Buddhism: The Way to Dialogue

In a region of diverse cultures and religions, dialogue has to be both the way of life and
the mission of each culture and religion if peace is to reign in Asia.

In Asia, dialogue between Catholics and Buddhists is taking place on various levels. As early as 1979, the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences (FABC) had already noted and appreciated the improving relationship and significant changes in attitudes on both sides. There is now greater openness, easier contact, and more positive appreciation than ever before. At the same time, many have also recognized the existence of difficulties and obstacles to dialogue.¹

Asia is home to diverse cultures and religions. Dialogue must be both the way of life and the mission of each culture and religion if peace is to reign in Asia. Furthermore, living in harmony with these cultures and religions is the preordained context of proclaiming Christ and of living the Christian life in Asia. Thus, Christians, who form a minority - about 2.2 percent, and less than 1 percent if we set aside the Christian-dominated Philippines - must learn to live together with other religions.

Recognizing other religions' various forms in dialogue, Dr. Alfredo Co emphasizes that "we try to find their true strength first and then secure the room for cohabitation with them and then proceed to support each other in the area of meaningful dialogue."² Dialogue, to be meaningful, must therefore include three elements: true strength, true strength of the other, and mutual support. The first element pertains to the foundational identity of a certain religion, while the second refers to the foundational identity of the other religion. Finally, the third refers to harmony between the two religions. Harmony is contributed to by both religions, emanating from their unique and distinctive "true strengths."

At the outset, we are faced with two distinct identities and are challenged to find the harmony that will bind them. Moreover, explicit in the principle stated above is a fact that it is the foundational identity, which is unique and distinct from the other, that will serve as the very "room for cohabitation." In short, in dialogue, the true identity should be neither compromised nor diminished. Rather, it is in the fullest appreciation and sincere recognition of, and total respect for, another religion's foundationality that we find the way to dialogue. The challenges that we face in this paper then are the following: Should this harmony come from within or outside the foundational elements of the two distinct identities? Is the quest for harmony also the search for the commonalities between these two distinct identities, which will bring the two into the same basket? In an attempt to answer these queries, the emphasis will be to indicate the possibility of the "room for cohabitation" in Buddhism.

There are two major tendencies in the dialogue of foundational identities between Catholicism and Buddhism. These two tendencies can be characterized as either propositional truth or existential truth. In propositional truth, dialogue is the preponderance to seek commonalities in the sameness of understanding major concepts in each religion. Another possibility is to reread Buddhism entirely, according to the categories of Christianity, or vice versa. Existential truth, on the other hand, is the letting-be of each religion according to its uniqueness and "totality" as the manner of embracing the other in its uniqueness and "totality." This kind of possibility, which I shall attempt to set out in the latter part of this paper, is my humble understanding of the "true strength" of Buddhism as the very "room for cohabitation."

In the dialogue between Heng-ching Fa-shih (Fa-shih means "Dharma teacher") and Lee Mu-shih (Mu-shih means "pastor-teacher"), Lee Mu-shih, a Christian, claims that he is not satisfied with the "typical formulations of sin and salvation," and adds that "strange as it may seem, Buddhist teachings may provide new categories for me to reinterpret the central Christian doctrines of sin and salvation."³ Initially, it appears that Lee Mu-shih is seeking understanding of his religion (faith) using the doctrines or categories of Buddhism. Yet, as one traverses the conversation between them, it becomes evident that the two are trying to find the commonalities in their conceptual rendering of their respective religions. Thus, what is called causality in Christianity is samsara in Buddhism; while good in Christianity is kusala in Buddhism. Although recognizing that their nuances are completely different, their sameness lies in their meaning toward understanding salvation and nirvana.

In the context of Japan, Joseph Spae traces the resemblance of sin and salvation in Buddhism and in Christianity. Sin and salvation, in the Christian context, are located in the social relationship between persons and God. Sin is considered to be the willful disobedience of the will of God. Salvation, therefore, is effected only by acceptance that the grace of God is bestowed upon the repentant. Clearly, salvation is not affected by the person's effort, neither can it be accomplished through a person's persistence and goodness. It can only come about as a gift given to anyone on whom God bestows his mercy and grace. Moreover, even realizing one's wrongdoings and the action of changing one's heart - metanoia - can be accomplished only when one surrenders oneself to the grace of the Almighty.

From the Buddhist point of view, Spae emphasizes zaigo, the Japanese-Buddhist technical term for sin as the equivalent of the meaning of Christian sin. Zaigo derives from go, which means karma.⁴ And karma forces us to "sin."⁵ If there exists a categorical denial of sin in Christianity, Buddhism tends to look at sin in the Middle Way, where "evil conduct, involvement with persons and things, can be an aid to enlightenment when such entities are perceived to be ku, empty, and thus apprehended as manifestations of the busshin, the ultimate reality and essence of all things."⁶

At the ontological level, we can at least identify two major differences between Buddhism and Christianity in the understanding of sin and salvation. First, in Christianity, the denial of sin means surrender to God - hence, the way to salvation - while in Buddhism, karma apprehended properly becomes the very situation that leads to enlightenment. Second, sin and salvation in the Christian sense are legitimized by a transcendental reality who is God, while in Buddhism, this transcendental reality is absent as the ultimate fulcrum of desiring salvation.

Another ontological difference between Buddhism and Christianity regarding salvation is the object of salvation itself. In Christianity, "the Way, the Truth, and the Life" of salvation are only Christ as the once-and-for-all Incarnate Son of the Father, the human revelation of God. On the other hand, in Buddhism, the historical Buddha is one among the many buddhas who have come - twenty-six to be exact - with an eschatological Buddha yet to come.⁷ For Roccasalvo, what makes Christianity uniquely different from Buddhism is precisely the uniqueness and unrepeatability of Christ as the Savior.⁸ This is if we assume that those two characteristics justify one to be better than the other.

The bias of reading Buddhism according to Christianity is also a strong tendency in doing dialogue. Henri de Lubac, in his discourse on the difference between Buddhism and Christianity on charity, discussed what he termed the selfish foundation of charity in Buddhism, which can be remedied only by Christianity. To wit:

This brings us to our final point. Buddhist charity, being provisional and not final, and remaining a means extrinsic to the ends sought, vanishes inevitably when it is regarded from the point of view of absolute truth. Its teaching will always, therefore, be somewhat exoteric - if a doctrine about God was involved, we should say somewhat anthropomorphic. Here again it is in striking contrast to Christian charity. In His highest revelation, God revealed Himself as Love.⁹

Another way of reading the dialogue between religions is to define the commonalities of the foundational identities and structure them as universal values and norms, an example of which is the global ethics of Hans Kung. Global ethics pertains to the basic tenets of all religions, such as love, justice, the fundamental right to life, and care for the environment. The bringing together of these major themes of various religions provides a unitary solution of breaking the barriers and specificity of each religion. In fact, these are the key elements from which a true religion becomes true.¹⁰

So far, what we are dealing with here is the debate and exchange of concepts between the two and how they are related in the long run. The relationship, as has been noted, is intended to amplify the understanding of one's faith or religion via the unique categorization of the other. In so doing, it becomes a necessary consequence to reduce the one to the framework of the other. In an attempt to avoid this pendulum, the solution of Hans Kung is to create new taxonomies and parameters of harmony by deriving essential sameness from each religion. Yet this tendency clearly violates the very essence of dialogue: that is, "true strength" can come only from the foundational identity of each religion without compromising its integrity in the process of dialogue. This is dramatically expressed in the recantation made by one Buddhist, when he finally come to a realization.

Unfortunately, some years ago, I too used the term [mysticism] in connection with Zen. I have long since regretted it, as I find [it] now highly misleading in elucidating Zen thought. Let it suffice to say here that Zen has nothing "mystical" about it or in it. It is most plain, clear as daylight, all out in the open with nothing hidden, dark, obscure, secret or mystifying in it.¹¹

According to Aloysius Pieris, the core of any religion is the liberative experience.¹² At best, what is being implied here is the fact that the linguistic treatment, or the language barrier,¹³ either exegetically or by way of textual analysis, brings out only the propositional truth. In the end, it is the truth of the statement juxtaposed with the truth of another statement of the other religion that creates dialogue. There is a strong caveat, however, that no matter how pure one's interest is in understanding one's faith from the categories of another faith, this can never shed light on the matter, because faith is necessarily experiential and historical. I shall mention this again when I refer to the strength of Buddhism as "room for cohabitation." In the meantime, it is sufficient to arrive at the conclusion that dialogue between propositional truths does not result in the dialoguing partners' entering into a genuine friendship. This is because, when reality is limited and encapsulated in language, the issue ceases to be the dialogue between partners as the presentation of their true strength. Rather, it becomes a competition revolving around whose categories can shed better light on the other's. What Pieris would consider a core-to-core dialogue is not that which is happening on the level of concepts and ideas and how they are related, albeit vague and at times characterized by forced sameness, but that which is the experience of being at home in one another's homes, because prior to arriving at somebody else's home, one is already at home in one's own religion. In the words of Hans Urs von Balthasar:

The future planetary unity of people will find a truly human form neither in Western nor in Eastern ways, but perhaps only when the common point at which they correspond has been found.¹⁴

Correspondence is not about writing letters clarifying with greater intensity what each has actually meant by every word that has come out of their minds.¹⁵ Correspondence, von Balthasar adds, is "conversation between worlds," "intermundane communication" between cultures, which is primarily concerned with their incomparableness.¹⁶ As has been indicated above, dialogue requires rootedness, or what Dr. Co calls the "true strength" of each religion as a prerequisite of doing dialogue. Fidelity to one's religion is the fundamental demand of dialogue. Fidelity refers to the life that individuals have as the very incarnation of their faith or religion.

Religion is the professed faith in a given time, culture, and situation. The "true strength" of a religion, therefore, is necessarily historical and experiential. It is in these accents that the liberative praxis of religions takes place. In their historical situatedness, religions are incomparable to one another.

What is the true strength of Buddhism? And how can this true strength provide room for cohabitation? Dr. Co has succinctly described the liberative praxis of Buddhism as follows:

In its great effort to help save humanity, Buddhism tries to counter the restlessness of the human heart by proposing the "Middle Way" between the two extremes of "ascetic life" and "worldly indulgence." Its teachings provide rules of holy life and moral conduct.¹⁷

Hans Waldenfels warns us that the Middle Way is not another position crafted between the "ascetic life" and "worldly indulgence." The middle is "beyond concepts or speech; it is the transcendental, being a review of all beings."¹⁸ The Middle Way is not an epistemological construct, because knowledge is still rooted in samsara. It points to the very core of Buddhism, which is sunyata, or emptiness, the precondition of enlightenment.

Sunyata is not intelligible; neither is it a categorical characterization of the state of a person. To grasp it is to reduce it to an object of knowledge, while to categorize it as a state of being will be to contradict its very meaning. Although literally translated as "emptiness," sunyata is more of the dialectic between two opposites, perhaps even better, the combination of the empty and the nonempty.¹⁹ The relation between the two, namely empty and nonempty, then, can be characterized as binary and conjunctive at the same time. It is binary because they are both distinct, and yet in an existential state, they are one and the same.

Emptiness is a state of awareness wherein samsara is already being transcended. This is the level of awareness in which the individual is no longer affected and influenced by interdependent origination. The concept of interdependent origination refers to the infinite causality of existence characterized as ephemeral, transitory, and contingent, in short, samsara. Reality cannot be based on samsara because this would mean that life is anchored from the outside, or from any of its parts, or from any of its accidental attributes. Emptiness is precisely the capturing of the stillness of life, but neither as an object nor as a subject (anatman). Such "stillness," or the state of enlightenment, is not the passage from one stage to another stage; neither is it an abrogation of one part and emphasis of the rest.

Sunyata is also nonempty. It means fullness. "The final state of the enlightened consciousness of a Buddha is not the mere realization of emptiness but the omniscience that provides the ground for the Buddha to altruistically and spontaneously help others."²⁰ Thereby, at the height of emptiness, one becomes full in the sense that one has become attuned to the plenitude of the world.

Sunyata is not merely a concept. It is the achievement of the buddha-nature. We are told that the Buddha did not want his followers to follow him. Sunyata implies also killing the Buddha. To take the path of buddha-nature, the life of sunyata, means the cultivation of consciousness.²¹ Sunyata is achieved through the clarity of consciousness. In fact, at the core of Buddhism is precisely this true form of consciousness. This is also the reason the Buddha is silent about any transcendental reality, other than the person himself, that would save a person or remove the person from samsara. The path to enlightenment is the story of consciousness. Buddha-nature is enlightened consciousness. To wit:

Enlightened consciousness, however, is not a state of isolation. It does not mean "seeing the last of all desire," nor is it "the extinction of all desires." It is not even equal to annihilation. By means of prajna, consciousness achieves a higher level of understanding of the world of samsara. At that level, enlightened consciousness arranges and appreciates the world in which it properly belongs. "By enlightenment Buddha sees all things in their proper order, as they should be, which means that Buddha's insight has reached the depths of reality."²³ The Buddha has beautifully described this state of experience of enlightenment in the Majjhima Nikaya:

At this juncture, what we have pointed out as the Middle Way actually refers to Buddhism as "the philosophy of suchness, or philosophy of Emptiness, or philosophy of Self-identity. It starts from the absolute present, which is pure experience, an experience in which there is no differentiation of subject and object, and yet which is not a state of sheer nothingness."²⁵

Is there any room for other religions to cohabit with Buddhists? Cohabitation, as we have indicated above, must recognize, appreciate, and fully accept the true strength of other religions. Is there a possibility then of other religions' residing in their uniqueness and totality in the home of a Buddhist?

Buddhism as the Middle Way, expressed through the reality of sunyata, and achieved through the cultivation of the mind (prajna), is a state, according to Suzuki, where there is "no division between 'ought' and 'is,' between form and matter or content, and therefore there is no judgment in it yet."²⁶ At the level of enlightenment or pure experience, it is seen that religion, culture, truths, and language all fall short already in that they become categories that belong to samsara. An enlightened one no longer looks at an other according to a set of beliefs or in terms of rites and practices. There is nothing external that influences him or her, nor anything that can serve as a basis of reaching out to the other. The "principle" (for lack of a better term) of sunyata demands the Middle Way as a practice that dissolves binary opposites in the same basket. In fact, at the point of enlightenment, an enlightened mind does not even distinguish between nirvana and samsara. At that point they are one without dissolving their difference. It is at this stage that words do not determine the division of reality, because in the first place such division collapses:

(1) There is no conceptual appearance; (2) there is no sense of subject and object, which are, instead, mixed like fresh water poured into fresh water; (3) there is no appearance of inherent existence; (4) there is no appearance of conventional phenomena - only emptiness appears; (5) there is no appearance of difference - although the emptiness of all phenomena in all world systems appears, they do not appear to be different.²⁷

A Buddhist (in the sense that his nature achieves buddha-nature) is necessarily a person of dialogue. This is because his nature is such that not only is all (the plenitude of reality) incorporated into his being but he is also one with them by way of his intuition, his deepest understanding (prajna) of reality. It is here that I find dialogue most closely associated with the Middle Way. For the Middle Way can be paraphrased as the gathering together of the true strengths of the various realities. A Buddhist naturally welcomes and embraces the wholeness of all others. This welcoming and embracing, in the end, are what Buddhists call compassion. As already cited above, at the height of the experience of enlightenment, a Buddhist altruistically and spontaneously helps, accepts, and loves others.

1. See the final statement and recommendation of the first assembly of the Bishops' Institute for Religious Affairs (BIRA), Bangkok, October 18, 1979, in For All the Peoples of Asia, vol. 1, ed. G. Rosales and C. G. Arevalo (Quezon City: Claretian Publications, 1997), 109.

2. Alfredo Co, Philosophy of the Compassionate Buddha (Manila: University of Santo Tomas Press, 2003), 158.

3. Peter K. H. Lee and Shih Heng-ching, "A Christian-Buddhist Dialogue on Causality and Good and Evil," Ching Feng 30, no. 2 (May 1987): 39.

4. Joseph Spae, "Sin and Salvation: Buddhist and Christian," Ching Feng 30, no. 3 (September 1987): 123.

5. Ibid., 124.

6. Ibid.

7. Joseph Roccasalvo, "Toward an Atheism of Reverence: The Special Case of Buddhism," Chicago Studies 41, no. 2 (2002): 217.

8. Ibid.

9. Henri de Lubac, "Retrieving the Tradition: Buddhist Charity and Christian Charity," Communio: International Catholic Review 15 (Winter 1988): 504-5.

10. See Hans Küng, "What Is the True Religion?" Ching Feng 30, no. 3 (September 1987).

11. Hans Waldenfels, Absolute Nothingness: Foundations for a Buddhist-Christian Dialogue, trans. J. W. Heisig (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 126, quoted in The Eastern Buddhist I, no. 1: 124.

12. Aloysius Pieris, "Christianity in a Core-to-Core Dialogue with Buddhism," Japan Missionary Bulletin 42, no. 1 (1988): 31- 44.

13. Ibid., 31.

14. Hans Urs von Balthasar, "Buddhism - an Approach to Dialogue" (editorial), Communio: International Catholic Review 15 (Winter 1988): 409.

15. See D. T. Suzuki, Mysticism, Christian and Buddhist, The World Perspectives Series, vol. 12 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), 53.

16. Von Balthasar, 409.

17. Co, Philosophy, 162.

18. Waldenfels, 18.

19. Ibid., 20-21.

20. Donald W. Mitchell and James Wiseman, The Gethsemani Encounter: A Dialogue on the Spiritual Life by Buddhist and Christian Monastics (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1997), 22-23.

21. Ibid., 23.

22. Suzuki, Mysticism, 45.

23. Ibid., 46.

24. The Middle Length Sayings (Majjhima Nikaya), vol. 1, trans. I. B. Horner (London: Pali Text Society, 1976), 214-15.

25. Suzuki, Mysticism, 69.

26. Ibid., 70.

27. Mitchell and Wiseman, Gethsemani Encounter, 25.

Pablito A. Baybado Jr. is an assistant professor at the Institute of Religion and a researcher at the John Paul II Research Center for Ecclesiastical Studies, University of Santo Tomas, Philippines. He is also an executive committee member of the Asian Conference of Religions for Peace, a board member of the Religions for Peace Philippines, and a co-convenor of the Religions for Peace Philippines Interfaith Youth Network.