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Since religions such as Buddhism and Christianity have fundamentally different grammars, how can they have anything to say to each other? Thirty years ago, before I began the study of Zen, I said, "Mountains are mountains, waters are waters. " After I got an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, I said, "Mountains are not mountains, waters are not waters. " But now, having attained the abode of final rest [that is, Awakening], I say, "Mountains are really mountains, waters are really waters. " (1) Zen master Ch " ing-yuan Wei-hsin presents Zen as the means to attain "the abode of final rest. " His phrase evokes biblical references to God's Sabbath "rest, " (2) and suggests that Buddhism, like Christianity, is a way of salvation. The passage as a whole, however, functions within a different soteriological framework. Salvation for Ch " ing-yuan Wei-hsin entails not the restoration of right relation between God and humanity, so much as a profound shift in the manner in which things are seen.
This brief saying indicates that, while Christian redemption is rooted in history and narrative, Buddhist "awakening" is a sort of a historical gnosis into the true nature of things. Such fundamental differences preclude direct conflict, at least on a theoretical level. Instead, I would argue that these two religious outlooks are simply incommensurable. Each embodies a distinct grammar, or set of linguistic and doctrinal rules, leaving little basis for common reference between the two. One looks in vain for point-for-point correspondences. While parallels seem to present themselves, the divergent frameworks within which they occur make direct correlation a questionable undertaking.
Even so, Christians and Buddhists have been talking to one another for some time, ranging from the "Great Dispute of Panadura" in Ceylon in 1873 to the proliferation of inter-religious conversations of the present day. But if these two ways of salvation are truly incommensurable, on what basis can dialogue take place, and what can be gained by such an enterprise? I propose that dialogue entails a provisional bracketing of one's own point of view in order to enter into a sympathetic understanding of the other religious outlook. The result is nothing so tidy as the discovery that Buddhists and Christians are engaged in the same basic project, using different words to say the same thing. This is precluded by the in commensurability of the two traditions. I suggest, rather, that in the encounter of one tradition with another, there emerges something more modest, what I would like to call "resonance. " This essay consists of three parts.
The first offers a methodological basis upon which Christians might engage in dialogue with another religious tradition. This approach is not uniquely specific to the Buddhist-Christian encounter. It presumes all religions to be incommensurable to a degree, although Buddhism, in relation to Christianity, presents a particularly strong case of in commensurability, in contrast to, say, Judaism or Islam. The second part attempts the provisional "bracketing" described above, and introduces the Buddhist doctrine of "emptiness, " assuming that most readers will have only a sketchy understanding of this notion. This section presents Buddhism in own terms, giving the non-Buddhist reader the chance to "inhabit" an alternate way of looking at things, and at least partially to "try it on" from the inside. In the third part of this essay, I assess the Buddhist notion of emptiness from within a specifically Christian framework, and explore the concept of "resonance. " Dialogue in In commensurability In his essay "The Strange New World within the Bible, " Karl Barth argues that the Bible confronts us as startlingly other.
The Bible "drives us out beyond ourselves" and invites us into a "new world. " (3) Barth, of course, conceived the "strange new world" within the Bible to be utterly distinct and without parallel. Nevertheless, it suggests an analogy for conceiving the encounter with a religion other than one's own, in-sofar as such dialogue invites us to venture "out beyond ourselves" and explore a "strange new world" from within. This attempt to "inhabit" another outlook is necessarily partial and provisional. Obviously we cannot entirely bracket our native way of conceiving the world. Only conversion, involving a permanent shift in outlook, offers a complete grasp of another religion. The results of dialogue are more modest.
One becomes a sort of tourist, rather than permanent resident, seeking not conversion but simply a degree of sympathetic understanding that is greater than what one had before. (4) What I am suggesting is akin to the task of the cultural anthropologist in which, as Clifford Geertz puts it, the social scientist attempts to uncover the conceptual structures that inform [the] subjects' acts... and to construct a system of analysis in whose terms what is generic to those structures, what belongs to them because they are what they are, will stand out against the determinants of human behavior. (5) The anthropologist seeks to understand a culture as much as possible from within, by a sort of "thick description" that employs terms generic to its internal structure. In much the same way, we may treat religions as cultural systems, attempting to "find our feet" within the particular conceptual structure of another religion rather than imposing our own conceptual structures from without. While this approach may be "an unnerving business which never more than distantly succeeds, " (6) it maximizes the possibility of understanding another religion on its own terms, while retaining the integrity of one's own religious convictions. I would contrast this approach, based on the presumption of in commensurability, with two others that have gained prominence in recent decades.
Karl Rahner's "Anonymous Christianity" extends the possibility of salvation to those who have not embraced the Christian faith, while retaining the conviction that Jesus Christ is the unique mediator of salvation. Rahner's position is rooted in a densely conceived theological anthropology in which he makes two basic theological moves. First, he contends that the movement of grace and its acceptance by faith may operate on a "non-thematic" level apart from explicit verbal objectification. It is possible... to envisage a [person] who is in possession of that self-imparting of God called grace as the innermost heart and center of [that person's] existence, one who has accepted this in unreserved faithfulness to [one's] conscience, one who is thereby constituted as a believer in a form which, while it is not objectified in words is nonetheless real... I cannot see why we should not call such a [person] an anonymous Christian. (7) Rahner's next move is to formulate a Christology in which an "obedient ial potency" or human openness to God's self-communication is uniquely and fully actualized in the person of Jesus.
Hence a non-Christian's quest for fulfillment "possesses a relationship to Jesus, even if [that person] does not know how to call him by his proper name, " since that person's search is directed to Jesus, "who in reality is its proper goal. " (8) Despite Rahner's efforts to widen the franchise, some have objected that the assessment of other religions as anonymously Christian is demeaning and imperialistic. [I]t 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. To bring the partner to the discussion into our own circle in this way closes the dialogue before it has even begun. This is a pseudo solution which offers slight consolation. (9) Moreover, the notion of an "un thematic" and "anonymous" divine self-bestowal that attains its final actualization in Jesus Christ places the Christian in the peculiar position of claiming to know the real truth of another religion better than an actual adherent of that tradition. Equally odd is a concept of a religious truth that is abstracted from the concrete content of actual religions.
In this regard, Rahner's notion of religion betrays a Gnostic and a historical streak that devalues the historical actuality of non-Christian religions. Would it not be more in keeping with the Christian value placed on history and incarnation to allow each tradition to speak for itself, and opt for a genuine pluralism? John Hick endeavors to present a pluralist corrective. Hick distinguishes himself from the exclusives who asserts simply that "salvation is confined to Christians, " (10) and from the inclusivist who includes non-Christians within a Christian soteriology by positing an implicit or anonymous Christian status. Hick's pluralist position assumes that no one religion is definitive, but that each attempts to articulate an ineffable ultimate reality that Hick calls "the Real. " Yet Hick's pluralistic hypothesis harbors a curious inconsistency: he does not allow various religions simply to coexist. Instead, he imposes an additional global meta-theory about "the Real" that entails specific theological claims of its own.
Hick contends that the various conceptions of the absolute - Trinity, Allah, Brahman, Sunyata - refer to a different "persona" or "impersonal" of the Real. In Kantian terminology, they are all "phenomenal manifestations of the noumenal real-in-itself. " (11) Hick thus demythologizes each religion, or "phenomenal manifestation" of the Real, on the basis of his meta-theory of "The Real, " which becomes the privileged account of ultimate reality. This pluralist scheme imposes the task of doctrinal revision on particular religions. As a theologian, Hick seeks to "contribute to the on-going development of Christian thought in the light of [his] knowledge of the wider religious world. " (12) This development entails a "reopening of the Christological question, " (13) and an adjustment of classic claims about the uniqueness and definitiveness of Christ. This move undermines Hick's claim to be a genuine pluralist. A truly pluralistic outlook would allow each religion to retain the coherence of its own internal grammar, without forcing the theoretical adjustments required by an additional religious meta-theory. (14) To engage in inter-religious dialogue on a presupposition of in commensurability allows for a genuine pluralism that imposes neither an anonymous Christian status, nor a meta-theory that transcends all particular religions.
Such genuine pluralism is possible not merely for the disinterested commentator, but specifically for the Christian who embraces traditional claims about Jesus of Nazareth as God incarnate, and his death and resurrection as the definitive salvific event of human history. It requires only the ability to distinguish between, and yet continue to practice, two different discourses. One is the discourse of faith, in which a believer permanently inhabits the Christian faith and posits reality claims within the context of that faith. The other is a methodological discourse in which one declines to make reality claims at all, and simply considers how religions work as cultural systems. This point of view owes a debt to Geertz's notion of culture, as well as to the linguistic philosophy of the later Wittgenstein, and is intriguingly consistent with the methodological presuppositions that underwrite the Buddhist doctrine of Sunyata. But most directly, the notion of religions as distinct and incommensurable webs of meaning, each with its own doctrinal grammar, borrows from George Lindbeck's "cultural-linguistic" theory of doctrine.
Lindbeck argues that doctrines function as rules within distinct webs of discourse. He contrasts this approach with a propositional view, or correspondence theory, in which doctrines make straightforward truth claims and provide discursive information about objective realities. (15) But Lindbeck also rejects an experiential-expressive model, in which doctrines derive from experience as "noninformative and non discursive symbols of inner feelings, attitudes, or existential orientations, " (16) and in which competing religions are "diverse expressions of a common core experience. " (17) From a cultural-linguistic perspective, doctrines are regulative. Neither informative, nor symbolic, they provide the grammar that recommends and excludes certain ranges of utterance. A religion thus becomes "comparable to a cultural system... a set of language games correlated with a form of life. " (18) A cultural-linguistic model does not privilege one religion over another, just as "one language or culture is not generally thought of as 'truer' than another. " (19) This approach is frankly non theological. Because it does not posit truth claims, "it is not the business of [such an approach] to argue for or against the superiority of any one faith. " (20) One does not look for an ontological correspondence between a religious statement and the object to which it refers.
Nor does one judge a religion's "symbolic efficacy" in giving expression to an inchoate experience of the divine. Instead, one explores the "categorical adequacy" of a religion. Adequacy is a matter of the fit within a particular grammar of religious faith. It does not guarantee truth as such. Religious doctrines are comparable in terms of the manner in which their respective categories function within their generic grammar. It is in such comparisons, according to Lindbeck, that religions and the categories that they employ are found to be "incommensurable. " One cannot adjudicate their truth or falsity because they are simply not talking about the same thing.
Hence, different religions may "regard themselves as simply different and... proceed to explore their agreements and disagreements without necessarily engaging in the invidious comparisons that the assumption of a common experiential core make so tempting. " (21) One religion does not seek its anonymous counterpart in the other, as Rahner proposes, since they are conceived not as diverse expressions of a common pre-linguistic experience of human transcendence, but rather as patterns of language, ritual and ethical practice that "constitute, rather than being constituted by... their existential understanding. " (22) Language determines experience, and not the other way around. This candidly non-theological approach does not preclude theological predication.
It simply recognizes it as a different mode of discourse. Theological predication occurs within a particular religious framework, and according to its own categorical and grammatical norms. John Hick describes this intentional shift of discourse when he speaks of being "a philosopher of religion on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays [when] propos[ing] the pluralist hypothesis, and... a Christian theologian on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and... particularly on Sundays. " (23) But Hick conflates these two discourses when he attempts a programmatic revision of Christian doctrine to bring it in line with his pluralistic philosophy of religion. By contrast, Lindbeck's approach would keep these two discourse separate, and while not excluding the possibility of development, would retain the doctrinal coherence of each religion.
To speak theologically is to make reality claims. Everyday faith does not qualify every assertion with the caveat that it only applies to a particular language game. Even if, within one discourse, we decline to adjudicate religious claims from a neutral position outside of our cultural-linguistic location, we continue to live within another discourse, according to which we embrace the claim that "Jesus is Lord" with the core of our being. In the intersection of these two distinct discourses, a certain form of propositional predication becomes admissible even within a cultural-linguistic framework. Such predication entails a correspondence to reality that extends beyond the question of categorical coherence. Truth, in this case, is not conceived merely in intellectual terms, but rather "by a set of stories used in specifiable ways to interpret and live in the world. " (24) Such truth is "performative. " Statements of faith do more than convey information - they provide warrant for behaving in particular ways.
When one makes an authentic theological statement, that sentence becomes a first-order proposition capable of making ontological truth claims only as it is used in the activities of adoration, proclamation, obedience, promise hearing, and promise keeping which shape individuals and communities into conformity with the mind of Christ. (25) Recourse to this performative dimension of theological statements is Lindbeck's way out of the epistemological fly bottle, and echoes the Kantian shift from metaphysics to ethics. Theological truths are not grounded in a foundational metaphysic that transcends cultural-linguistic location; they are embraced by a faith that is lived out in particular patterns of life. The interplay of two discourses, one methodological and one theological, allows for the co-ordination of an "inclusivist" theological discourse with a "pluralist" theory of religion, without revising the Creed or abandoning basic Christian p
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