______________________________________________________ EUROPEAN NETWORK OF BUDDHIST CHRISTIAN STUDIES ______________________________________________________ N e t w o r k I n f o - M a g a z i n e ______________________________________________________ (c) by ENBCS December 1999 ______________________________________________________ Editors: Br. Josef Goetz : josef.ottilien@t-online.de Martin Roetting: roetting@iol.ie Internet: www.buddhist-christian-studies.israd.net or www.homepage.iol.ie/~roetting ___________________________________________________________________________ Content ___________________________________________________________________________ 1. Editors Note 2. 4th Conference of the Network in Lund "Christian Perceptions Of Buddha" (by Dr. Aasulf Lande) 3. Book Review (by David R. Loy) Dale S. Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism 4. Book Review (by John May) O'LEARY, Joseph Stephen, Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth (Edinburgh University Press, 1996) __________________________________________________________________________ 1. EDITORS NOTE __________________________________________________________________________ Dear Reader, We are happy to give the second Newsletter-Magazine in to your hand. Please find information about the next conference and two interesting book-reviews. You will find this Newsletter-Magazine and the last one avaliable for download on the homepage. If You have articles which would fit here or would be for interest, there is also a place at the homepage archive. Have a good advent and a blessed christmas and start in the new year! Yours Martin Rötting Br. Josef Goetz OSB __________________________________________________________________________ 2. The 4th Conference Of The European Network of Buddhist Christian Studies in Lund "Christian Perceptions Of Buddha" (from Dr. Aasulv Lande, Lund) __________________________________________________________________________ Dear friends! I send updated information on our coming conference, Christian Perceptions of Buddha. The Fourth Conference of the European Network of Buddhist - Christian Studies is scheduled to take place from Friday May 4th till Monday May 7th at Aakersberg Diocesan Centre, Höör, Lund. Registration to begin at 15:00 on Friday afternoon and departure to take place after lunch 12:00 on Monday. As requested by the last conference we turn its theme of Buddhist Perceptions of Christ upside down and focus in the coming conference on Christian Perceptions of Buddha.The three full days are planned to feature Aloysius Pieris (Sri Lanka), Elisabeth Harris (England) and Tierelinckx Reimyo (Germany), Sulak Sivaraksa (Thailand), Håkan Eilert (Sweden), Perry Smith Leukel(Scotland), Thich Nhat Hanh (France) and Kosuke Koyama(USA). Alysious Pieris is asked to talk of "The Buddha as inspiration", and even have a presentation on "Love meets wisdom" to which we invite Sulak Sivaraksa to respond. We have asked Thich Nhat Hanh and Reimyo Sensei to talk on "What do I as a Buddhist Expect Christians to Discover in Buddha?". Håkan Eilert, who is an active religious dialogist and researcher in Sweden will take us into the ideas of a Western Christian missionary who loved Buddhism: Karl Ludvig Reichelt. Elisabeth Harris and Perry Smith Leukel will share perspectives on Buddhism with us from different points of view. Elisabeth Harris will analyse Christian perspectives on Buddhism in Sri Lanka, whereas Perry Smith Leukel prefers to formulate his presentation: "Buddha and Christ as mediators of Salvific Transcendenty Realities." In accordance with a desire of our last meeting at St.Ottilien, we have asked Kosuke Koyama to address the issue of "Creation, Space and Time" in an interreligious perspective. And we want to continue our tradion of a combined academic, contemplative and social perecpectiv in mutual questians and responces by Christians and Buddhists. Please convey your viewpoints and suggestions to us now in the final stage of planning. Best greetings and wishes from Lund! Sincerely yours, Aasulv Lande We have so far had three planning sessions, the next one to take place on November 23 1999. The planning committee in Sweden consists of the Buddhist doctoral student Natasja Kaervinge, Dominican Father Bernard Durel and professor Aasulv Lande. All three are in Lund, Sweden. Two of these speakers are women, six are men. We are, however, concerned to find as good a balance as possible between the presentation by the sexes - in order to mirror the experiencial variety of religious perceptions. So far we have not had any negative responces. We are, however, still awaiting confirmation by Aloysius Pieris, Sulak Sivaraksa, Kosuke Koyama and Thich Nhat Hanh. Hopefully we will have them soon. It is our aim to present the finalized programme before summer 2000 and open up for registration by a mailing early autumn 2000. By September we intend to distribute the programme and the invitations by Network information and by ordinary mail. ______________________________________________________________________ 3. Book Review Dale S. Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism by David R. Loy ______________________________________________________________________ Dear Sangha friends, I've just finished reviewing a very fine book on Zen -- in fact the best thing I've read on Zen in a very long time. For those interested . . . Dale S. Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism (Cambridge University Press, 1998), xv + 227 pages. Ch'an/Zen scholarship today provides us with a good example of the fundamental tension that lies at the heart of religious studies. On one side are the older "romantic" approaches of D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts and John Blofeld, which attempt to transmit the timeless truth and transformative power of the Zen tradition to a West which sorely needs it. On the other side is a more academically respectable "scientific" tradition which analyzes the history and sociology of Zen, and demonstrates that romantic transmisssions of Zen are inaccurate, for they project forms of Buddhism that reveal more about contemporary ideals than anything that ever existed in Asia. But from the romantic perspective, disengaged scientific studies miss the whole point of Buddhism: to assume, in effect, that "this text has nothing to do with us" contributes nothing to our liberation or to reducing the world's suffering and delusion. How much should we use sophisticated hermeneutical approaches to challenge the Zen tradition's self-understanding? And how much can we use Buddhist insight and meditative techniques to challenge the (also historically-determined) "objectivity" of contemporary Buddhist Studies - that is, its own self-understanding? Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism addresses these questions more directly, and answers them more successfully, than anything else I have read on the topic. Wright approaches this crucial issue by reflecting on the remarkable differences between John Blofeld's influential English translation of the Huang Po texts (first published by Grove Press in 1959) and Blofeld's introduction and notes to those same texts. Wright's meditations on these differences apply the insights of hermenutics to show that Zen students (and, by implication, all Buddhists) need not be afraid of postmodernism, for by dispelling our romanticist preconceptions it can make Zen practice more liberative. Instead of corrosively dismissing old claims about Zen which are no longer tenable in the forms presented by Blofeld, Suzuki and Watts, this book goes far in determining what of a de-mythologized Zen tradition remains alive and important for us today. The first three chapters are on textuality, reading and understanding. Although the Zen movement strongly criticized dependence on books and reading, it produced by far the largest and most influential canon of texts of any East Asian Buddhist movement; in fact, so ubiquitous were reading practices in Zen that they threatened to overwhelm other practices, a problem which led to regular dependence on "anti-textual texts" to put reading in proper perspective. Zen critiques of reading were intended to valorize its opposite, immediate experience. But if we look closely we see that the very opposition between a literary world and the world of immediate experience is itself a literary construct, which functions to make the "real world" of immediate experience more real than it was before the act of reading. Huang Po did not stop reading; what he taught was how to read. According to Wright, the anti-intellectualism that developed later in China (and Japan?) was at least partially responsible for the eventual decline and marginalization of Zen. "Inability or unwillingness to reflect on what you do eventually leads to naive and narrow practices" (33fn). In contrast to romanticist prescriptions that we should let go of all our preconceptions, postmodern critiques have demonstrated how we cannot understand at all without preconceptions; and even if we could, "that would render everything one saw in this foreign land uninteresting and not particularly noteworthy" (56). Understanding both conscious and unconscious provides our practical attunement to the world; it is the way we are embedded in the world and engaged with it. Instead of supposedly "letting them go" in meditation, it may be more fruitful to make conceptions and preconceptions more conscious, "and thus susceptible to transformation through reconception in the very process of reading" (36). For Blofeld, reading Huang Po was simply a matter of recognizing the truth one already knows to be there, but too much eagerness to accept what is in a text may overlook its "otherness", its radical challenge to our preconceptions and its ability to disrupt the self. The scientific approach falls into the opposite trap: by considering the text to be about someone else in some other time and place, the historian also manages to avoid being challenged by it. Both lose the liberative potential of reading. The next two chapters are on language and rhetoric. According to Wright, no tradition anywhere has ever been more aware of its language than Zen. Zen texts do much more than simply proclaim the "wordless dharma'': they debate and exalt it, and trace its sacred lineage. Nor can we simply reject language as delusive, since it is not just a tool for us to use (or not use): it is inextricably part of the world we reside in. Our activities presuppose it, for experience always comes fully clothed. Language and experience are never so separable that, from the side of experience, we can see how language has run up against its limits; language is always there in the construction of these limits. Hermeneutically, language is essential to the world-orientation that creates our possibilities. Those possibilities - today including our interest in Zen - are a result of past language usage and reflection. This includes the language of Huang Po's texts - and Blofeld's. "Those same romantic texts, now once or twice removed, perhaps even as unknown to us as our great-grandparents, stand in the lineage of our openness to Huang Po and invisibly shape our reading of Zen" (78). Chapter 6, on history, challenges the romantic stereotype that Zen emphasized a timeless and ahistorical awakening (often understood as the mystical core of all religions). Huang Po lived at a time when a new history was beginning to be composed, a new school of Chinese Buddhism created which became self-consciously different from other schools in the very act of writing its history. This included a very traditional emphasis on tsung, ancestry, a term which retained deep pre-Buddhist connotations of ancestral spirits who establish and oversee the clan - hence the importance of spiritual lineages (the six Chinese patriarchs, etc.) and one's responsibility to future dharma successors. Today we know that the succession of patriarchs from Sakyamuni to Huang Po and his successors is a construct. This raises questions about the meaning of "mind-to-mind transmission" and the way the whole tradition has been idealized by creating continuities and coherences, which recent historians have refuted by discovering the transformations and disjunctions these continuities were often invented to hide. It is natural that each new generation of Zen students will project its highest aspirations onto its ancestors, but, without an understanding of the "otherness" of the past, practitioners live out of a highly idealized and precritical understanding of their own tradition. What is lost is truth: what really did happen is held subservient to mythic ideals which are not realized to be mythic. And, as we know from many other instances, myths taken literally become deceptive, even dangerous. Again, modern historians fall into the opposite trap, by understanding truth as representational accuracy and bracketing all traditional claims about whether what is reported is in fact true. The past of Zen is presented as past, with the assumption that it is not the task of the historian to consider whether there is any other relationship between him/herself and the truth-claims of the text. By valorizing objective disengagement, historical studies of Buddhism "fail to locate us in a productive relation to the text, one through which we might be provoked by the text" (116-7). The romantic and historicist traditions both end up implicitly denying the radical mutability of history, by tending to assume the universality and noncontextual truth of their own self-understanding. Chapter 7 asks whether our Western valuation of autonomous reason over authority, personal insight over tradition, and the individual over the group, has led us to misunderstand the nature of Zen freedom. Romantic Zen understands Zen liberation as freeing us from institutional and cultural constraints, but there was virtually no place in Zen monastic life for personal autonomy, and what forms of freedom were possible were dependent upon accepting limitations on individual will. "The paradox is this: the pursuit of freedom in Zen was understood to be actualized in the act of surrendering one's freedom to a cultural institution and to those individuals who currently represent it" (129). Instead of escaping from the destiny of one's "finite placement in the world", Zen offers an awakening to the impermanence and multiplicity of this placement, which includes one's history and culture. More interesting than freedom from the world is freedom within it. In what sense, then, does Zen offer transcendence (literally, "going-beyond")? One important theme in Zen is that the realization of the student must "go beyond" the teacher's, which suggests that mind-to-mind transmission is best understood not as passing-on some eternal, ahistorical essence, but as an always evolving realization of successive generations' highest aspirations. On this reading, emptiness is the Buddhist principle of finitude: form continually reforms, "going beyond" its previous shape. Means and ends overlap, each helping to redefine the other. The goals sought by Buddhists in different cultures have been varied. As new practices were devised to actualize different conceptions of liberation, new conceptions and experiences of the goal evolved. Early Chinese images of enlightenment included greater emphasis on the philosophical articulation of Buddhist thought; after Huang Po Zen rhetoric focused on strange and disruptive ways to shake us out of conventional belief into an experience of groundlessness and openness. Goals, rhetoric, meditation practice: each provoked and was affected by the development of the others. Transcendence as a historical phenomenon, subject to change, implies a new view of "Mind" (chapter 9). For Huang Po, mind is encountered in every presence, not independently as one presence among others, but as the "formless" background on the basis of which all forms make their appearance. Wright, following Derrida, questions "the dream of full presence", which is a function of our desire to transcend finitude. All presence is already a representation; when we peel back the layers of our experience, we never reach a final layer, for there is no pure experience at the foundation of mind, no "bottom" to the "void". Presence always includes absence, e.g. background factors which help to shape the experience. "The distinction between 'immediate' and 'mediated' experience is itself a highly 'mediated' abstraction" (167fn). Lacking secure grounds, the freedom and contingency of finite existence is highlighted, and without the closure of certainty, openness becomes the primary feature of a cultivated mind. Yet there is a "fundamentalist" tendency within the Zen tradition which has occasionally emerged: the tendency to select a limited set of basic doctrines - "no-mind" [wu-hsin] and "no-thought" [wu-nien], etc. - that are literally interpreted and taken to be the timeless essence of the tradition, with the unfortunate effect of limiting the ability of Zen Buddhists to understand their practice and their achievement. "One problem that the tradition has not faced is a pronounced tendency not to recognize Zen doctrine as doctrine . . . Although unreflective Zen is certainly possible, it is not desirable, and constitutes a self-limitation that has, on occasion, weakened the tradition. . . . A dialectical relationship between the practice of thought and Zen experience is essential to the tradition" (178-9). In what sense does enlightenment (chapter 10) involve experiencing oneself and the world as a whole? Although one can think the whole of things, and enlarge one's awareness, finite practitioners can never experience such a totality directly, except in the sense of the whole as the empty ground of things. As the Huang Po texts repeatedly assert, the "source" is not something but that within which all things are encountered. The openness and bottomlessness of reality in Zen has sometimes led to the conclusion that enlightenment is not something definite but rather an ongoing perfecting of awareness and responsiveness, a process without end. As the Zen saying has it, even Sakyamuni is only halfway there. I hope this incomplete summary helps to convey why this book is so important. Does it achieve a "middle way" between romantic and historicist perspectives on Zen? I doubt the tension between them can be or should be resolved once and for all. While open and sympathetic to Zen claims, Wright's understanding of spiritual possibilities is very much determined by our contemporary views of human possibility: emptiness as finitude, and enlightenment as immanentist freedom within the world, etc. Perhaps this is all a little too comfortable for us today, not strange or disruptive enough of our consensus scientific reality. While we can never "escape" language, I wonder if a deep realization of its emptiness can lead to a more nondual and transformative experience of it. And this account has little place for mystery or the numinous, which are hardly mentioned (but are such categories a Judeo-Christian projection?). Something else hardly mentioned, an understated influence on Wright's own receptivity to Zen, is the post-Kehrewritings of Heidegger, who may be responsible for much of our postmodern receptivity to such a radically different tradition. Wright's own understanding of enlightenment is dominated by Heideggerian metaphors such as openness, attunement and releasement. Whether or not Heidegger was himself influenced by Suzuki and other Asian scholars, his own strange and disruptive later philosophy helped to establish a new philosophical vocabulary that made the West more receptive to Zen. Expressed another way, however, it means that our intellectual appropriation of Zen may have been conditioned by Heidegger's thought and influence. Here there is an instructive parallel with Western interpretations of Madhyamika Buddhism: we have been able to understand Nagarjuna differently, and better, as Western philosophy has evolved and given us new perspectives with which to perceive his writings. Then can't we expect future Western philosophy to grant us fresh perspectives on Buddhism? Perhaps the same will be true for our understanding of Zen: new Western ways of thinking - themselves quite possibly influenced by Zen - will lead to new ways of understanding the goals and practices and teachings of Zen. In that way Zen might continue to evolve, now in the West as well as in East Asia. If so, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism may well be remembered by future generations as an important contribution to that development. David R. Loy Bunkyo University October 1999 -------------------------------- David R. Loy Professor Faculty of International Studies Bunkyo University 1100 Namegaya Chigasaki 253 Japan tel. (81) 467-53-2111 fax. (81) 467-54-3722 _______________________________________________________________________ 4. Book Review (by John May) O'LEARY, Joseph Stephen Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth (Edinburgh University Press, 1996) _______________________________________________________________________ Every so often a book appears that seems to light the way ahead. This book, which presents itself as part of "a quasi-Kantian 'prolegomenon to any future theology'" (ix), is such a one. It predicts that theology will need to come to terms with a post -metaphysical phenomenology, a general theory of religious pluralism, and a contemporary account of rationality(ix-xi). It contains some markedly programmatic statements: Buddhism shows up a precipitation, a naivety, an arbitrary violence in the premises of monotheism; primitive religions recall what monotheism has repressed - the earth, the body, human vitality in its labyrinthine texture; scientific cosmology precribes a larger, subtler thinking about the divine. (185) O'Leary concentrates on Buddhism's challenge to Christianity, but he opens up the prospect of immensely fruitful confrontations with the primal and the scientific worldviews as well. God and emptiness can be thought together only along the paths of a dialogue between traditions which is animated, like the encounter between Jesus and the Buddha (historical revealers of God and emptiness respectively), by an instinctive attraction, a mutual recognition that resists translation into conceptual terms. These two ways of approaching ultimate reality cannot be reduced to unity in a speculative confrontation. These two languages have been constructed as pointers to that reality for thousands of years, and it may be that henceforth a more adequate pointer than either is the play between them, and that either without the other falls short of being a 'skilful means'. (202) Not everything in the book quite measures up to this striking proposal, but O'Leary is steadfast in his resistance to the 'synthesisers' who would make Buddhism and Christianity somehow commensurate, two versions of the 'same' spirituality. Like the Buddha, Jesus represents a perfect (but not exclusive or exhaustive) realisation of a spiritual tradition, whence flows at once a great richness and a great simplicity. ... Today, such a clarification [of non-objectifiability in theological explication] is being sought at the crossing of three paths of thought: the exegetical quest for the biblical Christ, reflection on the liberative social implications of the Gospel, and interreligious questioning. The image of Christ which emerges at this crossroads is no longer a stable presence set before us as an object of adoration, but rather a dynamic process inscribed in the very texture of our life. (215) Once again, this sets the parameters for contemporary Christian theology. The question is, how many are really working within them? Are these events [resurrection, pentecost] intrinsically more mysterious than those of the life of the Buddha, who realised, taught and lived the path to a universal liberation from suffering? Jesus opens history to the power of a God who saves. The Buddha opens human existence to the dissolution of its illusions, and to the vision of reality as it is, in the enjoyment of nirvâna. Both established modes of religious life which remain viable and verifiable. Both were human beings, who became the instruments and revealers of a transcendent reality. (232) To which we say: Amen! But how were these bold statements arrived at? Rich as it is in subtlety of language and originality of insight, a large part of the book's value lies in its radical proposals for rethinking the philosophy and theology of Christianity in the context of religious pluralism and dialogue. In arriving at these proposals, O'Leary sets up a meta-dialogue between Derrida and Nâgârjuna which, once it has been carried out, we realise was long overdue. The relatively scant attention given to primal religion and liberation theologies can be pardoned in the light of this pioneering venture, whose demands absorb most of O'Leary's energy while providing an enormous stimulus for further work in other types of contextual theology. Some of the key themes running through the book are developed in direct dialogue with Derrida. Again and again initiatives which one would have thought were at the cutting edge of contemporary thinking are shown to phenomenalise and existentialise the properly transcendent, whether the "regulative idea of unity" imposed a priori by Hick (20-21) or Murti's neo-Vedantic interpretation of the Mâdhyamika (137). Barth, interestingly, is given credit rather than Troeltsch for maintaining the primacy of 'faith' over 'religion' (16-17), for as soon as religion loses its sense of its own relativity, it is the absolute that slips from its grasp (2). The image of the divine 'withdrawal', which Derrida, like Levinas, inherits from the Kabbalists and which is reflected in the post- Holocaust a-theism of a Richard Rubenstein (201), is a recurring theme. Even the 'pure otherness' addressed by Levinas is not allowed, as it still smacks of the ontology of 'full presence' (39). Once the Derridean différance comes into play, all meaning is radically pluralised because its 'quasi-transcendental infrastructures' leave us with no truths or foundations, no ultimate horizon or definitive translation. Precisely because the archi-écriture that determines all linguistic activity is unavailable for objectification, language-in-use is constitutively and continually en jeu, a play of meanings whose rules change with different contexts. Religions , caught up in these games but unaware of the fluidity of their metaphorical constructs, imagine themselves to be making 'true statements' about God, whereas all they can hope for are constant re-translations (44-46, 50). The 'dissemination' of meaning cannot be imprisoned in 'definitive' texts; rather, the texts are subject to what Derrida calls 'citationality', always already 'quoted' and mutually enveloping one another as they 'read their readers' (50-54). No one epistemological order or regime of reason is the truth of all the others, especially in the light of Foucault's insight that truth is historically an instrument of political control determined by power (71-73). To maintain with relativists like Rorty, however, that there is therefore no truth is to play into the hands of the manipulators. Here O'Leary takes issue both with the rationalism of Paul Griffiths (78, 91) and the intratextualism of George Lindbeck (86-87), but also with Derrida in that he misunderstands 'judgement' as adequatio (103). In his efforts to put behind him all theories of truth as 'correspondence', 'presence' or 'unconcealment', Derrida overlooks the primacy of judgement and truth over concept and reference. Here a scholastic heritage makes itself felt, in my view rightly, though I also sense an apologetic intent: at this crucial point Buddhism has other priorities. At the same time, truth is not extra- linguistic; it continually disappears as we approach its infrastructure in writing. Truth happens 'in' the plurality of gestures, not 'before', 'above', 'behind' (120); it "makes its exigence felt by constantly withdrawing from our grasp" (122). Yet truth is not reduced to fiction, either - il faut la verité. Though not stated explicitly, it would seem that truth in O'Leary's interpretation is the Archimedean point from which justice gains a purchase on the world. All this would be challenging enough, but the real achievement of the book is the confrontation of Derrida's deconstruction of metaphysics by radicalising the phenomenological heritage with Nâgârjuna's philosophy of emptiness. Buddhist emptiness 'heals' Nietzschean nihilism (7). O'Leary insists that this is not to be misunderstood as yet another 'negative theology' (137). Despite the enthusiasm of Western theologians (Cobb, 196) and philosophers (David Loy, 147), this does not mean the reification of emptiness; it has no direct parallels in Western philosophy (151), committing itself neither to existence nor to non-existence (135-136). Buddhists themselves will have to evaluate the extent to which the universal relativity of pratîya-samutpâda (128) and the kenôsis of fixed identity in which the absolute announces itself (125) are commensurate with shûnyatâ as a philosophical teaching. Emptiness is neither meaningless nor irrational, but sets out to liberate thought by the quiescence of every differentiation (141, 144). There is no perspective from the standpoint of ultimate reality, only the interplay of traditions with their interiorities; "the more one enters into the interiority of the other tradition the more the possibility of final judgement recedes" (153 - that image again). Dogma only fulfils its function in so far as it remains provisional - an unsettling thought for both Theravâdins and Pharisees! (156). O'Leary does not shirk the implications of his meta-dialogical approach for Christian theology. If Scripture becomes a 'palimpsest' of continually reinscribed meanings (116-118) and the Fathers of the Church fade in significance, "estranged from us by the questions they did not ask" (158), we are left with the fragile continuity of our context- and culture-bound narratives. God has "a 'housing problem' in a demythologised universe" (David Strauss, 164). It is not easy for those of us brought up on an ontology of being to regard our theological language as upâya, a 'skilful means' or tactic to be used in the interplay of meanings. "It is not by totalisation but by discovering the impossibility of totalisation that we move toward an apprehension of the divine" (166). Though 'naming' God in localised situations is the hallmark of the prophetic tradition, 'God' is an improper name (167), at once indicative and descriptive, singular and indefinite, a 'great question' containing all the tensions of pluralism (175). Yet the withdrawal of God is the advent of grace, the shattering of the tablets the emergence of the Law (168, 175). Various attempts to substantialise emptiness for the sake of Buddhist- Christian rapprochement, whether by Nishida (like Levinas!), Nishitani (Taoist!) or Tanabe (like Kierkegaard!, 192-194), are dismissed as incompatible with the true intent of shûnyatâ. Speculative reconstructions of God-as-Emptiness à la Cobb/Abe are a 'false trail' (195, 197). Nor does creation as kenôsis lead us beyond phenomenalism. Just as biblical language seems to be immune to Derrida's deconstruction, it is not really demonstrated how the 'Empty Christ' of the final chapter can remain the eschatological Lord of history: "If history can be redeemed, then Christ alone emerges as the historical saviour" (233). Transcendence, in this one instance, can escape the 'hall of mirrors' (115). The 'flesh' the Logos became is the entire historical world; Christ thus becomes a life-giving Spirit for all, across the entirety of human life (221). The Logos emerges as Jesus grows into his existence as the Logos; thus enfleshed, the Logos is 'nothing less than God' (218-219). The resurrection and pentecost, as events of disclosure, are "in continuity with the normal pneumatic life of the Church" (230). Pleasingly, both Moltmann's re-scripting of the Christian meta-narrative and Pannenberg's speculative totalisation of history come in for criticism (236), as does Karl-Josef Kuschel's re-mythologising of Christ's pre-existence (238-239). The 'Three Bodies of Christ' - eternal Logos, resurrection, earthly - bear a striking resemblance to their Buddhist counterparts (244), but neither they nor 'emptiness' may be projected onto God. We may and must 'name' God; though we cannot definitively translate the name 'Jesus', than which there is no other, we must continue the attempt (250). Dogmatic determinations tend to give rise to intolerance and violence, as can also be seen in the Mahâyâna, yet the distinctiveness of Christ can and must be determined as ontology, revelation, reconciliation, resurrection and eschatology, his divinity reduced to its phenomenal base and tested against the meaning of John 1:14 and the whole New Testament (211). Triadic, trinitarian topologies of the Christ event must be rooted in that event. Drawing approvingly though not uncritically on John Keenan's Mahâyâna Christology, O'Leary sees Jesus's 'emptiness' as his openness to God, his 'dependent co-arising' as his engagement with this world (254). "Can we make 'emptiness' rhyme with 'Jesus Christ'?" (253) is O'Leary's provocative question. My totally inadequate sketch comes nowhere near doing justice to the inventiveness and elegance of his de- and re-construction of a Christian theology chastened by Buddhism and made aware by Derrida of the insuperable limitations of scripture and tradition, whose meanings are continually en jeu in cultural contexts and historical situations and therefore never available for definitive statement and authoritarian imposition. His strategy of using Derrida, the enfant terrible of contemporary philosophy and the gadfly of canonical interpreters of Western tradition, is almost irresistibly attractive. Yet like so many such attempts to escape the confines of Western ontology with its philosophy of the subject and phenomenology of consciousness - Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger - it stands or falls with the viability of Derrida's project. As I still have almost insuperable difficulties with the concept of archi-écriture and the dismissal of speech as 'presence', I still intend to keep counsel with the likes of Levinas and Habermas. Yet what O'Leary offers us is surely a milestone. If his theological critique of Derrida can be made to stand up, and his reappropriation of Nâgârjuna is found to be viable, then the scope for creative reinterpretations -in-dialogue opened up by his book is almost endless. His reflections provide a whole new methodology for entering into the play of meanings in a historical tradition, for deciphering the Buddhist and Christian re-inscriptions which make for both openness to new situations and continuity with the past. One can only say: bravo! - and encore! Dr John May, Irish School of Ecumenics, Dublin ============================================================================ ____________________________________________________________________________ The Networkinfo-Magazine is a free quartal published email magazine of the EUROPEAN NETWORK OF BUDDHIST CHRISTIAN STUDIES ____________________________________________________________________________ To SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE this magazine, fill our networkinfo/form in the hompage: www.buddhist-christian-studies.israd.net click NETWORKINFO at the menue bar or send a mail to martin.roetting@t-online.de subject> subscibe magazine or unsubscribe magazine (c) 1999 30th November European Network of Buddhist Christian Studies ============================================================================