediations for those who cannot bear the full immediacy of Buddha-insight as a free and efficacious communication of that insight, a communication enacted by the Lotus Sûtra itself.

  What is the content of the communication? Not a set of propositions but the enlightened vision itself that has made the Buddhas such masters of communication. The purpose of their communication is to raise all sentient beings up to Buddhahood. One might demythologize this by saying that the variety of personal Buddhas named in the text are symbols of an impersonal process of universal enlightenment that is going on all the time. Then faith in these Buddhas could be demythologized as openness to the enlightenment that is afoot, liberation of the mind from hesitation, indecision and any other obstacles to being enlightened. Skillful means could be a term to cover the entire revelatory activity of the Buddhas, all the manners in which enlightened vision impinges itself on our awareness, if we but attend to them.

The noun adhimukti occurs 12 times in the chapter. Bodhisattvas are firm in resolve (verse 7, adhimuktîya ye sthitâh). A synonym, found elsewhere, is adhimoksa – which reminds us of a connection with moksa, release, liberation. Kern also translates adhimukti as ‘inclination’; hîna-adhimuktâ (v. 120) is ‘low inclinations’ (Kern, p. 56); dharmam bhâsâmi sattvânâm adhijuktim vijânija (ch. 5, v. 1, p. 117) is translated as ‘I declare the law to all beings after discriminating their dispositions’ (Kern, p. 122). Adhimukti is a disposition of receptivity to the liberating teaching of the Buddhas, and it puts one on the way to final release.

 

yam Sâriputro sugatah prabhâsate

adhimukti-sampanna bhavâhi tatra (v. 19, p. 31) ;

 

‘Thou, Sâriputra, be full of trust in what the Sugata declares’ (Kern, p. 34). One might again translate adhimukti here as openness or receptivity. The text has stressed that heroes, sages and boshisattvas have failed to plumb the Buddha-wisdom:

 

bala vimoksa ye tesâm vaisâradyâs ca yadrsâh

           yadrsâ buddha-dharmas ca na sakyam jnâtu kena-cit (v. 2, p. 29);

 

‘None can know their powers and states of emancipation, their absence of hesitation and Buddha properties, such as they are’ (Kern, p.32). A vocabulary of knowing, explaining, investigating prevails in these lines. When v. 19 introduces adhimukti, should we think that a soteriology of faith, based on hearing a revelation, is replacing one of meditative investigation? bhagavato bhâsitam sraddhâsyanti pratîyisyanty udgrahîsyanti (p. 35, ll. 11-12); ‘They will believe, value and accept what the Lord declares’ (Kern, p. 38).

Verbs for faith or trust (prasâda, sraddha) also occur 12 times in Chapter 2. The etymology of prasâda links to sâd, sitting. Like adhimukti, these words seem to hark back to meditational attitudes, in contrast to Western words for faith and trust (fides, fiducia) which either connect with the noetic realm or with ideas of personal loyalty (God himself ‘keeps faith’ with those who trust in him).

Something similar is true of ‘the doubt and uncertainty’ (Kern, p. 35) that are opposed to faith, vicikitsâ (p. 32, ll. 18-19). The Lotus Sûtra contains many calls to banish doubt. vyapanehi kânksâm tatha samsayam ca (v. 70; p. 45); ‘Remove all doubt and uncertainty’ (Kern, p. 48). Doubt is conceived less in terms of cognitive skepticism than as a failure of resolve, a spiritual faint-heartedness. The asraddhah (v. 38; p. 40), ‘unbelief’ (Kern, p. 44), of the 5000 monks etc. who withdraw from the assembly is traced to spiritual deficiency; they are ‘defective in training’ (v. 39); ‘They have no sufficient merit to hear this law’; tat tesâm kusalam nâsti srnuyur dharma ye imam (v. 40).

Faith, then, is an openness to enlightenment. But it is perhaps already enlightenment or awakening itself, or of the same stuff as it. To embrace the teachings joyfully is itself the mode in which the teachings act and become real, so that there is a non-duality between faith and what it grasps. Compare The Awakening of Faith in Mahâyâna. Spirituality is of the essence of grasping skillful means. The words of a Scripture can be heard and appreciated in depth only if we bring to them qualities of spirit developed in religious practice. The entire sûtra is a dramatic unfolding of many modes of communication of Buddha-wisdom, challenging the imagination of the hearers to embrace all these means in their vast plurality and in their mind-boggling exaltedness. The full embrace of this arsenal of skillful means would itself be enlightenment. Such a conception can be a medicine for the fetishistic focus on 'beliefs' in Western attitudes to religion. Faith is a joyful practice that brings spiritual growth, not a cognitive struggle that is constantly fretting over the unlikelihood of the tenets it wishes to hold.

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TOWARD A SATURATED USE OF THE NOTION OF SKILLFUL MEANS

The notion of skillful means tends to undergo an inflation, especially as the tradition develops away from the early Mahâyâna original exposition of the idea, so that, depending on context, many forms of language and many views can be called upâya, if skillfully and wholesomely deployed. This becomes an universally applicable strategy for dealing with contradictions or implausibilities. Buddhists ‘are able to show patience in accepting heterodox and even contradictory tendencies in their surroundings, and on the other hand they are both persistent and sophisticated with regard to the eventual recoupment of Buddhist meaning’ (Pye, p. 160). Since no religious utterance is perfectly, exhaustively, literally true, the limping or malformed utterances of the erring or immature can be tolerated as differing in degree of validity, not in kind, from the considered formulations of seasoned orthodoxy (which for their part may lack basic vitality in practice). Even shoddy and unwholesome teachings can be justified as possibly being enlightening for someone. The notion of skillful means contains a critical edge, but in practice criteria for discerning between skillful and unskillful may be hard to establish.

Perhaps we could say that instead of judging life by the criteria of religious categories we should judge the latter by the criterion of life. A skillful means is known to be skillful by its healing, life-enhancing effects. Religious ideas or practices that have the opposite effects are thereby revealed as unskillful. Religion promises not just life, but the fullness of life, and a religious vision is one that enables one to see life in its full splendor.

To such a vision, the universe itself becomes a skillful means as all natural phenomena preach the dharma. The Buddha putting forth these skillful means is no longer a human preacher but the dharma-body, whose divine voice is heard in all things, which are all originally enlightened. The rhythm of the seasons, scattered leaves and blooming flowers, is itself the Dharma. Jien, versed in Tendai doctrine, makes Japanese place-names skillful means for propagating the Dharma and inculturating it:

 

津の国の難波のこともまこととは

たよりのかとの道よりぞしる

 

‘That the bay of Naniwa in the province of Tsu is real too, we know from the way of the gate that assists.’

Japanese naniwa also means ‘anything’; such double entendres give these poems a density of reference comparable to those of Mallarmé or Valéry. ‘The locution naniwa no koto was well-known in the Heian period in the sense of “anything at all, everything whatever,”… Thus the ensemble  Tsu no kuni no Naniwa no koto mo is nothing other than the poetic elaboration of the Buddhist technical term shohô, itself a rendering of the Sanskrit sarva-dharma… To these “things” the poet applies the term makoto, an almost banal word, that can be analyzed as ma-koto, “veritable thing.”… The expression tayori no kado is the Japanese transposition of the title of the Skillful Means chapter: Hôben bon’ (Robert, pp. 18-19). The enlightened gaze, penetrating the usual landscape of Japanese poetry, where all is impermanent, to discover ‘beyond impermanence, the real aspect of the existent’ (p. 17). All of nature is originally enlightened, and constantly teaches the Dharma. Japanese poetic technique, with its layers of meaning, intertextual references, and puns is set at the service of manifesting this. Everything becomes skillful means, and the skill of the poet flourishes on this realization. Even the moods of love-poetry or nature-poetry are enlisted in this pedagogy; emotions themselves are skillful means, conveying the Buddha’s Dharma without one’s being explicitly aware of it.

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THE TWOFOLD TRUTH AS SKILLFUL MEANS

Madhyamaka thought associates the teaching of ultimate truth with the dexterous deployment of conventional means: ‘Without relying on everyday usage (vyavahâra), one cannot indicate the ultimate (paramârtha). Without penetrating the ultimate meaning, one cannot attain nirvâna’ (Nâgârjuna, Mûlamadhyamakakârikâ 24, 10). The realities of our world have a merely conventional existence, and the ultimate truth about them is their emptiness, their lack of substantial existence; but this truth is realized only in the perpetual dismantling of the illusions of substantiality to which the conventional world ceaselessly gives rise.

The doctrine of the twofold truth may be useful for exegeting the implications of upâya, but its historical origins are independent: the Mahâyâna sûtras revel in the notion of upâya but never refer to the twofold truth; conversely, Nâgârjuna is the foremost advocate of the distinction between ultimate and conventional truth, yet he never refers to upâya (Pye, p. 2). Later the two traditions are melded, as in an anonymous 8^th century Chinese Pure Land text, Ten Doubts Concerning the Pure Land:

 

The Vimalakirti-sutra states, ‘Even though the Buddha knows that the Buddha Land and sentient beings are empty, he perpetually establishes the Pure Land in order to convert the multitude.’ Also, the Ta-chih tu-lun says, ‘A man who in constructing a mansion is successful when he builds it on a vacant ground, but fails when he tries to build it in space.’ In the same way, the Buddhas always rely on the two truths to explain ultimate reality without destroying the provisional name. (quoted, Tanaka, 2008)

 

Like skillful means, the twofold truth is prone to inflation. Every enunciation whatever, even if it refers to emptiness or other ultimates is merely conventional. As with skillful means, the twofold truth is reflexive; whatever I say about ultimate and conventional is itself conventional.

Buddhas use skillful means out of compassion to bring sentient beings to liberation. In Madhyamaka the skillful use of conventional truth corresponds to this. If all propositions are worldly convention, never ultimate, there is nonetheless a duty to cultivate the garden of conventional truth, not in a resigned skepticism, like the billiard-playing Hume, but in the conviction that this is a way of remaining in touch with the ultimate. Madhyamaka recognizes two levels of conventional truth. One concerns our daily dependence on robust notions of the identity of self and of things, in order to conduct the practical affairs of life. The other belongs to the speculative register, to a discourse that undoes the daily substantialist mentality and teaches the reciprocal conditioning of things and their lack of self-identity. This teaching of emptiness is itself a convention, but as a refutation of cruder convention it is step toward awareness of the truth of ultimate meaning. Work on the conventional is guided by the twofold concern to assure its practical and rational functioning and to pluck up the weeds that spring up when the conventional begins to forget its modest status and to give itself airs of ultimacy. More generally, the entire Madhyamaka dialectic or deconstruction is a skillful means, ‘a corrective or cure for deep-rooted obsessions with any possible picture of the world’ (Huntington, p. 129). Conventional truth is a skillful means, but the twofold truth itself, as a mode of navigation between convention and ultimacy, is a skillful means. The word upâya may not figure prominently in Madhyamaka vocabulary, but a concern with salvific efficiency presides over all its prescriptions for the use of the tetralemma and of such concepts as emptiness.

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CHRISTIAN RECEPTION OF THE IDEA OF SKILLFUL MEANS

The notion of skillful means can have a fascination for Catholics, precisely because of the focus on objectively true, certain dogma in Catholic tradition. My bishop, Michael Murphy, found the notion attractive – at least in its application to extravagant popular devotions and superstitions. More widely, skillful means is a concept that addresses a basic disquiet people have about every religious heritage – the sense that religions are a kind of fantasy, with a touch of madness (as Buber remarks), not to be taken as solidly true – that even when we adhere to them and find them powerful, gracious, sustaining, there is a problem about managing the host of representations and theses they bring with them.

This use of the idea of skillful means to salve crises of faith or to allay the burden of hard doctrines may tend to become the opposite of what the Buddhist concept intends, namely to build up faith and to give insight into the perfection of Buddhist doctrines. If extravagant devotions are indeed skillful means, then one should embrace them with enthusiasm, using them to build up one’s imagination and to grasp the numinous at work in them. The entire fabric of Catholic faith could be embraced as a mighty organ of enlightenment. Indeed, such total embrace of mythical images and powers is a form a demythologization, for it is not the specific content of the belief that counts but its success in effecting religious conversion and spiritual awakening. (Just as, to give a somewhat troubling analogy, the total embrace of mythic forces in Wagner becomes a modern, demythologizing, deconstructive rapport with these forces.)

Theologians look for a free and creative relationship to the archaic traditions of religion, which would be neither a positivistic rationalistic reduction nor a blank check for uncritical credulity. But is such a prudent, judicious approach to religious tradition suited to the material, and is it likely to have any effect whatever on the actual practice of religious life? Theology should be secreted from a gut-level involvement with the religious practices, a generous adhimukti embrace of them, no questions asked. If the sickly cast of reflection and questioning pre-empts this fundamental vital commitment and prevents it from being lived out fully and unselfconsciously, then our relation to tradition is not free and creative, but detached and sapping.

The notion of skillful means allows one to cherish the richness of the religious fabric while not investing too heavily in dogmatic fixations. Or rather it makes ones embrace of doctrine wholesome, in that one looks to how doctrine functions as an organ of enlightenment or an occasion of awakening, putting aside the fixational or oppositional attitudes that come from objectifying doctrine in the mindset of an ideological advocate or a detached theological observer. Truths of religion plant themselves deep in the heart. We commonly fear that when forced into propositional form, as in the doctrines of the incarnation or the redemption, some of their convincing power is diluted and a shriller assertion takes its place. We allay this fear by thinking that even the most central doctrines of the Creed can only be a skillful means for indicating the ineffable. Even if a believer is utterly convinced that Christ is the one Savior and divine the meaning of these expressions is elusive; they are monuments of religious thought that mark a place of depth, but they need to be used skillfully if they are to continue to mark that place. This mobile and delicate way of thinking has already infiltrated common religious consciousness, where a constant assessment of the words and gestures we use is going on.

There is a danger in such skepsis, the danger that it whittles down the power of doctrine, causing a loss of faith. The step back from fixational attitudes should not lead to a pulverization of doctrine but to a larger, richer milieu, in which doctrines are allowed to deploy themselves as skillful means expressing this larger vision and life. Thus religious awareness can become something more dialogal and exploratory and open-ended, without losing its core of conviction. Pluralistic appreciation of all traditions and a certain relaxed relation to one’s own tradition’s doctrinal claims and convictions may be the condition of authentic faith today and tomorrow. But this should be in the key of a fuller affirmation all round; mutual deconstruction as mutual liberation; it should not be a mutual sapping that exposes religions as tall tales that are mere props for spiritual or psychological growth. When a religion turns on itself critically, it need not rip up the fabric of skillful means and withdraw its trustful subscription to them. Rather it can deepen the sense that they are precisely that, skillful means – means that have had stupendous success in bringing the divine reality close – and that can continue to have such success when they are adjusted to contemporary consciousness.

One can defend the objective referentiality of theological concepts on condition of recognizing that their objective content cannot be abstracted from their pragmatic function in a healing and liberating discourse. If they are skillful means, they are used by a teacher to communicate with an audience, and both the soteriological intention of the teacher and the believing trust and understanding of the hearers are intrinsic to their texture. Religious tenets often come to stand on their own, like axioms in a science. What the notion of skillful means brings home is that religious revelation is a communicative, educational process, a movement of dynamic awakening and enlightening such that none of its deliveries have any sense except as part of this salvific action.

But can dogma itself be a skillful means? Can the sacraments – objectively bearing the presence of grace, in Catholic thinking – be treated as skillful means? Can a Catholic say that the entire discourse of dogma, so carefully honed over centuries, is merely a skillful means, belonging to the register of conventional truth, and that the really important truth – the really revealed truth and the really saving truth – is ineffable? Apophatic theology strains in that direction. But the word ‘merely’ is misleading here. Skillful means should denote rather the authentic texture and functioning of dogmas and sacraments.

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THE CONVENTIONALITY OF RELIGION

In associating skillful means with conventional truth in the Madhyamaka sense, I may court a rather downbeat theological sense of skillful means as ‘merely’ conventions. But perhaps conventionality too can be regarded in a more positive light, as the very language of ultimacy, the only language it has.

Wherever we probe the texture of religious discourse and imagery, we find a human, historical achievement of thought and imagination, and the more we probe, the more the contingent, fragile, makeshift character of this achievement comes to light. When one seeks to fully recognize the constructed, historical, limited character of any given religious vision and even of any religious tradition in its entire trajectory, while at the same time wanting to insist that these constructions make possible a valid relationship to the divine, one is inevitably thrown back on some form of the distinction between samvrti-satya and paramârtha-satya.

That there is an iron logic at the heart of theology, and that like mathematics it advances with the steady tread of a secure science, is more than doubtful; but even if it were so there is a school of thought, in the line of Henri Poincaré, that is ready to see mathematics itself as a smoothly functioning convention. Even let the power of reason within theology be brought to its maximum perfection, as in Aquinas, a sophisticated reading will still bring to light the admixture of contingency and conventionality that undermines the appearance of timeless, self-sufficient rationality. Such a reading will show that even Aquinas is swimming in a sea of conventional representations, which he manages adroitly by setting his logic to work on them and by pressing them through metaphysical grids.

These exercises of regulating conventional truth are ‘valid’ but not ‘ultimate.’ To claim ultimacy for valid conventions is to introduce a pervasive distortion of religious truth. It is the task of theology to wean our minds away from such false ultimacy and to teach us ever anew the conventional status of our understanding. There is an ‘ultimate’ aspect to faith, no doubt, but that ultimacy cannot be entirely invested in any proposition or image, however high up it be in the hierarchy of conventional truths.

‘God is my creator and redeemer,’ for instance, looks like a proposition that demands the total investment of faith that only the ultimate can demand. But as we realize the historical texture of the notions of ‘God,’ ‘creator,’ and ‘redeemer’ we come to see that they serve as indicators of a relationship that they cannot really encompass, they are skillful means for awakening us to that relationship, to be set aside when they get in the way of such awakening. Dogmas refer us back to what is given in a lived encounter with the divine and they can add nothing to that encounter, on which their referential value is parasitic. The concrete sense of a term such as ‘God’ depends on practices of trust and prayer by which our existence is oriented to and from God; a God abstracted from that context is already a false God. One imagines and adores a God surpassing every context, yet one always does so starting from a concrete context and using notions that context provides. Should every connection with the real context disappear, adoration would become a vain fantasy.

As to truths lower on the hierarchy, such as those that divide Christian denominations, here the historical genesis is likely to be far more entangled and its results far more obscure, so that to invest in them anything like an ultimate commitment would be extremely unwise. The sectarian mind, imprisoned in small differences, fails to use the higher, unitive convictions to open itself to the sense of ultimacy. Even the differences between Judaism, Islam and Christianity, or between Buddhism and Christianity, have only ‘conventional’ status. Ecumenism will deal with them in such a way as to use them as springboards to ultimacy. This ultimacy does not emerge in a mystical plunge beyond all religious discourse, but in the wise handling of the conventional discourses in their perpetual dialectical interplay. One’s own confessional position within this dialectic is not to be imposed violently on the entire interreligious space. It suffices that one knows one’s creed to be a channel of contact with ultimacy, while recognizing also that in its historical and cultural fabric it can be corrected and perfected.

The Mahâyâna outlook is monistic, in the sense that salvation is not a change of our state, brought about by an intervention from beyond, but consists rather in realizing that we are always already nirvanized, that the painful realm of samsâra if seen properly, without delusive conceptualization and imprisoning attachments, is none other than the peaceful, liberated realm of nirvâna. When we dismantle delusive conceptualizations and discriminations and undo our passionate attachment to them, we find ourselves where we always already are, in the empty, dependently arisen world of experience; such is the Mahâyâna vision of salvation.

If we embrace this Mahâyâna sensibility, are we betraying Catholic realism, which insists on the historical origins and fleshly reality of Christ and his mysteries? Christianity presents redemption and resurrection as singular events precisely located in relation to a concrete history. It would be hard to maintain that Christ`s death and resurrection, like Sâkyamuni’s entry into nirvâna, according to the Lotus Sûtra, are not so much new events that transform the world in its relation to God, as revelations of how reality ultimately is – and how it has always been. Physical miracles, notably the virgin birth and the empty tomb, are signs of this irreducible singularity.

To be sure, many Christian thinkers have taken ‘offence’ at this singularity or positivity of divine acts in history. An interventionist God, who tampers with the fabric of history, or a God-of-the-gaps, who supplements the natural processes of evolution, has bad press among philosophically-minded Christians. A ‘naturalized’ theology interprets salvation history as a matter of development of human consciousness of the divine. Incarnation and resurrection are put in perspective as an evolutionary threshold in humanity’s development toward a higher life. (Some go further and take salvation history as a fabric of fictions and metaphors to be taken as stimulants to or indicators of transformed vision.)

Grace and revelation are universal processes, as old as humanity itself, and if Christ enjoys centrality or primacy in relation to these processes it must be for some more modest reason than formerly thought – not so much ‘God becoming man’ as humanity relating in a new way to God, in a prophetic opening up to the divine future (the Kingdom of God). Such revisionist theology treats the biblical story as skillful means for an archaic culture that lacked our evolutionist and historical perspective. Of course even the early Church can be seen as treating the Hebrew Scriptures as a kind of skillful means; the Christological reading of these Scriptures, which claimed to penetrate their spiritual sense, hidden from their Jewish readers, shows a similar structure to the contemporaneous revisionist reading of early Buddhism carried out by the Mahayanists.

Today’s questioning consciousness tends to dissociate the colored fabric of religion from the bedrock of scientific or existential truth. It detects not only in Christianity but in any religion to which it adverts the play of usually obsolete conventions, and it disencumbers every religious claim and representation of its absolute character. This relativizing skepticism is the very element in which religious thinking is marinated today. Is it possible to bring a new religious language to birth from this experience – one that begins by fully accepting the fragility of religious imaginings and reflections and that gives an oblique and indirect sense to all claims of divine revelation? Religions are conventions, skillful means, to be used freely and creatively in the deepening of spiritual consciousness.

Pye evokes ‘the inescapable probability that all specific religions will eventually disappear, without trace. It is in tune with the way of the world to understand any expressions of religions in terms of provisional articulation and eventual dismantling’ (Pye, p. 162). ‘It is notable that recent decades have seen among Christian theologians one of the most sustained attempts in history to dismantle a religious tradition from within’ (p. 163), and, Pye suggests, the tensions this created could be managed by drawing on the idea of skillful means. ‘In the end we’ll all be dead’ is a somewhat disheartening hermeneutical horizon. In any case the Abrahamic inspiration and the Buddha tradition continue to be major resources of human religious thought, and in their transformations they may continue as long as humanity lasts. What Pye sees as a self-dismantling of Christianity could be seen simply as adjustment to a new phase of its evolution. In a sense such dismantling has always been part of biblical religion, and of course Buddhism is the most deconstructive religion of all. Much that seemed merely destructive before Derrida came along now appears as deconstructive, as recognition of complexity rather than as mere negation.

Religion is like life, multiform, complex, mysterious no matter how much it yields to scrutiny, and its illuminative force will attend human life always. Indeed it is itself part of life, the awakening of the spirit, and all constituted revelations, religions and religious teachers make sense only as consubstantial with that awakening, only, that is, as skillful means. We approach these traditions armed with all the weaponry of historical and philosophical suspicion, but a hermeneutics of trust, of adhimukti, must prevail, so that we can connect with Buddha, Jesus, even Muhammad as powerful breakthroughs of the divine revelational event at the heart of things. Theologians may quarrel about the respective roles of these figures and traditions, but the basic stance to be adopted is to humbly believe, value and accept all of them. Where historical scholarship seems to banish the divine from the human landscape, the imagination of faith appropriates these traditions in a more relaxed way, as blessed upâya, successfully interconnecting with all our experience, so that the divine draws near again.

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REFERENCES

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TEXT

U. Wogihara and C. Tsuchida, ed., 1935. Saddharmapundarika-sûtram. Tokyo: Seigo-Kenkyûkai.

H. Kern, trans., 1909. The Saddharma-Pundarika. Oxford: Clarendon.

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STUDIES

C. W. Huntington, Jr., 1989. The Emptiness of Emptiness. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Michael Pye, 1978. Skilful Means. London: Duckworth.

Jean-Noël Robert, 2008. La Centurie du Lotus: Poèmes de Jien (1155-1225) sur le Sûtra du Lotus. Paris: Collège de France.

Kenneth K. Tanaka, forthcoming. ‘Amida and Pure Land within Contemporary Worldview: From Shinran’s Literal Symbolism to Figurative Symbolism,’ in a Festschrift for Roger Corless.

-----, 2008. ‘Skillful Means in Pure Land Buddhism.’ Tokyo Buddhist Discussion Group, December 2008.

Two Books on Buddhist-Christian Dialogue

Katrin Amell. Contemplation et dialogue: Quelques exemples de dialogue entre spiritualités après le concile Vatican II. Uppsala: Studia Missionalia Upsaliensia LXX, 1998.

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Robert Aitken and David Steindl-Rast. The Ground We Share: Everyday Practice, Buddhist and Christian. Boston: Shambala, 1996.

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Here are two meritorious and well-produced works devoted to the dialogue between Buddhist and Christianity. They also have in common a certain desultoriness which left me reflecting on the limits of the rhetoric of ‘dialogue’. Having taken over from ‘liberation’ as a theological buzzword, ‘dialogue’ seems by now to have exhausted its usefulness. William James remarked that everything genuine will somewhere become a sham. Lip-service to a vague ideal of dialogue becomes a palliative for for the unmet challenge of Buddhist-Christian thought, and the less the dialogue is practiced the more its importance is verbally celebrated.

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The retention of the word ‘dialogue’ may even serve to keep the religious other at a comfortable distance: it is more reassuring to say, ‘Of course we are in dialogue with the Buddhists’ than to say ‘We are facing up to the challenge Buddhist thought poses to Christian theology,’ for in the former statement ‘the Buddhists’ remain conveniently located others, sitting across the table, rather than a troublesome, potentially subversive presence within our own intellectual world.

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In their submission to the recent Roman synod of Asian bishops the Japanese bishops made much of their commitment to interreligious dialogue, and this was acclaimed with enthusiasm. But the impression left by Karin Amell’s book (a doctoral thesis in missiology) is that not very much is going on in this area in Japan, the country seen as ‘the promised land of dialogue’ after Vatican II (p. 119). ‘One has the impression that it is an activity for a few specialists’ (p. 145), leaving the ordinary faithful largely untouched. Dr Amell apparently does not read Japanese, so there may be much that she has missed, yet for my part I can think of nothing to add to the factual content of her account of the Japanese contribution to Catholic-Buddhist dialogue. [2006: Constantly painful is the language of the Japanese translations of the liturgy – it has none of the savor of spoken Japanese, but seems to be beckoning to some Latin original, and when one must read it aloud one feels that one is advancing in a clanking coat of armor. Yet the strangeness and foreignness of this unattractive language seems accepted by the Japanese clergy and faithful, who never complain. Christianity is meant to be different and strange. Though some fervently call for a more inculturated theology and liturgy, their voices are ineffectual. Dialogue with Buddhism or Shinto seems quite pointless to the majority of the faithful, or worse, a return to the very thing from which they fled in becoming Christian.]

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For the spiritual side of the Buddhist-Christian encounter Amell focuses on three Japanese pioneers, now in their seventies (pp. 150-91): Kadowaki Kakichi SJ, Okumura Ichiro OCD, and Oshida Shigeto OP. To what extent these men have succeeded in creating a widespread Catholic Zen culture remains unclear, but Amell believes the ‘dialogue of religious experience’ is the most widespread form of Buddhist-Catholic interaction in Japan (p. 146). As to scholarship, which is not Amell’s direct concern, one has the impression that everyone is too busy with church and university affairs to devote their time to this. The scholarly labors of Heinrich Dumoulin, for example, have not been continued by anyone else. Despite the work of a powerful Catholic foundation, the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture (p. 141), Buddhism does not seem to excite Catholic intellectuals in Japan.

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Japanese Catholics are a small community, numbering about half a million. But given the high number of theologians, clergy and religious (p. 137), one would expect a more intensive interaction with local religious traditions. Instead the focus of theological interest remains fixed on Western sources. Meanwhile, those engaged in contemplative sharing with Buddhists seem to avoid intellectual issues. Amell is uneasy with the insistence on intuition and the latent anti-intellectualism she finds in the inter-monastic dialogue (discussed in the first half of her book) and especially among Japanese Catholic Zen practitioners (p. 169). Vatican control of seminaries, which prevents the appointment of non-Catholic teachers, has not favored the emergence of an interreligious theology.

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Reading between the lines of Amell’s survey, one may suspect that the fundamental obstacle is still a fixation on religious identity that prevents Japanese Catholics from being reconciled with and rejoicing in the religious pluralism that is knit into the texture of Japanese history and culture.

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“The Ground We Share” is a dialogue between a Zen teacher, Robert Aitken, and a Catholic monk, David Steindl-Rast, held in a mountain retreat in Hawai’i in 1991. The title refers to the idea that ‘all religions are exploring the same existential ground’ (p. 100). That sounds rather bland, but it might have promise for interreligious thought. The present work, however, is not a confrontation between Christianity and Buddhism, but a gentle conversation about how to live wisely and well. There are no doctrinal or philosophical fireworks. Aitken best identifies the theological framework of the discussion in remarks like the following: ‘Where do I feel comfortable? With what do I feel deepest affinity? I think those are the bottom-line questions that the seeker needs to ask. Questions of equal validity or unequal validity can drop away’ (p. 49). One danger in this pragmatic attitude is that it could make religion intellectually uninteresting.

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The conversationalists have so much in common that their voices are hard to distinguish. Their chief concern is ‘spiritual refinement,’ and while many pages will be found ‘helpful’ (for example the advice on how to become a warmer and more friendly person on pp. 136-40) I noted a tendency to lapse into monkish cliché, as in the labored distinctions between ‘sensuality’ and ‘sensuousness’ (p. 113), the banal discussion of sentimentality, exemplified by the poem ‘Trees’ (p. 118), the remarks on ‘particular friendships’ (p. 164), the somewhat narcissistic preoccupation with avoiding imperfections such as pride (‘Oh, I tended to brag a little bit there’, p. 96). If interreligious dialogue reduces to such harmless exchanges, then it is a rather unexciting business.

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As if to liven things up, Steindl-Rast has an obiter dictum about the damage done by hysteria about pedophilia: ‘I don’t condone child abuse at all, but neither do I welcome the recent media explosion about it. The self-consciousness that results from it hurts adults and children on a much larger scale than what is labeled child abuse... Not even the pornography business has done more harm to our society than this frenzy of fear about child abuse’ (pp. 185-6). He also opines that mandatory celibacy for secular clergy is ‘an abuse of authority’ which future generations may well judge more severely than we now judge the burning of witches (p. 179). But these remarks do not receive the elaboration they deserve. Otherwise a rather rarefied monastic perspective on sex prevails: there is talk of ‘channeling the kundalini’ (p. 110) and of transforming sexual energy into ‘an asset for practice’ (113), and fretting about ‘sexual misconduct by religious leaders’ and monks climbing over the wall to visit the ‘whorehouse’ (p. 183).

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As a monk, Steindl-Rast feels called to resist the stranglehold of self-preoccupied institutions: ‘In the Catholic context at this present moment in history, however, the institution has become so oppressive that it’s, in large measure, counterproductive. Rather than facilitating the handing on of the message, it’s making it more difficult’ (p. 54). He fills out his vision of a liberated Christianity with rather vague theological gestures: ‘I consider the natural as everything we can grasp and the supernatural as that which grasps us’ (p. 30). ‘Buddhist metaphysics could be called the missing theology of God, the theology of Silence’ (p, 36), an idea elaborated with some flabby speculation about the Buddha Bodies (pp. 17, 34). He quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins and T. S. Eliot far more frequently than any classic Buddhist or theological sources. These quotations create a sense of old-fashionedness, as of a tame imitation of Thomas Merton.

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Since Buddhism and Christianity are both powerful intellectual traditions, one would expect their encounter and mutual transformation to be a source of intellectual excitement. The two books reviewed here might suggest that this expectation is misguided, and that all that will happen is that the two religions will supplement each other’s supply of practical spiritual wisdom. But perhaps it is the model of ‘dialogue’ itself, with its connotations of a genteel ecumenism, that is blunting the intellectual challenge of Buddhism. Merton’s remark, ‘the future belongs to Zen and Christianity,’ points beyond ‘spiritual refinement’ to the real promise of the convergence of the traditions, namely, some new and comprehensive vision of ultimate truth.

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                   Joseph S. O’Leary (Buddhist-Christian Studies 20, 2000)

                                                 

The Significance of John Keenan's Mahayana Theology

Sometimes one is tempted to think of Christianity as a high-rise building that has been hit by an earthquake and is about to collapse. Many have deserted the edifice; others huddle in panic; meanwhile voices of authority deny the rocking of the walls, forbid discussion and dissent, stridently insist on old certitudes. If only there were some assurance of a solution in sight, it might be possible to let go of fear and face the crisis honestly.

"But there is!," shouts a fireman from the street below. He holds out a wide safety net, and calls out: "Jump!" The fireman's name is John P. Keenan and the net is called "emptiness." The figures on the balcony stare down in terror -- that net looks like a black void – better to clutch at these solid stones, no matter how they quake, than leap out into the unsupported air, entrusting oneself to some nebulous nirvana. The voices warn against the dangers of Buddhist-Christian syncretism, denouncing Buddhism as “a sort of spiritual auto-eroticism” (Cardinal Ratzinger). But the fireman's persuasion begins to take effect. One by one, the trembling believers drop down into the net of emptiness.

If I cast John Keenan in this grandiose role, it is because his achievement is well-nigh unique, as a fully qualified Buddhologist, with particular expertise in Indian Yogacara thought, who has drawn on Buddhist insight to construct an original Christian theology. What we see emerging in his work is a new theological landscape, one that is consciously interreligious at every point, or rather `intrareligious,' since the Buddhist and Christian frames of reference work together within a single integrated religious vision. He is the first theologian to reveal that Mahayana Buddhism has become structurally necessary to Christian faith.　[Keenan, 1998, p. 139, doubts that the edifice of faith is “in imminent danger of being consumed in the fire of postmodern malaise”, making Mahayana structurally necessary to it. He prefers to see Buddhist philosophy as a supplementary ancilla theologiae. Perhaps it is unbuddhistic to talk of urgent necessities, but at least a certain need of Buddhist healing seems to be built into the present situation of theology, especially as we become more fully conscious of the monstrous perversions to which inadequately critical faith led us in the past as well as of the sterility of unacculturated, unmodernized faith today,] Without the background of wisdom and insight explored by the Madhyamika and Yogacara thinkers, the Christian kerygma fails to exfoliate its full meaning and remains truncated and opaque. In the past the thought-world of Hellenistic metaphysics provided an intellectual medium for the unfolding of the meaning of Christ. This resource has now been exhausted, and continued reliance on it has a cramping effect, intensifying rather than resolving the crisis of credibility. [Again Keenan demurs. To be sure, Western philosophy is rich in resources, but the limited yield of these for a renewal of faith is something that we can measure, whereas the resources of Buddhism are full of unexplored promise.] Hence the sense that the discovery of Mahayana thought comes as a providential rescue. Its categories are not in tension with contemplative insight, and they keep in touch with an attentive openness to the phenomena of experience; thus they can heal the split in Western theology between the abstract intellectualism of dogmatic debate and pre-conceptual awareness of divine presence.

DEPENDENT CO-ARISING AND EMPTINESS

Keenan's procedure is to reinterpret the meaning of central Christian texts and traditions in light of dependent co-arising (pratitya-samutpada) and emptiness (sunyata), as interpreted by Nagarjuna, along with the distinction between conventional truth (samvrti-satya) and the truth of ultimate meaning (paramartha-satya). Another important reference is the Yocacara theory of the turn-about of consciousness from investment in imagined meanings to recognition of the dependently co-arisen world in awareness of its emptiness. He sees nothing obscure or problematic in these notions [or rather, in his application of them he does not highlight the aspects that fuel Buddhist controversy, but brings out the main lines of force], and so can apply them consistently to the theological tradition, which has often invested in imagined meanings (parikalpita) and confused conventional with ultimate truth. The critical edge of this diagnosis is complemented by a constructive correlation of the presence of God with the realization of emptiness. This is something fully experienced only at the level of ultimate truth, where all the skillful articulations and conceptualizations of religious doctrine and theory fall silent. [“There is, I think, no ‘level’ or ‘vantage’ of ultimate meaning, and to it makes no sense to complain about consigning doctrine to the ‘conventional register.’ The only register we have is conventional” (1998, 141).]

The necessity of applying these ideas to Christian tradition, and the healing illumination they bring, are undeniable. Yet is may be that Keenan, in the manner of many great pioneers, has moved too far, too fast. In bringing into conjunction the worlds of Christian theology and Mahayana Buddhism he may be riding roughshod over the radical differences between the two, both in their epistemological and ontological presuppositions and in their cultural and religious contexts. He anticipates and refutes the more obvious objections to his procedure, but its undeniable validity in principle does not guarantee that its enactment in practice will be plain sailing. Every single application of Buddhist categories to Christian discourse implies a `fusion of horizons' raising the most difficult hermeneutical problems. The strong affinities between the two religious traditions, especially in their mystical reaches, make it imperative for theologians to think out their relationship. But affinities must not be taken for identities. The critical impact of Buddhist analysis on the illusion-ridden texture of much Christian discourse has to be pursued fearlessly. But we must be sure that the targets of the critique are properly identified, not underestimating the degree to which Christianity, too, is a sophisticated, self-critical religion. For a fruitful development of the questions Keenan has opened up, we need to stand back and pursue the inquiry in a more scrupulous and elaborate negotiation, keenly conscious of the difficulties that rise up at every step. [Keenan thinks that this is putting the cart before the horse; hermeneutics always comes later: “I consider myself to be doing straightforward theology, not brokering disparate discourses identified as Buddhist or Christian” (1998, 145). But is there such a thing as straightforward theology?] The resulting encounter may be less direct and global than what Keenan proposes. The Buddhist and Christian ideas and sources may play off against another in mutual critique, without any decisive overriding conquest either way. Their debate may take the form of a series of local interactions rather than a grand synthesis. To the ambitious theologian that may seem a messy prospect, but it is more faithful to the concrete complexity of history and of human encounter.

Keenan has faced the crisis of traditional beliefs and categories and tasted deeply the skepticism and nihilism of the modern masters of suspicion. Yet I do not think he has ever been an addict of anxiety. He has found a biblical correlate for the ordeal of the negative in Job and Qohelet. The skepticism and despair expressed in those texts is overcome by a higher wisdom, which lets go of certitudes and opens up to the presence of a God who cannot be contained by human categories, a God who is empty. This wisdom can take the destructive impact of suspicion in its stride; where doubt abounded, faith abounds the more. The ideas of dependent co-arising and emptiness give a more lucid, systematic cast to this trust in an empty God.

Christ is the richest presentation of wisdom; we find “in the pattern of his life, death, and resurrection an answer to the dilemmas about human suffering, death, and the silence of God” (1989, 29). His life is characterized by non-clinging; his death is a complete opening up to emptiness; his resurrection is the arising of authentic consciousness of ultimate reality. Such wisdom is appropriated in an experience of the overwhelming, undeniable presence of the love of God, manifested in Christ, an experience Keenan finds to be in deep accord with Buddhist understandings of awakening or enlightenment.
   
The dogmas that caused such headaches to generations of modernist theologians – the existence of God, the divinity of Christ, the resurrection, the immortality of the soul – are reinterpreted as events of the wisdom of emptiness. Christianity exists only to create an experience of wisdom: “the realization of an Easter enlightenment that can transform our consciousness and, with that, the world we construct based upon that consciousness. It is an experience of the emptiness and dependent co-arising of all our notions and endeavors that frees one for awareness of God beyond discriminative concepts and transparently embodies the rule of compassion in the world of hard politics” (242).

This experience of the world as it is, in its dependent co-arising, is identical with the discovery of God as “Abba,” “Father” [Keenan denies making such a simple identification (1998, 145)]. We must renounce all images of God as one who intervenes miraculously in human affairs; the only miracle is the grace of awakening: “The very arising of all things in interdependency is itself directly and immediately the presence of Abba... Abba does not come to the rescue of bodily or mental anguish ... The Old Testament skeptics were right: Yahweh does not save his people. He allowed them to be consumed in the fires of the holocaust” (1989, 244). More substantive and dogmatic ideas of God are idolatrous projections that close us to Abba-awareness: “The point of the Mahayana refutation of the creator deity is that any idea clung to as ultimate is an illusion, for any such idea represents a meaning constructed within the conditioned world” (245). The God of Jesus is not posited as an object: “Jesus as the wisdom of God embodies not an idea of Abba, but a preverbal awareness of ineffable meaning thematized as Abba” (247).

There is a basic misfit between the reality of God and the conventional world of ideas and concepts: “Ideas of God indicate their reference in terms of their dependently co-arisen context and cultural milieu. This does not mean simply that ideas are inadequate to present God, but still analogically applicable. It means, rather, that the presence of God is simply not amenable to conceptual expression at all” (247). This is a far cry from John B. Cobb's process-philosophy claim that God is the supreme instantiation of dependent co-arising. Our words and concepts are made for the samsaric world. It is only by realizing their fragility and the fragility of the world they designate that we can open onto the silence of the ultimate. To find God: “Attend not to an absentee gardener, but to the garden itself in all its immediacy and empty transparency”; as death-of-God theologians saw, “an objectively real God somewhere within or transcendent to the world simply did not matter anymore” (247).

The heart of Christian truth lies not in dogmatic certitudes but in a conversion of consciousness: “The basic structure of consciousness is already directed toward ultimate meaning and rejects God-conceptions because of their failure to ground themselves in that structure ... In awareness of the original structuring of consciousness oriented toward ultimate meaning one becomes aware of God as prevenient and encompassing” (248). Divine activity is conceived of non-anthropomorphically, as follows: “the activity of the pure Dharma Realm in benefiting beings is like empty space encompassing all actions: although space is not purposeful and never sets about implementing any divine plan, yet it is the encompassing source for all beneficent action” (249). This is quite a convincing phenomenology of grace, which can detect grace at the heart of all processes of life, which allowing it to emerge dramatically to the fore in experiences of conversion and enlightenment.

For Keenan it is contemplative experience that is the source of doctrinal insight, not the other way round. He is critical of the what he considers the intellectualist, objectifying approach to knowledge of God in the “mysticism of light” deriving from Origen and sees it corrected by the “mysticism of darkness” found in Gregory of Nyssa and Pseudo-Dionysius, which opens onto “the mystic realm of meaning as apart from all mediating images and words, as distinct from the extraverted, confrontational knowing of imagined essences” (116). But Christian theology refused to let itself be founded in such radical mystical awareness. Today, Madhyamika and Yogacara thought “can assist Christian theology both in reclaiming the centrality of its own mystic tradition and in maintaining a valid place for theoretical systematics” (123). A radical skeptic would explain the heightened immediacy of contemplative experience and its dissolution of the subject-object dichotomy as a projection of unconscious desire. But Keenan, though well aware to the human capacity for generating illusions, finds that negation is brought to a halt at this point.

A BUDDHIST READING OF MARK

Recently Keenan has turned his attention from Gregory and Pseudo-Dionysius to Mark's Gospel [and more recently still to the Letter of James (2005)]. This text, the earliest of the Gospels, comes from a pre-dogmatic and non-metaphysical level of Christian tradition. Its parables and cryptic narrative exemplify a style of religious communication that undoes at every turn dogmatic rigidity and bondage to convention. Recent commentary on this Gospel has been marked by a deconstructive radicality which goes half way to meet Keenan's Buddhist insights. He attempts to capture the resonances of the Markan text when heard with a Buddhist ear, just as others have listened to the text with Marxist, feminist, or psychoanalytical ears. A Lacanian psychoanalyst does not impose his interpretations upon the analysand, but offers only a punctuation of the analysand's speech, so that its meaning become clear to the analysand. Keenan's commentary is just such a Buddhist punctuation of Mark's speech. The result of the punctuation, however, is to interpret Christianity as far closer to Buddhism than one had imagined. Some might say that the Buddhist insights add nothing to what deconstructive exegetes have already seen. But this underestimates the significance of what is afoot here. Keenan applies to Mark not merely a few scattered Buddhist ideas, but a sensibility formed by the mainstream of Mahayana Buddhist thought. The fact that Mark and his exegetes can be translated so consistently into the terms of that tradition reveals a substantial common ground between Christianity and Buddhism.

Such a Buddhist parsing of biblical wisdom in its various forms saves the biblical message from seeming peremptory or archaic and rehabilitates it as a probing and well-grounded revelation of our relationship to ultimate reality. It opens up a new way to making sense of the notion of God, one that may allay the doubts of the death-of-god philosophers. But it seems to me that the biblical God may resist the consequent application of Buddhist categories, and that Keenan may be underestimating the strength of this resistance. One problem is that the Buddhist conception of ultimate reality, as entirely ineffable and as excluding all distinctions and discriminations - these have validity only on the conventional level - seems to fit poorly with the concrete figure of a living, active, personal God, who speaks through the prophets and involves himself in human history. Can the biblical God be entirely explained as a thematization of a preverbal awareness of ultimate meaning? Ultimate meaning, `the emptiness of things in their inexpressibility and silence,' seems extremely static, silent, monotonous, in comparison with the dynamic, communicative, and many-sided God of biblical tradition. [“Ultimate meaning is neither static nor dynamic, neither silent nor enunciated, neither monotonous nor many-sided, because ultimate truth does not function within our frameworks of meaning or philosophy” (1998, 142). Certainly, I cannot criticize ultimacy, but the discourse it prompts may have a monochrome cast. A “holy skepticism” that pulls us back again and again “to the silence of wonder and the givenness of the world” (ib.) is what Zen seeks a dynamic language for.] Keenan might say that the simplicity of the ultimate is perfectly compatible with the variety of the everyday world in its dependent co-arising, and indeed sharpens our perception of this variety. God-for-us would belong to this dependently co-arisen level, while God-in-Godself can be attained only in the ultimate quiescence of all fabrications and disappearance of all distinctions. This solution is reminiscent of Eckhart's postulation of a pure Godhead, beyond all the shifting forms of revelation and the affirmations of dogmatic theology. But it may be that the biblical God undoes precisely such a vision of ultimate purity. The Buddhist demythologization of Scripture may be matched by a biblical dismantling of the Buddhist myth of ultimate meaning as a realm in which all differentiations disappear. Such biblical resistance to a Buddhist reading would immensely complicate the project of a Buddhist-Christian theology. [I agree that ultimate meaning is not the purity of the Neoplatonic One (not even as reconceived by Gregory of Nyssa or Pseudo-Dionyius) and that any demythologization of the language of ultimacy is itself at the service of ultimacy.]

Keenan often appeals to ultimate reality in order to reduce doctrinal claims to the level of conventional truth: “All perspectives are worldly and conventional, in the face of ultimate meaning which is perspectiveless and silent” (1989,139). All religious utterances are contextual and provisional, and they function well only when they point beyond themselves to the ineffable ultimate. “Mahayana theology argues that all theological models (even a Mahayana model) are valid only within their contextuality in terms of the particular conditions in virtue of which they arise. In the words of Maximus Confessor, ‘the doctrines of the Church are transcended by their own content’” (225). One cannot insist too much on the fragile, hodological character of religious statements (hodos = way); they are pointers, set in the context of a practical lifestyle, to an ultimate mystery they can make no pretence of defining or explaining. Yet there seems to be a residual tension between the biblical and the Buddhist evaluation of these pointers. Christian doctrine about God is not exclusively negative or apophatic; rather, it is resolutely affirmative or kataphatic. To associate the negative with the ultimate and the affirmative with the conventional is almost a reversal of traditional Christian priorities, though it is true that under Neo-Platonic influence Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Eckhart came close to such a reversal.

The doctrine of the Trinity is sometimes cited as setting limits to apophaticism in Christian theology, since it proffers objective statements about the divine being in itself, which it would be heretical to regard as merely symbolic. However, when we look at the matter more closely we see that this doctrine is only a clumsy parsing of the biblical encounter with God as Creator, Word, Spirit. All it claims is that there must be some objective distinction of these aspects within the divine unity. (Of course popular and speculative conceptions of the Trinity have gone far beyond this, but without solid biblical or patristic support.)

A better objection to Keenan's apophatic emphasis is simply the style of the Scriptures, their overwhelming insistence on God's Word and the almost complete absence of reference to God as an ultimate reality best contemplated in silence. Biblical revelation and salvation seems to dwell fully in what Keenan would see as the conventional realm, while the dimension of ultimate meaning, in its otherness from this realm, hardly gets a look in. [Keenan sees no place for such a presentation of ultimacy as other than conventions critically scanned: “Ultimate meaning does not entail a cross-culturally shared immediacy of pure experience, but is the guardian against any view of or claim for such an experience. The emptiness of ultimate meaning is a non-affirming negation of the the ultimate validity of any language, and at the same time a reclamation of the logical, reasoned validity of conventional discourse” (Keenan 1998, p. 143).] The critical impact of ultimate meaning, as relativizing all conventional constructs, has to be transcribed into more positive terms in order to be applied effectively to Christian discourse. The Bible is very much a self-deconstructing book, but the deconstruction is not in the name of a purer ultimacy, but of a more convincing incarnation of God. In this context, is Keenan's stress on ultimate meaning not perhaps a subtler version of the `absentee gardener' approach he rejects?

The myth of the ultimate goes hand in hand with an epistemological myth of pure, unmediated experience, shared by mystical traditions in different cultures. Keenan distances himself from this myth to some extent: “There are, I would acknowledge, no pure, unmediated meanings for the very act of insight mediates experience in some terms or other” (1993, 17). Despite the gulf between ineffable experience and language about it, there is a “symbiotic and reciprocal relation” between experience and doctrine (18). Now, if the heightened immediacy of contemplative experience does not exclude such pluralism and contingency, does this not in turn undermine the monolithic view of ultimate meaning? [Keenan replies (1998, 143) that ultimate meaning is not a matter of views of any kind.]

Keenan grounds the variety of Jesus’s teachings, parables, and discourses in a single transcendental experience of God as `Abba' (Father). The application of Buddhist categories seems to smooth away the pluralistic perspectives suggested by the biblical text. Jesus’s parables no doubt aim to produce awakening, in a manner reminiscent of Zen koans. But is that all they intend to do? Is it even their primary aim? Jesus speaks more as a prophet than as a master of spirituality, and all the difference between biblical and Indian tradition weighs against any effort to translate his teaching immediately into Buddhist terms. But even if we do correlate Jesus with Zen, could it not be that the Madhyamika-Yogacara way of talking about ultimate reality is just the sort of thing that Zen snaps us out of and that Jesus too would have snapped us out of if he had ever heard of it?

Nonetheless, there is a substantial enough phenomenological core to Keenan's correlation of Mahayana and Gospel vision. In both he discerns a powerful call to conversion from the mind of delusion to the mind of wisdom, a conversion that brings us into intimate contact with ultimate reality. Despite its hermeneutical short-circuits, Keenan's theology is consistently phenomenological; it sticks close to the experience of delusion and awakening as exhibited in both religious traditions, and all its categories are derived from this experience. In contrast to the speculative constructions of other Buddhist-Christian thinkers, which distort both the Buddhist and the Christian phenomena, Keenan's constant effort is to allow these phenomena to unfold their meaning in an unforced way. When he feels obliged to the archaic categories and images in which they have been transmitted to us, he does so not in view of speculative reconstructions but in an appeal to the phenomena themselves.

CONVENTIONAL AND ULTIMATE

In admitting freely that all language belongs to the register of conventional truth and that the truth of ultimate meaning will always elude its grasp, Keenan brings a healing serenity to the epistemological crisis of religious language, and weans his readers away from the vice of `attachment to views.' The polishing and refining of our religious language becomes a functional affair, a matter of removing fixational habits of thought and reifying representations, so that the conventional language can continue to serve as a skillful means of awakening us to the ultimate.

His conception of the conventional language is not a monolithic one. Within the conventional, he distinguishes between purely illusory thoughts and thoughts which correspond to the dependently co-arisen condition of the samsaric world; in Yogacara terminology: between parikalpita and paratantra. He moves from a conventional religious language which is unaware of its limits and constantly projects illusory reifications of that to which it refers, to a self-conscious language which has taken cognizance of its provisionality.

If `the conjunction of strategies to embody truth always fails and self-destructs before the disjunctive otherness of ultimate meaning' (1989, 138), why worry about the correctness of these strategies? The answer lies in the criterion by which religious traditions are judged, namely, their capacity to permit experience of the deepest reality. Religions can serve as pragmatic, provisional paths to spiritual freedom, or they can hinder and repress such awakening. Dogmatic propositions, when divorced from their reference to spiritual awakening, lose their truth and their meaning. In light of this criterion, most theological discourse seems reified and alienated.

Religious traditions are dependently co-arisen. This means that they are human historical formations that have to be studied in their cultural particularity. The absolutization of a religion or its credal propositions spells a denial of the law of dependent co-arising. Such absolutism is a lie, which will issue in violence. Here we touch on the basic flaw that explains the tragedies of Christian history. When their historical particularity is seen, religious traditions are reassessed in terms of their functional effectiveness, as paths cut out within a given culture, enabling an opening to reality, or in theistic language, an opening to God. `God' is not a rival to `emptiness' as the name of ultimate reality. Both are valid conventional indicators of the ultimate reality, which both inspires and surpasses all the paths toward it that are traced within religious cultures.

Keenan is not opposed to a theology of conceptual refinement, even system, as long as it remains open at every point to the experience of wisdom, as he considers the conceptuality of Yogacara to do. The classical debates about the three hypostases of the one divine substance, or the two natures of the one hypostasis of Jesus Christ, have divorced themselves from such mandatory reference to awakening, or in Pauline terms, to Spirit. Their apparent logical coherence masks a profound debility, for they no longer serve as effective conventional testimony to ultimate reality. [“In their time and culture, classical formulations were existentially crucial to the Christian practice. They were felt intensely and triggered deep emotions”, Keenan 1998, p. 140. That is slightly off-key. Chalcedon was a horos, a definition of the space of orthodox discourse, not anything existential or kerygmatic. This theoretical horizon is what we seek to “overcome” by bringing it into historical perspective – in reference back to Scripture and forward to the present. That has little to do with claims that the categories of Chalcedon once “rocked” and have now become bloodless.]

Here again I want to sound a note of caution. There are many valid ways of constructing a critique of traditional Christian discourse, including the critiques of feminism and liberation theology. Keenan seems to put all his eggs in one basket, in his focus on the absolutization of the conventional. This critique is made to do work it is not suited to do. It gives rise to sweeping assessments of the language of dogma (notably of the Christological doctrine of the Council of Chalcedon in 451) and of the role played by metaphysics in theology, topics of extreme historical complexity which cannot be dealt with in a single massive stroke.

Can one accept the conventional status of language in Nagarjuna's sense, seeing religions as skillful means for opening up a path to the ultimate, while at the same time preserving theological realism, that is, the claim that dogmatic statements have objective reference, and are not merely expressive or symbolic or pragmatic utterances? The old awareness of the merely analogical status of talk about transcendent realities has been enriched and intensified by the modern experience of the historicity and culture-bound nature of religious language, so that theology is more than ever ready to embrace Buddhist insights in this realm. Dogmatism, which posits an identifiable truth as ultimate meaning, can be corrected through a subtler presentation of dogma, as a statement of truth which has integrated a sense of its own situatedness and relativity.

Our contingent culture-bound religious languages are skillful means for pointing to the ineffable. They are the finger, not the moon. Yet they retain the capacity, when set in the context of the entire tradition and lifestyle that sustains them, to speak objectively of transcendent realities. Religious statements are `undecidable' in a sense: we cannot pin down what they are saying in a language other than the very imperfect, ramshackle, myth-laden language which the tradition has given us; we believe the statements are true, but we are rather in the dark as to wherein exactly their truth consists, or how exactly they touch the truth to which they point. Religious statements are shots in the dark, but they can succeed in hitting their mark. They can be analogical statements about what is in fact true, though the analogies are shifting, fragile and context-dependent in a manner not theorized by Aquinas. Keenan objects that for Aquinas “theoretical meaning becomes not a symbolic weaving of models to express the ineffable, but an analogic and valid affirmation of what is in fact is true about God” (117). Ultimate truth lies in the realm of mystic awareness; doctrinal statements belong to the realm of “conventional, language-formed presentations of that awareness” (123). Is there not a danger here of reducing theology to a science of the “as if” or of “supreme fictions”? [No, for one aims “merely to affirm that it is human discourse” (1998, 143). Indeed, one could well argue that the biblical language of God is evidently a fiction, a means of creating a scenario in which the silent ultimate speaks to us and we to him, so that this human discourse – warts and all – becomes the highest fruit of a human group that exposed itself radically to ultimacy, becoming the “chosen people” by that token.]

Referential success is not guaranteed for all time to any statement, for the statements arise within an ongoing historical struggle to articulate religious conviction, and the integrity of their terms depends on the concrete conditions of their production. “Last year's words belong to last year's language” (T.S. Eliot). A true religious statement is the product of a kairos; the decision about its truth-content always contains, therefore, a moment of prophetic discernment. Yet none of this undermines the objective referentiality of such a statement.

God is not an object over against us, to be grasped in confrontational knowing (a Gegenstand), but in another sense God is objective, in the sense that the ultimate reality to which the term refers is not merely a supposition. God cannot be conceptually grasped or circumscribed, yet inadequate concepts can be used in a conventional language to advance a judgment which can stand as a valid statement referring to God, for example, `God is supremely good.' To say that the conventional status of religious language forbids us to speak here of valid judgments and objective reference would inhibit and undercut that language to a degree incompatible with belief that the biblical word is a communication of truth about God. Keenan devotes much attention to imaginary patterns of thinking about God, but there is a sober and modest discourse about God which does not fall prey to these patterns. Objectivity is not a matter of imaginary objectifications; valid affirmation is not a matter of exhaustive conceptual grasp.

CRITIQUE OF METAPHYSICAL THEOLOGY

The critique of the role played by Hellenistic metaphysics in Christian theology has a long history, but the subject remains a difficult and delicate one. It is a mistake to underestimate the cogency and intellectual force of the metaphysical tradition. Keenan himself draws on the best of Christian metaphysics – the apophatic reaches of medieval ontology and refined philosophy of consciousness developed in the transcendental Thomism of Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan. Reference to Heidegger could serve both to complicate and to clarify Keenan's stance toward metaphysics. Heidegger does not contest the truth of metaphysics, or the truth of science, on its own terms; rather, he points to a dimension of thought which metaphysics has been too busy to attend to, a contemplative attunement to being which is attained by stepping back from the conceptual realm. The critique of metaphysics from this perspective need not involve any discrediting of the conceptual labors of the philosophical tradition since Plato. Keenan's critique of metaphysics, unlike Heidegger's, is largely an intra-metaphysical critique: he advocates a flexible, critical metaphysics of consciousness over against a fixated reifying metaphysics of substance. In addition he performs a step back from metaphysics which has some remote analogies with Heidegger's, insofar as he consigns all metaphysical discourse to the level of conventional truth, not to the truth of ultimate meaning. One recalls that Heidegger drew inspiration for his `step back' from German translations of Lao-tse and D.T. Suzuki's essays on Zen. Heidegger's step back, like Harnack's critical labors on the history of dogma, is not merely a shift of register, but installs a thorough interrogation of the entire history of the tradition, somewhat as in Madhyamika the conventional is critically revisited from the vantage of the ultimate. Does Keenan's handling of the two truths facilitate such critical work on the tradition or does it simply bypass ancient tensions through consigning them globally to the conventional register? [The point is that immanent critique, say of the role of Greek metaphysics in theology, should be differentiated from a more searching reflection on the conventionality of all discourse.]

In his critique of Chalcedon, Keenan moves too quickly from a Buddhist stress on the `selflessness' of Christ to a rejection of all talk of `nature' and `hypostasis' in connection with Christ. He presumes that the conceptual labors of the Council were tied into the pattern of imaginary reification, neglecting the possibility of a more benign reading in light of his own view that the language of `self' may be reassumed on the conventional level. To be sure, if we accept the Buddhist ontology of the emergence of phenomena in radical interdependence, there can be no fixed substance of the humanity, divinity, person, or nature of Jesus Christ. But this does not rule out a reformulation of Chalcedon without any reference to fixed substance. “There is no selfhood to Jesus at all, for all human beings are empty of any self (atman). Christian doctrine on the person of Christ cannot then be expressed by attempts to define his dual nature or divine personhood” (1989, 225). But the doctrine of Chalcedon does not “define” the natures and person of Christ. Its concerns could well be expressed in Buddhist language. Its stress on the distinction of the divine and human aspects of Christ consigns his humanity cleanly to the conditioned realm and his divinity to the unconditioned. The inseparability of the two aspects recalls the inseparability of samsara and nirvana in Madhyamika.

Though Keenan's reading has a constant critical agility, the sifting of gospel events between conventional and ultimate becomes rather monochrome, like the practice of some of the Fathers who ascribed some actions of Christ to his humanity, some to his divinity. Resistance to Jesus always derives from attitudes that can be cured by insight into the two truths. People are fixated on the conventional taken as ultimate; they cling to the defined boundaries of the conventional instead of letting go in faith; they are trapped in discriminations which impede whole-hearted faith; they bifurcate the sacred from the profane, the supernatural and their ordinary lives, mistaking the otherness of ultimate meaning for an identifiable other, a separate realm, rather than the “silent awareness of the emptiness of everyday living” (1995, 151). In contrast, the way of faith abandons the props of the conventional, in “a wilderness conversion, modeled on that of Jesus’ direct awareness of God” (153). Faith is not insistence but expropriation, not clinging but letting-go. It rejects the institutional temptation “to reduce the ultimate meaning of tradition into the conventional framework of obvious necessities” (288).

In its central thrust this reading does capture much of the impact of the Markan Jesus. But there are elements in the Gospel and even in Jesus' own religious world-view that can be revised in the light of Buddhist insight. (This will sound blapshemous to fundamentalists, but Paul and John encourage a critical overcoming of the Letter that kills in light of the Spirit that gives life.) If Keenan had made a greater effort to define carefully the differences between the New Testament and Mahayana contexts, he could have staged such an open confrontation between Buddhism and the Gospel. Bland appeal to the two truths can whitewash ancient errors, such as Paul's approval of slavery: “Paul acquiesces in the givenness of his world” (256). Here a serious blind spot in early Christianity is whisked away and the door is opened to an over-facile method of coping with the Christian past (Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung). [A necessary immanent critique of tradition is eluded through recourse to the loftier vantage of the ultimate/conventional distinction.] Again, Keenan wishfully assures us that Mark “is not recommending a replacement theology, whereby the new religion of Jesus takes over from the outmoded religion of the Jews” (1995, 283); yet “he will give the vineyard to others” (Mark 12:9) can have no other meaning, and to say it refers to “the recognition of the otherness of ultimate meaning, of the falsity of clinging to any tradition, whether Jewish or Christian” is pure escamotage [if one is asking about the significance of the text for Jewish-Christian relations. Keenan replies that the text is directed against the temple authorities, denounced for giving ultimate status to human customs; “it is an implausible stretch to imagine that Mark himself is arguing for the superiority of Christianity over Judaism, as if a critique of religious authorities entailed a rejection of the tradition they inauthentically represent” (1998, 147). Yet the parable does allude, disturbingly, to the people who kill the prophets and the Son, not merely to their religious leaders, even if at 12.12 the leaders sense that it is directed at them]. From the Buddhist standpoint we should be freer to recognize the gravely questionable things in Scripture, such as this replacement theology which lays the foundation of Christian antisemitism. Precisely because the Gospel-writers did not have access to Buddhist refinements about the status of religious language and about spiritual awareness, they fell into various dangerous short-circuits, of which Buddhism can help to heal us today. Keenan's supposition that Mark is an anonymous Buddhist may cause him to miss the full healing potential of Buddhism for Christian tradition. [“I do not suppose that Mark is “an anonymous Buddhist.” Never in life should such a thought be thought! It is precisely because Mahayana maps such a different terrain and elicits such an alternate set of questions that it seems to assuage my theological itch” (1998, 146). Fine. But a “straighforward” theological reading of Mark through Buddhist lens must be the beginning of a more elaborate hermeneutical reflection that will abide with the tensions between the two horizons, as we abide with the tensions between the Greek and Hebrew roots of classical theology.]

I wish he had applied the two-truth hermeneutic more cautiously, with constant attention to its problematic aspect, instead of using it as a catch-all net. His commentary is a perpetual hybridization of two heterogeneous worlds, sometimes effected by allegorical eisegesis that biblical scholars will find regressive. [I agree that “a hybrid is perhaps better suited to withstand the frost of the modern world” (1998, 139).] Even the most adventurous exegetes Keenan draws on follow the basic law of literary criticism, that interpretations must be grounded in a plausible construal of the text. Commenting on Mark 11:23 (the believer can cast a mountain into the sea), Keenan writes: “The depths of the sea symbolize the complete absence of human constructs, the emptiness of all supports for conventional language” (1995, 276). Here the effort to coax Buddhist insight from the text is counterproductive. It leads not merely to over-interpretation, a common vice of recent Markan exegesis, but to completely tangential associations [“I offer but one plausible symbolic reading” (1998,147)]. A shorter, trimmer book, that would sacrifice such descants and siphon out the more persuasive correlations between Mark's strategies and two-truth theory, would serve more effectively to establish Buddhist-Christian theology as a viable discipline, capable of steady development.

THE RESURRECTION

The resurrection is perhaps the Christian doctrine that is most unconvincingly preached at the present time, and it is also the one that generates most anxiety, for if Christ was not raised from the dead the entire system of Christian doctrine collapses and there is no guarantee of eternal life for believers. Discussion of this theme is polarized between “realistic” accounts that insist heavily on the alleged empirical signs of the miraculous event, such as the empty tomb and the appearances, and more “spiritualizing” accounts that tend to reduce the resurrection to a mere interpretation of the meaning of Jesus’ life and death. For Keenan: “The resurrection stands as the breakdown of all conventional linear events and the breakthrough to awareness of the complete otherness of ultimate meaning” (366). Useless, then, to try to circumscribe this ultimate spiritual reality by insisting on empirical data or by giving a dogmatic definition of the resurrection-event. Resurrection means awakening to the ultimate reality signified conventionally by the entire ministry and passion of Jesus. The resurrection narratives, if taken literally, take us into an unreal world in which the laws of nature are broken at every moment. But if these miracles are taken as symbolic representations of the breakthrough of ultimate meaning everything falls back into place. In all probability the laws of nature are never suspended and apparent miracles are ultimately explicable in natural terms. The resurrection is not to be sought in the realm of magical interruptions of nature’s course, but in the realm of ultimate meaning, or what Paul and John call “Spirit.”

“Mark is not trying to demonstrate the truth of the resurrection within the context of imagined thinking, for no such demonstration is possible. Rather, the point is that Jesus is not there within conventional frames of reference, and thus not within the realm of words and judgments that might be called upon to demonstrate his renewed existence” (1995, 393). “There are no resurrection appearances because Jesus is beyond empirical validation. He will not ‘reappear’ even in Galilee. The resurrected Jesus can be seen only upon the awakening of conversion that he came to preach about, not in some supernaturally perceptible coming back to show his new glorified body” (394). “Through his life and death, Jesus has resurrected the ordinary dependently co-arisen course of life, infusing it with his presence” (395). “His resurrection is an awakening to the eschatological wisdom of God-awareness, empty of any identifying image or idea, and to the subsequently attained wisdom of reengaged world awareness, with all the images and ideas needed to live and witness to the gospel” (397). “There is no great day when the Lord comes in all his glory and gives Jesus' enemies what for. The eschaton comes in the everyday suffering and the everyday resurrection from that suffering” (358).

All this sounds as if the resurrection-faith hangs on a very thin thread. Yet the thread is no thinner than that on which Buddhism hangs. It consists in contemplative insight, rather than empirical proofs. Matthew Arnold claimed that the facts on which Christian faith depended had failed it, leaving only the poetry. But for Keenan the true facts are of a spiritual order, the breakthrough of ultimate reality in the figure of Jesus, which like the Buddha’s enlightenment is received not by blind faith but by growth in insight. As to the resurrection of the individual believer, this too becomes nebulous, about as intangible as Buddhist nirvana. The voice of the Johannine Christ, assuring us of the presence of eternal life, has the same calm authority as the voice of the Buddha proclaiming nirvana. But we can appropriate the message only by letting go of worldly or egotistic expectations.

[While all of this may help to identify the mode of being to which the message of the resurrection points, there is an extra dimension of objectivity and concreteness which the Buddhist framework does not particularly help one to see. To be a witness to the resurrection is not merely to be able to see beyond conventionalities, recognizing their emptiness. It is to announce a perception of the eschatological Kingdom breaking into the historical world. In short, the resurrection is an event (a historical-eschatological happening, registered by its witness at particular times and places), not a state.]

THE ESCHATOLOGICAL CONCRETENESS OF CHRIST

Does Keenan do justice to the Christian claim that God is made known in a uniquely concrete way in the election of Israel and in the incarnate manifestation of God in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ? Perhaps this claim, too, needs to be refocused and tempered, or given a specific limited bearing, so that it no longer lessens the autonomous dignity of other religious traditions. The categories in which Keenan refocuses it may not be adequate to capture what is most concrete and decisive about God's action in Jesus, which is not only a breakthrough of ultimate meaning but a concrete, historically mediated work of salvation.

On this point it would be illuminating to compare Keenan with the century’s most influential New Testament scholar, Rudolf Bultmann. For Bultmann, the resurrection is the transformation of the memory of Jesus into a powerful kerygma, a word of salvation, wherein Jesus becomes the Eschatological Event of God's breaking into human history. Eschatology is demythologized and existentialized, but for Bultmann the kerygma remains primarily a prophetic address to faith and conscience, rather than an instrument of converting us to the mind of wisdom. His Eschatological Event engages with real history in a more positive sense than Keenan's. No doubt Bultmann’s Lutheran hermeneutics of the New Testament could have been enriched by Buddhist and Hindu attunement to the dimension of Spirit (pneuma) in Paul and John (and here the later Heidegger would have been more helpful to him than the Heidegger of “Being and Time”). Keenan, to the contrary, practises an entirely spiritual hermeneutic, emphasizing the universal presence of the Kingdom as the “power of awakening” (211), a present reality which no longer strains toward a future consummation. The Kingdom is redefined as “the judgment of ultimate meaning that empties all conventional traditions and activity” (282); it is “present and available at every moment, has no linear time reference” (267). But once the Kingdom message ceases to be a concrete intervention within human history and becomes instead a universal, ahistorical wisdom-teaching, it loses its raison d’etre. Of course we should avoid giving Jesus’ eschatological language an absolute status; it is only a provisional expedient; the eschatological in itself remains ineffable. [“Eschatology itself is a myth, not a map of linear time. We already have our concrete and unavoidable history, which is quite capable of satisfying any demand for social embodiment. Precisely because Jesus collapses the mapped hopes of linear time, the kingdom is history-only, worldly convention-only, and not an imagined realm of God-Taking-Over on that final day” (1998, 148).] Still, to make it refer only to enlightenment, in its ultimate and worldly aspects, goes against the grain of biblical thinking; the reader can resist Keenan’s emphasis by consulting the exegetes he generously quotes in his notes (e.g., 1995, 268). If Jesus was merely teaching timeless spiritual truths, he chose an extremely clumsy and cumbersome vehicle for them, and the best thing would be to jettison these eschatological myths altogether. [Jesus, in short, does not leave history-only just as it is but constitutes a transformation of history; not just by lending it new spiritual significance, but by orienting it toward its concrete goal.

If there is a blind spot in Keenan's theology, it is located here. But the fact that he is forced to a spiritualizing interpretation reveals how opaque the eschatological message has become in our world and how difficult it is to retrieve the concrete historical meaning of the Gospel call. [Not only difficult, but “chimerical,” Keenan thinks, for it involves thinking “as if that history were happening today”; but surely the ongoing history of the Gospel is happening today, though of course “our histories are different and our tasks for constructing the kingdom of justice and peace must consequently differ” (1998, 148). Reading “the signs of the times” is precisely the way to actualize the historical-eschatological power of the Gospel.] Buddhism puts great pressure on Christians to dissolve this aspect of their tradition as an archaic positivism. Meanwhile, Christians find themselves incapable of addressing to Buddhists a concrete kerygma of the Kingdom of God. But in time both Buddhists and Christians may rediscover the distinctive strength of Christianity, its prophetic engagement with concrete history.

Meanwhile, Keenan has opened up a Buddhist way of reading the Gospel that may today be more practicable in the West than standard Christian readings, for it bypasses many thorny theological conundrums. The appropriation of Christ as wisdom-event is one of the most fundamental demands of the Gospel. All the dogmatic claims that have divided Christians and Jews, and split the Christian community itself, can be handled more lucidly and irenically if this foundation is first put in place. There is another, even more fundamental demand of the Gospel that Buddhism sheds less light on, namely the concrete message of a historical event of salvation to be received by faith. Here we still stumble on profound differences and unresolved problems of interpretation and articulation.

My thought has been profoundly influenced by John Keenan's over the last twenty years, to the point that in arguing with him I have the impression that I am arguing with myself. He is better armed than I to move boldly to the frontiers of Christian-Buddhist theology. I am more inclined to worry about the hermeneutics and methodology of the enterprise. I have no doubt that the enterprise itself is a great one, and that it is laying the ground for a future religious vision, one that can elicit an adult and vibrant faith, far beyond the sectarian panic and dogmatism of the churches today. We may anticipate that Christianity will emerge from its embrace of Buddhism altered even more profoundly than Keenan's writing suggests, though not thereby diminished.

TEXTS OF JOHN P. KEENAN REFERRED TO:
(1989). The Meaning of Christ: A Mahayana Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Reviewed by J. S. O'Leary, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 19 (1992), pp. 94-100.
(1993). "Mahayana Theology: A Dialogue with Critics." Buddhist-Christian Studies 13:15-44.
(1995). The Gospel of Mark: A Mahayana Reading. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.
(1998). "Hybrid Buddhism." The Eastern Buddhist 31.1:139-49.
(2005). The Wisdom of James: Parallels with Mahayana Buddhism. New York: Paulist.

From The Eastern Buddhist 30.1 (1997), updated.

Towards a Buddhist Interpretation of Christian Truth

From Catherine Cornille, ed. Many Mansions? Multiple Religious Belonging and Christian Identity (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002), pp. 29-43.

My models of "double belonging" are the late Winston and Jocelyn King. They meditated together every morning, he as a Buddhist Christian, she as a Christian Buddhist. Here was a marriage of traditions that left all theological cavilling far behind, demonstrating that there is no fundamental contradiction between the Gospel and the Buddha's path. One might try to maintain that each spouse had a primary and total commitment to one tradition and only an auxiliary commitment to the other one. Yet in the lived symbiosis of traditions it may be doubted whether such questions of priority were of any great moment. Jocelyn liked to quote Hakuin's slogan: "Great faith, great doubt, great effort." Great faith is practiced both in the initial total commitment to one's own tradition and in the subsequent generous embrace of the other tradition. Great doubt arises in the mutual testing and purification of the traditions. Great effort is called forth by the horizon of spiritual searching and questioning which the meeting of traditions opens up.

Vatican Warnings
   The immense mutual enrichment that religious pluralism brings was noted with joy by Pope John Paul II during his recent visit to Israel. A contrasting note is struck in the recent Declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus: "The Church's constant missionary proclamation is endangered today by relativistic theories which seek to justify religious pluralism, not only de facto but also de iure" (par. 4). This document has the merit of pointing to real dangers of the interreligious encounter. Theologians should ponder its warnings about "the difficulty in understanding and accepting the presence of definitive and eschatological events in history; the metaphysical emptying of the historical incarnation of the Eternal Logos, reduced to a mere appearing of God in history; the eclecticism of those who, in theological research, uncritically absorb ideas from a variety of philosophical and theological contexts without regard for consistency, systematic connection, or compatibility with Christian truth; finally, the tendency to read and to interpret Sacred Scripture outside the Tradition and Magisterium of the Church" (ib.). Religious relativism is popular today, partly because of the repulsion and fear excited by its polar opposite, fundamentalism. There is also a strong pressure on theologians to abandon the high claims made for Christ not only at Nicea and Chalcedon but in the New Testament.
   However, dangers are sometimes unavoidable, even salutary. The encounter of Christianity and Buddhism of its very nature puts a question mark against definitive eschatological events, demands a less substantialist ontology of the Incarnation, sets up a play of ideas which cannot be reduced to systematic connections, and uncovers meanings in Scripture which are thinly represented in traditional church teaching. Theologians dealing with these pressures will usually try to maintain the definitive character of what God has done in Christ, including a view of the Incarnation that can claim fidelity to the truth of Nicea and Chalcedon. But their striving for orthodoxy will inevitably seem insufficient to those who refuse to take Buddhist questions and insights seriously. As to "uncritical" syncretism, one is tempted to ask to what degree it is in the eye of the beholder. The alternative to it, in any case, is not a purism that would refuse to use any non-Christian or non-Western concepts, but rather a discerning "syncretism" of the kind practiced by the Fathers when they took on board the riches of Greek philosophical theology. The Vatican document offers little positive advice on how to proceed here, and in the context of the discouragement of study of Asian religions in Asian seminaries one suspects that it is fomenting panic about relativism in a rather obstructionist way. 
   Vatican documents of this kind, ever since Pascendi (1907), tend to erect theological questions or problems -- problems usually posed by the realities of the cultural context or by the results of historical research -- into fixed "presuppositions" forming a system of errors to be overthrown. These errors are then dismissed by citation of the Creeds or of other Vatican documents, citation which can be highly selective (witness the fate of Paul VI's left-leaning texts, Populorum Progressio, Octagesima Adveniens, Evangelium Nuntiandi in contrast with the use of his Creed of the People of God as a litmus test of orthodoxy). The hermeneutics implied in this procedure is one of circular transparency between modern questions and ancient texts. There is no recognition that the ancient texts, unless sensitively interpreted for the modern context, have an abrupt and rather scandalous character, due not to the truth they contain but to the inadequacy of its archaic expression. The same unresolved question of the need for translation of ancient creeds into modern categories underlies the skirmishes between the Vatican and hermeneutically alert theologians such as Rahner and Schillebeeckx. Of course it is very frustrating and discouraging for theologians to have to explain the elements of hermeneutics to uncomprehending church authorities again and again, especially when their patient clarifications are rewarded with contumely. Doctrinaire impatience with hermeneutics also plays into the hands of those who would dissolve the Christian tradition, for instance by labelling two millennia of Christian thought as anti-Semitic, anti-woman, or 'metaphysical'.
   The encounter with Buddhist thought enhances the hermeneutical task of theology, by opening up the possibility that Christian truth today can be more luminously presented in a discourse influenced by Buddhist analytical methods and ontological insights than in the old frameworks formed in dialogue with Greek ontology. In order to dissolve the theoretical objections to a Christian-Buddhist symbiosis, without trivializing them, one needs to trace the points of contention to their historical roots. This is a vast and unending hermeneutical task. In our non-Eurocentric culture it is unconvincing to dismiss the ontological analyses of Buddhism as simply erroneous while conferring on those of Thomas Aquinas a perennial validity. A thoroughgoing philosophical dialogue between the traditions of western and eastern metaphysics is called for, with on both sides a constant attempt to rejoin the phenomena themselves, the Sachen selbst, from which no philosophical or theological discourse can stray with impunity. Buddhists, like Christians, have always sought to understand the nature of reality itself, both in metaphysical analysis and in meditative contemplation of the "suchness" of things. When they share their quests they are unlikely to find a systematic connection between the two ontological traditions, nor is it likely that one tradition will simply refute the other. Currently, Buddhist philosophy seems to reinforce the deconstruction of substance-ontology that has been going on in the West since Kant and Hegel, with some help form quantum physics. Yet Buddhism can also provide a deep underpinning to the modern philosophies of subjectivity, language, and phenomena, revealing ultimacy at the heart of the realms they open up and preserving them from nihilistic forms of reduction. Buddhist ontology could also perhaps repristinate insights of classical metaphysics; but we do not yet have serious Buddhist readings of Plato, Aristotle, or Aquinas. Conversely, western philosophical analysis may be necessary to give Buddhism an articulate modern voice, for the great debates of the Madhyamika or T'ien-t'ai schools, so fascinating to scholars, seem tangential to contemporary questions unless this hybridization is allowed. The exchange between Buddhism and western philosophy is far more vibrant, at least intellectually, than the Buddhist-Christian dialogue, and it is flourishing unchecked by any supervising agency such as the Vatican. "Double belonging" in the realm of philosophy has its tensions, to be sure, but they are of a purely intellectual order. In the realm of religion we seem happy to confine ourselves to a dialogue of contemplation or praxis, which eschews the clash of ideas and the opening up of questions. The all-importance claimed for spirituality or for politically correct causes produces a discourse in which Christianity and Buddhism taste exactly the same, a bland spiritual chewing gum.
   The first questions raised in Buddhist-Christian encounter may seem like tired chestnuts, not worth fretting about. The question of God, for example, is already so blurred and confused after centuries of discussion in the West that one can scarcely summon hope that Buddhism could renew it. With its stress on universal impermanence, Buddhism is uneasy with the idea of an eternal God, or rather it is positively hostile to the idea. Even when Buddhists teach that Buddhahood is a constantly abiding reality, identical with the very suchness of things, this Buddhahood, as Dogen stresses, is not a substance but the event of becoming Buddha, an event constantly renewed. Thus if "impermanence itself is Buddha-nature" and thus "constantly abiding" (a difficult paradox), conversely, Buddhahood itself is impermanent in its fabric. Buddhism begins by dismantling the Brahmanist idea of a securely substantial God, whereas Christianity is firmly rooted in Jewish monotheism and even reinforces it by Platonic structures of transcendence wherein God is located as supreme eternal being. Here we seem confronted with an irresoluble contradiction that makes "double belonging" impossible.
   But this may be tackled as a challenging koan, pointing to a subtler conception of the meaning of monotheistic language. The doctrines of non-self and emptiness do not annihilate human personhood, but free it for a more authentic existence. Similarly, an empty God, who is non-self, is closer to the dynamic Johannine and Pauline conception of God as an event of Spirit, light, agape than to the God of classical metaphysical theology. Even within metaphysical theology, when God is spoken of as "being itself" or as "beyond being" we are asked to think of God as an empty space attained when we put speech aside (apophasis) and suspend our desire to grasp conceptually (akatalepsis). When God is spoken of in this way, Buddhists may sense an affinity with their own positive conceptions of ultimacy, the notion of dharmakaya for example. In Buddhism and Vedanta apophatic thinking serves to bring us into the presence of ultimacy here and now, an immanent ultimate, rather than to transcend the present world in a Platonic ascent to a world beyond. But in Christianity, for instance in Meister Eckhart, and even in Plotinus, apophasis can be a means of awakening to present reality, finding oneself where one already is. Buddhism encourages the overcoming of Platonic dualism through a more thoroughly phenomenological and contemplative method of thinking. Just as Buddhist conceptions of Buddhahood or the dharmakaya are supposed to be quarried from the experience of realizing Buddhahood in meditation, a new concept of God could be discerned by sifting our inherited God-language through a thinking that hews to the phenomena. (The peculiar clumsiness of process theology derives from its lack of a secure grounding in the phenomenology of how God is encountered; the same may be said of the bloated trinitarian speculation so popular of late.) Eternity can be translated into phenomenological terms as the discovery that God is "always to hand" -- pantote in the sense of "the poor you have pantote with you" (John 12:8). To be sure, the inherent quality of that which is encountered undoes the application of temporal categories; love, grace, spirit are not subject to temporal categories, just as Buddhahood in its nirvanic ultimacy and emptiness cannot be tracked by them, though each of these noumenal realities are always being realized in a lived here and now. Perhaps the nearest analogue to Buddhahood in Christianity is the Holy Spirit. When we call the Spirit an "eternal being" we feel we are missing the phenomenon of the Spirit, ever active in the here and now.

Christology
   As even the title of Dominus Iesus indicates, the most persistent objections to Christian acceptance of Buddhist thought stem from Christology. The accents of Buddhist ontology can have a refreshing impact here. The language of substance, nature, and hypostasis as applied to Jesus has tended to shield the humanity of Jesus from contingency and impermanence (Buddhist anitya) in a docetistic fashion. Buddhism allows a more thorough appreciation of the kenotic character of Christ's humanity, its full participation in the dependently co-arising texture of samsaric existence. Even apart from Buddhism, theologians are constrained to envision the definitive eschatological role of Jesus Christ in light of the radically contingent texture of human evolution and history. The singular meaning emergent in the life, death and ongoing life of Jesus needs to be credibly placed within the general perspectives of history as we currently discern them and particularly within the history of religions. The metaphysics of the incarnation need not be an inexplicable amalgamation of two substances, human and divine; a step back to the perspectives of Origen or the quasi-adoptionist language of the New Testament (Acts 2:36; Romans 1:3-4, etc.) can suggest that the divine Word is manifested, becomes historical, in a unique and full way in and across the entire history of Jesus in his connections with Israel and the entire human community. Never to be forgotten is the fact that Logos is God and that Jesus is a man. The "hypostatic union" of the Logos and the man as one and the same Lord Jesus Christ has always been seen as an unfathomable mystery. Yet if we approach it "from below," along the pathways of the history in which the figure of Jesus emerges as the divine Word spoken into the heart of that history, and of all human history, then the dogma acquires a certain phenomenological profile; the mystery comes into focus without ceasing to be mystery. The contingent, dependently arising events of the Christian "history of salvation" (embracing Israel, the fleshly Jesus in his various interconnections with others, and the history of the Church) reveal ultimate reality in a distinctive way, summed up in the phrase "the Word became flesh" (Jn 1.14). Phenomenologically, the claim that Jesus is savior and divine is grounded in the way that in the story of Jesus divine ultimacy and human historical struggle click together in a cogent and potent way, unknown elsewhere.
   A metaphysics of emptiness can greatly enhance these efforts to rethink Christology in a phenomenologically accessible style. To see Jesus as a man empty of own-being, and therefore manifesting in his dependently co-arising existence the ultimate reality of divine emptiness, is a vision that chimes well with many aspects of the Gospel. John P. Keenan shows this in his remarkable commentary, The Gospel of Mark (Orbis Press). Even Johannine Christology could be re-envisioned in these terms; it is in his abandonment of vain claims to substantial self-nature that Jesus becomes the true Word of the empty God, and can enter the dimension of glory and become the source of Spirit for all who accept him and live the same "empty" life. But it may very legitimately be feared that Buddhist analysis will ultimately have a corrosive effect on the language of Christology. Converting it from a language of being into a language of emptiness carries the great risk of losing its integral content. The temptation that lies nearest, and to which Dominus Iesus is particularly attentive, is that of a "Nestorian" separation of the eternal Logos and the man Jesus.
   The doctrine of the Atonement raises a further series of problems. Rene Girard offers pointers to rethinking atonement as a human process, the dismantling of human mimetic rivalry and its murderous outcome through the prophetic non-violence of Jesus, given universal presence in the symbol of the Cross. (Girard's humane sensitivity as a literary critic contrasts with the unwieldy contraptions of theologians who speculate on the "creative suffering of God" and other far-fetched unbiblical notions.) Jesus draws on himself the violence generated by human greed and ambition, eloquently countering it in his death with an expression of forgiveness, compassion, humility, and love: "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). Jesus has a bodhisattva's insight into the bondage of his enemies to delusive passions and delusive objects of passions, rooted in a delusive idea of self, and he exerts educative compassion on their condition, to release them from suffering. Wherever the Cross is made known, the same compassionate education is continued. The truth revealed in the event of the Cross is as old as creation -- the truth of God's loving-kindness constantly pressing on his creatures despite their closed hearts. "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself" (2 Cor. 5:19), not by magic but through the eloquent expression of forgiveness and compassion in all the gestures of Jesus culminating in his death. Wherever the Cross is remembered, God's work of healing, through the Spirit, is something phenomenologically accessible. To human arrogance it is a stumbling block or mere folly, but when its meaning is discerned this exhibition of failure and weakness is understood to be "the power of God and the wisdom of God" (I Cor. 1:24). It may be objected that the Cross has been an emblem of violence and tyranny in crusades and colonization. That means that the Cross has not been understood. Today we understand it better, because we see more clearly how damaging is the disease to which the Cross brings the cure. The three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion are writ large in contemporary history and are studied in depth by psychoanalysts and sociobiologists. Alongside the wisdom of the Buddha, the power of the Cross is increasingly being recognized as the supreme antidote. (Buddhist gentleness suggests to us the question whether the harshness of biblical language -- especially in the gospel denunciations of Pharisees and "the Jews" -- has been an appropriate method of conveying the wisdom of the Cross.)
   Against substantializing and magical theories of the Atonement, we do well to set in high relief the salvific impact of the Cross as registered in human experience; that impact reaches far, to the very depths of humankind's biological and psychological make-up, and it can correct even what is human all too human in the letter of Scripture and the activities of the Church in history. Redemption, too often conceived as a magical "behind the scenes" process, is worked out in history as the deconstructive impact of the figure of the Cross, dissolving the barriers set by human arrogance and fixation against the liberating space of divine ultimacy. God's reconciliation of humankind with Godself takes phenomenological profile as the power of the Cross -- epitomizing an entire trajectory of awareness and enactment -- to put humans back in touch with gracious ultimacy. What is experienced as dramatic divine intervention can also be grasped as the human process of opening to the ever-available ultimacy, an opening supremely expressed and enabled in the life and death of Jesus. A phenomenology of breakthroughs of ultimacy need not overlook the conventional processes which are the vehicle and the basis of such breakthroughs. Indeed, it is only by deepening our awareness of the sheer conventionality or contingency of religious languages, in a kenotic spirit, that we can preserve their functionality as vehicles of ultimacy.
   Focusing on these phenomena, we realize that grace is not an abstruse invisible substance. It is the core of reality itself, constantly operative, awaiting our realization of its power and presence. One might compare this presence of grace with the notion of "original enlightenment," central in Japanese Buddhism and now powerfully rehabilitated in Jacqueline Stone's Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism (University Press of Hawai'i, 1999). For Buddhism, at least in the optimistic form that prevailed in medieval Japan, the status of Buddhahood is open in principle to any human being; indeed we already have the Buddha-nature and need only wake up to the fact; why, even grasses and trees can be Buddha, or rather already have the Buddha-nature just as they are! The reason for this is that Buddhahood is identical with the suchness of things; to become a Buddha is to be what one is and to be it to the full. This is attained not by the intercession of a Buddha but by each individual discovering and following the path to Buddhahood, or simply awakening to Buddhahood. Such a system of salvation seems a blank denial of Christian claims about sinful humanity's radical need of a Redeemer. But let us remember that Christian thinkers have always rejoiced in the radical goodness of being, none more so than that prince of soteriological pessimists, Saint Augustine. All that exists is good to the core, and evil is a mere deficiency in being. Ultimate gracious reality is revealed in all beings and is at work in all beings. When we say that salvation is found only in Christ or only in the Church, the meaning of "salvation" here must be a highly specific one. Perhaps the completeness of historical eschatological salvation is what is meant, the idea that Christ brings to fulfillment and leads to its ultimate destiny the universal creative-salvific process that is always going on in all religions and in all life. Paul VI had a beautiful flight of eloquence in his Christmas sermon for 1975: "I see all the religions of the world converge around the crib of Bethlehem, and as I say this my voice trembles, not with incertitude, but with joy -- la mia voce trema, non d'incertezza, ma di gioia." This was the vision of Vatican II, albeit imperfectly expressed in its documents, a vision rooted in a Teilhardian sense of the dynamic of life.
   
The Universal Mediation of the Incarnate Word
  The claim that all grace is mediated by the incarnate Christ and his Church, so stongly stressed in Dominus Iesus, could be interpreted more gently if one first stressed this universal constant presence of grace at the core of reality. Christ and the Church are definitive historical ciphers of grace, its eschatological incarnation, but they make sense only against this broader background. In theologies like that of Karl Rahner this background is expressed in abstract metaphysical terms, but we can discern it in its concrete richness if we interrogate the witness of the great religions, all of which speak of the miracle of grace.In the Fourth Gospel Jesus tells his disciples that they still have a lot to learn and that the Spirit will lead them into all truth (John 16:12-3). One of the places where that truth should be sought is in the religious witness of humanity. Intrinsically, Christ as the Word Incarnate is the fullness of truth; but to discover this divine fullness in the concrete words and signs in which it is deposited is an infinite labor, in which all humanity participates. Christ is always ahead of us, waiting to be fully known.
   Jacques Dupuis's book, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (Orbis Press, 1997), under investigation by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the two years preceding  the publication of Dominus Iesus, is perhaps the target of the following remark: "the theory of the limited, incomplete, or imperfect character of the revelation of Jesus Christ, which would be complementary to that found in other religions, is contrary to the Church's faith. Such a position would claim to be based on the notion that the truth about God cannot be grasped and manifested in its globality and completeness by any historical religion, neither by Christianity nor by Jesus Christ" (Dominus Iesus, par. 6). The phrase "the theory" seems to lump together many different possible positions, to consign them all to the dustbin of heresy.
   "Theological faith (the acceptance of the truth revealed by the One and Triune God) is often identified with belief in other religions, which is religious experience still in search of the absolute truth and still lacking assent to God who reveals himself" (par. 7). Here again an important nuance risks hardening into a black and white opposition. All religions have faith in the sense of generosity of vision and existential trust that goes beyond the warrant of narrow empiricism and implies a relation to gracious ultimacy. On the other hand, there is the specific recognition of God at work amid his people Israel (Jewish faith) or in Jesus (Christian faith), which corresponds to that extra something, that definitive eschatological fullness of salvation, that Scripture proclaims. But the quest-structure of human experience pervades all religions. According to Augustine, God "can be found while he is being sought" (inveniri posse dum quaeritur); God is "sought in order to be found more sweetly, and found in order to be sought more eagerly" (Nam et quaeritur ut inveniatur dulcius, et invenitur ut quaeratur avidius; De Trinitate XV 2). All religions have their mighty finds and their ongoing quests. The incompleteness of their understanding does not mean that they have not found what they seek; and the fact that Christians securely possess the fullness of divine truth does not mean that they are not seeking still for what they have found. The attempt to view this universal process of human religious seeking and finding as the medium and mode of even biblical revelation, and conversely to find a divine revelatory activity at work in the non-biblical trajectories of religious experience and questioning, seems to me an irreversible path of theological reflection, imposed on us by the facts of religious pluralism themselves. To see only its dangers and not its promise seems faint-hearted and ungenerous. To insist that "the sacred books of other religions, which in actual fact direct and nourish the existence of their followers, receive from the mystery of Christ the elements of goodness and grace which they contain" (par. 8) may be logical, in that the eternal Word (God) is the source of all goodness and grace (and truth, unmentioned here), and this Word is most fully and definitively incarnate in the Christ-event and the Christ-process. But this logical claim has had deleterious effects on Christian understanding of Judaism, in the two millennia when the Hebrew Scriptures were read as testimonies to Christ which the Jewish people, due to their blindness, were unable to read correctly. Applied with equal bluntness to the sacred texts of Hinduism or Buddhism it would amount to the claim that only Christians, full of the Holy Spirit, are capable of understanding the true import of, say, the teachings of the Buddha. The stubborn realities of history and of pluralism are in tension with bluntly expressed theological claims here, and this tension cannot be resolved in a wholesome way by simply shutting out awareness of the other, as happened in Christian exegesis of the Hebrew Scriptures in the centuries between Jerome and Calvin.
   "The theory which would attribute, after the incarnation as well, a salvific activity to the Logos as such in his divinity, exercised 'in addition to' or 'beyond' the humanity of Christ, is not compatible with the Catholic faith" (par. 10). Nor is there any "economy of the Holy Spirit with a more universal breadth than that of the Incarnate Word, crucified and risen" (par. 12). According to theologians such as Karl Barth even the creation of the world is mediated by the humanity of Christ, and the idea of Christ's descent into hell implies that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were saved not simply by their faith in God but by their prophetic faith in the humanity of Christ. An inflated Christocentrism, even Christomonism, had a debilitating effect on much of Barth's and Von Balthasar's thought. Hasty insistence on stamping Christ and the Church on every phenomenon of creation and history leads to a counter-intuitive vision of reality and leaves no breathing-space for the diversity of humanity and the transcendence of the divine. That is why missioners are mistrusted; they are too quick to stamp Christ on local cultures or to stamp out these cultures to make room for Christ. In Asia, the Church is perhaps beginning to define itself as "defender of faiths" as well as propagator of the faith. Interreligious dialogue is not to be used as an instrument of mission, but rather it is out of dialogue that authentic mission may emerge.
   At an abstruse, transcendental level the claim that adherents of non-Christian religions mysteriously participate in Christ's paschal mystery, and not merely in the universal light of the Logos, may belong to the logic of Christian faith, even though it must be admitted that the "logos spermatikos" doctrine by which Fathers such as Justin Martyr were able to discern traces of the divine Word in Greek philosophy and religion often sounds as if the logos asarkos (the non-incarnate Logos) is being spoken of. In the actual practice of interreligious thought, however, it may often be indiscreet and positively distorting to introduce the humanity of Christ as an explicit theme. Britten's chamber opera, The Rape of Lucretia, has a narrator who comments on the ancient Roman story from a Christian point of view; the effect is an unconvincing clash of styles. The beauty of Mozart's music is mediated by the humanity of Christ and not just by the disincarnate divine Logos; but such a claim offers only the most nebulous guidance for a theology of music, and could licence the most insensitive intrusion of Gospel themes on the fabric of the musical work. There is a lot of Zen in the Gospel and there is a lot of the Gospel in Zen; but this communion of the two traditions is not brought to light by dogmatic fiat; (see Fr Kadowaki's Zen and the Bible for a phenomenological uncovering of the dynamic interplay between the two traditions, as discovered in meditation). Christians may find it more convincing and more tactful to say, along with Vatican II, that "the Spirit" is moving in all hearts, and if pressed they will of course affirm that this Spirit is none other than that breathed forth in the fullness of its power by the dying and risen Jesus. The paschal mystery is universal because it touches the essence of human living and dying; this universality is not imposed from without, by preaching Christ, but discovered from within, in every human destiny, as a horizon of hope, given a certain definitiveness in the Cross. Modesty is de rigueur in making such claims, since we are dealing with realities of faith not of final vision. An eschatological proviso, a docta ignorantia, must qualify all our affirmations. We grasp only dimly and from within a human historical perspective what the Spirit is saying to the religions and to us through the religions. We may measure what we grasp against what we have grasped of our own scriptural revelation, and the result may be that our grasp of our own tradition deepens and changes. Thus the normative and complete character of God's salvation in Christ does not exclude a lot of give and take in practice, given the radical limitations of our understanding of God and even of Christ. That stress on limitations need not signify a Modernist Neo-Kantian agnosticism; what the Vatican document understresses is the degree to which this emphasis can draw on sources deep within Christian tradition itself.
   Theological claims need not blind us to empirical reality. The claim that Christ and the Church are universal needs to be qualified by a recognition of the historical and culture-bound limitations of Christian discourse as it has actually existed. Only at the end of time will the universality of Christ be an actually realized phenomenon. For now it is a projected perspective of faith, a regulative idea guiding the dialogue between Christian tradition and other traditions. In that dialogue Christianity is in quest of its own universality. The fullness of truth dwells in Christ, but as particular historical movements the churches do not exhaust the totality of truth; there is always more of Christ to be discovered. Many new things are to be learned from Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, things not precontained even implicitly in the treasury of Christian truth that the Church effectively possesses, though they are precontained in the fullness of the Incarnate Word. Christian truth is not in any case primarily a set of knowledges, but the living memory of an event, the death and glorification of Christ. Our interpretations of this event, including the labor of dogma that produced the Nicene Creed and Chalcedon, remain very imperfect. Western philosophy has been found to be of great value in the ongoing task of interpretation, and Buddhism should prove of greater value still. Christianity, viewed in its history, is best seen as a dynamic and open project that is far from being able to grasp its own significance completely; still less can it grasp completely the significance of other religions, judging them from a superior vantage-point. The normativeness of the Christian project is an open-ended and fluid thing, as is the normativeness of the project of Western reason or of the Western quest for human rights. This normativeness is enriched if it can ally itself with kindred projects in other traditions.
   The categories of classical dogma have a role in orienting Christian faith towards its object, if they are skillfully deployed. But the fundamental thought of religious people does not move on the conceptual plane. When we rethink our images of God in light of a Buddhist insight into emptiness, for example, the dogmatic prohibitions of atheism, pantheism, etc. provide only a safety net, rather than powerful positive direction. Dogmatic criteria are less central than the criteria inscribed in the Gospel itself: the primacy of love, the superiority of the life-giving Spirit to the letter that kills, the abundance of grace and of divine mercy, justification by faith in Christ, the primacy and assured triumph of the eschatological Kingdom. These are mysterious criteria, demanding ongoing contemplative perception, and cannot be summarized in cut and dried categories. Even within the Bible, these criteria functioned in a subversive way, as signs of contradiction. They remain troubling to the Church whenever it becomes excessively bureaucratized. One of the wonders of Vatican II was that these criteria again came unmistakeably to the fore.

Back to the Phenomena
   If we identify the Christian essentials as love, Spirit, grace, we must be careful not to reify the saving event these terms indicate. We must not freeze our understanding of these terms, making them fetishes. When we meet an alternative discourse of ultimate spiritual life, such as the Buddhist discourse of Wisdom and Compassion, our mono-Christian terminology may be felt to be insufficient, parochial. The universality of love, Spirit, grace is perhaps already lost if we remain within the furrow of biblical language and refuse to confer an equal dignity and centrality on the Buddhist terms. The great religious founders were amazingly free people, and showed little concern with packaging their doctrine in an exclusive set of orthodox categories. The realm of religious truth is fundamentally that realm of pneumatic freedom, only very secondarily a realm of doctrinal propositions. Consider this description:

There is an important connection between the image of the Zen master as unhesitating and unflinching and the central Buddhist realization of the emptiness or groundlessness of all things. The Zen master is the one who no longer seeks solid ground, who realizes that all things and situations are supported, not by firm ground and solid self-nature, but rather by shifting and contingent relations. Having passed through this experience of the void at the heart of everything, the master no longer fears change and relativity. The Zen master is undaunted by the negativity in every situation and every conversation. He no longer needs to hold his ground in dialogue, and therefore does not falter when all grounds give way. What he says is not his own anyway; he has no preordained intentions with respect to what ought to occur in the encounter. Indeed, on Buddhist terms, he has no self -- his role in the dialogue is to reflect in a selfless way whatever is manifest or can become manifest in the moment. (Dale S. Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism, Cambridge University Press 1998, pp. 100-1):

This description could apply very well to Jesus, especially as he appears in the sayings tradition and in Mark. The awakened person is in tune with the movement of life itself. The Kingdom of God, the main theme of Jesus' preaching, is beyond the register of control and calculability. Perhaps his prophetic statements about its future coming were never intended to be taken literally, but rather functioned to awaken people to the divine at work in their midst. The future triumph of the divine is assured, but the assurance rests on "whatever is manifest or can become manifest in the moment" and it is here that the teaching of Jesus becomes precise and penetrating, whereas the references to past and future depend on the conventional symbolic framework of the time. Church teaching, too, should center on awakening people to the presence of God here and now, relying less on the secure grounds presented by the past or by promises about the future. The burden of worrying about these grounds weighs down the Christian present and creates a musty, shabby idea of religious truth as consisting chiefly in claims about what happened or will happen at other times and places. The history of salvation is a necessary backdrop to Christian preaching, but it is less substantial than is supposed, as can be seen from the fact that our understanding of it has changed so much over the centuries. The significance of the past and the promise of the future are always things to be quarried anew from the experience of the present. The tendency of Christian thought to see the present only in light of a mythicized past and future, instead of the other way round, stifles spiritual creativity. Projecting our perspectives on past and future from the Zen groundlessness and emptiness of the present, we can reground past-oriented faith and future-oriented hope in the present movement of the Spirit, a movement that itself has no firm ground but blows where it will in shifting and contingent relations and encounters.
　　Reductions of dogma to what is phenomenologically accessible have been afoot in theology since Schleiermacher. They defuse the basic tensions between Christianity and Buddhism. Other tensions are more a matter of accent and atmosphere, for instance, the stereotypical opposition of Buddhism as an impersonal, rational, equanimous religion or philosophy and Christianity as personal, emotional, and based on faith in authority. Different personality types flourish on different types of religion. Buddhism does a better job that everyday Christianity in catering to those whose religious sensibility is impersonal and rational; Christianity is richer in resources for those of more existential and affective temper. But Christianity is no more lacking in fearless rational analysis than Buddhism is in passion and compassion. Rather than think of Buddhist equanimity as a cool, self-protective attitude, we should see it as guaranteeing the authenticity of compassion; a busy nurse cannot direct effective compassion to a succession of patients unless she is deeply grounded in equanimity. The wealth of equanimity, as a spiritual attitude of wisdom and freedom, is so great that it can found and fund compassion. Conversely, Buddhists tempted to stereotype Christian piety as emotional should consider that sentimentality can be a skillful means for some people, and that a radical purification of emotion is available within Christianity in such masters as John of the Cross. Generally, any totalizing criticism of a great religious tradition will fall flat. Cardinal Ratzinger's comment that "Buddhism is a form of spiritual auto-eroticism" is a case in point, at least if read as a remark about the entire tradition rather than about some irritating local Zen enthusiasts. British Buddhologist Paul Williams claims that this remark was instrumental in his conversion to Catholicism, and that as a Buddhist he was unable to get outside his own mind. But the attractions of mind-only idealism are not unknown in the Christian West, and each tradition has its antidotes to the extremes of solipsism or other forms of mind-based nihilism, just as it has its antidotes to substantialist reification.
  　All religions have to do with salvation and healing. A religion which is no longer effective in healing the ills at the root of human existence risks being numbered among those ills itself. For Buddhism, religions are skillful means, expedients adapted to the concrete situations of suffering beings. That does not mean they are merely lies or fictions; each in its own symbolic language functions as a mode of the Buddha's presence. In Japanese esthetics, even the poetic naming of a tree or the spring rain can be such a presencing of Buddhahood. Christianity has not had this sense of itself as a pragmatic construction and has not been very generous in admitting a providential healing function in all other religions as well. It has sought to center its identity on the rock-like security of doctrinal truth, often at the expense of healing efficacity. Perhaps we have been too anxious to pin down the truth, imitating the methods of philosophy and seeking foolproof guarantees. We have been more anxious for proof that there is a God than for an understanding of what is meant by the word "God." Energy invested in shoring up doctrinal certitude carries a charge of violence, violence against our own questioning minds, which can overflow into violence against others who revive the repressed questions.
   "Unlilke the modern European focus on epistemological concerns -- the concern to attain accurate representation through avoiding error -- Buddhists envision a systematic distortion that pervades all human understanding" (Wright, p. 137). Buddhism avoids the trap of anxious attachment to views, content to let the experience of following the Buddhist path speak for itself. Buddhist tolerance of and respect for a variety of religious paths seems flabby to Christians, consonant neither with the biblical insistence on one saving truth nor with Greek rationality. But there is a twofold wisdom in the Buddhist approach. On the one hand, there is a clear insight into the relative character of any linguistic formulation of truth. Formulations belong to the register of conventional, not ultimate, truth, and they are characterized by an inbuilt inadequacy. On the other hand, Buddhists are optimistic about the power of truth to make itself felt in any language, always adapting itself to the capacities of the hearers. Applying this to Christianity, we may say that it is in its very brokenness that Christian language speaks with provisional adequacy of Christ crucified and of God. God is revealing Godself and acting for salvation in all languages, religious or secular, and even in the mute trees and stones. The Christian will hear the divine Logos in all things and in all religions, and even the Logos incarnate, as in Joseph Plunket's poem, "I See His Blood upon the Rose." The language of Bible and Church is a key for interpreting the other languages. In Buddhism a similar economy prevails: a canonical text such as the Lotus Sutra provides the perspective wherein all others are read. But whereas the Lotus Sutra marks itself as merely a provisional means of perception, the Christian Bible seems to have been absolutized in a way that makes it an obstacle to generous perception of grace and truth outside its pages. We need to find the places in the Bible itself where it marks its own status as an instrument of perception, to be used imaginatively.
   The task of interreligious theology is "to explore if and in what way the historical figures and positive elements of these religions may fall within the divine plan of salvation" (Dominus Iesus 14). One way in which Buddhism may fall within the divine plan is as a pharmacopoeia of antidotes for the sickness of religion. Christianity, like Buddhism, is a self-critical religion; the Bible has been seen as containing the remedies for every kind of religious pathology, including many enacted within the Bible itself. But the self-critical prowess of Christianity, even as renewed by the Protestant Reformation and sharpened by the challenges of the Enlightenment and modern atheism, today needs to be supplemented by the gentler arts of Buddhism. Buddhism tempers the elements of fixation, irrationality, emotivity, and violence in Christian thinking, and presents a peaceful, reasonable, wholesome mode of being present religiously to the contemporary world. Buddhist-Christian encounter and symbiosis does not concern primarily the confrontation of two sets of doctrines. We misread Buddhism when we assimilate it to historical Christianity and think of it as centered on institutions and doctrines. The Buddhist Christian is not a speculative synthetizer, but one who draws on the rich and various resources of Buddhist tradition when and where they are found to be useful and illuminating. In an age when religious fundamentalism and sectarian strife are more virulent than ever, the healing critique of Buddhism has perhaps a more central role to play than the classical dogmas of Christianity, at least at the forefront of history, whatever about the ultimate shape of "the divine plan of salvation."
   What needs to be lived and thought is this concrete symbiosis. The pontifications of theologians about inclusivism, exclusivism, pluralism, relativism, are part of that in-house ecclesiastical wrangling that is the mark of a theology disengaged from a living context. I would add that the dogmatism of liberal theologians who discard the notion of truth or who treat tradition as Henry Ford treated history could equally be a symptom of disconnection. The encounter of Buddhism and Christianity is an encounter of truths embodied in historical trajectories. The self-critical labor forever going on within each of the traditions is enhanced when they embrace in mutual appreciation and critique. Traditions may appear as conventional, contingent, culture-bound human constructs; yet they provide a necessary defence of and medium of transmission for the breakthroughs of truth in primary enactments of spiritual vision. A tradition is a finger pointing at the moon, fragile, provisional, changing as the moon moves across the sky. Yet without that fragile indicator few would see the moon, and there would be no sharing of the vision. The errors and distortions of tradition can be overcome only by a respectful hermeneutical retrieval of tradition, drawing on its salutary core to overcome these darker aspects. Theologies that escape from the historical concreteness of tradition and the critical labors it demands of us, and theologies that substitute a benign relativism for the scholarly and spiritual weight of inter-religious encounter, may create an atmosphere in which new questions are opened up, but more often their vacuous rhetoric is an obstruction to the advance of theological insight.
   The symbiosis of religions may take the form of a mutual aid wherein the weak points of one religion are healed and corrected by another. To say that Buddhism has no right to play that healing and correcting role towards Christianity is like saying that the Samaritan had no right to bind the wounds of the man left for dead on the Jericho road. In real life the religions need each other, whatever their utter self-sufficiency on the plane of abstruse theological claims. The religions, as human historical trajectories, are inevitably marked by incompleteness and tragic failures. The tensions between them are not to be suppressed by dogmatic self-affirmation, but to be interpreted as the tension of "truth" itself, making itself felt within the finitude and brokenness of the human language striving to express it. Just as a married couple give each other a sense of perspective and prevent each other from falling into megalomanic egocentic delusion, so Buddhism and Christianity in their irreducible otherness are good for one another, helping to keep each other open-minded and sane. It used to be said that a good Catholic needs to be a Protestant while a good Protestant needs to be a Catholic; today, we might add, a sane Christian needs to be a Buddhist.